These aren't the Games you're looking for
In customer service, you occasionally get to read those cards that customers fill out. The first thing any manager is told or tells anyone is "ignore than 10s, and ignore the 1s" or the varieties there-of (poor-Excellent is a horrible scale on only 5 points!). Why? because most of the time, the customer is just rushing through it. No, they tell us we should pay attention to the 6-8 range most. Why? because apparently that's where you get the most honesty!
Now not 100% applicable to my reasoning, but not far off either! My top 6-10 Are titles that actually move around. Whereas the top 5, well, are almost ALWAYS the top 5. I'll list them off, just so you have some context, and I'll go into detail on them for another post.
1. ChronoTrigger
2. Bioshock
3. TMNT: Turtles in Time
4. Capcom vs SNK 2/Street Fighter Alpha 3 (Tie)
5. Marvel vs Capcom 2
Those ones rarely change, in fact, Bioshock was the last addition, and it only bumped off Pokemon Red.
So without further adieu.
NUMBER TEN
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 1/2
These games, while the story is supposedly good, I'd never be able to tell you. This game is so good for multi-player that I have never bothered with the single Player campaigns. A game where, you take on the roll of a CTU Operative, hunt terrorists basically endlessly, and you do it coop? Sign me up. I love this game for its straightforward gameplay. Some of the Rainbow Six games have been known to be a bit convoluted, but with the advent of a headset and conversations taking place while you play, they seemed to have gotten rid of it all. I have played the other modes, I won't lie, they are great for the usual run and gun, hostage rescue, bomb diffusing fun, but terrorist hunt is the holy grail of modes.
NUMBER NINE
Pokemon Red (or Blue, or Yellow, or Green....)
Nothing beats a classic. When I play Pokemon games, I almost always want to simply recreate my line up from Red; Charizard, Raichu, Gengar, Graveller, Scythor, Hitmonlee. Now, most games now a days I can't, but I still play'em. They've added some layers of depth I guess some players can dig, but I'm really not interested in putting a pokemon in a dress, and parading it around on stage. Nor am I really interested in breeding them for the chance at a "shiny" version. Can you guess what I am interested in? Leveling my team, and kicking all kinds of ASS. That's all. And thats why the original versions of these games, even with their glitches, and age, will always stand up to me.
NUMBER EIGHT
I don't know how many times I replayed this game. It's in the dozens. The first time I played this game was in grade 9, and I played it without an functional understanding of Japanese. Years later a fan-sub was released, where you could actually play half the game in English, and the other half in french. This takes you basically through the Freezer saga. It's a long Saga, in which you take on the Earth Defense forces (Goku and company.) And fight your way through Napa, Vegeta, The Ginyu force and eventually Freezer. The game play is all based on playing cards, which was amazing to me in grade 9, as I loved the concept of deck building. Even though you didn't build a deck, but you could time card-switches, and power ups. One of my most notable wins of the game was having Tien not die in the Sayan saga, and then becoming more powerful than Super Sayan Goku. This game is one of the best RPGs I have ever played.
NUMBER SEVEN
This series is amazing. I loved Sim City 2000, and other Sim games at the time. But I spent hours playing this, building epic coasters, making parks that printed money, and sometimes, killing hundreds of men women and children in horrific park accidents just because I could. I am sick.
NUMBER SIX
Now, I may catch some heat for this, but I think this game has everything to make it into my gaming hall of fame, and it probably belongs a more lists than people think. When the game first released from Activision (produced by Infinity Ward.) It blew pretty much any other shooter at the time out of the water. Actually, it did so well that it's played more today by most people than COD:WAW (Treyarchs COD game, a year later) and, at time of this blog writing, COD:MW2 (Sequel). It revitalized a stagnant genre. War Shooters rarely took place in the modern era , and most that did flopped. We were sick of WW2 and Vietnam shooters, and equally annoyed by shooters from the future. There was a reason the most played shooter online was TF2 and Counter-Strike. This took the best of those, slapped some modernism to it, and put it in the engine and then, threw in some RPG just to spice things up a bit. All of a sudden, we have a new world wide Shooter phenomenon . I didn't play this as much as I let on, but thats due to the fact I suck at shooters. But i firmly believe, had it not been for MW's success, a game like Brink or Crysis could never have been made (2 games I love right now.).
This list is subject to change almost every quarter or so, but generally speaking, only a handful of games move in or out of favor for this part of my list. Sometimes a new game comes out that blows my mind with what it does or did (The World Ends with You). Thats where this part of the top 10 list does the best work.
That's the list yo, what does yours look like?
-Jamie
Zidane Tribal, thief with the traveling theatre company Tantalus, and Adelbert Steiner, Captain of the Kingdom of Alexandria's Pluto Knights, from Final Fantasy IX.
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