#8 -- Half-Life 2
PC, 2004


 

This is a gaming experience that is somewhat more experience than game, I admit, but Half-Life 2 is just phenomenal in so many remarkable ways. I’m of the opinion that the first-person shooter genre lends itself more readily to mindlessness (and artlessness) than probably any other genre in gaming, which is certainly a biased opinion, but boy oh boy does it help the exceptional stuff to stand out.

Half-Life 2 is an absolutely perfect experiment in mood-gaming. It’s chilling, but doesn’t go for the easy scare. It’s dramatic, but doesn’t resort to pre-determined deaths of likeable party members. Its story is rich and brainy, but we aren’t subjected to elaborate histories or genealogies.  It’s a game that feels, over and over again, as though it’s unfolding for the first time. It’s a game that so easily avoids the trappings of its own genre (and of others) simply by weaving an entire, coherent atmosphere out of suggestion and inference. 

Much was made of the impressive physics boasted by this game, and they certainly deserve their accolades. But as “technically” impressive as the physics (and, of course, physics-based puzzles) were, they served their real purpose in bridging the gap between gaming and reality. Nobody ever questions Mario’s physics, or Sonic the Hedgehog’s, and that’s okay, because they occupy a realm we will never know. We enjoy our time spent in those games, but, ultimately, we get to return home, to a world where things function very differently. On the other hand, Half-Life 2’s creaky valves, rusty filings, floating barrels, cement blocks and abandoned vehicles have too much in common (how they look, how they move, how they react) with the world we know to be left entirely behind when we shut the game off.

Admittedly, the most effective atmosphere in Half-Life 2 is reappropriated from George Orwell’s 1984, but that’s more a result of inspiration than imitation. City 17 is its own unit with its own rules and its own distinctive flavor of dystopia. The game can start to feel slightly schizophrenic once the player escapes from City 17, but it’s the effectiveness of this schizophrenia (and the constant uncertainty regarding even what KIND of game we’ll be playing in the next chapter) that keeps us under its spell. From the frantic helicopter chase aboard the airboat to the survival-horror episode in Ravenholm to the brilliantly structured “standing ground” segments of Nova Prospekt, the game never lets you get too comfortable with any one strategy for long.

Half-Life 2 is precisely the kind of game I wish all first-person shooters could be. Every kill is satisfying, every chapter is a surprise, and every puzzle has a root in the same logic we use to make it through the day. It’d be a stretch to call it perfect...but not an entirely uncomfortable one.

Where can you play it now?  Don't bother with retail (you'll have to download updates anyway).  It's available for download from Steam on your PC, either alone or as part of The Orange Box.  Buying it separately is somewhat foolish, as The Orange Box also includes two further installments of the Half-Life 2 saga, a universally-adored first-person puzzler called Portal, and multi-player killfest Team Fortress 2, which is probably fun for people who like that sort of thing.  Oh, Half-Life 2 was also ported to the Xbox and PS3, whatever those are.
 
Additional:  an online friend of mine points out that you Mac / Linux users can use Crossover Games to play Half-Life 2 and all sorts of other excellent Steam you're not supposed to be able to enjoy, without having to run a virtual machine.  Now where the heck was he with this kind of advice when *I* was saddled with a Mac?

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is an oddity in all kinds of ways, so let’s go over them in turn.

For starters, look at the title. It’s a game that was built and marketed as a celebrity cash-in, and yet...it’s a genuine classic. (How many licensed games can you say that about?) Also, it was originally an arcade game, but—unlike nearly every other console adaptation in those days—the more-technically-limited port was actually better than the original. Like...a lot better. Like...it’s almost worth pretending the arcade game never happened, and the arcade game was awesome. It’s just that much better.

But the strangest thing about the game, from a historical perspective, is that it’s a sports title that doesn’t make any attempt whatsoever to play like the sport it represents. Alright, granted, there wasn’t much you could do with two buttons and a D-pad to make gamers feel like they were REALLY playing a game of football or hockey either, but there’s no question that those games at least tried to pull off a passable simulation. Even Atari’s boxing game tried to give some small sense of what the sport was actually about: pummeling your opponent mindlessly and relentlessly.

