My wife and I have always played video games together. Back when we were first dating, she bought a gaming PC and left it over my house so that she could come over and play Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate with me. Later, we played Dungeon Siege, Champions of Norrath and Gauntlet Legends together. These top-down or isometric action RPGs are amongst our favorite games to play together. Recently, we’d been looking for a game of that ilk to dive into on the Playstation 3. While Sacred 2 is by no means the most recent PS3 game, it was well-spoken of, so we figured we’d give it a shot. On a whim one weekend afternoon this past spring, we popped by a GameStop and grabbed a copy. I’m not a big fan of teh Gamestop, but it’s good for impulse purchases.

Sacred 2 is awkward and difficult to understand. Each character has three skill categories, and four skills in each for a total of fifteen powers/spells/techniques. Most of them are difficult to use well, don’t do much damage, and don’t seem very cool. You can combine two into a single power and slot that power on a given button, but I have yet to find a good use for that, as the powers are mostly useless anyway. The game’s weapon system is similarly opaque. You can see the damage and level of weapons, but is a level 8 weapon that does 10-28 damage somehow better than a level 5 weapon that does 12-36 damage?

So far, it’s nearly impossible to die in Sacred 2. And while this is infinitely preferable to an error on the opposite side of the scale, it means that strategy is absent. In Diablo 2, you’d dodge incoming enemy fire. In Champions of Norrath, you’d use area attacks to take out enemies before they could close. In Sacred 2, this is not an option, nor is it necessary.

There is so much more I could complain about in Sacred 2. And yet we continue to play. The game mechanics suck, but the running around and killing things is somehow enjoyable.

This week is all about the PC games. In looking over things, just about half the games on my top 50 list are PC games. As an aside, twenty-two of them have zombies in them.

List analytics aside, let’s look at the next five games.

30 - Dungeon Keeper (Bullfrog Productions, Windows, 1997)
Despite being more than a decade old, Dungeon Keeper is still a lot of fun. The graphics are horribly dated, but the mechanic of digging out an area for your dungeon - creating your own space - is a lot of fun. I’ve never realized it before just now, but Dungeon Keeper really has a lot in common with Desktop Tower Defense. In both, you build a maze to channel creeps through so that you can kill them. In Dungeon Keeper, you’re just building traps and placing creatures instead of building towers and cannons. You’ve also got to mine gold and keep it away from those pesky adventurers. Ah, there’s nothing like laying waste to the kingdom…

29 - Fallout Tactics (Micro Forte, Windows, 2001)
The consensus about Fallout Tactics was that it was a pale shadow of the two main Fallout titles, and I’ll admit that the story and the RPG options present in the original were missing. Fallout Tactics is just a series of missions. But it lets you form a full party and control each of them in combat, which is something I’d wanted badly in the main games. It allows for quite a lot of strategy, and that’s where the game shines.

So you can create a party that consists of a ghoul with a high driving skill behind the wheel of your APC, a sniper who sits up on a fire escape, a sneaky guy who gets close, plants land mines, then waits nearby with a shotgun, and a deathclaw who sneaks in close before attacking. Then, BOOM! Your shotgun guy pops-up at point blank range and cuts two slavers in half with a shotgun blast just as your deathclaw charges in. The other slavers go after the deathclaw but hit landmines. And the ghoul driver comes in and runs down some others with the APC. Meanwhile, your sniper picks off strays. I love it.

28 - Wasteland (Interplay, Commodore 64, 1988)

Wasteland had a release on both the Commodore 64 and DOS platforms, and as such there’s still a version floating around that’s playable on modern computers. Wasteland was a hugely influential game - it ended up inspiring a little title you may have heard of: Fallout.

Wasteland is Fallout, only more so. It’s less tame. Sure, the Fallout games have plenty of blood, but in Wasteland you could do a lot of things that you just don’t see in more modern video games. In Wasteland, you’re attacked by a ten-year-old boy after you kill his dog, and you’re forced to kill the lad. And this is in the first 20 minutes of the game. One of Wasteland’s climactic battles has you battling nuns with assault rifles. And you can sleep with a prostitute and contract wasteland herpes. Good times.

27 - Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance (FASA Interactive, Windows, 2000)

Another reason I loved the old Mechwarrior games was because they were so unlike other mech games. Armored Core and Chromehounds are twitch games. Mechwarrior is not. Even when you’re in battle using jump jets to dodge gunfire, locking on with your missiles, and aiming your PPC shots, it isn’t frantic. The timing feels so much more relaxed - like a real time strategy than a shooter.

