Top 5 Influential Games of All Time
Author: Patrick OmariI'm sure anyone that has ever owned a video game console or played games on their PC has those few games that they remember most fondly. As the game industry has grown up and evolved so too have the players themselves. The kids who were playing Mario on their NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) are now spending hundreds of pounds on top end PCs and Xbox 360s.
I'm no different and video games were a huge part of my childhood while growing up. While many people are glued to their TV spending hours watching the same mindless shows I found that games consoles gave a much richer experience. I'm not alone and there are many great games I've played over the years. The following five games are ones that stand out above all others and the ones that changed the way I saw electronic entertainment.
Tetris was the first. As a six year old boy in 1990 I was the proud owner of an original Nintendo GameBoy with Tetris included as the only game. Now obviously as one so young I was never much good at it. I never saw the rocket ship that supposedly appeared if you got a really high score, and I never finished the game. However, what Tetris did do for me was spark an interest in computer games.
Created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov the game is one of the most popular and influential of all time. It has appeared in some form on almost every single device capable of running games since it was first released. The version that I played 18 years ago on the GameBoy was one of the most popular and the version that shot it to international success. Tetris is consistently named in the top 5 of 'Greatest Game of All Time' lists, I expect for reasons similar to my own.
There have been many games since that have far eclipsed Tetris in almost every facet but it still remains that first introduction to video games for thousands, maybe millions of people.
Next up is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. A flagship title for the SNES in the early 90s, A Link to The Past was unlike anything I'd ever played before. Offering two huge worlds to explore and a plot not unlike anything from a Lord of the Rings book it offered more gameplay and replay value than any game I'd played. For the time the graphics and the sounds were amazing and I spent many hours lost in the immersive game world.
The reason I picked this game over it's successor, Ocarina of Time, is that this is the first Zelda game I played, and as such has left a lasting impression. While Ocarina of Time is generally thought of, and rightly so, as being the superior game it was A Link to The Past that really made a huge success of the Zelda franchise.
The next game I chose for this article is one that is actually fairly similar to A Link to The Past. It is made by a Japanese company, features a large explorable game world, a great cast of characters, an engaging story and fantastic gameplay. Final Fantasy 7 was a massive hit. The first of the series to make any impact outside its native Japan the game features one of the best stories ever told in a video game.
This was the first game where I felt that games and film were really starting to merge. FF7 featured many non-interactive cut scenes and FMV (full motion video) sequences to augment the gameplay and help tell the story. While many people are put off by the lengthy pauses in action and hefty amount of text to read I found that the game became like reading a book in which you could decide how the story would unfold and which characters would star, and even if they would live or die.
The success of Final Fantasy 7 led the way for many similar games to get made and flourish in the western market, which typically hadn't warmed to Japanese RPG titles, instead preferring driving and fighting games. It is my belief that even online games such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft would never have enjoyed the level of success they have if it wasn't for FF7.
Usually games based on films are some of the worst games you can play. I don't think I've played a good one before or since my next entry. As important as FF7 was for the Playstation, Goldeneye 007 was so for the N64. A brilliant game that helped bring FPS to consoles and pioneer many features that are simply taken for granted these days.
However the reason I've mentioned Goldeneye isn't for the single player game, nor for the groundbreaking technology. It is for the multiplayer. This was the game that made me realise that as fun as games were, they were far more fun when playing with and against your friends instead of on your own. I lost countless hours of sleep in the late 90s to all-nighter Goldeneye multiplayer sessions with school friends. A brilliant game and the best use of a film license that I can think of.
Last up is a game that brought me back to the PC for games, and one that thanks to its huge modding community has kept me playing for years after its initial release.
Half Life and its sequels and mods that followed were and still are the defining PC games of their generation. The first Half Life game was praised for the complete immersion it offered the player, telling the story entirely through the eyes of Gordon Freeman, without ever taking control from you.
Half Life also had a huge and dedicated modding community. These people created their own single and multiplayer games using the Half Life engine and the SDK released by Valve. Of these mods Counter Strike is by far the most successful and was later released as a commercial product. Counter Strike also happened to be the game that introduced me to games online and on LANs, an extension of the multiplayer gaming enjoyed with Goldeneye on the N64 some years earlier.
