E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600, 1983)

What!?  Surely this is a prank.  Is this April Fool's Day?  I couldn't seriously be adding one of the most despised games in history to a list of Great Video Games.  E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1983) for the Atari 2600?  The game that killed the system, and caused the video game market crash the same year it was released?  There is absolutely no way this could be.  But, yes, I'm serious.  I'm adding E.T. to the Great Video Games because of its influence, historical significance, and because frankly, I kind of enjoy it.
I suppose I should tackle the last thing I said there, as that is sure to be the most controversial.  No, I'm not saying that this is some kind of misunderstood, underrated masterpiece.  It is a severely flawed piece of software, the product of misguided corporate decisions and rushed production.  It is, of course, based off of the classic Steven Spielberg film, where the eponymous alien botanist is stranded on our planet, and befriends a young boy named Elliot, who helps him escape Earth.  The game follows this plot.  Loosely.  I can't recall the part of the movie where E.T. had to go jumping in holes to search for pieces of the telephone, and I must have missed the scene where a scientist takes him to jail (only for him to walk right out again).
So the search is on.  E.T. has a limited frame of time (9999 footsteps, to be precise, shown in a counter at the bottom of the screen) to find three pieces of a phone which are hidden in random holes across a map.  These holes become the centerpiece of the hatred for this game.  "You have to check every one!  Plus climbing out of them is a nightmare!  Once you fall in, you lose health!"  Well, no, you don't actually have to check every hole.  If you stand in a certain spot on each screen where a special symbol appears at the top and press the button, You can see which, if any, holes have a phone piece in them.  Climbing out of the holes is easy if you know how.  When you want to climb out, hold the button and the joystick up.  Once you are floating out of the hole, move to either the left or right side of the hole and you are out.  When you fall in the holes, press the button quickly and lower yourself down to avoid taking damage.
The world is crueler still to poor E.T., as there is a scientist and an FBI agent trying to impede his progress.  The scientist will grab E.T. and drag him to jail, where you can hilariously walk out of as soon as you are put in.  The FBI agent is far more devious though, as he will confiscate one piece of the phone you have worked hard to find.  There is a spot on each screen you can stand to send these two away, but your best bet is usually to run (and then fall in a hole).  The extra-terrestrial is not helpless though.  You can find Reese's Pieces scattered about, which you can trade with Elliot for extra health.  Once he has all of the phone pieces, he must phone home, and then stand in a certain spot so that the alien lander can pick him up.
So this game sounds kind of annoying (to say the least).  Don't worry, it is also buggier than that cave in Temple of Doom.  Glitches ooze out of every crevice of this game.  So, why do I enjoy it?  I suppose it is for the same reason I love bad movies.  Their flaws make them unintentionally hilarious.  The same goes for E.T.  I had one experience in the game where I called Elliot on to the screen, and then when he tried to walk off the bottom of the screen, he got stuck, unable to leave.  The crude sound of his footsteps produced a catchy beat, so he and I held a little informal dance party.  There is a funny bit where if you die, Elliot comes back to resurrect you, and you can still move E.T.'s dead body back and forth.  One of the funniest scenes was when I went to actually complete the game, and just as a got picked up by the ship, I ran out of health.  What followed was an hilarious bit where the carcass of E.T. ascended into the heavens, and then the game stopped because it couldn't figure out where to go from there.  I consider that completion, technically.
I mentioned in my Yar's Revenge article that the programmer of that game, Howard Scott Warshaw, also programmed this one.  With Yar, he proved that he was a competent programmer, so what went wrong with this game?  The fault is entirely on Atari.  They gave Warshaw only six weeks to go from concept to completed product.  To put things in perspective, a typical game on Atari could be expected to spend about three months in production, if not more.  It is a miracle that E.T. runs at all.
Its lasting impact is in what it did to the industry as a whole.  The video game market crash of 1983 was not the single-handed product of the game, but it played a big role.  After that, Nintendo would take careful measures to prevent its first home console, the Nintendo Entertainment System, from meeting the same fate.  All consoles after the NES follow its guidelines.  Also, it has a striking influence on games of the next generation.  Its gameplay style of randomly generated items may have led to the modern sandbox titles of today, and its nonlinear gameplay and multiple screen exploration can be seen in games like The Legend of Zelda.  Is it a bad game?  Certainly.  Does that alone make it ineligible to be in the Great Video Games?  I don't believe so.

