The Real Top 30 Games

4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – Like a lot of people, I was disappointed by the recent Star Wars prequels. I didn’t hate them, but they left me wondering, “Was my delight in the world of Star Wars merely a product of my young memory applying a sense of wonder that eventually became nothing more than simple nostalgia?” Playing through KotOR is direct evidience that there actually was something to Star Wars to begin with: It wasn’t just nostalgia. That Lucas lost track of what made Star Wars good to begin with is a topic for another time but fortunately the team at BioWare tapped into that sense of awe with a prequel to the prequels which draws the player into the world of Star Wars like no other Star Wars licensed property since Timothy Zahn’s novelized adaptations of what would have been episodes VII, VIII and IX. KotOR gets Star Wars perfect, blending enough new with the familiar and incorporating a wonderfully engaging and open-ended story into a huge experience. There is so much here to praise: The Light/Dark paths through the game that make it one of the few role-playing video games that is actually re-playable; PC-style dialogue trees and detailed character interaction—on a console!; a smooth, good-looking combat system based on d20; really stellar character progression including Jedi powers that are introduced at just the right moment. I could go on. The bottom line is that if you like role-playing games or if you like Star Wars or if you like games that make good purchases (value-wise) and you haven’t played this game, it’s worth the price of the XBox alone.

3. The Legend of Zelda – Other than the classic sound effect you get for iscovering a secret door, the other thing that will always stand out in my mind about the original Zelda game is that surreal TV commercial they put out for it that featured a freakish guy looking paranoid and shouting out the names of some of the game’s enemies. “Octoroks!” But the game itself had so much to offer: From the gold colored cartridge to the battery save feature to the detailed quest that was the first I’d ever heard of that didn’t actually require going through entirely the way the designer intended. People would talk about beating Ganon with just the wooden sword. “Insanity!” I thought, but it was certainly possible. Like Metroid, Zelda offered not just places to go but things to acquire: The “collector” gamer was born with these types of games where your avatar increased in ability as the game progressed rather than remaining more or less static and simply offering new ways to use the same basic abilities available at the beginning of the game. That so much game was crammed between two buttons, a directional pad and the questionably useful “Start” and “Select” buttons is still amazing to this day, as is the fact that this game remains nearly as playable 20 years after its release as it was back in the day.

2. Super Mario Bros. 3 – There was a time when all the cell phone stores you see anywhere that could even be remotely referred to as a shopping center weren’t peddling cell phones. The ubiquitous storefront venture of the late eighties was the Mom and Pop video rental store. This was before the big corporate chains crushed everyone out of business, and they were everywhere. In the little shopping center down the street from our house when I was kid there was one of these stores and they were renting something else: Nintendo carts. Someone who worked there must have either been a gamer or was just really ahead of their time because they not only carried video games for rent before most other people were even considering such a wacky notion but they also had a handful of imported titles from Japan. Among them was this insanely anticipated forthcoming title named Super Mario Bros. 3. Following up the fun but unusual SMB2 (which was actually a Mario-ized facelift of an unrelated Japanese game), SMB3 was hyped everywhere, including getting feature billing in a feature film so having a chance to play with it (albeit the text was in Japanese) ahead of its release was spectacular. The game was everything players wanted back then: Reminicent of the original console-bundled classic, offering plenty of new challenges, loads of secrets to find and perfectly tuned platforming gameplay. I rushed out and bought the game when it was finally released in the US and I’ve played through it probably ten times including several times after getting the facelift for Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES. It’s a timeless classic and deserves all the praise it gets.

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