1994 Ranked
Donkey Kong Country aside, every game in this list is ordered both in terms of quality and in terms of how timeless vs. timely it is. Super Metroid? Timeless. Shaq Fu? Not particularly timeless.
List items
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Final Fantasy VI isn't the best JRPG of all time, nor is it the best Final Fantasy game of all time, but it's understandable that it often receives such weighty monikers. We often discuss classic JRPGs on the merits of their big, set piece moments, and no entry in the Square Enix gameography has ever eclipsed the sheer scale of Final Fantasy VI's most iconic twists and turns. In Final Fantasy VI, goddamn *world* ends, after all. That's pretty wild playing through it today, and it must've been even wilder at the time of its release.
However, the component parts of the Final Fantasy VI experience aren't always so novel. In fact, Final Fantasy VI is pretty uneven on the whole. Most people remember Kefka the nihilistic clown, the apocalyptic twist, and the meaningful subplots for the ensemble cast, but people forget about, say, Ultros the anachronistic squid, or Terra's non-sequitor motherly character arc, or the haphazard application of where, exactly, the end-times actually *ended* things. Like a lot of Final Fantasy games, Final Fantasy VI is crammed with content, and as a result of that breadth of content a lot of it ends up feeling uneven, arbitrary, or worse, thematically incoherent with the core themes and mechanics of the rest of the game.
Still - while Final Fantasy VI doesn't quite match up to FFIV's comparatively consistent anti-imperialist storyline, or FFVII's robust characters, or in some respects FFVIII's willingness to experiment with the Final Fantasy formula, Final Fantasy VI is ultimately still fantastic. I mean, really, this an *excellent* game, well deserving of its lavish praise, even if it can't quite keep its ambitions and its execution in harmony with one another.
The best part of Final Fantasy VI is its open and experimental game design. While the first half of the game is as linear as Final Fantasy IV, the post-disaster Final Fantasy VI is filled with non-linear, optional, meaningful narrative content. It preempts all of the design conceits of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which dominated gaming discourse for the better part of the last ten years - even crazier, it's actually a more profound expression of Breath of the Wild's core concepts, 25 years before that game's release. While Breath of the Wild used its post-apocalypse to justify giving the player gorgeous empty landscapes with which to traverse, Final Fantasy VI uses it's post-apocalypse to recontextualize the nature of a world the player is already familiar with, as well as expediting the latent drama within its many running subplots. In Breath of the Wild, the player will encounter a ruin and marvel at it, wondering to themself, "wow, I bet something interesting *used* to be here." In Final Fantasy VI, the player will encounter a ruin and think to themselves "I hope the guy who I know lived here is OK." That's a fundamentally more powerful experience, and the fact that a game made for the Super Nintendo was able to operate on that emotional level is pretty incredible.
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Super Metroid gets all its praise for essentially creating a genre, but just like with its Symphony of the Night counterpart, the fact that this game is a masterclass in SNES-era video game art is underdiscussed. I'll put it this way: for a game about shooting a pterodactyl with your clunky cyborg arm, this game sure feels foreboding, creepy, and threatening. It's a cinematic game in an era in which there were no cinematic games.
Furthermore, its elegance in design comparative to other titles from the era is matched only by the early Mario titles. Like the first few Super Mario Bros. titles, tutorials are overlaid onto the level design such that engaging with the game even a little bit forces the player to learn the ins and outs of the games rule set. Super Metroid is the same - but unlike Mario, it applies that same minimalist design to its narrative. Super Metroid never explains anything about its plot outright, but thanks to its stellar creature/world design and horror-movie pacing, it's a game without any dialogue or cogent thematic values that somehow still FEELS like it's telling a great story. It's not quite the tonal masterpiece of the original Dark Souls, but it's definitely a wellspring of creativity from which Dark Souls drew inspiration from.
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I'll admit my initial interest in Samurai Shodown II was entirely due to its fully smacked translations - and can you blame me? The translated text in this game is iconic. It's a chaotic mess of half-understood phraseology and square peg/round hole grammar, and yet the game only brims with personality that much harder.
