#4 - Super Mario Bros. Crossover

Here we have a modded version of the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES. These guys at "Exploding Rabbit" (for the record that's kind of a fucking stupid name) have taken a bunch of old school characters from NES era gaming, and compiled them into this game. This could have easily been cheesy, or stupid, but instead these guys have managed to put together a pretty sweet game. Now, if you've played all the way through the original Mario Bros. there's not really a whole lot to be had here with the exception of playing these classic levels with all of these different characters. Maybe it had been a while since I've played the original, or maybe this game just has some quality level design that makes these levels fun no matter how old they get. Either way I had one hell of a good time playing this game! My favorite part of the game is that these aren't just skins, slapped over the game. Each of these characters plays as they would in their original game. Not only that, but they upgrade as they would in their game. So Mega Man or Link, they don't just grow in size as they grab a mushroom, or just launch fireballs when they grab a flower, although Mega Man does now that I think about it. So when you're playing as Simon his whip upgrades to the morningstar, and when you're playing as link, his sword launches the laser sword deals that his sword used to back in the day, despite how little sense it made now or then. The biggest problem with this is that if you don't like how a character played in their game, you're not going to like them in this. Simon for example is no less of a pain in the ass to handle here than he was in Castlevania. They include mario in the game too, but where's the fun in that? I pretty much almost never used him unless I was at a part that I needed his specific jumps for.

Now Maybe the grass is always greener but I kind of wished they had included some levels from a few other games. I mean how much fun would it be to fight Mega Man Bosses as Mario, or to fight Death in Castlevania as Link. Now maybe this would have fucked with the formula that I already mentioned about the Mario levels being timeless, but who knows? That's my point. This game could have been boosted from fun flash game, to epic crossover. But on the other hand it could have been taken from a successful project to an extremely over-zealous failure. Who knows... Despite that, Exploding Rabbit has managed to make a pretty kick ass game here, despite that stupid name (let's face it, I've heard much worse.) If you want to check this game out for yourself, you can play it here. and I highly recommend doing so!

That's right, Mega Man's going to get it on with Mario's lady!

#9 - Mega Man

Mega Man has always been one of my favorite game franchises. I am aware that this is almost entirely based on Nostalgia, but still. I've always liked the idea of the character and these games, but wondered why he didn't keep growing with modern gaming. That being said whenever I think of Mega Man, I always forget how hard, and kind of not awesome this first one is. I still enjoy the game and gameplay, it's just a little bit of a pain in the ass. I guess in my brain I always imagine the series starting at two... It's not that this game is bad, it's just not as good as I remember. It's hard to say what I'm not crazy about in this game. I guess maybe it's that I know there's much better to come, and that feels like me slighting this game a bit, but as I'm playing I feel more like I'm going through the motions than anything else. I mean, I like all the bosses, and their respective levels are fun enough, but the gameplay just isn't varied enough.

If you've never played it, it's kind of a classic and I feel like it's almost owed to be played, especially if you want to play them all or like the games to come. This is the birthplace of a lot of those great gaming moments! I guess I'm just having trouble getting excited about it is all...

#10 - Castlevania

So I Recently decided that I wanted to go back and play some older NES games. this was the first one that i picked up, and I have to say, either I have gotten a lot shittier at games due to being pampered by responsive controls etc., or these games are a lot harder than I remember. Holy shit was this hard! Now, i'm going to be up front about this, i used an Emulator to play this. So I was using my keyboard instead of a controller, but i had access to an Autosave feature, which without I would not have been able to beat it. So go ahead and get your shit talking out of the way, because that's how I'll be playing most of these games…

Despite the games difficulty level, I did enjoy it quite a bit. Simon, the protagonist of the game, is one unresponsive douche! He's the kind of protagonist that if you push jump, and then try to guide him with the directional buttons, he's like "nah man, you pushed jump, so i'm just going to go for it." If you don't push a directional button before you jump then he just goes straight up, and after you ask him to jump, you better have timed it right, because the jump length is predetermined. It's a pain in the ass at first, but you quickly get used to it. His whip is pretty cool, and as you smash shit throughout the castle it gets upgraded. You find these upgrades so easily and so often that i kind of don't get why they're even there, but what evs. Then there's these bonus weapons. I guess they're there to spice up the gameplay, and this does a much better job than the aforementioned power-ups. There's a couple that are really shitty, like the axe and the fire, that i never figured out how to time right. The throwing knife isn't bad, but if you get ahold of the stopwatch that freezes enemies, there's really no need to grab these other things. It actually got to the point where when i had the watch I was avoiding the other stuff because they weren't nearly as good…

The bosses are fun when they're not ridiculously impossible. There's one that looks like Death, and throws these spinning scythes that has to be impossible… like i'm convinced that no one has ever beat this game without an autosave feature, because i had one and this boss took me like an hour and a half to beat. It went from being kind of frustrating that it was so hard, to being kind of fun that it was so impossible. Like every time I landed one more hit than the time before it was a huge achievement! It was super exciting! I will say that there's not much for a difficulty curve though, because the last boss is much easier once you figure out his pattern… but it was still cool.

