All Time Top Ten

[Ohio Joe]

I stopped at the dispensary on the way home tonight. The budtender tells me they have a great new strain, first harvest for them and it's called "Outdoor Elephant"... He gets a real serious look on his face after telling me this and dead serious says "It's just a name, we grow it indoors"... heh, I just about wet myself laughing

So I get home and my car pool buddy and I proceed to our now ritual 'get home smoke' before we go to our respective homes and the topic of the night ends up being all time favorite games... After I had some dinner and some more smoke I got in the mood to write my list and why each game is there... Please feel free to add your list, I do want to see it... This kid (kid... heh, he is 20 years younger then me and I'm 50 so he is a kid... Fuck it, anyone 20 years younger then you has got to be a kid) and I had very different lists and I came away from it with some new games to try annnnnnd, I hope to get more

So first my list, starting at number 10 and working our way to my pick for best game of all time... Any system, any time period...

heh... Ask me on another night and I'll almost certainly have a different list depending on what I remember or am thinking of but here it is tonight...

10 - We are going to not only start off but go with three in a row from one of the most maligned systems ever crapped out for a profit. I was still at my first job as a programmer with now dead Ames Dept. Stores in Rocky Hill Ct. I went total fanboy and whole heartedly jumped on board the Jaguar band wagon. Yeah... Perhaps the biggest flop in home gaming ever but... It did, IMO produce three absolute gems and the first is Tempest 2000... Fuck yeah, Game Fan magazine said it absolutely perfect when they said the game would cause permanent butt marks in your couch... It did indeed. I had just discovered what a decent/good Tequila was like and this game was perfect to kick back on the couch, sip some Patron (which for some reason seemed far more fucking expensive then) and be amazed by the incredible visuals and audio... I had some good shit back then too... A 26" NEC monitor and a decent stereo system for my audio... No, I'm serious, that was a pretty damn good set up back then

9 - Alien vs. Predator - Atari Jaguar - This game was fucking awesome. You could play as an Alien, a Predator or a Marine. They all took place on the same space station but each had their own story, play style and ending. The Marine type was very typical FPS fare... The Predator was played with an 'Honor' system, your kills were rated based on how you killed. The higher your 'Honor' rating, the more weapons you had access to... Up to and including the shoulder canon... Sweet The Alien was played full on attack... Impregnate the victim and move on... Each time you died, you went back to the earliest egg and hatched (you could have up to three eggs). The moment that put this game on the list was when my marine character first entered the Predator area and was hunted by a cloaked Predator... It would come up behind me, poke me and then run away with whispers and clicks lifted from the movie... Freakin awsome

8 - Doom - Atari Jaguar - I've played Doom on many platforms and hands down, the Jaguar version was the best. My buddy John would haul his system and TV to my place every Friday night and we would get wasted... He was often able to get some dirt weed and we would smoke and do some shots and cook up a storm and game. The Jaguar version of Doom allowed us to connect our Jaguars and play co-op, with full screen on each of our TV's... Yeah... The internet was kind of new fangled back then... heh

7 - Telengard - Atari 800xl... With the freaking cassette drive - This was the game that did it... Hooked me on gaming and it's never let go. oh... About 1980... I'm in my first apartment, working as a Teamster stacking cement blocks (I was called a "Cuber&quot and this was state of the art shit in home geekery... I shit you not, this game not only confirmed me as a gamer, it directly led me to becoming a programmer. The game came on a cassette tape, just like a music cassette tape and you played it to load the Basic code into the computers memory... Then you had to type "run 'program name'"... No, really, we did that, heh. My buddy Bill and I would play it for hours on end.

6 - Top Gear - SNES - I had played a few racing games in the arcade but not often as they always felt like a rip-off. As the move went more towards home gaming, this was the first racing game I fell in love with. A bunch of cool tracks, three types of cars to choose from, split screen multi-player and even difficulty levels... This was racing bliss. This is another game my buddy John and I played to death.

5 - Diablo - My buddy Bill introduced me to this particular addiction. We played over modem for ages until we discovered Battlenet and... It killed the game. We began playing in public games and found tons of people who gave away amazing items... We spent a few gaming sessions together using these godly items before we really asked out loud... WTF? We have been playing for ages and have never found a single item even close to the shit people are dropping like litter on Battlenet, what is this shit?... And we found out it was all crap that had been created in an item generator and duplicated a gazillion times... Sigh... I hate that shit.

4 - StarCraft - I still play this on occasion and still love this game. I suck at it... For as many hours as I've put into the game, I still pretty much suck at it but my buddy Bill and I have spent a hell of a lot of years playing it now

3 - Neo Nectaris - TG16 - This was a great little tactical game. You had a map with units and bases, kill all the other guys units or capture his bases to win the map and go onto the next map. Each map got progressively harder and before long you were horribly outnumbered and out gunned... Always fun figuring out each map. heh, It is one of the few items I've purchased from the playstation store for my PS3.

2 - Romance of the Three Kingdoms - SNES - I forget now if it was 3 or 4... or both I played... heh, there have been so many of these I've played through the years but that was when it started and I've been hooked on it for years. When I describe it to people who have never played them, they never think it sounds like a very good game but I swear they are awesome... It is part city building, part strategy, all turn based and with a story line about China around the second/third century that is presented with 80's wrestling style acting... I don't mean the actual wrestling, I mean how the wrestlers cut their promos... If you don't know what I mean, Sorry... If you do, well there it is, you know there is simply nothing in existence to compare it to

1 - Alpha Centuari/Alien Crossfire - I still consider this game to be perfect. I'm still perfectly fine with the general graphics of the game... The movies could probably stand to be redone to play full screen in HD... or 3D HD... But the game is still fine for what you need to play it and enjoy. The never ending stream of so freakin many quotes, both real and fictional, works so well. The game customization allowed is amazing... What? You want easy and stomp all over anything... Do it. You want so insanely hard that one single mistake, any time, any where... One bad random encounter... Death... And probably you will die anyway just because it is that freakin hard... Go ahead... Or you can make it anywhere in a huge range in between. I think it's eight different difficulty levels, 8 factions play per game and you can specify which ones or make them random from a total of 16 factions. Custom factions can be made with the handy editor. Size of the map to be played, victory conditions, native life forms... And on and on, heh, and that is just the set up options I was very intimidated by this game when I got home and opened the package... The fucking manual was 80 pages! I almost shit as I stared at it while installing the game (this was a forty minute process back then)... I poured myself a nice shot of tequila, open the manual... And was relieved to see that the first thing it said was 'Put down the manual and go start a game on easy'... Best fucking manual ever written. Not only did they make the best help system in a game ever done for easy (a tip pops up every time something happens and explains everything plainly, no 'in speak', noops welcome, heh... Two options to dismiss a tip, either 'this once' or 'never show again'. A few hours of this and you are doing pretty good but are starting to get some questions the tips are not going into... So off to the godly manual and start putting some time into it... Fucking-A, the manual is expecting you and it gives you all kinds of great info and you go back to the game and kick some ass and go to a greater challenge... And the higher the challenge you want to go to, the more information you need and... Sure as shit, the manual is crammed with charts and graphs and facts and figures and every fucking thing you need to get the most efficient path to victory... I have no idea who wrote this manual... Who fought to include an 80 fucking page manual of gold in a time when such things were already dead... But YOU my friend... Get my vote for best game manual ever written!

OK, gotta wrap this up, I want to grab a smoke, a bite to eat and play some Borderlands 2