MooMan1's Top 25 Games of All Time
by MooMan1

Strongest Point: The spritework. It's got this wonderfully pixellated charm to it.

It's as Peaches said: is it the gameplay or the story that really sells this game? The gameplay is a mishmash of Megaman meets exaggerated platforming meets Metroid meets RPG levelling-up system on your guns, and it's incredible. The story starts you with no backstory. You start in a cave in the middle of nowhere after witnessing what appears to be a frantic IRC conversation. You're filled in on the story as you go, until a coherent whole appears. The characters (especially recurring miniboss Balrog) are endearing, the gameplay rox, and the art is great. Plus, the whole thing was done by one dude, beginning to end, over a span of five years. Are you really callous enough to let that kind of devotion go to waste? I caught a link off of /b/, for Christ's sake, and even they couldn't manage to dislike the game. You really should play this game. Also, there's an optional bonus area known as the Sacred Grounds or Hell, and it's also balls-breakingly hard. Look up some JewTube runs, shit's intense.


Strongest Point: How I came to play it for the first time, chronicled below.

When I was a young boy in first grade, I was playing in the bathtub as any yonug lad of my tender age would be, and I cut myself just below my eyebrow (my eyebrows are uneven to this day. I came down with Horrible Rape Fever, and went into the hospital for two weeks. I almost lost my eyelid and everyone was worried that the infection might affect my brain, and as a six year old kid, I was blissfully ignorant of it all. Part of the facilities at the hospital was a SNES and a copy of Super Mario World. I played so much of that game that the four doctors assigned to my case were worried that I'd damage my eye due to stress.


Strongest Point: The sense of humor it has about it. Too few games try to be funny anymore, try being the active word.

Or: MY First RPG. There's not much I can really say about it. It's another solid SNES JRPG, but with Mario bukkake'd all over it. It's fun, and it set the tone for the rest of the Mario RPG's to follow.


Strongest Point: Class changes.

AKA Secret of Mana 2 because it never came stateside, one of the biggest crimes of the SNES era. It's the ultimate refinment of the Mana formula, and I suspect the reason that I don't appreciate Secret of Mana much. It was outdone by SD3 in every way. The art's better, the music is better, and oh lordy is the gameplay better. First, there's the class system, with four final classes for each character, with each of them having at least one redeeming quality. Second, they ditched the fucking percentage gauge (hate that thing so much) for a more generic cooldown system, which works much better. Finally, there's three storylines, all interwoven, but they're not much to write home about. It is cool, though.


Strongest Point: The color dungeon. For those not "in the know", there's a bonus dungeon in the GBC version that allows you your choice of two differently-coloured tunics: red for overpowered offense, and blue for doubled defense.

It's the Zelda I spent the most time with, and thus I can beat the holy living hell out of it with my eyes shut at this point. If I had played it through a little more when I was on my huge binge, I could have had it down to a science.