Playing on the emulator this game took me maybe four hours to beat… Maybe five or six. I'd say given that kind of play length and the amount of fun i had on some of the sections, I'd say the game was worth it, but only by a little bit. 

#2 - Professor Layton and the Curious Village

I have to think that the makers of this game, Level-5 Inc., wanted to make a Sherlock Holmes game and couldn't get the rights or something, because how you'd imagine that to be, is very similar to how this plays. However that sounded it wasn't meant to sound bad, quite the contrary! This is by far one of the most original games I've ever played, and I enjoyed the hell out of it for, if nothing else, that reason alone! The game plays basically like a point and click adventure with puzzles thrown in to break up the monotony. Now most games say they have puzzles in them to do something similar, but this game has real puzzles. I'm not talking move a block out of the way to find a button, or having to time when to jump down a corridor kind of puzzles. Like real, legit, puzzles. Like "On my way to St. Ives, i met a man with seven wives…" puzzles. Which is good and bad. These brain teasers are really fun at times, but there were a few i got stuck on and couldn't figure out the answer and had to ask help from a friend, or just look them up online in some cases. Now the game does provide a system so that you can get hints, but my problem with this is, most of the time you have to get to the third hint to even get a clue, because the first two are mostly filler. I mean there are math puzzles in the game and the first hint will be like "Maybe you should do some math man!" and it's like "awesome… like i hadn't thought of that already…" Most of the time it didn't bug me, but there were a few times that it was so redundant i wanted to punch the game in the face. That said, there are very few puzzles that are impossible to get right on the first try. Most of them after you get the answer, however you do so, your brain will click and you'll wonder why you couldn't figure that out yourself from the get go.


The biggest problem with this game is getting from one puzzle to the other. The bumming around town interface is a little less than desirable. Basically it displays one section of the town at a time and you click on everything to either find the hint coins i already mentioned, or hidden puzzles. I feel like a 3D interface would have worked better, or maybe even side scrolling sections would have improved upon this mechanic, because just tapping everywhere on the screen until you find what you're looking for can get old. Who knows, maybe the grass is always greener, because all of this is coming from the same guy who when he gets stuck in a Resident Evil game walks along every wall pushing the X button over and over again until i find what i need. Who knows which is worse, all i know is it got old at times in this game, but not to an unbearable point by any means. 

The Story is fine enough. it's your kind of standard, "Big mystery in a little town" story, but with some delightful twists here and there. The animated sequences are pretty top notch in my opinion, and the voice acting in them was pretty awesome. All of my favorite parts, aside from the few really outstandingly enjoyable puzzles, were the scenes acted out by the cast. Really enjoyable stuff. Specifically one about three quarters into the game, it really ramps up the emotion in the game. I was kind of going through the motions until it happened, and then i realized that i found these characters likable and that i cared what happened to them!

Overall the game was pretty good. At best one of the most unique games i've played, and at worst a little tedious. I'd say it's definitely worth checking out!

#11 - Final Fantasy XI

I Review some other MMOs later on that I think that do a much better job than this one, and cost much less, but for now, here it is: 

So I tend to like the creations of Square Enix, especially when they were Squaresoft. I had this idea that I was going to play every “Final Fantasy” Game from beginning to end. This is the game that shattered that idea. Not because it’s long or epic or anything of the sort, mostly just because it’s not fun. I had a lot of “Fanboy Love” for this series, and this game overcame that and still made me hate it, a lot. I’ve played the game two separate times once where I barely scratched the surface, and then again when I quit once I had done so. 

