:genki: THE 501 GAMES OF ALL TIMES :genki:

[HOBO]

440. ILLUSION OF GAIA



I didn’t think much of this game back in the day but then I learned Moto Hagio did the character designs, so now I think it’s good. There’s not a trace of Hagio to be found in-game, and I barely remember anything else about it, but it’s good. I think there’s a bit where you’re stuck on a raft? Maybe a sequence where you’re wrongfully imprisoned? Maybe this game is really depressing? I am pretty sure there’s a rich girl whose ill-tempered pet pig smashes up a house, and if this was about her I’d remember every fucking detail about it.

I present you with a challenge, gentle reader: make a game about that girl and her pet pig. It would surely be a hit. I know I’d pay $60 for it. Especially if you went hogwild with the alliteration. Like, you don’t have to call it Pampered Princess Porky & Her Pal Swineflu but y’know…you could.

439. SUB-TERRANIA

FUCK THIS SHIT I CAN’T EVEN BEAT THE FIRST STAGE

439. ATOMIC RUNNER CHELNOV - NUCLEAR MAN, THE FIGHTER


Now this is more like it. This is a good game.

Wikpedia claims Chelnov is an infinite runner. It’s not. It is an autoscroller where you can’t run backwards but you can stand still. I’m pretty sure it is finite. I haven’t beaten it but I think I saw the ending on Game Center CX. You can throw boomerangs and fireballs and do somersaults and shoot candles for powerups so it kinda feels like someone took a bunch of assets from 1987 Konami games and made the weirdest best romhack.

So that mislabeling upsets me because there is a lot of exciting information on Wikipedia and now I don’t know if I can trust any of it. Here are some things I learned that I also hope are true:

• An unreleased Sega Saturn port was unearthed in recent years.
• Chelnov appears as a boss in Fighter’s History: Mizoguchi’s Moment of Crisis!!, a Super Famicom sequel to Karnov’s Revenge. This means you can hold Chelnov vs. Karnov battles which makes this better than any Smash Bros.
• Makoto Mizoguchi from Karnov’s Revenge appeared in King of Fighters’ Maximum Impact Regulation A and wears one of those Japanese thongs.
• Mizuoguchi is the most promiment character in the Fighter’s History franchise. He is from Osaka. He is a high school delinquent. He is in his late 20s. He’s been repeatedly held back and unable to graduate. There is no indication of whether this is due to his stupidity or misdeeds.

Please tell me this is all true. If it’s all hoaxes…well, I request the Data East vandal please speak up. I know you’re on here cuz that’s SB-level lunacy.

438. KING’S QUEST

Roberta Williams is one of my major inspirations. We share a birthday and a hatred of all the dumb poor people who ruined PC gaming. Things were better before the Voodoo 2 and deathmatch and GameFAQs. Look at that page from the official King’s Quest hintbook, offering a step-by-step solution to solving the riddle of Rumplestiltskin. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? If you disagree sorry, maybe you should throw your computer in the trash and leave personal computing to brainiacs like me and the geniuses at Sierra On-Line.

I promise my game will sell at least as much as King’s Quest and feature twice as many scenes about having social anxiety in front of leprechauns.

I promise I will restore honor and intelligence to computer gaming.

437. SIMEARTH



I was going to bump this from the list cuz all the screenshots looked like the most miserable game for nerds but then I found this, which is very lovely. Gonna pretend it’s from the PC-Engine CD-ROM version. It’s that cool.

Remember how Wil Wright donated to the 2008 McCain campagin? Remember how all those Call of Duty guys did too? Remember how Modern Warfare had all those Dick Cheney quotes yet people still thought that game was good and had Things to Say.

Yesterday I learned that Wyclef Jean from the Fugees claimed to be a fan of Sarah Palin and that didn’t surprise me in the least cuz that dude seemed to be gunning for Bono’s crown as the pop world’s dumbest wannabe politician. But I read this on Wikipedia, which cited the original source as Women’s Wear Daily, so again, not sure how trustworthy that site is since it got Chelnov’s genre wrong.

436. REZ



My search for “Hitachi Magic Wand Fan Art” was one of my biggest disappointments since Rez but then I found this fake Keith Haring being passed off as legit and I can’t stop laughing.

It is fake, right.

