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And so we have it. My all-time favourite game. It's held onto the top spot for just under 20 years now, and weathered powerful attacks on its position from some of the other games in this list. Whenever I come back to it though I find it as compelling, fresh and addictive as ever. I've lost count of the number of times I've completed it yet I still relish every new start. It's a masterpiece of design, presentation and interface. It's smart and scary. It's amazing.
A friend of mine lent this to me - it must have been in early 1988 - along with some other games for the Atari ST. He didn't think much of it but thought I might like it. I watched my brother struggle with it for a bit, get killed by the first creature and dismiss it, but there was something there that fascinated me and I found myself loading it up whenever I could get onto the ST. Soon I was raving about it to my friend, who then gave it another shot and fell as much in love with it as I did.
I hadn't played anything like this before. A realtime environment, cunningly designed and filled with monsters, puzzles and riches. A freeform character levelling system and a seamless interface that had you interacting directly with the environment via the disembodied hand-cursor. That interface lent a strong sense of connection to the game along with the clean visuals, with every option no more that a couple of clicks away.
The magic system was rooted in a common-sense reality, made up of runes representing different forms, elements, alignments, etc. The specific spells were drip-fed to you as you progressed deeper, but a bit of savvy thinking and experimentation would unlock their power much sooner - if you had the resources to handle them. Characters progressed and became more proficient in the actions they practised. You could concentrate one characters' efforts towards destructive magic, another towards mélee combat, or have them Jack-of-all-trades. You could take one, two, three or four champions with you.
The design of the dungeon itself was a work of genius. After a fairly linear first half, the deeper levels opened up in all kinds of ways, and interconnected via a series of hidden stairways. The feeling of immersion in the place was absolute. I remember the first time I journeyed down to the deepest levels, and having the overwhelming sense that the entrance was a distant, unreachable memory. Each new descent brought a new creature or two to the roster, and a new challenge in dealing with them. The most ferocious and deadly of all reserved for the 14th, deepest level.
I remember level 12, keeping my starving party alive on stamina and health potions potions while battling against Chaos Knights. I remember jumping out of my chair on hearing a Magenta Worm attack me from the side. I remember the weird calm in the centre that is level 7, the epic battle against a room packed full of giant rats on level 9, which provided me with an almost endless supply of food. Most of all though I remember the final confrontation with Lord Chaos - a desperate, nerve-wracking test of dexterity that had my heart pounding as hard as any arcade game.
Dungeon Master lives on thanks to a couple of remake projects - the original games included in their entirety but with the capacity for total customization. The groundwork laid down by the interface has been put to amazing use by some talented individuals, keeping both the original game alive and expanding its potential. It's the kind of game that encourages that level of dedication and following, and I for one am grateful to be part of it.
I can barely put into words my feelings about Phantasy Star Online. Along with many people it was my first real online gaming experience, and the early days of the Dreamcast version were a gaming Utopia filled with friendly and helpful people. The universal chat interface brought players together in a beautiful way, and spending nights dropping into random games with complete strangers was a joy. The camaraderie was amazing, uplifting. High-level players would happily escort new people through a tough area. Gifts were given freely. The nature of the game engendered a community spirit unlike anything else.
After the hackers started in on things we marshalled ourselves together in more tightly-knit groups, locking games and giving out passwords only to trusted players. This only served to strengthen and solidify friendships though, and allowed for the more focused and demanding aspects of the game to be taken on. Challenge Mode demanded a solid unit, and we took up the challenge and met it. The intense co-operative team play of Challenge Mode PSO remains my pinnacle of gaming experiences.
All this is without talking about the game itself, though. PSO was unique in its aesthetics - everything from the visual style to the music was fresh and new, and so intrinsically linked to fond memories that simply thinking about the opening bars of the Forest theme triggers a wave of emotion. The gameplay was simple - Gauntlet in space, Diablo in space... but it was direct and immediate. An online RPG where arcade game skills mattered. The interface was clean and necessarily fast, with shortcuts configured to vital items and techniques.
