1996 Ranked
There's a lot of foundational games made in 1996 that get referenced a whole lot more than they get revisited.
List items
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Super Mario 64 was the first video game I ever played. I know this beyond a shadow of a doubt because playing Super Mario 64 is the first *memory* I have. To say that playing it was fundamental to my understanding of video games, entertainment, and *the concept of media itself* would be an understatement.
So, all of that being said, I've done quite a bit of thinking as to what it means that my first experience as a consumer of art and media. Put as simply as possible: I don't think I've ever gotten over the way Super Mario 64 constructed adventure. The world of Super Mario 64 is so simple, but there's an elegance to it, structurally, that even the arguably *better* games in the Mario series do not possess: there is an open hub full of magical doors which each lead to a completely distinct, unique space. As these unique spaces are excavated for their stars, more doors become unlocked in the hub world, which unlocks more spaces.
The intersecting mystery in Super Mario 64 is ingenious. There is *something* behind that locked door, and because this is a Mario title, it could *be anything.* A haunted mansion, a submarine hangar, a mega-clock that changes depending on when you enter it, a cosmic slip n' slide floating within the black infinite of the abyss - anything! Each level is its own little pocket plane of nonsensical Mario-isms; little ecosystems with their own rules, creatures and challenges.
Nothing ever gets stale because the possibility space is *incredibly* wide. No other game in the Mario series is quite as extravagant, even games which feature the same hubworld structure. Super Mario World features distinct 'types' of levels, but they're generally reducible to variations on five or six broad level design concepts. Super Mario Sunshine and Galaxy might *function* the way 64 does, but levels in those games are all variations under the umbrella concept of 'Island Vacation' and 'Space Travel', respectively. These games have the same whimsy, sure, but they're lacking the sense of discovery, the perpetual roller coaster feeling you get when you whiplash between a kingdom of quicksand and the Loch Ness monster's ancient hideaway.
If nothing else, Super Mario 64 is an evergreen source of 'why not?'-isms. This is a manufactured virtual space in which *anything* that a developer can decide fits, fits. *Why not* fill it with flying pirate ships and battlefields of sentient explosives? A video game is an opportunity to manifest the fantastic. Anything can happen.
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I think pretty much any contemporary player diving in to the original Tomb Raider for the first time will find that it's rough to play, and, yes, sort of excruciating to look at. But Tomb Raider is a game that's much greater than the some of its (very) roughly sketched parts. While Tomb Raider's plot and traversal mechanics are finnicky, there is an impressive amount of care in Lara Croft's character animations, and of her characterization generally. And the game has atmosphere to spare! It would be reasonable to assume this game is full of schlocky faux-Mayan tombs and other Indiana Jones knockoff concepts, but sometimes its levels are haunting and intricate. And...sometimes they're big, blocky rain forests filled with dinosaurs. Or a Lovecraftian flesh pit. Either way, Tomb Raider is a an engrossing, weirdly unsettling, iconic game.
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Shadows of the Empire is underappreciated, even by Star Wars fans. I think the reason is because the primary game mechanics are really, really simple; need to shoot an enemy? Just face in the direction of the enemy and smash that B button. Need to do some platforming? Well slide on over to the edge of that cliffside and float your way to the other platform. Finally got onboard the Millenium Falcon? Good! Welcome to an early on-rails turret sequence!
What makes Shadows of the Empire so good is the variety of spaces available to explore, and in spite of the mechanical simplicity, the range of Star Wars-y actions the player is tasked with. There's a speeder chase a la Return of the Jedi, a Hoth flight combat sequence, an Episode 4 asteroid field escape, and a gunfight against Boba Fett. That's a lot of Star Wars!
