EB Minion's Top 25 Games of All Time
by EB Minion

I got this little treasure as a Christmas present when I was 11. It's probably the one game that got the most mileage out of me as a youngster. For anyone not familiar with this game, it was available on the PC and Playstation. You played the role of Abe, a former slave of a slaughterhouse cartel specializing in driving the local wildlife to the brink of extinction. As it turns out, the next product on the menu is Abe and his race of Mudokons, which forces Abe to run away and save as many of his pals as possible, to a possible total of 99.

What makes this game awesome is just the fact that there was never a set way to handle most of the situations in the game. As a kid, it served as my playground for many a night. I would stay up many hours working out solutions to the game that worked best for me, and I died a LOT. But sometimes I could solve a puzzle by a simple fluke! At other times, because the enemies didn't disappear off-screen, I'd end up triggering a mass fleet of enemies all on the same screen, screwing myself over royally in the process, but working hard to try and avoid death nonetheless. Getting to see what happened in the game if I went out and did something completely random probably satisfied my curiosity for years afterward. Oh, and getting to possess enemies, make them shoot their buddies and then explode was always cool.



I don't know where to start. This was the first game I rented after I first got a Playstation, and I was so amazed when I first saw it. "Wow, Mega Man's now in a PS game!" The game art on the disc case looked like nothing I'd ever seen in a Mega Man game before, so I rented it and rushed that game to the Playstation, STAT. It was still a little while before I did any real research before picking up games, so I still had the habit of picking up whatever looked good in the store. But in this case, I'm really glad that I did.

You might not think that slapping Mega Man likenesses into a completely alternate storyline would work out... okay, forget I even said that. But anyway, the game was obviously crafted with a great deal of ingenuity and love. I think I care about the main cast of Mega Man Legends more than that of any other game I've played. Their personalities are very basic, but very entertaining; enough so that when something serious happens, I pay attention. You can really tell that whoever wrote for the game was having fun with what he was doing.

At the same time, the game itself was fun to play. Mega Man's gone from fighting cartoonish robots to fighting 3-dimensional mechanical behemoths intent on beating the life out of him. The dude's only about as big as the second-smallest robot in the game, and he's constantly fighting em! Plus you had the ruins to explore and could make weapons by completing the side quests that didn't actually feel like a chore in doing.

Best part about this game: It was my first real exposure to voice acting in a video game. I think the infusion of voices to the character animation gave the entire thing more life, and made their existence real for me. When Mega Man Juno threatened to destroy Kattelox Island and Mega Man protested, I could feel that. And it made me feel like I was (at least in-part) an honest-to-goodness hero, ready to throw my life down to protect everyone I'd met in that game.



As though drawn by some mysterious power, I became fascinated with this series one day without warning. I started reading everything I could on it, fan sites and fanfiction, stopping only short of FAQs and walkthroughs. So when I finally decided to buy the first installment of this sucker, I had an inkling of what lay ahead. Now I'm pretty prone to getting the crap scared out of me by "SURPRISE!" moments like when stuff jumps out the window. But Silent Hill's atmosphere practically had me shitting my pants every time I went into a building, I was so scared that something horrifying was going to pop up.

Fortunately (and this is the coolest part about my SH experience), I had company. I bought the game one day with a friend, and we'd get together every couple of days during the summertime and play a little further into the game after sunset. Playing while my friend watched (another extreme rarity as far as playing experiences go) helped me get over moments that had my heart beating through my chest, and urged me to keep moving.

Eventually we got the shotgun and emergency hammer, making Harry Mason an indestructible war god. In fact, my finest memory of the game is first getting the hammer and then using it on one of the nurses in the hospital - BAM! One clean blow to the face knocked her to the ground where she writhed in agony before dying. We'd never seen the nurse use that death animation before, so the effect had us in complete awe. I wanted that hammer back in SH2.



The key to Steve enjoying a platform-hoppin', sidescrolling-type game requires that there are few obstacles in any given level that can't be jumped over, blown up or rolled into in order for the character to continue moving past it. Donkey Kong Country had this element, and it worked very well. But there's no comparison to Mega Man X2. At the very beginning of the game, Capcom made the best decision ever, and decided to let you keep the dash function that X got back in the first game. DUDE! This made a huge difference gameplay wise. You didn't have to walk anywhere, you could constantly dash and let the background pass you by at a hundred cybermiles per second. So if you knew what you were doing, you could blast through every level in the game with X as nothing more than a blur to those freakin' mavericks.

As a result of this grand decision, Mega Man X2 stands today as one of the games I can replay at any time of the day and still enjoy myself. There's few things I enjoy more than storming that opening level, the maverick reploid factory, and blasting through it before Sigma's goons even know what hit 'em. And adding air-dash to your repertoire? Icing on the cake.



This is one of the few games I got unreasonably excited about back when I still had a subscription to GamePro magazine. I read all about the game before playing it, and it just sounded so awesome that I HAD to find it. You got to fight with two swords? AND you stole enemy powers? Sign me up! Saturday, the omnipresent rental day in my family, couldn't arrive soon enough. When we got the game, I shut myself in my room and spent, like, ALL weekend playing.

It was another adventure game with RPG elements, the feeling of which always tends to stick with me. The score orchestrated by Square for this game was simply brilliant; after beating the first boss, the music gave me cause to throw a hand in the air in celebration, I felt like I'd done so well. And it really felt that way everytime I managed to overcome another boss and make it to the next chapter. The different areas of the game are so varied that it never felt repetitive to me (unless you count the few parts where you're literally forced to repeat an earlier challenge sequence), each boss posing a new strategy and the use of your developing powers in a fun way.

Why this game kicks ass: This one's got pure nostalgic value, I'll admit that. If you really want to know why it's on here, it's because I worshipped it when I was still in middle school. It was a great action/adventure game for its time and was one of the first Playstation games I beat. The characters were adorable, the gameplay was fun and the story was written with a wonderful sense of humor mixed with a decently imaginative setting. Like Mega Man Legends, it's the kind of game that left me feeling heroic when I finally reached the end of the game. All in all, it's a game that was made before gameplay took the backseat to graphics, and is fun to play and great to experience.