Most game sites bring you Game of the Year awards every December or January. But here in Lungfishopolis, we’ve just acquired a crystal ball – we got a used one at this little shop in Chinatown, real cheap – and we are now able to bring to you our Game of the Year awards for the next decade. Hope you enjoy this little look forward. Sorry that you’ve got to wait so long to play these.

2010 – No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle (Nintendo Wii)

The sequel to No More Heroes came back strong with better minigames, better combat mechanics using MotionPlus, and even better comedy. Travis Touchdown still sits on the toilet to save his game and still drives around Santa Destroy on his “Schpeltiger” motorcycle, but now he can fight from the Schpeltiger and he’s got far better wrestling moves, including throws, submission holds, and the dreaded cluster buster.

In the opening cutscene, Travis’s girlfriend is killed, and the game consists of a giant revenge murder rampage, battling subsequently more powerful henchmen until he finds his girlfriend’s murderer. The villians are even more ridiculous, including a potato-chip-eating kid piloting a mech and a woman in a six-limbed jetpack.

2011 – Freedom Force vs The Atomic Robot Zombie Men (XBox 360, Playstation 3, PC)

This new tactical RPG from 2K Boston revisits Patriot City and reintroduces Mentor, Minuteman, El Diablo, and most of the original cast of heroes. FFvtARZM allows for online co-op play and the ability to create and share custom character models, as well as a level editor available only in the PC version.

When the evil Dr. Think takes over the Kremlin using his powers of malkinesis, Freedom Force flies to Russia to intervene. But soon, they learn of Dr. Think’s secret army of atomic robot zombie men. Can Freedom Force stop them before it’s too late?

2012 – Chimaera: Corner of the Eye (Nintendo Wii)

Chimaera: Corner of the Eye is a psychological horror game set in New Orleans. In 1971, dead bodies begin appearing inside Rachel Montrose’s house. After the third occurance, she leaves her home. When a body appears in her hotel room two days later, the police begin investigating her.

Chimaera incorporates the same insanity effect system introduced in 2002’s Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, and expands that insanity effect system in new directions using the Wiimote’s speaker, the new WiiMove controller, and the Wii’s internet connection.

2013 – Psychonauts 2 (Playstation 3, PC)

Psychonauts 2 picks up immediately where the previous game left off: at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp. The Grand Head of the Psychonauts has been captured, and as a new Psychonaut, Raz accompanies Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello to rescue him. Their adventures carry them through Paris and Prague, and into dozens of new minds.

2014 – Portal Wars (PC)

Everyone was expecting the announcement of Half-Life 3 at E3 2012, but instead Valve announced Portal Wars, a new persistent online shooter based in the universe of Half-Life and Portal. Portal Wars is not a MMO – there are no classes or levels – but you keep gear that you acquire, and weapons and ammo can be scarce commodities. Vehicles are extremely scarce, but rather than Half-Life 2’s 3-4 vehicles, there are 14 different vehicle types initially, including the troop transport and the helicopter. Each server is one of the world’s numbered cities, and it’s possible for players to travel between them, although the journey is generally difficult. When you log off, your character goes to sleep, so it’s best to rest in the underground resistance bunkers. If one is threatened while you’re offline, you can choose to be notified by email, instant messenger, or twitter. If you’re killed, the character is permanently dead, although this is less of a loss than a MMO, since there are no levels. But you do generally lose all your gear.

Portal Wars makes use of a face-mapping system, evolved from Valve’s faceposer software. Webcams can be used so that when the player speaks, his facial expression and lip movements are mapped onto his avatar’s face, creating a new level of realism.

And in a design decision similar to Left 4 Dead, Valve allows players to play briefly as Combine forces. Combine characters are nameless, non-persistent characters. Generally, you’ll play as a white-suited combine elite. They use the super-rare pulse rifles, and sometimes have access to mounted machine guns, sniper posts, and headcrab shell launchers. Infrequently, combine players will spawn as groups of hunters, paratroops and helicopter pilots, or even striders.

Valve indicated in February of 2013 that it is possible for the resistance to retake cities and even to totally repel combine forces from the Earth.

2015 – Wasteland (Playstation 3, PC)

A direct remake of the 1998 RPG by inXile Players create a party of up to four players to control, or optionally create fewer for online co-op play, in which up to six players can participate. You can also add NPCs to a party with less than six characters, but NPCs are under their own control.

