1994: The Kotaku Review | Tim Rogers | Kotaku

hello and welcome back to video games I'm Tim Rodgers you are watching the Kotaku comm review of 1994 the year I specify the year because otherwise you would assume that someone had made a game called 1994 that is the sort of name that an independent developer would give a video game it was the best of times it was the worst of times is the first sentence of Charles Dickens's 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities which we had to read in my English literature class 135 years later in 1994 as Charles Dickens said of London and Paris of 1775 eighty four years later in 1859 as I read one hundred and thirty-five years later in Indianapolis Indiana in 1994 so I say 25 years later in 2019 of video games and my life in 1994 1994 was the best of times to play video games and the worst of times to be me personally I won't mince words in 1994 I was a sweat pants wearing Frankenstein haired morbidly obese myopic bullying victim who spent almost as much time feeling sorry for myself as I spent thinking about video games likewise video games spent about as much time feeling sorry for themselves as they spent thinking about video games as I waited with increasing impatience for my own puberty video games were right in the middle of there's three and four years previous the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis had arrived one year after 1994 we would have the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation two years later we would have Super Mario 64 one year before the hardware madness of 1995 began its yet unceasing explosion we had nine 94 a year of revisionism not of innovation a year of refinement not of reinvention a year of technical mastery not of technological advancement 1994 was a year for game design in 1996 we would have Super Mario 64 in 1994 we had Donkey Kong Country in 1996 we would have quake in 1994 we had doom 2 actually this quote about doom 2 from Wikipedia just about says everything that I'm going to use the remainder of the running time of this video to say in far more flowery prose doom 2 was not dramatically different from its predecessor there were no major technological developments graphical improvements or substantial gameplay changes instead the development team took advantage of advances in computer hardware since the release of the original game that allowed them to do more with their game engine by making much larger and more intricate levels for video games 1994 certainly contained all the awkwardness of a puberty in 1994 they made a pacman - and it was a point-and-click adventure game for consoles in 1994 two completely different video games called vortex came out in 1994 Nintendo followed up Star Fox with stunt race FX in 1994 Konami called the second game in the rocket Knight adventures series sparkster as though someone's mom somewhere knew the name of that possum in 1994 Mortal Kombat brought bloody violence to Nintendo consoles only to squander this milestone with unimaginative fatalities such as Johnny Cage just grabbing his opponents torso and joylessly ripping it off in 1994 a few baby boomers somewhere became aware of the street fighter - and so Shaq learned Shaq foo Michael Jordan meanwhile it took aim on the other famous Jumpman and starred in a platformer action of his own chaos in the Windy City one year before 1994 we had a Super Mario Brothers the movie in 1994 beavis and butthead starred in a point-and-click adventure like game on the Sega Genesis in 1994 Electronic Arts literally made a video game about the perhaps fabricated fad of gripping a stranger's car bumper while wearing rollerblades yet unlike my own erstwhile puberty 1994 saw videogames blossom in hundreds of gorgeous ways for every soul lacking drummed up mascot platformer like Michael Jordan chaos in the Windy City we had one cute platformer like ooh me ha de calais a starring a little girl with a pink backpack and a fishing rod for every trashy Mortal Kombat wannabe we had to shun restricting Japanese action adventures to wit to top-down Japanese action-adventure games about fire fighters came out in 1994 today we have a new Call of Duty every year in 1994 if you said shooting game someone might have thought you were talking about an over-the-shoulder two-player co-op shooting gallery game about a cowboy a cowgirl and various evil anime steampunk robots as the year 2019 draws to a close I find myself looking back at video games many great games came out this year sure though also many video game developers publishers critics and historians tweeted many tweets this year about such and such games 25th anniversary anyone who like me owns the habit of paying too much attention to literally everything much to the detriment of their own comfort should be coming to the end of this year thinking less about their top 10 best games of the year and more about Wow there sure were a lot of 25th anniversary this year so today I would like to present to you what I have carefully calculated to be the 25 best games released in 1994 my ranking process required me to walk fine line between sentimentality and science nine times out of ten if you asked me to write a ranked list of historically important items I would prefer to go with my personal preferential instinct over performing any kind of mathematical calculation regarding historical significance like when a publication does a list of them 100 best games of all time and they put like Tetris at the top that's more boring to me than putting for example doom at the top Tetris looks like a choice a computer made doom looks like a choice a person made however as I composed this list I found it interesting that a lot of my favorite games from 1994 turned out to be historically significant so despite being a year of incremental improvements rather than blustery thunderous Hardware explosion it turns out that 1994 was an uber year for great video games it's almost as though the end of a console generation is better than the beginning of a console generation it's almost as though we make better games when we're not thinking about making bigger games it's almost as though incremental refinements are true innovation either that or I'm taking a really long time to say video games actually have not changed that much at any rate let's get started with number 25 motor toon Grand Prix before cuphead before Forza before Gran Turismo before Mario Kart 64 motor toon Grand Prix did not try to be all or even any of those motor toon Grand Prix came out two weeks after the launch of the PlayStation in Japan and nobody yelling about it on the other side of the Pacific was yelling loudly enough for me to hear diehard game fan hyperventilated about it for a bit but by then I'd learned to ignore most of diehard game fans hyperventilation at any rate none of us could have possibly known back then that the developers of motor toon Grand Prix would go on to change driving games forever with Gran Turismo in 1998 after Gran Turismo motor toon Grand Prix became a favorite in you know circles its power as a trivia item squatted in the back of my brain long enough for me to acquire a copy for less than a dollar a couple years later in Japan I put it on one day on a whim thinking I'd get my less than $1 worth it turns out it completely owns everything that its developers would need to crank out GranTurismo sleeps in motor toon Grand Prix's prehistorically simple action game erase flow