Well these were the games that influenced me the most, it is really hard to pick a top 5 and there are many that I've missed. I'm sure that some will agree with the games I've listed and others won't be able to comprehend some of the titles I've left out. Hopefully in the future we'll see some games that will push the boundaries even further and eclipse what we've seen so far.
Patrick is an expert Research and Travel consultant. His current interest is in the Gatwick Hilton and the Gatwick Sofitel.
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Top 5 Influential Games of All Time
What makes a worst video game of all time? Poor storylines, insane difficulty, controlling issues to the point of broken screens… all these contribute towards video games that you threw out your window in disgust of wasting 3 dollars in renting them. On this list we prudently considered what games made us break the most things, and made us ask ourselves “how the fuck was this game ever made?” There were some obvious immediate choices like “Shaq Fu” and “ET”, and there were also some more personal choices like “Fatal Fury” and “Elevator Action”. Old-Wizard brings you these top 20 worst games of all time in hopes that you never have to experience the inexorably abominable game play that we’ve had to experience in playing a game like “Three Stooges”, where what you thought would be 2 days of rented videogame euphoria turned out to be hours of personal disgust, wondering how it was possible you could have rented a game so bad. However, if you are one of those people who like to play bad video games because they make you feel better about yourself and ebullient about your own small accomplishments in life, then these are the games to play. As an elementary programmer, you probably have a decent chance at creating a game better than “Muscle”, and this doesn’t feel too bad.
Yo! Noid is about as much fun as eating left over pizza that’s been thrown away in the garbage a week earlier. When an advertising slogan gets put to a video game, you can be sure it’s total ass. This game is no exception. “Yo Noid” may be the best example of idiots in marketing who think that anything can be translated to a video game. This game is grotesquely difficult, much like the side-scrolling style of difficulty found in “Ghost’s ‘n Goblins”. What’s more annoying though is having absolutely no energy and no suit to protect you from just one enemy killing you. Even the smallest enemy within a proximate vicinity can dominate the Noid into oblivion, making you wonder why the hell the Noid took it upon himself to save New York City. His weapon is a yo-yo, not a magic yo-yo like we find in Star Tropics, but a standard yo-yo, making you wonder even more why the Noid thinks he can save New York City with no stamina and a fucking toy yo-yo. If you happen to embody video game luck beyond all understandable limits and get to the end of a level, you are put into a pizza eating contest while the city is on fire making the Noid a hero with no stamina, a bad weapon, and no dedication to the task at hand. What’s worse, if you lose the pizza eating contest, you have to start the insuperable level over again. At that point, you throw the cartridge out the window and remain validated in your consciousness of how bad an idea it always was to take a banal advertising signifier and assume it will be successful as a video game. I don’t think I ever ate at Dominos after playing this egregious excuse for a video game.
Skate or die? I would rather die then have to play skate or die ever again in this life time. The title screen shows some paltry loser who you want to beat on for looking so clownish. The game irritates you even more. You skate around different areas with the same ramps, same couple of maneuvers, and same impossible controller issues. Then when you finish an area you are bombarded with the same loser from the title screen, this time taking up even more space with his massive poaching noggin (who in their right mind would ever have a mo-hawk?) If your going to make a game called Skate or Die, how can it be one of the most pedestrian games ever made? Is it supposed to feel cutting edge because I’m looking at some goon with an ugly green mo-hawk? At least show a little bit of blood or anger when failing at these boring courses to merit the name skate or die. The same circle of courses proved to be quickly tedious, with little extra to spark any interest in playing further than five minutes, except if you like looking at 8-bit graphics of infirm skaters that may bring images of a “cool dude” flashing the rock hand signal at you when you were doing something cool. I suspect there are some people who like this trash. These people I should never meet, God willing.
Who would have ever thought this would have been a good idea? Okay, maybe if you were going to turn this NES installment into a superhero fighting game where Waldo had superpowers like something coming out of his glasses, but this installment turns out to be the same exact concept as the books, but only worse. At least in the books, you could spot Waldo, the graphics and objects for the NES “Where’s Waldo” are so poor that everything equally looks like shit making it impossible to have any chance at finding him. Why not just stick with the books though in the first place? Who in their right would buy this game? It’s hard to imagine even 5 of these games being sold. Could you imagine anyone admitting to buying this dung when you could buy the nice clear, iridescent books? “Where’s Waldo” consists of a big screen with a cursor moving around over non-descript objects. You would think the sales department would have something to say about this. But as with other games that were brought from the TV screen to platform console, all that mattered was cashing in on a good idea, no matter how bad the idea was for the video game system.
