i figured it'd be a good time to take a break from video games and post my personal picks of 2006 alt rock, as i did last year. these are basically my top ten favs from what iTunes returns for year 2006 and genre Alternative Rock:
1) silversun pickups / well thought out twinkles
2) regina spektor / fidelity
3) wolfmother / woman
4) zebrahead / back to normal
5) arctic monkeys / fake tales of san francisco
6) secret machines / lightning blue eyes
7) rise against / ready to fall
8) yeah yeah yeahs / honeybear
9) muse / knights of cydonia
10) the raconteurs / steady as she goes
hey, it's my list. never heard of a track? click the link.
--j
Friday, December 15, 2006
Thursday, December 07, 2006
All-Time Favorite Games (4th in a Series of 7)
sorry for the long gap between posts, been battling health issues (a post for another day) and bought a house (yet another post for another day). my favorite games of all time post #4 calls for the second half of my personal favs back on the SNES.
Super Mario Kart (1992)
i love SMK for entirely different reasons than the other SNES games i've mentioned -- sheer replayability. there wasn't exactly a huge wealth of goodies to unlock in this game, you could basically get better and better as you went along unlocking courses and modes. once you get everything open and unlocked, the game is awesome to play with friends. all the modes were fun to play with others -- whether it was a match race, GP with the whole field or battle mode.
historically, this is probably the game i played the most with my friend kevin and my sister. while it's plenty of fun to race, we spent the most time by far simply battling. the object was basicallly pretty simple, pop your opponents 3 balloons with items and win. my sister and i, in an effort to make the game more of a 'pure' sport, would make each other burn our red shells off so we couldn't knock each other out with the one homing weapon available. we quickly fell in love with a particular arena and basically wrote off all the others. the same thing happened with characters, we just got used to playing those that we were the best with and didn't even consider the others.
it's a funny thing when you play a game so much that you don't even really utilize all the features of the game. once you were good enough, you would just play at the 150cc level because anything lower was just painfully slow. like i said, you fall in love with certain modes and characters and that becomes the entire game to you, cuz that's what you like. you end up getting to the point where you ask your friend if you want to play, and you can turn on the game and choose all the settings without so much as a word. it becomes automatic, and yet remains entirely competitive. SMK would go on to produce a great series of games for the next decade plus, which i'll discuss further down the road.
Star Fox (1993)
i've never really had much interest in flight simulators, or any type of flying games, so buying star fox and betting on liking it was a bit of a gamble. it's a bit difficult to explain what i liked so much about the game, but it was a nice change to like a flying shooter. it was quite unlike a game like Super Mario Kart in that it worked extremely well as a pure single player game.
looking back, the overly polygonal graphics don't look so great, but at the time they were a big change. to have all the objects on screen look more 3D than they had in the past felt like a big upgrade from more cartoony mario games. i remember the game being relatively short, but going through and beating andross was always satisfying. i liked that you could take different routes through different planets and asteroid belts to make it to the final boss, with varying levels of difficulty. it was cool that you were part of a team, yet you had to take on stage bosses by yourself. something about your teammates constantly bugging you at least gave you a bit of company in such a single player type game.
the original star fox might not be entirely unforgettable, but it was responsible for launching yet another solid series of games on the later nintendo consoles. i recently bought Star Fox Command for the DS based on the nostalgia i had for the original star fox. hopefully another version will be produced for the wii to keep the franchise going.
Donkey Kong Country (1994)
i think Donkey Kong Country sort of came out of nowhere for me. honestly, i've kinda always hated the donkey kong character. he was never really used much by nintendo and just never had much good-guy appeal. so i was surprised that my sister and i latched onto this game so quickly.
it was basically the same concept as Super Mario World, for the most part. what really set it apart was how you traveled throughout a level, such as shooting through barrels, riding in mine trains, etc. released at a time not too far from when the playstation would hit the streets, the graphics looked far better than any of the initial SNES games had. the enemies were somewhat forgettable, but the music was fantastic. it was cool that you could play as donkey kong or diddy kong, since each character had slightly different abilities.
the game was pure platformer, but it brought a lot of great ideas to change up the genre a bit. after the first game, we gladly bought the next couple sequels in the series and enjoyed those as well. it would be nice to see nintendo try to continue the series on future platforms, such as the wii and DS. hopefully this game could be a hit. we'll see.
next time i'll delve into the playstation era.
