I’m an avid game player. I thought for Freedom Friday I’d treat you all to some of my favorite games of all time.
When I talk about games, I’m talking about video games. I enjoy playing the good board game with my kids and others, like The Game of Life, Monopoly and chess. But I get personal satisfaction when I vanquish invading Martians attempting to colonize earth in a no holds barred slugfest for my PSP.
Not that there’s anything wrong with loving our family game nights when we play a good round of Risk with ample snacks and drinks to carry us through the night!
Nonetheless, here are my über-favorite video games I’ve played over the course of my life. Maybe you might recognize some, maybe not.
Super Mario 64: Doesn’t Mario ever die? You know it’s rather awesome walking into my local Best Buy store and talking with the employees who grew up with Mario. “I love the part where I hit the block over the head and all the coins come out, one after another.” Yeah, it’s those scintillating conversations that make my trip to my nearest retailer something to look forward to. I mean, really. Hasn’t anyone not heard of Mario? I remember playing this game thinking, wow, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of this. The game features bright, primary colors. The reds, greens and blues flood the screen, giving the gamer a wonderful and immersive experience. Boy, I wish I had kept the old Nintendo 64 console.
Donkey Kong 64: This is another one of those Nintendo 64 games that kept me entertained for hours. It belonged to my older son, but I played tons of it late night, into the weekend. I enjoyed racing through the quests and grabbing keys along the way. My favorite part was to change into the various apes to perform feats of wonder and magic (actually, a player couldn’t get to a particular part of the map without transforming into one of the apes with special abilities). This game truly caused me insomnia.
Duke Nukem 3D: How can I describe this game as anything short of “action game crack”? It was the first game that featured a rich 3D environment in a cartoon-like setting. The storyline was over-the-top, the characters—lovable, and Duke’s quotes—hilarious. Here’s one of my favorite lines in any game, ever…
“Time to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I’m all outta gum.”
Duke’s a gun-toting, muscle man is reminiscent of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator characters. I’ll never forget playing multi-player for the very first time with this game. One of my friends had his place wired with networked computers and we wailed on each other, flying through the levels in hysterics after killing off one of our opponents. Fun times!
SimCity 2000: Well, included in this, is any SimCity game, really. But I can’t tell you how much time I’d wasted building the absolute perfect city. Balancing residential, commercial and industrial zones to achieve that all-so-glorious-and-mighty, top mayor score. I still have screenshots of my cities I’ll peruse occasionally, admiring my handiwork. And of course, being the responsible player I was, I never let hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or alien invasion harm my cities. Or did I?
FIFA 10: I have almost all the FIFA Soccer games. I began playing them on the PC then moved to my PSP. I think FIFA 10 had the right balance between game play, music, aesthetics and sheer fun. I burned through all the tournaments, creating my own player and training him to score at will. I’d gotten so good on the hardest level that I think even the goalies were afraid of my Frankenstein monsters I’d created!
LEGO Batman, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Harry Potter: I’ve played them all. Completed each level. Collected all the bonuses. And found all the secrets. These games are awesome. I have yet to play some of the newer titles, but I’m sure I’ll get to them soon. The wonderful part about these games are the puzzles. I loved working through a level a few times to see if I could find every item. Most of all, I adored, yes, adored having the ability to play the various levels as different characters. This is what makes these LEGO games so addictive (not to mention blasting away anything into a big pile of collectable bricks).
Do you have any games you like playing to pass the time? What platform do you use to play your games (ie. phone, tablet, laptop)?
Looking to God 
Ah! The nostalgia. I LOVE board games, reminds me of fun times with my cousin under the maple trees in Georgia we just played monopoly into the night. Great post!
I always loved monopoly, unfortunately the game never really ends and therefore everyone I’m playing with usually ends up mad at each other.
To continue along the N64 route, probably my favourite console ever, I would have to add Zelda Ocarina of Time and Majoras mask. And adding in Perfect Dark 64 for good measure as the first epic multiplayer experience. And for my PC gaming my favourites, I would have to say Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper 2 from Bullfrog and the Rollercoaster Tycoon series. I’m getting so nostalgic thinking about them, I may have to write up a list of my favourites now!
While I’m the opposite in that board games are my favorite and I supplement with a few video games– I like the list! Brings back thoughts of those ridiculous cartridges.
Thanks for checking out my blog- readysetplaygames.wordpress.com !
Such memories came fooding back 🙂
I especially remember pallying Super Mario on nitendo and Monopoly was the ebst source of entertainment. These were the games that brought al my family members together 🙂 Thank you for the share.
Regards,
“It’s pretty morbid but fascinating nonetheless.”
Uh, yeah. Great Post!
IMHO – Zombies rising from graves has little to do with science and everything to do with religion and magic. They are one of those horror creatures that has been transformed with the times, but the roots were definitly not science.
Thanks, Charlee! I’m placing the link to the original post for those interested: http://jackflacco.com/2013/02/18/rising-from-the-dead
Not a game player, but love your site…most intriquing.
Reblogged this on Superdoku.
