kisrael

Hopefully I'm not coming into this too late: First off, "Atari Master" should get a selfslap for not picking a better subject lines; you should be able to more or less know what a thread is about by reading the subject line. Portable gaming devices have to deal with: *power consumption - esp. on higher end chips, which ties in with heat *size *cost - this is one of the biggest issues for Nintendo *media - currently more or less limited to carts Nintendo has always leaned towards the conservative side of things with the gameboy and is the market leader for it. Higher power contenders have come and gone while even the four-shades-of-grey but portable and easy on the batteries original GB kicked much butt. Interesting to see if Sony's new entry turns up the heat though, I'm sure Nintendo is a bit complacent. Expandable systems are a bad idea. N64's "expansion pack" is about as far as it should go. Consoles beat higher powered PCs partially because developers only have to code for a single standard of hardware.

AARGH! I'm so sick of stealthy shooters. I want a GOOD death match. Give me Quake III. Give me Unreal Tournament. Hell, even give me a decent port of DOOM II! Looks like you have the wrong systems Fair point. Well, I have an agenda...it's the guys at work, they all love SOCOM, icluding some high up VPs, and so they all have PS2s. And maybe they'd be willing to play a different sufficeiently violent shooter, but the selection is so pisspoor. Beyond that, I barely give a damn about network play. I'd rather get some friends together in the living room.

How many times have you been to E3 ? I am going to guess and say zero. I think most people get their impression of the E3 from the coverage. shrug

AARGH! I'm so sick of stealthy shooters. I want a GOOD death match. Give me Quake III. Give me Unreal Tournament. Hell, even give me a decent port of DOOM II!

Frankly, yeah. I liked Conker a lot, had some ok if unbalanced multiplayer (frickin' teddy bears able to survive any damn fall unscathed, but beach was fun) but it's not exciting me half as much as Rogue Squadron or Mario Kart. I do wish PS2 had some more online gaming options though...

Not to bring this to the level of petty fanboydom, but, yawn. Halo 2, I can absolutely see. Doom3, maybe, if they don't have to dumb it down to much for the PC. But Ninja Gaiden, and Conker? Whatever. Compared to Nintendo's line up-- especially the prospect of brilliant looking sequel to Rogue Leader--I don't think X-box is owning much of anything, maybe just doing ok.

I like how that board cleverly doesn't make links look any different than normal text.

My wife rolled her eyes at your username... Anyway, I clicked on "Pretty Water"...it WAS good looking, but right at the end I noticed that the big stone wall opened right through the water, and didn't cause a single ripple...

It's a decent game, coulda used a 4 player mode, and had a total L-shaped difficulty curve...you get pretty far into it, and then BAM, impossible...I had to use a cheat to turn the competing craft into idiots.

I think, though, from a visual and design design point of view, Pac Man has it all over the sequel, there's something about its clean blue and black lines that holds up better than the all the colors the Ms. uses. I agree that just the great continuing presence of the sequel probably indicats her place in the top 100, over the more groundbreaking original. For a site called TileMachine.com I made this tiling wallpaper... At my gallery page you can see that I also tried frogger, q*bert, and a zaxxon that came out particularly well...

I gotta say (fair disclosure: I'm a bit of a Nintendo fanboy) Nintendo is making a pretty big impression at E3. The more I hear about the next Rogue Squadron game the more excited I get, sounds like Mario Kart is right on track, and F-Zero X should be fantastic. PS2...I dunno. I'm bitterly dissapointed by SOCOM (combined with the lack of choice of FPS styles on the system) so the sequel doesn't interest me that much. And I guess another Metal Gear Solid is big news. But I guess overall I'm not at all into stealthy-style games, and that's where the news seems to be. (Another GTA entry on the other hand would catch my attention and not let go.) I don't have an Xbox. I guess I'd be pretty jazzed by Halo 2 if I did. And maybe the Conker revamp will be worth while, at least once the price comes down. What do you all think?

I disagree that Super Mario World can't be included...I mean, technology for games is always improving, I'm sure SMB3 used a ton more cartridge memory than SMB did, and even if not developer's for systems are always finding new techniques. Dunno exactly, but I remember the guy who designed Pac-Man resisting the urge to give him an eye, because then they might want to add in a little mustache, or a hat, and where would it stop? Ms.Pac-Man, which I beleive started as a hacked Pac-Man ROM, went all out with the character frills. Could that, along with an enhanced sense of "woman friendliness" that the whole series was known for, have cranked up the future nostalgia value? I dunno, Tetris isn't that much fun for me any more...though I agree its simplicity has let versions be played on the side of buildings all the way down to the nanomolecular level, and that's cool. Still, Tetris Attack, which is also a simple idea- though not as simple because it kind of requires the idea of an enemy player, and garbage blocks-achieves so much more depth in what you can do...a great Tetris player is more or less a sped up novice Tetris player, with maybe a few better general strategies, but an expert Tetris Attack players sees things and makes things happen that the novice can only dream of...

Well, it's not just "accuracy", it's opinion as well. I've already argued that I don't think "Nintendo fanboyism" is unjustified in the history of gaming...nor is it unique to this list. Yes, but then it becomes hard to tell a great game apart from an obsessive compulsive disorder... I liked the list. A collection of Top 20s would be fun as well, though maybe hard to pinpoint genres for every worthy game.

