Blog Posts from "CronoT's blog"

The Top 10 BFG's in Video Games

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:07:44 -0500

First, let's start this list off right. No, a rocket launcher is NOT a BFG. It fires an explosive shelled grenade, not a bullet, so every rocket launcher from every game is immediately disqualified. Now that we're done with that, let's get this party started. 10. Chain Gun - Resident Evil Series In the world of Resident Evil, there's only one weapon you want at your side when facing the undead hordes. The rocket launcher is nice, but it's rate of fire is abysmally slow when you're being mobbed by zombies. That's when you want to reach for BFG #10 on the list, the Chain Gun. Featured predominatedly in Resident Evil 2, but also available in Resident Evil 3, the Chain Gun was the weapon of choice to kill everything in your path with extreme prejudice. Nothing could stand in your way as you blasted away with it, not even William Birkin's multiple forms. There was something deeply cathartic about hearing that gun wind up, and then seeing your targets drop like flies. 9. Rail Gun - Quake II After Quake II was released, the all-powerful Rocket Launcher fell from its position as the most coveted weapon in the game during multiplayer sessions. The new weapon that everyone was killing to hold in their metaphorical hands was BFG #9 on the list, the Rail Gun. While it's rate of fire was slower than any other gun in the game, its lethality is unquestioned. No matter how far away, no matter how much armor you were wearing, if this baby hit you, the result was always the same; you got to meet the Grim Reaper face to face. If you were lucky enough, you wouldn't respawn in the same area and get taken out again and again by the same bastard. 8. Barrett M82A1 .50 Cal Sniper Rifle - Rainbow Six 3 Rainbow Six 3 was one of the first FPS games to really stand out on the new Xbox console. It's many online co-op and head-to-head modes made it an instant classic. However, there was one gun that stood out amongst all the others. It's BFG #8 on the list, the Barrett M82A1 Sniper Rifle. It looked like you were carrying the anti-tank turret off of a Humvee, but the damage it did was extreme. One shot to either the head or the body area was an instant death for any terrorists unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of it's 10x zoom scope. Then, someone discovered a glitch. The Barrett was originally only supposed to be available in the co-op mode Terrorist Hunt. But, if you left the Barrett equipped when you switched from Terrorist Hunt to another of the online co-op or head-to-head modes, it would cause the game to allow the Barrett to be selectable by anyone in the match. This added a whole new dimension of pain, especially in any of the maps with good sniper's nests. 7. Iron Man's Ion Cannon - Capcom's Marvel Series When Capcom got the license to make an arcade style fighting game in the mold of their Street Fighter franchise with Marvel's character properties, many long time Marvel fans and geeks were estatic. I was among them, and I was happy to see characters such as Captain America, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Psylocke, and Iron Man. All of the characters had Capcom's over the top Super Combo style attacks, but none was more impressive or jaw-dropping than BFG #7 on the list, Iron Man's Ion Cannon. The screen would flash, and Iron Man would yell out "Here's my Sunday Best!". A huge cannon would then materialize right above his shoulder, and then pump out a massive blast of energy. While it's damage radius wasn't as large as Cyclops' Super Energy Blast, it lasted longer, and in the earlier games caused more damage as well. For most players, Iron Man became the go-to character, since there was nothing more satisfying than spamming out that Super Combo. 6. Farsight XR-20 - Perfect Dark In the history of FPS games, there's always been one Holy Grail everyone has wanted; a gun that can fire through anything and be instantly fatal to their opponents. Many games have had cheats put in by the developers, or hacked in by people after the fact that would allow them to do it. One of the most notorious was Counter-Strike, and it's auto-head shot cheat, that would instantly aim a weapon at any and/or every characters' head in range, and then put one right between the headlights. It was also the main reason why Counter-Strike quickly fell out of favor with all but the most hardcore of PC FPS gamers. Years later, Rare, the company behind the huge success that was GoldenEye007, wanted to make another game in the Bond series, using a refined version of the engine that ran its predecessor. But, Rare's license agreement with the company that owns the Bond property had expired. So, they made a new game with their refined engine, but with an all new story. This also gave them the freedom to use whatever storyline they wanted. One of the results of that unique storyline was BFG #6 on the list, the Farsight XR-20. While it had a rather slow reload rate, it was its secondary ability that made it one of the most coveted weapons in all of FPS games. The Farsight XR-20 could switch to a mode where you could see and fire through walls, obstacles, or anything else in your path, and take out an enemy or opponent from half a map away, and they would have no idea what happened, until after they respawned. Whether you loved or hated this gun was often heavily influenced by which end of the barrel you were on. 5. Gravity Gun - Half-Life 2 Valve just used to be the name of an item used mainly in plumbing and pnuematic devices. Now, it's also synonymous with one of the most inventive and creative video game studios in the world. Valve Software Studios released one of the most innovative FPS games since GoldenEye007. One of their most important creations was a physics engine unlike any other, the Havok engine. Using this engine, Valve created one of the most ingenious weapons ever realized, BFG #5 on the list, the Gravity Gun. Unlike most of the other guns on the list, the Gravity Gun isn't here because of its size or blast radius. It's here, because this gun has by definition, an almost limitless supply of ammunition, and near unlimited potential for destruction, to boot. Thank you, Dr. Freeman, for making science cool again. 4. Hyper Beam - Super Metroid Super Metroid is considered by most to be the best 2D game to come out of the Super NES/Sega Genesis era. Some consider it to be the best 2D game ever made, period. One of the core factors that has always made the Metroid Series what it is are the inventive weapons, such as the beam cannon, missiles, power bombs, super missiles, and so on. But none is as memorable as BFG #4 on the list, the Hyper Beam. After the last metroid gave its life to try and save Samus, it passed on its power to absorb and expend massive amounts of energy. Samus used this to her advantage, and then proceeded to blast the Mother Brain a new one. While the first part of their fight was a pitched battle of size and strength vs. speed, agility, and intelligence, the final part was totally one-sided, as Samus used the Hyper Beam to rip apart the Mother Brain, piece by piece. While the Hyper Beam did make another cameo in Metroid Prime, its power and use were completely tied to the appearence of the raw, liquid phazon the Metroid Prime left behind, severely limiting its effectiveness. 3. RC-P90 - GoldenEye007 When Nintendo released the Nintendo 64, their goal was to narrow its library, but to do it in a way that would force the cream of the crop to rise to the surface. Overall, the effectiveness of this method can be questioned. But, this method was also responsible for one of the best and most defining FPS games of all time, GoldenEye007. While the creativity of the missions helped the game immensely, it was the weapons that put it over the top for most gamers. Rare did an awesome job on this part, and so, even a dozen years later, people still talk about BFG #3 on the list, the RC-P90. The RC-P90 was a special kind of machine gun with caseless rounds, which allowed it to fire at a blindingly high rate of speed. Rare also addressed this issue by giving the RC-P90 an 80 round magazine, and an 800 round ammo bin. Opponents would run in fear whenever they saw you sporting the RC-P90, and nothing compared to the fear induced by someone double-wielding a pair of those babies. The amount of damage done by this gun could kill in one burst if you weren't wearing body armor, and if you were, it would usually deplete the armor to nothing. Also, headshots from this gun were lethal at almost any range. An Honorable Mention needs to go out to the Golden Gun and the Golden PP7, as well. People might laugh and call you a ***** the first time they saw you holding one of these. But after only one shot, they'd by your *****. 2. Spread Gun - Contra Series In the late 80's, Konami released a game for the Nintendo Entertainment System that has since become synonymous with brutally hard. That game was named simply Contra. You were thrown into a battle against waves of alien troopers and hordes, and all you had to defend yourself with was a measly single-shot rifle. Smart players quickly learned to memorize the position and availability of every single appearence of the weapons upgrades. But, no other weapon upgrade was more coveted than BFG #2 on the list, the Spread Gun. To paraphrase Stuttering Craig, the Spread Gun was BFG before BFG was even a concept. With it, you had a much better chance of surviving, which doesn't mean much, with bosses the entire size of the screen that will have you screaming Uncle faster than Jerry Louis under a Sumo Wrestler. While many weapons have come and gone in the Contra universe, the venerable Spread Gun has been there through it all. 1. BFG 9000 - Doom Series It's the gun that all other guns want to be. It has style, beauty, and enough firepower to level several city blocks. It's BFG #1 on the list, the BFG 9000. When Doom was released on the PC, it startled everyone with its bloody, gory, and sometimes even horrific settings. When pistols and shotguns weren't enough, you had to pull out some nastier firepower. While nothing was as personal as the chainsaw, it was the BFG 9000 everyone wanted. It could take out every enemy on the screen with a single blast, and even bosses would cringe and ask for mercy upon seeing it. You know when a military veteran is impressed enough with the weapon that you need to pay attention to it. Honestly, there are lots of people who would love to have a replica of this gun sitting on their mantle. If it's good enough for The Rock, it's good enough for me. This makes it a sold choice for the number one Big F'ing Gun of all time. I'll be taking suggestions for my next few lists, so toss me some ideas, please.

