Great Console Video Games (not including Final Fantasy games)

Before we start, realize that this list, like all my lists, is completely biased. I don't play sports games, I rarely play fighting games, and I dislike Halo. So let's start there. If you can move on, read on!

Great Video Games

• Ico: Chances are you've never heard of it, and chances are you would dislike it if you only play Halo and sportsy games. Your loss. This minimalistic puzzle/adventure/action game lets you take control of a horned boy who has to escape from an abandoned castle. At the same time, you have to help useless princess girl out, too. Getting from place to place is the puzzle, especially since getting princess girl out means that you have to make pathways for her to use, as she's not as agile as you are. You also have to protect her from shadow spirits. It's a breathtaking game. Very beautiful graphically, and with a very subtle and beautifully melancholy story that really hits you. Not for the impatient thirteen-year-old boy in you, that's for sure.

• Katamari Damacy: If you haven't played it or heard of it, this may sound weird. You're a little green alien whose humongous dad, The King of All Cosmos, has destroyed all the stars after a night of binge drinking. He's an asshole, so he's making you clean up the mess by rolling a sticky ball (katamari) around the world picking up things. The more stuff you pick up (ants, candies, tacks), the bigger the stuff you can roll up (people, cars, buildings, rainbows). And great music, too. Simple, psychotic, elegant.

Good Video Games

• Bully: I haven't finished it yet, but it's fun in that Grand Theft Auto way, although funnier, I think. And much less violent.

• Call of Duty 2: I normally dislike first person shooters, but this World War II game on the 360 does it for me. Although I can't play for that long without getting jumpy...

• Dance Dance Revolution: Fun and good exercise! I'm still not good enough to beat the advanced levels, though.

• Donkey Kong Country: Why was this game so fun? It's just a normal side-scroller. Okay, you can also swing from vines. Woop-dee-doo. But such nostalgia for me with this game!

• Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine: Oh yeah. I had a Sega Game Gear. This is probably my favorite pseudo-Tetris game, if only because the beans were cute and stuck together.

• Grand Theft Auto 3: It began a new era. And rightly so.
  

• Almost any Mario Brothers game, particularly the SNES one and the N64 one: Not much to say. Classic. I also enjoy Mario Kart (the N64 one best) and Mario Party (even though it's stupid). Smash Brothers is fun, but it never wowed me like it wowed you.

• Metal Gear Solid: Box box box, sneaking past the guards. The plots are incomprehensible, sure, but the sneaking around in lockers and shadows and strangling people from behind was a high point in my girlish fifteen-year-old life. It can be funny at times, too.

• Shadow of the Colossus: Made by the same people as Ico and just as beautiful. Also great music. There are only 16 enemies, but each is a monstrous, moving puzzle. It's amazingly original and well-made, but sometimes can get a little frustrating. I'm aaalllmost done, so I'll let you know how great the ending is when I get to it. I've heard good things, though.

• Tetris: Still great after all these years. Why mess with perfection?

• Almost any Zelda game, though I haven't played the newest ones (Majora's Mask and the Twilight Princess): To be fair, aren't they all basically the same? People are always bickering about which was best, but I dunno, how much better could Link to the Past have been than Link's Awakening? How was Ocarina of Time THAT much better than the Oracle games? Aren't they all about an elf trying to save another elf by throwing pottery at walls, attacking feral chickens, and cutting down unsuspecting bushes to retrieve mysterious bits of heart?

Great Computer Games (by genre)

Until quite recently, I was a computer gamer. Hardcore. Sure, it was 1994, and I was ten, but it still counts. It makes me sad that many of my old games won't work on Windows XP. That is, it made me sad until I figured out how to make them run anyway...

Great Adventure Games

Oh man, adventure games. I am a HUGE lover of the adventure game, even though no one else in the world is and the genre is now as good as dead (sigh). Why did people give up on the adventure game? Was it Myst? Was it? Because Myst was not the only adventure game ever, my friends. Nor the King's Quest franchise. No, there were good ones, too...

• Eco Quest: The Search for Cetus: It's an adventure game that teaches kids not to litter in the ocean! What's not to like? There was also a puzzle that forced me to learn how a toilet works, which has proved useful.
  

• The Monkey Island games, especially number 3, The Curse of Monkey Island: Who knew Lucas Arts could be funny? Actually, I did, because of these games. These hilarious adventure stories follow Guybrush Threepwood, wannabe pirate, as he quests to defeat the zombie/ghost/demon pirate LeChuck and save the beautiful governor, Elaine...or be saved by her, more likely. Famous for their insult swordfighting minigames, this series is full of all that I find funny: meta jokes, obscure cultural references, and lighthearted sexual innuendo. And puzzles! If you ever randomly want to play an adventure game, make it MI3.

• The Neverhood: This game is so weird, and I'm pretty sure you can't even find it anywhere anymore. It's done all in claymation and has one of the best most bizarre soundtracks I've ever heard. Deerhoof's got nothing on these guys. The puzzles are pretty standard, nothing special, but the slapstick humor and weird-ass style of the game made it well worth while. Lots of fun.

• Toonstruck: I can't for the life of me get this game to play! But I think I found a mod online that'll get it to work again... Anyway, this cartoony adventure game stars Christopher Lloyd (wha?) as a cartoonist sucked into a cartoon world. I remember it being pretty damn funny. Except for one or two annoying puzzles, the rest were logical--well, logical for a cartoon world. Suffice it to say, more than one puzzle was solved with a pun.

ps I've heard The Longest Journey is great, and I have it now. It's on my "To Play" list for sure. But I have console games to beat first! (The ten-year-old PC gamer is sobbing now, a little.)

