Ten Games You Should Play

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Posted April 28, 2009 by DMoore in Featured, Featured Home, Features.

Apparently EA has a scheme that trains current staff to be creative directors, which is no bad thing at all, but has been a bit of an inspiration. You see, part of their course is the following question:

What games do you think people should, at the very least, look at as seminal in the mediums history?

It’s an interesting question, and can lead to an interesting list as they are not looking for critically acclaimed titles or the most popular, just ones that did something interesting for the industry.

Now let’s face it, everyone has an opinion, and that is no bad thing, so we here at BeefJack have put together a list of titles that we think you should play, if only for an hour, just to see what they did for our beloved medium. These games can all be considered major points on the road map of video gaming, and though your opinion may be that they suck or they are part of a genre you simply do not like, at least appreciate what they did for the medium.

So here are ten games you should, most definitely, play. They are in no particular order.

Super Mario Bros

If you have played Super Mario Bros, you know why it’s on this list. Put simply, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and put Nintendo firmly on the gaming map. The classic platforming gameplay helped to usher in a new era in gaming in the late ’80s, and gave birth to its first true mascot.

Not only that, it was one of the first games to allow local co-op that wasn’t a shooter, and did it well, allowing the second player to assume the role of Mario’s brother Luigi. Together they bounced on the heads of enemies, had great power ups and a brilliant score. It also gave us the immortal line ‘Sorry, but the princess is in another castle!” Shigeru Miyamoto, was launched on his path to success with games like Super Mario Bros, and even after five minutes, anyone can see why, this is a true landmark in games.

Doom

I remember the first time I heard about Doom. My uncle had come round for my birthday and I had gotten some toys (transformers, I think) but he and my dad were taking about their PC’s and he started talking about this brilliant game he was playing called Doom. Well my interest was peaked, he brought it over and installed it, and that was it, the first person shooter was in my life and flowing through my veins.

Doom is seminal for a number of reasons, it ushered in the age of the FPS, it was one of the most violent games around at the time, and it sparked some of the first videogame controversy (a fact that still haunts the game to this day). Id’s John Carmack was catapulted into the limelight with this game, as his expert programming made it possible to pull off the tight corridors, demons and gore effects that made this title such a standout, and gave birth to an entire genre.

Final Fantasy VII

Ah, rule writers, they are an obsessive bunch, always going over every detail with a fine comb, and generally barricading themselves in a dark room, but they are open to suggestion, so long as you’re subtle. So we have Final Fantasy VII, a game that rather than just asks the rules to be rewritten, forced its way in, slapped the writers with a big fish and did it itself.

Thus, a new type of RPG was born, one with cinematic flair, a penchant for immersive story telling and one of the most notorious twists in gaming. Previous games were mostly monsters vs. swords and bows, but FFVII gave us a techno punk world, with motorcycles, stupidly large swords, and even a talking red dog. Oh, and one of the most enduring antagonists in recent memory, Sephiroth.

Command and Conquer

There was a time when the next ‘Big Thing’ in gaming was the so called interactive movie. Essentially lots of live action FMV used for cut scenes, many games utilised the technique, but the most successful was the brilliant Command and Conquer.

The previously mentioned cut scenes were cheesy, poorly scripted and the acting was sub par – in short they were great. They gave the game a feel all of its own and the excellent bad guy Kane, leader of the Brotherhood of NOD was a stand out. But this game did more, and was the first breakout hit for the real time strategy genre, and went on to spawn many sequels and off shoots. A true classic and the first of an RTS renaissance which gave us Warcraft and Starcraft among others, the late 90’s were a strategists dream.

Sonic the Hedgehog

How can you attempt to knock the king of platforming, Mario, off his much lauded seat at the top of the pile? This was the question facing Sega, but not only that it needed a mascot to help drive sales of the then brand new Mega drive. The answer to the first, quite simply, was speed. Lots and lots of speed.

Sonic the Hedgehog shot on to the scene in 1991, and all Mario saw was a blue blur before he was knocked down a peg or two. The game took Super Mario Bros mechanics and basically added a race track, letting you jump on enemies and fight the evil Dr Robotnik, but also speed about at a pace that was unseen at the time. Great gameplay and the first real challenge to Mario’s crown meant that Sonic proved even the mightiest could fall and gave birth to the first gaming mascot war.