Then there was the RPG aspect of it. Level-building, the collection of better equipment. In the pre-hack days we used to marvel at a player unveiling some mythical rare weapon. The Spread Needle, the Crazy Tune, the Twin Brand. Owning these things became an obsessive, almost quixotic quest. Beyond that there was the Mag raising. Your little robotic buddy, always at your side could be carefully manipulated into a variety of forms, and players became obsessed with raising particular types, or better yet finding a super-rare Mag Cell that would instantly transform it into one of eight special forms.
The game comprised only four main levels, split into two or three areas each, yet we played them over and over again for literally years. And happily, too. Just being in the game was cosy, it was so inviting. Everything just felt so right.
For a few years Sonic Team gave us a dose of pure gaming paradise, the likes of which I doubt I'll ever see or experience again.
I was introduced to Star Control 2 by way of the Ur-Quan Masters - a free remake made possible when the original creators released the source code into the open-source community.
It's an epic space adventure / strategy / arcade game. Hard to define, in fact, because it does so many things so well. It's completely open-ended, presenting the player with a galaxy to explore and exploit, technologies to acquire and use, alien races to contact and communicate with (sometimes with hilarious results - the script for SC2 is among the best I've ever seen in a game), forge allegiances, make war, engage in ship-to-ship combat... there's so much to do it's mind-boggling.
Being a space game it doesn't have to do much to appeal to me visually, and while it's quite basic compared to modern efforts it still has a very attractive, bright and colourful VGA style. The atmosphere is helped no end by some excellent music and ambience.
The short end of it is that Star Control 2 is comprised of several types and facets of gaming that I am a complete sucker for. There are trading games, combat games, exploration games, strategy games, even diplomacy games that I've enjoyed, but this one takes all those things and mixes them together in one glorious package. Some games you play for a quick fix, and others you settle down with for years. Star Control 2 is firmly and permanently in the latter camp.
I bought Chaos for 50p. I probably bought it because it was 50p. I mean, how could you go wrong for that? Not very, as it turned out. On the Spectrum I probably played Chaos only slightly less than Elite, and I'm still playing it today.
On the surface Chaos is deceptively simple, and seems almost throwaway. The graphics are modest even by Spectrum standards, the sound effects rudimentary, and the overall presentation of the game is very basic. None of that matters though, because bubbling under that surface is a strategy masterpiece that still outclasses its brethren in the genre.
Up to 8 wizards do battle in an arena with a variety of spells that their disposal. Creatures can be summoned, enhancements cast on the wizards themselves, fires started, magical woods created, lightning bolts fired... there's a large range of magics available to each player, each with its own chance of success. For example - keep casting chaotic spells and the chaos-alignment increases, making subsequent chaos spells easier to cast. Each turn the players get to choose and attempt to cast a spell, then move themselves and whatever allies they have. Directly attacking an enemy is simply a case of trying to move into its spot, either by land or air. Distance attacks and offensive spells have to be executed within range. Victory goes to the last wizard standing.
This simple premise soon blooms into a very tactical game. After a few rounds the boards is teeming with creatures and obstacles, all out for one thing: the destruction of their enemies. Players can hide inside citadels or forests for a few turns, they can mount their own ridable creatures or arm up and go into direct combat themselves. Different creatures affect each other in different ways.
Something I always liked about Chaos is the fact that it never lets on how well your wizard and creatures are doing... whether they're fit as a fiddle or at deaths door. Every attack on your wizard is a painfully tense moment. Will they survive or be wiped out? The death of a wizard is always a fun moment, as he explodes in 8 directions, taking all his creations with him.
With such a range of options, numbers of players and spell choices no two games of Chaos are ever remotely the same, which is why over 20 years on it's still my strategy game of choice.
I absolutely adore the game design of Tempest, and while the original still looks nice and plays a decent game, the idea really shone when Jeff Minter took it and gave it a total makeover for the Jaguar. Since then it's gone through many incarnations on many platforms, but it's retained that manic eye-melting formula. Typhoon 2001 - a freeware, homebrewed tribute - is the finest version I've played yet.
It's the kind of game that only makes sense to the person playing it (and even then only some of the time). It's completely exhilarating, and sometimes overwhelmingly frantic. Typhoon 2001 throws down the highscore gauntlet and dares you to blink. It's arcade gaming mainlined into your brain, forcing your hands to play catch-up. It's my absolute favourite dose-of-adrenaline game. The surest way into The Zone.