With Punch-Out!!, however, what we got was one part puzzler and two parts rhythm game. There’s nothing sporting about this boxing game at all. In fact—and, yes, I say this to anger boxers and boxing-fans everywhere—Punch-Out!! was a much more strategic game than the sport itself deserved. You were left with, basically, brutality for nerds. We were fighting against opponents that were literally three times our size, but all we needed was brainpower to take them down. Mindless brawn would only get you so far (Piston Honda to be exact...), but a good mind would take you all the way up to—and through—Iron Mike himself. (Imagine that. Seriously. Being crowned the heavy-weight champion of the world just by out-thinking your opponent. There’s a very real reason this game appealed to the kids playing this game in a dark room on a sunny day...)

Punch-Out!! was a game of memorization and quick thinking. You were rewarded for learning patterns, and penalized for acting out of turn. It’s the most polite boxing game in history, and its success threw the door wide open for future Nintendo sports titles that sacrificed realism for the sake of wider (and rewarding) accessibility, such as the Mario Kart series, and Wii Sports.

The characters also brought a welcome dose of humor to the NES, with their cartoon-like boobishness and exaggerated antics. Remember that we were at the mercy of underpaid, disinterested (and sometimes vindictive) translators at that time, and so clever wordplay and snappy dialogue wasn’t the way in which video games would make us laugh. (At least, not with the right kind of laughter.) Broad physical stereotypes and funny faces don’t need translation, though, and so every ounce of Punch-Out!!’s comic quirkiness made it through.

Where can you play it now?  Nowhere!  Unless you have a cartridge.  The Wii offers a download of a later version of the game, featuring the lame-by-default Mr. Dream instead of Tyson.  It's without question worth a download, but the satisfaction of knocking out this vanilla-skinned imposter just doesn't compare.  The Virtual Console also features the less-good (but still good) Super Punch-Out!!, and a brand new Wii installment of the game was released a month or so ago to overall great reviews.  (Which it very much does deserve.)

#10 -- Bubble Bobble
1988, Nintendo Entertainment System

Bubble Bobble is pretty much the ideal encapsulation of the NES-era of video gaming, and it wasn’t even made by Nintendo. Nor was it a console original. (Taito, and an arcade port, for the record.) But it serves as such a perfect magnification of everything the NES tried to do, and of everything that it did so well.

It’s a game that exists for one reason and one reason only: to be fun. There’s a story there, about why you’re a dinosaur blowing bubbles in a cave full of monsters...but who cares about that; you’re a dinosaur blowing bubbles in a cave full of monsters! Bubble Bobble was its own justification for itself. On paper, it seems like nothing. (Or, hey, I’ll even grant that it sounds like a bad idea.) But in practice, the game demonstrated that the best video games will always be the ones that are inherently fun to play.

It embraced the limitations of the console both visually and aurally, and it gave us a game that remains unforgettable even to those of us who haven’t played it for about twenty years. And I’m not using the term “unforgettable” loosely; the moment you saw the screen shot above, you heard the entire theme song, note for note, didn’t you? And if you didn’t hear it then, you’re definitely hearing it now.

The game is adorable, instantly gratifying, and a lot of fun. The early levels are easy enough for children to work through, but the game gets more difficult at a perfectly-measured pace, with gamers of all skill levels being left behind at one stage or another, until only the most devoted (and least-prone to frustration) remain. It’s fun enough that you don’t need to beat it to fall in love with it, and it’s addictive enough that that “continue” option will get a lot of use, well into the night, and then into the weekend.

Adding to its appeal was the addition of a simultaneous second player. Most NES games (both before and after Bubble Bobble) would have players alternating turns, which was fun, yes, but fighting separately for a high score didn’t compare to racing each other for the same powerup. Bubble Bobble was mainly a cooperative game, but once the enemies were eliminated from any given stage, you both had a few seconds to compete for the bonus food and snack items. And that, for some reason still unknown to psychological science, was at least as fun as the main game.  (Also oddly satisfying was using this time to blow bubbles in each other's faces.  Ineffective, but somehow also irresistable.)

It’s tough to find any fault at all with Bubble Bobble. It uses its simplicity and its limitations to its decided advantage, and is stronger for it. It’s big, it’s quirky, and it’s deserving of a lifetime’s worth of fondness.

Where can you play it now?  Well the Wii has two versions available:  a port of the NES version on the Virtual Console, and a (thankfully faithful) remake on WiiWare, the latter of which doubles the amount of levels available, allows additional level packs to be downloaded, and features simultenous 4-player madness.  Either version is an excellent purchase.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/04/10/woody.harrelson.zombie/index.html

"I wrapped a movie called 'Zombieland,' in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character," Harrelson said in a statement issued Friday by his publicist.

"With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie," he said.

Quite understandable indeed!