Board 8 > Leonhart Ranks 100 Games with Writeups!

(+) Yeah! (+)

The Simpsons Arcade game was the shit in the 90's. Even in like, 96-97, you could find The Simpsons in just about any pizza restaurant in town, and at least for my group it was like always the game we wanted to play. I didn't even know The Simpsons very well! Probably most of the things I knew about the show were from this game. But the game was just really colorful and fun, it didn't really look anything like any of the other arcade games of the time, and it was an awesome co-op experience with friends. The time we finally threw enough quarters into the machine to beat Mr Burns was like, a major triumph of my childhood.

The X-Men Arcade game was also around but we didn't play that one as much for some reason.

I think I only played like five hours of XV and didnt even finish chapter 1

Not sure why I dropped it; guess something else must have come out to distract me? Never got back to it, though.

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#96. Broken Age

I dont play a lot of point and click adventure games that arent called Ace Attorney. The only reason I ended up with this game is because it was one of the free PS+ games one month, and the description looked interesting enough for me to give it a shot. I dont know that Ive ever really noticed anyone on Board 8 talk about Broken Age, so Im not sure if it just hasnt been played by many people or people just didnt care for it! Maybe Im the exception for liking this game so much. I guess Ill find out after this writeup!

Anyway, Broken Age tells the parallel stories of a boy named Shay (voiced by Elijah Wood of all people) and a girl named Vella who live very different lives but have similar attitudes toward their lives. Theyre both frustrated with the status quo and start taking measures to undermine it and undo it. However, things for both of them (but especially Shay) are not what they seem, and eventually their lives intersect at the end of Act 1 and they end up literally changing places. Act 2 involves each character unraveling the mysteries behind the others world, and its really well done. Its a point and click adventure, so its not a hard game or a long game, but the characters are fun and likable. Its just a well written and well acted game, but when youre a point and click adventure, you have to be strong in those categories to succeed.

I dont know if theres really much else I can say without delving into spoilers, but I think if you enjoy narrative-driven games that are light on actual gameplay, Broken Age is worth a try. It would be nice to be able to discuss the game with someone because I dont think Ive ever been able to!

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I watched my friend play. It seemed really good, though he didn't explore nearly as much as I'd have liked so I missed a lot.

Vella is kind of a bitch ngl

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Yeah, she can be a bit much at times. I think I liked Shay better between the two, but I think the way the game juxtaposes the two of them works really well.

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ah, the first kickstarter i backed. i remember act 2 being a let down, paying off none of what was interesting about act 1.

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LeonhartFour posted...

I dont know that Ive ever really noticed anyone on Board 8 talk about Broken Age, so Im not sure if it just hasnt been played by many people or people just didnt care for it! Maybe Im the exception for liking this game so much. I guess Ill find out after this writeup!

looks like it was a little bit of both...!

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#95. Mario Party 2


Up front, Ill say that Ive only played the Mario Party games on the N64. My only experience with Mario Party 4 and onward is Pokecapns (of Sonic 2006 fame) LP of the series a few years back. I dont normally watch a lot of LPs, but that one is worth watching if youre into that! Anyway, the original Mario Party was a really cool concept that was rough around the edges, sometimes literally. The only video game injury Ive ever sustained was playing the first game, where I tore the skin off of my palm trying to rotate the stick fast enough to beat that mini-game where you have to power up a light using a bicycle before a Boo gets you. I will never forget that moment.

Anyway, Mario Party 2 took the original blueprint and greatly improved upon it. The boards all had cool themes, and all the characters dressed accordingly with the theme, so you have everyone looking like cowboys in Western Land or astronauts in Space Land. It was a cool little touch. Now granted, winning the overall game still requires some luck (although I feel like my friends and I never really cared who ended up actually winning in the end), and its definitely a game meant to be enjoyed with friends since playing against just the CPU isnt the same, but Mario Party 2 came out at the right time for me to play regularly when friends came over. Thats why I havent really gotten into the series beyond the N64. After high school, I just didnt have friends come over to play video games anymore, so my perspective on primarily multiplayer games shifted a lot. Thats why a lot of the ones that appear on this list will be 15+ years old. I dont really do online play (Theres only one game I did a lot of that for, and it appears later).