The Top 10 Games that Rocked & Sequels That Sucked

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:40:38 -0500

Top 10 Games that Rocked, & Sequels that Sucked 10. Altered Beast The original Altered Beast on the Sega Genesis was one of the first great games on the console, until the Sonic games came out. It already had a built-in audience from it's large distribution in arcades. To this day, it's still revered as one of the best games of the Genesis/Mega Drive era. It was also Sega's answer to Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, since it came prepackaged with most Genesis systems. Why a sequel was never released in the lifetime of the Genesis or it's successor, the Saturn, still confuses some Sega fans to this day. However, the "sequel" on the PS2 was so awful, it wasn't even released in the US. Only Japan and Europe were forced to choke it down. In this reviewer's humble opinion, the only reason it even has the name Altered Beast in the title was to try and cash in on the nostalgia factor, like when EA released their last Bond game, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. The writing couldn't have been on the wall any harder if it tried. 9. Syphon Filter I know what you're thinking. Syphon Filter was what we all hoped would be the GoldenEye of the PlayStation era. The first Syphon Filter was awesome. It had a perfect balance of fun, challenge, and gameplay. The story was engaging, had excellent characters, and the voice acting for the time was superb. Like GoldenEye, it moved away from the pure "Run-&-Gun" Aesthetic to a more nuanced gameplay style involving accomplishing multiple tasks, most in a non-linear fashion, too. The player had to carefully think out their plan of attack, and make sure that achieving the mission goals were paramount. You could even see the beginning of true Stealth gameplay being tested out in some of the later stages. Given the immediate success of Syphon Filter, Sony ordered a sequel. But, lightning didn't really strike twice. While 989 Studios, Sony's best producer of the PS1 era, usually knocked them out of the park, Syphon Filter 2 was not one of them. Instead of extending the length of the game from the first one, they simply cranked up the difficulty to near-insane levels. From the very first stage, you had guys who were always after head shots. No matter how hard you tried, you always got killed by some guy with a head shot. It made hoarding flak jackets nearly useless. Some boss fights even consisted of nothing but a regular or slightly higher level enemy who went after nothing but head shots. While there were some enemies in the first game that would occasionally go after head shots, you could shake them by rolling and then coming back up running. These enemies could track you through your roll from half a screen away, and were dead shots at anything other than the easiest difficulty. 8. Mega Man X4 X4 was the best of the X series games made by Capcom. It was the first game of the X series to try and connect the continuity between itself and the Mega Man Classic series. The bosses were detailed, the challenges were set to annoy you and keep you coming instead of frustrating you to no end, and getting all the pick-ups required all your skill, and even a little bit of luck. Also, the final boss was actually hard to beat, unlike with X2 and X3. Finally, we had those great anime-style cut scenes, and a chilling ending sequence for both X and Zero, giving the game a much darker atmosphere than its previous sequels, or any of the other Mega Man games before it. Then, along came X5 and X6. The controls were awful, and were far from intuitive. This game also introduced quite possibly the most hated character in the Mega Man Universe, Alia. To call her useless would be a colassal understatement. She never seemed to add anything to the game, and was always giving you "advice" so obvious, the instruction manual did a better job of it. Around this time was also when most fans think the steam really began to run out of the franchise. The bosses in these games were ridiculous, and just seemed like they were thrown together at the last moment. Also, who's bright idea was it to have a final boss style encounter at the beginning of the game? While X4 did an excellent job of threading the needle between the old and the new storylines, X5 just seemed to piss all over it, even going so far as to bring back the Yellow Rock Monster. When you run out of ideas is when it's time to move on and admit defeat. 7. Secret of Mana Squaresoft/Square-Enix has been trying to recapture the greatness that was Secret of Mana for years now. This game was grand in both scope and design, moving RPG's from turn-based to live action battle. It also moved the emphasis of the gameplay from only leveling up your characters, to leveling up just about everything in the game. Certain enemies were immune to or hard to hit with certain weapons, forcing you to learn how to use multiple weapons. You even had to use some weapons to traverse parts of the game screen, such as using the whip to grab posts and pull yourself across gaps. The weapons also had charging levels themselves, allowing you to pull off some very impressive attacks. Some of them were a little hit or miss, though. Finally, unlike most previous Squaresoft games which featured magic, you couldn't buy or find more powerful spells. You had to level them up just like everything else. Secret of Mana was one of the first games to use what's now known as level grinding, but it managed to do it as smoothly as possible, to avoid irritating the player. The story was engaging and pulled you in like no other game before it. True, some parts were rather cliched, but at the time, it wasn't as bad as it is now. While the male protagonist looked a lot like Crono from Chrono Trigger, the main difference was that he had actual lines of dialogue. Now, Squeenix, as it's been called by it's detractors, has just been puppy-milling out the "Mana" games. The only thing that can be said about those games is their complete lack of enjoyable gameplay. 6. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Like a lot of people, I bought my Xbox just so I could play this game. It was that good. LucasArts and Bioware promised us a great game. It was all that and more. The core of George Lucas' universe is the continuing struggle between good and evil. In Knights of the Old Republic, you start off by picking your character's class and gender. Then, you get tossed right into the middle of a bloody battle. Every decision you made affected not only your character, but how every member of your team and also how every other NPC in the game reacted to you. It managed to use this dynamic even better than Fable, Peter Molyneaux's much hyped game, a year before it even came out. It included all the well-known races from the Star Wars Universe, and even introduced a new race, the Rakatan, which was secretly the progenitors of high-technology in the galaxy. Over time, the Rakatan's overuse and abuse of the Dark Side of the Force rendered them incapable of using the Force. Finally, a plague nearly wiped out the last of the Rakatan race. Seeking to hide from all those they had oppressed, the Rakatan destroyed all evidence of their existence, and upon returning to their home world, devolved into barbarism. Millenia later, Revan, a Jedi Knight, discovered their secrets, and found their ultimate weapon, the Star Forge. Revan is also unofficially the first Dark Side Force User to assume the title of Darth. KOTOR was named Xbox Game of the Year when it came out. Then came the sequel. With Bioware off making their own game, which was later announced to be Jade Empire, the reins of the Old Republic series was handed off to Obsidian Entertainment. But, a rushed production schedule, a forced release-by date, and several bugs that were discovered but never fixed almost certainly doomed the game from the start. While the story from the first Knights of the Old Republic felt very polished and was an epic achievement, it seemed like Knights of the Old Republic II did little more than tread water. None of the characters ever truly draw you in, and most of the newer Force abilities in the game, except Battle Meditation, were either only used once, or were almost completely useless. The inclusion of Master Level Light Side and Dark Side ranks were nice, but did little more than pad a few stats. In the end, they were mostly useless, as well. The battle system was little more than a revamp from the first game. While most people would say the battle system from the first Old Republic was near perfect, the sequel added in lightsaber styles, which most people ignored, in favor of the Force powers or simpler and less complicated melee attacks. The difficulty was completely random, and would change at any moment from ridiculously easy to frustratingly hard. Also, the time honored tradition of level grinding had little or no effect on the game as well, since battle relied almost entirely on Force usage. Another thing that irritated some players was that almost every single character in the game could become a Jedi. The balance of the characters where one is a Jedi, and all others still manage to scrape along depsite their "seeming" limitations. One character even had the most convienient ability in the game. As long as one other character was alive, he could never die. Smart players learned to use this as a crutch for the entire game. The storyline was tired and cliched. It all felt like a poorly written Star Wars novel, like Kevin J. Anderson's Darksaber. Add on top of all that a game so glitchy, people were screaming for blood. I beat it once, then left it collecting dust on my shelves until I traded it in. 5. Final Fantasy Tactics Final Fantasy Tactics took the very niche game-type of battle simulation, and introduced it to the more mainstream audience when it was released. Up until that time, the only good battle simulation games were usually on PC, and were about historic conflicts, such as the Civil War game, North vs. South, or the many WWII games, the most famous of which is usually Patton vs. Rommel. Then, Squeenix released Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the Gameboy Advance. This game did almost everything wrong, from the clunky gameplay, to the uneven battle difficulty, to the actual inclusion of Laws, or rules of what you could or couldn't do in battles. Then, to pad out the very thin storyline, a massive subplot, even bigger than the main plot, was added in; The Clan Wars. You would spend more time taking and retaking clan lands than you would in playing the actual storyline. Square-Enix next released Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on the DS. They should have included a coupon for a free gallon of milk. It would have made it easier to choke down this grind sandwich. The way you leveled up your characters' classes was by equipping weapons to gain abilities from them. In order to get weapons, you had to refine them from items. In order to get the items, you have to win them in battles. This game made Final Fantasy VIII's anal-compulsion towards items and magic seem normal by comparison. With FFTA2, I committed the cardinal sin of an FF game: I traded it in without even beating it. It was that awful. 