1998 Ranked
1998 is one of those all-timer years, right?
List items
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While the critical appraisal of Metal Gear Solid's story was hyperbolic at the time, I can understand the impulse: Metal Gear Solid is probably the one game from this era that you could play through today without any baggage or conditions set by its age. It's a great anti-war spy thriller in its own right, check-marked by at least 12 different memorable set pieces and boss fights. In fact, Metal Gear Solid surpasses many of today's narrative games thanks purely to the fact that it's pacing is *stellar.* In terms of both the slow iteration of its game mechanics and the steady reveal of its central mystery, Metal Gear Solid never treads water, wastes time, or languishes in unnecessary spectacle. It's a rare, perfect video game.
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Ocarina of Time is the best Legend of Zelda. It's one of the only titles in the series that isn't about replication or the displacement of series tropes to retrofit a new adventure into an old format. In a very literal way, Ocarina of Time is about the legacy of the Zelda series, and the legacy of video games more broadly. The original Legend of Zelda was intended to emulate a childlike fantasy of adventure, of playing pretend in the backyard with swords and costumes. Ocarina of Time, despite the fact that it uses the same general format, monsters, and abstract core game design tenets, is more complicated: Ocarina of Time is about feeling your naive, youthful perception of people and places wash away, revealing something darker and more difficult to grapple with underneath.
This focus on the increasing complexity and responsibility inherent to adulthood is what separates Ocarina of Time from other Zelda titles. Ocarina of Time's Hyrule is an interconnected space in which the effects of actions on behalf of both the protagonists and antagonists are evident. During the siege of Hyrule castle, citizens are displaced. The economy changes and businesses struggle. Homes are abandoned and ruined. Younger figures of state are forced to solve impossible problems as social structures collapse and the old leaders die out. There's a lot going on, and your role as the player is to mitigate the damage, rather than prevent it.
Other Zelda games just don't take their worlds or fictional cultures as seriously. Wind Waker's Hyrule is a series of discrete spaces who only sort of cohere into a broader society, and even then only symbolically, through the primary supporting cast. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, for their part, depict Hyrule as a collection of discrete societies who suffer from the effects of disaster but which are nevertheless powerless and disconnected. Breath of the Wild takes place so long after its calamity that its remaining denizens don't even know or care about the calamity itself.
Ocarina of Time understands that, as an adventure game, an enormous part of the narrative experience is generated from the setting. The adventure genre, itself, implies a certain grand traversal of space. In order to make a great adventure game, then, the spaces the player encounters should be unique, as well as thematically and materially resonant with the rest of the experience. Ocarina of Time's simple directive - to return to the spaces you grew up in again as an adult, after a disaster - adds a tremendous weight to those encounters.
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Half-Life was exemplary in 1998 for its colorful narrative, but that colorful narrative was primarily used as set dressing for the game's first person corridor shooting. That said, Half-Life is still a game that's very much worth studying because, set dressing or not, Valve nailed the schlocky, late '90s horror aesthetic. Half-Life's mathematically perfect understanding of player behavior enabled them to craft some of the most memorable jump scares and set pieces of the '90s. If nothing else, it's an extremely fun example of how narrative design can be used to enhance games that otherwise are more interested in the play experience.
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While the original Baldur's Gate pales in comparison to its sequel both in scope and narrative complexity, it's a riveting western RPG in its own right. Baldur's Gate II features an endless variety of player choices which are both deep and wide - that is to say, Badur's Gate II's player choices are both meaningful in a plot sense and infinitely variable and context-dependent. The first Baldur's Gate doesn't have a comparable import of plot-related choices, but it's scope of choice is, at least, just as wide. If Baldur's Gate II uses D&D mechanics to tell a story which is elevated above the level of 99% of actual tabletop roleplaying stories, then Baldur's Gate is, instead, a platonic ideal of what a tabletop roleplaying story can do. The plot is broad fantasy stuff and the characters are mostly archetypical, but the sheer variety in what those narrative components can or will do is genuinely wild.
