It's been about 5 and a half years since I did my last Top 100 list. Due to my OCD and compulsion to constantly create lists in my head I think it's time for an all new Top 100.
My first thought was to reevaluate the old top 100, but fuck it, it's easier to pick 100 new games that I didn't have on the list last time. In the past 5 and a half years I've played more than I usually have, largely due to COVID. And in that time I've played a lot of new great games.
Plus, when I made the last list, I avoided adding multiple games from the same franchises. So I can dip back into the Dragon Quest pool and a few others.
Anyway stay tuned. Starting tomorrow we're doing this shit again.
My first thought was to reevaluate the old top 100, but fuck it, it's easier to pick 100 new games that I didn't have on the list last time. In the past 5 and a half years I've played more than I usually have, largely due to COVID. And in that time I've played a lot of new great games.
Plus, when I made the last list, I avoided adding multiple games from the same franchises. So I can dip back into the Dragon Quest pool and a few others.
Anyway stay tuned. Starting tomorrow we're doing this shit again.
It'll always be a mystery to me why Capcom couldn't just call this game Knights of the Round Table. Why did they have to cut off the last word? It's been 30 years, and I still find myself wondering about this from time to time. I'm sure it's some sort of trademark issue, but I'm sure they could have come up with something better.
All right, meaningless sidebar aside, this might have been my favorite arcade multiplayer brawler. As a young teenager who liked Renaissance festivals and Arthurian lore, how could I not love this game? I always chose Lancealot. Speed trumped everything else in my opinion. And I was fortunate because my best friend liked to play as Arthur. And if his little brother was tagging along with us to the arcade, he'd have to be Percival. Because who wants to be Percival? Look at that guy's hair. Even in the Dark ages, bowl cuts were not flattering.
When Capcom put out their first arcade collection in the early 2000s, I bought it specifically to play this game. The SNES version was okay, but not accurate enough for me. And it was a hell of a treat to have that arcade accurate game finally in my home. Anyway, great game, great theme, and really bad interpretation of the legends, but who cares. There's always wiggle room when a game is this fun.
It wasn't necessarily the Zelda game we wanted, but Hyrule Warriors, AKA Link's Adventure Through the Multiverse, was an absolutely wonderful experience. It was a new game and filled the brim with all the Legend of Zelda nostalgia you could handle.
For me, along with a lot of people I think, it was also my first experience with a Musou/Dynasty Warriors type game. And that was very eye-opening. It was remarkably satisfying to mow down hundreds of weak enemies that could rarely endure more than one swipe of your weapon. It was a good door to open. I've since played some of the other branded Musou games like the ones for Dragon Quest and persona. They've mostly been very good, but I still have to go back to Hyrule Warriors as being my favorite of the genre. I think Nintendo gave it that little extra polish. That makes it better than the others in the series. But hell, what do I know. There's still like a dozen or more out there that I haven't touched.
Also fun side story to go along with Hyrule Warriors, the day I picked it up from GameStop. I also went to Arby's and had the meat mountain sandwich. If you're not familiar with that, it's basically a couple slices of every meat they have in the store, all stacked up on one with a few slices of cheese, and an EMT's phone number ready to be called in case of a heart attack. This sandwich was actually pretty good, but when I waddled through the door after getting home. I looked at Hyrule Warriors and I just had to drop it down on the couch and go lay down and take a nap. The meat mountain conquered my desire for the game. But in retrospect, had I known how good it was, maybe I would have gone ahead and played the first level anyway.
That meat mountain sandwich sounds interesting. I haven't been to Arby's in a couple decades, despite one being about three miles away.
Oh my!
"Hey, let's just throw all of the shit that we have together!"
That's pretty much the gist of it. That said, it was pretty good. Oh and fun fact, Robio Jr works at Arby's now.
I will just take a regular old Reuben. How does junior like it?
During the 8-Bit era, I don't think any company worked better with third-party IPs than Capcom did. Rescue rangers and the rest of the Disney games, Willow, and even the Domino's Pizza Hut in mascot got turned into some really good games. DuckTales I think will always be the definitive classic, but Little Nemo, a game based on a movie that most people didn't even know existed, is right up there as well.
I think I talked about the animated movie that the game is based on before. Really high quality animation aside, it's not particularly good. But that doesn't really matter too much, as it really has more in common with the original turn of the century comic strip than the movie. And hell, that doesn't even matter. Capcom put together a stand-alone adventure game that, in terms of it's whimsical theme, It stands alongside the Mario games, fantasy zone, and any other classic 8-bit game that when you break it down kind of feels like a drug trip.
This was also one of those games that I didn't get to play when it originally came out, much to my own disappointment. Nintendo Power did a feature on it that made Little Nemo feel like a game that you would regret missing out on if you didn't play. And boy did they get that point across. This was one of those games that I always kicked myself for not buying back in the day, and it got really hard to find even once I finally had money as an older teenager in the 16-bit era. I didn't actually get to play it all the way through until maybe 10 years ago. And while admittedly it got obtuse at times, I was happy to wander around levels, feeding candy to animals in hopes of borrowing their powers and seeing whatever the hell was next. It's not often that an 8-bit game holds up to 25 years of hype, but this one definitely did.