When a publisher releases a video game based on a movie, it seems they often depend on the movie hype to sell copies rather than concentrating on actually producing a quality game. Total Recall for the NES was one such game (we’ll see two more games based on movies on the list as well). It is nothing short of amazing to consider that a console as great as the NES, with its track record of wonderful movie titled games (like Star Wars), would allow for such a mediocre title to be released. To add insult to injury, the game was actually released by Acclaim! Everything about the game leaves something to be desired: the controls are unresponsive, the graphics are atrocious and the game play is just plain confusing. In addition, the story line and characters fail to even resemble those of the movie it is supposed to be portraying — which may not necessarily be a bad thing, since I didn’t much like the movie, either.
Fatal Fury was fun to play for 2 seconds because of how obvious of a rip off it was of Street Fighter. It was the poor mans Street Fighter, literally and figuratively. The characters were poorly conceived, the after-fight dialogues were a monstrosity of van damnesque platitudes, and the final boss was about as scary as a 4th grade trick or treater in a wonder woman outfit. Your friend bought this game when he couldn’t afford the real street fighter which would go anywhere from $40-$50 dollars. Fatal Fury was a $20 dollar game and it showed. This however did not stop your friend from calling you up and saying “I got this game Fatal Fury that may be better than street fighter”, much to your laughter as you realize your friend made a competition out of who had the better video games (These are the people you would often find with books lying around entitled “How to start a conversation and make friends”). Fatal Fury remains one of the more poor attempts at a 2 player coin-op style fighting game. Combine goofy characters with derivative moves and conspicuous hopes of being “the next street fighter”, and you will get this impoverished piece of crap.
Pac-Man is a simple game and its one of the greatest games of all time. Donkey Kong and the Original Super Mario Brothers are also simple games that rank as some of the best video gaming experiences of all time. Elevator action is also a very simple game, and is one of the worst games of all time, proving that simplicity doesn’t always equal genius. This game gets repetitive quick. Climb down stairs shooting the same fucking sleuth enemies over and over again. Once in awhile, take an elevator down and shoot the same enemies over and over again. The music is deeply irritating and completely uninspired. It’s easy to fall asleep to this music (not in a good Coastal Mario Kart level), which should not be the case for an action thriller that tries to be “edgy”. There’s really nothing more to be said about this game. You will fall asleep 2 minutes into playing Elevator Action or you will be angry it’s so fucking boring. There’s a line between sheer boredom and sheer genius when it comes to overtly simple games like those listed previously. Pac Man you can play for hours and hours on end with a levels that barely change and enemy’s that only gradually increase in speed and difficulty level. Elevator Action on the other hand you know almost immediately to be tired and uninspired.
Playing this game for the first time, the first thoughts that pop to one’s head are “I can’t believe this game was ever created.” Fester’s Quest for the NES is well deserving of its spot on this list. Loosely based off the 1960’s T.V. show The Adams Family, Fester’s Quest follows Uncle Fester as he attempts to save his town from an alien invasion. What? What do aliens have to do with the Adam’s Family? The odd plot sets the tone for the game itself. Uncle Fester’s weapons include a gun that gets worse the more you power it up and whip. The story line, power ups, and game play give you the impression that this was supposed to be a different game before getting the Adams‘ Family name slapped onto it. And as with many of the games on our top 20 worst video games list, Fester’s Quest is hard. I’m talking Contra with lives hard. You get two hits, no extra lives, and no code. The various enemies are difficult to hit with the guns you’re provided with, and if you died even once, you had to start the entire game over again, making it not only hard but incredibly tedious and frustrating. There are almost no redeeming qualities to this game, other than the sound effects, which are lifted directly from Blaster Master, another Sunsoft game, and one of the greatest games ever made. Unfortunately, Sunsoft couldn’t repeat that brilliant success with this atrocious game.
