The 10th Hour 11.14.08: The Top 10 Retro Games I Loved (And You Probably Didn't)

Posted by Chris Lansdell on 11.14.2008

Hi everybody! I'm not Derek Robbins. Isn't that enough to make you want to read on? No? Well how about finding out what the greatest fighting game ever is?

Greetings, humanity! You have probably noticed, what with being all observant and stuff, that I'm not Derek Robbins. I am in fact Chris Lansdell, Wrestling zone veteran and Games zone newbie who had nothing better to do with an hour than knock off a list of the Top 10 Older Games I Loved (And You Probably Didn't). Yeah it's neither new or innovative, but you've never read it from me before. Let me give you a little background on me as a gamer, so you can get where I'm coming from.

I'm not very good. Sure, I've beaten a few games. I've done the "Mario 3 in one sitting with no whistles", I've made General on Battlefield: Bad Company and I've had a nice pot noodle, but I've never had a poodle, and...sorry, tangents. I do those a lot. Anyway, I hated Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I do not want to solve puzzles while playing, nor do I want to shit myself. I like sports games, real time strategy, beat em ups, action platformers, wrestling (of course) and music games. Recently I've got into FPS games. With that in mind, away we go!



10. Formula 1 Built 2 Win (NES) Ah the days of me not sucking at racing games. In what many people (OK, just me) consider the precursor to Gran Turismo, Built 2 Win started you off with a Mini Cooper. As you won races and earned money, you could supe up your wheels and eventually take a test to advance to the next stage (sound familiar?), where you could buy a new car and more parts. From the Mini you advanced to a Vector and then a Ferrari F40 before everything culminated in making it to the F1 circuit. Which is where it got hard.

The realism in this game was spectacular for an 8-bit outing. Collisions during a race would damage your car, but you could buy improved bumpers to lessen that. Your tires would wear down after races, so you had to keep an eye on their condition or you were going to spend a LOT of time on the grass. Better parts were more expensive, but don't think that you could just spend all your cash on the top engine right away, as they had restrictions on them too. You needed an A licence for the best engine, for example. Once you made it to Las Vegas, which if I recall correctly required a B licence, you could play the slots to win money. More than one hour was spent in there trying to get up t0 $50,000 for that memory bumper! Plus, you could buy nitro. NITRO! C'mon, that alone makes it worth playing.



9. Super International Cricket (SNES) Bear with me, American readers. You may think that you have to know what a crumpet is to play cricket, but this game was more about fun than actually playing cricket. None of the players had real names, the rankings were flawed (why did the worst batsmen have full batting gauges?) and the ball hardly swung, but I didn't care. Not everyone had a PC in 1994 and this was my first exposure to a console cricket game, since I was not a Sega guy. Even my cricket-hating brother gave this one a go, and we had tons of fun playing it. There were plenty of play modes, from limited overs to tests to world championships, the umpire really spoke (revolutionary!) and it had a cool calypso soundtrack that still pops up in my head from time to time.



8.Championship Manager 2 (PC) This is the ultimate geek game. What is it? A (real) football manager sim. You have a football club at your disposal, complete with budget for staff and players. You make the decisions for formations, strategies, signings, and friendly matches. Your club will have defined goals, and if the season ends without you meeting those goals you will be unemployed in short order with poor prospects for future employment. Succeed, and your prestige increases. The ultimate goal is up to you: do you want to try and manage a country to the World Cup? Do you want to get your favourite small club to the Premier league? Do you want to be the richest club in the world?

The sheer volume of stats, number-crunching and planning involved in this game, not to mention the detail in the game, is enough to scare away even fairly dedicated football fans. Me? I'm just the kind of guy who loves seeing his creation succeed, loves buying players when they're 17 for nothing and selling them for a fortune, and loves rags to riches stories. The game looks very utilitarian: the match is played out in commentary, with no visible players. There are no graphical innovations at all. Friends have dropped by while I was playing this and asked me what was reading. When I told them it was a football management game, the look they would give me was just like the look you give to a 4-year-old who drops his ice cream.