Characters begin as new desert rangers at Ranger HQ, where their adventure begins wandering the wasteland and eliminating dangerous desert creatures for the benefit of local settlements. Along the way, they can become entangled with mafia, cyborgs, and a gun-toting monastic brotherhood.

2016 – The Legend of Zelda: Destiny Mirror (Nintendo DSv)

A launch title for Nintendo’s new DSv portable, Destiny Mirror uses the DSv’s stereoscopic cameras to create 3d images of the player and his actions in the Destiny Mirror. Gameplay is stylus-controller, much like Phantom Hourglass, but much of the gameplay is done through use of the camera: waving a hand, making shadow puppets, and even drawing in mid-air with the stylus.

2017 – Quantum (XBox Universal, Playstation 4, PC)

Quantum is a sci-fi first-person shooter set in a near-future Earth where scientists at CERN have made human teleportation possible. As the game opens, the CERN facility is under seige by military groups from two separate nations who want to seize the technology. Players are part of a UN special forces unit sent to intervene.

Quantum received high praise for making excellent use of the new 3d technology in this console generation, and for its excellent voice acting.

2018 – Mechwarrior 6 (PC)

After the buggy mess that was Mechwarrior 5, nobody expected the sixth installment in this long-running series to be as good as it is. Using new DirectX13 capabilities and allowing players to run the game in up to three monitors for peripheral vision, Mechwarrior 6 brought the series to a whole new level.

2019 – Baldur’s Gate 3 (PS4, Sega Singularity, PC)

After nearly twenty years, nobody expected the Baldur’s Gate series to make a comeback. But it did, in the same way that the 1991 Neverwinter Nights game was remade in 2002, and the 1998 Wasteland game was remade in 2015. Baldur’s Gate 3 turns out to be as much of a phenomenon as the original was way back in the 20th Century.

Crab Battle is an oldie, but it’s probably still my favorite game-related humor video. If you’ve never seen this, you owe it to yourself to watch, especially if you’re a fan of Metal Gear Solid.

I’ll admit – it was the bizarre name that caught my attention. The premise is that you vault your sheep through the level using mines as propulsion, while avoiding landing on bear traps. It’s quite bizarre.

Play Traps, Mines, and a Sheep

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

My interest in click-to-attack hackfest RPGs has always been passing at best. I was never into Diablo as much as everyone else – the most fun I had with those is playing Diablo on the original Playstation with my friend Glenn and actually role-playing our twin barbarians (the Crush brothers) who resembled Hans and Franz from SNL.

But Dungeon Siege has a certain charm – a certain appeal that I don’t quite understand. I like the game. I played Dungeon Siege 2, and didn’t like it nearly as much, but I really enjoy playing the original. You can have a party with up to eight characters, and as I’m replaying it now, I’m finding in it just a bit of the appeal of games like Baldur’s Gate, wherein strategy comes heavily into play. Maybe I’ll actually finish the game this time around.

I’ve been wanting to do a music segment for a while now, and the first game that came to mind for music is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The mp3 is nearly 13 minutes long, whereas I was shooting for 10-12 minutes, but given the number of songs I squeezed in, I’d say I did fairly well. If you’re interested in a sampling of some of Symphony of the Night‘s best music, give it a listen.

I should also mention the plethora of technical difficulties I experienced during this recording. Firstly, I was terrorized by (and subsequently smote) a massive bee. Secondly, my cat at one point jumped up onto my server and sat himself down on the intake fan. I jumped up to unseat the feline and my foot caught on the microphone cord – I thought I’d broken my USB condenser mike, but thankfully it survived.

Lungfishopolis MusicCast – Castlevania Symphony of the Night

I went to get a haircut recently, and when I walked in the barber, who runs a one-man haircut shop, had one of the Grand Theft Auto games up on his TV. Turns out that he has a PS2, and when I heard that he’d gone all the way through both God of War games, I realized that he was more than a casual gamer of the type that only plays Madden and GTA.

I started giving him recommendations, because the PS2 has a lot of really great games, and was fairly surprised to hear that although he’d played PsiOps and Destroy All Humans, he really hadn’t heard of most of the games I’d mentioned.

So I’ve sorted through mentally, and while I’ve avoided making this a top ten list, the anal overanalytical organizer in me has categorized the games into four groups of four: four Playstation two games I’ve always wanted to try but never got around to, four good games, four great games, and four that if you’ve never played you absolutely need to try. This article has turned out far larger than I’d originally intended, so I’m bolding the game titles should you want to skim what I’ve written.