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Resident Evil is a landmark title that *just quite* doesn't hit the bar it needs to hold its ground against contemporary titles. It's built like a prestige haunted house, which goes both ways: one the one hand, the adherence to warping a single space for multiple uses over and over is novel, but on the other hand, much of the monster and environment designs use a kitchen sink approach, and it makes the entire project feel kind of...well, stupid. RE1's got giant snakes, giant tarantulas, giant bats, giant...sharks. The design ethos seems to have been: take an animal, make it giant, bloody it up, put it in a room somewhere.
This haphazard, manic approach to world building may have felt like a fun potpourri of horror tropes in the '90s, but now it's sort of laughable. RE2 fairs better comparatively, because that title, at least, goes for broke with the b-movie stuff. RE seems to want you to take it seriously. There's no denying this game's influence, but I wouldn't exactly call it timeless.
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NiGHTS is, flat out, one of the most interesting video games made in the '90s, and that's because it's one of the *weirdest* games of the '90s. And I don't mean to use weird as a pejorative - I mean it as a compliment. The most innovative titles from the '90s all were made famous because of complex and dynamic systems (think Fallout, Thief, Baldur's Gate) or their unprecedented scale and narrative cohesion (think Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy 6). It was a decade of exponential growth in the industry, both from a technical and a creative perspective.
NiGHTS is a whole other can of worms. This game is designed around an *emotional* high concept - to recreate the feeling of weightlessness and the limitless imaginary imagery of dreaming - and hyperfocuses on that end goal, exclusively. The end result is a kaleidoscopic and strangely moving experience which rewards curiosity. The closest equivalent to it would be Rez, of which this game is a progenitor. But the DNA is there! I would argue that Tetris Effect is one the end of a timeline which starts here.
While the raw game mechanics of NiGHTS very much resemble its progenitor series, Sonic the Hedgehog, NiGHTS uses speed and momentum as the underlying basis for the entire play experience, rather than as a kind of special feature that defines an otherwise traditional platformer. This is a game very much about enjoying the moment and experimenting with whatever nonsequitor imagery it puts in front of you, to the extent that failure doesn't even prevent you from continuing to play.
If there's one thing you can fault NiGHTS on, it's that its unfriendly. I can't fault new players for dismissing this game as an incoherent mess, because frankly, it *is* an incoherent mess, partially by design. The thing is, players might have felt more excitement at the concept of experimenting with that mess had SEGA not decided to apply a traditional points-based win/fail state to every level. While I understand the reality of '90s game development precluded short games from being made, especially at a full $50-$70 price point, there's no question that NiGHTS would be a better game without its restrictive score system and time limit.
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A Puzzle of Flesh is frequently atrocious, and it only very occasionally seems to achieve self-awareness of its haphazard look and feel. But it's *compelling*, man. This is a *deeply* weird experience. A Puzzle of Flesh has got a lot of big ideas and it espouses them with a kind of manic, rambling confidence that feels hallucinatory and often unintentionally hilarious.
Despite it's creepy subtitle and hyper-'90s cover art, the vast majority of this game consists of stock-standard 1990s anti-corporatism and a fixation on BDSM counterculture. If nothing else, I'll say that a new player will never in a million years be able to guess where the story is headed at any given moment. Because this is an FMV game it's been kinda forgotten or dismissed an archaic novelty from gaming's sordid history, but straight up, A Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh is a more interesting piece of media than nearly any game released in any given year,
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Tekken 1 and 2 are 'you had to be there' games. If you started playing the series at Tekken 3 like I did, Tekken 1 doesn't seem like an exciting take on a formula established by Virtua Fighter so much as it seems like a moon-gravity smack-a-thon between dolls who *resemble* Tekken characters. Tekken 2 is largely the same, just with a few more bells and whistles this time.
Look - historical import can only take you so far, *especially* with video games. It's an interesting title to try out and it has some style, but it's quite literally the second-to-last Tekken game I'd ever play if given the choice.
