Well, don’t worry, there will no more be long texts about the games, this post is just to put the whole list in just one post, in order to make it organized. So, in the end, the winners are:

• 10 - Super Mario World (SNES) - The game in which special levels are named “Way Cool”, “Awesome”, “Groovy”, and “Outrageous”! How cool is that?

• 9 - Resident Evil 4 (GC) - The game in which zombies say “¡Te voy a hacer picadillo!”. How cool is that?

• 8 - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii) - The game in which Zelda pushes Link off the edge of a floating island into the abyss and he comes back with a mole to help in plowing a pumpkin field! How cool is that? (okay, it doesn’t happen in that exact order in the game xD)

• 7 - Half - Life 2 (PC) - The game in which you are able to paint houses by throwing Flavia Paint cans on the wall with a Gravity Gun! How cool is that?

• 6 - Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (SNES) - The game in which a female monkey plays a guitar solo after getting to the top of a tower that’s being flooded toxic green liquid while transformed into a Snake! How cool is that?

• 5 - Portal (1 and 2) (PC) - The game that deploys smooth jazz to help you remain tranquil in the face of almost certain death. How cool is that?

• 4 - Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) - The game in which you can kill the Sun! How cool fucking badass is that!?

• 3 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES) - The first game in which Link could enter random people’s houses, break their jars, open their chests and mess with their chickens! How cool is that?

• 2 - Super Metroid (SNES) - The game in which Samus can moonwalk! How cool is that?

• 1 - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64) - The game in which weird-looking stones talk to Link when he wears a certain mask and tell him that people say that the horse Ganondorf rides is a solid black Gerudo stallion! How cool is that?

And that’s all we got! Congratulations for you great games, you are great indeed!

But here is just one more thing I would like to add to this long sequence of posts, that is: The Games that Almost Made It to the Top! (And I mean, almost, really, they got just one head behind Mario World). They are:

• Super Castlevania IV (SNES)
• Chrono Trigger (SNES)
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (SNES)
• Sonic the Hedgehog (the original trilogy from Genesis)
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (Nintendo 64)
• The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (GC)
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (GC)
• Metroid Prime (the trilogy) (GC and Wii)
  
• Super Mario Galaxy (1 and 2) (Wii)
• Braid (Xbox 360)

Congratulations for you too, other great games! At least you were mentioned.

And that’s the end for the bonus and final part. Thanks to you all people who have read through the texts, hope you were all pleased in doing so.

Shall we? For the final part:

• 1 - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64)

And so I come to the conclusion of my game ranking in the most predictable way possible. I am one of the thousands of people that would answer Zelda: Ocarina of Time if asked what is the greatest game ever. There is no surprise here, and I feel that I can’t write any relevant thing about this Zelda, since it is not one of the most, but the most acclaimed video game of history. Well, since writing that this is a good game is completely redundant, I’ll tell why it is good to me personally. I’ll keep the text more focused on my personal experience with this game rather than analyzing it.

Ocarina of Time was the second Zelda game I’ve played, the first was A Link to the Past. So, I used to love the Nintendo 64 my cousin had (I used to love my cousins too xD), I would very innocently tell him “oh, you can call me to come to your house if you want to” and I would go there almost every weekend indeed, whether he called me or not. I was very young when he got a copy of Ocarina of Time, and I think he said to me something like: “hey, I got a new Zelda game for the 64, just like the one I gave to you, but much cooler.” And I got quite impressed at the time, the game really looked good and indeed had similarities with the previous Zelda game I could recognize. I remember I had some difficulties in playing OoT at first, I found the N64 controller very complex and rather big (come on, I was 5-6), I only had some experience in playing 2D games on the SNES, that’s why I would often just watch him play instead of playing it myself. Not to mention the fact that in this game it is often very important that you can read what people say in order to advance, and I didn’t speak English at the time. And I have very fond memories of we all playing that, the boss fights, the Dark Link duel, exploring the Lost Woods, riding the horse on the field, playing music to the scarecrow, I had contact with many great moments of OoT without playing it myself to complete it. I remember being fascinated when he taught me the secret of listenig to the music in the woods, what a fantastic game it was. And that was my first contact with it, and in the following years, I didn’t play it by myself, there weren’t even remaining save files for me to create one for myself. And the N64 years passed. The second contact would come some years later, already in the PS2/GC years.

