really good list (Your Top 10)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	Your Top 10
Date:	21/08/01 (224 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They're all my faves, Hours of entertainment

Disadvantages: Can't get some of these any more

I’m not a huge game player, so it takes something to capture my attention and keep me playing past the awkward level where I keep getting killed. Call me lazy or unmotivated, but on some games, if I keep getting killed at a certain point (or the equivalent in games where you don’t get killed), then I’ll give up.

Obviously this list will be limited to games I have experience of (in my time I’ve owned an Atari ST, a Gameboy, SNES, Playstation and various PCs), you there’ll be no Sonic on my lists, not because I don’t like it, but because I haven’t really played it enough to put it on the list. There’s also a lack of modern PC games as my PC isn’t really high enough spec to handle them.

The only other rule is that if there are sequels of the same title, then only my favourite title in the series will make the list, to enable me to put a wider range of games into my top 10.

1 – MEDAL OF HONOUR: UNDERGROUND (Playstation)
This game must be pretty special, if it’s my number one, and yes it is. I don’t usually go for first person shooters, but for some reason, this one grabbed my attention. It’s a little more refined than the likes of Doom and Quake, as it isn’t just a case of running around and shooting everything in sight, it requires you to think about what you’re doing, entering areas carefully and picking the enemies off before they get you.

You play the part of Manon, a French resistance fighter, whose job it is to go behind German lines to steal resistance and destroy German artillery in an attempt to thwart their war effort. I chose it over the first incarnation of the game, as it’s a bit more of a challenge and the levels are more varied, seeing you destroying tanks, trucks and even riding in a motorbike sidecar. I enjoy it so much as the enemies are intelligent, running for cover and jumping out to surprise you, and the music and
dark graphics create a real sense of suspense and fear as you sneak around the abandoned towns and plants. The more perverse side of me enjoys shooting the Germans in the foot and watching them hop around in pain. The levels are reasonably long, tough but not too tough so that you get frustrated and don’t want to play again. It also has a system to keep you coming back, as if you get graded well enough on the levels in a mission, you get a cheat code to play the game with the next time you play, keeping you coming back until you get the next code. I love this game.

2 – CHAMPIONSHIP MANAGER (00-01)
I’ve wasted many hours in various incarnations of this game since I first got it in 96/7. I’ve chosen this game, as it’s the most up to date, with thousands of clubs and plenty of leagues. It’s probably the geeky side of me that enjoys looking at screens and screens of statistics, with minimal graphics the entire way through (matches are played out with the action in commentaries printed on the screen).

It’s so addictive because of the realism – thousand of clubs means you can pick your local or favourite team, and see if you can do better than the gaffer. The challenge varies depending on which club you chose – obviously it’s going to be easier to win trophies with Man Utd’s players and bank balance than it is with Everton’s weaker squad and debt.

I always had a funny way of playing – I hated old players and spending money, preferring to pick up youngsters on free transfers whether I was at Man Utd or Grimsby. I also had this thing about getting rid of anybody at the club who was over 30. I started playing that way when I started playing the game, and it’s stuck with me ever since.

It’s the type of game that makes time pass really quickly – it’s easy to get lost in developing your squad and weeding out the dross, and that can be a
s much fun as actually winning (or losing the game). It’s not the type of game you play if you don’t have plenty of time to spare, as the longer you spend developing tactics and your squad, the better your team will do (hopefully).

