Raiden's Top Games List: 30-21

30.) Tetris & Dr. Mario (SNES)

What do you do when you‘re making a list of your top 100 games and your two favorite puzzle games are on the list? You remember that they did a combination cart on SNES and you put that on there instead so you don’t have to make the decision as to which game you like better!

29.) Super Mario RPG (SNES)

Mario, Bowser, and Princess Toadstool on the same team, and fighting for a common goal. Of course, I never used Toadstool (or Mallow), my party was always Mario, Geno, and Bowser. The timed hits were a new wrinkle compared to the other RPGs I had played at that point. While I don’t think this game did anything perfectly, it did pretty much everything very well, and that’s enough to earn it spot number 29 on my list.

28.) SimCity (SNES)

I first played SimCity in the computer lab when I was in sixth grade. It was the original version, very basic, but I had a lot of fun with it. When a friend of mine rented it on SNES I knew it was a game I had to play more of. I rented it a few times, but it wasn’t the same. I looked and looked and looked, calling every store that sold video games within 20 miles of my house for months, until my dad had a brilliant idea (he did some city planning type stuff for his job, so I think my parents were happy with one of my game obsessions for once, since it was a more educational game than they were used to me playing). They put an ad in the newspaper (this was long before the internet was a big thing), and we got a bite. A drive across town, $30 from my bank, and it was mine. A month later Media Play got a huge shipment, and they had copies in stock for over a year. There are so many different building strategies to use, and I’ve tried them all when it comes to reaching the elusive Megalopolis. Unfortunately for me, the closest I’ve been able to get to that level is 462,000 citizens. One of these days I will earn the Mario Monument, and I will hear the Megalopolis music, and I’ll see if the Mayor’s house grows another level after Metropolis. At least I hope I will.

27.) Megaman X (SNES)

When I first saw this game, I thought it was Megaman 10, and that confused me. Why would they skip ahead in the series like that? Then I read the manual and learned that X was a name and not a roman numeral. The capsules, charging your special weapons, and characters with actual personalities set this apart from the original series. Plus, it has Zero. When he first dashed in and saved X at the end up the highway stage, I said “Holy crap she’s awesome!” Zero’s death was horrible since I found myself caring more about him than I did X, but after he died I had no choice. Sigma had to pay for starting the uprising that lead to Zero’s demise. And pay he did, several hundred times over the past decade, on SNES, PC, my Ipad, PS2, and PSP.

26.) Resident Evil 2 (Playstation)

I got Resident Evil: Director’s Cut when it was released just so I could have the playable Resident Evil 2 demo. I played through the first game so many times and couldn’t wait for more zombie destruction, puzzles, and potentially horrible dialogue with bad voice acting. While the bad dialogue and voice acting didn’t remain, there were plenty of puzzles, tyrants, zombies, dogs, weird mutated bosses, and of course, an exploding lab.

25.) GI Joe (NES)

I loved GI Joe’s growing up, so when I found out they had a Nintendo game I had to play it. Playing as one of five different Joe’s, each with different weapons and abilities (though Blizzard was essentially useless), plus you could play as General Hawk in the last level! There was even a second and third playthrough with increased difficulty for people who took the time to finish the game.

24.) Final Fantasy Tactics (Playstation)

This was the first tactical RPG I ever played, and another genre I didn’t know about until it was released. It took me a little bit to get the hang of things, but once I did I was hooked. I still prefer to use my own characters instead of the others the game gives you (TG Cid, Agrias, Mustadio, etc).

23.) Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest

The game that brought us Bloody Tears, one of my favorite video game tracks. I really liked how open ended this game was, and how you could choose where you wanted to go. Sure, if you went the wrong way without the proper items you couldn’t advance, but you were still able to go where you wanted to. If the internet existed when I first started playing this one I probably would have looked up where to go next, since there were so many different places to get lost (kneeling on the cliff with the red crystal, or at the river with the blue crystal being two of the ones that stand out).

22.) Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Playstation 3)

I liked Final Fantasy XIII, but there were a lot of flaws in the game. It was very, very linear, every time you did a paradigm shift you had to wait through that little animation, Hope (for most of the game), but XIII-2 improved on all of that. The story was pretty iffy, and they fell into the “Time Travel caused it” method of storytelling, but the gameplay and battle system made up for those shortcomings. While the ending was heavily foreshadowed, I still found myself a little surprised by it.

21.) Dragon Warrior 2 (NES)

I can’t figure out exactly what it is that makes me drawn to this game as much as I am. As far as RPGs from this time go it had a pretty good story, and being able to have three party members and fighting groups of enemies was a huge step up from Dragon Warrior when everything was one on one. The world in this game was huge (especially when compared to the original), and there were so many things to find. Don't worry about the picture, that's not really a dog, it's some kind of enormous tiger-like cat that wants to eat you.