GameCola fans and writers describe their favorite (and sometimes least favorite) games of all time.
Alex’s Top 10 Favorite Games
I recently stumbled onto your site, and loved it, and in addition to subscribing, I’m giving you my version of the top 10 games of all times that you pleaded for so much :). Hope you like.
10. Illusion of Gaia (SNES): Easily best action/RPG of all time. Great plotline combined with incredible puzzles and an awesome soundtrack made this game not only one of the SNES’ best games, but one of Enix’s and one of the best to grace a Nintendo system ever.
9. Fighter’s History (SNES): The game that caused the classic lawsuit between Data East and Capcom. Though it’s true that the game shares an incredible amount of similarities with the original Street Fighter II, it improved on it a great deal, with more personality, better graphics, better controls, and overall was just more fun to play… this is still one of my favourites to pick up and sit down for a good few rounds when friends come over.
8. Akumajou Drakula: Rondo no Chi (Turboduo Import): Without a doubt, the best Castlevania game ever released, past or present. Featured the same challenge as the earlier games did, with massively revamped graphics and redbook audio, years before the series went to the RPG/action style gameplay. If you want to see old-skool XV at it’s best, find a copy of this.
7. Street Fighter Alpha 2 (PSX): Though not the prettiest fighter, visually or aurally, ever released, the game certainly plays better than any other, whether it be 2D or 3D. With the combo system tweaked to perfection, along with the game’s speed and controls, it’s a classic in every sense of the word (that is, if you ignore load times in the definition of classic…).
6. AirZonk (TG16): It really was amazing what NEC was able to pull out of an 8-bit system. Better looking and sounding than most Genesis games, this game was a technological milestone, and it plays like a true gem. Underneath the at times overbearingly cute graphics is a massively addictive and challenging (on the high difficulty settings) shooter that deserved far more credit than it got.
5. Metal Gear Solid (PSX): What really needs to be said about this game? Kojima’s crowning achievement, he truly showed us what the 32-bit gaming experience should be. A truly immersive world that doesn’t even feel like a game most of the time. A truly incredible work of art.
4. Darius Twin (SNES): Though one of the SNES’ earliest shooters, it stands head and shoulders above its peers, on both its own system and others. Why? Not for its graphic or sound quality, for both, while decent at the time, have not fared very well at all with time — but for it’s ability to draw you in for hours, making you memorize specific patterns of enemy formations and bullet arrays, the ability to cut your own path through the solar system, thus giving you new levels every time you play, not to mention the satisfaction of winning the game after finishing it with one life on Hard mode.
3. Ninja Gaiden (NES): Long before using complex physics to get rendered breasts to jiggle properly, Tecmo got their first widespread industry recognition with this classic way back in 1989. It revolutionized the way action games told their stories with its dramatic cinemas laid out between each action packed level, each one revealing just enough of the plot to make you keep playing until you got to the next one to find out more. Without Ninja Gaiden, who knows! We could still be looking at endings like those in the original Super Mario Bros :).
2. The Legend of Dragoon: One of Sony’s true greats, which IMO got a lot of unjustly bad reviews. This one ties an incredibly solid battle system with gorgeous graphics and an absolutely amazing storyline… to which it should be owing its thanks to…
1. Final Fantasy 2 (SNES): The best RPG, and best game to have ever been made. Probably the first RPG to have a true central cast of characters with developed personalities and storylines that revolve around them that actually make you care about what happens to them. Combine that with an absolutely FANTASTIC score that Uematsu Nobuo managed to come up with for this chapter in the series (which was actually fourth in the series *Japanese*, not the second) that always manages emotionally to fit every scene perfectly, and you have a classic that arguably manages to sit atop not only the series, but takes the RPG crown.
