No One Can Stop Mr. Talking Time's Top 50 32 & 64-Bit Video Games!

[Sarge]

I came very close to putting Suikoden on my list (in some ways I prefer it to the sequel), but since I already had said sequel, I left it off for other games. I am a bit disappointed in myself for forgetting Kirby 64, though. While I'm not too nonplussed about it, it's definitely the equal of some other games that did make my top 25.

 

[ShakeWell]

#57: Bomberman 64 68 Points, 3 Votes

Bomberman was one of the first truly great party games. While the N64 version eschewed some of this aspect in order to focus on translating Bomberman into a 3D action platformer, the result was good enough to make the single player campaign one of the most celebrated entries in the franchise.

It's clear we're all talking about the western version, but fun fact: The game we know as "Bomberman 64" (this one) was called Baku Bomberman in Japan. Four years later, there was a Japanese exclusive Bomberman 64 that was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. It's 2D and has a ton of minigames, like the Bomberman Land games.

 

[spines]

i ended up voting for parappa over lammy (it was already near the end of my list) though i think the latter is vastly more playable and has a more interesting soundtrack. it's a shame that it's not seen as equally important since it certainly is, and ultimately i made my decision because i think the freestyling thing is a little more amusing (and maybe a little because i thought more people would vote for it anyway...i'd say this is far from my motivation for most of the list but since i put myself in a position to only choose one of the two and i enjoy them both quite a bit i couldn't easily decide)

kirby 64 i've played some of lately, for the first time. it's pleasant and gorgeous with some great design work in the menus especially, but i lost some steam because the orca boss was fairly obnoxious. if it's this low i'm imagining the n64 platformer i chose which i've also been playing lately probably didn't make it

 

[breakman]

if Bomberman 64 didn't make the top 50, I have doubts that the Bomberman game on my list will make it, since 64 is surely more widely played.

I came close to putting Klonoa on my list, but I just haven't played very much of it.

I had Suikoden at #15. I tried to avoid listing multiple games from any series, but in this case it couldn't be helped.

 

[Kirin]

Was it Scorched Earth? We were big Scorched Earth fans.

I think it was, yeah! Some version of it at least. One of a few games we played a lot when >2 people were playing in my dorm room.

 

[Issun]

#52 & 51 (Tie)

NiGHTS Into Dreams 74 Points, 3 Votes

NiGHTS was a lot of peoples' introduction to (and for some of us, our only experience with) the Saturn. It's not a bad look for the system, either. The art style is gorgeous, and the flight mechanics are graceful and intuitive. It's a shame it just missed the top 50.

Dance Dance Revolution 74 Points, 4 Votes

Phew! If I thought finding an accurate image for a specific King's Field game was tricky, there were so many versions of DDR in such a short space of time that I'm just hoping I got this one right. In fact, if I'd lumped the votes for different versions into one entry, DDR would have ranked easily. However, there were only 4 votes for vanilla DDR, so it juuust missed the cutoff. That's not to understate its importance, though. DDR singlehandedly kept arcades alive for a few more years, and its contributions to the rhythm genre are still being felt today.

Well, here we are. Tomorrow we begin the official Top 50!

 

[ThornGhost]

There's freeze arrows and those weren't introduced until DDR Max so nope lol

 

[Ixo]

It looks like your screencap is from Supernova, which came later on the PS2.

I did toss a DDR vote in, but it wasn’t for this one...

 

[Kirin]

How did I not vote for a DDR game? I guess it was because I didn’t really get into the series til PS2

 

[spines]

nights is the first game to appear in this thread that i voted for! (and quite low, so i imagine the other two must have put it pretty high...) i think there's a handful of top 50s on my list-probably 5-6 i'd consider almost guaranteed to show up, but that this one, which i'd consider one still one of the more widely-recognized games i put (and one with recent ports and a pretty vocal fanbase in my experience), didn't quite make it, makes me think i didn't have much more than that.

i have to admit i've never been much of a ddr person. not that i don't like it, just the initial learning curve is painful to get over as someone with a ton of bemani experience in games that don't involve legs. where most music games i expect i can easily play mid-level songs within ten minutes, that's...not the case at all for this one. it's a real different experience and i love how into it people are-a rare rhythm game played by people of all ages, but also competitively and even as performance art-and i really ought to try harder to break into it (or at least something similar) one of these days, for my own health if nothing else. but i voted for beatmania instead, since that's a game where if i see a machine and someone i think will tolerate a couple credits i will wrangle them into playing them with me

 

[ThornGhost]

I did vote for bog standard DDR, but in my heart it was a vote for the series as a whole since, as Issun noted, there were so many versions released so so quickly. I have very fond memories of spending Saturdays in the local mall arcade during college, slamming quarters on the screen to hold my place, razzing my friends who held onto the bar while playing and generally "dancing" up a sweat.