My favourite Roguelike, Dungeon Crawl (specifically the tiles version) jettisons so much baggage that it makes even other Roguelikes look flabby. The premise is as simple as they come: Descend into a dungeon and kill things while searching for the Orb of Zot. There isn't even so much as a town, or any shops along the way, and it makes no concessions to sidequests.
One of the many things I love about Crawl is the persistent levels. Everywhere you've been remains intact when you return, so heading back upwards for a breather isn't a proposition filled with uncertainty. There's a great religion system at work in the game, and after a few levels the player gets to choose which deity to follow. Performing certain actions while praying can incur the wrath or favour of these deities, and each one offers a number of abilities and bonuses - if you keep them sweet.
It's also famously difficult, in fact it's fair to say that the game takes a great deal of pleasure in sending your characters into the afterlife as often and brutally as possible. But you still come back for more. I get wildly excited if a character of mine gets down to double-digit levels in the dungeon.
The tiles version benefits from (obviously) the nice graphical tileset and even mouse control - though it's best to save the mouse for inventory management.
Dungeon Crawl is really a case of wearing the name that fits. It doesn't have any pretention, it just does what it does perfectly. I find it more engrossing and fun than almost any RPG I've played.
Despite a number of flaws I consider Freelancer to be the very best space trading and combat game I've played.
The mouse flight control feels wonderful, and after years of getting to grips with rotation, pitch, yaw and a dozen other commands, the handling of the spacecraft is actually the most fun part of the game. Gliding carefully through a debris field or circling round a huge battleship really brings home the intuitive nature of the control scheme, and simply clicking a mouse button gives access to all the menus in the game while still in flight.
Unfortunately, the combat suffers from this scheme in that it's simply a case of FPS strafe-and-shoot, most encounters coming down to who has the most powerful guns and the best shields. Still, there's no denying the excitement and dynamism of the battles, especially when there are allies involved.
The main feature of Freelancer that appeals so much to me is the sense of place it creates. Each solar system feels genuinely busy and realistic. With various ships going to and fro, radio chatter crackling all the time, police and military going about their business taking out pirates and insurgents. When I'm just sitting in space watching things go by it feels so solid and so believable.
It's aged a little in the graphics department, but that only means that I'm able to run it at full whack on my PC - and despite that I still think it has a special beauty of its own. Just the range of colours across the skies is captivating.
Freelancer has a lot to offer, and for a fan of the genre it's almost infinitely playable. It's simple enough to pick up and play without worrying about every little detail, but vast enough to have a grand adventure in.
Nintendo's greatest achievement and the greatest platform game ever made. Super Mario World is an absolute masterpiece of game design that has yet to be bettered almost 20 years on. I can't decide whether that's a cause for celebration or sadness.
Nintendo took the leaps forward that had been made with Super Mario Bros. 3, polished them up a bit, expanded them and let the Super Nintendo work its magic. For a start the look is timeless. Super Mario World will look just as great in 100 years as it does today - its crisp, clean style invincible against the march of technology. It handles so well. It's a given with Nintendo that its games - especially its Mario games - would be playtested to perfection, but it's most obvious here. The entire thing is flawless.
All the greatest tricks of the genre seem to have been put to work here. Hidden exits leading to hidden levels or even entirely new areas of the map, a dash of puzzling here and there and a range of new tricks and abilities opening up new possibilities. And this was a launch game.
Amazingly, the quality and inventiveness was maintained through nearly 100 levels. Never along the way are you just fed up of playing the game. It's possible to shortcut to the end, but why would you? You want to play through all those areas because it's such damn good fun.
And yep, I found all the exits, did the star road, collected the 'Super Player' coins.
In the case of Super Mario World it would be rude not to.
Vagrant Story is, to me, the Playstations crowning achievement. It pushed the machine to its limits technically and served up a magnificently dark, epic, intelligent adventure with incredible depth and replayability.
The unfortunate downside of its complexity is that it's reluctant to show its qualities to a casual player, and many who tried simply gave up, bewildered by its arcane combat system and seemingly impossible boss battles.
