this is the closest I’m going to get to a list of my favorite games so I’m going to write a bunch about them
dragon’s dogma - it is the game that is trying the hardest to be an MMO that you play by yourself most of the time while also being an amalgam of all the cool things in video games in the best way, as opposed to the worst way, which is the way most AAA dev studios do things because they are too afraid to look dumb while pitching monster climbing mechanics at the same time a meeting for pitching a complex player-developed AI system in the other room occurs; simultaneously, a meeting in which the story’s lore is explained in terms of having different layers of reality takes place. game’s wild and I love it
smash melee - don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said, outside of feeling like I’m the only person in my group of friends outside of SB that takes this game seriously enough to like, actually be good at it while following the tournament scene. there’s this designer at my company (that is a UCSC alum and did a VR game that the department head described as “good as far as personality and leadership goes” but I’m convinced he was only hired because he’s tall) who is always talking about the melee scene because UCSC had a big one and when he finally brought a gamecube and CRT in to play smash I played him and beat him 2/3 after having not played for years and the only game I lost was when I played link, which is always a rough time but especially after not having played for year (shield cancel up-B is link’s lifeblood and I couldn’t do it), and like, I guess it’s just my life to be the person in the group of people who decides to represent my interest in a game by like, playing it
rocket league - now you can be messi, but in a car; in a world where every soccer game is attempting to model the difficulty of controlling a ball with only your feet by using increasingly realistic PLAYER ANIMATIONS and BALL PHYSICS psyonix solves the problem of modeling the weirdness of non-binary ball possession by putting you in a car and telling you to play soccer
nba street vol 2 - I don’t think any game has ever quite captured the aesthetic and spirit of what it was referencing quite like this game did with 00s basketball? classic NY-centric hip hop sound track with just blaze doing beats for all the interstitial parts, a mode where you can build your own team of nobodies and then eventually play michael jordan from TEN YEARS AGO, reverence of basketball legends from all of basketball’s history, low key the best latin american representation videogames have almost ever seen with bobbito garcia as the MC, getting yao ming to literally nail an ALLEY OOP THREE POINTER and then watching him shimmy after his shot swishes so loudly that it not only gives you more than the possible amount of points there is to score in regulation basketball but it DEDUCTS points from the other team for deigning to attempt a shot block in the canned gamebreaker animation? people don’t talk about this game anymore but it really did bridge the gap between the 90s MJ and the Bulls era and the modern lebron/curry/antetokounmpo era while the rest of the country was being racist toward allen iverson
ssx 3 - this game probably defined my creative aesthetic more than any other game I’ve ever played and I have spent essentially my entire life trying to recreate the feeling of spending literally half an hour in a single session riding down a huge mountain while the game throws a band pass filter and phaser on the yellowcard track playing in the background as you leap from your 15th enormous fucking ramp
thps2 - I’m pretty sure this game got an entire generation of kids to start skateboarding, me included, and in addition to being a super technical game to play it also managed to merge both the vert and street skating scenes into one big experience and that’s why I’m picking this one over thps1; eric koston showed up in the 2nd one and watching his tapes in the game was just absolutely incredible
skate - I’m going to nominate two skateboarding games on this list because skateboarding is good; this and thps2 taken as a double feature is maybe the most complete statement on skateboarding as mechanics and cultural experience you could get from videogames, full stop. skate manages to successfully recreate the feeling of trying to stick ONLY and SPECIFICALLY a switch flip frontside boardslide on this specific rail in this specific place because it would look the coolest, and who cares if it’s the only thing you do in the hour you play the game/skate the spot
nba jam tournament edition - so for all I wrote about nba street vol. 2 representing 00s basketball, nba jam TE represents 90s basketball in all its glory and somehow doesn’t even manage to have michael jordan in it, AND also plays incredibly well to this day. there have been attempts to make this game with modern players but the modern game of basketball right now feels like what this game was ALREADY TRYING TO DO three decades ago, where a single player would score 50 points night after night and no one even comments on it because he also manages to get every foul call in the universe and your enforcer/shot blocker guy is nailing threes from the corner like it’s nothing and the whole game is transition offense; modern basketball is great because it feels like watching humans do things you’d only see in videogames (did anyone see damian lillard just pull up and shoot it from the fucking half court logo a week ago and knock it down like nothing happened?? incredible), nba jam is great because you’re watching 90s basketball players play like you thought they played in your imagination
def jam ffny - some absolute fucking genius found a way to give aki access to the def jam license and they managed to make maybe the best single player fighting game of all time? and you’re not just playing def jam rappers, you get to BE A CHARACTER THAT INTERACTS WITH THEM? like it takes the best parts of wrestling games and pairs them with non-wrestling styles so you get the whole dynamic of finishers and health only being a reflection of how long you stay down after getting knocked down, but now it’s redman running off a wall and kicking you that finishes you off; desus and mero playing this game is the 2020 version of soulja boy playing braid
wayne gretzky’s 3d hockey - people will have you believe that nhl 94 is the best hockey game, but those same people probably think that f-zero on the snes is the best f-zero. wayne gretzky’s 3d hockey is the f-zero GX to nhl 94’s snes f-zero and is secretly one of the quickest and fastest arcade hockey games you’ll ever play with 3-pass one timers being the default way to score and sometimes the goalie turns into a literal brick wall; this was only hindered by having to play it on the nintendo 64 controller at home, but there was an arcade version and playing that with my brother and two cousins was probably that time’s equivalent of like, killer queen or something
virtua tennis (I guess the dreamcast edition) - taught me how to position to play tennis in real life, also 4 human players playing this is glorious
super mario strikers - best arcade soccer game as far as I’m concerned, because it’s essentially an arcade hockey game but with mario and a soccer ball and I’m kind of surprised people slept on this as a competitive game? the only game that gets close in terms of having to track people that don’t have the ball and pre-emptively check them is wayne gretzky’s 3D hockey and/or NHL Hitz