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Doom is a perfect video game. Quake, which sought to translate the basic form and function of Doom into fully realized 3D, is an imperfect video game. The reason why isn't that surprising: in spite of the fact that Quake has the same satisfying game-feel as Doom, literally every single one of its component pieces is less interesting than Doom. It's almost funny how perfectly inferior it is. Really, between the following, which would you prefer?
- Doom's satanic monsters vs. "the strogg"
- Doom's pseudo-biblical hell + '90s computer software aesthetic vs. Quake's pseudo-Lovecraftian bio-horror + '90s Todd Macfarlane-esque comic-book-muscle-guy aesthetic
- Doom's hyper-speedy player character vs. Quake's mostly speedy player character
- Doom's kitschy, iconic melodic death metal vs. Quake's moody Nine Inch Nails soundscapes
- Doom's colorful, multi-dimensional, intergalactic levels vs. Quake's beige, anachronistically medieval levels
None of Quake's features, as listed above, are bad - they're all just *definitely* worse than Doom's features. Quake is a perfectly good video game that is nonetheless an obvious step down from the previous title by the same studio.
I like Quake, to be clear! I think it looks cool, it sounds cool and it plays great. But it's a whole lot like Doom - and it ain't no Doom.
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Daggerfall is probably one of the most insane undertakings in video games, both from a developer perspective AND a player perspective. I genuinely don't think any game has ever produced a space as huge as this one with this many layers to the simulation. Fans of this game always point out that it features property ownership as well as actual property taxation rates that can change over time and be manipulated by the player. It's a weirdly boring aspect to include in an action RPG, but it does give a sense of scope to this game: you can roleplay as a Wizard landlord who does tax evasion. Maybe that's meaningful to you!
Daggerfall's Achilles' heel, though, is that it lacks basically all of the stuff that gets me interested in video games. Daggerfall's world is huge and filled with people, but they're *filler* people. It features dozens of cities and many more villages, but they're all copy/paste people and places. There's no way to get attached to a place or to learn about a character, because nearly all of them only exist to further expand the potential space of the fantasy simulation.
This makes Daggerfall a game with a staggering amount of content but also with precious little narrative meaning - at least, precious little *authored* narrative meaning. This makes it an extremely 'your mileage may vary' type of experience.
You could say the same about a game like Minecraft, which gives the player a huge playspace and a robust tool set with which to manipulate the play space but with very little in the way of meaningful ecosystems or interactable societies. The difference for me, though, is that Minecraft gives the player to tools to *build* something meaningful in its world. Daggerfall only lets you inhabit that world. But without any definition to the game's places or complexity in its characters, I guess I just don't get why you'd want to. for more than a little while
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Crash was the defacto PlayStation mascot lacking any better options during the PS1 era, but he was also too insane of a character to be fully paired to Sony's brand like that. This is an extremely timely, '90's-ass character whose powerful jorts cannot be contained by Sony Computer Entertainment.
This first title is difficult in an old-school platformer way, but somehow more insidious thanks to some tricky (and clunky) camera work. Part of what makes the later titles tick is there commitment to consistently showing the player something new: a new environment, a new secret item, a new ability, a new boss battle, etc. Crash 1, by contrast, is nowhere near as colorful.
Upon a revisit, I don't know if I would go as far as saying this first game is a classic. It's a well designed game of its type and a decent amount of the level design is built on solid ground, but it doesn't introduce anything new to the genre. It's a well-built platform punisher that occasionally skewers the player with some total bullshit.
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San Francisco Rush has blessed energy, imo. It's a racing game built by people who love car races conceptually but not literally. The sense of speed is marginal, the handling makes absolutely no sense and it isn't as arcade-zippy as the abstraction of a Ridge Racer, for example, but it gets very specific elements of the arcade racing experience extremely right.
San Francisco Rush is an arcade title that emulates the fantasy of a kid racing Hot Wheels around a kitchen floor. Jumps are impossibly high, loop-de-loops appear out of thin air in courses, explosions happen for no reason at all, and the spectacle always takes precedence over the result.
