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Ten Best Video Games of 1990-2005
Every guy has played video games at least once in his life. This article is a testament to the ten (okay eleven) best games I have ever hand the privilege to play. Most people, I predict, will not have the same ten games for their top games and that is alright, because when there are millions of video games in circulation there is bound to be a few hundred amazingly epic games. The following ten games are games that have not only brought hundreds of hours of entertainment into my life but have also seriously helped me financially (Starcraft), physically (DDR) and emotionally (Primal Rage).
10. FFVIII (PS1) 1999 The fastest selling Final Fantasy Game of its time, FF8, received critical acclaim, both in the States and in Japan. Many people are probably raging because I have FF8 on this list instead of FF7. While FF7 was a good game, I really think FF8 is the best Finial Fantasy game I have ever played. While the concept of a gun-blade is mildly retarded, the game has an excellent story and game play mechanics. The things that set it apart/above the other FF games are the card system, battle cinematic and the Guardian Force system. The card game was called "Triple Triad" and was easily one of the best mini game functions in any FF game. The well thought out card system actually required tactical strategy and intellect. The cinematics were badass and included a assassination attempt, people on motorcycles killing shit and a kick ass gun-blade battle.
Finally, my favorite part of the game was the GF (Guardian Force) system. Unlike any other FF game before it, GFs had to be captured and assigned to a character to be used and could be leveled up just like main characters with battle experience. When used, each GF had its own cinematic cut scene before it would do damage to the enemy(s). During the cut scene the player had the option of pressing a button on the controller as fast as he could in order to make the attack more potent. There would be parts during the cut-sence where if you pressed the button it would restart all the additional damage you had added to the attack, causing great distress to the player and making the whole event pretty fucking intense. In fact I loved and used the GF system so much that at one point my Ifrit GF was at level 61 while my highest main character was at level 26, I was stuck at the final castle for weeks because you couldn't use GF's in the final battle, forcing me to slowly level up my main charactors. Also I agree theat the Gunblade is the stupidest weapon concept ever conceived.
9. Super Mario 64 (N64) 1996 Often in the world of video games when company attempts to port a video game series to a new system, it turns out to play like a steaming pile of walrus shit. Luckily the Mario series was able to cross platforms with little turbulance giving a huge boost to both the mario series and the Nintendo 64. I remember this game coming bundled with my N64 when I got it for christmas years ago. I have many fond memories from playing the game late at night, even into the morning , including ascending the big mountain in the first level to fight that big bomb-omb thing at the top, racing the fatass penguin down the ski slope and constantly getting yelled at by my parents for swearing loudly when i fell all the way down Tick Tock Clock over and over again.
8. Guiety Gear X-2 (PS-2) 2003 Many gamers think that 3-D fighting games are the future. I couldn't disagree more. A fighter game has to be in a linear 2-D format or it risks losing the fast paced continuity that makes a fighting game so exciting and fun. Guiety Gear X-2 is a great example of an excellent 2-D fighter that plays intuitively. Like many things made in Japan, the game is quite quirky and may be a turn off for people that don't like fighting with sophisticated vampires and cross dressing, yo-yo wielding tranvestites. Besides the awesome gameplay, GGX2 also sports beautifully smooth character animations and a musically score that really adds to the enjoyment of the overall game. I recommend GGX2 to anyone that enjoys fighting games.
7. Mario Kart 64 1996 I am sure most of you have played Mario Kart 64. While it sports better graphics and more items then its predecessor, it also has a watered down learning curve to allowing noobs to have a better chance at winning. The biggest blow to the learning curve is a shell weapon called the Spiny Shell. Unlike the lighting item that fairly disables every racer but you, the Spiny Shell tracks the person in first, forcing the leader to fall back to second or take a guaranteed hit, both options will disable the best player playing. The not so friendly moles are back in this game along with cows, penguins and thomps all very nice aesthetic additions, crafting memorable courses. All the battle mode levels are shit except for Block fort which is amazing. All in all, a solid game and a must have for any N64 owner.
Gotta catch 'em all was the name of the game. I remember waking up at 6am everyday to go to my friends Dan's house to watch the Pokemon animated Television series before school because we didn't have cable at my house. It took me 100+ hours but I eventually caught all 150 Pokemon with the Red version. Also I enjoyed the Missin No hack. I was able to get a level 255 Muk with the hack and constantly murdered all six human oppentant's Pokemon with one Pokemon during link games. I'm pretty sure I made some children cry haha. The only bad thing was that if I switched my Muk my game would freeze.
Unlike Guitar Hero where the best players are almost always extremely obese slobs (if you think this isn't true because your lanky friend is "the best ever" you haven't been to any real competitions) DDR masters tend to be thin/athlectic/Asian because the game requires much physical adroitness and limberness. DDR effectively breaks the third wall by having the player "dance" to different padded arrow buttons on the ground. The songs can get pretty hardcore and even if you are in great shape they will make you legs fill with lactic acid and burn like boiling lobsters.
Unfortunately, many American's are preemptively turned off to the idea of dancing to spunky Japanese pop music with wacky cartoonish characters running around in the background as their peers watch them.Yes, you do look like a fag when plaing this game but If more people would grow some balls and try it they would realize that it is very mood uplifting and an overall an extremely fun experience. Until then this game's majority population will lay in the domain of the Furries, overweight and queer goths.
F-Zero is my favorite racing game. Its raw and old-style game play mechanics are not forgiving, making it the perfect game for hardcore gamers. When your racing vehicle runs out of health, instead of doing some pansy, emotionally sensitive slow down and flash red like in the newer renditions of F-zero, your racing vehicle abruptly explodes with a loud 16 bit scratchy audio burst that is capable of making grown men jump. The only fault F-zero has is that it is only a single player game, which is why I have Super Mario Kart as the fourth best game of all time.
