MooMan1's Top 25 Games of All Time
by MooMan1

Strongest Point: The slides.

Yes, this makes three Mario games out of a list of 25, but fuck you. They're all great games.

Mario 64 was That Game for me. We all have That Game. It's the game that you played at a friend's house that one time, and you became enomored with it, but because of one reason or another, you couldn't own it for yourself. Mario 64 was my one game from about 1998 or so, and I only acquired it recently through the Virtual Console service. Having finally played it after all that time was quite a load off my mind. The only 3D platformer that even comes close to it in my mind is Banjo-Tooie, which would actually probably be in this spot had it not been for the aforementioned That Game thing.


Strongest Point: Folder construction.

I've never understood the hate these games get. When Capcom of all people decided to do something new with Megaman instead of locking him into platforming/action until Armageddon, the great masses cried foul because it was Megaman not in a platforming/action role.

The game's a lot better than most people give it credit for, really. It has a very unique battle system, unlike any I've seen before. Basically, at the start of a battle, you're prompted to select "chips", which are your power attacks. You can select up to five, with a few caveats, and then you start the battle. The action occurs on a 6x3 grid, with your area being the left nine panels. There, you try to hit enemies with your selected chips. If you run out, you have to resort to the Megabuster AKA the peashooter until the custom bar fills and you go back to the chip select screen, where the process repeats. It's very original and fun, and half the fun comes from folder construction. Your chips are drawn from a pool of 30 called a folder, that you construct out of your collection. Good folder construction is key, because selecting more chips per turn gives you much more power in battles. There's some amazing combos floating around for the various games that people have made (the most famous of which does 1800 damage with five chips, and you can have four copies of each in a folder).

The reason that there are two games up there is because I really can't make up my mind about them, akin to Polly and her Contras. For Three, we find folder construction at its most powerful, with not only the aforementioned combo but a host of others, all equally effective. On the other hand, there's Six, which has good folder construction and the Cross system to replace Styles and Souls, one of the best ideas introduced into the games since their creation? The choice is very difficult to make. If there were Souls instead of Crosses, I'd give it to Three no contest, but the Crosses add so much that it's unbelievable.


Strongest Point: The Moogle Charm. Why, will be chronicled below.

The single most important reason I've grown to love this game so much is because of the Moogle Charm, that wondrous relic for Mog that stops random battles from occuring. The first time I played the game, I was on the perilous edge of not liking it and outright hating it. After I finished with it (I didn't beat it), I left it alone for a good long while. Sometime down the line, I learned about the Moogle Charm, and decided to try the endgame with its benefits. At that point, I started to like the game, and decided to give it another run through. Played it, loved it, and the rest is history.


Strongest Point: Playing people as good as I am or better. There's something sublime about playing a fighter against people who have put in as much devotion as you have.

Gonna get this out of the way. I'm something of a tourney[REDACTED] regarding this game. I'm not a wavedashing [REDACTED], and I think that it ruined competitive play forever, but I like playing this one competitively. It's tons of fun.

2D fighters are great. I love the genre, it's competition at its most pure, but they're a bitch to get into, especially the most highly-praised. The rosters alone become intimidating; any given KoF game has at least 45, and Street Fighter 3:III has something along the lines of 25. Melee does weigh in at 29, but it's so easy to pick up that you'd never notice. All characters have the same commands for every move, making it a breeze to pick up the basics, and from there it's just moveset mastery, unlike more serious 2D fighters where you have to play for a very long time to even be able to pick a character. Melee is responsible for some of my favorite gaming moments. From parties to that one tourney soon to be described in detail, it's one of the best times I've had with a Gamecube.

At Youmacon (Detroit's {Anime Manga Gaming J-Music} Experience!), I got in the Melee tournament. The first two rounds were fairly uneventful, as I landed matches against two relative newbs, but the third match was the best match I've ever had in the game, and probably is my favorite moment in my "career" as a gamer. He was playing Fox, and I Marth, and we were almost exactly evenly matched. The whole match (best two of three, four stock, no items, Final Destination) was back-and-forth, and there was never a moment when there was a clear winner. It was just the most intense match of my life, and what made it better was that fuckin' Hyperstrike (runner-up from Who Wants to be a Superhero) was narrating the whole damn match, coaching whoever was behind at the moment, giving color commentary, etc. It just made it so much better.
,br/> That above paragraph (hell, the whole entry) sounds pretty crappy, but words just don't do the match justice.


Strongest Point: The suplex. Really, it speaks for itself.

This one surprised me. I've always been jumpy, so it was surprising, to say the least, when I became fascinated with the release of a horror game. Playing it, of course, made me realize that the horror (with a few exceptions) was a farce: it fits the mold of a second-person action/shooter much better. Damn good thing, because this game is fucking fun as shit. When I started playing it, I could not put it down. There are just sublime little pleasures that come from playing it, like kicking people and exploding their heads, suplexing people and exploding heads... okay, maybe I have a thing for disintegrating craniums, but there's more to it than that. There's the hilariously oover-the-top bad dialogue, with best-in-show going to Luis and Salazar. It's just impossible to review it except by saying that it's damn fun. If you don't have fun with this, I'd be willing to say you're no gamer, or you're excessively nitpicky. It's a fucking blast.


Time! I've been working on this damn thing since, oh, FEBRUARY when I decided to take on the project, and it's a load off my mind to know it's done. Anyways, since there are a few more exceptional games that there wasn't space for, we have some Honorable Mentions! System Shock 2 for having SHODAN, Castle Crashers for being incredibly rad and fun, Jet Set Radio Future for being classy and the best XBox game out there, the Phoenix Wright series for also being classy, and a host of others. Thanks for reading, and I hope that you enjoyed it.