3 - POKEMON BLUE (Gameboy)
Ignore the fact that it’s a global merchandising outfit; the game is actually very good. It’s an RPG, involving you travelling round the world fighting, collecting and training pokemon, collecting badges as you beat the gym leaders so you can go and fight the games final boss. It’s simple, and it works. Sometimes it can be a little dull, as all RPG’s can, as you walk around between areas, fighting the more insignificant enemies that aren’t a threat, but you have to fight them anyway. It’s another game that rewards you the longer that you play it, the more enemies you fight, the more experienced and stronger your pokemon become and the better you’ll do. I also like it because it isn’t your character doing the fighting, it’s your pokemon, so when they die, you simply get sent back to the nearest pokemon centre to start again. Being portable on the Gameboy, it means you could play the odd five-minute blast here and there to build up your experience. I don’t know why I liked it, perhaps it was the more or less sense of freedom in the game, you could follow the games natural path and fight the gym leaders, or you could simply wander around looking for different types of pokemon. Everyone laughed at me for playing it, but most hadn’t played it, and based their judgement on the fact there was a cartoon based on the game (or was it the other way around). Anyway, as a mark of how addictive it was, my then girlfriend was playing it one day, and got so into it, I didn’t see the Gameboy for a few weeks after that.

4 – Legend of Zelda (SNES)
Another game that took up a fair few hours of my life. This is the on
ly Zelda game I’ve played, and it was so impressive due to the size of the world of Hyrule you went to. It had an excellent learning curve, the enemies becoming tougher and more resilient as you progressed through the game and became more experienced yourself. It was a brilliant RPG, it wasn’t that it was tough to complete the game and defeat the final boss, it was that there was so many hidden features to the game – to properly complete the game, you had to find all the pieces of heart which where hidden away in the depths of Hyrule. I came pretty close, I had only one piece of heart left to find, but I never could find it. That’s what made it so special, that even though I had completed it, it had drawn me into the game enough to want to go back and try to find those extra pieces to be more successful. There was a friendly rivalry between us friends again, we all got the game around the same time, not long after it came out, and it was a race to see who could complete it first, and swopping tips when we should have been doing our French verbs.

5 – IMPOSSIBLE MISSION 2 (ATARI ST)
A very addictive and bizarre game – you took the role of a man stuck in this huge complex of towers, and the aim of the game was to escape. You had eight hours to complete this task, and each time you died, seven minutes was deducted from your total. You had to complete seven towers before you could face the final boss to escape the tower, but I never managed it.

To move between towers, you had to visit the rooms in each tower, removing the robots that controlled the room by leaving bombs on the floor so they dropped through, and finding the computer terminal to open the doors between the floors. Each room was a series of platforms, some with walls that could only be opened by finding the control in another room. It was as frustrating as it was exciting, as it required precision jumping to prevent you from falling into the chasm be
tween platforms. The best I ever got was about five towers completed before my time ran out.

I’ve looked everywhere for a version on the PC, but the versions I have downloaded so far refuse to work, which is a shame as I’m sure I’d get as addicted all over again.

6 – MARIO KART (SNES)
You probably know this one – eight characters from the Mario games racing around the tracks on their little karts. It was cute, and it was fun, especially in two-player battle mode. Again, it had the Nintendo trait of keeping you coming back for more by hiding parts of the game until you completed certain parts of the game, but the game was addictive enough by itself, as it wasn’t just straight racing – the player picking up most coins got a bonus, and there where items on the track to help you along – shells to fire your opponents out of the way, and feathers to help you jump over shortcuts.

When it came out, me and my friends more or less shared one copy, which was passed around to see who could beat the fastest times set by the others, this was quite competitive, and although we would drive around the same track time and times again (I remember Ghost Valley 1 was a particular favourite), because we where trying to beat each other, it didn’t become stale or boring. I have the emulator on the PC now, but without trying to beat my friend’s scores, it isn’t quite as exciting as it used to be.

7 – MORTAL KOMBAT (ARCADE)
And the SNES version that came out at the same time. I’m picking the first one in the series, even though I felt the second game was better, more because of my friends again. When it came out, we where all mesmerised by this game, it seemed so much better and more exciting than Street Fighter, probably because we where 13 and the blood and gore looked cool. We all had our favourite fighters (mine was Scorpion) and I remember we would sit in class duri
ng the week talking about it, discussing the moves and religiously learning the combinations you had to press on the joystick and buttons to pull off the special moves, and the fatalities to kill your opponent at the end, and then we all went down to the arcade at the weekend to try and pull them off. We stood at the same machine for hours on end, taking on all comers and trying to complete the game (we ended up being quite good, we could get an hour out of 20p easily by taking on challengers). Once we’d finished it, we moved onto the second Kombat game which had just came out, but we never really got into that one quite as much, which in a way I found quite sad, as we more or less drifted apart after that.