Mario Party 2 had a lot of fun games that I spent a lot of time playing. My personal favorites include Bombs Away, Bumper Balls, Hexagon Heat, Slot Car Derby, Speed Hockey, Toad Bandstand, Lights Out, and Shock, Drop, or Roll. 1-on-3 mini-games still tend to generally be the least fun, but there are a couple of gems in those. Also, some people may be wondering what that image I posted was about, but that was a sarcastic certificate Nintendo of America sent to Game Informer to congratulate them for their overly negative reviews of the first two games. I wish stuff like that happened more often!

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I love the costume changes snd the duel mini games.

Me and a friend basically just played the pirate game over and over. 3 was the one with the special mode where you could have enemies fight each other right?

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pjbasis posted...

I love the costume changes snd the duel mini games.

Me and a friend basically just played the pirate game over and over. 3 was the one with the special mode where you could have enemies fight each other right?

Yeah, that sounds about right. I honestly don't remember a lot about 3 (or at least it probably blends in a lot with the others so I don't remember which details went with which games). We didn't play that one nearly as much because we soon realized it wasn't as good as 2!

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3 was definitely my favorite Mario Party. I never owned any of them, though; iirc I rented them from Blockbuster several times.

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3 was indeed the one with the Duel mode where you had partners duking it out.

3 > 6 > 2 > 7 > 4 > 5 > 8 > 1 will always be my ranking of the series.

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Tag
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#94. Tecmo Super Bowl


This was my first real sports game (as in, a sports game that used players from real life in it). I know a large chunk of the board isnt into sports at all, but Ive always been a huge sports fan and of football in particular. Its still the only sport I watch with regularity, while baseball and basketball have mostly been relegated to playoffs only. Anyway, I know some people ride hard for the original Tecmo Bowl, but that was a little before my time (Well, technically not, but I was only a year old when it came out! Tecmo Super Bowl came out when I was nearly 6), so I spent way more time with Tecmo Super Bowl.

Compared to football games now, Tecmo Super Bowl is pretty simplistic, of course, but it felt pretty advanced at the time. You had four run plays and four pass plays to choose from, and each team had a different set of plays. People talk about how broken Bo Jackson was in this, but I never really played as the Raiders. My team of choice was the Houston Oilers, for some reason. I was strictly a Cowboys fan at the time, but I guess it was fitting because the Oilers would eventually become the Tennessee Titans. I loved the Warren Moon to Haywood Jeffires combo (I was convinced that Haywood Jeffires must have been a really good WR in the NFL as a kid, so I just looked up his career stats and hes about as average as it gets!). I also loved the cutaways to big plays and touchdowns. It was a cool touch of presentation to increase the drama of the moment.

There was also a mode where you could simulate an entire season, and I spent a lot of time on that mode just simulating seasons, seeing how the results changed from season to season and who wound up winning the Super Bowl. I guess that was the beginning of my journey as a stats nerd! I remember there was one season where I was determined to get the Atlanta Falcons (a thoroughly mediocre team in the game) to not only win the Super Bowl but go undefeated. It involved a lot of soft resets, especially when the 49ers (one of the best teams in the game) popped up on the schedule twice, but I eventually got it done. I dont recall if I tried to do that with anyone else, but I specifically remember that one because it took so many retries to get it.

So yeah, Tecmo Super Bowl is a game I have a lot of fond memories for. I played it on an emulator about 10 or so years ago just for old times sake, and I think it mostly held up. Theres an element of randomness to it, but thats present in a lot of sports games, especially older ones. I still think you can succeed if you understand how the game works because its so easy to break big plays, which is a big part of the fun.

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Possible spoilers for future lists of mine but yeah Tecmo Super Bowl is a top 100 for me too. I just love how fun everything about the game is - like not just the simple-but-entertaining football gameplay that is surprisingly advanced for a 1991 (?) game, but also the visuals and the music, it just evokes this feeling of a more joyful and optimistic version of the NFL than anything that's ever actually existed. The tunes are so goddamn catchy and the graphics are such a fun encapsulation of like, Japan's distanced idea of what american football is like. I semi-frequently download the fan-made patches that update the rosters (and teams) in the game and play through a season or two, it's still more fun to me than any Madden game will ever be. Madden just feels like a joyless experience compared to Tecmo Super Bowl.