Here's the little blurb I submitted with my list:

"Not the first rhythm game, but almost certainly the most famous of its era, Dance Dance Revolution launched a series that did what seemed impossible: brought America back to the arcade. The home version with its thin, slippery mats certainly had a place, yes, including on this list, but what came after was the true...revolution."

 

[breakman]

NiGHTS was #6 on my list. That's too bad, I (clearly) think it deserves to be in the top 50.

I like to imagine that, in an alternate universe where Sonic the Hedgehog was meant to be a more arcade-y, score attack kind of game, NiGHTS would be the natural evolution of that series.

 

[Yimothy]

I’m not sure if I voted for NiGHTS or not - I had Christmas NiGHTS at #5 and said to count that vote for NiGHTS if the other game didn’t make it, so I think I probably did.

I think NiGHTS was my introduction to 2.5D gameplay - you fly along predefined paths in and out of the screen, but you can also move freely in 3D if you run out of time as NiGHTS and revert to one of the kids. It was also my introduction to analogue controls - I still have the giant Saturn analogue controller. There was also some thing going on in the background with the little NPC characters who would evolve or something as you played the game. I don’t remember how it worked or what the point was, but it was there.

 

[Issun]

I’m not sure if I voted for NiGHTS or not

I did count your vote towards the base game.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I try to keep my lists from having more than one entry to a franchise, so Suikoden didn't make the cut. It's a great game, it just (naturally) isn't as good as its successor. Definitely a list-worthy title, however. If I'd not had this rule, my list would have looked pretty boring with four Suikoden titles on it.

I voted for DDR (#13) but didn't include any real qualifiers of system or edition. If I had to, it probably would have been the original home PS1 version, since that was my entry point to the franchise. I spent a lot of time as a teen playing DDR. Even saved up for some fancy third party dance pads to play at home. The learning curve is steep, but that's just kind of how all physical sports go. Once you start getting the hang of it though, it's one of the more rewarding games I remember learning how to play along with Rock Band, since you can *feel* yourself getting better the more you play. Since you can easily quantify success with beating harder songs/modes, getting better scores, and not being as fatigued as you build up physical endurance. Only a handful of games have I ever really experienced that positive feedback loop of enjoying the raw process of learning a game. Probably my all-time favorite arcade game too.

 

[Violentvixen]

DDR was (and still is) a form of torture for me when it came out, but it was such a big deal and became such a huge series I had to put it on my list. Watching other people do it at the arcade was amazing.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

DDR has one of the weirdest learning curves ever. The easiest modes are actually harder than playing the game on a harder difficulty. Because so much of doing DDR well is about building up a rhythm with the music. And on the easiest modes, the button presses are so infrequent that you just never get a chance to even build a rhythm. Once that sense of rhythm clicks, the learning curve completely bottoms out for a while, then gradually builds back up again once harder difficulties bring rapid-step-patterns into things. But once the game rhythm clicks though, it's like playing SaGa games where the lightbulb goes off in your head and suddenly you can just *do* it now, it's great stuff.

 

[ThornGhost]

At the peak of my DDR power, I could reliably ace "7 feet" songs and push through on some "8 feet" songs, but I felt there was some kind of wall there I was never able to actually surmount.

I also played a LOT of Stepmania on a keyboard, basically crushing 9/10 feet songs all day, which didn't necessarily translate to DDR proper except for maybe some pattern and arrow recognition. I think whatever visual-to-physical impulse that you train playing DDR is so highly specialized that even games with relatively close gameplay mechanics don't quite count as DDR training.

I will recount, for the sake of history and fun, the tale of the best DDR player I ever witnessed, a man known only as "The Casey". Casey, dubbed "The Casey" was another denizen of the Tilt Arcade at my university mall: a rangy DDR master who was most at home in a dim neon room on top of a flashing dance pad. Some said he was another student, some said he was a townie. I never knew for sure.

The Casey's DDR skills were unparalleled. Having long ago conquered the base game with a single pad, The Casey could only find succor, if one could call it that, in DDR Max 2's double pad endless challenge. Pop twice the standard requisite of coins into the slot and you could dance across eight flashing arrows of hell in an increasingly difficult elimination mode. Play perfectly and you could play forever. Make a mistake, and that $1.50 was down the toilet. A knife's edge of skill.