Maybe if I had a Trance Vibrator I’d like REZ but even then I dunno. I doubt it would be as fun as some time with a buttplug and the Steep Slope Sliders visualizer. If I’m gonna get rude I’m gonna do it proper.

435. THE MANHOLE



Little known fact: if you become close friends with Rand Millar he’ll let you play the super secret unreleased The Manhole 2: Welcome Leathermen.

Another little known fact: I am making a Hypercard-styled game – that’s DDD: THE NATURAL PLAYBOYS, the best game of all time – yet I have never played a proper Hypercard game.

Myst doesn’t count. I played it on PC and I don’t think that version used Hypercard.

I used to live near the Manhole in Chicago. I never went in. I was too chicken. I don’t think I was buff enough. I don’t think I could ever be buff enough to enter an establishment that holds a regular Dog Tag Night.

But who knows, maybe if I end up with my own Myst-sized hit on my hand I’ll be able to afford that top tier gear and get so fuckin’ swole and then…and then…

434. DRAGON WARRIOR



I went looking for scans from the Dragon Warrior manual but I found this old doodle I did instead. I think I was messing around with color in the new version of Manga Studio? I never showed anyone cuz this was back when there were all these older dudes doing back knockoffs of Michael DeForge and I was like “This looks kinda like one of those people drew it.” Took 15 minutes! Who cares!! No loss!

But here it is, 4 years later!! Are there still lots of 40 years old aping DeForge? Probably! I don’t read anymore so I wouldn’t know.

I think Dragon Warrior is a wonderful, underrated game. I recommend pouring some wine, loading it up in an emulator, and spending 2-3 hours fastforwarding through the entire thing. It is nice playing a game where NPC text is often puzzle hints. Cuz the game has puzzles! It’s almost like an adventure game! And the Ye Olde English shit is cute. I loathe the accents in the post-Dragon Quest 8 localizations. I was all hyped to buy my Pokémon-loving nephew a copy of DQ4 as a gift but then it it came out and it was like reading fucking Trainspotting but way worse cuz there are no references to the opening scene in Jean Claude Van Damme’s LIONHEART where they set that dude on fire. What kid’s gonna put up with that shit??

433. THE IMMORTAL


I never got past the first page of Trainspotting and I never got past the opening of LIONHEART. Why bother? There’s nothing better than that dude getting set on fire.

When I was a kid I had all these friends whose parents were square faux-religious types who were super strict about content filtering, and others whose parents were immigrants and they just did not give a fuck about what they watched but they went to church every week so I think they may have had it way worse. Hanging with the latter group was always thrilling, like the one slumberparty where we spent all night dying in the Immortal and rewinding that dude getting set on fire in LIONHEART. We rewound that for at least an hour. We laughed until we cried and, I think, literally passed out. I bet that was the best fuckin’ birthday that guy ever had.

I haven’t played this game since. I wonder if it’s any good.

432. SNIPPERCLIPS


I’m a very lonely man with no friends or lovers. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon. So purchasing Snipperclips was probably a mistake. Perhaps I thought owning a Nintendo Switch would change my life? And it has: I like games again. But it hasn’t brought more people into my home so perhaps it is a failure. Perhaps video games are as well.

I did play this in co-op once. It was with my mother. It was the fourth game she ever played: the first was Super Monaco GP at a 7-11; there was a flag girl in a swimsuit and I felt the need to apologize and tell her “not all games are like this, Mom! None of them are! Things are weird in arcades!” Then she played Wii Bowling once, said “I want to buy this for everyone in the family and we can have parties every week!” but she never touched it again. And a few years back she sang some songs in Beatles Rock Band. She still talks about how much fun that was. Probably because it was just singing.

So she doesn’t know how to use a controller but she did OK at Snipperclips considering. I got frustrated but y’know, tried not to let it show. She was showing improvement. Seemed to be having a good time. I asked if she wanted to give another shot a few weeks later and she had absolutely no memory of ever playing a video game. So yeah games are a failure I guess.

431. TONGUE OF THE FATMAN


I imported this as a kid. The Japanese version was titled simply FATMAN. I knew it was so rude that it would be Censored in America. I was so fucking excited. But it didn’t have the sickie staying power of Splatterhouse and I think it may have come over uncut eventually? Also it sucked. If only I’d known it was developed by Westerners…younger me would have known to avoid it.

OR

Yeah I do oral. Tell your mom.