Donkey Kong Country (SNES, 1994)

Games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) were often very blatant about their use of the system's biggest graphical toy, Mode 7.  As I've stated before, Mode 7 allowed the SNES to stretch, twist, and tilt sprites without having to redraw them, which could be used to generate pseudo-3D graphics.  Early SNES titles like F-Zero and Pilotwings showcased the kind of visuals the system was capable of, and most later titles had to shoehorn Mode 7 in some way.  So how is it that Donkey Kong Country (1994), often considered one of the best-looking games on the SNES, uses its special effects so invisibly?

Actually, Mode 7 is used very subtly in the game.  More impressive and revolutionary was its use of pre-rendered computer graphics.  Character sprites were drawn and animated using early 90's CG, and then put into the game.  This allows every character to have crisp, detailed sprites and fluid animation.  It allows the game to look just as impressive today as it did back then.  When Mode 7 is used, it is for background details.  Inside of a mine shaft, lanterns hanging from the ceiling will rock back and forth.  In underwater stages, a vast expanse of sand will move as you move in the distance.

A game is nothing if it doesn't have great gameplay, even if it does have amazing graphics, and Donkey Kong Country nails that as well.  It is a 2D platformer, one of the best on the SNES.  The story goes that King K. Rool has stolen Donkey Kong's precious horde of bananas, and now with the help of his buddy Diddy Kong, he'll get them back.  You control the two apes through levels of jumping, climbing, and fighting baddies.  The two have different strengths and weaknesses which makes each one better for unique situations.  Donkey is stronger and tougher than Diddy, but Diddy is faster and jumps higher.  They also have animal friends who will give them rides from time to time, like a rhinoceros, ostrich, and giant frog.  The pair can also pick up and throw barrels at enemies.  Some can only be killed with a barrel.  If Donkey or Diddy get hit once, they are knocked out, but can be brought back if a special DK barrel is found.

One of the best features of the game, however, is its marvelous atmosphere and sense of humor.  The game is full of self-referencial humor, such as the inclusion of another Kong named Cranky, the old wise ape who will impart some knowledge to you, and scold you for being spoiled by new-age graphics ("I'll bet you thought this was 64-bit!  Back in my day you only got four pixels, and you'd be lucky to get more than one shade of grey!").  The music also adds to the atmosphere.  Every track is memorable and fantastically composed, but they never make an overstatement.  The soundtrack is right up there with the likes of Super Metroid and Final Fantasy VI.

The game was actually not developed by Nintendo, but a company called Rare Software.  They had produced a few games on the original NES, but were now tasked with making a high profile SNES game.  Obviously, they did an outstanding job, and Donkey Kong Country's success led to a golden age for Rare.  There were two sequels to Donkey Kong Country, plus their own Killer Instinct on the SNES.  On the Nintendo 64, they had Goldeneye 007,  Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark, and Conker's Bad Fur Day.  They were bought by Microsoft in the early 2000's, where they suddenly started to produce sub-par (even awful) titles on Xbox consoles.  Nintendo bought them back recently, so maybe we will see a return to the glory days of Rare, all started by their early masterpiece, Donkey Kong Country.

