LogFAQs > #949579376

66. Pokmon Picross (3DS, 2015)

I have Wigs to thank for this one; at a rhythm game tournament in New Jersey in August 2016 he introduced me to this game and I literally played it daily for nine months. Pokmon Picross is a free-to-play 3DS game that limited the amount you could play it (though you could spend picarats to recharge your meter) and limited the amount of content you could access (though you could spend picarats to unlock more). Of course, picarats cost real-life money. However, if you were patient enough, you could earn a meager daily picarat income and eventually buy the next set of levels after a few weeks, hence playing it for nine months straight.
Picross is a pretty fun concept; like I said in the Minesweeper writeup, it's exciting and novel for a while until it becomes fairly rote. You're given a set of numbered clues for each row and column, and use them to fill in squares until you make a picture. Cute pictures of Pokmon absolutely helped out with the appeal, and there's like 200-300 stages worth of content in the game, plus the daily challenge is pretty compelling as well.
It's always hard to quantify where something like this ranks - it's not particularly replayable and even if I did the experience would be entirely different - but for getting me into picross in general this absolutely deserves a spot in the countdown.

65. F-Zero: Maximum Velocity (GBA, 2001)

F-Zero is one of my all-time favorite video game franchises, without question. Racing games have a pretty natural appeal to them, and F-Zero always seemed to know how to strike the right balance of making interesting and crazy tracks while never forgetting that the racing itself should be the star of the show.
In summer 2001, this was the game I got with the launch of the Game Boy Advance, playing it pretty much nonstop for two months including during a two-week vacation in northeast Canada. On one hand, I kind of retroactively wish I would have cared more about the trip, but on the other, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity is an excellent game, and was hard as hell to master. Structured around the formula of the original F-Zero, you race through five laps of a track, earning a boost after each lap, and also having to ensure you are within the top few places after each lap, decreasing from 15 to 10 to 7 to 5 to 3 (or something). It's punishing, though both the levels and the game's physics aren't as brutal as the original. Even so, as a kid, I managed to beat all the cups on all the difficulties, unlock all the characters, and set some pretty rad records on the Championship Circuit.
The game looks really solid for early GBA - the SNES-style Mode-7 works well here - and there are a lot of creative courses. There are certainly better F-Zero games, and full 3D is always more suited for racers anyway, but FZMV is still pretty fun to go back to, even if there's a lot of nostalgia baked in there. This the only F-Zero entry coming for quite a while, but I still wanted to give the series its due - there's no excuse for why there hasn't been a follow up in over 15 years at this point.
Top 5 Courses: Ancient Mesa: Split Circuit - Tenth Zone East: Plummet Circuit - Cloud Carpet: Long Jump Circuit - Synobazz: Championship Circuit - Cloud Carpet: Icarus Circuit

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