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Few games have a place in my heart the way The House of the Dead 2 does. For my money, this game is the best interactive B-movie ever developed. While a significant portion of its kitschy appeal comes from its bizarre English localization (and its unforgettably weird voice performances), its tendency to go weird rather than gross is an intentional creative choice that makes for a timeless lightgun shooter; the fact that this game was later transmogrified into The Typing of the Dead, a game designed to better the user's word-per-minute ration through the power of typing-based zombie murder, is no coincidence, is what I'm saying. The House of the Dead 2 is the ultimate "they understood the assignment" game.
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The core gameplay in Bomberman Hero is good - it's like a tougher, more variable Mario 64 with a lot of thrown projectiles - but what really makes it great is its aesthetic. Bomberman Hero posesses one of the all-time greatest soundtracks in a video game *ever,* and goes for broke with some truly surreal visuals. Easily one of the most interesting titles in the genre, if not also one of the best.
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The platonic ideal of a King of Fighters game, '98 has a perfect cast of characters and stages. Personally, I think I prefer 2002: Unlimited Match for the sheer early aughts energy which courses through that game, but as far as the 'perfect' KoF experience goes, I'd say this is it.
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Thief: The Dark Project is a foundational video game released in a year resplendent with foundational video games. It also happens to be the *worst* among its peers in this celebrated category. While a contemporary player may find themselves pleasantly surprised by how alike 1998's Canonized Video Games feel to the games they inspired, they will undoubtedly leave Thief thinking instead about how a game like Dishonored does so much more with the same basic pieces. Thief: The Dark Project is foundational, that's true, but it's also a maddening, brazenly illogical romp through a cruel level designer's acute madness; in other words, it is a bad great game.
Let me explain. First, consider what the rest of the games on this list went on to inspire in the industry. Baldur's Gate deeply widened the scope of what 'role playing' could entail as a verb. Ocarina of Time a theretofore unheard of combination of scale and intimacy, re-conceptualizing what the 'adventure game' could be. Half Life seamlessly blended coherent environmental storytelling with traditional FPS combat. Fallout 2 broadened the possibility space of player expression via dialogue and faction alignment. Thief: The Dark Project, for its part, was the first 'immersive simulation' game, a non-traditional first person stealth title that emphasized unique problem solving and patience on the part of the player rather than the rapid violence of a Doom or a Quake (or a Half Life).
However, Thief was not the *only* foundational stealth title released in 1998. Metal Gear Solid, the semi-isometric PS1 stealth classic came out this year, too. Contrasting Thief against Metal Gear is enlightening: whereas Metal Gear Solid is a heavily directed, linear experience which also gives the player a wide range of actions with legible and guaranteed consequences, Thief features non-linear, interconnected levels populated by enemies that have more complex routines than 'walk back and forth in a perfectly measurable way.'
In Metal Gear Solid, a player can interrupt enemy guards who respond in a 'binary' way, because guards in Metal Gear are only ever in one of three states of being: patrolling, searching for the player, or actively hunting the player. Metal Gear Solid will also visually signal which state an enemy is in at any given time via the use of on-screen UI. Thief, meanwhile, simply allows it's enemies to break out of their patrol patterns organically if they hear a noise or see an open door. If a Thief guard sees a dead body, they might (might) decide to figure out what happened, or if they catch the player they'll either fight or run for the alarm. Thief guards might be assigned to 'patrol routes' in each level like Metal Gear guards are, but the number of factors that go into their decision-making is much broader. In Metal Gear, if a guard breaks his patrol route, it's either because the player made an error or because the player decided to intentionally distract them. In Thief, guards can completely abandon their post because they, say, heard a cup fall, or an alarm go off. Once Thief guards abandon their post to search for the player, they can end up *anywhere.* I once set off an alarm during a Thief level, which led to nearly every guard in the area wandering into a single room, standing by the alarm sound indefinitely, allowing me to freely explore a level that was supposed to be filled with enemy patrols. The sheer number of dynamic elements in a Thief level are much higher than a Metal Gear level, but the chances of those dynamic elements upending the entire intended experience is *much, much* greater than Metal Gear.