4. Final Fantasy VII I know what you're thinking: "What in the world is FFVII doing on a bad game list?" Remember, this is a list of games that were awesome, followed by games that just outright sucked. Final Fantasy VII was the game that introduced RPG's into the mainstream video game audience. Up until that time, must people who had played RPG's continued to play them from PC's, or were gamers like me who were craving something deeper in their gaming experience. Super Mario Bros. is fun, but it's also painfully short compared to most games theses days. FFVII was the best RPG on the PlayStation, and some would argue, the best RPG ever made. The story was deep, the characters were engaging and drew you, and it had one of the most memorable villians in RPG and FF history, Sephiroth. Also, most people don't know this, but the name Sephiroth was taken was Jewish mysticism. It also began FF games divergence from a group or core group of people fighting evil, to a more personal confrontation between the primary protagonist and the primary antagonist. However, it was followed by one of the most despised RPG's ever made, Final Fantasy VIII. Like FFTA, Square did just about everything wrong with this game, from the worn-out Soap Opera-style plot, to the clunky battle mechanics, to the magic system, and even to the money system. In this game, you didn't get money from winning battles. You actually got "paychecks" from your main base, and you could take tests to raise your pay grade. I don't know about you, but when I play a video game, I expect to have fun, not train for college and learn how to climb the corporate ladder. The YouTube User SpoonyOne even recently embarked on playing the entire game while hacing a running commentary on it. His insights into the game were both hilarious and thought provoking. 3. Super Mario 64 It's been called the Holy Grail of Mario games. It got everything right. The gameplay, the graphics, the difficulty curve, and the plot. It even included a completion challenge for the OCD gamers out there. It carried on the tradition of having a Mario game as the #1 launch title of a Nintendo system. It also took full advantage of the new design for the N64's controller. It played as smooth as silk, and was as fun as ice cream on a hot day. Years after I got it, I would still pull it out and play it. Then, came it's sequel, Super Mario Sunshine. Mario and Peach decide they've had enough of Bowser interrupting all their "one-on-one" time, and leave for a vacation to sunny Delfino. Unfortunately, someone arrived before them, and was impersonaiting Mario, and was committing random acts of vandalism, by smearing paint everywhere. So, being dragged into yet another adventure he had nothing to with, Mario was obliged, aka, forced to go around the Delfino Islands, and clean up all the mess. But how was he to clean it up, you ask? With a water-spraying backpack, that's how. Professor E. Gadd, the weird, lame rip-off of Doctor Emit Brown from Luigi's Mansion, had made a portable water spraying device he had christened F.L.U.D.D. Honestly, this game was so childish and kiddy, even I was up in arms saying Nintendo was going straight for the 8-12 year old demographic. Except, the game was hard; almost brutally so. The challenge level fluctuated rapidly, from mind-numbingly simple, to hair-pulling hard. After all that, we were finally introduced to the real villian, Bowser Jr. Didn't Bowser have 7 kids already? So where did this little bastard come from? Has Princess Peach been getting kidnapped on purpose all these years? Or is there some adoption agency out there so stupid or overburdened, they'd be willing to give a kid to Bowser. yeah, we know he's royalty, and pretty well off because of it, but is he really the best role model for a young child. Bowser Jr. also made his return in New Super Mario Bros. But, despite his prescene, the game managed not to suck. 2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Often referred to in shorthand as Zelda 64, LoZ: Ocarina of Time was considered even better than Super Mario 64 in pure gameplay and storyline. It "completed" the Zelda Mythos by officially being the first story in the series. The gameplay was perfect. Since all previous Zelda games had either been top-down or side-scrolling, the battle mechanics had to be redesigned for the game. What Miyamoto created a battle system which has come to be known as lock-on combat. You and your opponent would face off, always moving in concert with each other. This made the many creatures you had to battle much easier to take down. While it did occasionally make for longer and extended fights with lesser enemies, it's purpose shined through in the many boss battles. The story was perfect. Link, a small boy who lived among the Kokiri, a race of children who were immortal and watched over by the Deku Tree, was thrust into a conflict not of his own making, in order to stop Ganondorf, the Thief King of the Gerudo, from taking over Hyrule. The graphics, given the slight limitations of the N64, was as perfect as possible. With the N64's high-level of processing power, the instances of pixelization and images breaking down were almost nil. Fire, water, and even ice moved realisticly in the many environments. Then, came Majora's Mask. It was clunky, and the story was bland and formulaic. Some gamers give it a little credit, since Miyamoto, the creator of Zelda, was minimally involved in it's production. However, it left a bad taste in the mouth of most Zelda fans and casual gamers. Link, while out riding Epona one day, gets attacked by the Skulltula Kid, who then grabs Epona and takes off through a dimensional gate to another world. In this world, the moon is getting ready to crash down and destroy everything. Link has to repeat the same three days over and over again, kind of like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but even less interesting. Nintendo next released LoZ: The Wind Waker. While graphically, you either loved it or hated it, there were some problems that everyone agrees just hurt it. First, there was far too much emphasis on the sailing part. Many people spent hours sailing around, only to find out the place they needed to head to was right next to them. Then there was the overall shortness of the game. The entire game had 5 or 6 dungeons, depending on how you count them. The original Zelda had 9, Link to the Past had an amazing 12, and Ocarina of Time had 9. Finally, there was the Triforce hide-&-seek part of the game, where you had to find 8 maps, collect an insane amount of cash, and then go find the 8 pieces of the Triforce. One thing they finally got right was the sword fight at the end with Ganon. Also, Ganon has one of the most soul-searching speeches we have ever heard from a main villian, in which he explains the origin of his hatred for Hyrule and it's people. But, it was still a little short. 1. Chrono Trigger Considered by most to be the best console RPG video game EVER, Chrono Trigger at the time was an unparalleled achievement. The storyline was great, the gameplay was great, and the battle system was revolutionary for it's time. You could use single Tech or magic attacks, combine them between two characters, or invovle all three characters at once to pull off massive attacks. Finally, the scale of the game was as grand as time itself, spanning from a mythical 65 million years B.C., all the way to 2300 A.D., and even The End of Time, or Limbo, as some people called it. Another part was the multiple endings of the game. While some games had already done this, it was a mere 2 or 3 endings. Chrono Trigger had an astounding 12 different, seperate endings, including a Super-Difficult ending you could only get to once you'd gone through the entire game 2 or 3 times. Finally, when you'd done everything in the game, you got the New Game+ option, that allowed you to restart the game with all your items and levels brought over from a saved file. It allowed you to breeze through the game, or to go through it with a god-like sense of invulnerability. One of the most amusing quirks of the game was that the title/lead character, Crono, never spoke the entire game. While Squaresoft never came out and said he was mute, it simply made it so he never had anything to say. There was one of the many endings were Crono did talk, but it was a tongue-in-cheek ending where nothing discussed actually happened. When the news of a sequel was released, Chrono Trigger fans were metaphorically frothing at the mouth. However, after only a few minutes, it was immediately appearent that this game was radically different. The gameplay was hideously over-complicated, the battle system was a confusing mess, and the story had even veteran RPG and sci-fi fans asking "Who wrote this crap?" One of the very few gripes that a minority of fans had about Chrono Trigger was that it had "only" 7 characters. This game was a perfect example of why any more than 10 characters is usually a bad idea. Chrono Cross had over 40 characters, each who supposedly had their own unique play mechanics. Maybe it was the glut of characters that pulled down the production value. The only real connection this game had to Chrono Trigger was a short cameo from the principal characters, Crono, Lucca, and Marle. The rest of the continuity linking Chrono Cross to Chrono Trigger was so retconned, it was disgusting. The final boss was so convoluted, you could beat it by "lining up the element colors." Infact, the only way to get the good ending to the game was to do this. Squaresoft took a loose end from Chrono Trigger, Schala, and wrapped an entire game around her. What a godawful mess. Check out my next Blog entry, where I'll be listing video games' Top 10 BFG's. 'Til next time, see ya.