it turns out that the zeitgeist of 1994 into the upcoming hardware madness of 1995 perfectly encapsulates the entirety of an opportunity window in which video game developers very well could have replaced mascot platformers with mascot racing games motor toon Grand Prix's curious mixture of cartoons cars tunes and flat polygons lend it a look worthy of thousands of retweets in gif form by circa 2019 indie video game developers number 24 urban strike urban strike is not as good as jungle strike vote you know what I didn't care in 1994 I loved helicopters about as much as I love helicopters in 2019 and urban strike was a game about helicopters I had already squeezed every last drop of hot milk from the stone of jungle strike so I hunkered down and slaked my thirst on a long weekend with a rented copy of urban strike one could say that urban strike thus had a textural sensation not unlike the DLC of today that would be a stretch though this whole video might as well be a yoga class so let's allow an urban strike taught me that a game could disappoint me on some critical instinctual level yet still stand worthy of my wolfing down of every grisly morsel today we can look back at the strike series as pioneers of two aspects first their gargantuan large level maps and freeform mission objective punctuation laid the groundwork for grand theft auto which planted the flag of the modern open-world game design disease second it had helicopters not enough games today have helicopters helicopters are better than cars flying a helicopter in third-person is better than running around with a rifle in first person in 1994 I played all the way through two games about helicopters urban strike and choplifter three well three if you count wing war in 2019 I got nothing number 23 Donkey Kong Country late in 1994 Nintendo published this little side-scrolling platform game marking the historical occasion of their allowing a Western developer access to their precious intellectual property it is great to love Donkey Kong Country for nostalgia reasons though I hope that even its most supportive fans can agree that it offered little in the way of innovation for the platforming genre yet I make the decision to place it here on my list instead of a much better platforming game like Bumi Hanukkah wasa because Donkey Kong Country also represented a colossal e massive marketing event you could not flip open a phone book thick issue of electronic gaming monthly in 1994 without your eyeballs tripping over a paragraph about how they used the same computers to model Donkey Kong that they used to make the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park mainstream Toys R Us videogames were suddenly high-tech in a buzzword e local TV news e way that pc games had confidently never bothered to be number 22 monster world v i confess i did not know about this game until many years after 1994 when I finally played it it opened a back door in my brain monster world for enlightened me two reasons and machination x' behind many of the PlayStation era games that I had loved while other developers chased trends and refined their own classics the makers of monster world for polished half-baked discarded relics at the time I first played at monster world for reminded me of Zelda 2 The Adventure of Link legacy of the wizard facts Anna do battle for Olympus and other under loved NES games it is a heavier harder more brutal action role-playing game than most people must have wanted in its day where other games and soon to come later years would adopt Zelda like breeziness and accessibility monster world--for issued the very notion of player friendliness in favor of heavy action techniques possessing density that could drown a castlevania protagonist too many modernly trained to sensibility its dedication to easygoing cartoon storytelling might seem at odds with its brutal dungeon designs though if we look at it through the lens of 1994 we might sympathize with its developers there really was a chance something this angry yet beautiful could have taken off in 2019 and forever it's a masterpiece back in 1994 my favorite American video game magazines didn't even blip it as an import only curiosity coming in at number 21 black thorn black thorn is out of this world the video game it proved to me in 1994 that level design was in fact an art form black thorn distilled the cinematic aspirations of out of this world and flashback into a distinctly video gaming experience one year earlier black thorns team had made lost vikings an undeniable classic we probably wouldn't have any puzzle platformers were it not for the lost Vikings maybe that's not the worst thing 25 years later black thorns developers are Blizzard and they made overwatch World of Warcraft and Diablo also in 1994 Eric chahi released heart of the alien a sequel to his classic out-of-this-world no 25 years later visionaries like Fumito Louetta and Hideo Kojima will cite out-of-this-world as one of their biggest influences the level design scientist in me sees a lot more to love about black thorns sticky action mechanics you can hide in the shadows you can fire your shotgun behind your back in the same year that they released black thorn for Super Nintendo and das Blizzard also released Warcraft orcs and humans for das both black thorn and Warcraft were incremental refinements of existing video game genres possessing a scarce few examples each may be a fool would not have been able to notice a pattern looking at these two games though anyone compelled to compare the microscopic game design differences between Blackthorne and flashback would have immediately declared that blizzard was going places number 20 Sonic and Knuckles Sonic and Knuckles is the best Sonic the Hedgehog game for those keeping score Sonic mania is the second best Sonic the Hedgehog game and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the third best Sonic the Hedgehog game anyone who says they like the original Sonic the Hedgehog game the most is a liar anyone who says the best Sonic the Hedgehog is Sonic 3 & Knuckles is an arc Sonic & Knuckles is the best Sonic the Hedgehog game because it has the best level design geometry for a video game series that situates almost its entire charm around the very concept of joyfully moving forward at a higher speed than most human eyes can comfortably read the level design geometry is always going to be the trickiest part to get right Sonic and Knuckles was the fourth main line Sonic the Hedgehog game if we don't count Sonic CD which we shouldn't because I didn't have a Sega CD and you probably didn't either and if you did have a Sega CD you were a cop sonic Knuckles was the fourth main line Sonic the Hedgehog game and the last to deem one for a long time by the time Sega decided to again dedicate themselves readily to the Sonic the Hedgehog business the game industry was trending toward all 3d all the time so Sonic and Knuckles perhaps encapsulate s' the spirit of 1994 as succinctly as any of the other games on this list ever did Sonic and Knuckles was the fourth main game in its series and the second game in that series released in the same calendar year it was the last 2d entry in a series that later went 3d it sported a strong gimmick you could connect other Sonic the Hedgehog games to add the character knuckles to them as though by magic this form of glorious unique one-of-a-kind materialized DLC also expresses the spirit of 1994 ish iteration ISM