The end result is that Metal Gear levels are *much* easier to experiment with than Thief levels thanks to Metal Gear's transparently video game-y nature. In Metal Gear, guards will 'reset' from an alert status back to patrol status if the player hides from them, reverting a level back to the way it was before the player interrupted it. In Thief, guards' behavior can flip-flop rambling dementia patients and vicious murder hornets. The player either outsmarts them when they are clueless or is killed by them when they are insane machines with an unquenchable thirst for blood - a behavior which, it should be noted, can be easily circumvented by simply spinning around the alerted guards and slapping them in the ass with a sword. If the player can remain in the shadows, Thief levels are either tense or hilariously slapstick, depending on the player's tactics, or they're reduced to the video game A.I. equivalent of a Three Stooges episode. In other words, the simulation in Metal Gear Solid works regardless of how well the player is doing, because what is happening and why it is happening is always clear. in Thief, the simulation either works (if the player is operating with perfect care) or it falls to the floor screaming and crying if the player decides to experiment with it too forcefully.
The non-linear possibilities in Metal Gear are relatively simple. During Metal Gear's opening sequence, the player can infiltrate the enemy base through the front door, or a vent, or a side-door, all of which are telegraphed to the player in a cutscene. Because the consequences of the player's actions in this scenario are instantly evident, experimentation feels worthwhile, even in this very basic example of non-linear gameplay. The first time a player progresses through the Metal Gear intro, they might find themselves in a tough spot surrounded by guards when they enter the enemy base, but the next time they try, if they trick a guard into leaving his post and enter through the side door, they'll have found that they skipped about half of the guards in the room by entering it from a different angle. That's great! In Thief, by contrast, every level loops back in on itself multiple times over, via incomprehensible tunnels and secret passageways, to grant the player a variety of approaches for infiltration and exfiltration. This *sounds* cool, but the sheer number of possible pathways in any given Thief level make exploration frustrating and nonsensical. Finding a hidden path can either mean you've found a way towards your objective or yet another cavern that loops back around to an earlier portion of the level, and the difference between the two is never perceptible thanks to Thief's unconventional architectural design. There are always just as many branching paths forward as there are backwards, and personally, I seemed to discover each and every pathway, from every direction, every time I tried to get anywhere in this game.
What I'm saying is, Thief: The Dark Project is a *conceptual* masterpiece, but an abject source of frustration in execution. While Thief may have introduced complex design philosophies into a medium which would've considered Half Life's hyper-speed mish-mash of B-movie-isms to be the apex of video game narratives, its innovations are ultimately theoretical thanks to its nonsensical level design. People are *constantly* revisiting 1998's games and discussing their inspirational qualities on the internet - far fewer people return to Thief with that same elegiac energy, and for good reason.
Part of the problem is that Thief gives the player a semi-robust tool set to tackle its levels, yet these tools only occasionally work as advertised. I was intrigued to be given 'rope arrows' early on in the game, an arrow type that drops a climbable rope from any surface it attaches to, only to find that 90% of the game's surfaces do not accommodate them. There are also gas arrows that explode and incapacitate any enemies in the blast radius, which would be great if the blast radius wasn't mere inches from the point of impact. Lethal and non-lethal mines, similarly, have a bizarre two foot long range which makes using them a gamble thanks to the shambling nature of the enemy A.I. It's safer and easier to hide in the shadows and club people in the back of the head, which is...fine, I guess, but also very silly when you see it in action, and difficult to actually pull off.
Still, there's a lot of good here, too. Thief's general 'look' is excellent, a hodgepodge of low fantasy, anachronistic steampunk post-industrialization, and gothic horror. Even given my frustrations with the level design, the sheer *weirdness* of later levels really is something else. There was a sequence towards the end called "The Lost City," in which the player unearths the ruins of an ancient society, and it's *awesome.* The city is powered by magic and filled with traps, which leads to some really interesting and unique challenges. Unearthing ancient living quarters, lights flickering on and off as I sulked from room to room, it occurred to me that Thief had accomplished the same, specific flavor of alien tomb raiding that The Outer Wilds would, except nearly two decades before that game was even a rough sketch in the minds of its developers.