Yeah, it came out in late 1991. I meant to mention just how colorful and joyful the game looks and sounds. I can still hear the music that plays during an actual play, or the tune that plays when someone gets injured, or scores a touchdown. It was all so catchy and added to the fun.

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I feel like that sense of "catchiness", not just in the music but in the overall presentation in a way, is something that modern games don't really value as much, and that western games have NEVER valued as much, but it's something I really value.

Yeah, I think I'd agree with you on that front. Western games have always valued realism way too much to really appreciate that level of presentation, in my opinion.

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https://gfycat.com/astonishingorganicgordonsetter

I would have so many random sports game in a top 100

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Man, I remember that from the original Madden! They changed it in the future editions on SNES and Genesis that the players would run off the field, which was so lame.

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#93. WCW/nWo Revenge

This is another one of those writeups that involves some background of my personal history. I grew up adoring wrestling. I never missed a show of Raw, Smackdown, Nitro, etc. if I could help it. I went to several live shows, including a couple of Pay-Per-View tapings. I subscribed to the WWFs magazine so I could get behind the scenes looks at stuff. This will date me, but Id turn to the Pay-Per-View channels on my TV and just listen to the audio through all the wavy screens that wouldnt let you actually see anything. I distinctly remember doing that for the Iron Man Match between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels at Wrestlemania XII, as well as the King of the Ring Stone Cold won when Austin 3:16 was born. My cousin who lived next door eventually got one of those hacked cable boxes where you could watch Pay-Per-View channels for free, so Id go over to his house whenever there was a wrestling PPV since he was a huge wrestling fan, too. I lost interest in wrestling sometime late in high school and havent really gotten back into it since, but I do still hold some nostalgic fondness for the glory days of whats now called the Attitude Era.

As such, I played a lot of wrestling games growing up, and there were a lot of really good ones! Most of them didnt make this list, but I still had fun with them. Pro wrestling is one of those mediums that translates really well into video game form since theyre basically real life fighting games (although that doesnt mean there werent some duds, of course). THQ entered the game during the Monday Night Wars between WWF and WCW. They were originally on the side of WCW but eventually shifted over to WWF games (one of which is also on this list ahead of it). The first one was WCW vs. nWo World Tour, which was fun, if not a bit basic. It had a small roster and didnt have very many modes or customization options.

When Revenge came out a year or two later, they had massively improved on the formula of the original. This game also probably came out when WCW was at its peak, and so this game had a huge roster of a ton of big-name superstars, including several that had defected from the WWF at this point, such as Bret Hart or Randy Savage. The grappling system really came into its own here, and they added a championship mode where you could basically go through a gauntlet of challengers until you won a particular championship. They also had the venues for the individual Pay-Per-View events this time, unlike the first game, and the characters had unique ring entrances and their own finishers.

As a twist, there was no life bar, but instead there was a stamina gauge that would ebb and flow with the momentum of the match, almost like a real wrestling match, so you were never really out of it or beyond the point that you couldnt turn things around. It was really cool. I think its the type of game you could enjoy even if you didnt care about wrestling at all. Its just a well-made fighting game. I was always more of a WWF guy, but I couldnt deny that Revenge was super fun.

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wow no love for wrestling games

more writeups tomorrow

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Count me in as another person without much interest in sports beyond watching ProtonJon livestreaming.

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WWF No Mercy was king, but Revenge was great and definitely an improvement over World Tour.

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I lost countless hours of my childhood to the wcw/nwo series on the 64, never could get into them much after that sadly, save for smack down on the ps1.

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Darkside_84 posted...

I lost countless hours of my childhood to the wcw/nwo series on the 64, never could get into them much after that sadly, save for smack down on the ps1.

Smackdown was pretty good. The main thing I remember about that is that everyone had The Rock's over the top reaction to being hit by the Stunner, which seemed a little unnecessary!

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#92. Zombies Ate My Neighbors


Growing up in the 90s and early 00s when rental stores were commonplace (the parents of my best friend growing up actually owned one, so he got free rentals, which was a sweet deal), sometimes you would just pick out a game at random based on nothing more than the box art, the title, or the back of the box. When you started up the game, youd really have no idea what you were getting yourself into. Zombies Ate My Neighbors was one such game for me. I am not a horror movie fan whatsoever. That genre just does not appeal to me, and yet I found myself playing and loving this game that is essentially an homage to (and a spoof of) horror.