26 - Typing of the Dead (Smilebit, Windows, 2000)

Before the Sega Dreamcast version of Typing of the Dead was released in 2001, this was a PC title. It’s now very rare and difficult to obtain, but it’s very much worth it. It’s so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking it up.

Typing of the Dead is a game about which I may never tire of ranting and raving. It’s got a lot of camp value, and to fully enjoy it you need to enjoy the humor of the terrible voice acting and outdated graphics as much as the humor of the ridiculous things you’re typing. I keep Typing of the Dead installed on my PC and play it from time to time when I don’t have any other games lined up. It’s always fun, and since it’s already so old, it never gets old… er.

Insanely ridiculous. That’s how I’d describe No More Heroes. And I love it.

I was a fan of the first game, but it had issues. In the sequel, many of those issues have been fixed. And as far as over-the-top goes, they’ve outdone themselves. It’s like the boss battle in the first game in which the boss kills himself before you have a chance to fight him. It’s like the shopping cart lady with the giant laser.

I’m not far into No More Heroes 2, but in one of the boss battles, I was surprised when my opponent suddenly flew away. To outer space. Then, he got into a mech. I was further surprised when my own character (in a cutscene) mounted his motorcycle, fired its rocket boosters to follow his opponent into outer space, and nonchalantly entered his own mech, commenting on how he’d been itching for a chance to use it. The boss battle became a mech vs mech battle. It’s insane out-of-the-box moments like this that make me love No More Heroes.

No More Heroes consistently goes where I’m not expecting it to go, and it makes me laugh my ass off.

Today I continue my list of my top fifty games of all time.

35- Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights, Nintendo Gamecube, 2002)

The Nintendo Wii plays GameCube games. When I got my Wii, the only GameCube game that I eagerly hunted down was this one, because I’d heard so much about it. It did not disappoint. The base game was an above average survival horror story. But the system of insanity effects that the game puts into place were downright amazing. The game is eight years old, so I won’t concern myself too much with spoiling it at this point. At first, when my character’s sanity started failing, I’d see a volume meter across the bottom of the screen turn down, and I’d think that maybe I was sitting on the TV remote. Later, I’d click rapidly through a series of prompts to save a game, and the game told me that it was deleting all my saved games. Aargh! Noo! It’s not the type of horror you usually see in a video game, but it was certainly horror. Brilliantly innovative. I’d love to see a sequel.

34- Desktop Tower Defense (Paul Preece, Flash (Browser), 2007)
Desktop Tower Defense is one of the few games that has improved its position on my list since I last listed my 50 favorite games - it’s moved from position 48 to position 34. Why is that? Probably because other than perhaps Starcraft, Desktop Tower Defense is potentially the best real-time strategy game I’ve played. I love the fact that you use cheap towers to construct your own maze. I love the fact that the game is updated so frequently. And I love that it’s a free game. I bought the Nintendo DS version, and while the smaller screen size and lack of mouse control makes it much more difficult to play, I still play it a lot simply because it’s portable.

33- Tenchu: Stealth Assassins (From Software, Sony Playstation, 1998)
Although I would later grow to love the stealth action in Thief: Deadly Shadows and Beyond Good and Evil, neither allowed you to sneak up on a foe and disembowel them. Before the era of achievements, Stealth Assassins awarded you for getting through an entire level without being seen once. And it was hard. But it was so rewarding to come up behind that guard who could kick your ass face-to-face and putting your sword through his side before he ever knew you were there. Stealth games are a favorite of mine, and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins was my first love.

32- The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo EAD, Nintendo DS, 2007)
I haven’t played a lot of Zelda games, but more and more, I’m learning to love them. Phantom Hourglass went up a slot since my 2007 top fifty list. It was in 33rd place, and now it’s in 32nd. It’s very likely the best Nintendo DS game I’ve ever played, which I suppose doesn’t say a lot for the platform since we’re not even close to the top twenty. But there are many other DS games that I’d like to rave about (The World Ends with You, Elite Beat Agents) which honestly aren’t as good as Phantom Hourglass. There’s something about the Zelda formula and the way Nintendo is able to continually innovate that makes the games a joy to play. In Phantom Hourglass, I got to enjoy open world exploration with optional sidequests, level-less character upgrades, unexpected uses of the DS console’s lesser-utilized features, and very creative boss battles. I loved it.

