Posts tagged games
The Greatest Games I’ve Played: #22
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest
The original Donkey Kong Country was the first game that I actually anticipated. I was 9 at the time. Yes, I had played many games before, but I didn’t really know of their existence until they were in my hand after opening a Christmas or birthday present. But by 9, I had found sources of advance information– magazines at bookstores, the Toys-R-Us Thanksgiving Toy Book, etc. And when I saw Donkey Kong Country, my little world was rocked.
A new Donkey Kong game, after all these years? And Donkey Kong is the good guy? And 3D graphics? This can’t be real!
So I saved up my allowance money, and bought my first game. And it was worth it.
But for everything that DKC did well– the beautiful, colorful jungle worlds, the incredible soundtrack, the spot-on platforming mechanics– its legacy is the introduction of a little baseball-cap-wearing monkey by the name of Diddy Kong.
The Greatest Games I’ve Played: #23
Myst
It would be difficult to explain the appeal of Myst to a kid today.
You stare at an image. You point. You click. The game loads the next image. You’ve taken five steps forward. You look around some more. You point. You click. And so on.
The Point-and-Click adventure has more or less retired to the great keyboard in the sky, but it left its share of classics: Monkey Island, Sam & Max, and The Dig immediately come to mind (you’ll notice that these are all pre-1995). But Myst was the king.
What was so great about Myst? On the surface, there were the jaw-dropping graphics. True, they were merely pre-rendered, low-resolution 3D polygonal scenes that didn’t technically “move”– but they were really pretty. The team at Cyan worlds were skilled artists, and they were way ahead of the curve– crafting hauntingly beautiful and otherworldly environments, ranging from treetop villages to barren ruins to futuristic mecha-topias. At the time, it was revolutionary.
But better than that, Myst was an intensely and addictively challenging. It drops you into a mysterious world and gives you nothing. No clues. No direction. No suggestion as to what to do at all; just the lure of exploration and puzzle-solving.
Myst defeated my young mind with ease. I made my way into three or four of the “ages” (worlds contained within books scattered across an alternate universe) before ultimately succumbing to the endless onslaught of puzzles and mystery. I remember being in awe of the father of one of my best friends at the time– he was an accomplished architect, and a genius by most accounts. Over the course of several months, he made his way through Myst, literally filling entire journals with notes and diagrams of its puzzles (probably the only way to actually beat the game) before finally reaching its end.
Cyan Worlds– now a failing company after unsuccessful attempts to keep the Myst franchise alive– recently released a port of Myst for the iPhone. I’ve been tempted to go back. But I’m pretty sure it would own me again.
The Greatest Games I’ve Played: #24
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (2007, Nintendo Wii)
“Yeah, I’ve always wanted to catch that.”
We always have a growing stack of classics or cult hits that we intend to see/read/play simply because we feel we must for our own cultural education. You’ve either seen The Godfather, or you intend to. You’ve either read the Harry Potter books, or you’re planning on getting around to it (or you think they’re an abomination).
Similarly, I went 20-something years intending to play a Metroid game. The Metroid series has always stood as a hallmark of game design, thanks to its unique and mysterious narrative, its seamless welding of platforming, adventure, and action, and its protagonist– Samus Aran– who is arguably the first strong female gaming lead.
The Greatest Games I’ve Played: #25
For no reason in particular, I’m going to run down the best games I’ve played over the course of my 23+ years of gaming. I understand that this adds a substantial number of punches to my nerd card. I’m okay with that. Games, just like films, books, and other creative arts, helped foster my imagination growing up, and even helped steer me down the path toward digital arts. And games hold, for better or worse, a legitimate place in American and international culture and therefore deserve recognition and analysis.
I’ll keep a running list here.
RBI Baseball (1988, Nintendo Entertainment System)
There’s a little bit of nostalgia at play here. Actually, there’s a lot of nostalgia at play. And while I normally try to ignore nostalgia when evaluating a work’s time-tested quality, the original RBI Baseball has this undeniable old-school charm that enhances its enjoyability.