No More Heroes (Wii, 2008)

Travis Touchdown is a scoundrel.  He watches anime and pornography in his apartment in the town of Santa Destroy, his only companion being a kitten named Jean.  He doesn't have a job, and he visits the bar much too often.  His luck is about to turn around though, now that he has won a beam katana (essentially a lightsaber) in an internet auction, and upon one of his trips to the pub, he is hired by a mysterious woman named Sylvia to assassinate "the Drifter".  He does, and finds that she represents the United Assassins Association, and now he is ranked 11th among the world's greatest killers.  Now Travis is on a quest to find and kill the other ten assassins and become the number one ranked, and possibly get Sylvia to sleep with him if he does.
This is the beginning of No More Heroes (2008), one of the most unique games you will ever play.  It was created by Suda 51, who also directed the acclaimed Killer 7 and the recent, not-so-acclaimed Lollipop Chainsaw.  His games, even when they are no good, always carry his fingerprints.  Cel-shaded graphics, quirky characters, and an anti-hero as the protagonist are all his trademarks.  His games all have an over-the-top and dry sense of humor, and it really comes through in this game.
The game starts you out on a mission to take down the tenth ranked assassin, Death Metal, a retired rock star, now wallowing discontented in his mansion, waiting for his final battle.  This is where the player is taught the rules of the game.  Travis can fight by either using his beam katana or a number of wrestling moves that he has learned by watching WWE fights.  Be careful with the katana though, since it can run out of battery power (which is recharged by shaking the remote in a masturbatory fashion).  When you have drained an enemy's health enough, you can perform a finishing move by swinging the Wii remote in whatever direction the on-screen cue tells you to.  In lesser games, this is known as a "quick-time event," where you have to press a button or buttons in a timed sequence, and failure to do so results in death.  It works in this game though, since they are always expected, you have plenty of time to react to them, and failure does not have fatal consequences.  The reward for success is a hilariously stylized death, with dismemberment and a shower of blood.
When Travis gets to the end of a level, he has a one-on-one duel with the assassin.  These are the best parts of the game.  All of these battles are incredibly fun and unique, with the standard being set by Death Metal.  You arrive with him sitting alone by his pool, sipping on wine.  They have an exchange:
Death Metal:  "Quite beautiful, wouldn't you say?  Paid for with the lives of many.  When you have the strength to take life for yourself, that is true wealth.  I am free of desire, so long as I have this scenery to look upon.  I need nothing more.  Please, leave me be."
Travis:  "You're the one leaving, in a body bag."
Death Metal:  "I'll only say this once more, leave here now!"
Travis:  "Hey, you know what paradise is, right?  This is paradise, the place where dreams are fulfilled.  Well, you've had your dream, old man, time to wake up!"
Death Metal:  "Paradise.  This is no paradise."
Travis:  "Okay, then what is it?"
Death Metal:  "A place to die."
Death Metal comes across as a man who is sick of the game, and Travis is unaware of the risk he is about to take.  He does not understand that to get into the game of killing means you can never escape.  Once you are one of the top ranked assassins, there will be others trying to kill you.  It is an endless cycle of killing that only ends with your death.  Death Metal knows this only too well, and while he is not going to give up the fight on purpose, he is eagerly awaiting his release from the system, so that Travis can take his place.
Not all of the assassins are on the same page as Death Metal.  There is Shinobu, a high school girl who is in the same mindset as Travis, kill all those in your way and become the best.  There is Destroyman, an actor who plays the superhero personality that has taken over his twisted mind.  Dr. Peace, a corrupt detective, has been left cold and unfeeling by his divorced wife and estranged daughter.  The only thing he enjoys anymore is killing.  Travis's motivation changes over the course of the game as a conspiracy starts to make itself apparent, and suddenly it becomes about more than simply being number one.
No More Heroes plays like the best of a samurai film or western.  If I could point out a few flaws, they would be centered on the sections in-between missions, where you roam around Santa Destroy, doing odd jobs to make enough money to pay for the next admission fee for a battle.  You can level up your stats here and get new stuff, but it feels more like padding than anything.  This aside, It is a highly original and fun game, one of the best and most original for the Wii.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis, 1992)