In truth, Samurai Shodown II is a well executed take on a straightforward fighting game formula. It's not a game overburdened by complex fighting game mechanics, and if anything, that lack of complexity makes it feel all the more timeless. This isn't a game about swift movements, but a game about getting just a few solid hits in. Despite it's apparent functional similarities to Street Fighter, this alone dramatically changes how a good Samurai Shodown player will approach each fight. Divekick was a clever distillation of fighting game stratagem, but before that, Samurai Shodown must've felt just as raw and threadbare.
Had Samurai Shodown II been more widely available and sported a legible English translation, I think it would be uncontroversial to put it alongside Street Fighter II as one of the best and most foundational fighting games.
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I've always appreciated Contra with a healthy dose of detachment in the way you approach anything that kitschy and otherwise absurd, but Hard Corps is legitimately cool as hell. The difficulty is ridiculous (to its detriment), but Hard Corps undeniably has style. There are a *lot* of games from this era that try to do exactly what this game is doing, but none of them stick in the mind the way Hard Corps does.
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I've never been a huge Virtua Fighter fan - getting into games in the 2000s, the way I did, the series seemed like a relic of a bygone era. VF's characters were less colorful, the fighting mechanics were simpler, and it lacked the flashy, set piece-y weirdness of Tekken or Dead or Alive. Playing VF 2 for the first time changed my perspective on the series entirely - of the 3D fighting games released in the early '90s, it was the only one that hadn't bit off more than it could chew. It focuses on a smaller subset of moves and simpler characters than Tekken did in '94, sure, but it's more timeless than that game thanks to its focus. It still looks pretty great, too!
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I like Doom - on the one hand, this is more Doom. and I like that. On the other hand, this is arguably *too much* Doom. Did you like the 'find the hidden red keycard' puzzles in the first game designed to make you explore the full map? Oh, good, because figuring out how to even navigate from one end of the map to another in some Doom II levels is in itself a puzzle. Maybe you thought the levels in the first Doom in which you'd just get absolutely flooded with enemies in a comically tiny combat arena were actually the best parts? If so, the latter half of Doom II will deliver in spades.
It's not that I think Doom II is a *bad* game - it's just a front-loaded game. It comes with baggage. If you aren't interested in exploring the mechanics of Doom in a semi-meta way, or of engaging with level design as text rather than subtext, I just don't think Doom II is the title for you. If you are that person, though, there are an abundance of riches in Doom II - it can be a bit of a headache to get to them, but they're there.
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OK sure, Mega Man X skews a little too '90s 'tude, but it complicates the Mega Man formula in a clever and satisfying way. The animation in the early Mega Man X series in particular has always been really striking, and the almost cyberpunk-ian aesthetics are a lot of fun.
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Sonic 3's a good game, but I think it's the first moment in which it was clear the Sonic franchises heyday was at an end - unlike Nintendo's various big name series, in which any new creative direction could easily steer a Mario, Zelda or Star Fox sequel in any number of directions without interrupting the core archetypes inherent to those titles, Sonic games demand frenetic speed and little else. The foundation there, as simple as it sounds, is therefore weak.
Can you build a precision platformer title in the Sonic formula without interrupting that core value? No. Can you build, say, a fighting game or a 3D open world adventure? No. Even applied to the genre of kart racer, the best answer to the question 'is this subgenre appropriate for Sonic?' is a resounding 'maybe.'
Sonic 3 itself doesn't suffer from any of these soon-to-become fatal flaws - it's bigger, sharper and more colorful than its progenitors. But that's *all* it is. To put things in perspective, just two years from the release of Sonic 3, the next mainline Sonic title was Sonic 3D blast; the next Mario title was a little game called Super Mario 64. Again, this doesn't make Sonic 3 a *bad* game - but between this and Sonic and Knuckles, the series had already began to reach the ceiling of its core feature set and ceased to innovate.