Top 10 Games That Defined Or Redefined Gaming

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:22:04 -0500

Top 10 Games That Defined Or Redefined Gaming While this list is rather Nintendo-heavy, please keep in mind that if not for Nintendo, the video game genre itself would have died more than 20 years ago. This list isn't about the best games of all time, but the games that changed gaming itself. Also, for those of you wondering, Metroid came in at #11, and Street Fighter II came in at #12; sorry. 10. Wii Sports With the release of the Nintendo Wii in 2006, gamers were able to play games in a way never before realized: with intuitive motion sensitive gameplay. Unlike with previous games, where you held a controller and pushed buttons to get your character to respond, Nintendo took gameplay a step further, and broke down the wall between you and the game, allowing for varying degrees of accuracy in representing the motions involved in the playing of actual sports, from waving a tennis racket, to swinging a baseball bat, to bowling, to even boxing, without the need for the large areas required to play the games, or in the case of boxing, suffering the welts and bruises. While some people have complained about the occasional flub in gameplay, there's no denying that Wii Sports has taken video gaming in a completely new direction. 9. The Legend of Zelda Based on the childhood experiences and storybooks of Shigeru Miyamoto, the Legend of Zelda changed gaming by taking it from a simple left-to-right gameplay, and expanded it to cover an entire world; or as much as you could fit into an 8-bit cartridge. While previous D&D based fantasy games had the player interact with mostly text and very little in the way of graphics, Zelda turned this formula on it's head, by allowing the player to immerse him or her self in the game world with little or no direction being given. Ultimately, it was up to the player to decide how and where to go, making this game a radical shift in the gaming world. 8. Duck Hunt The granddaddy of all lightgun games, Duck Hunt was simple, repetitive, and insanely addictive. It came bundled with most NES systems, along with Super Mario Bros. While it's depiction of actually shooting a gun is comical at best, it set the stage for all lightgun games to follow, such as Time Crisis, House of the Dead, Virtua Cop, and many others. Also, aside from the old man in the original Legend of Zelda, no video game character has been more hated and loathed than the Duck Hunt dog. While he was supposed to be man's best friend, he would laugh and taunt you mercilessly when you failed. Many an adult has scarred memories over that iconic mutt's laugh. 7. Doom/GoldenEye007 These two games made such an impact on the market, it's truly a question of whether either one could have succeeded if not for the other. Now, I know that Doom came out years before GoldenEye007 did, but both shaped this gaming genre in a way that has reverberated down the years. Doom was as simple as it was gory. You're a Space Marine who's been dropped in the middle of the Mars Colony, only to find it's been over-run with aliens, monsters, and demons. You have to run, gun, and with the chainsaw, hack and slay your way through the enemy hordes in order to save the day. While the single player mode quickly became old to experienced players, the very new concept of LAN parties added a new dimension to the game, and gave gamers a thrill they had never known before: mercilessly hunting down and slaughtering their friends. Then GoldenEye007 came along, and completely turned the FPS genre around. While it still kept the multiplayer function in the game for up to 4 players, it moved the goal of the game from hunting down and massacring everything in sight, to needing to accomplish mission goals, such as beating a time limit, or placing a certain object in a certain spot, or any number of goals the game designers could come up with. Now, for those of you who have either never played either Doom or GoldenEye007, or scoff at their importance to the video game genre, think about this. Without both of these games, you never would have played Halo 1, 2, or 3. 6. Final Fantasy When the fledgling video game company Square was on the verge of bankruptcy, one man stepped forward to either be it's savior, or the final nail in it's coffin. What we got was a game so grand in it's scope and design, it recently celebrated it's 20th Anniversary; a group so exclusive, only four other game icons can lay claim to it: Pac-Man, Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. In Final Fantasy, you could choose to fill 4 slots with up to 6 different character classes, giving you an amazing number of possible combinations to play as. While some of the classes have either been eliminated or rolled up into other ones, 4 of the classes still remain as distinct types in the Final Fantasy world: The Black Mage, The White Mage, The Thief, and The Monk. While other classes were added along the way, these 4 remained as the core archetype of the Final Fantasy Universe. While there have been both good and bad Final Fantasy games ranging across almost every console ever made, there's no denying the impact this game has had on the gaming genre as a whole. 5. Resident Evil Until this game was released, the only place horror fans could get their fix was from horror films by Wes Craven, movies based on Steven King novels, or the myriad Jason and Freddy slasher flicks. Then Capcom took a very old movie, Night of the Living Dead, and breathed some life, and death, into it. What we got was a game based on the 50's and 60's horror films, but with all the blood and guts from their 80's and 90's counterparts. Taking full advantage of the recently created ESRB ratings board, Capcom took the limits of what good taste was in a video game and threw it out the window. While dogs, birds, spiders, and other creepy crawlies had been in video games for years, they were relegated to nothing more than minor nuisances. However, in this game, everything was out to kill you, as fast and as gory as it could. Your only defense was the weapons and ammo you found along the way; and may the Good Lord have mercy on your soul if you were left with only the knife to defend you. While some gamers considered it a video game equivalent of the Red Badge of Courage to go through the entire game using only the knife, this made an already brutally hard game nearly impossible. While there have been many good games in this series, there have also been some outright godawful bombs. Here's hoping Capcom can keep the series as fresh and undead for the next 15 years and beyond. 4. Super Mario 64 Taking the video game world into true 3D for the first time, Super Mario 64 took the intrepid plumber into new areas, and added a dimension to him we had never seen before. While most games that had tried 3D relied almost entirely on their graphics, Super Mario 64 had awesome graphics, and had an amazing story and plot to go along with it. With 15 huge worlds to explore, and many more mini-maps to find bonus stars in, Mario set out on his grandest adventure to date. The Princess, who for the first time in the US, reveals her first name as Peach, invites Mario over to her castle. But when Mario arrives, all is not well. Bowser has stolen all the Power Stars that magically protected the castle, and has sealed her mushroom people retainers inside the walls of the castle, and Princess Peach inside a stain-glass window. Mario must now enter the pictures of the castle, where Bowser has hidden away the Power Stars in an attempt to prevent anyone from recovering them. The worlds inside the pictures range from a single field with a hill, to a massive sky-city above the clouds. However, with the Power Stars relegated to items, and not a mushroom in sight, Mario would need new items to power him up. To this end, Nintendo gave Mario three new abilities, all in the guise of his trademark cap. While one retained his ability to fly, it gave Mario the ability to soar through the sky as never before wherever he managed to find and open a red block. The two other caps, one from a blue block, and one from a green block, either made Mario immaterial, so he could walk through most walls and actually fall through some floors. The other, turned Mario into a metal juggernaut, capable of running through most enemies, and protecting him from the hazards around him; but at a price. Whenever Mario was in water with his metal suit, he sunk like a rock. While some of the Power Stars required you to do this, the water slowed Mario down to a crawl. Another change in this game was the inclusion of a breath meter. In all previous Mario games where Mario went swimming, he could hold his breath indefinitely. Now, if Mario didn't come up for air, or find an air bubble to breathe, he would drown. The final addition to the game was Mario's new moves. In all his previous games, Mario could do little more than run and jump. Nintendo expanded on this, by allowing him to triple jump, long jump, do a back flip, or even do a sliding jump that could pull you out of danger. The final addition to his move set was the ability to crawl. While Mario could always duck, he could never move in this position. While this new movement method, Mario could plod along like a turtle. For those gamers patient enough, the crawling method opened up it's own assortment of possibilities. Finally, Mario came face-to-face with his eternal rival, Bowser. This had changed as well. Unlike previous games, where all Mario had to do to defeat him was to drop him off a bridge, or make him fall through one to his doom, Mario now had to grab Bowser by the tail, and hurl him into bombs encircling the arena. While Mario only had to hit him once in the first two encounters, during the third and final encounter, Mario had to slam Bowser into three different bombs, with the last one being twice as hard as Bowser altered the arena you were fighting in. Once you defeated him, Mario would take to the sky one last time, as Princess Peach was released from her stain-glass prison. The game ended with a scene that confused and/or infuriated many gamers, when Princess Peach baked Mario a cake. While Mario has been in several 3D games since Super Mario 64, few have managed to capture the granduer of his first 3D foray. 