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It's funny to remember all the old vs. titles, as they largely have been swept under the rug of Marvel vs. Capcom franchise history. If you were a newcomer to the series, you'd probably assume it started with Marvel vs. Capcom. There were actually a couple largely identical permutations on the [Marvel Property] v. [Capcom Property] series, and even more if you count X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes (which, really, you should, for gameplay purposes they're all pretty much the same).
This one isn't a particularly high point - really, not many of them are - but I deeply prefer the simpler MvC 1-style combat, which X-Men vs. Street Fighter has, to the hyper complication of MvC 2-style combo-athons. This is also one of the only match ups that logistically makes sense to me - Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter feels...weirdly unbalanced, somehow?
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Virtual-On might feel a bit weightless considering its a game about battling anime mechs, but if there's one thing it nails it's the spectacle factor. I think I appreciate Vitual-On more in the abstract than in practice, but it's a really neat game either way.
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Jet Moto is one of those '90s relics that wouldn't work in most other cultural contexts without a serious overhaul. Mechanically, it's closest to the cart racing craze of the era, albeit a cart racer with a grappling hook mechanic. There was a TON of Mountain Dew branding in this game, too, if I remember, sort of like how WipeOut had all that Red Bull branding. The whole thing was drowning in surf rock, weird vibes and high sugar soda.
The fact that Jet Moto is so distinct is an asset in certain ways. There are a TON of mechanically similar cart racer-y titles in this vein, but very few of them had this kind of aesthetic footprint.
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As a huge The House of the Dead 2-liker, I have to say, The House of the Dead and The House of the Dead 3 are disappointing. I mean, this game gets points for establishing the formula of the series, but it just isn't as unhinged or bonkers with its cheap horror scares as its sequel. Fine enough, but not especially interesting in and of itself.
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This year's KoF is of middling quality. Once you hit KoF '98, just about everything's functioning at full capacity, but '96 and '97 have barely any identity to call their own. Certain mechanics are streamlined, rosters are changed around, stages are new, etc. etc. etc. Not a ton to write home about, but it's the same quality of fighter as last year, at least.
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Goosebumps is such a surreal mess of a live action B game that I'm not 100% convinced it exists. There's a sequence at the end in which a bunch of demons, whose costumes are just barely holding it together, kidnap the adult actors and all the child actors immediately start laughing and breaking character as they deliver their lines. And this was just left in the final product. Right? Or...am I making this up? Did I really play through this entire game as a kid? Am I even here right now???
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Look: Duke Nukem kinda sucks. There's no amount of '90s nostalgia that makes this game bearable. I'm aware that it features a degree of interactivity with objects in its levels that was considered innovative for the time, but straight up, there is no advancement in video game toilet flushing technology that would excuse how corny this game is. Deeply embarrassing stuff.
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This isometric Sonic title is pretty much a disaster. Of all possible vantage points of the Sonic the Hedgehog experience, is there a worse one than *isometric*? And the emphasis on THREE-D in the title - only in the most generous sense is Sonic 3D Blast a '3D' title in the way Doom or Mario 64 are. A real headache of a video game.
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When I was a kid, I'd play pretty much any game that included skateboarding. This one's more a racing game than a stunt game, and it's also only in pseudo-3D, but - well, actually, there is no but. This is not a very good or interesting game. I will say I spent forever trying to find a game I believed was called 1Xtreme so that I could see the full trilogy, but 1Xtreme doesn't exist. Turns out, the original game was called ESPN Extreme Games. Yeah - *E*xtreme games. It wasn't even called 'ESPN Xtreme Games.' They just took the original title and went, 'eh, it's the '90s,' and produced "2Xtreme." I am retroactively angry about this.
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The Vectorman games have always been a hallmark of the generic video game. None of it is, like, shoddy or half-assed, but every single creative choice is garish. It's not totally un-fun mechanically but just about every element of it is simultaneously boring and unimaginative.
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