So to start things out, let me hit the four Playstation 2 games that I’ve always wanted to try but never have. I won’t be able to give you too much on any of these, having not played them, but I hope to get a chance someday.

First up is Ico. The game is near-legendary, and I have yet to give it a shot. Currently, I’ve just got way more games than I can play, and I’m limiting myself to one Playstation 2 game at a time. Right now, it’s Final Fantasy XII, so I’ll have to finish that behemoth before I move on to something like Ico. I’m wanting to play this game primarily due to its reputation, as I have very little clue as to what the game’s about.

Fatal Frame is another series about which I know little. I know that Fatal Frame 2 and 3 are the titles in the series that made it to the PS2, and I know that it involves killing ghosts by taking their pictures before they can kill you. I’m hoping that it’s got more Resident Evil in it than Silent Hill.

Odin Sphere is a JRPG that sounds a lot like Dragon Warrior 4, an old game which I loved. I don’t know much about it other than it got good reviews. But I really like the idea of individual character stories which overlap and eventually intersect.

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King is a game I’d always wanted to play, but at this point I likely won’t. If I want to play a Dragon Quest game, I’ll probably get the Nintendo Wii one: Dragon Quest X. Release date still to be announced.

With those out of the way, let my talk about some PS2 games that I have played: my “good games” category. Firstly, Katamari Damacy. I do have to admit that Katamari Damacy is a totally bizarre game. The premise is that the King of All The Cosmos, who by the way looks absolutely ridiculous, got drunk or something and knocked all the stars out of the sky. Yeah, he’s a big guy. As his diminutive son, it’s your job to put the stars back. The way you go about this is by pushing your magical sticky ball – a “Katamari” – around the Earth. As you roll it, things stick to it, and it snowballs. You start collecting small things: paper clips, dice, pencils, and as you grow you’ll find yourself collecting flower pots, road cones, and cats. While I never managed to finish the game, (stupid time limits!) I do have to admit that it’s a lot of fun to push a big ball of stuff around, slowly growing it larger and larger, eventually picking up people, cars, and skyscrapers.

The next game is Hitman 2. I actually didn’t play this game on the PS2 – I played the PC version. And I never finished it. When I got to this one level where everything was covered in snow, a sniper in a tower kept taking me out before I could get anywhere near the place I needed to be. But there were enough fun levels leading up to this part that I’ll still recommend the game. It’s a stealth game, which as anyone who knows my game-playing predilections will know is a huge plus for me. I remember well sneaking into a mansion and poisoning some guy’s sushi, sneaking into a skyscraper to be properly positioned to snipe a general who was in a neighboring penthouse, and infiltrating an underground lair. The game in some ways feels a bit like the Thief series, but with guns. Fun.

Another Playstation 2 game that I actually played on the PC is Metal Gear Solid 2. It’s the only game in the series that I played, and I really enjoyed it. I own copies of Metal Gear Solid 1 for the Playstation and MGS3 for the PS2, but haven’t gotten into either. To make it even worse, the PC port of MGS2 that I played was one of the worst ports I’ve ever played. The fact that I was able to get as far into the game as I did despite the bad port speaks to how good the game is. Odd then that I could never get into MGS1 or MGS 3. I’ll have to go back to them some day.

The last game in my “good games” list is Resident Evil: Code Veronica X. It’s the last title in the series to adhere to the original formula. After this game Resident Evil 4, which might as well have been part of a different series. But if you loved Resident Evil 2 like I did, you’re likely to get a kick out of Code Veronica. They made some minor modifications to the original engine to utilize the PS2’s 3D capabilities, but it definitely has the feel of the original games, which is why I enjoyed it so much. Unfortunately, the game is also very hard. After I’d gotten about halfway into the game, I found myself in a situation where I was gravely wounded without enough ammo or healing supplies to go on. I had to restart the entire game. The next time through, I got a good bit further, but found myself in the same predicament. This time, I quit rather than restarting the whole game. There’s only so much I can take.

Next up, my four “great” games. The one I’ll hit first is God of War. If you haven’t heard much about this game, you probably don’t play games very much. Kraatos is a badass Spartan who could kick the crap out of most of the characters in 300. Kraatos has the attitude of Jack Burton, the skill of Darth Maul, and the luck of Bruce Campbell’s Ash. He spends most of the game telling the gods to piss off, and decides to kill Ares and become the god of war. A great movie quote comes to mind: “Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!”