3. Tetris While there had been puzzle-type games on consoles before, they were made for and played only by little children. Some examples were Color A Dinosaur, or the many Sesame Street games. They were also examples of why puzzle games didn't do well. They were simplistic, childish, and could be beaten by a brain-dead chimp. But one man from the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain was creating a game that would cross the entire planet, and do more in less than a decade to thaw out the strained relations between the Soviet Empire and the Western World than in the past 40 years. Alexey Pajitnov discovered a puzzle, similar to the Rubik's Cube, called pentaminoes, or five-sided pieces. When he purchased one and took it apart, he found it almost impossible to put them back together. This gave him the idea for a game, where the pieces would fall randomly, and the player would have to organize the blocks, or lose. While he first started out with 5 pieces for each block, due to programming limitations, he was forced to use only four per piece. This, however, worked to the average person's advantage. While only four blocks per piece, there could only be seven possible pieces used. Since the average person's immediate memory retention is seven, plus or minus two, the pieces could be quickly recognized and ordered. He named the game Tetris, for the Greek word for four, Tetra. Pajitnov then put the program on his computer, using a word processor type program, because his computer didn't have any graphics capability. The game made the computer nerd rounds, until finally, it was discovered by an industrialist in Hungary. From here, the game was licensed and then fraudulently sold to a British software firm, and then to Atari. The industrialist was going crazy trying to get the licenses for all the properties everyone was selling like hotcakes. Eventually, the Soviets, who tired of never seeing any royalties and who were shown multiple copies of their game they never approved, pulled all current licenses except for the ones relating to PC's. Nintendo, through a saavy publisher, Henk Rogers, was then able to sew up all the rights to the game, including for the then still secret Game Boy. Nintendo then issued, through their legal dept., a cease & desist order to Atari Games/Tengen to stop producing and pull all copies of their version of Tetris, since it was being sold under a fraudulent license. Atari Games/Tengen counter-sued and lost, and was forced to pull all their copies of the game after only one month on the market. Despite being such a simple game in design and play, Tetris would go on to make some people billionaires, and leave others penniless and bankrupt. While there have been many sequels and redesigns for Tetris, many gamers still feel the original is the best. 2. Atari Pong While considered almost obscenely crude by today's standards, Atari's Pong was the original video game. When Nolan Bushnell envisioned playing games in the electronic world, his imagination was without limits. However, his limitations on the technological side were quite severe. He was limited not only by the size of the usable area, but also by the amount of graphics that could be on the screen at the same time. His first game would have to be incredibly simplistic. Once Bushnell was finally able to get a "ball" to caroom around the screen, he noticed that it resembled a ping pong ball. He then decided to make a ping pong style game, but was once again restricted by the amount of processing power. So, he used two sticks to resemble paddles, and then added a line down the middle to complete the board. Once the game finally worked, Bushnell faced a new challenge: How to get people to play the game. He decided to use what is now standard in the arcade world, an arcade case with a TV dedicated to playing the game. It was an uphill fight. Many retailers and stores refused to carry the machines, claiming people would simply steal the TV out of the case, and leave them with a ruined mess. Bushnell finally convinced one retailer to have the machine set up, and put a quarter slot in it, a standard now in the market. He received a call less than a week later. The owner said the machine had stopped working. When Bushnell arrived, he found that the quarter hopper was overflowing, and simply couldn't accept any more. The retailer immediately ordered more machines, and advertised he had a new machine that would make pinball games look tame by comparison. With this and many other successes, Bushnell eventually created a company named Atari, and released a home console, the Atari 2600. But, due to Bushnell making the system open source, meaning anyone could make and release a game for it, the quality of the games began to decline rapidly. The number of bad games became so large, millions of unsold cartridges were marked down, some as much as 90% of their original price. What is considered the final nail in the coffin of the Atari Dynasty was the game E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. While the movie had made parents and children cry, the game made them cry for another reason: The game was so awful, it was barely playable. With broken controls, unclear goals, and hit targeting that went beyond atrocious, the game was an immediate bomb. There are still rumors today that millions of copies of the game were bulldozed into a landfill somewhere in New Mexico. While Atari may have faded away from the annals of video game history, it's impossible to deny the effect it's first game had on the genre as a whole. 1. Super Mario Bros. The game that launched a million home consoles, Super Mario Bros. was actually the second game to bear the portly plumber as it's main protagonist. While Donkey Kong had been a spectacular success in the arcades, home games would require more depth and game play to be successful. After the phenomenal achievement of his first game, Donkey Kong, Shigeru Miyamoto was tasked with creating a game that would move the Nintendo brand from the arcades, considered a place of juvenile deliquency, to the home. He began by taking bits and pieces from his favorite references from childhood and popular culture. Some, but not all of his inspirations, were Alice in Wonderland, Star Trek, and many of the Hans Christen Andersen stories. Up until that time, most games had only a handful of levels to play, and only one boss, or final obstacle, at the end. In Super Mario Bros., there were an astounding 32 different levels. While some were remaps of prevous levels, they had random enemies or distractions added in to make it just that much harder. This was another game standard pioneered by Miyamoto: a difficulty curve. Most games of that time started out hard, and stayed that way. Miyamoto, on the other hand, made the game very simple in the earliest levels, while cranking up the difficulty in the later ones. It gave the players a sense of accomplishment to finally beat the game. At the end of every fourth level, you would face a boss enemy. As with the levels, the first ones were very easy, while the later ones were very hard. Once you defeated the boss, either by hitting him with five fireballs, or by dropping the axe and thereby cutting the drawbridge, you would find a prisoner. At the end of the first seven boss levels, you would find a mushroom retainer, Toad, telling you the Princess was in another castle. Finally, at the end of the eighth boss level, the most complex of all, you would finally find and rescue the Princess. You could either choose to stop here, or you could continue playing with a harder version of the game with a level select option. Every time you beat the game, it would get harder and harder until you either lost all your lives, or you reset or turned off the game. This gave Super Mario Bros. something that had never been seen in video games at that time: replay value. After The Crash, as the events leading up to the death of Atari are referred to, Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Mario single-handedly rescued the video game market from utter oblivion. Hence, it is listed as the #1 game that defined video gaming in history, not only in my list, but in many others across the internet and in other video game media.