The problem, for me, is that these moments are exceptions to the rest of the experience. I think the final nail in the coffin for Thief is that the narrative, while certainly appreciable on its merits, just isn't captivating enough on its own to justify the futility of the gameplay experience. For all its little moments of wonder, the hours and hours of torturous trail-and-error maze-running irrevocably anchor its potential.
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I don't think there's any game in what is broadly accepted as the 'video game canon' with a more fabricated legacy than Fallout 2. I had some high hopes for playing this game after hearing so much about it's deep, complex political and ethical choices and its wide potential for player expression. More than anything, I was excited to play through Fallout 2 to finally experience what has repeatedly been described to me as the greatest American satire in video games. Fallout 2 is, almost point-for-point, not expressly pursing any of the merits bestowed upon it. It's not a satire so much as a broad, Mad TV parody of American entertainment occasionally punctuated by some low-hanging fruit political comedy.
I'm not even necessarily saying all this as a critique, but just as a statement of fact. The idea that Fallout 2 is a searing political satire and that Fallout 3 is this anti-satirical fall from grace for the Fallout series is an invention. If anything, Fallout 2's political commentary is such a figure-eight knot of unexamined American presumptions that it makes a better accidental example of America brain than an example of considered commentary.
Firstly, this game is racist. Straight up. Fallout 2 contains infrequent examples of out-and-out, unrestrained racist ideology. You encounter it right away, as the game begins by depicting an inherently imperialistic imaginary of what a "tribe" is and what a "tribes" potential community consists of - which, in this case, is racist depictions of drug-addicted shamans who speak in riddles. Shortly thereafter, you encounter the game's first companion, a slave who is a broad amalgamation of various Carribean attributes with stereotypically "tribal" penchants for 'speaking with spirits' and bonking guys with clubs. Much later, you end up in a Chinese-occupied San Francisco, and find that every Chinese NPC makes jokes about your 'weird' American eyeballs - the joke being, presumably, that it would be funny for Chinese people to make as many racist assumptions about skinfolds on the eyes that Americans tend to?
Second, the *vast* majority of Fallout 2's characterization and quest design either adopt a Hobbes-ian libertarian understanding of civilization or a broad referential '90s comedy. You can encounter a city called New Reno late in the game, for example. Unlike New Vegas, the titular hub city from the 2010 Fallout title, New Reno does not posses a series of factions with complicated belief systems which intersect and become embattled with one another. New Reno is built entirely from movie references. One ruling gang consists entirely of references to The Godfather. A boxing club has a quest that culminates in a Mike Tyson bit in which a character called the Masticator chews off your (or you chew off his) ear. This isn't exactly searing commentary. 90% of this game consists of murderers or drug pushers lamenting anarchy (or, at one point, quote, "a sort of Darwinian struggle" in which only the strong survive), and the other 10% consists of references to, like, The Blues Brothers.
That's not to say Fallout 2 isn't a good game. It is a good game! Speaking purely as a point of comparison between it and the rest of the industry as of the 1990s, the only games offering a potential for dynamic player expression were this and Baldur's Gate - and, well, the original Fallout. There are plenty of moments, on a pure game design level, in which I was surprised by the lengths the game would go to in order to fulfill on its promise of role playing. You can have a child who gets their own backstory if you have sex in the open world without birth control, for God's sake. There's a lot of stuff to chew on. That stuff just isn't within the upfront narrative. Fallout 2 is a good game - it's just not a *great* game, and certainly not a great satire.
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Einhander is one of the flatout coolest bullet-hell shooters ever made. The game is set in a Blade Runner-esque dystopia and features unusually high production values for a 3D game of its type. Einhander is the only time I've played a game like this and kept going with it because I wanted to see what was going on its *story,* That's *weird* for a bullet-hell game, right? Especially considering it's a late '90s title.