I’m currently playing Final Fantasy XII on and off when I’m not in the mood for Far Cry 2 or Thief Deadly Shadows, and when the big TV isn’t available for me to play Resident Evil 5. It’s a JRPG, and I guess I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with JRPGs. I can only take so much of them, but at the same time, they tend to be very very long games. That’s probably why I’ve taken a few month-long breaks from the game before going back to it. I do like the Final Fantasy games, but I’ve only ever played IX to completion. Final Fantasy XII is a great game – complex story, interesting skill and level advancement system, and certainly lots to find. I’m actually amazed that they could fit everything they did on one disc. If you’re into JRPGs, there’s no reason not to recommend it.

Indigo Prophecy has its plusses and minuses, but for me the fantastic gameplay outweighs the mindbendingly bizarre plotline that emerges in the latter portions of the game. It’s an adventure game in the vein of Syberia or Still Life, but in addition to the staple puzzles, the game incorporates certain real-time elements. In conversations, if you fail to pick a response within the allowed time, your character will mumble something stupid or incriminating. Essentially, something bad for you. There are quicktime-type events that control action sequences, stealth sequences, and split-screen action segments that build tension by showing you how close that cop is to opening the door while you frantically try to hide the evidence. You play as Marcus, an everyman who wakes up in the bathroom of a diner with a dead body and blood on his hands. He’s got no memory of what happened, but there’s a cop on the way. The plot picks up from there, and he struggles to find out what’s going on. Then the game switches and you find yourself playing the cops investigating the murder. It’s pretty wild playing both angles, but it makes for some great storytelling.

Shadow of the Colossus is designed by the same team that worked on Ico. You may remember me having written about it in my “Keepers” segment. I’m willing to bet that most of the PS2 games in this column will show up in “Keepers” eventually if they haven’t already. Shadow of the Colossus is a beautiful game distilled down to its core elements. There are no hit points, you can’t buy new equipment, and nothing to unlock. Just a boy finding and defeating colossi – a giant series of boss battles. And it’s awesome. Read the Keepers article for more info.

With those dozen games out of the way, it’s time to hit the four games I think are absolutely must-play titles for the Playstation 2. Firstly, Beyond Good and Evil. I’m hoping that the good people of Lungfishopolis aren’t staging a coup over my incessant raves about this title, but what can I say? I love the game. It’s available on the Playstation 2, so of course I had to include it. It’s got action, stealth gameplay, intrigue, mini-games, stuff to collect, and talking anthropomorphic animals. What more could you ask?

Okami is another seriously overlooked game. Although I never played the PS2 version, I’m roughly 80% finished with the Wii version of the game, and it’s fantastic. Definitely of the Zelda ilk, Okami puts you in the role of a Japanese god who takes the form of a white dog. You spend the game running around, battling increasingly powerful demons, and turning the blighted land into a beautifully colored landscape, which ends up being surprisingly satisfying. The graphics in this game, while not photorealistic, are just incredible.

Next up is Resident Evil 4. While it’s a big departure from the previous titles in the series, Resident Evil 4 is just a great game. Although I’ve always preferred using a mouse and keyboard for shooters, the laser sights made the joypad usable. And the game had some seriously awesome moments. Battling insane villagers while riding in a runaway minecart has to be my favorite, but the jetski chase and the part where you need to protect a girl with a sniper rifle were also fun. There are some portions of the game that are maddeningly difficult, but nothing impossible. Plus, you get to make the president’s daughter spend time in a dumpster.

Lastly, the game from which I got the title for this site: Psychonauts. Psychonauts has got to be one of my favorite games ever, and with good reason. It’s fun, and it’s incredibly funny. I even got my wife to play through the game as far as Lungfishopolis, which is at least halfway. The premise here is that a psychic kid named Rasputin has broken into a summer camp for psychic kids, and is being sent home. He’s only got a couple days in which to train before he’s got to leave. In the meantime, he uncovers a diabolical conspiracy.

I just finished reading the G4 Staff’s Top E3 Highlights, and I thought I’d offer my own five favorite items from E3 2009.

I’ll hit these in no particular order. Firstly, The Last Guardian. I’ve got to agree that the trailer looks amazing, but I have to agree with Penny Arcade’s take on how the story will end. I should probably go back and play Ico before The Last Guardian is actually released.

Interestingly, we’ve got very little about what the actual plot of The Last Guardian will be. There’s a boy, and there’s some weird canine chicken-dragon thing. I guess that’s the guardian. The one that’s the last one. I think I read something about stealth gameplay, which sounds great. Interesting how you can get so psyched for a game you know so little about, isn’t it?