The game looks enough like a “Final Fantasy” game. Everything looks very epic. There are a lot of NPCs that tell you shit that’s absolutely useless. And there’s a Metric Fuck-Ton of gear that’s not spaced out well enough so you can never afford the next highest up item that you want, so you usually just end up saving up for a while and skipping some. Anyways, I picked my class and got down to the grind, which I didn’t really mind at first. Then we got a few quests here and there, which were a nice improvement over grinding. They were a little harder and not exactly the same every time. So I think at this point I’m going to go ahead and make a long story short, after we finished anywhere from 3 to 5 quests, I don’t remember exactly how man, we got to the point where we were level 11 and the very next quest we could do we needed to be level 21. “What the Fuck?” I literally said aloud… Don’t get me wrong, I expect a certain amount of grinding from MMOs, RPGs especially, but why the fuck would anyone think that its fun to just go around and kill shit for a week just to get to the next quest? I was pretty annoyed. The person I was playing with and I came to an agreement that we would try and stick it out and figure out some way to endure this, putting aside the fact that I’m sure that somewhere later on down the line we would hit the same problem, and have to do the same thing again. Our solution to this problem was “Hey, why don’t we go outside of the areas surrounding the city. We’ll go out and explore the world, and kill shit on the way, and it won’t feel so much like grinding.”

We were very naive. We headed out and killed stuff on the way and it wasn’t so bad at first. We killed the stupid worm things and whatever other bullshit monsters they had at the beginning for Noobs like us to kill, but as we got further and further away from the city we started getting our asses kicked, a lot. No biggie, these guys were just a little tougher, right? Once we got away from these guys, and found something else to kill, we’d be straight, right? Nope, absolutely wrong. Two maps outside of our starting city, and we were screwed. Everything was too strong for us to fight. Now again, maybe I’m just talking shit about the MMO Genre and not this particular game, but what the fuck is up with not being able to leave the starting city until weeks into the game? All this time is spent making this huge massive world, and you completely cut yourself from anyone who’s not the most dedicated player. It’s just not good marketing… Anyways, so we went back to the city, and probably made it halfway to the next quest, and I just said, fuck it, I’m going to play something that I’ll enjoy…

#7 - The Impossible Game

This game is so addicting. This is probably one of the most addicting games I’ve ever played. In this game you play the hero, an orange block who has the ability to jump. Now, I’ve fought some pretty badass villains in my time. I mean, big daddies are pretty cool, brutes might pose some trouble, the Joker is one of my favorite villains of all time, and I could merc zombies all day long, but in this game your biggest enemy is three triangles next to each other or a thick black line at the bottom of the screen. 

The concept is pretty nil, but the idea is that you’re on a white line, and triangles begin to rush at you, and obviously you have to jump over them so as not to explode. Then there are blocks that you can jump on top of, but if you run into them, you also explode. Then, sometimes the floor turns from a white line into a thick black line, which also makes you explode. So the idea is to avoid the obstacles by timing your jumps correctly… I think I just explained what a platforming game is by definition... So I feel a little stupid for boiling a game down to it's core mechanic and saying "That's what the game is about!", but this is what makes this game so much fun, its textbook platforming, without all the hoopla. The true entertainment in this game is its shear intensity. This game is so hard it keeps you coming back with the desire to defeat it. 

I can’t even believe how fun this game is, and I mean that‘s really what matters in the end right? I bought it because it looked like something my girlfriend might enjoy, and I played it a couple of times and I couldn’t stop. There’s a practice mode where you can set up checkpoints throughout the level, and see the whole deal, which is a lot of fun in itself, but playing the game the way it’s meant to be is awesome. It may not sound like it, but this game is great. The controls work well, which I hope considering you really only use 1 button in the regular mode and four during practice, but everything feels natural and flows well. At first I didn’t realize you could hold down the jump button so I was trying to get into a rhythm, and there was literally this one part I spent a half an hour to an hour trying to beat this one part that I later realized I could just hold down the button and the orange box would skip through it with no problem for me. The “Level” design is really good, just when you think you’ve got the hang of how you’re going to conquer the level, there’s a curve ball. There are a couple of misleading paths, and different obstacles later in the level, with a definable difficulty curve. I mean the developer himself has only beaten the game a couple of times not in practice mode, I think that says something. Not only that, but the soundtrack is great, and how it flows with the obstacles, this game almost plays like a music/rhythm game. All of that coupled along with the fact that the game is only a dollar, I think this is awesome, and it’s a great example of how indie developers should be getting more credit in the community. You can purchase the game on both Xbox Live, and at the iPhone App store. Go check it out Here, this guy deserves to make some money off of this game.

Mission Statement

The idea here is that I want to create a video game countdown, of my all time favorite games, that doesn't end. Not only does it not end, but it grows and changes as I do. Basically I want to review games, and put them the order of my least favorite, to my favorite. But as i play new games, or replay ones i've already played, it will change where each game falls. So one game might be in one place for a while, but the countdown as a whole grows. I'm sure there will be random posts here or there, but that is the overall idea. Wish me Luck!