The level of depth in this game is only outmatched by how much fun it is to just barely dodge a red shell in battle mode. The courses are dynamic and have high (borderline addicting) replay value. It's been ten years and I have still be unable to score a gold cup on the hardest difficulty; whereas on the 64, Gamecube and Wii versions I was able to completely beat each respective game in under a week. Pure, hardcore, unadulterated fun.  3. Primal Rage Primal rage is simply the best fighting game to be released for any system thus far.
The games use of dinosaurs has led my mother to refer to the game as "Jurassic Park" much to the humor of my brothers and I. One of my favorite features of the game is the innovative health bars. Each bar has a beating heart at the end of it and slowly starts to beat faster as your character loses more health. Wnen you are out of health the heart ruptures sending blood all over the screen. Badass. Playing this game growing up has helped make me a more confident and assertive person.  2. Halo 1 XBOX What a freaking great game.I remember playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark for Nintendo 64 all the time with my friends. Back in the early 2000's those two games were considered the industry standards in the console shooter genre. Then one afternoon, when I was still in high school, my brother came home and told me about a new Xbox game called Halo. He couldn't stop raving about it and explained in great detail how balanced the weapons system was, the innovative yet tactical vehicle usage and the impressive dual control stick control for movement/vison.
Before Halo most FPSs would let you pick up as many as you could find on a multiplayer map. This is not only unrealistic, as a normal person would not be able to hold a weapons cache of that magnitude, but also created a unbalanced playing field and required less overall strategy. Bungie had devised a weapon system in Halo whereas a player could only hold two different weapons at once, making the game take considerably more forethought. The human weapons set was also balanced almost perfectly (something Bungie would fail to achieve in H2 &3), which was probably by chance. I could go on for paragraphs about H1, if you want to hear more on the Halo series click here. Also check out this short documentary I made when I was in grade school about a big 8v8 halo game that I played in. The match had more than a grand on it in total bets (I won $100).
The original Halo 1 came with a a few demos of games that you could play right off the game disk. The only notable demo was of Fusion Frenzy, a Mario-party type game that consists of many multiplayer mini games. Most of the mini games were disabled (as it was a Demo) but one mini game that was not disabled turned out to be so good some gamers call it the "Second Half" of Halo 1. The game, Twisted System, is extremely basic with players only using 2 buttons and no analog. Like a cigarette after a rough sex session, a few matches of Twisted System after a good CTF match hits the spot (BTW anyone who actually bought Fusion Frenzy is a Fag).
11/2. GTG: Super Mario World Stories LINUX Although only briefly available commercially through a third party site, GT goKart: WS was simply the best parody/alternative universe game made to date. Published by Ignition Entertainment the game was quickly removed from the retailer's site due to an alleged threat of lawsuit from Nintendo Corp. GT goKart was unique in the fact that it's development was partitioned into four different programming teams. A Yoshi racing type game, two different types of first person shooters and a pseudo-real time role playing game were all wrapped and smoothly blended into one mind blowing piece of gaming entertainment.
The game sports an edgier motif then the original children-friendly Mario games with cutscenes that include Mario mowing down koopa troopa with a macinegun and Luigi bumping a line of cocaine. Unfortunatly a build of the game is now notoriously hard to find even on the Internet. Many people Lurk online torrent sites for hours for the chance of finding this gem''s tar.gz file. Be wary though, there are many fakes that are actually hours of compressed gay pornography purportedly put out en mass by Nintendo as an attempt to disrupt the pirated distribution.
In 10,000 BC there was fishing.
The game is just as big in South Korea as the NFL is in America, with Major players like BoxeR and [NC]Yellow making over $400,000 a year plus sponsorships. "My roommate my freshmen year of college was Korean and he was a hardcore StarCraft addict, and was good enough to win tournaments in Korea; which is like beating every American simultaneously... they take their StarCarft seriously. The beginning stages of every game was complete muscle memory for him. He could be looking away from his laptop and talking to me while the screen was a blur of flashing images, his mouse clicking like a drumroll, with his speakers spurting an insensible garble of sound clips of the selected target only to be interrupted a fraction of a second later by another selection." Starcraft is a more advanced and involved game than chess for two reasons. The first is that the game requires real time reflexes and extremely rapid brain activity to play at the competitive level. Yes, Chess does have time clocks but the forethought and time-sensitive decision making in Chess games is massively shadowed by the micro and macro intensive strategy seen in most SC games. A professional SC player have the brain capacity to make thousands of in game economic, militaristic and geographic and choices every ten minuets. In this same time span a professional chessmaster may make one move.
The second reason Starcraft is better than Chess is because unlike in Chess where a computer program can be designed to defeat a human player nearly 100% of the time, an analog AI program could never be designed for Starcraft. The reason for this is Starcraft has an unknown variable called Fog of War. With Fog of War, computer intelligence can never know (assuming it has the same input as its human competitor, which should be the case if it truly a fair match up) exactly what the situation of the entire match is. This uncertainty feeds ingenuity and ingenuity is un-programable at this point of time. A chess board has no Fog of War, allowing a complex computer the chance to analyze every single possible move. This effectively distills chess down to Tic-Tac-Toe, meaning the person that moves second can only lose or tie if a perfect match is played on both ends. Starcraft should really be called "Chess Version 2.0".
At college, a small group of friends and I formed a Starcraft betting ring where our group would place cash bets on every game we played. It turns out when I play Starcraft I have a tendency to not blink and hover in a few inches from the screen, even if I play hours on end. This causes my left eye to swell and become bloodshot to such an extreme that I cannot look at a computer screen without wincing in pain. My Co-gamers have dianosed me with "Zerg Eye".
Games that didn't make the list
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