Next, Scribblenauts. I’ve written recently about it, so I won’t go to far into depth here, but the fact that they were able to include such a huge dictionary of words on a DS cart and allow for each to create its own objects with which you can interact is amazing. I’ll be buying this game as soon as it’s available. And then I shall summon Cthulhu.

Heavy Rain is a game I’ve been looking forward to for years. Quantic Dream seems to have realized that their plot derailment at the very end of Indigo Prophecy was a bad idea. When the final bosses hiding behind their minions turn out to be an ancient Aztec oracle and some weird AIs made out of electricity who “grew sentient using the net in the eighties”, you know your game has gone off the deep end.

Anyway, Heavy Rain is looking to be a much more sensible, much more graphically impressive, and overall better game. I can’t wait.

Lastly, Brutal Legend. It’s got heavy metal, Jack Black, and it’s done by the same guy who did psychonauts. I’m excited to see a game coming out that has a chance at hitting that level of humor.

There were many more announcements of fantastic-sounding games at E3, but those are the five that stick out most to me. What are your top five?

Greg wrote about how MadWorld disappointed him, so I figured I’d offer an altenate take.  If you haven’t read his take on the game, please do so.  I’ll wait.  Oh, spoilers will be included so if you don’t want to have things ruined, now is your chance to leave.

Ok then.  So here we go.  MadWorld is, so far, one of my favorite games to come out of this year.  I gave it pretty high marks at GameShark and generally think that it kicks a whole lot of ass.  I loved the style, the humor and the various ways in which you could dispatch foes.  Initially the level structure bothered me, but once I got into the groove of things, I quite enjoyed it.  In MadWorld, you have thirty minutes to finish the entire level, boss battle included however you can’t just stroll in and take on the boss.  The boss battle itself doesn’t unlock until you’ve scored enough points with points scored by not just killing but killing with style.  For example, simply beating a guy to death, while effective, doesn’t score a lot of points.  Stick three signposts in his head, jam a tire over his arms and then chuck the whole bloody bundle into a giant spike will net you considerably more points.  Along the way as you score points you’ll unlock new weapons, new challenges and new enemies.  Oh sure, it sucked when you died during a boss battle and had to do a level all over again but honestly, in this case, it’s not that bad.  Now, usually if I hear that a death during a boss battle means you start over, I won’t even pick up the game in the first place, so for me to say it’s not that bad means that it’s really not that bad.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, I’ll speak to Greg’s various points as I’m not feeling particularly creative today and pulling my own opinions into a cohesive whole is tantamount to inventing cold fusion.

“After the thirtieth time of putting a tire around a guy’s waist, spearing him through the head with a street sign, running around to find a garbage can to jam over his head, and then picking him up and walking very slowly over to some spikes to impale him, it gets old. Actually, for me, it took less than thirty times to get old.”

Yeah, for me, it never got old.  Part of that is because I thought it was hilarious, part of me was because doing all of those combos was necessary to get the boss battle to unlock so that you’d have enough time to beat the boss, so the combos become a necessary evil.  Plus, as you progress through the game, the levels start offering more and more variety as to what you can use to kill guys and the enemies start getting wise to your tactics, requiring you to change things up.  Everyone’s tolerance for repetition is different, especially if one person finds a game engaging and another doesn’t, but for me, I never got bored.

“It doesn’t have even the depth of combat that Double Dragon 2 had.”

I can’t speak to this as I don’t think I’ve ever played Double Dragon 2.  Does Jack have a large set of moves?  Well, no.  He has a few chainsaw moves, some fist moves and a dash and a dodge.  Instead of moves though, he has the environment and there is plenty to use there to take guys out with.  Now, you can certainly say that picking up a lamppost and jamming it through someone’s head is no different than doing the same thing with a signpost and you’d be right, but it’s when you take what you can do with the signpost combined with what you can do with this weapon and this moving train and Jack’s weapons and there is a lot to do.  Is it really, really deep?  No, but there is a lot to do.  Personally, with a game like this, I want simple.

“But this one stayed easy for a while, right up to the point where a grim reaper on roller skates with an instant death attack appeared. This is how the game increases difficulty: instantly killing you.

I found that the difficulty curve ramped up nicely.  Yeah, the roller skate guys were annoying, but they never killed me so I can’t speak to the annoyance of them.  I think there were two levels that I had to repeat and one was because I was being stubborn during the boss fight.  The second one was just straight up difficult, however things seemed to level out after that.  I never felt that the game wasn’t so hard that I couldn’t handle it, as long as I switched up my tactics and got creative, which is a big part of what the game was all about, killing creatively.