Anyway, Zombies Ate My Neighbors is an action game where you go through individual levels trying to save your neighbors from various horror movie staples, like werewolves, vampires, skeletons, and so on. They would occasionally do absurd concepts like the giant baby pictured above. The levels could be traditional horror movie stuff like an open field with a hedge maze (which you could buzz your way through if you could find a chainsaw), or it could just be a supermarket. You had a wide variety of weapons, and monsters would be more susceptible to the things youd expect them to be, such as the werewolves being weak against silverware. You had two playable characters: Zeke (if anyone ever wants to know what the stereotypical 90s kid looks like, show them a picture of this dude. He had blonde hair sticking straight up in the air, a t-shirt with a skull on it, and 3-D glasses, for some reason) and Julie, who was a lot more normal by comparison. The level ended when all of the neighbors were either saved or killed by monsters.

My best friend and I played this game a lot, but we never managed to beat it. Not because it was too difficult, but we always got stuck on the same level. There was this level where you needed a skeleton key to open a particular door, and we could NEVER find it. I tried playing the game again as an adult, and I STILL couldnt find this stupid key. I dont get it! Maybe one of these days, Ill try it one more time and Ill just look up a guide on GameFAQs!

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zombies ate my posters

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for whatever reason i never played any on the WCW games so i dont have much to comment on them!

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#91. Kingdom Hearts


Did you realize that this game is nearly 20 years old now? Thats wild to think about! Games that didnt come out before the very first Character Battle will soon be two decades old. Just as a comparison point, games that were 20 years old at the time of the first Character Battle in 2002 included Pitfall, Q*Bert (both of which had characters represented, who were blown out and never seen again), and the infamous E.T. game. Anyway, enough of things that make me feel old. The point is that Kingdom Hearts is a thing we accept as normal now because its been around for nearly two decades, but when the idea of a Final Fantasy/Disney crossover was first revealed, that was mind-blowing stuff, man. No one could have ever imagined something like that happening. Now we live in a world where Disney owns everything and crossovers are everyday occurrences, but that first image of Cloud looking like a vampire with a taped-up Buster Sword interacting with Donald friggin Duck and Goofy was almost impossible to process at the time.

Anyway, Kingdom Hearts probably interwove the Disney and Square stuff into the actual plot better than any other game in the series. In future games, it almost feels incidental to the plot because its expected to be there now as Kingdom Hearts veered into its ownunique storylines. Maleficent feels like a fearsome opponent here, while she almost becomes a joke villain no one really takes seriously in the rest of the series. They do a good job of adapting Disney villains into good boss fights, sometimes being combined with a big Heartless. Now I think some of the actual worlds arent super great, primarily Wonderland and Deep Jungle, but those are the first ones in the game so at least you get them out of the way early. Also, while Sora has never really been cool, I think hes hard to like for most of the game, especially as he and Donald bicker back and forth on a regular basis. I know a lot of people complain about the Gummi ship stuff, and while future games did improve upon it, I didnt really mind it. Its never been a draw of the series either way.

But Kingdom Hearts does a great job of building up toward the finale and then paying it off in a big way when you get to Hollow Bastion. Its still one of the highlights of the series for me. The atmosphere, the music, the design, the gauntlet of boss fights, everything, its all so good. It always feels like the climax of the game whenever I play it even though I know theres still one more world to go afterwards and youve only just been introduced to the main villain. Speaking of Ansem, I think Kingdom Hearts also does a really good job through the Ansem Reports of gradually revealing that Ansem isnt actually a good guy (as the initial reports suggest), but hes the bad guy behind everything and the biggest threat. Later games would provide some context to all of that, but it was still a pretty cool way to handle a villain reveal. Overall, Kingdom Hearts is a game that incorporates a lot of different elements and somehow made it work to an extent that the series endures to this day.

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Gummi ships were fun in KH2

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KH2 had better gameplay in almost every way but the series never topped the original as a total package.

