My Top 100 Video Games (16 – 20)
I hit a video game milestone recently: I have beaten 100 games! I thought it would be fun to rank all 100 of the games in a series of videos. Here’s the seventeenth video, ranking games 16 – 20.
This is episode 17 of 20 in my top 100 Videogame series. Check out the full Top 100 Video Games playlist for a bit more about the rest of the videos, specifically check out video #1 to learn about the qualifications for this top 100 list, the main qualification being that I must have beaten the game for it to make this list.
Questions will pop up throughout this video. Please use the comments section to answer these. I respond to pretty much everything.
20. Fallout 3 was developed by Bethesda Game Studio and originally released in October 2008. This game opened my eyes to how far games have come in the few years since 2005 when I took a bit of a break following college. I had just purchased a new computer and, looking for something to do with it, I bought Fallout 3 on a friend’s recommendation. To this very day the slow panoramic view upon exiting the vault for the first time is the most memorable snapshot in any video game I’ve ever played. In fact, I knew Fallout 76 would be terrible when the teasers for the game both a) spoiled that scenic reveal and b) the reveal itself was not treated in the breathtaking way that both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 were. No vault-exit pan over the horizon. No thank you. That’s even more important to me than NPCs.
Fallout 3 kickstarted a love of first player role-playing play games that has remained strong since. From Fallout 3 to Fallout 4, to Fallout: New Vegas, to Skyrim, to Fallout: New Vegas…okay, I’m being a bit aggressive with my claim to love an entire genre based on a series of games all released by the same publisher, but I can say with confidence that any reveal of an upcoming game in that genre peaks my interest. In fact, the Fallout series is the reason I even considered The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or just Skyrim, as it’s called by everyone. I don’t care for the swords and sorcery high-fantasy aesthetic. I’m way too much of a buzzkill. In a magical world where seemingly anything is possible I get irritated when the characters come across an obstacle that’s almost too trivial even for our real world. Oh, you need to get into that wooden door but you don’t have a key or a lockpick. You could, I don’t know, use magic! You know the only thing that makes your fantasy past world better than our real modern world. I’d live in squalor with clothes made out of mud and leaves and beds made of rocks where the blankets and pillows are also rocks and I’d consider a mortality rate of 96% pretty good odds and reason enough to continue eating questionable mushrooms found growing out of pig carcasses left to rot in public streets if all that meant I could use magic! Oh, but wait, I can’t use magic to open a door. Nevermind! But Skyrim, yeah, when I played it I was able to look past the high-fantasy because I realized that just love the mechanics of this type of game. So if I love Skyrim so much, why isn’t it on this list? Well, maybe it is. You might want to subscribe to find out.
Question for the comments: Most memorable horizon view in a video game?
19. South Park: The Fractured But Whole was developed by Ubisoft and originally released in October 2017. I’ve made videos in the past that not just insist on the importance of judging a piece of media according to its authorial intent, and to a larger degree, its entire context–even the context of its own lineage–as I’ll discuss more later–but also I’ve made videos that extol the beauty of a piece of media that understands context really, really well. That’s something the South Park television show has always done and South Park: The Fractured But Whole is no different.
People forget things very quickly. South Park, the show, is created in such a way that it can uniquely comment on very recent events, making the mentally straining effects of temporal distance less of a factor. Considering the speed at which information spreads these days, this means South Park has a near-infinite pool of context from which to cull story ideas. The creators of South Park don’t so much mine history for significant plot points but rather skim the scum from celebrity twitter feeds, which is probably much harder than the former option. Anyone can read a history book; the curation is done for them. Only brilliant people like Matt Parker and Trey Stone can find gold in an infinite pool of uncurated cess.
But what happens when your medium isn’t a television show with a one-week build time, but instead is a video game with a years-long build time? You, South Park, play with the context of your own creation (see, I told you I’d get back to this idea).
The Fractured But Whole, though not a sequel to 2014’s The Stick of Truth, plays with the expectations created by that game in the same way the television series itself does with its episodic format. In fact, episode 4 of season 21, titled “Franchise Prequel” is in essence the build-up to The Fractured But Whole which went on sale just 6 days after “Franchise Prequel”’s airing. The Fractured But Whole plays well as both a game and an episode of the television show which feels to me exactly how the game should be presented.
The game not only reawakens long-forgotten characters from the series, like the gay fish, Dr. Mephesto, and his son, but also plays with the storyline from the Stick of Truth, at one point going so far as to have the Fractured But Whole kids interact with their Stick of Truth counterparts in a confusing–but very South Parkian–time paradox storyline.
Question for the comments: Do you still watch South Park?
18. South Park: The Stick of Truth was developed by Obsidian and originally released in March 2014. All of what I said about The Fractured But Whole earlier could be applied to The Stick of Truth. Most reviews of The Fractured But Whole have said it’s not as good as The Stick of Truth, and I’d probably agree, but only insofar as I don’t know that The Fractured But Whole could have ever been better, and I’m convinced the creators knew that. The Stick of Truth surprised players in many ways. It was not only a great South Park game–the only good South Park game following a history of truly awful experiences–but it was a great game, full stop. With players having been acclimated to the reality of a good game with The Stick of Truth, without the element of surprise, The Fractured But Whole stood no chance at being better. I think that if The Fractured But Whole had come out in 2014, with The Stick of Truth coming out in 2017, we’d all think of The Fractured But Whole as the superior game. That’s how important the element of surprise was to The Stick of Truth.