Great Old-School Educational Games

• The Dr. Brain games: Thinking about these again reminds me of when science was fun. In elementary school I learned about genetics by breeding aliens into bizarre inbred freak aliens. Life was good.

• The Oregon Trail: Was this educational? We did play it in school. In conclusion, I was addicted to Oregon Trail last summer. ps It's best to play as a teacher!

• Almost any SuperSolvers game: You know. Gizmos & Gadgets, Treasure Mountain/Cove, the not as easy as you'd think Operation: Neptune (especially when you turn the math difficulty to its highest). They mixed learning with shooting things. What more could you ask for?

• Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?: 'Nuff said.

Great Strategy and Sim Computer Games

I'll admit, this list is going to be missing your favorites, because I never played very much Civilization or Sim-whatever. I did play them, but not enough for me to judge them. Sorry.

• Europa Universalis: Take over the world, one province at a time! Real Time Strategy never felt so good... until...

• Hearts of Iron II: James, Carlos, and I were VERY addicted to this game for a time. It's a lot of fun. Start in the 1930s, play as any country as you want, and play the war. We got some bizarre scenarios to go down (like the one where the US took over the entire western hemisphere except for Brazil).

• The Sims 2: I loved The Sims in its time, but the sequel is just much better planned. The characters now have life goals and age, making it much more purposeful. Especially fun is the Romance life goal, which demands that you get your character to bone three people a day or something ridiculous to get special items.

• Tropico: James, Carlos, and I were also addicted to this one. All right, I'm still kind of addicted, but I haven't played it in a month now so maybe I'm off the stuff. But playing a third world Caribbean dictator is so much fun! Playing it straight it great, and playing it evil is just as fun (if much harder). The happy happy background music and humorous and vaguely offensive narrator also make it quite worthwhile.

Great Puzzle and Board Computer Games

• Lemmings (and also Lemmings 2: The Tribes): Best puzzle game ever. Also quite good music. Very nostalgic. Let's go!
  

• Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee: This game is a weird mix of puzzle and action. The puzzle part is fun, if sometimes frustrating. The action part made me very nervous; I can never play it for long without jumping out of my skin every time I hear a sound and think it's a slig with a machine gun... Anyway, you play this enslaved cute alien guy named Abe who has special powers to control bad guys. Use the powers and good old-fashioned puzzle-solving to free your people (without getting shot or eaten or exploded).

• Magic: The Gathering: Yeah, it's nerdy, but it's better to play on a computer so you don't have to deal with other people. Wait, does that make it more nerdy?
  

• Risk: The fun part of playing Risk on the computer is that the computer does the moves in five seconds, so you can play a whole game in about twenty minutes.

And...


Gotta shout out for World of Warcraft here. I've only played two MMORPGs in earnest, and I've played one or two more for a couple of hours, but it's easy to see that WoW is the tops. I think it has a lot to do with the user-friendly interface, actually.

Okay, video games next.

In honor of Final Fantasy XII's release this week...

Great lists of computer and video games! Hooray! Hooray for you!

Quick TV Show Update

My Name is Earl: Not worth it.

I watched about ten episodes. It was cute and likeable, but likeable doesn't keep me watching. Funny keeps me watching. Well-crafted keeps me watching. Engaging keeps me watching.

Earl is almost these things but falls short. Funny? Well, I laughed once out loud every couple of episodes, which is actually far more than I laugh at most sitcoms. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't have sat through the whole DVD. Well-crafted? Well, kinda. They tried to do the Arrested Development thing of having the plots come together at the end, but they were just too predictable or felt forced. Engaging? To some, engaging means likeable. Earl is a likeable character, but in such a banal way that he almost has no personality. To go back to Arrested Development (the comparison is inevitable, as Earl seems to be trying to do AD but with an audience), the characters were engaging because they were both likeable and horrendous. Let's take a look at the characters side by side:

My Name is Earl

• Earl. Is a "bad guy," but he's changed his ways. And the bad stuff he did was, for the most part, not too bad at all. He loves his brother, sticks like a born-again Christian to his newfound "karma" philosophy, and is your usual stereotypical underdog character.
• Randy. Loveable oaf? Check! Randy also loves and would do anything for his brother. He's dim, but in that Lennie from Of Mice and Men puppyish kind of way. What's not to like?
• Joy: Caricature bitch. Her purpose is to make Earl look good in comparison. Too annoying to be funny.
• Catalina: Perfect sagely Latina. Bland bland bland.

Arrested Development

• Michael: The "likeable" center of the show only works because he's snarky and mocks everyone and sometimes can be a real dick.
• GOB: The loveable oaf, here played by a douchebag. His likeability comes from his over-the-topness and hilarious assholery. And the fact that he's a loser and doesn't realize it.
• Lindsay: This shallow blonde bitch works because she's not an annoying caricature. Similarly...
• Lucille: This shallow bitch works because her plots are brilliant. While Joy would say "Gimme my money!" and go after Earl with a shotgun (vaguely funny), Lucille would slyly play her children off of one another to get her way (sounds unfunny, but is actually a very good way to build a hilarious plot arc).
  
• George Sr: This sage works well because he's a criminal and only doles out advice when he's manipulating people.

And so on. I'm sorry, Earl. When you're everything to everybody, you lose the quirkiness that would make you watchable. That's not to say it's completely terrible, but I'm not going to use my Netflix queue slots to watch more.