--j
Super Mario Kart (1992)
i love SMK for entirely different reasons than the other SNES games i've mentioned -- sheer replayability. there wasn't exactly a huge wealth of goodies to unlock in this game, you could basically get better and better as you went along unlocking courses and modes. once you get everything open and unlocked, the game is awesome to play with friends. all the modes were fun to play with others -- whether it was a match race, GP with the whole field or battle mode.
historically, this is probably the game i played the most with my friend kevin and my sister. while it's plenty of fun to race, we spent the most time by far simply battling. the object was basicallly pretty simple, pop your opponents 3 balloons with items and win. my sister and i, in an effort to make the game more of a 'pure' sport, would make each other burn our red shells off so we couldn't knock each other out with the one homing weapon available. we quickly fell in love with a particular arena and basically wrote off all the others. the same thing happened with characters, we just got used to playing those that we were the best with and didn't even consider the others.it's a funny thing when you play a game so much that you don't even really utilize all the features of the game. once you were good enough, you would just play at the 150cc level because anything lower was just painfully slow. like i said, you fall in love with certain modes and characters and that becomes the entire game to you, cuz that's what you like. you end up getting to the point where you ask your friend if you want to play, and you can turn on the game and choose all the settings without so much as a word. it becomes automatic, and yet remains entirely competitive. SMK would go on to produce a great series of games for the next decade plus, which i'll discuss further down the road.
Star Fox (1993)
i've never really had much interest in flight simulators, or any type of flying games, so buying star fox and betting on liking it was a bit of a gamble. it's a bit difficult to explain what i liked so much about the game, but it was a nice change to like a flying shooter. it was quite unlike a game like Super Mario Kart in that it worked extremely well as a pure single player game.
looking back, the overly polygonal graphics don't look so great, but at the time they were a big change. to have all the objects on screen look more 3D than they had in the past felt like a big upgrade from more cartoony mario games. i remember the game being relatively short, but going through and beating andross was always satisfying. i liked that you could take different routes through different planets and asteroid belts to make it to the final boss, with varying levels of difficulty. it was cool that you were part of a team, yet you had to take on stage bosses by yourself. something about your teammates constantly bugging you at least gave you a bit of company in such a single player type game.the original star fox might not be entirely unforgettable, but it was responsible for launching yet another solid series of games on the later nintendo consoles. i recently bought Star Fox Command for the DS based on the nostalgia i had for the original star fox. hopefully another version will be produced for the wii to keep the franchise going.
Donkey Kong Country (1994)
i think Donkey Kong Country sort of came out of nowhere for me. honestly, i've kinda always hated the donkey kong character. he was never really used much by nintendo and just never had much good-guy appeal. so i was surprised that my sister and i latched onto this game so quickly.
it was basically the same concept as Super Mario World, for the most part. what really set it apart was how you traveled throughout a level, such as shooting through barrels, riding in mine trains, etc. released at a time not too far from when the playstation would hit the streets, the graphics looked far better than any of the initial SNES games had. the enemies were somewhat forgettable, but the music was fantastic. it was cool that you could play as donkey kong or diddy kong, since each character had slightly different abilities.
the game was pure platformer, but it brought a lot of great ideas to change up the genre a bit. after the first game, we gladly bought the next couple sequels in the series and enjoyed those as well. it would be nice to see nintendo try to continue the series on future platforms, such as the wii and DS. hopefully this game could be a hit. we'll see.next time i'll delve into the playstation era.
--j
Monday, November 20, 2006
All-Time Favorite Games (3rd in a Series of 7)
i'll continue with my favorite vidgames to no one in particular. now that i've moved beyond the NES era, it's time to get to what i'd probably consider my favorite console thus far, the Super Nintendo. here are three of my favorite legendary early SNES games:
Super Mario World (1991)
i think i could easily say i love SMW better than any NES game i've mentioned before. it was still a straight-up 2D platform mario game, but the added capacity (for both storage and graphics) of the SNES game really made the series into something that felt completely different. the music for the varying levels was fantastic, as well as the changes in atmosphere.
super mario world, despite being a launch title for the SNES (thus an early 16-bit experiment), just did everything right. i even loved things like the digitized effects when entering a particular level, the music adding drum beats whenever you rode yoshi, etc. even the addition of yoshi himself, with different colors and abilities, added a completely new element to the game. the world map concept did well for the mario series, which had been started in SMB3, but expanded even more in SMW. the castles & ghost houses usually succeeded in creeping me out somewhat, and loved how the doors/keys would swallow mario into them.
like i said, the game just did everything right, basically. SMW, since it was much less linear than its NES counterparts, had a lot more replayability to it. my sister & i spent a ton of time playing it over and over, which was kinda funny cuz it'd be like 1994 and we'd play the 1991 game that came with the system. with that kind of replayability, i felt particularly obligated to note super mario world.