A great video game sequel ought to expand and perfect the gameplay of the first game.  It should not just be a retread of the same formula, but stay true to what made the original special.  It should iron out the flaws of the original game while avoiding making new flaws.  It isn't very hard for a video game sequel to be better than the original, but there are instances where a sequel takes a major misstep.  On the other hand, you have fabulous games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992) which are everything I described as a good sequel.
The game basically continues the plot from where the first game left off, with Dr. Robotnic once again trying to take over the world, this time by constructing a doomsday device known as the Death Egg (no, you don't use the force to take it down).  Sonic has a bigger challenge this time, but he is aided by his new sidekick, Miles "Tails" Prower, a two-tailed fox who can spin his tails like a helicopter rotor to fly for a short period of time.  Of course, his name is a not-so-clever pun on the phrase "miles per hour," but I suppose that is forgivable.
Now Sonic has been given one new move for this game, and it feels like a godsend all by itself.  By holding down and tapping the jump button, he can charge up a dash and launch himself from a standstill to running in no time flat.  I can't tell you how annoying it was in the first game to have to run back and build some momentum if you had to get over a slope.  This problem is gone in Sonic 2, and is one of the biggest reasons why it is a much better game.
The other new feature of Sonic 2 is a multiplayer mode, where two players engage in a split-screen race to the finish line in one of four levels from the game.  I usually don't talk about the multiplayer in games because I feel that most games nowadays push their multiplayer in the spotlight while the single player campaign is left to suffer.  Sonic 2's multiplayer doesn't feel that way since the main game is so solid.  It feels like icing on the cake, an additional feature that does not detract from the overall experience.
Sonic 2 also features bigger levels, more of them, and better graphics.  The levels in the first game sported branching paths, but nothing like in the sequel.  There are some areas of the later levels that you may never see if you don't do a little exploring.  They are also more varied and numerous.  The first game had six zones that were broken up into acts.  Sonic 2 has at least twice that.  One level is a marsh with underwater paths and sections high in the trees.  Another level is a giant casino with pinball segments and slot machines, the dark of night illuminated by neon lights.  The game isn't drawn with much more definition than the first game, but Sonic 2 has a brilliant color palette.  Everything is bright and eye-pleasing.
Speed has always been one of the defining features of any Sonic game, but this was the first game to truly use it to its full potential.  The levels are all designed like huge roller coasters.  In fact, this is one of the games used in Sega's famous "blast processing" commercial, where they claimed that Genesis games were faster than SNES games.  This is true, since the Genesis' processing speed is about twice as fast as the SNES' (although in every other techical category, the SNES is superior), and if any game were to be the proof of it, that game would be Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
Like the first game, Sonic can only get the true ending if he collects all of the chaos emeralds, but the way you get them this time is different.  Instead of collecting fifty rings and then going through a big ring at the end of the level, now you need to collect that many rings and go through any one of the many checkpoints in the stage.  This will open up a portal to the bonus round, where Sonic and Tails run headlong down a tubular track, collecting rings and avoiding obstacles.  Collect enough rings, and you are rewarded with a chaos emerald.  Fail, and you are sent back empty-handed, left only to try again next time.
Sonic has become something of a whipping boy nowadays.  His contemporary titles have ranged from lackluster to abysmal.  Who remembers a time when Sonic games were always looked forward to?  His days in the Genesis were a time of constant uphill improvement, rather than a joke.  The Sonic games were always Sega fans' biggest and best argument as to why their system could be superior to Nintendo's.  We are long down the road from those times, but many people still argue as to which system was better.  What's my take on the situation?  Well, Mario has never appeared on a Sega console.