the lock-on cartridge as they called it perhaps represents the ultimate example of employment of extreme thoughtful care in implementing a minor edition which sort of breaks the game and if you're still keeping score yes I love playing Sonic and Knuckles his original levels as Sonic oh I'll say about knuckles right now is he's more fun to play than Donkey Kong Country number nineteen Daytona USA at the time I first saw eight linked up Daytona USA cabinets at the local block party that was an arcade chain not a social event by the way I was the sort of amateur grunge listening 1990s teenager who hated to their hometown by default after I saw and played Daytona USA well I can't say that I fell in love with my hometown not seven years later I would leave my hometown and never return outside of a few scattered holiday seasons however Daytona did bless me with one mystic notion for all my antisocial disdain for Indianapolis Indiana and its storied traditional loves of high-school basketball and yearly Motorsports I could not help looking at Daytona USA and suddenly deciding that NASCAR was pretty cool in school I knew and knew of many loud meatheads who liked NASCAR one way Daytona USA proved to me that some other people 10,000 miles distance from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway had discovered another method for expressing appreciation for NASCAR the confrontationally bold confidence of Daytona USA's presentation convinced me to set shame aside for a second and assess the scope of NASCAR's game design as a sport to this day I love NASCAR I own many richly vintage NASCAR t-shirts this never would have happened had Daytona not wooed me with its bizarre music its luxurious typography that Sonic the Hedgehog cameo and the opportunity to provably drive a stick-shift better and faster than my taller older brother here at number 18 beyond oasis or the story of Thor the only two things I loved as much as Zelda games are 2d Zelda games and weird Sega published 2d Zelda likes the only thing I love as much as weird sega published 2d zelda likes is of course Alondra weird sega published 2d zelda likes magic knight rayearth link'll liver story landstalker light crusader shining wisdom Crusader of senti and Beyond oasis all turned my 1990s brain into a forest fire of possibilities top-down sword swinging action-adventure games for a brief flicker of a moment before first person shooters became a thing felt like the future just when I thought shell de linked to the Past and Link's Awakening had showed me the full depth of the genre we had landstalker one year later we had beyond oasis with its lush cartoon animations it's crispy music and it's stylish hot sharp brawler inspired action sega published beyond oasis as the story of Thor on the Mega Drive in Japan a week after Sony launched the original PlayStation in Japan in December of 1994 beyond oasis did not come out in the West until 1995 which is when I played it I'm going to go ahead and include it in my list anyway because it offers me a perfect opportunity to nonchalantly segue into my next entry number 17 Crusader of sin T released in Japan as Ragna sin T released in Europe as soul a critique constructors employed at Western video game enthusiasts periodicals in 1994 unanimously described Crusader of sin T as a Link to the Past clone and maybe that's fair I mean look at it though in action it showed me a fast smooth and freaky alternate universe Zelda with something different at the guts of its design Crusader of sin T is a game so underrated I have even underrated it myself I rented and blasted through it in a weekend back during the summer of 1994 my biggest takeaway then was that I liked landstalker better for its bigger scale broader adventure and nastier puzzles however at some point ten years after playing Crusader of sin T I felt and hunger for it this hunger might have had something to do with meeting Kahn NATO the director of landstalker and talking to him about some of his favorite games I played landstalker with the director of landstalker and at one point while playing landstalker with the director of landstalker the director of landstalker said apropos of nothing and I swear I'm not making this up have you ever played ragna centi that games good and I said yeah I've played it it is very good to which he replied the thing about Ragna centi is they got the action right in ways Sheldon ever has thus encouraged I bought a used copy of Ragna centi from Mega Drive and took my time so 15 years after that experience when I say alternate universe Zelda I mean it Zelda games have been action games as long as they have been Zelda games Crusader of centi goes all-in on exploring the action aspect look at this silky smooth 60fps framerate and you will know the designers cared more about video game action than they probably did about real-life breathing Crusader of centi has got some arcade shooter worthy projectile action it also has some Japanese role-playing game worthy subsystems like equippable pseudo AI pet partners that's before Pokemon by the way you know what Game Freak was doing while the developers of Crusader of centi we're developing Crusader of centi they made pulse man for the Sega Mega Drive in Japan I replayed a lot of Crusader of centi this week into my office and I watched a lot of Ricky C's long play of it on YouTube and yes the game is a little bit rough though playing it constantly reminded me of how many great ideas this game had Crusader of centi raises its hand in the back of class dying to be recognized imagine a world where we'd had more Zelda clones however Crusader of Santi had unfortunately brought a dodge ball to a basketball court it turns out that innovation in off-brand Zelda game design was not exactly a college course anyone wanted to sign up for in 1994 I wish I had evangelized to this game on so medium or over the past decade because I now know that some of the people in charge of selecting games for the American Genesis many follow me on Twitter viewers I have failed you all and Sega if you're listening can I get a Sega Agis Crusader of centi number 16 system shock my first impression of system shock was that the dudes working at the videogame store were proud of it when I went in to preorder Donkey Kong Country the first time someone spoke to me of system shocks goodness it was in college and all they had to say was dude system shock rules dude in addition to gracefully proceeding system shock to system shock gloriously presented in 1994's older game likers a robust three-dimensional game of narrative choices and densely hard to pin down sci-fi themes it would be several years before we had Deus Ex and more than a decade until Bioshock and right here for people who'd cashed in enough of their life savings on PC parts was a big video game that was legitimately about something more than pointing clicking or shooting number 15 right here the Elder Scrolls arena when I think of Bethesda's first Elder Scrolls game I remember low ceilings and slow feelings a first-person perspective so rudimentary it fostered an atmosphere of shocking dread freedom to go many places and do many things which amounted most profoundly as a freedom to get lost I did not play arena until 1997 and by then I'd already played Daggerfall though when you look at the two games and juxtaposition you can see the beginning of the beautiful arc of iteration that sustains this series even today arena showed us a crusty