But if I may remove myself from such arbitrary ranking measures for a moment, perhaps the only aesthetic I like less than high fantasy is the superhero thing. I like many superhero movies. I collected comic books as a kid (though more for the art than for the story). I like a lot of superhero video games. But much like high fantasy, I have a tough time setting aside my logical brain. Superheroes exist in an uncanny canyon where the superhero world is just close enough to the real world to be off putting. So, I’m expected to believe that New York is just going to exist with hyper powered, insane villains running around and web slinging spider guys flying around? Everyone in the city should be scared all the time. The streets should be empty. This aesthetic preference hierarchy is the only other reason, besides the release order, that The Stick of Truth is higher on my list than series follow-up game The Fractured But Whole.
But again, much like with Skyrim in my previous entry, I recognize my own contradiction. You may be surprised that there’s a real-world set superhero game high up on this list. Subscribe to this channel to find out which game that is.
Question for the comments: What superhero game is forthcoming on this list?
17. Super Mario Odyssey was developed by Nintendo and released in October 2017. I had not played a Mario game since Super Mario Sunshine for the GameCube, released in 2002. That’s 15 years I went without Mario and his weird group of sometimes friends sometimes enemies. I had shifted since college (I graduated in 2006) to primarily a Playstation gamer then to a non-gamer while I wrote some books, and then I came back as a short-lived PC gamer and then back to Playstation. I wasn’t really interested in Nintendo until the Switch. And that’s hard to say, as my childhood was 95% Nintendo, 3% Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and 2% Other…dang, I wish there was a line of action figures called Other so that I could make a crazy good pun right now.
Super Mario Odyssey reminded me of playing Super Mario Sunshine and even Super Mario 64 before that. We all look back at games from our younger years and remember them as way better looking than they really were. This is especially true with the early 3D polygon models like these two games, but especially in Super Mario 64. I played Odyssey and at first I thought, “wow, the series hasn’t changed much,” but because I wanted to love Nintendo again and I didn’t want to feel like they sat on their butts and refused to innovate and refine, I watched a couple lets plays of Super Mario 64 and, wow, I was wrong. Super Mario 64 looks bad. Sure, not as bad as many other games from that time, but still pretty bad.
So, once I understood and accepted the visual marvel that Super Mario Odyssey is, I was able to sit back and appreciate everything else about it. I dare you to find a more responsive 3D platformer than Super Mario Odyssey. I dare you to find a game that so beautifully respects its heritage without leaning too heavily on it. It reminded me why I loved Nintendo and why I’ll keep loving Nintendo for decades to come. Super Mario Odyssey was like a welcome home present, a reunion of sorts. It made me feel good about loving video games.
Question for the comments: What’s the best Mario game?
16. Ratchet & Clank was developed by Insomniac Games and was originally released in November 2002 for the Playstation 2, but I’m referring to the re-boot or re-master version released in April 2016 for the Playstation 4.
The original Ratchet & Clank on the Playstation 2 is the game that made me fall in love with 3D platformers. Of course there were many and great 3d platformers before Ratchet & Clank (the aforementioned Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario 64 to name just two examples). But no 3D platformer made the genre so fun. This game is chaos.
The game rewards players with an incessant stream of casino-like sounds and lights with a seemingly endless variety of weapons you can use to destroy things that give you those casino-like sounds and lights. At times, there are so many bolts filling the screen that I feel like I’ve walked into a surprise party with confetti and horns galore.
That winning sound is what casinos–and any addictive entertainment, really– rely on to keep you engaged. A constant barrage of bells, dings, and chimes does a few things to your brain. Those sounds imply a fun and exciting environment, which is like candy to your brain, and most importantly those sounds make you think that winning is more common than losing, which is like mainlining sugar. In casinos this is especially pertinent; you can’t hear the sound of losing, after all. With Ratchet & Clank, losing has a sound, sure, but it happens so rarely compared to the bombardment of bolt grab ka-chings, that it might as well be silent.
Ratchet & Clank celebrates every menial achievement. I love it for that.
That’s a difficult balance for a game developer to achieve. A game that’s not frustrating, but also isn’t boring, and still encourages the player to maintain forward momentum. Sure, the job may be easier with a 3D platformer like Ratchet & Clank, as these genres by nature are full of collect-a-thon tropes and therefore the sweet, sweet sounds that signal the attainment of those collectibles. And that balance is where Ratchet & Clank could have gone wrong. The positive feedback bolt grab loop is so constant that a player could have easily built up a tolerance within the first 10 minutes of gameplay. But the developers packed in a ton of action, they’ve packed in some minor puzzles, and a weapons upgrade system that encourages exploration. These elements allow us, the players, to slow down, ensuring we never reach critical intoxication. A dead addict is of no benefit to the pusher, afterall.
Question for the comments: What’s the most satisfying sound in a game?