31- The Temple of Elemental Evil (Troika Games, Windows, 2003)
Another game that moved upwards on my list (eleven slots!) despite its horrible bugginess, Temple of Elemental Evil is the second of Troika’s three games. I loved Troika’s games, but was never able to finish any of them. I was prevented from seeing the conclusion of Temple of Elemental Evil firstly because of the game’s bugginess, and secondly because of an insanely difficult final boss. (It was, after all, a god)

The game was fantastic, and would have been better if not for its insane bugginess, about which I’ve previously written. Its implementation of the D&D 3.5 ruleset was perfect, the graphics were impressive, and aside from the buggy slowness, the engine was fabulous. If the game were bug-free and had a bit of a better story, it could easily be in my top ten.

Although the ending is a bit climactic, Heir does a good job of capturing Shadow of the Colossus’s gameplay in a 2D form. The music sounds sufficiently epic, and the colossus is… well, colossal.

Play Heir

I spent this weekend at a beach in Mantoloking. Riding the waves, sitting in the sun, and most importantly: building sand castles with my daughter. I’ve always enjoyed building sand castles, preferrably as the tide is coming in. You dig a trench, use that sand to build a horseshoe-shaped wall, and erect some towers behind it. Then, as the tide comes in you do everything you can to delay the inevitable. You’re about as likely to prevent the sand castle from being destroyed by surf as you are to prevent my daughter from having a tantrum when she’s skipped her nap, but sand castle building is decidedly the more pleasant of the two.

As I was kneeling in the sand, building my third epic sand castle in three days, turning my knees into hamburger, a thought came to me: Sand Castle Tower Defense would make a fantastic video game. It would require some fairly accurate water and sand physics. You could begin the game with only a cheapo shovel and plastic pail, and a single sea shell atop your lone tower. You’re given a single child and must assign him to build a wall around the tower and defend it from the incoming waves. As the game progresses, you earn better tools such as plastic cups to build extra towers, new seashells to place atop them, bigger shovels to dig deeper trenches, and more kids are drawn to your cause, giving you the means to multi-task and expand your sand castle domain. When the last seashell-bearing tower falls, your game is over and the kids go boogie boarding.

This week, the five games I’ll be covering in my top fifty list include many newer games - games that didn’t exist at the end of 2007 when I last composed a top fifty list.

40-Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (Arkane Studios, Windows, 2008)

Dark Messiah was panned in reviews because the plot was lame and predictable, and because the voice acting was sub-par. I won’t disagree with these assessments. But even so, there’s a lot to like about the game. The set pieces were easily as impressive as those in Oblivion and Half-Life 2. It was spectacular to watch from a first-person perspective as a twelve foot tall cyclops smashed a city gate to splinters and charged in, raking aside the city’s defenders and wreaking havoc.

The game also boasts a better first person melee system than Oblivion and a very good classless skill tree. The stealth gameplay was well done (and optional) and the game encourages you to make use of the environment during battles by placing a lot of destructible and throwable objects. Plus, defenestrating orcs is just plain fun.

39-Point Blank (Namco, Arcade, 1994)

It’s somewhat surprising that there’s been no Wii version of Point Blank given the cartoony light gun goodness that the game represents. My favorite aspect of the game was its variety. In some levels, you’d be shooting paper cutout ninjas, in others you’d be firing at targets which you had to hit in order one through twelve in under five seconds, and in other screens you might be protecting Dr. Dan and Dr. Don from oncoming tanks or an erupting volcano or invading aliens. Before the Wii, Point Blank was fun for very much the same reasons that the Wii later gained popularity. I still have my Playstation copy of Point Blank, and I still have my light guns. I’ll tell you - those old style light guns work way better than the Wii remotes for shooting accurately. Writing about it now makes me want to pull them back out.

38-Mariokart Wii (Nintendo, Nintendo Wii, 2008)
My introduction to the MarioKart series came very late: the first Mariokart game I ever played was MarioKart DS. But although I did play that game multiplayer with friends who were across the country, it wasn’t until I played Kart on the Wii with my wife that I really grew to love it. People may speak fondly of Mariokart 64, but I think that’s largely because it was their first exposure to the kart racing genre. For me, it’s all about Mariokart Wii.

37-Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (Hothead Games, Windows, 2008)

I’m lumping the first and second title in the series together here since they were moreso “part 1″ and “part 2″ than they were separate games. I’m a big fan of Penny Arcade’s sense of humor - I’ve been following Penny-Arcade.com for many years, and seen them rise from a simple webcomic to a gaming empire.

Their game is an over-the-top RPG where your three characters are battling robots, hobos, mimes, and barbershop quartets with fists and garden implements. A lot of the humor is very R-rated, but it’s truly hilarious.

