1988 Ranked
I might've missed a game or two this year
List items
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Godawful ninja. Running through NY streets at full blast, stabbing neighborhood dogs to death. Terrible ninja
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Super Mario Bros. 2 and its sadistically challenging counterpart, Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels, are more frequently discussed via the merits of their history as opposed to the merits of their actual game design. On one hand, I totally get that, as I don't think either game is capital-G 'Great,' or inherently valuable in a Canon of Video Games kind of way. On the other hand, it's kind of a shame considering how interesting both of them are.
While The Lost Levels is a natural extension of what video games already were in the '80s, Super Mario Bros. 2 (or, if you're from elsewhere in the world, Super Mario Bros. USA) is an early example of what video games *could be.* I'm putting too fine a point on it I guess, but maybe a better way to put it: Super Mario Bros. 2 is weird as a video game in the way that the premise of Super Mario Bros. is weird. The original Super Mario Bros might have a bonkers premise, but the mechanics of the game are just about as traditional as traditional video gaming can get. In Super Mario Bros. 2, the game mechanics fit the outlandishness of the Super Mario premise.
Consider Super Mario Bros. 2's bizarre core mechanic: the player primarily engages with the world by throwing root vegetables at their enemies. The world, too, is bizarre, foregoing the fungal Saturday morning cartoon-fantasy of the original title for hooded figures, floating jester masks, and egg-spitting, orb-containing Birdo, possibly the weirdest enemy in the history of Super Mario Bros.
Rather than tasking the player with an endless series of platforming challenges, Super Mario Bros. 2 intersperses traversal with puzzle-solving. Secrets in the original Super Mario Bros. usually made the game easier, but secrets in Super Mario Bros. 2 are more ambiguous. Sometimes, you jump into a pot and find some coins; other times, you jump into a pot and find yourself in a Limbo-esque shadow world. Sure! Why not.
I don't think all this makes for a *great* game - really, the expectations this sequel subverts are often frustrating, and not a minute went by during my playthrough in which I adjusted to the idea that jumping on an enemy's head in this Mario game *doesn't do anything,* but at the same time, a *ton* of the series' longstanding iconography gets invented here. Luigi grows a few pixels taller than his brother and earns a flutter jump, Toad becomes a playable character in his own right, and Peach's move-set is established. It's a weird, fascinating little game.
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Wasteland is a chaotic mish-mash of wild ideas and it was way ahead of its time, but it's also virtually impossible to engage with thanks to both of these qualities
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Gain Ground is sort of neat: three soldiers from different eras compete in combat arenas that span all of human history. The goal is to either get all three playable characters towards an exit on each screen or to kill every enemy, so a lot of the tactics come down to deciding which character's arsenal fits best with each stage setup. It's pretty basic stuff, but as far as arcade games go, this one's pretty fun to think your way through.
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Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is somehow both impressively ambitious and utterly threadbare. When I say The Adventure of Link is amitious I mean that its core mechanics predate game design trends by literal decades. This game meshes the platformer with the roleplaying game, uses a combination of real-time, side-scrolling combat with traditional experience point-based leveling up, and visually depicts possible random encounters on the overworld map, therefore making them skip-able. In a vacuum, all of these moves demonstrate a level of ingenuity only very rarely seen in '80s game design, and give the impression that this game is a kind of forgotten classic.
On the other hand, Zelda II feels completely perfunctory on a moment-to-moment basis. Everything works, but nothing works well. As an RPG, The Adventure of Link arguably has more going on in terms of narrative than it's infamously obtuse progenitor, but frustratingly little effort was put into the English translation and many of the games discrete locales are *literally* the same place with different location names slapped on. The Adventure of Link may grant us the ability to play a side-scrolling Zelda game, sure, but its side-scrolling sequences are slow, meandering; they lack both tactile joy of the speedy Super Mario obstacle course or the careful, more tactical level design of a Castlevania.
All of this is to say, The Adventure of Link is the kind of game you'll remember having played, but not the kind of game in which you'll remember what you did in it.
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Look, Altered Beast was always awful. Something so unnerving about the way the main character slowly and joylessly obliterates everything in sight. Even worse, his main function is to......expand
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Bad Dudes biggest (only?) defining trait is its slightly incoherent attempt to pander towards American propaganda. That's it. It's a mediocre beat 'em up that lacks a strong identity which nevertheless begins and ends with some truly demented onscreen text.
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