In 2003 I got a Gamecube, my first videogame (the SNES wasn’t mine) and played all that good games from the beggining of the generation: Melee, Luigi’s Mansion, Mario Sunshine, Pikmin and of course, Zelda: Wind Waker. Woah, I really loved this last one, and it was the second Zelda game I completed and, considering the way I “played” Ocarina, Wind Waker was the second Zelda I really played. Than, in 2006, a friend from school, in the most awkward circumstances ever, gave to me a copy of the Zelda: Collector’s Edition, and right after completing Wind Waker, I finally started Ocarina of Time on the Gamecube, and now, for real, I mean, being able to play it in my own home and understanding English now! And that is rather funny, because when I played it in 2006, though it was the first time I played it for real, I had some nostalgic feelings now and then, remembering stuff I’ve seen at my early childhood. And needless to say, I fell in love with Ocarina, played it already knowing it was one of the greatest games ever, and even so, I was surprised. Ocarina is pure magic, it is a beautiful game, a lyrical beautiful game, full of emotions and feelings that lack in most of our current generation of video games. It’s so revolutionary in many aspects as we all know, it succeeded in converting Zelda to a 3D universe, creating the model on which all the following Zelda games were based. And improved as no other game had done the action button (the A button that’s used to perform a wide variety of actions, depending on where Link is) and the lock-on ability, such innovations were responsible for bringing movement in a 3D space in videogames to a whole new level. 3D gaming would never be the same after Ocarina. It is A very deep game, very involving also, with a constant flow of interesting details, truly lovely characters and many things to explore. I remember the feeling I had when I arrived at the first dungeon with Link as an adult, the Forest Temple. Oh my, all the bright and vibrant things from child Link had vanished, Hyrule was corrupted and entered an era of chaos, and now an adult Link is walking past twisted corridors on a dark mysterious dungeon holding the Hylian Shield with just one hand and the Master Sword with the other. That’s just the most epic thing I’ve ever seen in videogames, nothing compares to that, it’s the pure greatness in gaming!

Well, that’s what I wanted to say about Ocarina of a Time. It is a beautiful game with an impressively good music and full of strong feelings and sensations. One of the few games in which one can get sincerely touched, while playing Ocarina of Time you will find in the game feelings of love, sadness, excitement, wrath, admiration, loneliness, regret and so on. And that is what makes of it the greatest game of all time.

Shall we? For the next one:

• 2 - Super Metroid (SNES)

Super Metroid is frequently mentioned on best games ever lists, and it is supposed to be like this, it is a true masterpiece, but as far as I’ve seen it, this game is usually not ranked as high as it is in my list. I am not sure if there’s other people who have a similar opinion about this SNES classic, but I think that this game can easily be considered the best videogame ever made, if we had to pick up one. For me, Super Metroid is the definition of a good action video game, it as simple as that, it is an efficient game that combines incredibly complex and refined gameplay and an immersive intense atmosphere, it’s strongest aspect in my opinion. Super Metroid is most likely to be the first game to have used all the buttons on the SNES controller in a perfectly functional way, you can’t find a single thing to complain about the controls, they are a marvellous achievement for a game that was released in 1994. One button for selecting items, one for cancelling items, two others for angle up and angle down and another one for dashing and you can change the buttons configuration in the way it suits you better. Everything works out just fine, you learn quickly the basics of jumping and shooting and as you progress you learn increasingly complex movements so that in the end of the game you will be able to, for example, jump from a platform, while in the air angle down and shoot at a switch on the wall, perform a walljump, turn into morph ball leave a power bomb to kill a monster that’s chasing you and use the grapple beam to pass through the door you opened, and finally land from the jump. It is that complex, and even for our 2012 point of view, imagine this in 1994, it is just fantastic. Here’s a tip, if you play it on Wii, you might want to try the GC controller, I tried it once, it feels quite good.

