Post by Woo on Nov 13, 2008 22:53:42 GMT -1
Here is a link to Part 1. Now onto Part 2.
90. Muppet Race Mania
It’s time to rev the engines
It’s time to watch the lights
It’s time to race your friends on the Muppets game tonight!
During the last few years of the PSone’s life it seemed that everyone was trying to make a kart racing game. Disney made one, I believe Warner Brothers made one and there was this one staring Jim Henson’s Muppets and unlike the previous two kart games I mentioned, this one was good. It’s not the best karting game on the console, actually it’s not even the second best karting game, but it has something that neither of them posses- the Muppets themselves.
Seriously how could you resist racing Animal in his drag racer, Beaker (my favourite Muppet) in his moon buggy, Gonzo’s flying saucer or even Rizzo the Rat in his car made from cheese… All the Muppets gang are here- Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, Sam the Eagle, Rowlf, Sweetums, the two old grumpy men and many more. Also they each have their own special move too, including Miss Piggy’s ‘Hiyaaaahhh!’ attack. It isn’t a perfect game though, the graphics look terrible and even looks worse than the two other kart games that were released before this. Also if you don’t like the Muppets you probably won’t like this, but everyone loves them right? By the way I couldn’t find a decent picture of the game in action, so this’ll have to do.
89. Hogs of War
Kill the enemy swine!
Yeah, the ‘enemy swine’ was the best war-pig related pun I could think of and I spent ages trying to think of one. I actually thought “Oh I’ve got one- ‘Hogs of War!’…oh wait, that’s the games title..” 50 points to anybody who can think of a better pun! Anyway onto the game itself. Hogs’ is effectively Worms’ in 3D, only with heavily armed pigs replacing the invertebrates and it plays pretty well too. The 3D areas do make things interesting with lakes to drown in, huts to hide and even tanks to attack your fellow mammals with. The game has lots of different weapons ranging from sniper rifles (taking advantage of the 3D design), shotguns and best of all the laughing gas, which sends any pig it hits into a squealing frenzy making them charge randomly until they drown in a lake or run into a minefield.
Take control of six pig armies, all based on a different country (Britain, Japan, USA, France, Russia and Germany) and all featuring the pigs hilariously ‘hamming’ it up un-politically correct stereotypes of their respective nationality. The team names’ themselves highlight this with the French being called the Garlic Grunts, Japan- the Sushi Swine and USA’s team name being Uncle Ham’s Hogs. You can probably gather from all this that HoW is funny game, and you’d be right to think that, but to further prove that this game has it’s tongue firmly in it pork-flavoured cheek, they hired Rik Mayall (of The Young Ones and Bottom fame) into do brilliantly amusing commentary during the fights. Great little title this, though Worms is still the better game.
88. R-Types
Start level. Die. Restart level. Get a bit further. Die. Restart level. Get a bit further die. Restart level….
‘On the edge of a dark empire, you embark on a mission no one has yet survived. Will you?’ asks R-Type’s tagline and the answer to that question will probably be- ‘no’. The R-Type games are notorious for their challenging trial-and-error gameplay meaning the only real way to complete a level is to keep playing until you learn the best way to reach the end without your shit exploding into a million pixels.
Anyway this game called R-Types features of R-Types and R-Types II so buying his would be like owning a little bit of arcade history.
87. Destruction Derby Raw
Destruction Derby returns to the Playstation with a bang….a shunt and a whole lot of broken cars.
Another one of their early games was Destruction Derby 2 and it was great fun. A racing game where not only were you not punished for hitting your opponents, but you were actively encouraged to do so. The opponents themselves were also a great cast of characters from the crazy Spanish driver Psycho, the mysterious Master in car number 00, the General who seemed to have a real grudge against me and best of all Irish racer Learner Driver…who would usually be found stuck in a ditch with black smoke bellowing out of his car. You could forsake racing all together and compete in a last car standing fight in a bowl, one of which brilliantly had sheer drop at one side, which instantly wrote off any car unlucky enough to fall down it.
However the game did have several flaws, which at the time were easy to ignore, but after awhile really started to show. There was only 3 cars, but your choice of the three was neglected by the fact that one car equals easy mode, the second medium and the third car makes the game hard. So you were choosing your difficulty mode rather than a vehicle. Even worse was that there was no two-player mode! Instead you had pass the controller…how very stupid… Raw though fixes all these faults. You have a wide range of vehicles ranging from sports cars to fans and the game also has a four-player split screen mode and it was brilliant featuring great multiplayer games like Sky Scraper (push your opponents off a building) and Pass the Bomb (like child playground game Tag/It with bombs.) A great sequel that sadly got forgotten about.