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Bethesda Softworks make games that everyone plays, but that everyone also complains about. Casual players, who pour hundreds of hours into them, complain about the pervasiveness of bugs and immersion-breaking stuff. RPG diehards criticize Bethesda's streamlining and flattening of the "role playing" aspect of the role playing game experience. Morrowind fans bemoan the broadening, genericized mass appeal of post-Morrowind Elder Scrolls games and old-school Fallout fans dismiss the newest titles as an aberration from the supposedly highbrow satire of the original titles.
The thing is - I don't think Bethesda has ever *not* made a product which greatly diverges from their core design philosophy. With the exception of dissapointed Morrowind fans, who correctly identify that game's unique emphasis on material relationships between its cities, its muddy psychedelia, and the friction it gives to players who play fast and loose with the rules of its world, Bethesda have *always* made games within the same basic framework. If nothing else, The Elder Scrolls: Arena is the perfect example of Bethesda's design philosophy; it is a Rosetta Stone for understanding why Bethesda make the games they do.
First, consider Arena's visuals: they're blocky, they heavily reuse assets, and they emphasize functionality and legibility over everything else. I wouldn't say Arena looks *bad,* per se, but it certainly looks...nondescript. There's a reason for this: Bethesda were hoping to make an epic-scale fantasy adventure, but they wanted to make an epic-scale fantasy adventure which would reach as wide a player base as possible; therefore, they needed to make a game which would run on as many PCs as possible. Bethesda prioritize mass market access over tech, always - at the very least, they seem to make games which simultaneously cater to the standards of the current era of games that don't also lock players on a budget out of the experience.
Second, consider Arena's sheer scope. This is an *insanely* big game. Like, *wildly* big. If a player were to walk from one end of the world map to the other without using fast travel, it would take about as long as starting and completing a contemporary Bethesda game. It's that big. Arena is not a game with a great story, but it's pretty obvious that the story exists as an excuse to interface with the rest of the world. It provides the player with a motive to explore each major city and dungeon, likely stumbling upon a bunch of other distinct locales along the way.
Third, consider Arena's conception of "role playing." Arena gives the player a pretty enormous amount of space with which to design a character. Yet, it gives the player very little space with which to *express* as that character. In Arena, you can build characters from a long list of places and races and give that character unique skill sets which will dramatically change combat. You will not, however, be able to make a character that interfaces socially with the world in a unique way. Like many Bethesda games, Arena is disinterested in the notion of placing the player character into its world. Rather, they want the player character to be a wandering, unstoppable tourist, permitted everywhere and restricted from nothing. The primary verb of any Bethesda game is "wander." Any mechanic or narrative framework which precludes the player from freely exploring runs counter to the experience.
Of course, later Bethesda games emphasize unique cultures, spaces, weapons, people, and quests. Arena does none of these things. It's a worse game than literally anything Bethesda would go on to make after it, but that's probably not why you'd check it out today, anyway - you'd probably play it out of historical curiosity. Considering it's being offered for free in perpetuity, I'd recommend playing around with it. Arena is not a great game in a singular sense, but within it are the foundations of basically every open world AAA game of the last twenty years, from GTA III to Elden Ring.
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Look, I get the faux 3D look of Donkey Kong Country and its subsequent issues with platforming precision make it an imperfect game in retrospect, but goddammit, Donkey Kong Country is good. I don't know what this game's contemporary reputation is, but I never see it remembered with the fondness for Nintendo's (or Rare's!) other titles at the time.
As anachronistic as Donkey Kong Country is, it's good *mood*. Compared to other platformers, which are largely full of irritating jingles and eye-bleeding art styles, Donkey Kong Country feels like it's going for something different, even if it isn't immediately clear what that something ultimately is. I think a lot about how weirdly melancholic the underwater levels in this game are thanks to its music and comparatively unhurried pace. The visuals are a strange mixture of archetypical platformer and low budget early aughts CGI Saturday Morning cartoon, which gives it a weirdly specific visual flare. The level design is hyper linear, but paired with the roll attack and the low ceiling for jump height it makes you feel like I imagine DK should - a huge, power animal barreling through an environment. I dunno man, I think it's good.