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Marvel Vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes was the last of the Capcom Vs. games to really make sense to me. Don't get me wrong - I think MvC 2 and 3 are great games, but my appreciation for them is almost entirely due to the fact that they are overwhelming, bat-shit insane arcade fighters with immaculate spectacle. The thing is, I don't like playing them competitively at all. Marvel vs. Capcom's relatively understated (only in comparison to MvC 2 and 3 would a game like this be referred to as "understated") list of characters and additional mechanics makes for a more enjoyable and accessible fighter overall.
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Spyro is a great game for all the reasons people say it's a great game. The part that most impresses me about Spyro is that it's got a real sense of speed. If you think about it, of the 3D platformers of the era, Spyro was the *only* game with a sense of speed. Super Mario 64 was the high watermark of the genre at the time, and even that game had to make a huge concessions to its protagonist's ability set in order to compensate for bigger non-linear environments. Hell, even Sonic the goddamned Hedgehog slowed to a crawl in his series' first adaptation.
Insomniac was the developer that solved the puzzle, and it's largely due to Spyro's unique character design. Spyro isn't a *dude,* he's a dragon. He's got four legs and wings, which means he's faster than a dude, but he can't turn on a dime. The reason why this is important is because, in order for Spyro to move at an adequate pace, he needs to *gallop,* not run. Locomotion is the primary mode of movement in Spyro the Dragon. You can run just as fast as the old 2D platformers used to let you in this game, but you have to commit to a direction before doing so.
The thing that really blows a hole this game, though, are its collectibles. While the majority of Spyro the Dragon has the player complete a standard six-ish tasks per level to unlock dragon statues - this game's equivalent of Mario 64's stars or Banjo-Kazooie's jigsaw pieces - Spyro is also weirdly fixated on the player rounding up tertiary collectibles: gems.
Gems are like wompa fruit in Crash Bandicoot or rings in the Sonic series, except gems are much worse. Collecting *every single hidden gem* in this game is a requisite to unlock the final level, which is itself one big gem collect-athon. Worse still, the game measures the gem collection completion rate per level by *value percentage* and not the number of missed collectible objects. In other words, if the game tells you you're missing 10 gems in a level, that could either mean you failed to collect 10 1-value gems, 2 5-value gems,1 10-value gem, or any combination of the three. It's a *huge* pain in the ass.
Spyro the Dragon's other core problem is that its 'locomotion' concept makes difficult objectives needlessly frustrating. Certain objectives require the player to run through a gauntlet that encompasses and *entire stage,* which means that if you beef it at the end you have to walk all the way back to the beginning of the obstacle course, like a kid waiting in line to get back on a rollercoaster. Funnily enough, Insomniac *never* solves this problem! All of the original Spyro games feature sections in which you're just kinda walking around.
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Tomb Raider III has no illusions about itself or its importance to games or the rest of the Tomb Raider series - this game is a very straightforward collection of Tomb Raider levels. It's a little less predisposed towards gunplay than Tomb Raider II, has about a quarter of the narrative of the original, but it's got more variety to its locales than either game in about half the time. It's more Tomb Raider, and that's about it.
I have fond memories of this game the way I have fond memories of, say, the Roger Moore James Bond films. Speaking broadly, this is the series on autopilot, sure, but confidently making more of what you already no with little regard for anything else ends up making Tomb Raider III *weirder* than if the devs had the pretense of making an 'important' series entry; this game has a kind of 'first thought, best thought' vibe to it that it wouldn't had the devs committed to a specific concept.
I mean, compare Tomb Raider III to its sequel, Tomb Raider: Revelations. That game is an endless series of linear Egyptian tombs peppered by expositional cutscenes.Tomb Raider III, though, is the game where the final boss turns into a *12-foot spider-god with a human man's face,* for some reason. It's the game where Lara Croft goes to *Nevada,* USA, to shoot up a prison. And that's incredible!
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Yoshi's Story has been basically forgotten by Nintendo, and I think that's a shame. This game is a 2D platformer that uses the same general mechanics of the original Yoshi's Island, but it commits to a storybook aesthetic which shapes the entire experience. There's some really strong art direction and sound design in this game. I don't think it works all that well as a platformer, but it's iconoclastic art design makes it the kind of game you'll remember playing, way more so than other games in the genre with more traditional visual design. It's sort of like Kirby's Epic Yarn, but earlier, and with a butt-ton of multi-colored Yoshis.