7. Top Players' Tennis (NES) Chris Evert. *thwack* Ivan Lendl. *thwack* Cheesy 8-bit era music. Heard that on more than one rainy day in the summer of 1991.

Somehow I feel that not only will nobody else admit they liked this game, but they won't admit to even remembering this game. It was a tennis game, but it was special in that you started off with basic stats and developed your player the way you want as you progressed. What I loved about it was that the different ways to allocate points actually mattered. Certain opponents would cream you if you went for all power, but would lose to all spin, and vice versa. You also had the ability to play "story mode" tournaments as Girl or Boy, singles or doubles. This is something from which games today could take a cue. Looking at YOU, Smackdown vs Raw!

The game does suffer from the same problem all tennis games have suffered from: in 2-player games, the dude at the top of the screen gets screwed. It's also not really difficult. But it's fun, and isn't that the reason we play video games?



6. Jackal (NES) Woohoo! A non-sports game! Jackal was right up there with Gauntlet for two-player time-wasters, only this one was less frustrating (WTF do you mean blue elf shot the fucking food?!?! I KILL YOU ELF!) and it had explosions. Oh, and Easter Island-style heads that spat out heat-seeking missiles. Gotta love that.

The story of the game was that some of your buddies were captured behind enemy lines. You got in your little jeep and drove into the heart of enemy territory, killing everything that moved. Well, not everything. Certain places in the game housed the hostages you were sent to rescue. Kill the guards and blow up whatever was housing them, and drive them to the nearest heliport to get the bonus points and power-ups (and 1-ups if you collect the right people) and then go blow up some more shit. The boss battles were fiendishly difficult later in the game, even if you did have the cool grenades and missiles. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack ruled. Right guys?



5. Ultimate Basketball (NES) I know 4 people who did not think this game was total ass. They all looked at it, laughed, and went back to Double Dribble. Hey it's a Konami game, and at that time Konami could do no wrong. But for me, my brother Rick and our friends Syd and Stefan this was the bizzomb of bizzasketball.

Why? Well, it had substitutions. On the NES! Not that we used them that often, but hey you COULD! It also had cutaway scenes when you went up for a dunk, shot a three or took free throws (fouls? Really? TURN EM OFF!). Better yet, if a player was nearby when you tried a dunk, they were in the cut scene too, and had a chance to block the duck if they timed the button press. Of course if they failed, they got their face on a poster. The game also felt more realistic with the passing and you weren't guaranteed to win by shooting from the 3-point elbow all game.

4. Apocalypse (PSX) Summer 1998. I was working as a manager at EB Games in Woking, England. Every now and then we would get video tapes from head office that we were to play in-store, with previews for the coming season. I had read about Apocalypse, which promised to have interactive AI buddy play (like we see so often nowadays in squad combat games) for the first time. Not only that, but the voice of your AI buddy was to be provided by...BRUCE MUTHALOVIN' WILLIS! I was determined to have it. When I heard that the buddy system was being dropped, and Bruce was now voicing the main character, I changed my mind. Then I heard the amazing song "Control" by Poe, which features in the game (Poe provides the voice of one of the boss characters) and was the music for the preview. It was the first and last time I bought a game based on a song.

However, the game ended up being great fun. Well I thought so. This game set the store recorded for cancelled pre-orders, but I'm glad I bought it. The storyline was great (fight the Horsemen? Religious zealots? Futuristic setting? Love it!) and the graphics fit perfectly with it. There was a flamethrower (Best. Weapon. Ever) and some sort of laser that was AWESOME. Plus, unless I'm losing my mind again, Bruce Willis says "Yippee Kiyay" at least once. Along with a ton of other deadpan comedy. Oh yeah, and it was H-A-R-D. There was a lot of jumping to do, while also trying to kill stuff and avoid being shot yourself. The smart bombs helped but I was never able to complete the game without a cheat.



