general thread for the great selectbutton pastime of videogame listmaking, from the idiosyncratically personal and hyperspecifically themed to the broad and popularly canonical, along with the discussion of existing lists external to the forum. inspired by @Rudie’s excellent 100 games list. there have been various list threads throughout the years and it’s fine if this gets merged but i couldn’t find one that was general enough to encompass everything i want to include here.
here’s my top 25, a blend of personal favorites and games that sit on high in my platonic heaven mind palace of videogame even if i don’t play them competently. made with topsters.
i remember not really getting Beautiful Escape when i played it nd i still need to give Vague Story another go, but i would still rec both as “cool good things people have done with the engine”. fwih their authors’ oeuvres along with’t.
i really liked LISA when i first played it a few years back but idk how id feel now. substitute for growling in my demise at will. 1/2 of this is games i already mentioned in my top10 or related but i am literally asleep rn
A nonvideogame thing I think about a lot is Rolling Stone’s top 50 COOLEST albums from 2008. It’s actually pretty hard to find online nowadays. (Link)
Without having the actual article to explain the context or criteria, it’s interesting to imagine what they were going for. In this post I can’t really get into what I think about it–other than to say that I don’t think coolest means most obscure or hardest to enjoy.
So I’ve long thought about what the videogame equivalent version of this list would look like. Not in a personal way, but like roleplaying that I am a magazine writer begrudgingly getting the job done and trying not to add too much personal bias. Unfortunately I am just one guy and it would make more sense if it was compiled from multiple people’s opinions. I really struggled to get into the mindset to think about pc games, recent games, and recentish art games. In fact this was a really bad idea in general and I didn’t think I would ever share or do anything with it, but now this thread appeared so I decided to rush and finish it. It was hard to not just fill the whole thing with Taito games.
Oh one other thing I will say about the intention of the RS list: I think their list partly stems from a desire to make a list of good music while breaking from typical music magazine list canon, so that they could finally relax and not feel obligated to put sgt. pepper and shit. In that sense, this videogame list is kind of a failure because the regular Selectbutton top games of all time* list is a pretty big break from normal videogame lists. It just feels too familiar to me as a poster, but I bet it would blow other people’s minds. Anyways,
*Speaking of lists, yeah I made this wiki page a while ago. I do not plan on working on it anymore so if you feel like adding or redoing any of it, please go ahead & you don’t need to ask me, I’m not really proud of the layout/format. And the pull quotes, they were actually chosen by the person who ran the whole voting process in a now-deleted post, not by me–I needed a starting point & figured those would be good to capture for posterity
Games that are my favourite kind of game. Roughly in order of chronological influence starting with The Manhole. I think I was 5 or 6 when this ensorcelled me and I realised games could be more than (to me, at the time) fun but flat, controllable Saturday morning cartoons. They could be worlds to enter into and poke around and get turned around and get lost inside of. The Manhole has no end goal. It seemed infinite and mysterious and returning to it as an adult was like returning to my childhood home after 20 years for the first time as an adult. This is not the same place! The uncanny smallness of it all! But it made video games seem magical in a way I hadn’t connected with before.
Dark Forces expanded on this in sophisticated ways though I was unsophisticated enough to never get beyond the first level I’m pretty sure (maybe it was just the demo (wait that’s not true I remember eventually grappling with the second level and finally reaching the sewer mission after that, I was just unsophisticated!)) but that first level felt so considerately, cryptically constructed and I distinctly remember the first time I found the Imperial hideout with the red insignia on the door behind the big wall, it felt borderline taboo! Speaking of taboos, my older cousin said if I liked “that Star Wars game” I should play DOOM and he installed it on our computer and that was a special illicit indulgence to play when my parents weren’t around. Definitely just the shareware version but it got me interested in demons and occult shit and changed my sketchbook content lol and kept me plenty entertained.
Until ol’ Mario transitioned from being just another flat Saturday morning cartoon character and blew my 11 year-old mind. This game still blows my mind, and I’ve said a lot about it here over the years but the quality of being on the cutting edge of something new and undefined and exuberantly trying to define that new something (which a lot of games on this list are doing) goes beyond nostalgia for me to embody a moment transcending personal reminiscence, the inventive, playful gestures of presenting a character that explains/embodies the idea of a 3D camera and then like halfway into the game encountering a mirror to show you that character filming you, filming itself, showing you the behind the scenes workings of this concept in a cartoon visual way idk that’s wonderful! One of the many little things I think about is the hidden entrance into Shifting Sand Land. I assume the designers had two ideas about its discovery: 1) The player encounters a dead end and is curious enough to touch it and see it ripple and have an “ah-ha!” moment (I don’t recall exactly, cuz when’s the last time I read the damn signs but there may be one eluding to a hidden painting) or 2) when MiPs the rabbit runs past that spot while you’re trying to catch him, being one of those stretches where you’re tempted to make a dive at him, you might (likely) miss and have a generously happy accident, “ah-ha!?”
Then I saved up lawnmowing/babysitting money for a Playstation and Tomb Raider was my first game. Maybe there was some initial frustration with how stiff Lara controlled compared to Mario but after a while I came to appreciate and even feel this was a superior 3D platformer (and maybe I still do). Post-The Manhole the thing I like about these games is having a conversation with the designer in the language of geometry, distance, perspective, and Tomb Raider is a punchier, tougher, sharper more rigorous dialogue than SM64’s level design small talk (that curious players can push further so it’s maybe more flexible and “you get out of it what you put into it”) but Tomb Raider is more demanding and I think rewarding as brass tacks design. Also it carries on the ?/? secrets tallied per level from games like DOOM and Dark Forces and I like that sort of thing!
Jumping Flash! made me realise that game characters don’t jump high enough and that looking down from a giant leap is unique video game joy (how did the 3D platformer peak in the first year of its birth??? (I consider Quake a 3D platformer pretty much and even though I go to DOOM to get a certain gunplay fix, Quake is just more this kind of game)). And thank you Crackdown for bringing that back in the imo dark ages for these kinds of game. And with guns! And grenades! And even though a lot of the subsequent entries have plenty (shout out to Dark Forces II and it’s, again, first level in their first fully 3D game, for its terrifically twisted, tangled, rabbit-holed and colossally vertical spaces (and because I can never not think of its imo lovely cornball FMV cutscenes, a virtue of this list it nonintrusive narratives, in-between levels sure, but don’t bug me when I’m in my zones)) LSD proves it’s not necessary if the art and the vibe and the mystery in combination with exploration is compelling enough. The Manhole will always be special for being the first glimpse of recognition of of this kind of game so it was something special to recently find that the other bookend to this list, the Map Collection games, could make me feel that again, the conversation going new places to rewire my brain a bit. Maybe if I can get it together, I can contribute on a personal level with the concepts I’ve gathered thinking about these games* over the years. Maybe! I didn’t mean to post so long. Ok. Thanks for reading.
*Why didn’t Demon’s/Dark Souls or Grow Home make the list? Well, the former are too weighty and maybe too heavy with representationality and thick with other (amazing) STUFF, and the latter is a delight but there’s a too…workmanlike simplicty to its (satisfying) central goal, maybe if the levels were more labyrinthine/the vibe was different idk. There’s also another favourite kind of game list but Metroid (NES) is the only one on it.
I never actually played Manhole at any time when I was a kid and there was a gaping hole of missing desire its exact size in the middle of all the games I did play. I needed it and didn’t know it existed.
and clicks reply