86. WWF Smackdown 2: Knox Your Role
“Go one-on-one with this Great one.”
Okay I want to start on a negative note. This game is now very, very old. Mother Nature and Father Time have apparently teamed up to layeth-the-smack down on this game. It’s not the oldest game on this countdown, nowhere near in fact, but the wrestling genre has come a long, long, way since this was released. Rather than age like wine and get better with each year, it’s ageing more like Hulk Hogan. It’s flaws (a lot of what I mentioned when I wrote about WWF Attitude earlier) were forgivable at the time, but are now much harder to tolerate.
But forget about now- this is a console that is nearly 15 years old after all and back in the day this was amazing, especially if you had a multi-tap and friends of course. SD2 had lots of different stipulation matches to keep you interested- Ladder, Hell in a Cell, Tag matches, Hardcore and Casket matches (okay well truth be told- Casket matches suck) amongst mothers. Also if you get bored of the 50+ wrestlers you can create your own grappler in a very impressive creation mode. Okay it’s uglier than Mae Young, as stupid as RVD and makes more mistakes than Jeff Hardy, but it’s still fun the bottom line.
85. Breath of Fire IV
The only RPG in this top 100.……..just kidding.
Okay Breath of Fire III maybe should have been here instead but I’ve made the banner for this game already. Breath of Fire IV like features series regular Ryu, a legendary world warrior who has won several street fights and seeks a fight with Bison who murdered….. Oh what it’s not that Ryu?! Okay this Ryu rather than simply using dragon punches he actually turns into a dragon! (Cool!) He also suffers from amnesia (not cool! Seriously why can’t any video game characters remember anything? Does their memory get wiped every time you turn off the console or something?)
The cartoon style graphics still look pretty decent, in a cute retro kind of way, the turn based fighting is decent and best of all the fishing mini game from BoF III returns. Yay! There really aren’t enough games with fishing mini games in. All in all if you like RPG’s, and if you don’t you’ve sure joined an odd forum, you will find lots to enjoy here.
84. Brian Lara Cricket
It’s like real cricket, only fun.
Brian Lara Cricket had the distinction of being the very first cricket game on a Sony console so it didn’t have any competition as such, however there were a lot of great sports title out there so why play this? Well because of the multiplayer mode. If you can find somebody else who wants to play a cricket game with you then there is a lot of fun to be had here. You can play against each other with one of you bowling while the other bats, but I always found it more fun if you are on the same side, especially if you are both batting.
There’s a real guilty pleasure about mistyping you run between the wickets resulting in your mate being run out, just as it looked like he was about to get that century, but there is also a sense of camaraderie too as you work together trying to get enough runs to win the game. Bowling is almost as fan as batting as you try to find the right place on the crease to bowl out your opponent and made more interesting by the way everybody bowls differently- some are speed bowlers while others prefer to spin the ball Shane Warne style So bowling is fun and batting is great…..whatever you do though, avoid fielding, god is that boring.
83. Landmaker
Forget killing all the colossi in Shadow of the Colossus. Forget defeating Ruby Weapon. Nothing feels more rewarding than creating a 8x8 skyscraper in Landmaker to earn an ‘Excellent’ ranking.
I knew Land maker (known as ‘Builder’s Block’ in the U.S) was a great puzzle game when compiling this list, but when I came round to writing about it I drew blank. I didn’t know what to say other than “It’s fun…” so I just popped the game into my PS3 and wow! It really is fun! At one point I actually pumped the air and cheered when I passed yet another puzzle.
However when I first put the disc in and failed to remember who to play the game and instead started shooting yellow blocks randomly I was greeted with messages of “Failed” which had me running to the game’s manual to find out what an earth I was meant to do. However once I worked out that I was meant to be creating houses, buildings and skyscrapers by creating squares of blocks in 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 etc shapes the game suddenly became very addictive and rewarding. It also has a fantastic two-player mode that adds a lot of longevity to it. I could talk about this game all day, but instead I am going to go back to playing it!
