Over the last few years I've seen a number of lists of the top 100 games, top 10 games, or best games of all time. The problem is that the majority of the lists I've seen end up very biased towards PC games or towards console games. Because of this, I feel the need to make my own list of games that have helped shape the industry and are important to me.

Street Fighter II, the World Warriors defined the concept of selectible character fighting games. It also pioneered the idea of a complex combat system utilizing 6 buttons used in conjunction with the stick to create a vast assortment of moves. Add to that the array of special moves for each character, and you have the game that all other fighting games are based on.

In fact Street Fighter II is why I play videogames today. I played a few games off and on as a kid but never really got into them because I sucked at most of them other than racing games. I never even owned a game system until I bought my old roommate's Super Nintendo off him for $40 in 1994. However, my life changed in the fall of 1992 when I started college. A friend of mine showed me SF2, and I was enthralled. It had amazing artwork, sound, and was insanely complex compared to other games of the time. Best of all you could play against your friends and beat on each other. It was a far cry from World Karate, the last fighting game I'd seen. The SNES version even allowed players to set the difficulty level so that you could handicap better players such that poor players had a chance.

For my entire freshman year of college we played SF2 just about every day. We always played loser stays which meant that whoever lost had to keep playing until they won. This worked quite well for getting a newer, or crappier, player up to speed skillwise. Eventually everyone in our group was damned good at the game. We all literally knew every single move and the timing for each of them. Usually the first move of the game would determine the outcome because we knew every counter and possible move from that point on. I remember playing Dhalsim vs. Guile with my buddy Randy for 300+ games in a row. The win/loss counters were maxxed at 99. It got so we absolutely knew who would win after the first two moves because neither of us would make a single error the entire game.

Because of SF2 I started playing Street Fighter II: Turbo Championship Edition when it came out. Then I found out about Samurai Shodown and King of Fighters 94. After that it was pretty much all downhill. I ended up buying a Sega Saturn to play Street Fighter Zero and have bought every console since then and nearly every SNK or Capcom fighting games since then. I would conservatively estimate that I've spent $5000 on console games because of Street Fighter II.

Doom wasn't the original first person shooter but it was the first that showed just how immersive the genre could be. The sense of tension and the feeling that you really were the game character were unique at the time. I never really played Doom. When I got my first PC Doom 2 had already been released. I bought that and played through the entire game on the default difficulty. It was the first time a game ever actually scared me while playing it. I don't remember how long it took but I do know I was quite pleased with myself to finally beat it without using any cheats. I enjoyed it so much I then played through the Heretic demo. It was just as good if not better. I was too poor to buy Heretic though unfortunately so that was it quite awhile. About a year later I picked up Hexen which was supposed to be a successor to Heretic. It wasn't. It was instead an amazingly irritating, not very fun at all game with level design that annoyed me to no end. However, that still doesn't diminish how bad-ass and fun Doom, Doom 2, and Heretic were.

Quake was the next revolutionary step beyond Doom. While everyone else was making sprite-based games Id Software was getting set to change the face of computer gaming. Quake's gameplay wasn't all that different from Doom's but the switch from a sprite/tile based engine to a 3d polygonal OpenGL based engine was amazing. The world and characters could be rendered in far more detail witha much greater amount of realism in the movement, physics, and artwork as compared to a sprite based game. This game single-handedly created the market for 3D accelerated videocards. The only bad thing about Quake was that I didn't have a machine that could play it. My 486 just couldn't cut it even with 32MB of ram and a 50mhz processor. By the time I got a machine capable of playing Quake, Quake 2 had already been out for quite awhile. I never really got the chance to play it but did play quite a bit of the original Counterstrike mod over a LAN. I still need to go pick up Quake 2 and play through it just to see what it was all about.

Battle Arena Toshinden was the first 3D fighting game with Street Fighter-esque moves. It was the first fully 3D fighter that allowed the player to move literally anywhere in the arena as far as I know. It also had innovative character designs and real transparencies. In terms of what it accomplished it was far, far beyond Virtua Fighter, its only real rival at the time. It more or less took the place of Street Fighter 2 in our group for over 6 months. The only bad thing about the game was that I wasn't very good at it. I just never could get my reflexes to take into account the weird timing on moves in the game. Luckily Toshinden 2 changed the timing to be more in line with 2D fighters like the King of Fighters series. It also vastly increased the damage output so rounds didn't drag on too long like they could in the first game. To this day I still consider Toshinden 2 Plus to be the best 3D fighter ever made. It fully captured the feel of an SNK or Capcom 2D fighter while doing it in a fully 3D environment. No game since then has been able to capture that feel. The closest is probably the Soul Edge/Soul Calibur series but the button based blocking and the comboing system are more like Virtua Fighter than a Capcom or SNK game. I've had fun playing Toshinden 3, the Bloody Roar series, Virtua Fighter 4, and a host of other 3D fighting games since then but none of them quite match up to Toshinden 2 Plus for sheer entertainment and Street Fighter-ness.

Panzer Dragoon was the first shooter I ever enjoyed playing. It came out on the Sega Saturn, and I bought the Japanese version of it because the local import store had a used copy for $20. I had no idea what to expect and bought it solely for the artwork in the booklet and on the back. Suprisingly it ended up being one of my favorite games of all time. It is the first game I ever played with such a focus on the art. The graphics and art design were amazingly beautiful and surreal. The music was just as good. If I remember right the music was actually redbook audio on this game so I would just play it as an audio CD. The gameplay was also incredibly good. It didn't try to actively screw you over like shooters in the 80s did and actually had a coherent story. I played that game a lot and beat it numerous times. A year or two later Panzer Dragoon Zwei came out, and it was even better. I played that one just as much if not more. After that came Panzer Dragoon Saga which was the first and only RPG I've ever completely beaten. Those games proved it was possible for the Saturn to look just as good if not better than the Playstation and provided some of the best gameplay I've ever experienced.

My only disappointment with the Dreamcast was that Sega never made a Panzer Dragoon game for it. Unfortunately most of the members of the team that made them had left Sega after the death of the Saturn. A few years later Sega finally made a sequel on the XBox. From what I've heard a bunch of the original developers came back to Sega which allowed them to make a sequel. The XBox version is exactly what I'd hoped for. It has everything that made the first three games so good but with sound and graphics that fully utilize the power of the XBox. My only complaint is that it seems to be a bit more difficult than the original games were. Easy mode is more like the Normal mode of the original games. I've only made it to level 4 on Easy and level 2 on Normal. Oh well, practice will make perfect. Odds are this will be the first non-Resident Evil, non-fighting game I'll have finished in a long, long time.

More to come later.