I LOVE games!! Board and card games are my favorite. My nephew collects monopoly games. I love Uno Attack, Sorry, Pictionary Man, Skip-Bo and so many more. Game night is always a fun night!
Agreed! We have a game day over at our house tomorrow, since it’s a provincial holiday here in Ontario, and I can’t wait to get the games going with the family. I’m making my customary, holiday sushi and we have Mousetrap lined up for the afternoon of all things!
Lol I loved this. I don’t have a play-station or any of that anymore since the kids had grown and gone ( i do lust after a wii fit though or dance central) I however like apps fro my kindle and love Mahjong tiles. My favorite game when the kids were home though was Zelda.Noow that the granides are here I am learning new ones on the ds.
Re: Super Mario 64 – You forgot one clunky detail. How everything was shaped like a hexagon! I can’t believe how ridiculously quick that format died and Playstation took over!
“I love the part where I hit the block over the head and all the coins come out, one after another.” LOL I know just what you mean. I remember playing an older version of Mario (he doesn’t have wings).
For years there were many games, but for me it has all boiled down to Chess and thats pretty much it. Its one of the few things in life that I do and dont mind getting my but kicked at. But I like Chess. In person.
I’m with you on so many of these…
We have a ps3 and recently got a wii for the sole purpose of playing Mario. You will have to add Lego Lord of the Rings to your collection. According to the men of my house, it’s awesome (we too are big fans of Lego games). I stink at video games but love the ps3 bc I can watch Blu-ray on it and stream Netflix.
The Lego games are so simple and yet addicting.
I’m looking forwards for sim city 5!
I’m more the handheld gamer. I have Nintendo DS, PSP and I also have PS2. My boyfriend sometimes will bring over his PS3 to play. I’m more of the DS fan because it has more logic games such as Professor Layton or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. DS is also good for games like Mario, one of my personal faves 🙂 For PSP, I’m still working on some games like Patapon or Loco Roco, Final Fantasy.
These days its been passing time on the comp with Angry Birds or Bejeweled 🙂
Awesome post!
Patapon and Loco Roco kept me entertained for hours. I still play them once in a while though my time is limited nowadays. Have you ever played Kingdom Hearts? To me, this has to be one of the best fantasy games for the PSP. The game is fantastic! Bright, lively colors, amazing story and lots of puzzles to solve. The character build engine is incredible. If you ever get the chance to purchase it somewhere, grab it!
I have Kingdom Hearts. However, I didn’t start it on PSP yet. I am still working on the PS2 ones. 🙂 But its just so awesome. I love it especially since they mix in Disney characters into the story and the worlds.
I’m totally with you there, Super Mario 64 and Donkey Kong 64 are still two of my favourite games of all time! I still fire them up sometimes and honestly, despite the fact that I’ve played a lot of excellent modern games, those along with Goldeneye and others of that period are the ones that truly never get old for me. I’ve seen N64 consoles at used games stores (that’s where I got mine), but you can definitely find them online if you ever feel like picking one up again!
Doom. Not only did we play it across … hehe, back then you didn’t play MMO style, you connected computers via modems … not only did we play across modems, but we edited our own levels. Yep, Doom ruled. I still love the original Doom and Doom II, Doom 3 which came out recently was epic and carried on the gorefest.
After that, I’m an MMORPG guy. I got in on the ground floor of Everquest II, but now I’m more of a fan of “Requiem: Memento Mori”. Being a horror based MMO, it’s dying a slow and painful death with few players. Requiem is certainly a “big boy game” in that it requests an age just to check out the website and is rated for 17+. It’s the Doom to World of Warcraft’s Mario Kart.
I remember playing Doom, Doom II, Quake and Quake II. By far, they were a series of great first person shooters. I’ll never forget playing Quake online for the first time. Some guys had cheats on and you can see ’em zip around. Crazy. I could never catch them but I kept on playing. Those were the days!
My grandsons are gamers and sometimes, actually give me the joystick, or whatever it’s called, to play for a few moments before whisking the controls away. But I do enjoy playing Wii games with them because I get my own control thingy.
My guys are all gamers. Current favorite is Skyrim, for which spouse and sons are plotting on purchasing some new modules. They play on PS3 and the Wii, mostly. My youngest likes Minecraft, too. He plays on our iMac, an iPod and an iPad.
I tried to play video games. As a younger chick, I played an old text game called Telenguard. It was stored on a CASSETTE. That old, yes. My brother was able to reprogram it (he was maybe 11 at the time) and we tinkered with the parameters of the game regularly. The only other video game I could play was Centipede. That is about as sophisticated as I ever got. 🙂
Gosh, Centipede…I remember playing that in the arcade when I was a teenager. I then purchased a clunky IBM XT to play a version of the game. I spent $2,000 in 1988 for 640k ram, monochrome monitor, two 5 1/4 floppy disk drives and a printer. It was the top of the line back then. It didn’t have a hard drive either. Crazy. I remember my second program on that thing was a game like Pong…yeah, two paddles, one ball. Unbelievable how much money I burned on computer equipment over the years that a small handheld nowadays can blast past millions of times faster.