82. Tempest X3
Like ‘Space Invaders’ on LCD
Like R-Types Tempest is another arcade classic game, but if R-Types’ influence stems from Defender then Tempest’s is most definitely Space Invaders. The idea of Tempest is very straightforward you have to shoot alien ships as they head towards you. However unlike it’s influence where the ships descend down in lines so well organized they would make the army proud, in Tempest they hurtle down the screen towards you from all over the place.
Like Landmaker before it this game is very hard to get used to, made no easier by the controls which require you to use the D-Pad which is awkward at best- the analogue sticks would have improved the situation somewhat, but this was made well before the analogue pads were created. However if you keep on persevering and there will be a point where everything will click and you’ll be hooked and once you are you’ll keep on playing till your retinas feel like they are bleeding and you’ll start to see the enemy crafts imprinted on the inside of your eyelids. Some people might mock the graphics, but with the lights off and the sound turned up the simple objects on the screen make you feel like you in some apocalyptic rave- and yes that’s a good thing.
81. Front Mission 3
Goodness knows what happened to games 1 and 2...
From a small little Japanese developer some of you may have heard of called Squaresoft comes this tale of two Japanese warring armies set in the year 2112 (Phew, not 2012. The London Olympics are safe…) Rather than use war planes, submarines and tanks the armies have decided to equip themselves with giant heavily-armed mecha robots called ‘Wanzers’. You play as test pilot Kazuki Takemura who ends up getting caught up in the war and wrapped up in a conspiracy and the plot can pan out two different ways depending on the choices you make in the game- which adds a lot of longevity to the game.
However it’s the fully customizable Wanzers that are the stars of the game. You’ll want one and if Japanese anime has taught me anything it’s that everybody in the future will have their own walking tank. So how will you be fighting with these Wanzers? Well the game plays a bit like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea, no exploding penguins though sadly, but when you have walking tanks who cares? Front Mission 3 came out very late in the PSX’s life and that’s probably a reason why it didn’t sell too well, which is a shame as it’s really good. To be honest though after I said ‘RPG’ and ‘Square’ you’ve probably already made your mind up if you will like this game or not and I probably could have filled this paragraph with the lyrics from Bohemian Rhapsody and nobody would be any wiser. So here goes- “Mama…….
Join me next time when we dive into the top 80 games- featuring exploding rodents, evil pigs and a heroic beach ball! Seriously!
90. Muppet Race Mania
It’s time to rev the engines
It’s time to watch the lights
It’s time to race your friends on the Muppets game tonight!
During the last few years of the PSone’s life it seemed that everyone was trying to make a kart racing game. Disney made one, I believe Warner Brothers made one and there was this one staring Jim Henson’s Muppets and unlike the previous two kart games I mentioned, this one was good. It’s not the best karting game on the console, actually it’s not even the second best karting game, but it has something that neither of them posses- the Muppets themselves.
Seriously how could you resist racing Animal in his drag racer, Beaker (my favourite Muppet) in his moon buggy, Gonzo’s flying saucer or even Rizzo the Rat in his car made from cheese… All the Muppets gang are here- Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, Sam the Eagle, Rowlf, Sweetums, the two old grumpy men and many more. Also they each have their own special move too, including Miss Piggy’s ‘Hiyaaaahhh!’ attack. It isn’t a perfect game though, the graphics look terrible and even looks worse than the two other kart games that were released before this. Also if you don’t like the Muppets you probably won’t like this, but everyone loves them right? By the way I couldn’t find a decent picture of the game in action, so this’ll have to do.
89. Hogs of War
Kill the enemy swine!
Yeah, the ‘enemy swine’ was the best war-pig related pun I could think of and I spent ages trying to think of one. I actually thought “Oh I’ve got one- ‘Hogs of War!’…oh wait, that’s the games title..” 50 points to anybody who can think of a better pun! Anyway onto the game itself. Hogs’ is effectively Worms’ in 3D, only with heavily armed pigs replacing the invertebrates and it plays pretty well too. The 3D areas do make things interesting with lakes to drown in, huts to hide and even tanks to attack your fellow mammals with. The game has lots of different weapons ranging from sniper rifles (taking advantage of the 3D design), shotguns and best of all the laughing gas, which sends any pig it hits into a squealing frenzy making them charge randomly until they drown in a lake or run into a minefield.