This game was originally released in 1992 for the Genesis system and it maintained a small following for a while. The reason behind the following is most likely due to the onslaught of sequels to this game, which include “Jungle Strike”, “Soviet Strike”, and “Nuclear Strike”. It should be noted of course that all of these titles pretty much give the game away before one is even able to enjoy any playtime. This review however, will only focus on the first in the series “Desert Strike”.
While most games are bad because the idea of the actual game being played is terrible, or because it is so difficult you can’t get by the first level, “Three Stooges” introduces a new reason why a game can be awful. Three Stooges is basically incomprehensible to play. For the most part you have no idea what you’re doing when you’re playing this game. You press start and you’re taken to an outside street with the three stooges where a Wheel of Fortune wheel comes out of thin air that ostensibly picks what you’re supposed to do in the game. Next you notice you’re in another random place where you have no idea what you’re supposed to do. You’re at a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. There are also what looks like pieces of cat excretion in the soup that you have to eat. Trying to control your spoon proves to be one of the more difficult tasks you will take on in this life. After a couple of minutes of throwing your controller at the screen you hear a sound that sounds like a box fan breaking down which I think is supposed to be one of the 3 stooges getting angry that you didn’t pass a test that you couldn’t control and knew nothing about, and had no idea how you got there, and why your eating soup with ambiguous objects inside. You next may randomly find yourself in a hospital flying down an operating room with a nurse picking up things she’s dropping. You have no idea what you’re picking up though. Once again, trying to control this fiasco proves excessively enigmatic, and once again you will be throwing your controller at the screen.
Superman: The New Superman Adventures, released for the Nintendo 64, is by far the worst thing to happen to the Superman franchise since Richard Pryor. Univerally panned for its ridiculous plot, the game also offers up bad graphics and poor gameplay. The plot unfolds to reveal Lex Luthor’s entrapment the Man of Steel’s best friends - Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Professor Hamilton - in some virtual world into which you must enter to save them. My first thoughts upon hearing this plot were, “Okay, sounds stupid so far, but most Superman plots are. I still can’t wait to play as Superman on the N64. This is going to be great! Besides, anything with Superman can’t be all bad.” Boy, was I wrong. The gameplay and missions themselves are just plain boring. For some reason, Lex Luthor has suspended some hoops in the air, and you must fly through them in order to complete you mission objectives. Okay, this can still be cool: I like flying. Nope. The unresponsive controls will have you assuming you have pushed the wrong button which usually results in mashing others to get some sort of response, all the while being confused by the weird perspectives. Not only that, but you barely get to use your other powers since you are occupied flying around through some boring backgrounds that look more like they belong on SNES than the N64. You do occasionally get to fight a virtual copy of one of Superman’s archenemies, though. The only reason to play this game is to see how bad it is, and only if you can find a friend who still owns a copy and hasn’t resold it or burned it.
A reoccurring theme for the top 20 worst games of all time has been when games have been so difficult that you had to buy a new tv from smashing your controller against it too much. There is no game that exemplifies this upshot from sheer difficulty like Ghosts ‘n Goblins. 1/8th through the first level you’re surrounded by mound and mounds of enemies. As you’re walking as your character, you’re basically surrounded by a force field of enemies coming at you from every possible angle. Ok, maybe if you had a lot of energy or someone decent armor, you could take the level one onslaught of nefarious enemy’s. As you walk, you see you do have armor, looks like pretty strong armor, until a weak ass looking bird swoops down, barely hits you, and your armor comes flying off. Not even faux-Halloween armor is this poor. I’m pretty sure that if a bird touched a plastic armor suit that you wore for Halloween, it wouldn’t come flying off. As your worthless armor comes flying off, you’re left with an almost-naked character who is left with nothing on except underwear. Q: Who wears nothing under armor? Am I inept to mid-evil tradition or is there something completely untenable about someone wearing nothing under armor? Your basically left naked running around in the wild with a force field of petulant enemy’s surrounding you at every second. This stultifying game play leads you to give up after 1 to 2 minutes making you feel like shit and making you retire to much more germane games with more sane difficulty levels. When programmers make these games, don’t they realize these most obvious setbacks for the player? Setbacks so large, that they stop playing the game after 5 minutes?