old bard's tale like wizardry style role-playing game with a hint of that techno juice that had begun to fuel the day's elementary first-person shooters that spurt of juice sufficed to Kindle many imaginations arena was a video game whose very presence on a store shelf in a shopping mall in Indianapolis Indiana told any onlookers that a lot of really good videogames lurked just around the futures corner number 14 Shin Megami Tensei - oh I actually did not write a blurb for this one I meant to write a blurb for this one I had very strong feelings about it and this document is huge it's a very long giant sprawling document that I'm reading from maybe I'll type something later and come back in here and read it and then put it into the video or maybe I should just freestyle something right now does everybody wanting to hear what it's like when I just freestyle something off the top of my head instead of meticulously writing it down with q-tips on my keyboard and then reading it in my slow weird luxury voice sheen Megami Tensei ii came out in 1994 in japan and we knew nothing about it in the united states of america and i don't know if anybody knew anything about it in europe either none of my favorite magazines mentioned it and they were always talking about japanese role-playing games that were maybe never going to come out in the United States so it's a little bit suspect that they never talked about it I actually never learned about the Shin Megami Tensei series until I learned about personam one which websites that I liked such as the gaming Intelligence Agency or the GI a.com shout-out to any former GI a readers or staff members who are listening to this these sorts of early and live journal era video game bloggers were banca hog with recommendation lysing personam won a lot of these bloggers went so far as to name-drop the shin megami tensei series i'm not sure if any of them had actually played it or if they just wanted to look cool because I know that I just wanted to look cool at that time and they were about the same age as me I played the heck off of the first persona game that when it was released for the PlayStation and I beat the trash off of the second persona game when it came out later back then I was pretty newly aware of emulation so I tracked down some of the early Sheen Megami Tensei games because I was such a huge fan of these persona games that I've been playing and I've got to say I did not know any Japanese much less enough Japanese to understand anything about Shin Megami Tensei 2 for the Super Famicom I stumbled around in it for a bit decided that I liked to persona better and then did not return to the game until I had moved to Japan several years later and purchased a used copy of it for the Super Famicom and looked at the game in an emulator earlier this week and it's just there it is it's all there everything that anyone has ever liked about any of the persona or Shin Megami Tensei games is all there in 1994 you have all that weird wild chocolate cake density lore where like the city of Tokyo has been completely buried beneath a recent history level apocalypse it just shows to go.you than all the way back in 1994 these God darn game designers were out there and they were making exactly the sorts of games that they would become famous for making and continue to be famous for making these people brought a legend directly out of their brains and began working on it they did not build up to it over the course of many years during which they acquired curiosities and curios from various extraneous locations they just made this thing and it's modern and it's beautiful and you're gonna yell at me for mentioning its name though I'm gonna say it we wouldn't have stuff like Dark Souls without this the end and let me know how you liked my improvisation there and here's number 13 Streets of Rage 3 or bare-knuckle 3 Streets of Rage 3 is better than Streets of Rage 2 it's faster the action is harder the design systems stack up more intricately every character can sprint with a DoubleTap do you want to know why people like Streets of Rage 2 more reason number one it's better than Streets of Rage one reason number two because the music track in the first stage of Streets of Rage 2 is phenomenal finally because the first stage in Streets of Rage 2 is an actual Street the story crawl of Streets of Rage 2 lays out a narrative about a simple kidnapping for any teenager who had ever seen a Hollywood film Streets of Rage 2 story was relatable ish as far as 1990s videogames go well on the other hand in the spirit of 1994 Streets of Rage the ring opens with our brawler heroes loudly attempting to defuse a nuclear bomb with their fists inside some hybrid of a meat locker and an industrial music club with a more muted color palette than usual Streets of Rage 2 grows a little stale as it goes on streets of rage 3 shrilly unfolds with shockingly sick battles and monumentally ahead of its time grisly grotesque hard-edged electronic music here again crouches the most syrupy essence of 1994 as much darker harder sharper colder more technical more refined more cuisine liked and more crystalline in its self-confidence than its predecessors as it is underappreciated in every modern comparison also the music is better if you don't agree give it another 25 years number 12 live a live all the way back in 1994 before you could even download a video game much less download content for a video game long before anyone had ever referred to a game as episodic there was live alive I am pronouncing that correctly by the way I made sure I looked exactly at the katakana under the name on the Japanese box live alive occurs as a sort of a Japanese role-playing game greatest hits album by a non-existent band uniquely for its day and uniquely for right now live alive presented multiple brief role-playing scenario episodes each set in a seemingly different world each wildly different in narrative scope each assuming a different genre of fiction in 1994 it appealed to me on thrift value alone 7 games for the price of one unfortunately I was unable to play it until I moved to Japan and learned to Japanese if you've never played live alive I can forgive you for presuming that its 7th ematic alida verse chapters probably add up to a buffet-style experience you know the food isn't as good at a lunch buffet as it it'd be if you ordered off the dinner menu though when I eventually played the game it delighted me to learn it's 7 chapters actually play off one another like fine dining courses in a manner that has no modern analog also 12 years later the designer of live alive Nobuyuki Inoue would go on to direct the similarly cuisine like ultra cohesively episodic Japanese role-playing game masterpiece mother3 number 11 winged war I always wanted to be pilot you might have noticed this if you have ever seen me in person because I was probably wearing one of my fancy flight jackets that I hope to someday be cremated in my hunger for the blue yonder is so prolific that I knew of the optometric requirements of the pilots trade even at age four I'm being serious when my dad accidentally drove my mom's 1979 Ford Thunderbird off an icy bridge on Groundhog Day 1984 and I looked up into the rearview mirror afterward to see my right eye had literally exited my skull my first thought was that maybe I wouldn't have 20/20 vision anymore and thus I could never become an Air Force pilot well ten years after that in 1994 I