Take control of six pig armies, all based on a different country (Britain, Japan, USA, France, Russia and Germany) and all featuring the pigs hilariously ‘hamming’ it up un-politically correct stereotypes of their respective nationality. The team names’ themselves highlight this with the French being called the Garlic Grunts, Japan- the Sushi Swine and USA’s team name being Uncle Ham’s Hogs. You can probably gather from all this that HoW is funny game, and you’d be right to think that, but to further prove that this game has it’s tongue firmly in it pork-flavoured cheek, they hired Rik Mayall (of The Young Ones and Bottom fame) into do brilliantly amusing commentary during the fights. Great little title this, though Worms is still the better game.
88. R-Types
Start level. Die. Restart level. Get a bit further. Die. Restart level. Get a bit further die. Restart level….
‘On the edge of a dark empire, you embark on a mission no one has yet survived. Will you?’ asks R-Type’s tagline and the answer to that question will probably be- ‘no’. The R-Type games are notorious for their challenging trial-and-error gameplay meaning the only real way to complete a level is to keep playing until you learn the best way to reach the end without your shit exploding into a million pixels.
Anyway this game called R-Types features of R-Types and R-Types II so buying his would be like owning a little bit of arcade history.
87. Destruction Derby Raw
Destruction Derby returns to the Playstation with a bang….a shunt and a whole lot of broken cars.
Another one of their early games was Destruction Derby 2 and it was great fun. A racing game where not only were you not punished for hitting your opponents, but you were actively encouraged to do so. The opponents themselves were also a great cast of characters from the crazy Spanish driver Psycho, the mysterious Master in car number 00, the General who seemed to have a real grudge against me and best of all Irish racer Learner Driver…who would usually be found stuck in a ditch with black smoke bellowing out of his car. You could forsake racing all together and compete in a last car standing fight in a bowl, one of which brilliantly had sheer drop at one side, which instantly wrote off any car unlucky enough to fall down it.
However the game did have several flaws, which at the time were easy to ignore, but after awhile really started to show. There was only 3 cars, but your choice of the three was neglected by the fact that one car equals easy mode, the second medium and the third car makes the game hard. So you were choosing your difficulty mode rather than a vehicle. Even worse was that there was no two-player mode! Instead you had pass the controller…how very stupid… Raw though fixes all these faults. You have a wide range of vehicles ranging from sports cars to fans and the game also has a four-player split screen mode and it was brilliant featuring great multiplayer games like Sky Scraper (push your opponents off a building) and Pass the Bomb (like child playground game Tag/It with bombs.) A great sequel that sadly got forgotten about.
86. WWF Smackdown 2: Knox Your Role
“Go one-on-one with this Great one.”
Okay I want to start on a negative note. This game is now very, very old. Mother Nature and Father Time have apparently teamed up to layeth-the-smack down on this game. It’s not the oldest game on this countdown, nowhere near in fact, but the wrestling genre has come a long, long, way since this was released. Rather than age like wine and get better with each year, it’s ageing more like Hulk Hogan. It’s flaws (a lot of what I mentioned when I wrote about WWF Attitude earlier) were forgivable at the time, but are now much harder to tolerate.
But forget about now- this is a console that is nearly 15 years old after all and back in the day this was amazing, especially if you had a multi-tap and friends of course. SD2 had lots of different stipulation matches to keep you interested- Ladder, Hell in a Cell, Tag matches, Hardcore and Casket matches (okay well truth be told- Casket matches suck) amongst mothers. Also if you get bored of the 50+ wrestlers you can create your own grappler in a very impressive creation mode. Okay it’s uglier than Mae Young, as stupid as RVD and makes more mistakes than Jeff Hardy, but it’s still fun the bottom line.
85. Breath of Fire IV
The only RPG in this top 100.……..just kidding.
Okay Breath of Fire III maybe should have been here instead but I’ve made the banner for this game already. Breath of Fire IV like features series regular Ryu, a legendary world warrior who has won several street fights and seeks a fight with Bison who murdered….. Oh what it’s not that Ryu?! Okay this Ryu rather than simply using dragon punches he actually turns into a dragon! (Cool!) He also suffers from amnesia (not cool! Seriously why can’t any video game characters remember anything? Does their memory get wiped every time you turn off the console or something?)
The cartoon style graphics still look pretty decent, in a cute retro kind of way, the turn based fighting is decent and best of all the fishing mini game from BoF III returns. Yay! There really aren’t enough games with fishing mini games in. All in all if you like RPG’s, and if you don’t you’ve sure joined an odd forum, you will find lots to enjoy here.
