Maybe not the best, maybe not the best known, but the games that made me the gamer that I am today.
Showing 1-10 of 21 items
A pack-in for the Colecovision, Donkey Kong is the first game that I ever played (at 3 years old). I'm pretty sure that my brother and I wore that cartridge into a nub with how many times we played it.
While not the best game ever, this is the first game that I skipped class to play. My friends and I would sneak down to the computer lab during the teacher's lunch break and boot it up on the old Apple IIs
Though Super Mario Bros. is the most obligatory game for a list like this, that doesn't alter the fact that it changed everything for me. While I loved my Colecovision games, and constantly pestered my parents for quarters at the mall's arcade, SMB turned videogames into a lifelong obsession. Unfortunately, I never owned an NES. But my friends did, and I was always at their house playing this game over and over again.
With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize just how bad Roberta Williams was at designing games. Her bizarre puzzles, and equally insane solutions, were virtually impossible to figure out without some sort of guide. Unfortunately, gamefaqs.com wasn't around at the time, meaning that I spent countless hours trying to figure out how to just get around. But at the time, I loved it.
This game was my first introduction to RPGs, and is definitely the reason why I became such a DnD dork into high school. By the way, I fought the 99, 99, 99, 99 guard party fight and won, after hours of battle. That's how hardcore I am.
Sure, everyone's played this game. I'd never heard of the Game Boy, but someone brought one into school in fourth grade. We passed it around under our desks, wasting away the school day, until our teacher finally caught us and confiscated it. From then on, I constantly begged my mom for a Game Boy until she broke and got me one.
I grew up a deprived child. I never had an NES, but I did get a TurboGrafx-16. Bonk's Revenge was my Super Mario Bros. It was the one game I owned that I played over-and-over again (whenever I couldn't go to a friend's house to play SMB). Though very easy, it was still a load of fun.
There has never been a beat 'em up that I've played more times than Double Dragon II. My friend and I would spend hours going through this game over and over again on his NES. Even today, I'll pull it up on my emulator and blast through to the end.
As I've mentioned previously, I didn't have my own NES; I had to mooch off of friends. However, I babysat my neighbors' kids, and they had Mega Man 3. I must've played this game 100 times, and Shadow Man is one of my favorite bosses in the series, while the Top Spin power goes down as the most useless skill ever put into a Mega Man game. I used to put a chair leg down on the d-pad of the 2nd controller to activate the high jump and infinite life cheats.
Another obvious game; Street Fighter II: Champion Edition was installed into Buffalo Grove, IL's Wal-Mart, which was only a couple of miles from my house. My friends and I would load up on quarters, bike over to Wal-Mart, put our quarters up on the cabinet, and calmly wait for our turn to shine. One time, I leaned against a railing waiting for my turn and got stung by a bee. My hand totally swelled up, but I wouldn't leave until I got to play. Naturally I lost due to my puffy mitt of a hand, and my friend thought that I was nuts. Although I never got very good at SF2, you couldn't keep me away. Until Mortal Kombat II came out.