didn't even have 20/20 vision in my left eye either so Sega's winged war arcade game was a comfortable enough solution for the problem of my career aspirations I loved winged war even more than I'd loved Virtua racing more than I loved Daytona USA winged Wars controls were stuck halfway between simulation and arcade game it's gregarious ly simple game flow asked me only to obliterate my opponents slower than doom and faster than chess Sega's winged war let me throttle my 20/20 vision having Big Brother so hard he would quit video games almost immediately afterward and winged war had a helicopter today I often think back on it and wonder after an alternate present in which winged war had really taken off supplanted fighting games and realtime strategy and to become the seed sower of modern eSports here we go number 10 Castlevania bloodlines Castlevania bloodlines is my favorite Castlevania game four years before Castlevania Symphony of the Night ripped off Super Metroid and somehow began taking credit for inventing nonlinear 2d side-scrolling action adventure games and one year after Dracula x-brawn doh of blood on the PC engine CD represented the absolute apex of old-fashioned Castlevania heavy action game design Castlevania bloodlines tried something uniquely different bloodlines presents us a breezy leisurely fast-paced wackier less logistical sensical Castlevania one of the main characters has a spear it's got some of the tricky button input technical actions of Rondo of blood and it's also got some of Symphony of the Knights lightness and speed perhaps most historical significantly Castlevania bloodlines marks the first big example I can remember of game name : subtitle the subtitle in this case stood in for a number because bloodlines was Konami's first castlevania game for sega genesis after years of fealty to nintendo konami didn't want to put a number in the title because they didn't want to confuse kids who only got Sega consoles for Christmas also probably because even Konami did not understand Castlevania splott timeline and number 9 sensible world of soccer first let me apologize what you see here is actually sensible soccer International Edition for the Mega Drive not sensible world of soccer for the Amiga I couldn't find any good footage of the amiga game and I didn't have the six hours necessary to boot up an amiga emulator I thought of asking Bennett fadi for help though I figure he's busy sensible world of soccer is a sequel to sensible soccer sensible soccer sits near or at the top of every amiga game recommenders list when I was working on a hyper accessible minimalist sports game of my own in 2011 I did a deep research dive into simple sports games my thesis as a game designer was that sports games could be action games and that the action game enos could feed sublimely into the technical sports depth so with the help of game design history mavens like Bennett fatty I looked at some older sports games action like sports games and sports like action games I looked at cyber ball Powerball and projectile Bennett fadi strongly recommended sensible soccer I almost died from how much sensible soccer impressed me with a little elbow grease I recommended sensible soccers 1994 sequel sensible world of soccer to myself perhaps nowhere else in the entire history of video games can we see such a sublime blend of accessible action game action in sports Simula torii depth sensible world of soccer shows that games can bridge unseen understanding gaps in sports later sports games would acquire greater graphics realtime strategy games which were only just getting started in 1994 would later grow in complexity until they were regarded as sports unto themselves meanwhile sensible world of soccer sleeps here role model ask perfectly embodying simplicity and simulation even two-and-a-half decades hence number eight contra hardcore a few months after Castlevania bloodlines Konami released contra hardcore on the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive like Castlevania bloodlines contra hardcore represents the historical first entry of one of Konami's famous series on Sega's 16-bit console like Castlevania bloodlines contra hardcore has a : in its title like Castlevania bloodlines contra hardcore taints the formula of its Nintendo cousins with blazing wild 60fps uniqueness we could say that bloodlines and hardcore are 1994 in a nutshell incremental changes to an established formula applied with texturally transformative results perhaps in an effort to differentiate itself from contra 3 the alien wars or perhaps in an effort to contend with the 1993 Sega Genesis born classic gunstar heroes by treasure hardcore offered apocalyptically branching plots contra hardcore is home of some of the weirdest wildest most memorable structural visual and game design related humor in videogame history so it amounts to a fittingly 1994 en tragedy that designer director Nobunaga's Otto never quite became a household name here's number 7 elevator action returns few games wield the confidence of elevator action returns boldly attaching the word returns to the end of the title of a game whose only and previous entry came out 11 years prior took elephant-sized balloon guts in shocking than modern contrast to its then ancient predecessor elevator action returned with dystopian photo like grit wallpapering its previous pixel art II simplicity in subversive defiance of expectations much of the action in fact took place outside of elevators shedding the heft of old-timey friction palaces like Castlevania action games of 1994 had begun a trend toward lightness and breezy speed unto a world that would receive its third and fourth entries in the mainline Sonic the Hedgehog series in that same year elevator action returned with all the glorious angry heaviness of its fore parent I first experienced the arcade version of the game at Carosa Entertainment Yard H ey or hey in Akihabara Tokyo Japan in November of 2001 in early 2002 I purchased a used Sega Saturn and the Sega Saturn version of the game released in 1995 though even in 2001 even seven years after its initial arcade release the mightiness of elevator action Returns was apparent here is a game that will forever lurk modernly right down to its typography now 25 years after its release my love for this game has grown to hideous sighs I wish it were available on more consoles wherever whenever i hunger for its simplicity here is a game I could put on any time and play through it like I'm listening to a favorite album all I've ever wanted to do in the video game industry is make a similar game to this one I might even be doing that right now heck I even officially pitched Taito on a sequel to this once we don't have to talk about that right now though number 6 policenauts as of 1994 I had only been able to observe the video game snatcher on my mom's friends son's Sega CD the kid would not let me touch the controller while the Sega CD was turned on he made crude jokes and experimented with r-rated language as he plunked around in ugly in the game the kid knew every fatality in Mortal Kombat he was the type of kid who would yell no stop I want to do the fatality when you were about to beat him I'll admit I had never specifically envied anyone before I had to watch that kid play snatcher before I had even had a chance to play snatcher myself my favorite magazines were already whispering glossa lee about policenauts policenauts was according to