8 – WWF SMACKDOWN 2 (Playstation)
I like the WWF, and consequently I like this game. It would probably have been further up the list, apart from the extremely annoying long loading times, and the speed with which the season mode becomes stale. It’s a beat em up featuring the WWF wrestlers, both inside the ring and outside, with 60 of your favourite WWF stars, each looking lifelike, moving in their own distinctive way with their own finishing moves. Where it falls down is that the moves are all generic, there are no combinations of key presses to learn just push a direction and a button. While this evens the playing field, it can make competition boring at times. Like I said, the season mode, where you play the events in sequence does take an awfully long time to load between matches, as there are video sequences featuring the stars to try and create storylines and rivalries the way you would see on WWF programming. It is fun to play, and I still pick it up occasionally, but it’s quite a lightweight game that is easy to master, and without the challenge, it becomes a little dull. The appeal wasn’t just the gameplay, it was the fact that the matches at times where just like the TV, you could make you player do their crowd
taunt, pull off tag team moves and wrestle in the various matches that you see in WWF these days. Yes, I’m a sad lad.

9 – INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR SOCCER DELUXE (SNES)
I’ve played this on the Playstation, but I have to say, the second version on the SNES was my favourite version of the game. Although it’s dated now, it’s still very playable, and while it may not have the huge amounts of teams or real player names, it was quite funny at the time to see the man on the Columbian team that was supposed to be Carlos Valderamma, he of the huge Afro haircut. The computer seemed quite intelligent, it wasn’t a case of learning where to shoot from as it was in FIFA, and it actually required a little skill to create a goal. And once you became adept at the controls, there where little moves you could pull off like flicking the ball over your head when moving past the opposition. I loved being Brazil, they had a player who could score from the halfway line at the kick off, but the best thing was showing off in front of your mates by bringing the goalkeeper out to score. It was a really well designed game, you could handicap 2-player games so one team had more players, or their players where fitter and could run faster than the opposition, just little things to make the game more even. The Playstation version just doesn’t inspire me the same way this did.

10 – DRAGON’S BREATH (ATARI ST)
A strange choice for my final game, I only vaguely remember this myself. I got the disk with the Atari computer, and all the games that came with the computer had a joint manual, with a page of instructions each, but this game had over 40 pages of charts and rules and instructions. It was a game where you took the part of one of three people in a mystical land of monsters and weird stuff, and you had to collect items to make the potions. To collect the stuff, you had to breed Dragon’s, and when they grew, send th
em off to your opponents land to try and steal some toad’s foot or something. Of course, the Dragon couldn’t just waltz in there, it had to fly and try and avoid the little people in trees throwing things at it, and try and remove the risk by using it’s fiery breath. I really don’t remember much of this game, I was only about 10 and it was all a bit over my head, I didn’t understand the plot at all, but I remember having great fun waiting for my dragons to grow up so I could fly them all over the show, unfortunately I was a bit crap at steering them, and I could probably have been tried for Dragon slaughter. As things would go, the disk soon got corrupted and I never played the game again, but still remember the game (very vaguely) with fond memories.

There you go. If you don’t agree, I don’t care; this is my Top 10 dammit. I only wish I could get a few versions of the Atari games for the PC, as I really did love those games – remember back when these things where based on gameplay and not graphics? The Atari may not have been the most popular machine in the world, but it sure had great games. If you haven’t played any of the games on my list, they’re well worth a look; most are on the budget labels of the respective computers, or so old that you won’t find them.

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