The Top Ten Baddest Final Bosses of All Time

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:39:59 -0500

10. Darth Malak In the groundbreaking epic by Bioware, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Darth Malak was the epitome of what a Sith Lord could be. He was cruel, evil, and would commit mass murder on a whim. But, he was also cold, calculating, and was willing to do anything to complete his goals. While he started out as the apprentice of Darth Revan, Malak took his shot at his Sith Master as soon as he could. He even managed to turn the most promising Jedi Padawan in the galaxy, Bastila Shan, to the dark side. When a Jedi strike team, led by Bastila, boarded Revan's flagship, Malak took full advantage of his Master's distraction, and ordered his ship to fire on him. While you could get your revenge as Revan, or try as hard as possible to turn him back to the light side, Malak wouldn't go down without a fight. He used the dead Jedi from the Dantooine Enclave as a power source, and continually restored himself off their life force. Smart players quickly learned to either destroy the capsules containing the Jedi, or to use them as a source of power for themselves. Ultimately, the decision was up to you if Revan would rise again, or if peace and justice would be restored to the galaxy. 9. Dr. Wily The eternal rival of the original Mega Man, Dr. Wily was originally Dr. Light/Dr. Wright's assistant. However, a laboratory accident twisted him to evil. He stole Dr. Light's first 6 robots, reprogramming them for destruction and mayhem. After Mega Man defeated these six robots, Dr. Wily would build many more, forcing Mega Man to take them on again and again. While his tactics would shift from simple brute force, to deception, to black mail, to out right fraud, he would always appear as the puppet master pulling the strings behind all the action. Some would consider his kidnapping of Dr. Cossack's daughter and forcing him to build 8 robots to destroy Mega Man to be his greatest possible plan, but others would disagree. He even created a counterpart to Mega Man and Rush, in the form of Bass and Treble. Since Capcom has been purposely unclear about the connection between the Mega Man Classic series and the Mega Man X series, beyond the creator of Zero, we may never know how far down the rabbit hole goes with this Mad Scientist. 8. Mother Brain While the Mother Brain was left completely out of the Metroid Prime games, there's no doubting her influence over the Metroid series. Unlike most games of the NES generation, the Mother Brain had one surprise left when you beat her. Her death triggered a fail-safe device that incinerated the entire surface of Planet Zebes. Samus had only a scant few minutes to escape the planet or be caught in the explosion. With the Mother Brain taking a break in the Game Boy sequel, she had enough time and energy to craft a whole new set of surprises and traps for Samus on her second visit to Zebes. When Samus defeated her in the same manner as the first time, the Mother Brain sprung her trap. A massive mechanical body had been built for her, taking up almost the entire screen, easily 5 times bigger than Samus. After she toyed with Samus for a while, the Mother Brain played her trump card; a beam weapon derived from the power of the Metroids, sucking away Samus' power suit reserves and neutralizing all her weapons except her arm cannon. But, before the final blow could be struck, the Metroid Hatchling, which had been mutated to massive proportions, attacked the Mother Brain, and stole her beam weapon. It then tried to transfer all the absorbed power back to Samus. Before it finished, the Mother Brain's mechanical parts restored her to life, and she began to pound on the Metroid, trying to kill it. When the Metroid Hatchling was killed, its final act was to give Samus its power absorbing ability. Using this new beam weapon, Samus devastated the Mother Brain. But, the Mother Brain had once again set up a fail-safe in the event of her defeat. Samus had to evacuate Zebes, as the fail-safe bomb this time took out the entire planet. With her escape, the Mother Brain's plans to use the Metroids to conquer the galaxy were dashed, and peace was restored to the galaxy. 7. M. Bison (Vega) Depending on what part of the world you played the original Street Fighter II in, the final boss' name was different. However, the anger and frustration were almost identical. Capcom made the final boss extremely difficult. He could jump higher than anyone else, hit harder, and when he used the Psycho Crusher, he had invincibility frames, making it impossible to counterattack. The main frustration was that characters like Zangief, Dhalsim, and E. Honda had an annoyingly hard time beating Bison/Vega, because of their slow speed and limited move set. In fact, to this day, E. Honda is still the only fighter of the original eight who doesn't have an effective counter to projectiles. The dirty little secret of Bison/Vega's near unbeatable fighting skills was something that would come to be used again and again in fighting games, even today. Capcom programmed Bison/Vega to be able to read your input commands, and be able to counter them almost before your fighter even executed them. Many players of the arcade just looked at it as another example of the opponent cheating. However, when this programming was ported over to the home consoles, some gamers reacted with outrage. With the basic Genesis controller, with only three buttons, you were already at a severe disadvantage against the CPU opponents. Having the CPU being able to read when you were switching from punch to kick commands was insanely wrong. 6. William Birkin/Mr. X Resident Evil 2 was one of the rare games where the improved graphics actually did make for a better game. The amount of detail and realism added to the psychological horror of being alone and running for your life. With the addition of several, very well animated cut scenes depicting the cause of the city-wide T-Virus outbreak, the ultimate cause and victim of the plague was revealed. William Birkin, a genius scientist in the area of biogenic research was betrayed by his benefactor, the Umbrella Corporation. With the complete failure and destruction of the Spencer Mansion in the Arklay Mountains outside Raccoon City, the Umbrella Corporation moved to secure the experimental G-Virus; which was even more powerful and potentially more destructive than the T-Virus, by any means necessary. Two squads of shock troops were sent in to get the G-Virus, with orders to kill anyone who got in their way, including Dr. Birkin. With Dr. Birkin refusing to hand over the G-Virus, a stand-off ensued. One shock troop with an itchy or nervous trigger finger accidentally shot and mortally wounded Dr. Birkin. But, unbeknownst to the shock troops, or even his wife, Annette, William had kept a vial of the G-Virus with him in a syringe. Knowing the virus had regenerative properties, William injected himself, and become the first victim of the G-Virus outbreak. While it did save his life, it turned him into a raging, unthinking beast. He immediately killed all but one of the shock troops, and smashed all the vials containing both T-Virus and G-Virus samples. After that, the genetic imprinting designed into the G-Virus took over, and William was compelled to spread the infection to other living creatures. In Claire's first game, he did this by impregnating his own daughter, Sherry, with an embryonic egg that would take over her body. Depending on whether you were playing the character's first or second quest you would face William Birkin up to four times in combat. The battles culminated in a final fight on the train trying to escape the doomed city. Birkin had mutated into a living wall of flesh, with tentacles and eyes sprouting from all angles. Birkin was finally killed when the Umbrella Complex and half of Raccoon City was destroyed by the self-destruct system built into the complex. Mr. X, on the other hand, was added in as an extra challenge for a player going through the second quest. He was less dangerous, to a degree, because most encounters with him could be avoided entirely, simply by running past him or escaping through a door. In the final confrontation, though, Mr. X revealed his true form, that of a Tyrant MKII. Unlike the Tyrant from the first Resident Evil, this Tyrant was completely finished, and was a relentless killing machine. Even being dropped into a vat of molten lead wasn't enough to stop him. The player finally had to destroy him