“Probably because while the other games used violence to tell the story, I felt like Mad World was a game created solely for the violence. The violence was its raison d’etre.”

I think that Greg hit the nail on the head here.  The game’s entire purpose was violence, but for me, that only increased the impact of the story.  The basic premise of the game is that terrorists take over the city and infect all of the citizens with a virus.  They then tell the citizens that if the citizens kill each other, whoever does the killing will get an antidote.  In short, the only way to survive is to pick up a weapon and kill.  The terrorists have also released horded of psychopaths into the city for the citizens to fight as well.  Jack enters the city with the intial intent of rescuing the mayor’s daughter, but as the story goes on, his real motivations are uncovered.

I guess what go to me about the game’s violence is that as the player, we’re supposed to be appalled that the terrorists would do such a thing, after all, we’re in the city to stop it, yet we’re so eager, and happy to take part in it ourselves.  As the player you’re encouraged not to stop whoever did this horrible thing, but to enter the games and win them.  That’s an important distinction. Instead of getting into the city and only killing those that get in our way of investigating the attack, we’re supposed to win the game which means taking part in the very thing we’re supposed to be condemning the terrorists for.  To this end, the violence is important because by taking part in the violence, it makes us complicit. It shows us that if we’re willing to do these horrible things to these guys, even if they’re “bad” guys, we’re really not any better.

Finally, once you do everything you need to and you win the games and you find out who is behind the whole thing, Jack is standing over his enemy who is hanging off a building.  The guy asks for help, which Jack doesn’t provide, and then plummets to his death.  Looking over the newly smashed corpse, Jack delivers the last, and best line of the game: I don’t help people, I kill them.  For some reason, this line stuck with me for days and days.  It felt like almost like a condemnation of sorts of all of these violent games we play.  So much of what we play involves killing and while it may be done in the interest of saving the day or being the hero, what stands out is the violence, not the end results, which is to say nothing of the countless multiplayer matches played every minute where the sole objective is just to kill.  We don’t play games to help, we play them to kill.  There are very few games out there where the job is to work with another person towards a common, non-violent goal.  Most of what we do is kill, kill and then kill some more.

Now, I’m not saying that all of this is bad, although I’m sure that it ain’t entirely good, I’m just saying that between the violence, the premise and that line, it made me think about this hobby and about the types of games we enjoy and what that means about us.  It probably doesn’t mean anything.  Kids have been playing soldier or cowboys and indians for generations, shooting each other with their fingers or with sticks so all we’ve done is gussy up the stick, but at the same time, the game gave me pause and made me think, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting that.  Not from this game.

So yeah, I loved it.  I enjoyed it while I was playing it, but I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more when I was done and could take the time to think about it.  Based on the sales numbers, I’m one of the few, which is a shame because games that make you think and examine your actions are never a bad thing.

Actually, this is some kind of Arkanoid/Breakout clone, but it plays just like Arkanoid. And it’s as addictive as ever.

Play Arkanoid

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

I’ve always enjoyed Castlevania games, and Symphony of the Night is the best game in the series. You can buy it now as a downloadable “classic” version, but I’ve still got my Playstation 1 disc, which I kept even when it was going for upwards of $100 on EBay.

The game is just phenomenal. It set a precedent that changed the basic formula of the Castlevania series from then on. RPG elements in additon to the platforming allowed you to equip different weapons and armor, buy better gear, and even cast spells by performing Street-Fighter-like joystick motions. You could summon familiars, turn into a bat or a wolf, and find dozens of hidden passageways.

On top of all of this, the orchestral score for the game isn’t synthesized: it’s a real orchestra, and the music is fantastic. I’m actually listening to the Symphony of the Night soundtrack as I type this.

But probably my favorite part of the game is all the special abilities that aren’t documented anywhere. For example, I found that if you equip a specific rod with a shield and press two buttons together, you cast a unique spell. And with that rod, there’s a different spell for each shield, which makes previously worthless shields suddenly useful. There are many items like this, and the only way to find their abilities was to stumble onto them. I know that you can likely find a list online somewhere now, but back then if there were online walkthroughs, I wasn’t reading them.

I have very fond memories of watching my completion percentage approach 100% and growing a bit sad. Then I found that there was a second upside-down castle atop the first and that the percentage actually went up to 200%! Glee!