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There is a rich history of Nintendo's smaller studios making weird as hell stuff that no one remembers like three years on from their existence; of these games, Game Boy Camera is one of the best. While on the surface Game Boy Camera appears to merely be a cartridge-based camera peripheral for the original Game Boy, it's also an extremely strange minigame collection that uses uploaded photos to generate custom enemies and player avatars. It was also an extremely early photo editor, allowing the player to append stickers or draw overtop of its photos.
3DS owners may remember that the 3DS also contained pre-installed software which roughly did the same thing using that device's camera, too, but I promise you Game Boy Camera was weirder. Example: one of the mini-games was titled "Space Fever II," and allowed the player to replace boss enemies with custom images. This mystified me as a kid, because...why *two*? What happened to Space Fever I? I spent quite a bit of time trying to 'unlock' Space Fever I in Space Fever II, but what my little baby brain didn't understand was that Space Fever II was actually a direct sequel to Nintendo's 1979 Space Invaders knock-off, titled "Space Fever." No way I was gonna figure that out without the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Another mini-game: "Run! Run! Run!," in which a stick figure with the player's face stapled onto it is pursued relentlessly by a bird. Or: "DJ," a WarioWare-esque chiptune remix game which I'm pretty sure preceded every piece of DJ remix software in the video game industry.
None of the minigames in Game Boy Camera are super compelling on their own, but as a pastiche of weird, inventive ideas which make use of the camera peripheral, Game Boy Camera was pretty fascinating. I feel like the central design ethos of this game draws a direct lineage to Nintendo's other forgotten but equally fascinating Tomodachi Life.
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It's funny to think about how little Pokemon has changed since this first entry. This is a series built on a *sturdy* foundation, man - at least, a sturdy foundation for a miniature multi-media industry of its own. As far as the singular experience of playing Pokemon goes, I really don't think it's worth differentiating one entry from one another all that much. The scenery's different each time, there's always new monsters. At the end of the day, though, Pokemon [New Concept/vs. Oppositional Concept] will always be the same old gotcha-game comfort food Red/Blue were.
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The quality of Midway's Rush games is completely circumstantial. These are inelegant racing games with bizarre physics, matchbox-looking cars, and weird-but-only-sort-of-weird stage designs - but, as party games, they're *incredible.* Yes - incredible. Despite the wishy-washiness of the racing gameplay, Rush 2 features a delectable stunt mode which turns the game's bizarre physics into an asset. The Rush games are *very* fun to play casually, too. They're a sort of Cruisin' USA for the person who has only ever played Mario Kart but really likes it when cars explode. An untapped market, you might say.
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Crash Bandicoot: Warped was the last 'original' Crash game. It's got a much wider feature set than the original titles and a fun time travel hook. It's all pretty good, but none of it is really *great.*
Actually, strike that, one part of this game is great: the environmental art is phenomenal. I'm not a huge fan of the general art direction in these games, but the stage design in Warped really pushed the PS1 to its technical limits. Most levels feature backgrounds that actually scale dynamically depending on where the player is in a level, with background
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This high-budget, presentationally stellar arcade title recreates action sequences from the Star Wars original trilogy in light gun format, with some additional flight mechanics thrown in for good measure. Despite the fact that Trilogy Arcade can be reduced to 'just a lightgun shooter,' it does a phenomenal job of transmogrifying Star Wars into a rollercoaster ride, and it took on something of a mystical quality in my mind playing it in the arcade as a kid. You wouldn't expect it, but Trilogy Arcade has a real sense of momentum to its flight and gravity to its shooting. While building a game like this has natural limits as to what you can accomplish with the Star Wars license, if you had to make a Star Wars arcade lightgun shooter, I really don't think you could do better than this.