With a modicum of effort and research though that initial spike can be overcome, and the greatest RPG to grace the Playstation is the reward. It seems to me that Vagrant Story is a true labour of love for everyone involved. Coming off the success of Final Fantasy Tactics, director Yasumi Matsuno and his team from Quest got a chance to craft a game of their own, and Matsuno brought his full genius to bear on it. His brand of convoluted political intrigue served as a background for a story of one mans journey of self-discovery and redemption. Every character is full of hidden motivations and shifting allegiances, and by the time the game approaches its climax many assumptions are undermined.
The story of Vagrant Story is by far the most intriguing and compelling I've ever come across in a videogame. Lucky then, that the western localization was carried out by a tremendously talented team who relished and respected the task. It's undoubtedly among the finest translation jobs ever performed on a game.
At its heart, Vagrant Story is a dungeon-crawler. The player takes direct control of the main character and journeys through the derelict city of Lea Monde, both above and below. Along the way he is confronted with all manner of creatures from bats to dragons, beasts and supernatural beings. Combat is very much the core of the gameplay, and its here where Vagrant Story truly shines.
The player can create his own weapons and armour by combining found items of the same. By experimenting, two weapons can be used to create a new, more powerful one. Likewise with armour. Underneath the surface of this is a complex system that determines what the outcome of any combination will be, and it's the exploitation of this system that makes for one of the most compulsive aspects of the game. You will very rarely find an item as good as one you can make. It goes without saying that - for someone who tends to get addicted to the minutiae of a game - this is an irresistible draw. I once spent five hours entering and leaving one room on the off chance of the creature inside dropping a particular item I wanted. By the time I'd finished it had dropped it three times.
The combat itself has a kind of rhythm-action vibe to it, with timed button presses keeping a combo of hits going. Everything is scored, too. From your highest combo to the number of enemies you've killed with each type of weapon. It's a stat-hounds dream come true.
There's a clear game option after you complete the adventure, which allows you to start over with your stats, abilities and items intact. In fact this is the only way to complete the game 100%, as certain areas are inaccessible on the first play. I've played Vagrant Story six times over on the same file.
Last but not least goes a mention to the music. Hitoshi Sakimoto's finest hour, the score here ranges from pure ambience to grandiose battle themes. The soundscape meshing perfectly with the theme and visuals of the game.
Taking the top spot in my gravity games list comes Oids for the Atari ST. It's got a touch more substance than most, and even something of an emotional core, concerning itself as it does with rescuing little androids (Oids) under the oppression of nasty aliens.
You have to firstly destroy the buildings they're held in to free them, then land and let them board. Accidentally frying the Oids themselves is a traumatic experience, and is best avoided. Alien spacecraft will take exception to all this and attack you, and there are other things dotted around the landscape that affect you, such as towers that repel or attract your ship.
In gameplay terms that's all there is to it, essentially. It is, however, completely addicitve, fun and satisfying to play. What's more, there's a comprehensive level editor included for you to design your own fiendish worlds to challenge yourself or others with. The graphics are simple - minimal, even, and the sound is barely existent. Which only goes to show how great the game is regardless.
This is a little unusual in the list, because it's a game I only discovered very recently. Sure, I was aware of its existence but I hadn't played it and never thought twice about it. I ended up trying it by default when playing around with a BBC emulator recently. I mean, when you've got a BBC emulator what do you play? Repton, Elite... and Exile.
After smacking myself 'upside the head' for a while for being ignorant of this amazing game all these years, I settled down to play it intensely and ended up favouring the Amiga version for its clarity of visuals (I spent an awfully long time stuck at the very beginning of the BBC version because I couldn't tell what anything was supposed to be). However, it remains a classic in all guises, and a genuinely amazing feat of programming and execution on the BBC.
Marrying the gravity gameplay to a sprawling, puzzle-based adventure game, Exile casts the player as an astronaut sent to a remote world to stop an insane genius from unleashing his deadly experiments on the galaxy and Earth. Arriving without equipment and low on power, you have to search for items and weapons to aid you, while fighting off the creations of the exiled madman.
The behaviour of the astronaut with regard to gravity, weather and physical interaction with other objects is so satisfying. The delicate controls beautifully responsive. It's an immense pleasure to just move around in the game, but there's a job to do. Exile can be a real head-scratcher, with some serious lateral thinking required, but it's also very accommodating to the player. You can't die in the game - you just return to your last 'remembered' position when you take too much damage (you can hold one position in memory at a time and teleport to it at will - a vital component of several puzzles).