What I know is that The Casey would end this challenge mode on his own terms. He'd simply walk off the game when he had played his fill. The game never called the shots when mighty Casey played. In a magnanimous gesture I remember lo these 15+ years later, he once quit his running challenge game just because my little posse of 8 feet weekend warriors were waiting on the machine. We apologized, told him we would've waited and that he could keep playing.

"Nah," he said, walking out of the arcade, toweling off, "I've played long enough."

~fin

 

[Issun]

#50

It is a handsome offer, no?

Developer: Sonic Software
Publisher: Sega
Platform: Sega Saturn
Release: December 20, 1996 (JP), June 19, 1997 (EU), June 30, 1997 (NA)
75 Points, 4 Votes, Highest Vote: #11 (Yimothy)
​

The Shining series is most famous for the Shining Force games, which were a beloved series of strategy RPGs, but it's run the gamut of styles. Its first stab at first-person dungeon crawl em ups was the Genesis's Shining in the Darkness, but Shining the Holy Ark took the entire genre to new heights, with fluid movement, gorgeous graphics and snappy dialogue. The plot itself is nothing special: Mercenaries battle a 1,000 year old threat, but the localization and gameplay more than make up for it. It's games like this one that really drive home the Saturn's potential as a system. Who knows what would have happened if Sega had lured away powerhouses like Square, Capcom and Konami from Nintendo instead of Sony? Unfortunately, Sega's marketing department never matched their zeal from the 16-Bit era again, and the Saturn and its games have become collectors items. It's too bad, too, since now in order to enjoy this classic you need either several hundos to buy a Saturn and the game or a willingness to play it by less savory means.

Sarge said: Melding a classical JRPG battle system with a dungeon crawler is something that was done earlier in the series with Shining in the Darkness, but Holy Ark expands the scope significantly, making it a proper JRPG with all the bells and whistles. Definitely one of Saturn's overlooked gems.

Selected Track:

 

[Issun]

#49

Big day today, Freeman.

Developer: Valve
Publisher: Sierra Studios
Platform: Windows
Release Date: November 19, 1998
81 Points, 3 Votes, Highest Vote: #6 (Ixo)​

Before Half-Life, story was an afterthought in first-person shooters. And even when story became prevalent in FPSs, no game in the genre so seamlessly blended story and gameplay the way this game and its sequel did. There are no cutscenes here. Gordon Freeman's journey is a nonstop fight through the atmospheric Black Mesa labs, with story dispensed only via the dialogue spoken by those around him. Some of this game can feel a bit clunky by today's standards, especially given how much its younger sibling trailblazed game physics. And the less said about the final area, the better. But there are only a handful of shooters that are as important to gaming as a whole as Half-Life. It even had such an incredible mod community that two years later a mod of Half-Life would revolutionize online shooters in its own way.

Selected Track:

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I voted for Half-Life (#11). Mildly surprised Half-Life only got three votes. It was the highest ranking PC game on my list, and if we're being honest, it's the greatest PC game of all time. If we're breaking things down to its components, no individual thing Half-Life did was unique or revolutionary. But as a sum total, it's probably the most important PC video game of all time, or at least on PC gaming's Mt Rushmore. It's this intersection of ideas that was so well executed that it changed how games were made (for better AND worse) for years after. It's also the genesis of the megalith of gaming known as Valve. (Again, for better and for worse.) And it spawned the most vibrant of modding scenes that launched the careers of thousands of devs, and multiple actual games that went along to also reshape the entire industry. My vote for Half-Life was also an implicit vote for TFC and CS, since you needed the base game to play those free mods, which is the vast majority of my time with HL1. (I assume Issun counted those games as separate, despite them not actually being something you could purchase separately until well after the year 2000.) As far as I'm concerned, multiplayer gaming for decades have been chasing the white whale of TF2 and CS, and mostly coming up empty or short. Even later iterations of these games couldn't quite get the Zen simplicity of those experiences and comfy grassroots experience of a private server community. I've yet to have a gaming multiplayer experience that matched the sheer thrill of a dorky high school LAN party centered around HL1 and its mods.