One of the best selling books of all time subsequently made into one of the highest grossing movies of all time, right? You’d think they would attempt to design a game of similar stature, right? You obviously have never played this boring as paint drying game. One would think that when a certain storyline is created, that most subsequent recreations of the story would follow a similar pattern. Jurassic Park though just kind of meanders through the jungle and leaves the game player feeling dejected and hurt in the end. After a rather weak opening scene of the T-Rex roaring at you in low-def, the game simply starts. There is Dr. Grant standing in the jungle, armed with a dart gun and a few grenades, waiting to be brought through the jungle to a destination. And that’s about it. You need to do some jumping, a little hopping over rocks, and maybe maneuver to avoid little creatures trying to drain your life bar. You come across a dinosaur that will simply fall over for about a minute after you hit it with a dart. The grenades of course make them not get up anymore. A little more jumping and hopping along through the jungle and maybe stomp on a baby raptor while doing so. And then….TA DA! You reach the end of level one. Maybe level two will have something more exciting? But sorry, it may be a different scene, but the same general premise level after level. You go into substations, go back into the jungle, and maybe drive a motor boat through another low-def scene. This is all happening with the final goal being to get back to the Visitor Center. The second to the last scene is going through the ventilation system with raptors running around below you. Once you jump through a final hatch, you land on top of the large bones setup in the Visitor Center main hall. With a simple flick of the thumb and the toss of a grenade in between the skeleton setups, they crash onto the raptors waiting below. And the game ends…
Joust is unbearably boring. Same screen, same enemies, same poor sounds, no music. If one were looking for a legal soporific agent, Joust would be your best treatment. Who could possibly think this idea would keep the attention of the player beyond 30 seconds? When designing this game, who thought that this 1 screen sleep fest would be enough to justify its place in an entire cartridge? At least have a 2 nd game along with this garbage. At least have some weak ass side scroller with your jouster (who looks more like a flying ostrich) killing medieval enemies. Speaking of the enemies, what exactly are these things? How come all the players and enemies in “Joust” look like poorly designed birds? In Joust, you’re enveloped with one boring game, controlling something that looks like a bird, fighting against things that may or may not be more birds. Yes, the controls are simple; yes the concept is simple, but so simple that you don’t know why you should be playing this game after 30 seconds. That this ever retained a place in an arcade is beyond Old-Wizard. The sight of this NES cartridge at a used video game store induces the largest of yawns.
It is quite ironic that Wayne’s World begins with Wayne and Garth reviewing their “Top Ten Worst Arcade Games List” since it is the only Super Nintendo game to make our worst ever video games list. Being fans of the SNES, a game released on that console needs to reach inordinately bad marks to be considered for inclusion on our list, but Wayne’s World did just that. Usually, video games based on movies without “Star Wars” in the title don’t turn out very well, and games based off BAD movies turn out even worse. This game is no exception. As you might expect from a game based on Wayne’s World, the story line is less than stellar: an evil purple putridosity called Zantar has kidnapped Garth, and you have to guide Wayne as he tries to rescue his hapless sidekick. Wayne is armed with a guitar that helps him defeat various enemies inhabiting Kramer’s Music Store, Stan Mikita’s Donut Shop, the Gasworks nightclub, and suburbia. In each location, the assailants include monster bagpipes, accordions, coffee cups, disco ball, and headbangers. Poor story line alone does not necessarily automatically place a game in the “bad” list. Unfortunately, boring levels, unwieldy controls and sheer monotony do. Oh, and should you choose to play it yourself, it will probably take you all of ten minutes to come to agreement with us on this one.
The NES had a myriad of decent wrestling games under its belt including “Pro Wrestling” and “Wrestlemania”. It also held the worst wrestling game ever made, none other than “Muscle”. The biggest reason why Muscle is a terrible game is because of how boring it is. There are no moves, no real characters, and no dialogue. You start off the game by choosing between 9 ostensibly different players, who in reality are all exactly the same, except a slight discrepancy in the color of outfits and shape of face. The game is completely silent. You would think that if a wrestling game is going to be made, at least include some tension and excitement by adding crowd noise and an announcer, albeit an 8 bit incoherent announcer. You get none of this with “Muscle”. You get no music, no crowd noise, 2 or 3 boring moves with no choice of different characters unless your duped into thinking changing masks makes a wrestler completely different. It took about 3 minutes of playing this game to realize that you wasted 3 dollars on renting this soporific excuse for a wrestling game. Bring on “Pro Wrestling” where I can bash “Amazon” on the head with a steel chair and can use a character with a giant star in the middle of his head (Hint: When making games, use your fucking imagination!). 