Exile is a game that not only provides a compelling challenge and an attractive gameworld, but also has a particularly attractive feel to it. Something unique to videogames.
After many years of trying all kinds of squad-based strategy games I always come back to Laser Squad. To me it's simply never been beaten for immediacy, ease of interface and replayability. I actually have fun playing it, something that often seems lacking in other entries in the genre. There seems to be a line of complexity over which I lose interest, but Laser Squad hits it just right. I want to choose what equipment to take, and that's it. Straight into the action.
Even though there are only 6 missions they vary generously in objectives and environments, and as with any good strategy game they really come alive in multiplayer. Having said that, I never, ever tire of blowing apart the home of Sterner Regnix, or making my way cautiously through the Moonbase. Even against the computer Laser Squad is very entertaining and rewarding.
Julian Gollop has expanded his series in various directions, and Laser Squad is still going strong today, albeit in a substantially different arena. None of them have managed to top the purity of this classic.
A short while after the launch of the Playstation I sold my machine, having wrung all the entertainment I was ever going to get out of Tekken and Ridge Racer and having given up on anything appealing turning up anytime soon. I dropped out of gaming completely for a year or so until Final Fantasy VII turned up.
I don't even know what compelled me to buy another machine for it. I wasn't familiar with the series, I hadn't been reading game magazines so hadn't been exposed to the preview hype, but for some reason when it hit I just had to have it. Maybe Square put something in the water.
It seems I was ready to dive back into gaming, as I spent the next few months utterly obsessed and engrossed in the game. It remains one of only two 'traditional' Final Fantasies that I can happily go back and play (the other being in this list already). Whatever magic formula Square hit upon here, it worked. Technical limitations aside the story, characters, magic system, visuals and soundtrack were as perfect as could possibly be. The game had buckets of depth: time spent idling at the Gold Saucer, the convoluted and obsessional quest for a Gold Chocobo, defeating the optional Weapons, mastering Materia, and last but not least levelling your party above and way beyond the call of duty. I've still got a save file with characters that can win the game just by counterattacking.
I love the world of Final Fantasy VII. I used to play it every night then go to work the next day and tell a friend everything I'd done and the new places I'd seen. The game is so dear to me that even the random encounters don't bother me in the slightest. I think that first play through took me somewhere around 70 hours - much, much more than any game I'd previously played.
And that death? I didn't cry, but I was very surprised and impressed, and found a whole new level of respect for the game - that it would be willing to do that. I know SEGA had done it years before in Phantasy Star 2, but I never felt it as strongly as I did here. I had spent a significant amount of time levelling the character and following her story. I should have been angry at what might have felt like wasted time, but Square pitched that moment and its aftermath so surely that it became essential to the game, and I remember feeling nothing afterwards other than an intense desire to see it through to the end.
And the first thing I did after completing it? I started over again.
Forget the business about the value or otherwise of the game. Radiant Silvergun is a stone-cold classic of design and gameplay.
Taking advantage of every trick the Saturn has to offer, and pulling out a few that people thought it never could, Treasure crafted a masterpiece in the shoot 'em up genre. I didn't buy this blindly on the hype - even I'm not that daft, I downloaded a rip of it and tried it out on a modded PAL Saturn. A few hours with that slow, bordered version was enough to convince me I had to get hold of a genuine copy and a Japanese machine to play it on.
To me, Silvergun is like taking part in a big, dramatic story. It's peppered with dialogue and cutscenes - something that you tend not to see in shmups, and that lends it a quality of immersion seldom experienced. I'm not talking about The Zone here, I mean that particular feeling that what's going on in the game is actually happening. Hard to explain but there it is.
It's incredibly tough, but it's entirely possible given the effort. As with most shmups it mainly comes down to learning the patterns and best strategies to take on the bosses. And the bosses are glorious beasts - the game is essentially a boss rush with the business inbetween all about levelling your weapons and chaining for highscores. The music is essential to the experience, and the game wouldn't be half as thrilling without it.