 

[Peklo]

Voted for Holy Ark. I've mentioned this before, but aesthetics are especially crucial for me in the dungeon RPG genre; they must hang together if I'm to invest to any great extent in them. This is one of the best representations of the form, with big bobblehead middle-of-the-decade computer renders, between toys and claymation in their presence. Something like SaGa Frontier shares much with its visual appeal, and since that game's brand-new remaster has seen people re-estimate their impressions of its presentation (which was always best in the medium), one hopes Holy Ark may be recipient to a similar re-evaluation if given the opportunity.

 

[dosboot]

"Big day today Freeman"
"That's one less horror in the world"
"That will look great in my trophy case"
"Oh my God we're doomed!"
"Grenade!"

I didn't vote for it, but I was a big fan of Half-Life during this early period of the franchise. Team Fortress Classic was dope too, even though everyone always remembers Counterstrike. TFC just seems friendlier since it was about teamwork and you had a decent amount of HP to work with.

I also remember how exciting and new Half-Life felt to play. Even just small details in the environment felt like a big leap, like how everything looked like an actual industrial/scientific facility, the walls had painted signage, and the various pipes actually led to places. It was all very cool to explore.

 

[Adrenaline]

I did not vote for Half-Life because the console port was on PS2.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I could write a big fat effort post on TFC. Teamwork is obviously paramount, but the game was structured in such a way that you could have fun playing solo a myriad of ways. I used to play scout to see how far I could get trying to cap the flag solo like some kind of intense rogue-like. Or you could play spy and just troll the other team constantly. Same with the medic and its plauge-spreading. Or you could just pick sniper and if you were good enough you could single handedly destroy an entire team by yourself. And when every character had a shotgun, you could go toe-to-toe with just about anyone so long as you had the reflexes and the accuracy to do it. Every class was viable and allowed for you to be the hero in TFC which is something TF2 brutally stomped out with carefully designed roles that made the game boring and predictable. Also grenade spam. I miss grenade spam so much. It used to be so fun to hide in trenches/behind walls and to try and time your mad dashes across no-mans-land in brief pauses between grenade spam. Stuff like caltrops and concussion grenades just gave the game an arcadey feel. I miss it so much. There will never be a team shooter as good as TFC.

 

[Sarge]

Pretty obvious I voted for Shining the Holy Ark. It was one of the first Saturn RPGs I played through, and one of the few first-person games I'd finished as well. There seems to be a theme there where I tend to finish the console-style games like Arcana or Soul Hackers, and not so much the WRPG-style games.

 

[dosboot]

@WisteriaHysteria Grenade spam I remember at first every class had a very large number of special grenades (nail grenades, MIRVs, etc) but then a patch reduced it to "1" I think. One team would just spam those grenades on the doors to the enemy's respawn point, you'd get wrecked, and then in future matches you would be adopting that strategy yourself and encouraging your team mates "go go go, grenade their spawn". It felt like magic when you managed to lob a deadly grenade *into* the spawn point, and not just at the doors.

The "Hunted" maps had one player controlling this chubby executive/president guy with an umbrella (a crowbar weapon reskin) that the rest of the team of soldiers, medics, and heavies had to escort against a team of snipers. I remember we had all these memes about the president, what hitting someone with your umbrella meant, and so on, but it has escaped me now.

Mastering the art of the "solo" play was definitely a thing. It depended on how good the enemy team was of course, but if you stuck to a class you'd learn very good strategies for each map. It'd always be a countdown until one of the good players on the other team wises up and starts tackling your shenanigans head on. There were websites like planetfortress which would have "guide" pages and linked forum posts on how to play each class. I remember reading these strategy pages the same way I read about strategies for Starcraft.

The team effort going on was always this "push, push, push, rah, rah, rah" feeling in the forefront of your mind. If you could see an enemy player wrecking house you'd make it a mission to prioritize them to help your team, because taking matters into your own hands was always more reliable than just typing out a team message and hoping for the best. Sometimes it felt like you were the first person to pick up on an enemy player's plan (by observing them trying to do something with each death), so you felt especially responsible for inserting yourself into the situation to stop them.

 

[Falselogic]

I was one of the Half-Life votes. It really was a revelation when it came out.

 

[Adrenaline]

I did vote for Resident Evil and Kirby 64. They're good games.

 

[Violentvixen]

I did not vote for Half-Life because the console port was on PS2.

This and I totally thought it came out later than it apparently did. Mainly because I looked up the release date for Portal (2007) since that's the game I have more of a connection with and that made me assume the first one came out in the mid-2000s and missed the cutoff for this. Apparently Half-Life wasn't available on Macs until 2013?! Huh.