using an RPG, aka a rocket propelled grenade launcher. While not as dangerous as William Birkin, Mr. X was designed to be the cherry on the **** sundae. If you could manage to kill him without using the in-game cheats or a gameshark, you were damned good. 5. Dr. Robotnik/Eggman The final boss in almost every single Sonic game, Dr. Robotnik, as he was named in the original American release, was a genius scientist in the area of robotics. He used his intelligence and his 300 IQ to build giant machines designed to conquer and rule the fictional planet of Mobius with an iron grip. He did this by collecting seven rare emeralds, alternatively called chaos gems and chaos emeralds. In his plans to build a utopian civilization of robots and high technology, Dr. Robotnik discovered the power of the chaos emeralds. He attempted to use them to conquer South Island. Unfortunately for him, this was also the home of Sonic the Hedgehog. After being stopped by Sonic the first time, Dr. Robotnik returned with his battleship, which he christened the Death Egg. Sonic, with the help of Tails, managed to stop him once again. In his next foray, Dr Robotnik created a robotic clone of Sonic, and named it Metal Sonic. He then traveled to Little Planet where he tried and failed to take possession of the magical stones there that would give him the power to control the flow of time. In his final attempt during the Genesis generation, Dr. Ronotnik's Death Egg crashed-landed on Angel Island, a mysterious island floating in the sky. Here, he stumbled upon Knuckles, an anthropomorphic Echidna, which he tricked into thinking that Sonic was attempting to steal the master emeralds. Believing Dr. Robotnik, Knuckles ambushed Sonic and stole the chaos emeralds from him. However, Dr. Robotnik eventually revealed himself as the true villian, and betrayed Knuckles, stealing the master emeralds so he could repair his Death Egg battleship. Knuckles, realizing he had been tricked, helped Sonic to take down Dr. Robotnik again. In his final act of villiany on a Sega console, Dr. Robotnik stumbled upon the legend of Chaos, the true guardian of the chaos emeralds, and the master emerald. Dr. Robotnik shattered the master emerald, releasing Chaos. He then attempted to take over the world again, by feeding Chaos the chaos emeralds, which increased his power each time he consumed one. However, Chaos became too powerful, and turned on Dr. Robotnik. Sonic was forced to defeat Chaos, stopping him from destroying the world. As the Sonic games continued, Dr. Robotnik would eventually be pushed to the side, as flashier and more menacing villians attempted to take his place. Most people consider Sonic Adventure to be the height of the Sonic games. If this is true, then Sonic's slow fall is tied inexorably to Dr. Robotnik's disappearence from the scene. 4. Lavos The ultimate villain in the game Chrono Trigger, Lavos was a force for change and destruction throughout the entire game. While the player was introduced to him early on, it took until almost two thirds of the game had been completed to understand the depths of his impact on the world, and the entire storyline of the game. While the writers took a few liberties, ie, putting cavemen in the year 65 Million B.C., the overall storyline was a parallel reality to our own, with magic and high technology being discovered far earlier than in real life. In the mythical 1,000 A.D., the technology was comparatively similar to our own at the time of this game's release, the mid 1990's. During a war between the cavemen and a mythical race called the Reptites; humanoid, sentient reptiles, Lavos crashed onto the planet, wiping out all the dinosaurs, and altered the planet's climate. By the next time period, 12,000 B.C., the Earth was a frozen wasteland, populated by only a few small settlements. However, mysterious structures resembling temples were found by the player. These structures teleported the player to a floating continent above the eternal clouds, where sunlight still reached. Here, the Kingdom of Zeal reigned, and used the people on the surface, known as the Earthbound Ones, as slaves. Unbeknownst to the player, the magical kingdom was being sustained by siphoning off the power of Lavos, using a device called the Mammon Machine. When the machine was brought too close to Lavos, he awakened, and once again unleashed devastation across the planet. The floating continent was destroyed, and the eternal clouds were finally removed. But, the world had been drastically altered. When the floating continent crashed into the ocean, it flooded almost the entire world, leaving only a few small islands left. From here, the timeline jumps all the way to 600 A.D., where a member of the Zeal royal family had been stranded by a time portal. Adopted by a race of magical beings called Mystics, Janus, who would later take on the name Magus, used his knowledge of the arcane magics to rise to power as the leader of the race. While his second-in-command, Ozzie, followed him believing he was attempting to conquer the humans, Magus was secretly planning on summoning the creature Lavos to exact his revenge on it. In order to further his, Ozzie's, plans, Queen Leene of Guardia Castle was kidnapped. However, events 400 years in the future would complicate her rescue. A young man named Crono (Chrono in the JAP format) is chosen by destiny to defend the Earth from the threat of Lavos. However, the flow of time could not be altered linearly. In the year 1999 A.D., Lavos awoke from his 14,000 year slumber, and once again decimated the planet; this time throwing it into a permanent nuclear winter. Finally, in the year 2300 A.D., the player discovers the true scope of the threat to their future. The heroes then decide to attempt to alter history, in the way they did to save the female lead. After going forward and backward in time on many occasions, they finally came face to face with the creature. After defeating what they think is Lavos, they venture inside the shell, and discover the true horror of its existence. The Lavos creature is merely a shell/ship for a parasitic humanoid being, who uses forced disasters and genetic tampering to guide the evolution of a planet for its own needs. Once the planet reaches a certain state, the being begins to suck away at the very essence of the planet, leaving it a withered husk incapable of supporting life. Once this deed is done, the being leaves and begins the process anew on another planet. In a climactic fight outside of time but somehow connected to all the previously visited time periods, the player takes on Lavos in a fight to the end. If the player wins, the Earth is saved. If the player loses, the Day of Lavos occurs in 1999 A.D., and the Earth is doomed. 3. Ganon The eternal villain of Hyrule, Ganon has taken on many forms, disguises, and puppets in his schemes to conquer all. In the first game, an unknown hero named Link is tasked with defeating Ganon and rescuing Princess Zelda. Before Zelda was captured, she shattered the Triforce of Wisdom and hid the eight pieces across the width and breadth of Hyrule. Link had to enter the dungeons containing the pieces and recover them. But, even a piece that small still possessed awesome power. Monsters of all sizes were drawn to it, and soon the dungeons were filled with them. Link defeated all the monsters, traps, and puzzles, and found all eight pieces of the Triforce. He then went on to challenge Ganon. After finishing him off with the silver arrows, Princess Zelda was rescued. However, this was only one of the many portions of the legend that Ganon was involved in. While Ganon wasn't a part of Link's next adventure, he was an ever present threat. If Link dies, Ganon's minions would sprinkle his blood over Ganon's corpse, and be revived. It was a haunting game over screen for it's time. In Link's next adventure, Ganon used a puppet named Aghanim to earn the trust of the king and the people. Then, he slaughtered the king and took over the castle. Ganon had been sealed into The Golden Land; now called The Dark World, in a climactic battle centuries ago. Now, through his puppet, he was attempting to break the seal, and conquer Hyrule, which was now referred to as the Light World. Link struggled valiantly, but was unable to prevent his puppet, Aghanim, from breaking the seal. With his death, Aghanim broke the seal, and cast Link into the Dark World. In order to restore the balance, Link had to rescue the seven maidens, who were the ancestors of the seven sages that had cast the seal. While most of their power