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I realize KOF '94 is following years of similar SNK fighters like Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury which basically formed the mold of KOF, but it's still pretty remarkable how fully formed KOF '94 feels as the first mainline title in the series.
It's easy to forget that the early KOF games forced you to choose by team rather than by individual fighter - I'm super into that! You can very easily get stuck with the ole 'every one of my three fighters is Ryu' crutch in later KOF titles, but having two swap between three very different styles of fighter forces you to learn the roster better. It's also a bit more fun knowing that both you and your opponent will inevitably end up with at least one character you're less skilled with than the others.
Ultimately KOF '94 suffers from severe limitations in its feature set than practically any other KOF title, and it lacks some of the personality of the other SNK titles it's pulling from. It's a fun title to revisit, but it's definitely not the KOF title I find myself regularly returning to.
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Anyone who started playing Tekken with any title past two can tell you how tough it is to go back to the original two titles - 3D fighting games were pretty rough at the jump, and no matter how revolutionary Tekken may have felt at launch the shadow of every one of its sequels looms large over it. Worse for me is the general look of the game - these are some UGLY characters! Law in particular, my GOD why did they do that to Law??
Once you find your groove with the otherwise simple core mechanics. it can at least be fun for a few rounds - it's still Tekken. It's just Tekken in which the Earth has moon physics and everyone is really hungover.
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Has that tactile, lightspeed feel SEGA perfected in Sonic 3, but Sonic & Knuckles feels like an un-needed addendum to the series, more a game full of bonus content than a meaningful title in and of itself. This goes doubly if you ignore the 'put Knuckles in the other games' peripheral. The level design is a bit different than Sonic 1-3, but usually for the worst. Too many crappy lever puzzles and sequences that demand precise platforming, too few memorable environments or sequences.
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Streets of Rage 3 takes every element of the first two titles and triples down on their worst qualities. We've got: absurd, anachronistic enemies (kanagaroo boxers?), a plot that's weirdly too complicated for what it is, an absurd difficulty spike way too early in the game, enemies that skip from one axis to another making them impossible to hit, and relentless boss fights that feel impossible until something dumb happens and you win. It's not ALL bad - I like that you can dash in this one, especially vertically, and some of the environment artwork is quite nice - but it's a huge slog towards a negligible payoff.
Streets of Rage 3 isn't difficult in the way of 'measure your platforming ability down to the pixel' of Mega Man or 'master the animation priority' of Castlevania - it's difficult in such a way that makes mastery feel *impossible.*
The skill ceiling is low, first of all. In the early goings, a highly skilled Streets of Rage player will appear different than a casual beat 'em up liker, but their results at the end of the level will be nominally the same. By the end game, players who have mastered Streets of Rage's mechanics will still need to rely on quite a bit of happenstance in order to, say, defeat the screen-hopping robot enemies at the end of the final stage without losing a life, because sometimes they just act in such a way that you can neither hit them nor dodge their attacks. There's no pleasure to completing a sequence like that, because there's no way to outthink or outperform it.
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This game nails the look and feel of the Batman animated series from the '90s, which really means something in an era that produced an endless series of landfill-bound super hero beat 'em ups. Although it's still bound within the (very) narrow constraints of its genre, it's also the best case scenario for this kind of game.
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Super Star Wars is one of those series that has a reputation as being difficult, but it doesn't feel as clunky as it looks. Glad these have been getting digital re-releases on modern consoles, they're way better than the one-off movie tie in games they could've been. Return of the Jedi in particular allows you to play as Leia in the bounty hunter outfit she uses to rescue Han, which - why don't other games capitalize on that look?? That suit looks rad as hell.