these floppy heavy printed telegrams a game by the same guy who made snatcher I remember thinking so a snatcher is like a terminator and a Body Snatcher and a police knot is like a police officer who's also an astronaut I knew that someday I would play both games and that I would love them I eventually did play them and I did love them and I loved policenauts more though by the time I played them I had already both played Metal Gear Solid and learned to the name Hideo Kojima policenauts shows us Hideo Kojima millimeters from Metal Gear Solid twenty five years before death stranding ten years after he gave up trying to publish novels and went into game development policenauts stands at a historical crossroads in video game creativity in his bookish game ich and film ich it is so film ished that the main characters are pretty much exactly anime Mel Gibson and Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon policenauts is huge it brims with words and ideas it overflows with science fictional jargon of both borrowed and invented varieties yet it is also briskly paced and refreshingly playable thinking about policenauts in the year of death stranding sends me into a bittersweet reverie we all know that hideo kojima has been making games since the 1980s though thinking about policenauts in 2019 brings to light that hideo kojima has been making hideo kojima games since at least 1994 yes I'm insinuating that snatcher might not exactly be a hit AO Kojima game it is hard to recommend you play policenauts now without condoning a little piracy so take that as an encouragement if you can get the various emulators working there is a fan translation patch prepare for a wild precious experience and number five the ninja warriors the ninja warriors is the best beat them up video game of all time as I've said numerous times during this list video game designers as of 1994 had begun the first phase of a hard very swerve toward breezy lite mainstream accessibility now this swear of would broaden audiences drastically it would bring in hundreds of thousands and then millions of players the for a sweet moment in 1994 several designers still clung to the heavy slow awkwardness of the old times in no other game does Georgie heft lurk quite so Herculean as in the ninja warriors for Super Nintendo in Japan it was called the ninja warriors again because it's technically a remake of an arcade game called the ninja warriors though you know what I don't like the arcade game on the other hand I love the Super Nintendo game I could talk about this game for six consecutive hours colleges book my lecture you have my number and if you don't have my number well if you have to ask you can't afford it for now let me just say that I felt genuinely sad to see critics call the ninja warriors as original development teams beautiful 2019 remake remake ninja saviors return of the Warriors slow and bland it's neither slow nor bland it's meticulous and strict when you press a button you have to make sure that you will have wanted to have pressed that button in 1994 ninja warriors saw that they beat them up genre used vertical multi plane movement as a crutch in ninja warriors you're locked to one plane this means you can Crouch you can also jump hold the attack button to block utilizing poetically elegant state machines and controller courts ninja warriors milk's a tiny quantity of buttons for maximum technical action it would take the collective video game developers of the world 24 years to craft another game as heavy slow and hot hard as this if not as good you I'm talking about Red Dead Redemption - which is a cowboy game not unlike the ninja warriors as developers other 1994 game Wild guns number four Super Metroid nowadays when someone remakes a game or pays it stylistic tribute they embellish the old object until it's ancient nature becomes smooth and shiny for example shovel knight shows you an 8-bit platformer action-adventure game that looks exactly like Capcom's ducktales - someone who has not played Capcom's ducktales since 1989 I point this out because this trick works even on me I love a prosaically old stylistic visual aesthetic I like letting my nostalgia win 25 years since the release of Super Metroid 2 facts stick out first is that almost every game now has some Super Metroid lodged in it somewhere like a splinter second is that when Super Metroid came out it didn't remind me of anything and I had played all the way through Metroid on the NES in 1988 I don't even know how I did it the original Metroid was excruciatingly ly hard and it took me a long time I had even played Metroid 2 the return of Samus on my gameboy because there was something wrong with me my eyes still hurt yet when I rented it clicked it into my Super Nintendo and booted it up in April of 1994 Super Metroid presented me personally not a milliliter of nostalgia nectar as I played it Super Metroid awoke minimal memories of the old Metroid's I'm saying that Super Metroid was always more Super Metroid than it was Metroid Super Metroid occurred to me as a nostalgia vacuum it was utterly concerned with being itself two and a half decades later Super Metroid remains a milestone among masterpieces just about every third indie game that has ever been released lifts super metroids endearingly pseudo nonlinear structure today's go-to game for critical comparisons Dark Souls O's at least as much - Super Metroid as it does to itself see that one of the more shocking joys of Super Metroid arrives whenever you urghhh from a door to find your path has looped around and connected to a previously inaccessible area atop this super metroid has good guns fast action and effortless atmosphere if we searched for Super Metroid review on youtube we would probably get about a hundred thousand results I don't have time to get into everything good about Super Metroid for now suffice it to say that if we'd had Twitter and YouTube in 1994 commenters would have yelled at critics every time they tenuously compared another game to Super Metroid number three tokimeki memorial I remember seeing a jocular leader is Avast act ray blurb about tokimeki memorial in a magazine less glossy than die hard game fan halfway through 1994 to paraphrase imagine a video game where you date girls the blurb scribe had likely intended the reader to fill in the blanks with a rejoinder along the lines of give me a machine gun any day wake me up when you want me to kill something the blurb portrayed tokimeki memorial as a quaint curiosity however deep within the shotgun blast of my dense hair my brain bubbled like butter on a hot cast-iron skillet I wouldn't play tokimeki memorial until the summer of 2003 though its name alone sustained my imagination as a thought experiment for those nine years a game where you date girls why not why not also a game where you wait tables at a restaurant why not a game where you manage a retail store as of 1994 I a massive fan of the Final Fantasy series as someone who played enough Monkey Island to decide it's jokes were too similar to the ones the priest made in church I needed no sales pitch er er the power of video games as narratives one screenshot of tokimeki memorial was enough to give me the most resounding why not possible tokimeki memorial did not by a longshot invent adventure games tokimeki memorial didn't even invent first-person Japanese anime style point-and-click adventure games it wasn't even the first Japanese video game to have dating