Agreed. That was an oversite. I love Bionic Commando (which made the list) but at BEST, as a single game it's neck and neck w/ Mega Man 2; given the legacy the latter left behind that the former hasn't (a GB port and GBC sequel are all that comes to mind for BC), it shoulda been there. I think it's good for a list like this to group series; are there any situations when it's not obvious when it counts as two series? Like, it's pretty obvious that Super Mario World -> Mario 64 was pretty much a total paradigm shift, but actually given the play mechanic, Link to the Past -> Z:OoT, it's less clear. (I only played Zelda 2 growing up, folling around with Zelda 1 after playing Z:OoT I was amazed at how much of the game I knew best was there in the original.)

Seanbaby sure as heck remembers the shoe! All his old pages are so great. Anyway, I won't strongly disagree that SMB3 deserved the nod over SMB. I think it's a much richer game. then again, SMB2 is my favorite, so what do I know. (I still think SMB is still more innovative, inventing a genre is always more amazing than refining and perfecting it (though yeah, putting in the original non-Super Mario Bros was pretty cool), but frankly I never got into SMB much in terms of actually playing it...too much fiddling jumping)

It was generally a good list, but having five out of the top six games by Nintendo smacks of slavish devotion, rather than objective reporting. Well, given that EGM has the same thing, Nintendo's high placement is probably as objective as such a "all time" list could get...I wish I had the Game Informer list or some other lists at hand to see how Nintendo does in those other ones. But I think as objectively as possible, Nintendo deserves no fewer than 1/3 of top ten spots, if only because the series of Mario, Metroid, and Zelda are that important to gaming history and gamer's hearts. I think SMB is pretty revolutionary; I can't think of too many precursors to the genre it set on the scene; maybe Donkey Kong or Pitfall 2? Later games (like SMB3) were probably better gameplay wise. And Pong and Space Invaders were more innovative in their way, but, IMO, don't hold up as well for the modern gamer. I think what SMB did was bring the idea of interesting worlds to the fore, with all those levels. Other games like Adventure and again DK kind of hinted at that, but not as well. If you read about Miyamoto's childhood, he had a very active imagination, and SMB was where he finally had the technology to start putting in a sense of wonder and discovery into his games. True enough. But then what would we have to post about? I always like discussing the history of games, how new game ideas came on the scene, and where you can see the roots of later games in the earlier ones.

It was a good (not perfect) list. Nintendo has made some of the best games in gaming history. EGM's 1997 Top 100 had 5 of the top 10 by Nintendo, and their 2002 list had 6. That's what you get when one company brings out the Mario, Zelda, and Metroid series; all series that have either invented new styles of gaming (SMB, Metroid, Zelda) or come close to perfecting it (SMB3, Link to the Past) or both (Mario 64, Zelda: Oot) I mean, I think Street Fighter 2 and Final Fantasies are semi-pointless games in multiple lists' top10s that aren't near worthy the time they take to play them well, but given their general reputation, I accept that my tastes aren't universal and they probably deserve the accolades.

And I guess we are all what we eat. But I already knew I was meat. Guess I should avoid fruit, nuts, and vegetables...

Double Dribble was still pretty fun when I gave it a whirl with a friend a few months back. Well, I think the issue is finding the sweetspot between realism and gameplay, at least for team sports. Heh, could you imagine a game where you controlled a single lineman? Play after play, you just charge in, and if you're lucky something "interesting" happens. There's always gonna be a compromise between control of one player and the strategy of the whole team. I guess this idea applies to many games that strive for realism. A realistic flight sim is going to be very difficult to play, because you haven't had those hours and hours of training...

Point taken...though somehow it seems a little unfair to credit systems for games they remake/revamp. Well, yeah, N64 was better than the PSX graphicwise but both were "first gen" systems. There's a pretty close mapping to NES->SNES, N64->GameCube. It's very unclear if there's ever going to be another SNES->N64 level leap, since 3D...well, our lives are largely 3D, and we're reaching the point where game makers have to balance realism with gameplayability. Speaking of N64 and 2D, Has anyone played Bangai-O on N64? I've only played it on Dreamcast (wrote a walkthrough on GameFAQs actually) But the DC version at least put way more enemies on the screen than the SNES coulda handled. So the N64 had the potential to be an incredible 2D machine, but times being what they were, that wasn't a big selling point and most game makers (and gamers to be fair) wanted to see what could be done in 3D...

Miyamoto has done a lot more than just Mario, though...he tends to get over-credited as being behind everything Nintendo does which isn't fair, but he's had a hand in many, many games in some different genres.

mrc? "Conker's Bad Fur Day" had an insane amount of audio for a cartridge game, that really impressed me. The graphical look of "Maro Kart" and later "StarFox64" blew me away. Sort of like Metroid back in the day, I realized that computers of the day just weren't doing this level or type of game. And then Smash Brothers blew me away by being the game I would have designed in middle school...

Huh, I know people gripe about the textures, but the sound? I love some of the generated music...like the character select in Diddy Kong Racing, where as you hover over one character to the next the instrumentation and style of the music changes to something appropriate for that character. To me, FF7 barely seemed like a game. I know it's popular, but even the promise of a great story didn't help me get past it seeming like FMV plus a crapload of random, really boring battles. Actually I think the N64's big thing was multiplayer, though it did essentially invent the 3D platformer, and had some great ones. But having 4 controller sockets w/o special hardware led to some amazing gaming. Did you have any friends, then?

I'm kind of partial to the "breakfast burrito" myself. !Que emocianante!

For some reason Zelda didn't inspire me much, but yeah, Mega Man had an awesome design sense that I tried to emulate, goofy but not too goofy robot bosses...