The word that best define this game is “pioneer” (which is good, because this is a word that goes well with science-fiction in general xD). Not only on the gameply, Super Metroid was also a pioneer in an aspect in which SNES gamed would hardly ever succeed, and that is: creating an immersive atmosphere. While playing Super Metroid, the feeling you get is of constant curiousity about what will come next, there are always surprises, hidden stuff and new interesting challenges, talk about a very dynamic game, it is a constant flow from the beggining to the end. It is very exciting and involving to see Samus getting increasingly stronger each time you get a new item or ability. The soundtrack is also a crucial element for creating that deep Super Metroid experience, there are many good tracks in a peculiar style, that resembles electronic music but is also rather sophisticated. Visually it is impecable, featuring some locations already known from the first Metroid but much more detailed, and the creatures of Zebes, specially the bosses, are beautifully designed. It also has an acceptable backstory, that is very simple but just fine, though it certainly isn’t one of the most praised aspects of this Metroid game, after all it is not really important, this is a game that focuses on the action more than on any other thing. And in what concerns its action, there is no way one feels disappointed, it is shooting-platformer-action-adventure gaming of the highest quality.

That’s why I’ll end the text with a cliche: if you consider yourself a gamer and still haven’t played Super Metroid, you own yourself a favour, pick it up on a SNES or Wii (or wherever you find it) and see what is an awesome game.

And that’s it for part 5, see you later.

Age of Empires stuff. I didn’t create this, but it is just incredibly funny for whoever played the games. And I guess it’s funny even for people who didn’t play it. xD

Now let’s begin the fourth part:

• 4 - Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)

I can tell you I don’t really know what else can be said about Super Mario Bros. 3, I mean, it is a huge success, everybody knows that this is a great game. So, to say something that differs from the common sense, you would have to talk bad about it, which is something nobody does (at least almost never), because indeed there’s nothing to be criticized in this game. Everybody can play and love this game today (it is the top-seller game on the Virtual Console on Wii) and it’s almost 25 years old, and that is because in this game, Miyamoto and his team managed to evolve the Mario formula they created to a perfect level. This game, of course, resembles the first Super Mario Bros. and was based on it, but every change they made to it, everything they added, including the world map, all the secret stuff on the levels, the new power-ups and so on, made it only better, that’s why SMB 3 is a much better game than its predecessors (the box says it - true fact). So, I like this game for one simples reason: it is a 2D Mario game of the highest quality, the classic 2D Mario “formula”, that inspired so many other games, at it’s best.

• 3 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)

To understand the importance of this game isn’t hard - the third game to be released in the Zelda series is the responsible for making of The Legend of Zelda one of the greatest series in the history of videogames. Let’s see, the first game came out, everybody loved it, it is indeed a great game, ahead of its time in many aspects, became a best-seller. It showed a very strong potential to become even better in a sequel. Zelda II came out later and was also a success (in sales, at least), but not the succes that everybody was waiting, I’m not sure but I think that many people at the time got really disappointed with the sequel. Zelda II fails a lot, it is terribly hard, you never know where to go and the 2D gameplay with random RPG elements doesn’t seem appropriate for Zelda. It’s not a bad game, it is a good one, but certainly not as good as the Zelda games that came before and after it. The game that everybody was waiting for would come later on SNES.

Much in the same way Mario Bros. 3 is related to the first Mario game, Zelda: A Link to the Past (Zelda III indeed) is related to the first Zelda. It is a similar form, but a lot improved and full of new stuff and different possibilities. In the case of Zelda, the improvement was much more significative, as the game was released to a different platform, the SNES. So, when people played it they recognized what they liked in the first game, and saw it all good-looking with much better controls, graphics and sounds. A Link to the Past is a very powerful game, if you can call it like that, it begins with what I could call a combo of good stuff. When you turn it on, the 3D Triforce triangles appear slowly and some epic music starts when they join, with some sharp blade sound effects, it is just great! Then, a lower music is played, in the prologue the player gets to know abou the Golden Land, the Seal of the Sages, the ancient myths of Hyrule. And now the Zelda backstories began to be seriously developed by Nintendo, many of the elements we see in the series today were created in this game, such as the Master Sword, the Temple of Time, The Sacred Realm and the Ocarina, to mention only the more important. And then walking out on the rain, entering on Hyrule Castle with that epic music, rescuing Zelda (yes, you meet her very early in the game), and all that before heading to the first dungeon, this is just amazing! A very elaborated beggining, the exact opposite of “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.”. That is why I say that this game is the one responsible for the status Zelda has achieved, it all started here. The elaborated prologue and beggining of the game, The intriguing and very rich plot and backstory, the excellence in music, the very diverse and complex characters. And also, not sure if I can explain this well, the structure of two sets of dungeons, that go on one earlier in the game and other later, like two quests with different goals. The following games in the series are like this, In ALttP it is Light World dungeons then Dark World dungeons, in OoT it is Child Link dungeons then Adult Link dungeons, in TP the Fused Shadows quest first and then the Mirror of Twilight quest. Also, the interesting mechanic of travelling between parallel worlds that affect each other was a great innovation and, undoubtedly, the inspiration for the time travels of Ocarina of Time.