in it what it was was a lavish grand gesture tokimeki memorial was konami the makers of castlevania and contra making a high-profile high budget game not about slaughtering demons with throwing axes or murdering aliens with a laser gun tokimeki memorial saw Konami's developers applying their proven expertise and sensibilities to a roundly polished experience of another nature I've included several Konami games on this list so allow me to pause for a moment to crown Konami perhaps the most 1994 Ian of video game publishers as video game prom monarch for 1994 in 1994 Konami polished their shiniest Jade innovated in sometimes invisible areas expanded their flagship franchises to a new console and invented to the modern Japanese dating simulator from where I stood in 1994 as a player of Castlevania contra and sparkster and as a reader of magazines breathlessly touting CD game experiences like tokimeki memorial and snatcher I saw every reason to believe that even 25 years later Konami would still be the biggest best brilliant esteem acre of video games of all time and I would have been disastrously wrong and that is perhaps the most 1990 forest thought of them all also now that we're up to the top two let's do a quick rundown of the score card in other words if ever there were a time to say it this would be that time so yes it's time for daddy's bingo let's start with Konami we've just crowned Konami video games class of 1990 for prom monarch in addition to sounding prosaically fancy that title also has a scientific backbone the title of video game prom monarch can only be bestowed upon a video game publisher with four games in the top 10 of a top 25 list I don't make the rules and neither do you exactly four of the games on this top 25 list are Konami games and all four of those games are in the top 10 good work Konami too bad you're dead now and I didn't even go to your funeral Taito made two of the games on this list and I love them both Nintendo has also published two of the games that I've revealed so far maybe there's another one or two waiting in the wings if we look at circa 1994 Nintendo's juggernaut of a video game console the Super Nintendo Entertainment System however we see that six of the games we've revealed so far on this top 25 list were released only on that Super Nintendo in 1994 well done on the other hand eight of the games we've revealed so far were published only on the Sega Genesis even if the top two games on this list are Super Nintendo exclusives Nintendo can only hope to tie the Genesis at this point wow it's almost as though both consoles were great however if we look at games published by Sega including the arcade games Daytona USA and winged war for example we see that Sega themselves published five of the games on this list and if we add those two arcade games to the list of Genesis games we can say that 10 games out of the 25 on this list were exclusive to Sega Hardware at least in 1994 urban strike came out on the Super Nintendo in 1995 urban strike probably shouldn't even be on this list sorry on the one hand I wanted to put Paul's man or marathon on here on the other hand I bodily needed to represent a helicopter bringing up the rear on this list is Sony Computer Entertainment with exactly one PlayStation game wow talk about 25 years of play this list contains only five games not developed in Japan perhaps because Japanese games are what I personally tended to play also we've covered that many Western games publishers back then were interested in making stuff like Shaq foo I cannot say so with a scientists certainty though I'm pretty sure Japanese games were better than western games in 1994 that about concludes the crunching of the numbers now let's see these top two games will de su / Nintendo achieve a tie with the Sega Genesis let's find out with number two Final Fantasy six or Final Fantasy three on Thursday December 8 1994 a student who would never be caught lit our high school's gym on fire it caused millions of dollars of damages it made the national news school closed for two days I powered all the way through Final Fantasy 3 during that arson gifted four day weekend when school opened again the place was full of cops administrators threatened expulsion to any student showing up even one second late for class from that day until the day I graduated every morning I had to pass through a metal detector Final Fantasy 6 released in English as Final Fantasy 3 had cost me many hours of trial and worry to obtain I had rented a day half-dozen times each time restarting from scratch before finally being able to purchase it so it was that when I began that four-day weekend binge session I did so as a master mindedly expert at the first half of that game being a Super Nintendo game and a role-playing game and from Japan and having a massive heavy instruction manual Final Fantasy 3 as they called it retailed for $79.99 that's like a hundred and forty of today's dollars however when Cole's inexplicably advertised it for 50 to 96 in their newspaper flyer on Sunday December 4th 1994 I sprang into action I crammed a box full of NES games for the first time in my life I had decided to part with video games on purpose long ago they had been my treasures now at age 15 I realized that Battletoads was a terrible video game thanks to its sacrifice I obtained Final Fantasy 3 on December 4th 1994 that's exactly 25 years ago to the day as I sit here typing this and I'm reading this into a microphone on the same day that I typed it so no one in my high school would have called me and overachiever I did score a 4.0 GPA though that didn't even impress my parents I swear that I expended the absolute least and most antisocial effort possible in my pursuit of the highest marks I treated that high school like a fast-food drive-through now 25 years later I often find myself thinking I could have done so much more I should have joined the drama club for example I could have learned to play an instrument I wasted my high school years because all I wanted in my life was to truly believe that I was too good for that place I wasn't antisocial in a cool way because there's no such thing as being antisocial in a cool way I was a jerk and a loser and I deserved my haircut the only one area of high school where I put in more effort than the teachers required was books only I for some reason never considered it academic in nature I read literature for fun in a way that felt like it was happening on accident let me tell you exactly how it happened in December of 1994 we were reading A Tale of Two Cities in our English literature class I could not stop there I went ahead and read great expectations as well I was in the middle of reading great expectations in secret during mr. Gould E's 10th period global awareness class there at North Central High School in Indianapolis Indiana when the fire alarm went off on the afternoon of Thursday December 8th 1994 a long weekend followed during which I played through Final Fantasy 3 and thought about the work of Charles Dickens several late plot revelations in Final Fantasy 3 possessed a distinctly Dickensian flavor here I was a 15 year old who had decided he hated Battletoads who had once been a 12 year old who had beaten Battletoads a 15 year old who had played all the way through Donkey Kong Country to 101 percent completion while wearing a Donkey Kong Country t-shirt a 15 year old who had seen Pulp Fiction in a movie theater two months