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Lots of developers were chasing Mario 64's popularity, and despite this game's lower placement on this list, I don't think any series outside of maybe Spyro came as close as the Gex games did. While the general game design and level design is interchangeable with any wannabe Banjo-Kazooie platformer, Gex had something extra: it was a transparently bad idea for a video game, to such an extent that it's kind of fascinating to experience. Every other 3D platformer knew it needed a cute mascot to compete with Mario, Crash, Spryo, Banjo, and all the rest of the kids TV crowd, but the Gex series was like...'well, what if our mascot is a reptilian vehicle for Dana Gould bits?' So you have a completely stock-standard Banjo-Kazooie game except the entire time Banjo is throwing out these *terrible* impressions of TV stars from the '70s and '80s who you *definitely* don't know if you're in the game's target audience. Truly bizarre.
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Glover had something important which separated it from, say, Jersey Devil, or Banjo-Kazooie, or Gex, or Crash Bandicoot, or any other mascot platformer: it had a mascot whose special abilities were immediately legible in both a literal sense and a gameplay sense. Glover is a glove balancing on a ball. He is not a anthropomorphized bandicoot with wrestling moves or a lizard who, uh...goes inside of television shows. Glover is an intelligent glove that moves like a human hand does. It rides on a ball and interacts with that ball the way a human hand interacts with a ball. The gameplay possibilities make sense instantly when you're playing it. That means something!
All that being said, Glover still wasn't that great of a platformer. Like other mascot platformers of the era, the gameplay was weirdly swimmy and noncommittal, sometimes frustrating, and occurred within muddy approximations of regurgitated level design conceits.
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Bomberman rocks, but the potential for the series as a pick-up-and-play portable title is weirdly unexplored. Bomberman GB isn't an especially colorful or fully-featured Bomberman title, but it got the basics right. Sunk a pretty decent chunk of hours into this as a kid.
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Like many Star Wars games of the N64/PS1 generation, Rogue Squadron was ultimately appreciated largely thanks to the fact that it crammed a lot of Star Wars into the modest shape of the early 3D era, and not because Rogue Squadron was an especially innovative or, really, even very good flight combat game. Rogue Squadron has the original trilogy's most iconic ships and it feels fun enough to play with, but it lacks a compelling story, and it does very little to emulate the feel of a Star Wars movie. While it's worth taking the N64's requisite technical limitations into account, there's also no denying the fact that this is a muddy, blurry-looking video game. At the end of the day, it's Rogue Squadron II that earned fans' nostalgia - Rogue Squadron, however, is better left remembered than replayed.
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Apocalypse is one of the most interesting games from the '90s that nobody ever talks about. First off, it's a Neversoft game developed immediately before that studio was irrevocably revamped as the Tony Hawk studio; both games use the same engine, and a prototype for the Tony Hawk series was developed alongside this game. Second, it's got a somewhat infamous backstory, in that it was a game that originally starred a generic protagonist with Bruce Willis co-starring as a supporting character, but then Neversoft got nervous with the idea and recast Bruce Willis as the protagonist, in spite of the fact that they obviously didn't have a lot of recorded voice work from Willis. Third, it's a 3D, d-pad based shooter, in the vein of, say, Smash TV or Geometry Wars. Fourth, it presents itself with this energy that it's about to be the next big action series in video games, produced on a blockbuster scale, despite the fact that it's mostly just a pretty neat Smash TV-alike with some '90s hyperviolence. I don't think Apocalypse is a *great* game, mind you, but it is one of the more memorable games released in 1998.
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This obscure action game advertised itself as a product of the Tomb Raider devs, but it's clear pretty much right away when you play it that this game is a fraction of the size of Tomb Raider. Ninja; Shadow of Darkness is a 3D beat 'em up with some occasionally terrible platforming thrown in...and that's pretty much all it is.
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Somehow, there are a bunch of video games with the premise, 'this video game will pyschoanalyze you, the player.' Think Until Dawn, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, some of the Metal Gear games. Tender Loving Care is a psychosexual FMV drama that purports to do the same thing, but it's substantially worse than just about any other game in the category. This game is *wildly* exploitative, but seems to consider its regressive depictions of mental illness and sexual abuse as more arthouse than campy nonsense. What this means in practice is that Tender Loving Care is a *very* unintentionally funny game that proudly drops the ball on just about every narrative component it possesses. Of the '90s-era ludicrous FMV games, this one is arguably the most embarrassing.