World of Warcraft

Up until 2004, massive multiplayer online (MMO) games were very complex, very inaccessible, and generally promoted to a very hardcore crowd. However, in November of that year, Blizzard unleashed something that would become a true gaming god.

World of Warcraft, based on the best selling RTS Warcraft, brought the MMO to the masses. It was accessible, yet hardcore, and most importantly, extremely addictive. Currently the game has 11 million active players and that number is still growing, as well as its expansions being two of the fastest selling games of all time. WoW, as its more commonly known, should be on this list because it did something special: revolutionised a genre and became one of the biggest success stories in gaming history.

Metroid Prime

The Metroid games started life on the NES as side scrolling platform shooters, but ended up skipping a console generation with no game on the N64. It was just after the Gamecube was released that rumours started to fly about a new game in the series, and sure enough Metroid Prime was announced, to some fan outrage.

You see the first screen shots showed a first person perspective, not the 2D side scrolling most people were accustomed to, and this courted much wrath from the series fan’s. However, all those dissenting voices were silenced and forced to eat humble pie upon the game’s release, as it was simply spectacular, and garnered many top honours from the press. It took everything that was great about the series and added the FPS viewpoint, making more of a ‘First Person Platformer’ rather than a shooter. The bosses, puzzles, weapons, environments, even the weather effects were brilliantly done, and it shows that you can radically alter a game and still make it a landmark title.

Halo: Combat Evolved

Halo is a landmark for a number of reasons. It ushered the original Xbox, placing Microsoft firmly on the map and igniting the current console war. It was the first FPS on a console to truly take advantage of the hardware and controls without feeling stripped down, and it is also one of the most ambitious and well thought out universes to ever be created for a videogame.

The production values were awesome, and the controls deeply intuitive, so much so that pretty much anyone could pick up and play without fighting the controls. The AI was revolutionary as well, actively using cover or plain running away if things got too hairy, and it was excellent. The fact you played as the Master Chief, a faceless super soldier in green power armour with recharging shields and a gruff demeanour didn’t harm either. Halo has extended in comics, books and at some point movies, and is a rather large point on the gaming map.

Resident Evil 4

Sequels will generally always be better than the preceding game, however Resident Evil 4 was different. The previous games were all survival horror games that used static backgrounds and clunky controls to portray their events, but Capcom decided enough was enough and they needed to do something different.

To be fair, different is something of an understatement, as RE4 completely revolutionised the 3^rd person action genre at the time. The tension present came from low ammo and having to stop to shoot. But by being able to move the camera around you had repercussions that are still being felt today. The few QTE’s scattered about added to the action and didn’t remove you from it, and helped conserve ammo. The new zombies were the shambling relics of the past, no, the Ganados were fast and agile and were able to use weapons. This game is on this list because it turned traditional conventions on their head, and much like the other games, completely rewrote the rules.

Shadow of the Colossus

The ‘Games as Art’ debate will rage for many years, probably even after the art world caves and says it is art, but for the time being, if you are a truly artistic game, look no further than Shadow of the Colossus.

Essentially it’s a bunch of boss battles with nothing else in between, but this game is so much more. Each of the bosses are massive, majestic Colossus, which are roaming about the beautiful landscape. Shining your sword to find them, it’s just you and your horse until you find the towering beasts that you must destroy in order to save your princess. The art style, game play, sound track, it all screams ‘Art’, and is one of those critically acclaimed yet woefully under played titles, but anyone who has played it knows that they just played their first work of pure art.

So there you have it, ten games you should play. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, yet each provided a turning point in the history of the medium. As I said at the start of this article, you may only play these games for an hour or even less. But check them out, if only to further your knowledge of the games you play and how, for example, Gears of War turned out as good as it did or why Grand Theft Auto uses certain mechanics.

Maybe even you could start your own list, there are certainly more games you should play than these ten, and again each has furthered the medium in unprecedented ways. So take a good look at the games in your collection and simply have a think about their influences.

Tagged as best games, Command and Conquer, Doom, feature, Final Fantasy, Halo, mario bros, metroid, Resident Evil, shadow, sonic the hedgehog, top 10, WoW