36-Thief: Deadly Shadows (Ion Storm, Windows, 2004)

I’ve gotten a lot of flak for liking this game better than the original Thief game, but I think my preference is based largely on the fact that it’s difficult for me to go back to such an old game if I’ve not played it before. Nostalgia’s glasses do much to mute the imperfections of a game’s old age. After six years, even Deadly Shadows is now showing its age - the platforming is difficult to stomach, you can get stuck on the environment, and compatibility with newer operating systems is iffy at best. But control tweaks and texture packs help, and levels like Shalebridge Cradle make the game worth playing despite its flaws.

Today I’ll continue reviewing my favorite 50 games of all time. Last week, I listed items 50-46, and today brings the next five in my list.

45-Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom (Capcom, Arcade, 1993)
Comparing this updated top 50 list to the list I made years ago, Tower of Doom is one of the few games that has actually moved up. Previously, I’d had it listed in position 50.

Tower of Doom was the best of the 4-player arcade cabinet games. You could play a fighter, dwarf, cleric or elf. You could pick up new weapons, extra arrows for your bow, magic items, and gold to spend in a store between levels. The cleric and elf had a list of spells right out of the Player’s Handbook which improved as they went up in level. Everyone except the elf had a shield that was useful in the same way as the Knight’s shield in Trine. Plus, certain characters had moves that were performed like the special moves in Street Fighter 2. These were bull rushes, rolls, dive attacks, and slides - as useful for evading traps as they were in melee.The game’s combat was far more technical than most sidescrolling beat-em-ups.

There were branching routes in the game, secret areas, and the list of enemies in the game included kobolds, ghasts, troglodytes, manticores, medusa, a beholder, and a couple dragons for stage bosses. That’s the kind of game you’d never imagine having seen in an arcade, and that’s why the game is on my top fifty list.

44-Neverwinter Nights (Bioware, Windows, 2002)
If it weren’t for the Aurora toolset that let you create your own adventures, complete with its complex scripting engine, this game would never be in my list. I viewed the included adventure in much the same way that I viewed Rivers of Light back in the day - as an example of what you could do with the adventure construction set they’d handed you. And I spent long evenings for a year building my adventure, complete with custom music and custom rules for wandering monsters and setting camp. My adventure had four possible endings.

43-Autoduel (Origin Systems, Commodore 64, 1985)
For a game that was released twenty-five years ago, I do a lot of thinking about and writing about Autoduel. And if I could see only one old game remade as a modern video game, this would be it.

The main draw of Autoduel to me was the degree to which you could customize your vehicle. You could create a compact, sedan, station wagon, or van. You could select which tires and which engine to use, and assign armor to the sides and the undercarriage. You could load up with machine guns, recoilless rifles, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and lasers, positioning them on any side of your vehicle. The game even had smoke screens, oil slicks, mines, and spike droppers.

The best thing is that the game was an RPG. You could take the vehicle out on the road on courier missions, hunts, and missions for the FBI. You’d make money through missions, arena battles, and by selling parts salvaged from other vehicles, and use the cash to upgrade the car you had. Meanwhile, your character’s driving, gunning, and salvage skills would slowly increase.

42-Borderlands (Gearbox, Windows, 2009)

Since Borderlands is such a recent release, I likely don’t have to talk much about it. I’ve written plenty about it on this site already. Great shooter, RPG elements, fantastic art style, multiplayer co-op added quite a lot. Too bad the storyline sucked and the PC matchmaking was broken.

41-Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (Konami, Nintendo Entertainment System, 1990)
I have a very warm feeling when I think about Castlevania 3. Had it been out on the Wii Virtual Console earlier, I’d have bought it immediately. Checking now, I see that it was released in January 2009 - guess I’ll have to go buy it.

Until Symphony of the Night came out years later, Castlevania 3 was the best platformer I’d ever seen. It had branching paths, incredibly creative levels, hidden secrets, and three different playable NPCs with vastly different abilities that you could recruit. Grant the pirate could climb walls, which let you get to a lot of otherwise inaccessible locations. Syfa the wizardress got spellbooks rather than the axe/knife type items that Trevor would pick up, so she could throw fire, freeze enemies with ice, or protect herself with these weird power globe thingies that would spin around her. Alucard was the best. His basic attack was a projectile, and he could change into a bat and fly around.

The levels included factories full of giant pendulums and spinning gears, rivers that you’d have to wade through unless you could freeze the water with Syfa’s ice power, and an amazing level where blocks would drop from the sky, eventually allowing you to climb on them to reach a high ledge. Maybe you had to play it in order to get it, but I loved it.