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Banjo-Kazooie has just about every quality people popularly hate about mascot platformers, but it's got the Rare pedigree behind it, so nostalgia has trumped taste in our collective remembrance. That sort of doesn't matter - play Mario 64, Bomberman 64, Spyro the Dragon, or, hell, even the deliriously unhinged Sonic Adventure games - and the contrast in quality between Banjo-Kazooie and the other AAA mascot platformers is *wild*. Banjo-Kazooie has its highlights (that submarine level was fair), but it's a deeply boring and unremarkable thing in and of itself.
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The PS1 and N64 Rugrats games were cursed objects. Speaking literally, they were all fairly generic minigame collections, but in practice...there was something cold and broken in these rough sketches of infantile cartoon-ery. Something *cursed*.
In Search for Reptar, angular, mechanical, 4-foot tall infants scrabble around empty houses collecting insane jewels and begging for the warm light of other people (the warm light never comes (except for in cutscenes, of course, in which case the parents unceremoniously re-appear in seconds-long respites from the alien wasteland of the rest of their waking hours).
The houses have the liminal quality of nightmares. Why are all the lights on if no one is home? Why is no one home? Why can't I *leave*?
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Look, I'm just going to say it: the Twisted Metal games are all bad. That's right. They're *all* sort of crappy. The driving mechanics are shitty and the combat mechanics are much worse. Is this a step down from Twisted Metal 1 and 2? Sure, I guess. Is it *considerably* worse than those games? Not at all! This was a 'playing it safe' sequel in a kinda dumb series. It's fine.
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As far as half-assed movie licensed games are concerned, this one's fine. Not particularly bad. Basic platforming stuff, some gentle puzzle solving, lots of planting seeds which produce a variety of tools. Boring.
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Ahhhh the late '90s...back then, you were either one of the 75% of video game players flipping between hundreds of interchangeable 3D platforming mascots or you were one of the remaining 25% of players who were experiencing breakthrough titles that were building the foundation of an entire medium of expression. Unfortunately for me, I was in the former category.
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Completely insane grapplehook-based racing game in which everyone plays as a Madballs knockoff. That's right - a Madballs *knockoff*. Do people even know what Madballs *were* anymore?? The big problem with Iggy's Reckin' Balls is that the player navigates the courses by shooting out a grapple hook-tendril out of their head, vertically, at which point they can transition to a different orbital track. In other words, you're constantly reaching upwards towards aspects of the level that are just out of reach. This means that not only is the finish line out of sight for the entire race, but *so is every other part of the race track*. Incomprehensible.
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Space Station Silicon Valley is fuckin' *weird*. The concept was that you, a little microchip with legs, could insert yourself into the brain of any given animal in a level and solve a number of discrete puzzles with those animals' unique abilities. The problem is, this game is *buck-wild* in how ugly it is. We're talking ugly hall of fame, here. Just a sloppy, blurry, undulating mass of horrifically British, neutral-toned geometry. Awful.
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I say this without any exaggeration: ReBoot for the PS1 is maybe the most inscrutable video game I've ever played. Granted, I played this when I was *really* young, so keep that in mind, but still: I found ReBoot more difficult to parse then than I find intentionally surreal indies or half-finished prototypes of games leaked online difficult to parse now. The reason why this is remarkable is because this game is an adaptation of a children's television show.
The premise is: your legs are locked onto a hover-skateboard which controls like a lawnmower. A pistol is glued to your hand. The game begins in an open area. Because of technical limitations, you're only able to see what is about ten feet ahead of you. When gameplay begins, a timer counts down. Enemies roam the open area hunting you. You gotta find thingies before the timer ticks down, otherwise everything explodes and dies. Again, it's worth saying that I only ever played this game as a child, but, y'know - this was a video game adaptation of a *children's show* so I think it's fair to expect some general legibility to younger players.
Either way, what a weird, fucked up game this was!
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