F-Zero (1991)
f-zero was one of those games that i never actually owned myself. my childhood friend kevin had it when the SNES first came out, and so i was constantly over at his house playing it. i'd say it really says something that a game i didn't even own myself would appear on this list.
f-zero is probably the least celebrated game i've put onto my all-time favorites so far. i don't know if the common gamer today is entirely aware of it, even. but it came out before Super Mario Kart did, so it was basically THE racing game for the still-young SNES. i think at that time console racing games weren't really all that popular, so this was really my first exposure to enjoying a full-on racing game.
it was kind of just a coincidence that it was a great racing game and also futuristic, which i was into as a kid. the idea of driving (well, more like flying) around in hovercrafts instead of cars was appealing, as well as the illusion that you were travelling at ridiculous speeds. i liked that the game was relatively simple as far as no item collection or brilliant AI, just trying to beat the rest of the fields. just like the majority of my all-time favs, the music was great as well. i particularly liked the mellow tune it would play when you'd crash out and die. at the moment, i actually have the start-up and GO!!! sound as my 'new text message' sound on my SLVR cell phone. old school, kids, old school, indeed.
i'm convinced it was the original f-zero that paved the way for me enjoying the hell out of later futuristic racer Wipeout XL, as well as the gamecube iteration of the f-zero series, F-Zero GX.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1992)
okay, i don't wanna blow my load on this whole all-time favorites list, but i'll just say that of all the games i've listed and probably will list later on, this is my absolute favorite game.
with that short disclaimer out of the way, i'll try to come even close to explaining why that fact is true. you could basically throw down two different genres on the table, platformers and RPGs. somewhere in the middle of those two radically different types of video games are straight-up, vanilla adventure games. i've already discussed the original Legend of Zelda here a bit, so i've touched on what i like about the genre, but obviously LttP just expanded on that concept even more. nintendo achieved a perfect mix of purposeful quests to get through the game with whimsical and intriguing side quests to further advance link's capabilities.
i loved how it borrowed magic and item elements from RPGs, yet didn't really bother with levelling and turn-based actions that slowed the game down too much. i loved how the further you went on in the game, the more your items screen had so many useful items in it. often times the later parts of the game would require you to use all the tools you'd acquired throughout the game to achieve something, which piqued the puzzle enthusiast deep inside me. the inventory list of items you'd collect would only expand further in future iterations of the zelda games.
the idea of having both light and dark worlds, and the interesting contrasts between both, was especially cool to me. as the game went along you'd become aware that you could go back and forth between these worlds, something that enhanced gameplay even further. the light world that you start in already seemed huge compared to the NES version, so obviously it seemed downright massive once you realized the world was actually twice as big.
i dunno, moreso than the often-frustrating and occasionally-empty platformers like mario and the like, the zelda series has always appealed to me. i like the mythology that they create with the zelda series, because they successfully create the type of fantasy world that an average gamer can grasp without feeling like a bit of a dork for being so into it. possibly moreso than all other zelda games, LttP appealed to a large audience with the initial SNES crowd once the mystique of Super Mario World wore off. i recently bought a used copy of the GBA version of LttP just cuz i wanted to go back and play it again on my DS whenever i felt like it. i figured for $10 it was better than fiddling around with an emulator version of it, which i'd tried and never felt natural. so far i've loved the nostalgia of playing my all-time favorite game some 14 years later and yet still enjoying it just the same.
--j
Super Mario World (1991)
i think i could easily say i love SMW better than any NES game i've mentioned before. it was still a straight-up 2D platform mario game, but the added capacity (for both storage and graphics) of the SNES game really made the series into something that felt completely different. the music for the varying levels was fantastic, as well as the changes in atmosphere.
super mario world, despite being a launch title for the SNES (thus an early 16-bit experiment), just did everything right. i even loved things like the digitized effects when entering a particular level, the music adding drum beats whenever you rode yoshi, etc. even the addition of yoshi himself, with different colors and abilities, added a completely new element to the game. the world map concept did well for the mario series, which had been started in SMB3, but expanded even more in SMW. the castles & ghost houses usually succeeded in creeping me out somewhat, and loved how the doors/keys would swallow mario into them.like i said, the game just did everything right, basically. SMW, since it was much less linear than its NES counterparts, had a lot more replayability to it. my sister & i spent a ton of time playing it over and over, which was kinda funny cuz it'd be like 1994 and we'd play the 1991 game that came with the system. with that kind of replayability, i felt particularly obligated to note super mario world.