Doom (PC, 1993)

Doom (1993) collected an awful stigma after its initial release.  At the time, it was possibly the most violent, macabre, and distasteful game ever made (with close competition coming from the Mortal Kombat games).  It became the poster boy for politicians looking to outlaw video games after the shootings at Columbine High School.  The two boys responsible were avid players of Doom, and so it became a scapegoat that video games cause violent behavior.  So, why in the world am I adding this game to the Great Video Games?  For a couple reasons, actually.
The first reason is that it was a trendsetter for gaming.  The first-person shooter (FPS) is the most prolific genre of our day, but back in the early 1990's the technology to produce it was just becoming available.  Doom was not the first of these games, Id Software's own Wolfenstein 3D predates it, but it was the first to really nail how an FPS should work.  No, it isn't perfect, but the games of today owe Doom a lot for its innovations.
Doom's plot goes like this.  You are a marine banished to live on the Moon for violent crimes/treason, and during his sentence, a portal from Hell opens and starts leaking out the armies of Satan.  Bummer, right?  So he alone will use his arsenal of found weapons to fight back the demonic legions.  It's not a very complex story, and it would make for a terrible movie (as a matter of fact, it did) but this was still in the days when story was an underscore to the gameplay.  And boy, did Doom have gameplay.
The trouble with first person games before Doom were the controls.  There was no standard at the time for the way to move, attack, etc.  It set a new template for all of this that is still used to this day.  Move with the A, W, S, and D keys, aim with a mouse and shoot with the space bar.  You can carry a large amount of weapons, ranging from the basic pistol to the famous BFG 9000 (stands for Big @$#%ing Gun) which could wipe out a whole room of enemies with one shot.  You could reasonably charge into a crowd of demons and come out okay if you have the right weapon, but sometimes it pays to be stealthy and sneak up on enemies.  Sometimes, enemies will get the drop on you.
Doom's art style is a glorious conglomeration of all things demonic, macabre, and occult.  Decaying zombies will try to blast shotguns at you.  Cacodemons, floating bull-like heads, will spit balls of fire at you.  You battle the cyber-demon (a cyborg faun with rocket launchers for arms) while hiding behind pillars that wear the face of the devil on them.  If all of this sounds completely over the top, that's because it is.  Doom does not take itself seriously, and neither should you.  Aside from the testosterone fueled action segments, there are some genuinely scary moments.  For instance, on one level, you find a key card innocently sitting on the far end of a room.  When you pick it up, the lights black out, and enemies swarm you.
So does Doom hold any other significance?  Its unintended association with many violent crimes suggests that it should not be spoken in the same breath as games with better taste.  I think not.  Should we not hold ourselves accountable for our own actions, instead of blaming a piece of media?  Later games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto are also thrown into this heap, and I added one of them to the Great Video Games.  Doom never specifically endorses violence, and you never kill anything human in the game.  If it had not been for the tragic events at Columbine, I'll bet that Doom would have been remembered today as an oddity and influence on the medium of gaming, rather than an influence on unhealthy minds.

Machinarium (PC, 2009)