had been drained, together they could give Link a fighting chance against Ganon. After he had saved the seven maidens, Link would finally challenge Ganon in one on one combat. Using the silver arrows, Link defeated Ganon again. But, unknown to the player, there was still one final story to be told. The origin of Hyrule, and of the eternal struggle to keep Wisdom, Courage, and Power in balance. In this game, Link began as a small child, barely 10 years old. Also at this time, Ganon was not the major threat he was destined to become. He was a simple Thief-King of the Gerudo, named Ganondorf. But, when Ganondorf heard of the power hidden away in a legendary, almost mythical realm, he had to possess it. Princess Zelda was too young to fully grasp the consequences of attempting to enter the Sacred Realm. Ganondorf followed our young hero, and when the Sacred Realm was opened, took the Triforce in his hands. But, the Triforce had a legend. If a person with a pure heart claims the Triforce, he or she will be granted its unlimited power. But if their heart is not pure, then the portion of the Triforce that most reflects their desires will be given to them. He or she must them look for two others who will have been selected by Fate to be the bearers of the other two portions. Ganondorf, who was wicked and craved only conquest, received the Triforce of Power. Princess Zelda, who was selected by Fate, received the Triforce of Wisdom. Finally, Link, the hero, was entrusted with the Triforce of Courage. But, Link was far too young to take on Ganondorf, so the Triforce sealed him away for 7 years, until he was old and strong enough to confront the King of Evil. However, Ganondorf used those 7 years to fortify his stranglehold on Hyrule. Only by awakening the 5 other sages could Ganondorf be defeated. After Link had conquered the five Temples, and awakened the 5 sages, he confronted Ganondorf in a fight to the end. However, with his last breath, Ganondorf cast a spell that caused his entire castle to collapse. Link and Zelda barely made it out alive, and thought the battle was finally won. But it was not to be. The Triforce of Power could not be stopped. Filled with Ganondorf's malevolence, the Triforce had become corrupted. Using its power, Ganondorf revived himself. But, as a result, he was transformed into a hideous beast. He was now Ganon, the Unholy King of Evil. After a long and brutal struggle, Link was finally able to subdue Ganon and Zelda and the other Six Sages imprisoned him in the Sacred Realm. While there are more stories of Link and Zelda's struggles against Ganon, this should be a good indication of why he is so high on the list. 2. Bowser Mario's eternal rival, Bowser, or King Koopa, as he's known in Japan, has been the main boss or nemesis in almost every Mario game ever made. His modus operandi has always been fairly simple: Kidnap Princess Toadstool. However, his strategies to combat Mario have changed over the years. In his first attempt, he cast spells on his minions that disguised them as clones of himself. It wasn't until Mario made it all the way to the end and entered Bowser's Castle that he finally confronted him, face to face. Bowser put up a valiant fight, but he still fell before Mario's skill. In his next attempt, Bowser used his children to cause unrest across the Mushroom Kingdom. While Mario was distracted dealing with the schemes of his kids, Bowser once again kidnapped Princess Toadstool. However, this time, Mario was not so lucky. Bowser had fortified his castle and the path to it. Mario had to go through multiple stages with massive amounts of enemies and ammo being tossed his way. Once he finally won through to Bowser's Castle, he was in for a surprise. Bowser had set a trap for him, and when Mario entered his chamber, Bowser attempted to smash him flat. When Mario was able to outsmart him yet again and rescue the Princess, Bowser tried a different tack. He kidnapped the Princess yet again, but this time fled to the remote area Dinosaur Land, in an attempt to have his troops and the natural dangers of the land kill off his nemesis. Mario managed to succeed only with the help of one of the residents of Dinosaur Land, Yoshi. In the final battle, Mario had to clobber Bowser using his own mechanical minions, mechakoopas. Once Mario beaned him six times, Bowser lost, and the Princess was rescued. In his next attempt to overthrow Princess Toadstool and conquer the Mushroom Kingdom, Bowser initiated a surprise attack on Peach in her royal residence, the Princess' Castle. Mario, who had a received an invitation from Peach a short time earlier, arrived just after Bowser had conquered the castle. He then had to rescue Peach and her Mushroom Retainers by finding all the Power Stars that had magically protected the castle. Bowser had scattered them all over, and given them to his many minions, who used them to create massive worlds inside the castle's paintings. Unknown to Bowser, Peach and her Retainers had also managed to secure or hide away some of the castle's many stars during the attack. Once Mario found all the stars, he conquered Bowser in a climactic fight to the finish by hurling him into several precariously placed bombs. Bowser was defeated, and Peach and all her Retainers were freed from their prisons. Bowser would launch more attacks and raids against Mario and Princess Peach, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind when most people mention Mario and Bowser. 1. Kefka While many people consider Sephiroth as the ultimate villian from the Final Fantasy series, he doesn’t even hold a candle to the evil that is Kefka. While they do have some similarities, ie, both were the result of experimental techniques that ultimately went terribly wrong, they diverge radically from there. Sephiroth was a soldier in Shinra's Merc Army. He never attained a high rank, other than being in the highest eschelon of said army. Kekfa was a General in the Imperial Army, and for the first half of the game, was Gestahl's right-hand man. Sephiroth eventually went insane on discovering the horrible secret of his birth, and an imagined connection to his "mother," Jenova. Kefka, from all appearances, was utterly insane from the get-go. He only served under Gestahl because he was unable to muster enough power to overthrow him. Sephiroth viewed all other humans as thieves who had stolen the planet from him and Jenova. Kefka viewed all other life as insects to be crushed beneath his heel, and thought nothing of using tactics and techniques that went beyond brutal; for example, when he poisioned all the inhabitants of Doma Castle, including some of his own soldiers who were being held in the castle dungeon. As soon as his chance presented itself, Kefka turned on and killed Emperor Gestahl, using the power of the Goddess Statues. He then used their power to alter the very face of the planet, and declared himself a god. The story picks up one year later, with one of the player characters awakenening from a coma. Kefka now ruled the planet as a god on high, punishing all those he felt had wronged him, or just for his own sick amusement. The Returners had to regroup, one person at a time, and complete a series of quests to ready them for their final challenge. They then entered Kefka's Tower, and traveled through a confusing maze of twists, turns, and traps. Before they fought Kefka, they had to challenge the Three Statues, which were the source of all magic in their world. The Returners had feared that destroying the statues would also remove all magic, but Kefka had drained the Staues of all their power, making him the source of all magic. When they finally reached Kefka, he tried to stop them by pitting them against several horrific and unspeakable magic beasts. When the Returners defeated them, Kefka himself challenged them in a fight to determine the outcome of the entire planet. In a long and drawn-out battle, Kefka finally fell, but at a price. All magic disappeared from the world, and Terra, the lead female protagonist, lost her innate magical abilities and become purely human. In the end, the world was saved, and peace reigned. In the annals of video game history, no mere villian has accomplished so much, and as such, Kefka is Number One on my list of Top 10 Baddest Final Bosses of all Time.

Blog Posts from "CronoT's blog"

Top 10 Video Game Title Screens & Opening Cinematics

The Top 10 BFG's in Video Games

The Top 10 Games that Rocked & Sequels That Sucked

Top 10 Games That Defined Or Redefined Gaming

The Top Ten Baddest Final Bosses of All Time