Radiant Silvergun is one of those rare games that's almost as entertaining to watch as it is to play, because of that great sense of the dramatic. To play it though is a dream, whatever the cost.
I still think Capcom got their survival horror series bang-on with this installment. It's perfectly paced, atmospheric and genuinely scary. It offers great replay value and has a great schlocky plot.
I love this game so much I pretty much forced it on a friend who isn't a fan of scary movies or games, because I was so convinced the sheer quality of the game would compel him to play and love it too, and I was right. I had played Resident Evil but it never quite clicked with me the way 2 or 3 did. I found it a little too clumsy, a little too difficult and unforgiving. When the second one came out I bought it because of the hype and, well... it's placing here speaks for itself.
The visuals have a grimy roughness necessary to the limits of the platform but also perfect for the visual style of the game. I think it still looks tremendous. The music and effects totally draw you into the world. The constant wind blowing through the streets contrasted with the eerie silence of the police station, punctuated by that classic piano piece. The voice acting is a little on the stiff side, but it's leaps and bounds over the terrible effort on the first game. It's cheesy but fits perfectly with the B-movie atmosphere.
I used to be able to ace this game, I unlocked everything and was pretty much always able to get through the whole thing without using more than a couple of health herbs. That's how much I played it. I loved the fact that it's possible to learn it in that way. There's no randomness to trip you up and frustrate you.
The thing I like most about it is the pacing. It's spot-on. The early parts of the game are pretty quiet, punctuated with action moments but on the whole it's more of a sedate puzzler. Once you get out of the police station things ramp up a little, until the finale at the lab where you're toting all kinds of firepower and running against a clock. The whole A and B scenario is a valiant idea, but it's not quite executed perfectly (some things overlap inconsistently). Still, it adds a nice twist to the game and gives at least another reason to play though it again.
Ostensibly a space trading and combat game, but one with insane amounts of detail. Sundog is a game that's been bizarrely lost to the collective memory, but is every bit as classic as the finest entries in the genre.
The 'Zoomaction' system was a brilliant way of presenting the potentially complex facets of the game to the player. You never had to use anything other than the mouse. Clicking the mouse buttons took you down or up levels in the menus, and literally inside whatever vehicle or building you were in. You could walk around your ship for example and personally check on the engines or shields while in flight or even combat (racing to replace damaged shield batteries and engine parts during combat was hair-raising stuff).
There's also a pretty large RPG element. Your stats are determined at the start of the game by spending from a pool of points. Strength, Intelligence, Charisma etc. will affect your abilities in various areas in the game. You could be attacked on the street while walking to the bank, or have to persuade a character to give up some vital information. Yes, in this game you can not only land on planets, you can get out of your ship and into a car, and out of that and walk around. Be careful where you park though, or you may get a ticket! You even had to feed yourself and make sure you got enough sleep.
There is a strong storyline that develops during the course of the game, and following it will lead to an end screen (which is unusual in itself for such an open-ended genre). I never saw it though, because I always enjoyed bashing around the galaxy too much.
Metal Gear Solid thrilled me like nothing before when it first came out, and I still think it's the best one in the series. Subsequent games have added complexity in both gameplay and plot, but for me they've never recaptured the drama and excitement of this entry.
One of the rare occasions where I was genuinely eager to find out what would happen next in a game story, MGS had me playing solidly (no pun intended) until the finale, and not for a single moment was I bored or frustrated or disinterested. It's a greatest hits of action gaming, every area offering a new challenge. It's plainly obvious that Hideo Kojima and his team threw everything they had at the game. They had plenty of fun breaking the fourth wall, too, leading to some very inventive and memorable moments. The variety in the boss battles was great, from hand-to-hand combat to taking out a helicopter with missiles. Though it usually comes under criticism for its aspirations to a movie-like experience people tend to forget that it's packed full of gameplay of all kinds. I never felt short-changed at all.
The sense of place is outstanding, each environment packed with details. The whole thing hangs together beautifully as a consistent setting. Even the much-derided Codec conversations don't bother me here as they did in the immediate sequel because I was so invested in the story and characters, and they helped to make it feel like I was really a part of this adventure. Alongside the Resident Evil games it has one of the best ambient soundtracks I've heard as well. From a technical standpoint it still holds up remarkably well, and I do believe that it's particular style means that it will never look bad.