84. Brian Lara Cricket
It’s like real cricket, only fun.
Brian Lara Cricket had the distinction of being the very first cricket game on a Sony console so it didn’t have any competition as such, however there were a lot of great sports title out there so why play this? Well because of the multiplayer mode. If you can find somebody else who wants to play a cricket game with you then there is a lot of fun to be had here. You can play against each other with one of you bowling while the other bats, but I always found it more fun if you are on the same side, especially if you are both batting.
There’s a real guilty pleasure about mistyping you run between the wickets resulting in your mate being run out, just as it looked like he was about to get that century, but there is also a sense of camaraderie too as you work together trying to get enough runs to win the game. Bowling is almost as fan as batting as you try to find the right place on the crease to bowl out your opponent and made more interesting by the way everybody bowls differently- some are speed bowlers while others prefer to spin the ball Shane Warne style So bowling is fun and batting is great…..whatever you do though, avoid fielding, god is that boring.
83. Landmaker
Forget killing all the colossi in Shadow of the Colossus. Forget defeating Ruby Weapon. Nothing feels more rewarding than creating a 8x8 skyscraper in Landmaker to earn an ‘Excellent’ ranking.
I knew Land maker (known as ‘Builder’s Block’ in the U.S) was a great puzzle game when compiling this list, but when I came round to writing about it I drew blank. I didn’t know what to say other than “It’s fun…” so I just popped the game into my PS3 and wow! It really is fun! At one point I actually pumped the air and cheered when I passed yet another puzzle.
However when I first put the disc in and failed to remember who to play the game and instead started shooting yellow blocks randomly I was greeted with messages of “Failed” which had me running to the game’s manual to find out what an earth I was meant to do. However once I worked out that I was meant to be creating houses, buildings and skyscrapers by creating squares of blocks in 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 etc shapes the game suddenly became very addictive and rewarding. It also has a fantastic two-player mode that adds a lot of longevity to it. I could talk about this game all day, but instead I am going to go back to playing it!
82. Tempest X3
Like ‘Space Invaders’ on LCD
Like R-Types Tempest is another arcade classic game, but if R-Types’ influence stems from Defender then Tempest’s is most definitely Space Invaders. The idea of Tempest is very straightforward you have to shoot alien ships as they head towards you. However unlike it’s influence where the ships descend down in lines so well organized they would make the army proud, in Tempest they hurtle down the screen towards you from all over the place.
Like Landmaker before it this game is very hard to get used to, made no easier by the controls which require you to use the D-Pad which is awkward at best- the analogue sticks would have improved the situation somewhat, but this was made well before the analogue pads were created. However if you keep on persevering and there will be a point where everything will click and you’ll be hooked and once you are you’ll keep on playing till your retinas feel like they are bleeding and you’ll start to see the enemy crafts imprinted on the inside of your eyelids. Some people might mock the graphics, but with the lights off and the sound turned up the simple objects on the screen make you feel like you in some apocalyptic rave- and yes that’s a good thing.
81. Front Mission 3
Goodness knows what happened to games 1 and 2...
From a small little Japanese developer some of you may have heard of called Squaresoft comes this tale of two Japanese warring armies set in the year 2112 (Phew, not 2012. The London Olympics are safe…) Rather than use war planes, submarines and tanks the armies have decided to equip themselves with giant heavily-armed mecha robots called ‘Wanzers’. You play as test pilot Kazuki Takemura who ends up getting caught up in the war and wrapped up in a conspiracy and the plot can pan out two different ways depending on the choices you make in the game- which adds a lot of longevity to the game.
However it’s the fully customizable Wanzers that are the stars of the game. You’ll want one and if Japanese anime has taught me anything it’s that everybody in the future will have their own walking tank. So how will you be fighting with these Wanzers? Well the game plays a bit like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea, no exploding penguins though sadly, but when you have walking tanks who cares? Front Mission 3 came out very late in the PSX’s life and that’s probably a reason why it didn’t sell too well, which is a shame as it’s really good. To be honest though after I said ‘RPG’ and ‘Square’ you’ve probably already made your mind up if you will like this game or not and I probably could have filled this paragraph with the lyrics from Bohemian Rhapsody and nobody would be any wiser. So here goes- “Mama…….
Join me next time when we dive into the top 80 games- featuring exploding rodents, evil pigs and a heroic beach ball! Seriously!
