LogFAQs > #950579954

28. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Arcade, 2000)

Please read the remainder of this post while listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPjjnfGKrPc

The character select song in MvC2 might be the song I've heard most in my life against my will. From the time it appeared in my local arcade through its DC and PS2 and later XBLA versions I've heard it thousands of times. It is both obnoxious and obnoxiously catchy. But I put up with it all those years because it always was a signifier of a good time. I had a pretty good crew of friends and acquaintances in the early 2000s for in person gaming, and we spent a lot of time playing this in arcades, and later, in our homes and at the aforementioned Boys & Girls Club. It's not the most technically proficient or fair fighting game, even in its own insane series - MvC1 almost certainly earns that title - but its 56 characters and triple tag team format created an almost endless number of permutations, which kept the game fresher than almost any other fighting game. The ability to mix and match and make your own squad of Avengers, X-Men, Street Fighters, etc - or their arch enemies - was just as compelling then as watching an Avengers movie would become a dozen years later. 56 characters, of course, has been surpassed, but man, at the time, what a thrill to unlock them as you went.

27. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch, 2017)


Simply put, it is the perfect kart racing game. It is everything that Mario Kart can be and needs to be to be endlessly replayable and ceaselessly fun, and the Switch version, with 42 playable characters and the full array of karts and customizations and courses, is just tremendous. There's almost no great courses from the series missing, and it even gave us fans of F-Zero a nice little token in the forms of Mute City and Big Blue, which play appropriately fast.

26. Resident Evil (aka REmake) (Gamecube, 2002)

REmake was a series-saving game. The more I think about it, the more I believe it to be true. Code Veronica was not the success that Capcom had hoped, Gaiden was Gaiden, and the series needed to hit big. Coincidentally, Capcom had entered into a period of semi-exclusivity with Nintendo. Not for every series, but it was a Big Deal at the time. They were dedicated to bringing big games to the Gamecube, and REmake was the first. It set the stage for a series of incredible and bold successes over the following years, and P.N.03. Most importantly, it took a game that had become almost entirely skippable in Resident Evil, overhauled the graphics, the controls, the voice acting, and upped the fear factor (no one expects that first Crimson Head zombie, or the horrors of those Chimeras). The most remarkable thing is that it took an entire human generation for RE2 and RE3 to get remakes, given how overwhelmingly successful this game and its series proved to be in the subsequent years. It's rare, even in this age of revisiting and rebooting beloved games, that you can entirely redefine a game and a series, but REmake did it first, and maybe best.

(screenshot from the 2015 HD remaster)

25. Super Mario Odyssey (Switch, 2017)

Not the most recently released game on my list, but the game I've most recently played to make the list. I didn't start playing Super Mario Odyssey until the tail end of last year, but it is the 3D Mario best designed for my brain in the 2020s. It's a beautiful, smooth-handling game that you can play for any length of time you please, because there are so many Moons to chase and you're not obligated to proceed in any direction or pace at any time. It pays homage to the entire lineage of Mario games that came before it. It features Captain Toad. But on top of all that, it's among the most cleverly designed and most thoughtful Mario games to date. None of the Moons - at least to where I am, which is not that deep into the game, even still - seem unfair or rude or tacked on. They all feel pretty organically included into their fantastical worlds, which themselves all feel spectacularly designed. It's really a remarkable game and I'm excited to keep playing it and seeing how it continues to surprise me.

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The Thighmaster