Games of My Life

Darius Kazemi — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:34:00 +0000

I’ve decided to copy Shane Liesegang and do a list of the 10 “most impactful” games, and try to find some trends in the games that I pick.

Unordered 10 Impactful Games

Jagged Alliance 2
Amplitude
Deus Ex
Spelunky
Super Mario Bros 3
Fallout
Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle
Grand Theft Auto 3
Alpha Centauri
Scorched Earth

I chose the games for this list by thinking of games that are personally “impactful” to me. They either changed the way I think about games, or changed the way I think about the world. Like Shane, I’m interested in finding any trends between these games, so I’m subjecting them to a set of metrics that might possibly be completely meaningless.

Note that I’m limiting it to video games here, otherwise I’d have backgammon on the list. But comparing video games to board games or to folk games is in many ways an apples-to-oranges thing, especially considering the comparisons that I want to use to examine them.

Chronological Order

1988: Super Mario Bros 3
1991: Scorched Earth
1993: Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
1997: Fallout
1998: Alpha Centauri
1999: Jagged Alliance 2
2000: Deus Ex
2001: Grand Theft Auto 3
2003: Amplitude
2009: Spelunky

It’s not surprising that while the list spans 21 years, half of the games I chose were made between 1997 and 2001. For me, those are the golden years of gaming. I’m also not surprised that there’s a big gap between 2003 and 2009. While there haven’t been a whole lot of AAA titles that affect me the way titles from the late ’90s did, I even struggled to think of an indie game that really truly affected me in the way that Fallout or JA2 did. Spelunky is the obvious exception, but while there have been many fantastic indie titles that I think about all the time, I think they’re often just too small in scope to really affect me the same way that the other games did.

Of course, now that we’re talking about scope, let’s look at play time.

Play Time

Jagged Alliance 2: 200+ hours
Amplitude: 100-200 hours
Super Mario Bros 3: 100-200 hours
Scorched Earth: 100-200 hours
Deus Ex: 80 hours
Grand Theft Auto 3: 80 hours
Spelunky: 50 hours playing, 25 hours modding
Fallout: 40 hours
Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle: 30 hours
Alpha Centauri: 30 hours

In this list I’m attempting to remember how many hours I spent with each game. This ties back into the whole indie games thing: no matter how much I like a game, it’s probably not going to change my life if I don’t spend a lot of time with it. So Spelunky averages about 3 minutes per play session, but I have spent as much time with it as I have with GTA3. Whereas Passage and Execution are very important games to me that changed the way I think abotu games, but somehow they don’t seem so impactful because I played them once or twice and felt like I was done with the experience.

Fun fact: I played through the Jagged Alliance 2 demo about three nights a week for a year before the full game came out.

Metacritic

97: Grand Theft Auto 3
94: Super Mario Bros 3
93: Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
92: Alpha Centauri
90: Deus Ex
89: Fallout
86: Amplitude

Some of the games did not have metacritic scores, and are not included. Some of these games had multiple SKUs, in which case I picked the highest score. It looks like the games that matter to me are also games that the critics love.

Genres and Demographics

Jagged Alliance 2: tactical combat RPG
Amplitude: rhythm action game
Super Mario Bros 3: action platformer
Scorched Earth: turn-based artillery
Deus Ex: action shooter / RPG
Grand Theft Auto 3: sandbox action
Spelunky: procedural platformer
Fallout: RPG
Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle: adventure
Alpha Centauri: strategy simulation

Various stats about the list:

2 platformers
3 RPGs
4 turn-based games
1 first-person game
2 games where you navigate an avatar around a 3D space
5 action games (relying on reflexes to any degree)
9 American games, 1 Japanese game
2 games with puzzle elements
1 game where the puzzle elements are key to the experience
4 “open world” games, including Deus Ex
1 game that must be played multiple times through
3 strategy games
7 PC games (were primarily released for PC)
3 console games: 2 PS2, 1 NES
5 games that are continuing titles in a series
2 games that kicked off a series
3 games that stand alone
1 game that loses a lot of value on replay
6 games with strong story elements
4 games where the story is absolutely central to the game
3 games with multiplayer (Deus Ex had a patch but I don’t count it)

Amplitude Revisited

Darius Kazemi — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:28:00 +0000

So Amplitude has long been on the list of my favorite games of all time, but it’s been about 3 years since I’ve played it and I was recently wondering if it still deserved to be on that list.

I popped it into my PS2 yesterday, and lo and behold, yes it is still absolutely fucking amazing. While Harmonix’s Rock Band and Guitar Hero are definitely better social experiences, the core “spinning plates” dynamic of Amplitude is just brilliant and makes for a much better game experience than its more famous counterparts.

Also, I like the song selection way better in Amplitude than in GH. Although Rock Band comes close to beating it.