Reliance on the radar system can lessen the experience, and after a couple of plays I ditched that and moved onto the harder difficulties. It becomes almost a completely new game, and a much more satisfying one.
Cinematic in the very best sense, Metal Gear Solid remains a benchmark for action gaming that its sequels have so far struggled to equal.
SEGA's masterpiece on the Master System, Dragon's Trap is a near-perfect platform adventure that mixes in light RPG elements as the icing on the cake.
I had greatly enjoyed Wonderboy in Monster Land, but was always frustrated by its timer and hurried nature (understandable, given its arcade origins). Dragon's Trap got rid of the linear format and laid open a world to be explored at leisure. Here were a variety of wildly different environments, challenging the player in different ways and containing plenty of secrets. The stuff of great adventures.
But the real stroke of genius was in the decision to have Wonderboy cursed and transformed into various forms throughout the game. Each form having unique abilities that allowed the player to access the level specifically designed for it, for example Mouse Man being able to stick like a spider to a particular type of block, or Lion-Man being able to slash downwards with his sword, breaking blocks below him. This Metroid-like mixture of abilities gave the game a superb freshness throughout with new challenges, and offered plenty of scope for exploration as a new form gave access to previously inaccessible rooms or areas. These would usually hold some kind of item or cash reward for players savvy enough to find them.
Like Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES, Dragon's Trap really proved what could be done with the Master System in capable hands. It's bright and detailed, the enemies and different forms of Wonderboy superbly designed and full of character, and the areas are complemented by a range of great tunes, my favourite being the island music Side-Crawler's Dance.
It's an eternal source of sadness to me that SEGA didn't keep up the Wonderboy series and build on the promise of this classic. A couple more installments appeared on the Megadrive, but the character and even the style of game faded away. With the continued success and obvious popularity Metroid and Castlevania I can't help but think that SEGA let a really good thing go to waste.
A homebrewed hybrid of Gravitar, Oids and Thrust, Gravitron uses a similar glowing-vector style to Thrust Xtreme for its visuals, but is more varied in its environments and elements. In addition to tight caverns to navigate there are spacemen to rescue, reactors to destroy, boulders to clear out, enemy ships, forcefields and a variety of gun emplacements to tackle. It can get pretty intense, and luckily there's a password system that allows you to start over from any level you've previously reached.
Suffice to say I'm won over by the nature of the game itself and the visuals. This is like a game created with the sole intention of appealing to me, and it's a no-brainer for inclusion in my 100 favourites.
People tend to think I'm joking when I tell that I think Geometry Wars is the best game on the Xbox 360, but I'm completely serious. It's the game I bought a 360 to play, and it's one of the best pure highscore arcade games ever made.
Another rung on the evolutionary ladder from Robotron via Smash TV, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is a pure and simple arena shooter that gets progressively more manic until the player is overwhelmed. It's just a case of using skill and luck to last as long as possible.
Taking the most basic visual style - vector graphics - and putting the grunt of a machine like the 360 behind them naturally means that you can have some mindblowing effects without any loss of performance. GW is eye-candy at its most glorious, and it's always tempting to let the screen fill up with as much as possible just because it all looks so tasty.
The sound is a vital aspect, too. Every spawning enemy has a unique sound, and it's imperative that the player learns every one in order to immediately face whatever's coming next. Enemy behaviours, too, because things get pretty frantic with several types onscreen at once. Some coming directly for you, some avoiding your shots and moving away, some travelling in predetermined patterns. Threading your way through the tiniest space with dozens of enemies on your tail is heart-pounding stuff, and the game cleverly discourages the use of your limited smart bombs until it's absolutely necessary.
It's true that I love few things more than a good old highscore game, and I'm just glad that there are still a few people out there happy to make them.
And so we have it. My all-time favourite game. It's held onto the top spot for just under 20 years now, and weathered powerful attacks on its position from some of the other games in this list. Whenever I come back to it though I find it as compelling, fresh and addictive as ever. I've lost count of the number of times I've completed it yet I still relish every new start. It's a masterpiece of design, presentation and interface. It's smart and scary. It's amazing.