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#90. Jak II


Rarely has a series done such a drastic tonal shift from the first game to the sequel quite like the Jak series did. The original Jak & Daxter was your standard 3-D platformer collect-a-thon attempting to piggyback on the massive success of Super Mario 64. In the late 90s and early 00s, there were many, many games that tried to copy that formula. I know some people like Jak & Daxter a lot, but I didnt think it was anything special aside from introducing a snarky sidekick in Daxter. Naughty Dog had already attempted a 3-D platforming trilogy with Crash Bandicoot, so I was honestly kinda glad when they basically just went, Forget it, and decided to copycat Grand Theft Auto instead.

Now granted, Ive never played a Grand Theft Auto game before, but I just appreciated the fact that they were willing to take such a big risk and completely change what the series was about. They went from a light and colorful platformer with a silent protagonist to a dark and edgy sandbox game with a protagonist who was equally dark and edgy (Jak gets a set of dark powers in this game) and suddenly learned how to talk and use guns. The game is no joke in terms of difficulty either. Your main hub is basically operating under martial law from the main antagonist, so if you commit any sort of misstep (even relatively minor ones), youll have the law chasing you all over town. Jak II also provides a good mix of platforming and combat, and it doesnt take it easy on you. There were several segments that took me multiple tries to beat. Theres also a really tough boss fight at the halfway point of the game, and I still remember how satisfying it was to finally win.

Jak IIs story is actually pretty good, too, which was a bit of a surprise since the first game was fairly basic in that area. Daxter is cleverly written and has a lot of good one-liners. The game also gave him a few playable segments of his own instead of just having him sit on Jaks shoulder the whole time like he did in the first game. Theres also a wild twist toward the end of the game that I thought was pretty cool. I havent tried to play the game again since I beat it the first time, so Im not really sure how it holds up. I do have the Jak HD Collection, and Ive been meaning to give it a shot one of these days. I just havent gotten around to it yet.

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don't worry

after the next, uh, three games on the list, my selections start getting more mainstream

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Kingdom Hearts and Jak II aren't mainstream?

apparently Jak II isn't mainstream for B8...!

I was referring more to the games before that and the next few games to come

zombies, sports, wrestling, arcade beat-em-ups, point and click adventures

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jak 2 good and still holds up IMO. I mean it's obviously gonna be very dated in some ways and is campy in its edginess... which kind of makes it better

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NFUN posted...

jak 2 good and still holds up IMO. I mean it's obviously gonna be very dated in some ways and is campy in its edginess... which kind of makes it better

honestly I can kind of appreciate that Jak II didn't really try to merely dip a toe into the dark and edgy waters and instead dove in head first

when Jak's first words were "I'M GONNA KILL PRAXIS" I was already sold on the game

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#89. Battle Arena Toshinden


While Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and Soul Edge/Calibur are most often acclaimed as the progenitors of the 3-D fighting genre, Battle Arena Toshinden was probably the first true 3-D fighter (and the first one to be weapons-based) since it was more than just 3-D polygons who were still technically fighting on a 2-D plane. You could actually do sidesteps around your opponents to dodge attacks. While it did spawn a few sequels, Battle Arena Toshinden feels like a forgotten part of 3-D fightings history. It was originally advertised to be a Saturn killer and a counterpart to Virtua Fighter, so Sony had high hopes for this thing. This was one of the first PS1 games, so I actually still have the huge case for it that they used for their games early on.

Anyway, Battle Arena Toshinden does the Street Fighter thing of having a bunch of different characters from different countries and playing on all their stereotypes, with the added bonus of having poorly acted and accented voice clips. So why did I cling to this game as opposed to Tekken, Soul Edge (never played any of the Calibur games), or Virtua Fighter, series which Ive played a handful of times but never grew attached to? Its probably a simplistic reason, but I like the fact that its not striving to be a hyper-realistic fighting game despite being 3-D. It still has projectiles and other special moves that arent feasible in reality. It feels more like a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat game, which is my style of fighting game. Im not looking to display skill by pulling off an intricate combo of precise button presses that will perform a series of graceful yet deadly fighting techniques. No, I want Sofia to be able to shoot a sound wave projectile by cracking her whip. Also, one of my favorite properties of 3-D fighters in general is the ability to win via ring out. I dont know why I like it so much, but theres something satisfying about forcing your opponent off the edge of the arena. Battle Arena Toshinden 3 took that away by making every arena caged in, which was a stupid decision.

