85. Super Mario Maker (Wii U)
84. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess/Twilight Princess HD (GameCube/Wii U)
I’ve written about this before, but to this date, I have never in my life been more excited for an upcoming video game than The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I remember when it was announced, I remember each new trailer, I remember when Midna and Wolf Link were revealed (in what still stands as my favorite video game trailer of all time)…there was the delay, the inevitable porting to the Wii, and all the hype and speculation surrounding the game’s release. I remember finally beholding the game Christmas morning in 2006, having just gotten home for winter break from my first year at college. I unpackaged the game, absorbed the title cinematic, and experienced those opening moments with shaking hands.
I had never been so immensely thrilled to herd goats.
I was surprised by how easily I became immersed in the
original Legend of Zelda the first
time I played it. I expected something that would be awkward and difficult to
get into compared to the Zelda games
that I’d played, and while perhaps in some ways this was true, The Legend of Zelda ended up being an absorbing
adventure that not only contains many of the hallmarks that make later Zelda games so great, but also a unique
charm that is all its own. It’s a satisfying challenge and there’s something about its
minimalist pixel art, tiled dungeons, and satisfying sense of progression that
I find very endearing. Coupled with its lovingly-detailed instruction manual
and official old-school-anime-style artwork, there’s a very classic nature to
this game that I adore. I was late to the party on this one, first playing the
re-released Game Boy Advance version, but thanks to a close friend also playing
through the same version at the same time, I was able to have that experience
of sharing secrets and experiences just like people did with the NES version.
And even though Level 6 is still a major pain in the ass, I still enjoy going
through the original Zelda quite a
bit today.
82. BioShock (PC)
I still remember the pre-release buzz for the original BioShock and thinking that the game
looked fascinating. The concept of a mysterious, derelict city under the ocean
full of hulking beings in diving suits immediately intrigued me. It did not
take long at all to realize that the game was something special the summer that
I finally dove into it and began exploring the halls of the city of Rapture.
The environment, atmosphere, art design, and sound design in BioShock is all brilliantly done, and
working my way through every flooded corridor and listening to every discarded
audio log was truly a treat. There’s a potent sense of place in this game, and Rapture
and its many colorful personalities is a beautifully-realized creation.
Can you believe that back in the glorious year of
2002, Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime both released on the same
day in the US? I mean, what a time to be alive! Comparing that with the dark
post-Other M times we live in today
is bound to make a person a little wistful, especially since these two games
were my very first experience with the Metroid
series. While Prime admittedly left
the bigger impact on me, Fusion is
still a great experience. Taking Samus to a creepy space station overrun with
mutants and a parasitic menace, Fusion
is a polished and somber follow-up to Super
Metroid, and is still currently the last Metroid story chronologically. While I prefer the more non-linear
2D Metroid titles over Fusion, it is nonetheless dripping with
atmosphere and the encounters with Samus’s eerie doppelganger, the SA-X, are a
tense highlight.
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Stop by again for #80-76!
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