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I didn't learn until years after I played this game that they meant, like, 'no, this is Pac-Man TWO motherfucker. This isn't some low rent sequel to some other point and click bullshit. This is the SEQUEL to Pac-Man.'
Maybe there was some novelty to playing what amounts to a point and click adventure game on a console in the early '90s, but either way this is still one of the most difficult to like games I've ever played. Rather than directly controlling Pac-man, in The New Adventures you can only *suggest* Pac-Man take actions, but you can never force him to do anything. It works sort of like a Tamagotchi or Nintendogs adventure game hybrid.
The thing is, Pac-Man doesn't want to do what you tell him. Playing Pac-Man 2 is like trying to litter train a puppy; Pac-Man is uncooperative, disinterested in what you're trying to teach him, and the best case scenario still leaves us working with shit.
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Platforming mascot.....but with ATTITUDE! What a revolutionary concept. And then Dana Gould is there writing these clunky, old school comedian one-liners. I don't dislike Gex or anything, it's just too overwhelmingly '90s for me to look directly at.
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There's a lot of western side scrolling shooters like this - I'm thinking of Vectorman in particular for whatever reason - and they never live up to the sharp gameplay of their eastern counterparts. It was like western devs hadn't, like, cracked the code yet on how to make shooting both feel precise and fast-paced in a side scrolling platformer. Compare this to, I dunno, Super Metroid or Mega Man X as an example - you can intuit exactly how those games work immediately, but it takes quite a bit of fumbling to really nail Earthworm Jim's core mechanics.
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I always get the sense that people loved Killer Instinct, which is such a mystery to me. If anything, it reveals the absolute worst of Rare. People like to remember Rare for their more whimsical titles like Viva Pinata and Banjo, or alternately for GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, but no one seems to remember how deeply, grotesquely '90s they were as a studio. Everything they made in a certain period was this jumble of lifeless, messy blob of faux-Todd McFarlane ugliness, and no game more singularly represents that than Killer Instinct.
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Tough to imagine a less likable fighting game than Primal Rage. In concept, I can see the idea: a bunch of monsters and dinosaurs square off against one another on a 2D plane, kids'll love it, it'll be violent, blah blah blah. But does playing as a T-Rex make sense in the context of a 2D fighter? Does King Kong? Other fighting games star a variety of people with a variety of body types, strengths and speeds - in Primal Rage, you're just one big lumbering giant smacking another big lumbering giant to death.
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The thing about retro superhero games is that, broadly speaking, they're all exactly the same lowest common denominator beat 'em ups. The key differentiator between them is that they all typically feature one gimmick related to their protagonist: in Wolverine, the player can pop out Wolverine's claws, in Spider-Man the player can swing from the ceiling, in Batman the player can throw batarangs, etcetera.
Of these gimmicks, you could argue that The Incredible Hulk has the most interesting one: when Hulk's health bar is depleted he is reduced to his human alter ego, Bruce Banner, rather than dying outright. Banner doesn't have any combat abilities to speak of and instead has to crawl to avoid enemies until the player either returns to Hulk form or dies. In other words, in spite of the fact that this is a game about the Hulk, the most chaotic and destructive character in comic books, levels are anachronistically designed to accommodate a character who can neither hurt or destroy. Pretty weird, if you ask me.
That's about all there is to talk about here, though. There's nothing to Incredible Hulk, really. It's more graceless recycled beat 'em up content. Virtually all of the NES/SNES-era superhero games are boring. They seem to consider a potential for physical violence the be-all-end-all of the superhero. Consequently, all of Marvel and DC's colorful characters are reduced to big men who stride down alleys and city streets clobbering faceless henchman. That's just about the least interesting thing you could do with a superhero video game.
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Always makes worst of all time lists because it's so flagrantly idiotic, but to be clear, Shaq Fu's worst quality isn't Shaq - it's the glacial, clumsy fighting that does it in. It's so boring! Unlike other trash titles, this one doesn't even pass muster as an irony playthrough because it's so difficult to care about.
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