F-Zero (1991)
f-zero was one of those games that i never actually owned myself. my childhood friend kevin had it when the SNES first came out, and so i was constantly over at his house playing it. i'd say it really says something that a game i didn't even own myself would appear on this list.
f-zero is probably the least celebrated game i've put onto my all-time favorites so far. i don't know if the common gamer today is entirely aware of it, even. but it came out before Super Mario Kart did, so it was basically THE racing game for the still-young SNES. i think at that time console racing games weren't really all that popular, so this was really my first exposure to enjoying a full-on racing game.it was kind of just a coincidence that it was a great racing game and also futuristic, which i was into as a kid. the idea of driving (well, more like flying) around in hovercrafts instead of cars was appealing, as well as the illusion that you were travelling at ridiculous speeds. i liked that the game was relatively simple as far as no item collection or brilliant AI, just trying to beat the rest of the fields. just like the majority of my all-time favs, the music was great as well. i particularly liked the mellow tune it would play when you'd crash out and die. at the moment, i actually have the start-up and GO!!! sound as my 'new text message' sound on my SLVR cell phone. old school, kids, old school, indeed.
i'm convinced it was the original f-zero that paved the way for me enjoying the hell out of later futuristic racer Wipeout XL, as well as the gamecube iteration of the f-zero series, F-Zero GX.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1992)
okay, i don't wanna blow my load on this whole all-time favorites list, but i'll just say that of all the games i've listed and probably will list later on, this is my absolute favorite game.
with that short disclaimer out of the way, i'll try to come even close to explaining why that fact is true. you could basically throw down two different genres on the table, platformers and RPGs. somewhere in the middle of those two radically different types of video games are straight-up, vanilla adventure games. i've already discussed the original Legend of Zelda here a bit, so i've touched on what i like about the genre, but obviously LttP just expanded on that concept even more. nintendo achieved a perfect mix of purposeful quests to get through the game with whimsical and intriguing side quests to further advance link's capabilities.
i loved how it borrowed magic and item elements from RPGs, yet didn't really bother with levelling and turn-based actions that slowed the game down too much. i loved how the further you went on in the game, the more your items screen had so many useful items in it. often times the later parts of the game would require you to use all the tools you'd acquired throughout the game to achieve something, which piqued the puzzle enthusiast deep inside me. the inventory list of items you'd collect would only expand further in future iterations of the zelda games.the idea of having both light and dark worlds, and the interesting contrasts between both, was especially cool to me. as the game went along you'd become aware that you could go back and forth between these worlds, something that enhanced gameplay even further. the light world that you start in already seemed huge compared to the NES version, so obviously it seemed downright massive once you realized the world was actually twice as big.
i dunno, moreso than the often-frustrating and occasionally-empty platformers like mario and the like, the zelda series has always appealed to me. i like the mythology that they create with the zelda series, because they successfully create the type of fantasy world that an average gamer can grasp without feeling like a bit of a dork for being so into it. possibly moreso than all other zelda games, LttP appealed to a large audience with the initial SNES crowd once the mystique of Super Mario World wore off. i recently bought a used copy of the GBA version of LttP just cuz i wanted to go back and play it again on my DS whenever i felt like it. i figured for $10 it was better than fiddling around with an emulator version of it, which i'd tried and never felt natural. so far i've loved the nostalgia of playing my all-time favorite game some 14 years later and yet still enjoying it just the same.
--j
Friday, November 10, 2006
All-Time Favorite Games (2nd in a series of 7)
alright, now that i've gotten the first few NES classics out of the way, time for my next few games that i'm sure you're probably just as familiar with. this is still NES era games, so i have to remember way back for these.
Mega Man 2 (1989)
i spent a ton of time playing mega man 2 as a kid, and i'm pretty sure i know why -- it has to be in my top 3 hardest games i've ever played with any consistency. when i was like 8 years old, i guess that's something that i liked. i liked the challenge of trying to beat something that was truly difficult, just to say that i had done it.
the mega man games were fun because they were simple. combine the simplicity of "keep mashing the fire button until the enemies die" with a kid's imagination of creative bosses and mechanical environments and you (apparently) have a hit on your hands. the different worlds in mega man were different, each stage almost felt like you were playing a different game. it varied a bit from mario games, where levels in each world could get a bit repetitive after a while and cause you to lose a bit of interest. it helped that you could go through the stages in whichever order you desired, meaning you could use the weapons gained from the bosses you beat on other enemies, possibly in a different fashion every time you went through the game.
while i loved the game so much as a kid, i have to say that enjoyment was somewhat short lived. i remember playing some of the sequels that followed the game and they were still good games, but capcom just kept churning them out, year after year. once the SNES came out, they still kept pushing the games out, even branching into the X series all the way to the PS2. in my opinion, the games just kinda ran out of gas after the first handful were made. once some solid 3D work starting to be done on games, the side-scrolling simplistic shooters just didn't cut it as much anymore.
i tried out a PS2 copy of the mega man anniversary collection and damn if i didn't just hate it. i went back and tried to enjoy mega man 2 and found the game way too damn hard. i dunno if it was cuz of the PS2 controller (face it, NES shooters just don't need that many buttons) or that i'm much older and don't have the patience to keep dying and trying over again, but i just couldn't see much appeal in it other than reliving the classic music. i guess there's just no replacing the original, especially decades later.
Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
as young as i was at the time, i remember 1990 and the ramping-up to the 3rd iteration of the super mario bros. series as being a big deal in the relatively juvenile gaming world. there was that cheesy movie the wizard that served as a bit of a preview for SMB3 for american kids, so we were all anxious to play it.
once it came out, it basically didn't disappoint. the original SMB was already seen as legendary, but SMB3 was really miles above the first from just 5 years prior. SMB2 was seen by most as being just too weird and unique to be considered especially memorable, so SMB3 felt a bit like returning to mario's true roots. the game was vastly more wide-open than the previous in the series, so there was plenty to do. particularly novel at the time were the different suits mario could wear for different purposes. the ability to take off and fly and reach upwards in the stages changed the dynamic of the side-scroller genre a bit as well.
the beauty of SMB3 was that it launched in 1990, when everybody who was ever going to get a NES had gotten one by that point, and so the game was a huge hit. it felt like at the time everybody had it and played the crap out of it until super mario world (and the rest of the early SNES games) came and blew everything out of the water.
that rounds out my NES favorites. next time i'll get into my personal favorite console of all-time, the Super Nintendo.
--j
Mega Man 2 (1989)
i spent a ton of time playing mega man 2 as a kid, and i'm pretty sure i know why -- it has to be in my top 3 hardest games i've ever played with any consistency. when i was like 8 years old, i guess that's something that i liked. i liked the challenge of trying to beat something that was truly difficult, just to say that i had done it.
the mega man games were fun because they were simple. combine the simplicity of "keep mashing the fire button until the enemies die" with a kid's imagination of creative bosses and mechanical environments and you (apparently) have a hit on your hands. the different worlds in mega man were different, each stage almost felt like you were playing a different game. it varied a bit from mario games, where levels in each world could get a bit repetitive after a while and cause you to lose a bit of interest. it helped that you could go through the stages in whichever order you desired, meaning you could use the weapons gained from the bosses you beat on other enemies, possibly in a different fashion every time you went through the game.
while i loved the game so much as a kid, i have to say that enjoyment was somewhat short lived. i remember playing some of the sequels that followed the game and they were still good games, but capcom just kept churning them out, year after year. once the SNES came out, they still kept pushing the games out, even branching into the X series all the way to the PS2. in my opinion, the games just kinda ran out of gas after the first handful were made. once some solid 3D work starting to be done on games, the side-scrolling simplistic shooters just didn't cut it as much anymore.i tried out a PS2 copy of the mega man anniversary collection and damn if i didn't just hate it. i went back and tried to enjoy mega man 2 and found the game way too damn hard. i dunno if it was cuz of the PS2 controller (face it, NES shooters just don't need that many buttons) or that i'm much older and don't have the patience to keep dying and trying over again, but i just couldn't see much appeal in it other than reliving the classic music. i guess there's just no replacing the original, especially decades later.
Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
as young as i was at the time, i remember 1990 and the ramping-up to the 3rd iteration of the super mario bros. series as being a big deal in the relatively juvenile gaming world. there was that cheesy movie the wizard that served as a bit of a preview for SMB3 for american kids, so we were all anxious to play it.
once it came out, it basically didn't disappoint. the original SMB was already seen as legendary, but SMB3 was really miles above the first from just 5 years prior. SMB2 was seen by most as being just too weird and unique to be considered especially memorable, so SMB3 felt a bit like returning to mario's true roots. the game was vastly more wide-open than the previous in the series, so there was plenty to do. particularly novel at the time were the different suits mario could wear for different purposes. the ability to take off and fly and reach upwards in the stages changed the dynamic of the side-scroller genre a bit as well.the beauty of SMB3 was that it launched in 1990, when everybody who was ever going to get a NES had gotten one by that point, and so the game was a huge hit. it felt like at the time everybody had it and played the crap out of it until super mario world (and the rest of the early SNES games) came and blew everything out of the water.
that rounds out my NES favorites. next time i'll get into my personal favorite console of all-time, the Super Nintendo.
--j
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