3. Tecmo World Wrestling (NES) Most people will tell you that No Mercy for the N64 was the best wrestling game ever. A lot of people will also tell you that Tecmo Bowl was the greatest sports game ever. Both are wrong.

Tecmo World Wrestling was revolutionary for the NES. It had that little commentator dude at the bottom calling the moves, even insulting you if you went button-mashing. It had finishing moves, and went to a cut scene if you hit the finisher when the opponent was low on energy. It allowed you to throw your opponent out of the ring with certain moves, and even had a rudimentary development feature with the Training option.

For some reason I could never find this game to buy, but I rented the hell out of it. Everyone wanted to play this game, if only to hit the dreaded Argentine backbreaker. We never really tried to complete the game, we enjoyed beating each other up too much. The one time we decided to try it, we all jumped up when we beat what we thought was the last guy, since we'd been trying for hours...and then the lights in Tecmo Coliseum went out and the Earl of Doom Blue King appeared. Mark-out moment for sure.

2. Knights of the Round (Arcade) No, I'm not talking about the summon from FFVII. This game was REALLY close to number 1, but in the end it lost out because I don't miss it as much as number 1. I never owned it on the SNES, but the arcade version ate more of my money than that one girl in high school who would...never mind. For those not familiar with the game, it was a three-player (three? Weird!) scrolling beat-em up with a difference: you levelled up, and as you levelled, you got cooler. Arthur, for example, got pimp gold armour eventually. Perceval just gets more and more badass. The enemies are varied, they keep on coming, and the levels look different enough that you never get bored. Capcom has always made good fighters and this was one of them. SLICE SLICE SLICE!

Did I mention there are horses? No? THERE ARE HORSES. You can get yourself on a horse and kick serious rump. Of course if you are unlucky enough to get knocked off said horse, there's a ton of bad guys who will gladly use it to kick aforementioned rump. Plus, exploding flaming tigers! Attack birds with daggers! Sharks with laser beams attached to their fricking foreheads! (Disclaimers: Sharks do not actually exist. Many animals were harmed in the playing of this game.)



NUMBER ONE



Bushido Blade (PSX)

I don't know anyone else who liked this game as much as I did. It is the only PSX game I still own. It's also, in my mind, the best one-on-one fighter ever.

Advance, feint, retreat, parry, sidestep, feint, swing, feint. A realistic fighting game, where one hit can cripple you, damage your weapon arm, or kill you outright. One hit. I remember having 3 and 4 minute battles end with a perfectly-timed headshot. It's like an FPS death match without the cowardice. Don't dare leave your feet; you'll never hit the ground alive. Don't go in all guns blazing thinking you're going to win in 5 seconds; if your opponent has any clue at all, you'll die in 5 seconds. This is the Rodin's Thinker of fighters. You can't even call it a beat-'em-up, since there's no beating involved.

Lest you think the game is all one-hit kills, allow me to extrapolate. First of all, how many people do you know that got knocked out from being kicked in the shin repeatedly? It's possible in almost any 2D fighter. If you like cartoony fighters then your Soul Caliburs and Street Fighters are fine. For realism, which is important to me, there is no competition for this game. I cannot believe that nobody has picked up this IP or even put the game on PSN or XBLA.

Honorable Mentions: Gradius (NES), Actua Soccer (PSX), Super Spike V'ball (NES), Brian Lara Cricket (Genesis)

Yeah so that's about all I got. This is the part where Derek puts the links, right? Well, umm...click back and see what else there is to read. Hope you enjoyed this minor diversion from your regularly scheduled programming. You can catch my reviews of WWE Smackdown vs Raw 09, Guitar Hero World Tour and Call of Duty: World at War, all for Xbox 360, within the next couple of weeks. You can also see me three times weekly in the Wrestling zone. Stay Cool, Rock Hard.

Lansdellicious – Out.

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