MooMan1's Top 25 Games of All Time
by MooMan1

TOP 25 LIST: NOW WITH 100% MORE PAT-ESQUE HOOKS It's funny how history can repeat itself. The very reason you are reading this is because the person who was going to write a list here lost their list in a hard drive crash, and I lost my original draft when I had to system restore my hard drive. Thanks to stubbornness and a five-hour car ride, I determined not to give up on the project, hence why you're reading this now. I chose and ranked the games I did based more on the memories of playing them and their signifigance to my gaming career than their merits as a game, nevermind the fact that that's the reason old bad games are remembered as being better than they are.

ALSO: just because they're numbered doesn't mean they're in a particular order.


Strongest Point: Making weapons. Default weapons are fun, but it's a lot of fun to make a set of weapons and go ape with them.

Liero is a gem of a title released by some bored Swedish programmer in 1998. At its most basic, it plays like Worms in real time. You control a worm with a gun. You select five weapons out of the 40 that come in the pack, and you go apeshit trying to kill the other player with them. The level, usually randomly generated, consists of empty space, dirt (which can be shot through) and rock (which cannot be shot through). It's tons of fun to play against like-minded people, and when you get bored by the weapons that come with it, you can make your own. It's a damn shame nobody plays it anymore, but what can I expect out of a 10 year old game that nobody has the source code for that doesn't run on XP or Vista with sound?


Strongest Point: Getting your first machine gun. There's a little tune that plays and your avatar/face/thing grows an evil grin. It's a great little feature id threw in.

This game is the first videogame I ever played, and it gets on my list for that stupid fact alone. Sure it spawned Doom and the entire FPS genre, but what did I care about as a kid? That there were secret rooms full of treasure. I didn't even realize it was Hitler in that robot suit until I read about it on the inntertubes.


Strongest Point: Sequence breaking, after finding out about it, has become my favorite part of any Metroid games.

It was this or Zero Mission, and Prime has not yet deleted all my hard-earned save data, so here we are.

Increasingly, I find that what I like the most about Metroid games is sequence breaking. The natural routes ofen are rife with backtracking, which gets really annoying to do after a while. I believe that in an average game of Metroid: Prime, you go through Magmoor caverns six or so times. Sequence breaking cuts it to about three. Plus, you can really spank certain bosses by getting, say, the Plasma Beam before you fight them. It's a ton of fun to do them, plus there's that smug "I'm cooler than the developers" feeling.


Strongest Point: The zombie-blood-puke-grenade that kills everything in its path.

Run 'n gun at its finest. Five levels of pure chaos and destruction. It's also balls-breakingly hard. I generally "spend" (lol MAME) about five bucks getting through the game, which is about 60 lives or so. By comparison, I think I could probably get through Metal Slug X on three dollars, the equivalent of 24 lives less.


Strongest Point: The song "Island of Zeal" and the fact that OCR has six mixes of it and none of them are any good.

It's probably the most solid JRPG I've ever played. Everything is good. The plot, the art, the mechanics, the music, it's all excellent. My ego would like to challenge that hack Yahtzee (the Zero Punctuation guy) to play this game and not enjoy it. I don't think even he could manage it.

This entry makes seven of twelve top 25 lists that include this game, making it the most popular game overall in the lists. Just a fun fact.