I Get Yoshi

December 5, 2008

Regardless of what Scott Heisel says, I do occasionally follow up on things I promise.

And like I said in my last blog (and at the request of beener48, whose whim I apparently feel a preternatural need to succumb to lately), I'm gonna dedicate this one to my Top 5 video games of all time.

I couldn't quite figure out a way to judge games for this (since I'm only a semi-casual gamer at best) and I haven't exactly played every game out there. So I decided the easiest way to rank games was to choose them based on the amount of time I spent mastering (read: becoming adequate) at them.

1. Burnout 3: Takedown (Xbox)

A widely accepted and unfortunate characteristic of mine is that I have paralyzing road rage. I went through a couple-year stretch during which I would routinely get into what I called "battles" with other drivers–usually resulting in 93 mph games of cat and idiot. So imagine my sociopathic glee when the original Xbox released Burnout 3–a game with a mode where the entire goal is to cause the most horrific accidents possible and a "Road Rage" mode in which the point was to run as many other cars off the road as humanly possible. I learned an important lesson during the summer that this game monopolized my life: Don't play it for six hours straight then get directly in your car to drive to Taco Bell. Am I right, Pennsylvania State Police? Yeah. You remember me.

2. Tekken 2 (Playstation)

I was never any good at Mortal Kombat. I was okay, and I could shoot Scorpion's grapple thingy, but there was always someone who knew every intricate "left-right-A-B" code out there, rendering me pretty useless and subsequently bored. But when my college roommate got Tekken 2 during my freshman year, it became a much more palatable use of time than my Intro To Logic course. It was a zillion times more realistic and smooth than MK, and thanks to staggering amount of classes I skipped just to play it, I became the dork who knew every move's code. I should've used that brain space on other things, but who really uses logic anyway?

3. Super Mario Kart (Super Nintendo)

I never owned Mario Kart. I never even owned a Super Nintendo. But my friend Lucas did in high school and during one magical summer break, our nightly agenda went like this: 1. Go to Eat N' Park and eat Cookie Fudge Fantasy sundaes; 2. Attempt to hit on whichever girls from neighboring school districts happened into our general vicinity; 3. Go to his house defeated and ready to spend the wee hours on Mario Kart shooting red turtle shells at each other. Ah, where would the video game world be without the universal rejection unleashed by high school girls?

4. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (Sega Genesis)

For my money, there's really nothing better than a spunky, potentially psychopathic hedgehog who moves at the speed of sound (back then it seemed like it, at least. His actual speed now translates to around 43 mph).

5. Missile Command (Atari)

While most of you have probably never had the ignorant jubilation of playing anything on the now-antiquated Atari system, Missile Command was pretty much Halo for people who wouldn't know what a CD was for almost a decade. That screenshot you see there is pretty much the whole game. Missiles are fired at your city and you've gotta shoot em down before they destroy the buildings below (buildings in 1984 apparently all looked like little blue letter "M"s). That's a lot of pressure to put on the shoulders of a 6-year-old. But if I ever find myself in the middle of some sort of worldwide nuclear Armageddon and only me and Jeff Goldblum can save the planet, it's all gonna come back to me.

Of course, they upgraded this game for more modern systems…