When you first see this game, you see the cover with a munificent, happy-go-lucky paperboy delivering papers. You think to yourself, well, a game about being a paper boy can’t be that much fun…but maybe it’s some sort of super-hero paperboy and that’s the reason why he’s so happy on the front cover! The game is opposite of the cover. After you play this game for 10 minutes, you realize the front cover should be a paperboy irritable beyond all bounds and maybe even sticking his middle finger up at the street dancers who have nowhere to dance except right in the middle of the fucking street you have to deliver on.
So yeah, we are talking about the worst games ever conceived by human beings right? There are probably some pretty horrible games trapped under the methane ice of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, but let’s not get off the subject of just how shitty this game really is. Now normally, we here at Old Wiz don’t take the opinions of others too seriously. You know the saying, “They are like assholes, and everybody has them”. Well the word over many news wires is that we are not the only ones who think this is worthy of the moniker of “one of the worst games of all time”. One thing for sure is that the production team is for Big Rigs should have been beaten into submission for violating the cardinal rule of gaming; creating a game that doesn’t just waste time but makes you want to punch someone after playing it. Let’s go over some of the finer points that Big Rigs offers to its lowly participants…
Top Gun for the NES is probably the most boring, hackneyed game to ever be released for the great 8-bit system. It’s a flight simulator with no extra features, no stirring sounds, and no control to do anything but move forward and sometimes shoot planes that look more like computer speakers. All is well though you think because a game this easy and boring will surely be conquered in no time, but then after 50 attempts of trying to land your plane in an aircraft carrier, you realize that this game is not only odiously trite, but is impossible to end because it’s basically impossible to land your plane. When landing your plane on an aircraft carrier, you are given terse directions from your “command screen” which you follow. If you follow the directions 100% perfectly, you will have about a 5% chance of landing the plane. I have personally seen the plane landed once. I remember that eventful day. I was at a friend’s house and four of us were watching my friends’ father trying to overcome this insuperable task. The first time we saw it land, we had a party. I remember looking over at one of my friends who may have been crying out of joy, that the annoyingly impossible task could be circumvented. The excitement lasted until the end of the next level where we all knew it couldn’t happen again, and it didn’t.
Shaq Fu for the Sega Genesis is probably the worst conceived game ever to come out for any platform system. The story line is so abominable that you almost wish for a completely incoherent one was substituted as to give the idea of the storyline being more enigmatic. You are Shaq, somehow in Tokyo, where you are discovered by some zen karate master who says that you have come from some distant planet to save the world (I wonder if Shaq himself ever played this, or maybe even wrote this story line?). After you endure the blatantly uninspired storyline, you have to endure the worst 2 player fighting game of all time. The controlling in this game is incomprehensible. The best thing you can do is just hammer the buttons of your controller with your hands and watch the screen, hoping your capricious hammering of the controller will cause a victory against the most banal of opponents. Looking at the screen doesn’t help the cause either because how dumb it looks to see hackneyed monsters fighting a big dude in basketball shorts. Once you lose because the controlling is so irritating, you have to endure more uninspired dialogue from enemies with 80 times more skill than you have as Shaq. Your opponents can basically throw the elements at you, they can throw fucking planets at you, while you’re left to a high kick and a low kick depending on which buttons your randomly smashing. With a name like “Shaq Fu”, you had to know this game was going to be bad, but you were not in store for how bad it was until you actually played it for yourself.
As a child in the 80’s, E.T. was a HUGE part of my life. It was the first, second, and third movie I saw in a theater. It made Reese’s Pieces my favourite candy. It forced me to ride my Star Wars Huffy off of small ledges in hopes of flying my chubby silhouette in front of the moon. Maybe the greatest of all, it took away all fear of aliens I may have had. You could imagine my excitement when my father came home with this game, his face lit up like he was my age, and led me by the hand to the beloved Atari 2600.