As for Battle Arena Toshinden itself, I think its playable roster is pretty solid. The fighters are all pretty varied and have memorable designs. Id have a hard time picking a favorite between them all, actually. I think I used them all pretty regularly, which is a good thing in a fighting game. Its a shame the series never really caught on like its contemporaries did, although I dont know if Id still be playing it anyway because the games really did get worse and worse after the first.

Oh hey, #89 on post 89...!

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LeonhartFour posted...

apparently Jak II isn't mainstream for B8...!

I was referring more to the games before that and the next few games to come

zombies, sports, wrestling, arcade beat-em-ups, point and click adventures

All seems mainstream enough to me! I mean, I'm not a wrestling games person, but I love Simpsons Arcade and Tecmo Super bowl and I think ZATM is pretty good as well (but it's not a personal fave of mine)

I mean they're pretty mainstream in general but they tend to be stuff that isn't up B8's alley per se from my experience

or at least they're things I've not seen discussed much at all except in the rare cases they were actually in contest matches

(it still low-key bothers me that Tecmo Super Bowl finished dead last behind friggin' Monkey Island and the original SimCity in 2009, such disrespect)

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Tecmo Super Bowl is a game that I've experienced even non-football fans having fun with.

Yeah, I think it's a very accessible game because it doesn't really require you to know much of anything about football to succeed at it. You can fool around with it a bit and figure out how it works pretty quickly.

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The thing about KH1 is that I can never imagine going back to it after KH2 because the gameplay improvements are just too much IMO.

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I think KH1 holds up as its own experience. I don't feel like KH2 necessarily made it obsolete. You just have to get readjusted to the way KH1 plays because it's different from how the rest of the series plays going forward.

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#88. Streets of Rage 2


Streets of Rage 2 is considered by many to be the greatest beat-em-up ever made, and for good reason. First of all, the game just looks great. The sprites are so detailed for the time, and the backgrounds look good. The characters move and act so fluidly, especially compared to the first game, where they could be a bit slow and stiff. Each character has their own moveset and special moves, their own strengths and weaknesses, and their own style. I preferred playing as Skate because he was quick and hard to hit, even if his physical strength was on the lower end. I liked using Axel, too, and Id play as Blaze every once in a while. Never saw any reason to use Max though. Hes just way too big and slow for a beat-em-up. I did feel jilted that they just completely dropped Adam from the sequel because its so rare to find a playable character in a video game who has the same name as me!

I feel like Streets of Rage 2 hits the sweet spot of being hard without feeling unfair or cheap, which is something a lot of beat-em-ups struggle with. Many games in the genre will generate added difficulty by just sending huge waves of enemies at you until youre just overwhelmed because you cant hold them off forever unless youre playing perfectly. This was a game I could actually beat as a kid without using a Game Genie or any sort of cheats. I remember it was a free game on PS+ for PS3 several years ago, so I picked it up for old times sake, and it still looks and feels great. Its reputation as a top game in the genre is absolutely deserved.

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Streets of Rage 2 had an absolute banger of a soundtrack. It almost felt ahead of its time in a way because you didnt hear this sort of techno synth sound in other video games. Im not sure what song I could pick that best represents that, but Ill just go with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogHpm0BwCPU

As an aside, Ive gotta ask: Is Streets of Rage 4 still a thing? I remember it being announced a couple of years ago, but there hasnt been much info yet and no concrete release date as far as Im aware. I just hope it does eventually materialize because I could definitely use a new sidescrolling beat-em-up in my life again!

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https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/246602-streets-of-rage-4

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LeonhartFour posted...

I think KH1 holds up as its own experience. I don't feel like KH2 necessarily made it obsolete. You just have to get readjusted to the way KH1 plays because it's different from how the rest of the series plays going forward.

Don't you need to play KH1 to understand the plot? Though I guess if you played it once...

KH1/2 are probably two of the games I'm most interested in playing that I have not played.

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

Don't you need to play KH1 to understand the plot?

Kingdom Hearts
Coherent Plot

Pick one.

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so is Aladdin at #109 the SNES game or the Genesis game?

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