earlier and had just finished reading great expectations the next day I would go back to school and what felt like a different era of a different world I realized today that my capacity for appreciating Final Fantasy 6 in 1994 might have been slightly unique then again couldn't we say the same of everyone who played Final Fantasy 6 in 1994 Final Fantasy 6 shattered to the huge expectations I took into it from my previous favorite game of all time Final Fantasy 4 aka Final Fantasy 2 these days I say I prefer Final Fantasy 4 and I could defend this position given enough time though today in memory of that day exactly 25 years ago I will confess that Final Fantasy 6 alone prevented me from quitting video games altogether the way my big brother had shockingly huge structurally virtuosic triumphantly Dickensian fanfic do nian Final Fantasy 6 treated me and video games like an adult and finally number one earthbound or mother 2 earthbound came out in 1995 in the United States of America it came out two days before my 16th birthday I played it that summer however it came out in August of 1994 in Japan where it was called mother - I've excluded a couple of games from this list because they only came out in Japan in 1994 well this is my list so I'm leaving this one on not only that in a shocking twist I'm putting it at the top every pure good playful and literary moment that any video game has ever perpetrated exists in some crystal pristine perfect form somewhere within earthbound the story of its release outside of Japan perfectly epitomizes video games of the 1990s earthbound arrived as the renamed sequel to a Japanese game that had not yet been released outside Japan its localization obscures references to its then absent predecessor in its design it evokes the mechanical traditions of another game in this case its immediate predecessor and Dragon Quest which its makers saw fit to gently embellish its english release involved a brazenly stupid marketing campaign the game became a cult classic it's huge box became a collector's item its eventual structurally radical sequel came twelve long years later and was never officially translated into English earthbound has been dissected deconstructed disassembled and put back together by legions of fans for two and a half decades earthbound reached out and touched the fourth wall in a way that video games have still never gotten their fill of emulating sometimes obnoxiously earthbound has directly influenced some of the best video games in history in this list I have included mostly games that adhere to a small set of sensibilities and similarities earthbound is unlike all of them it's unlike every game that came out in 1994 simply seeing earthbound detailed in video game magazines felt magical here was a role-playing game refreshingly set in a modern cartoon America simply looking at screenshots of earthbound in magazines a year before its release filled me with the fireworks of hopeful expectation that many more unique games might someday exist the many months I spent waiting to play earthbound only compounded the shattering joy of its magical narrative tricks and to the oppressive dread of its shockingly heavy literary themes and maybe exactly that for me is 1994's most meaningful contribution to the modern hobby of video games joyful turgid oblivious expectation today I spent more time looking at or thinking about video games than I do playing them I said once on the internet that earthbound made me a vegetarian obviously I said this because I just wanted to say something dumb in an essay on the Internet the truth is I hadn't eaten meat for many years prior to playing earthbound earthbound came out two days before my 16th birthday on my 16th birthday I got a job at the local Target store on the north side of Indianapolis Indiana not 20 minutes into my employment at that Target store I faced a sudden extremely real situation in which I had to talk to a girl later she'd tell me that she was a vegetarian and I'd say that I was a vegetarian too because it turns out I was and I had been for some time I hadn't eaten meat for several years I just never talked to anyone about it especially my family six months later I'd have lost about 80 pounds by biking swimming running and cutting back on the macaroni and cheese I would work at that Target store for seven years I paid my way through college at that job Earthbound was thus the final video game I acquired as a coin scrounging leaf raking snow shoveling lawn mowing child who can always count on a $25 birthday check from his grandmother like clockwork arriving every year before Memorial Day exactly two days after first playing earthbound I would enter the period wherein I earned my own way through life for my next birthday after 16 years of sending me $25 per year my grandmother sent me $100 and then she went on a cruise and then she died in 1995 one year before my grandmother died in 1996 and one year after it came out in Japan as mother - I played earthbound on exhausted weekend afternoons after eight-hour morning shifts pushing shopping carts under a hot Summer Sun I played earthbound as an almost adult who had one year previous warning to Aki kong contry preorder bonus t-shirt to high school twice played Final Fantasy 6 and seen Pulp Fiction in a movie theater thrice in some kind of up growing sweat dream son Bernie exhaustion my critical mind opened to earth bounce burrowing li profound amalgamation of American cartoons and Japanese literature I beat earthbound late one August night after I had passed out in the parking lot under 104 degrees summer heat because I now realize I had been starving myself in an attempt to lose weight faster two months later my Big Brother's best friend Jared would begin a ludicrous experiment of eating Subway sandwiches every day in between classes at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana where I would hopefully be headed in two years the best part of 1994 happened in 1995 the best part of 1994 was forgetting about 1994 the best part about 1994 was facing sudden actual adult situations in 1995 1994 taught me how to 1995 to reiterate in 1994 I wore a donkey kong country pre-order bonus t-shirt into a high school twice and sweatpants into that same high school a hundred times or more 1995 gave me a driver's license a job my mom's terrible old car jeans a girlfriend six pack abs and Earthbound the most critically important video game experience I would ever have it's safe to say I started experimenting with writing novels because of earthbound and now 24 years later I'm still talking about earthbound in other words earthbound did not exactly make me a vegetarian however earthbound did not not make me an adult and you know what despite my thinking about earthbound just about every other day I have not played all the way through that game in over 10 years maybe I should do that soon maybe I'll even document the entire process heck I bet my complete robustly organized thoughts concerning earthbound would just barely fit into the script for an in-depth three-hour video review I wonder if it would be possible for me to make something like that someday well until next time remember I was born stupid however I will not die hungry videogames forever Kotaku dot-com [Music]

Channel: Kotaku

Views: 105,125

Rating: 4.879899 out of 5

Keywords: Kotaku, video game

Id: A7HF7v9wUUA

Length: 68min 22sec (4102 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019