I got this game very young on my birthday (maybe 5 or 6 years old) when a cousin gave it to me and it was the first Zelda I played. I played it many times on the SNES in my childhood without knowing a single word in English (well, not really, I think I knew love, blue, yellow, cat, dog and to count from one to twelve, haha) and that is funny because I only came to understand all the text written on the game when I played it many years later when I downloaded it on Wii. And I was just enchanted (like this *_*) for understanding what all the people say and all the details of the story. Yeah, a truly great game, you should give it a try.

Well, that’s the end for part 4, see you later!

Let’s keep going on the Top 10:

• 6 - Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (SNES)

Now I guess that if you have read the previous part and saw Half-Life 2 on it you must be thinking something like: “that guy is nuts, no way any DKC can be better than Half-Life 2.” And I assume you’re right, I can’t claim that DKC 2 is a better game than Half-Life 2, but I am talking now about one of the games that got me into videogames and that keeps me amazed everytime I play it. I think the word that best define this game is:awesome! DKC 2 is a game that could only have been created in the 90s I think, it reminds me of that time in a certain way, unlike its predecessor, the first DKC, which is quite a regular game. I mean, while the first game in the series is surely a great game, it is somewhat predictable, the level design is simplist: jungle levels, sea levels, snow levels, cavern levels and every boss level has the same background. In a huge contrast, DKC 2 has one of the most creative, exotique and rich level design ever: pirate ship with storms levels, crystal mine with winds levels, beehive levels, rollercoaster levels, ghost forest levels and many others. Not to mention some strange stuff I can’t even name in english. It is just fantastic! And everything in gorgeous 3D graphics, a true pioneer for the time. The soundtrack of DKC 2 is also one of the best I’ve ever known in videogames, it’s gorgeous, varied and different from most stuff of the time. So, in technical aspects, I find this game perfect, and personally it is very important to me: it is the first game I got in my life. Not sure, I think I was 5 years old when my parents bought it to me. Well, I just love it!

• 5 - Portal (1 and 2) (PC)

First and foremost, let me explain why I put both games in the same position on the ranking. For me, Portal 1 and 2 are two episodes of a single work of art, a beautiful work of art, a series that started and ended majestically in less than four years. They could, for example, be named Portal: Part 1 and Portal: Part 2, as they are about much the same characters, and have much the same graphics and the main gameplay mechanics. That doesn’t change the fact that both of them are amazing in their own way and that Portal 2 is the one I like the most, in which I think most people do agree with me.

That said, I now have only positive comments to make about Portal. The first game was released as a part of The Orange Box bundle, and among the already known by the public Half-Life and Team Fortress, it looked like a bonus, a small surprise add to fill in the package. Despite it’s initially low ambitions, Portal turned up to be the icing on the cake of the bundle, it was a big success and came to be one of the most acclaimed games by Valve. Everyone knew after the release of the first episode that a sequel was to be released later. Portal 2 was developed in a completely different way, now a bigger and more ambitious project, with all the care and deft by the creation team that it deserved. The mechanics of Portal are one of the greatest achievements of the videogame industry of all time. It is at the same time, incredibly complex and so well-crafted that it is flawless. Portal is a very demanding puzzle game, it requires thinking with a whole new mechanic full of different possibilities (“Now you’re thinking with portals”), and almost every level presents new possibilities to the player. Physically perfectly crafted, it sometimes requires you to use your knowledge in physics in order to advance, which is something I really love about this game, it’s as far from a button-smasher as it could be, it requires pure logical thinking. The structure of this game is quite simple, it is mainly divided into levels and it usually doesn’t get away from this pattern. The development team made an impecable job on this game, making of every single level a new experience. In what concerns the plot and the characters, Portal is different from everything you have already seen. The characters are incredibly carefully created, GLaDOS, Wheatley and some others that talk to you during the game, all of them (except for one), are robots, and all of them, more human than the Chell that you control. This is a fantastic inversion of our ideas of whether humans are more sensitive than robots and how can we interact emotionally with non-human beings. Portal is full of precious phrases and intelligent ideas all around, and also, some great plot twists. Needless to say, GLaDOS is one of the finest characters ever created in videogame history, and I dare saying, in science-fiction history.