Make sure to come back next week for games 40 through 36, which include selections from the racing, rpg, fps, and light gun genres.

In a wonderful blending of different NES games, Super Mario Crossover lets you play Super Mario Brothers using Mario, Megaman, Samus, Simon Belmont, Zelda, or one of those guys from Contra. Each one retains all the abilities from their native game, which means that Simon can throw axes and Zelda has a boomerang that stuns enemies. Very cool.

Play Super Mario Crossover

This August, Lungfishopolis will celebrate its 2 year anniversary. Leading up to that day, I’d like to update my list of all-time favorites. Back at the end of 2007, before Lungfishopolis was born, I created a list of my favorite 51 games of all time. Now, more than two years later, I figured it was nigh time to take a hard look at that list and update it. While a lot of the games that were on the list then are still on the list now, many have moved around. Understandably, many have moved down to make room for the newer games that have appeared since that list was first created. Interestingly, others that were on the list before have moved up, which I think speaks to the longevity of those games.

It should go without saying that this is a list comprised entirely of my own opinions. I’m not saying that these are the best games of all time - I’m just saying that they’re my personal favorites. It doesn’t include games that I haven’t played, and there are many of those. I’ve never played through Ocarina of Time, I’ve never played GoldenEye, and I’ve never played a Splinter Cell game. I have a boxed copy of Clive Barker’s Undying that I have yet to play. Ditto Grim Fandango. I’ll get to these oldies someday. But for the time being, let’s dive into my favorites.

The bottom of the list is full of oldies, largely because they’re games that used to be amazing, and they’ve since been pushed further and further down the list. So for today, get ready for flashbacks to the eighties and nineties.

50-Puzzle Quest (Infinity Interactive, Nintendo DS, 2007)

The first of the puzzle genre mashups to make it onto my radar, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords drew me in with the promise of fighting the battles in an RPG by playing a bejeweled-like puzzle, and kept my interest with the variants on the main “battle” game wherein you’d craft items, capture enemies, and train mounts by solving puzzles. Like Scribblenauts, I suspect that this game was noteworthy primarily for its novelty. Still, it was fun working my warrior “Assface” up to fiftieth level and defeating the game’s big Lich boss.

49-Dance Dance Revolution USA (Konami, Sony Playstation, 2000)

Back in the day, I belonged to a group of friends who was fairly fanatic about DDR. The majority of us never played in arcades, but many of us had playstations, and DDR parties were common. I first encountered DDR at a dance camp in New Hampshire in September 2000. A year later, I could ace Smoke on the Water on maniac difficulty. Go me. I still have my DDR pads and my original Playstation. I plan to some day break them out and see if I’ve still got it.

48-Maniac Mansion (Lucasfilm Games, Commodore 64, 1987)

A few years back, I discovered a fan remake of Maniac Mansion called Maniac Mansion Deluxe which I could download and play on a modern PC. I did so, and was delighted to find that I still remembered how to get through all the game’s puzzles. I finished it in two evenings. But back when I first played it on my Commodore, before the era of The Internet, it took many months. During those months, I’d confer with other kids on the playground, exchanging strategies and learning what worked to get past Purple Tentacle and Dr. Fred. It was a different era, and to me Maniac Mansion is the best of the SCUMM games. More than twenty years later, the game still has an undeniable charm.

47-Jade Empire (BioWare, Microsoft Xbox, 2005)

While Jade Empire is by no means the best game BioWare has produced, I personally prefer it to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. I liked the fact that it’s an action RPG and that there was a fantastic story twist. Mass Effect was an action RPG, but it was a shooter to Jade Empire’s melee action. And KotOR had a great story twist, but the combat bored me. I also really liked Jade Empire’s single minigame - I only wish the game had offered 3-4 minigames rather than just the one. I suppose I’ll have to look to games like No More Heroes 2 for that kind of minigame variety.

46-Double Dragon II (Technos, Nintendo Entertainment System, 1990)
In the nineties, I was a big fan of the Double Dragon series, although I played only on the NES. I loved Double Dragon 2 and liked Double Dragon 3 very much as well. It was a sidescrolling beat-em-up that allowed for timing-based special moves like the super uppercut and the ultra-difficult super knee. When you got an enemy into a headlock, you had a choice of four different moves you could perform, and you could mix and match, ending with throwing the enemy either left or right. This enabled you to throw enemies off of cliffs, and I’d go through entire levels trying to send every enemy over one ledge or another. The variety of fighting options in this game were well before its time.

That’s the five on the list for this week. Stop back next week for games 45-41.