I will admit that I've never been a fan of point-and-click adventure games.  When I was a kid, I actually played a lot of them, but they were the ones developed by Humongous Entertainment.  That's right, the edutainment titles like Freddi Fish and Putt-Putt.  Years later I tried my hand at some of the more intelligent titles of the genre, like Shadowgate and King's Quest, but I always have the same problem with them:  they are too confusing and difficult.  Solutions to puzzles are often too specific and too surreal to solve, with the added problem of death being at every turn.  So I just figured the genre was not for me.  Until, that is, I played Machinarium (2009).
In this game, you play as the little robot Josef (named after the man who coined the word "robot").  He has just been dumped out by a garbage bot, and after reassembling himself, he returns to the robot city to find that three robots that used to bully him (as well as everyone else) are going to detonate a bomb on the tallest building in the city.  You find out later that this is actually Josef's home, and you must save it, as well as his girlfriend who has been taken prisoner and forced to cook for the bullies.
The story could have been more in-depth than it is, but the characters make up for it.  Each robot in the game is wonderfully drawn and has a unique personality, shown not through dialogue (of which, there is none in this game) but through appearance and behavior.  Josef, for example, is a weakling by nature, but he is clever and contemplative.  Whatever revenge he can get against his tormentors gives him not catharsis, but just indifference.  The bullies each have a different personality.  One of them is a portly bandit, who offers oafish laughter when he steals another bot's drum.  In your quest, you will come across many colorful characters.
True to adventure game style, these characters will have something that Josef needs to advance, but will only give it if you perform a favor for them first.  One robot is a walking wrench that you can use to drain a water tank (dumping it on the unsuspecting bullies below), but he wants you to get him a new radio before he'll lend his services.  When the bullies find you and toss you into a jail cell, your cellmate will let you borrow his extendable arms if you can make him a cigarette, which is a fabulous example of the game's greatest achievement, its puzzles.
Puzzles in Machinarium come in two different forms, whose that require item use and combination, and those that require clever manipulation of machine interfaces.  Sometimes you will have to do both.  In an early scene in the game, you must disguise yourself as a police bot to gain entrance to the city.  These bots wear a flashing cone hat and are taller than Josef.  Fortunately, Josef can stretch and contract, but needs to fashion himself a cap.  Another puzzle requires you to use a control panel to move a pipe that you can use to reach an object that you need.  All of the puzzles in this game are clever and will require a great deal of intelligence from the player.
Machinarium is a game that takes the tried-and-true templates of games past and perfects it.  The game is fun, smart, and beautiful.  All environments and characters are hand drawn and animated, giving this world of machines a feeling of life.  The art style reminds me of the dystopian world in Terry Gilliams' Brazil, with pipes and tubing running everywhere, a bureaucratic system that is not entirely practical (the same goes for the puzzles), however, the world of this game is much friendlier.  This is a game that will test your brain and get to your heart simultaneously.

Crystalis (NES, 1990)

Before talking about Crystalis (1990) for the NES, I'd like to briefly discuss Zelda II: The Adventure of Link which came out around the same time.  As a sequel to The Legend of Zelda, I think it fails pretty drastically.  This is not because it is completely different from its predecessor, but because the new things it tries are executed poorly.  The top down gameplay of the first game is abandoned (except for on the map screen where you cannot fight) in favor of traditional side-scrolling platforming.  Also introduced is an experience system where you level up for fighting enemies.  This game has aged quite poorly.  The control is slippery and lags a bit, the level design is sadistic at times, and the experience system encourages more grinding than in Dragon Warrior.
Having said that, here is Crystalis, a top-down (a la Zelda) action-RPG that in my mind, very well should have been Zelda II.  The story is about a nuclear war that ravaged the world some centuries ago, and your character awakens from a cryo-sleep chamber with no memory of anything.  He awakes to find that the empire of Draygonia is trying to use an ancient power sealed away on a floating island to take over the world.  It may not sound like much, but for the days of the NES, it is practically Shakespeare.
In terms of gameplay, it basically does right everything that Zelda II did wrong.  You have an overhead view of the action, allowing more precise swordplay and dodging maneuvers.  You upgrade your character stats with every level, and levels increase by collecting so much experience.  Grinding is actually handled very well in this game, as enemies give reasonable amounts of experience for killing them, fights don't take very long, and enemies respawn.  This all makes farming for experience fast and painless.
Apart from being successful in standard RPG elements, Crystalis also has its own unique innovations.  By holding the attack button, you can charge up a beam that will fire from the sword, allowing you to attack enemies at a distance.  Combine a sword with special items and you can get a bigger charge.  Larger charges are more powerful, but at a cost of taking longer to fire.  There is a nice strategy to it.  You collect four elemental swords, and different enemies are vulnerable to different elements.  There is also a system for different magic spells, some used for battle, and some used for context-sensitive situations.  One spell allows you to disguise yourself, which can be used to breach enemy security.  Another lets you put a person to sleep.
Crystalis has some of the best looking graphics on the NES.  Character sprites are well-drawn, and backgrounds and environments are colorful and detailed.  In addition, the music is lively, fits the mood of each area, and is fairly memorable.  There were many underrated games on the NES, some of those including The Guardian Legend, Journey to Silius, and Metal Storm, but for my money, Crystalis is the best of them.  It is an epic quest that was criminally overlooked both in its day, and today.