Portal is a perfect game, a cute, terrifying, sensitive, awkward and beautiful  perfect game. Play it and try not to love it, and as you won’t be able, play it and love it with all your heart!

I’ll give an answer that’s probably different than what most people would think I would choose. If I could survive, read books and listen to, play and create music I would live alone (or not alone) in an isolated location in the middle of a forest somewhere in Asia, probably India or Japan. Because that’s my idea of a fictional complete dive in art that I would do if I could. In this case, I assume I would have available everything I need to survive and wouldn’t have any health injuries or any kind of problem at all (which is practically impossible concerning real life). And of course, I would come back “to society” some time later, being there forever would be pointless.

Considering that this is a hypothetical and impossible situation, if I would choose a more reasonable option, I would go for Rio de Janeiro, though it certainly has many problems, it’s still a city I love. And I’m not a huge fan of beaches.

fyeahlilbitoeverything:

I just woke up everyone in the house.

So, beggining from where the other post ended:

• 8 - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)

I remember very well the day that this game was announced, unlike most people, which I think loved the graphics at first sight, I remember feeling somewhat insecure and disappointed about it and didn’t create much hype about the new title. Though in the back of my mind I knew it would be another great adventure, after all it’s Zelda, we can’t go wrong with that. So, the next year, 2011, was the most intense and physically, intellectually and emotionally demanding of my life, the reason why I almost didn’t see it passing. It was the year that I studied the most in my life and had the less time to play videogames and do other stuff, so, when I noticed, there were just about two weeks left before the release of the new Zelda game. So, unlike Twilight Princess, for which I’ve waited many months in expectation to play, this one came as a pleasant surprise, in a very difficult moment of my life. I do also have fond memories of the day that me and a friend of mine went to the game store near school and picked the game up there (yay for Bóris o/). That said, the game immediately caught me, and I was very pleased to see that the series I enjoyed playing four years ago (TP) was still great. And that’s not all, Skyward Sword was very different from other Zelda games in many aspects, it’s much more innovative than Wind Waker and Twilight Princess were. In my opinion, this game manages to reach a balance that few games do, it has very beautiful graphics (a gorgeous impressionism-influenced art style, possibly the perfect blend for Zelda), an amazing plot that was the dream of any fan of the series and very fitting, precise and creative controls. This game can be played by anyone, from new kids discovering the series to the long-time Zelda fans and this is why it is more than just a good game, it is a success and a celebration of the greatest game series of all time.

ps: The symphony CD that comes with the game is my precious, also. Game music of the highest quality.

• 7 - Half-Life 2 (PC)

This game is what we can call a seminal work in the videogame industry, Half-Life 2 pushed up all the standards of first-person shooting gaming and I see it as the predecessor of the huge FPS wave that would rise in the following years. We are talking about a game that was developed in five years, the creators had attention to every little detail, that’s why it is just flawless. Half-Life 2 simply doesn’t fail, it is visually incredible for the year of 2004, has a great soundtrack, efficient gameplay and a truly elaborated plot with a fast-paced and immersive narrative. Not to mention the physics in the game, that are perfect. It is a brilliant mature science fiction work, most likely claimed to be the best in videogames, and I find amazing how every situation you face in the game is a different challenge that requires specific way of thinking and taking action. It is the greatest accomplishment of Valve Corporation, in my opinion, one of the greatest (if not the best) videogame development company of the 2000 years.

And that is the end for part two. See you later!