5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Hyperstone Heist

My favorite beat em up. Sure, Streets of Rage has some banging 80's music and a black guy who's not a criminal (thank-you for racial equality Streets of Rage) but Hyperstone made me a fan of mindless violence. The Turtles say stay away from drugs kids...but kick the shit out of people dressed in bright colors. I remember an afternoon of jump kicking red foot soldiers in the sewers (YAH) and smashing mousers before the big Krang battle (YAH) and watching my bright purple donatello bars fading after that blue el camino runs me over in the first level. Rookie mistake. You go from New York to a pirate ship to a cave with yellow ALIEN clones leaping from blue water to a giant lab where mousers jump directly off the assembly line to kick ass. Quick offshoot...has anyone seen Alien 3 where they are in the prison? Who designed the computer CG ALIEN for that movie? Prolly the same guy who did the "Freddy Kruger is coming through the wall" scene in the new Nightmare. Zing!

Sometimes I go back to games for pure nostalgia, not because the game is any good (Mario Party). Other times I blow out the cartridge and jam it in the slot so I can say "Ah, don't make them like they used to, sonny jim" (Sonic 2). Or sometimes my best friend wants to see how fast we can beat Super C. Jump up and give those owls a piece! And then there are new millenium games that make my grandpa think he's watching real NBA basketball. Yes, Grandpa, I know that majority of players in basketball are black. No, I wouldn't call it a "shame". But what brings me back to games like Hyperstone are simplicity, characters, tight gameplay and only two buttons I need to worry about. Is it RB for block or..wait, dude quit freezing me...Jesus which trigger is grapple!...oh great, pulled my spine out. Real cool, Subzero. God Bless Hyperstone and its jump and punch. Enjoy the first level.

6. Medal Of Honor

The M1 Garand. The pixelated bazooka. Some pistol I never used. Germans in their beige and hunter green uniforms rolling on the ground and casually talking around an exploding barrel. Convenient. I'd always try to sneak up and aim my shaky reticle at their heads. Their helmets must be made of lead cause head shots just popped their helmets off then you had a swarm of Nazis clamoring. Ein ven slauter von mein! Grenade. Boom. The bodies went flying. Blew my mind apart. The body movements and contortion in Medal Of Honor was the first time a video game experience seemed real. Like I could feel the warm barrel of my Garand or hear the ringing in my ears and the clink of bullets spewing from a mounted machine gun. It became real. Close to real. Even those doctors who were building some rocket ship in the mountains seemed real. Find 5 schematics. OK, 5 schematics found, now blow the shit out of that rocket. That was the plan! Blow the rocket up? Why did I spend so much time and hear the tape rip on multiple med packs to find those schematics! Not to demean Duke Nukem (although it looked like a child with a crayon drew the environments) or any other FPS that preceded Medal of Honor, but this set the standard. Sure, it's wallowing in the market where Black Ops and MW2 are flash banging their way to popularity. That drum line to start a mission is my real FPS anthem! Duh da da DUH. This Snipers got talent! Oscar Mike! I love the smell of napalm in the morning! Sorry, war flashbacks. Stay Frosty.

Sex, Lies, and Vanilla Coke: An Interlude

I'm not Shane.  You can call me The Trooper. And I have to get something off my chest, in light of recent criticism of a variety of things close to me. 

I believe that critical evaluations, particularly of art, are founded on a variety of factors, preeminently taste and preference. In other words, every value judgement is subject to the preference of the judge on some level or another.  Don't write me off as a post-modernist just yet.  Not that anything is wrong with that. 

Too often, we label art, in its various forms, as either good or bad. We conclude that those who cherish what we disregard are either wrong, stupid, or both. However, art isn't a math equation, with right or wrong answers that can be proved or disproved. Or is that geometry.  I guess it's all math. I'm sure there are some of you out there who could dispute that analogy, but you guys need to get a life. 

It seems to me that different people appreciate and relate to different things in different ways, according to their age, race, resources, etc.  What's beautiful or useful to one person, is ugly or useless to another.  Different hoes for different bros, as some say. 

While this is particulary true of tastes in music and women, I think it is also applicable to the world of video games. For example: you can't prove to me that Super Mario Bros for NES is the best game of all time. I can't prove it isn't. You can certainly believe it is, based on it's originality, innovation, and influence.  Conversely,  I can believe it isn't, based on the evolution in gameplay and advancement in technology since then. It comes down to what each of us values. Subsequently, I simultaneously reject absolute truth in regard to art evaluation, and champion the wild world of relativism. I made quite a leap there in the structure of my argument, but I'm honestly tired of proving what I'm saying.  You should just see what I'm saying and think I'm right.  

Anyway, I think it's important to understand that lists and value judgements, particularly as sweeping as "Best _____ of all time," are inherently subjective. So get off your  high horse, unless you're trying to be arrogant.  Then it's ok.  And no, this does not apply to pop.  Coke is better than fucking Pepsi.  Let's not get carried away with this. I mean, have you TRIED Vanilla Coke?

7. Super Mario Galaxy

A lot of things can be debated. What is Dio's best song? Holy Diver or Rainbow In The Dark? (Uh, Rainbow In The Dark). Is Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels better than Snatch? (They seem oddly similar in plot. Hmm). Is Lebron as good as Michael Jor...hahahaha...ok, bad example. Point is, things can be compared. That's mostly what culture does for us. Culture filters out some options and bombards us with others. Thanks Bud Light, we get it, you make beer and I should drink it. Let me watch more than the opening kickoff before a commercial break. Fuck.

But sometimes items and characters and experiences are not going to be debated. They will be accepted. Like Hey Jude or hamburgers. Mario is that good. He's a mustached icon bigger than Burt Reynolds and his games are always excellent. This one topped them all. First time I walked on that opening grass covered planet and saw the mechanics and camera view that all shifted so smoothly, I was stunned. Hadn't even gotten my first star. Some games can't get camera angle right if you're just walking straight (Turok) or swimming (every game ever) much less jumping from planet to planet. This games colors were vivid, levels were varied and fresh and even the motion controls didn't gum up the works. My blue dot would just be blurring across the screen when I got shot out of a star. STAR BITS! NUM NUM NUM. I got every star. Finished it again with Luigi just for kicks. And even played that Luigi shaped planet with all the purple coins twice. You'd get the rhythm of that down, jumping from flip panel to vanishing panel. Should I have jumped there? Gotta backtrack sooner or later. LONG JUMP.....Nailed it. You'd be flowing through that. Kanye flowing to a beat..Too many Urkels on your team that's why you're...and then someone walks in front of the screen and you're wallowing in black muck. MOM!

8. Super Smash Bros Melee

Game Informer has a poll on their site asking what everyone's favorite fighting game is. Super Smash received the majority vote. Guess I never thought about Super Smash as a fighting game. Guess the SMASH in the title didn't clue me in. But it beat out both Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat by 10%. Personally I'd like to see a melange. Scorpion shooting that knife on a rope at bowser and pulling out his dinosaur spine. Perchance to dream. My personal favorite was Melee for gamecube. I even played the single player for it. Bet you didn't know/care if it had a single player did you. Thats prolly because it amounted to Yoshi trying to kick a bag of sand 2,000 feet and kirby busting a certain number of signs to move on to the next level. But it seemed to be worth the tedious task of beating first player to open up Jiggly Puff...until you played with Jiggly Puff. You could lull people to sleep and then mash A and kick them into oblivion.

I can see why it's voted most popular fighter though. The variety in this game seemed more complex than other games. It wasn't just block, jump and up up A down A B to bring the ice storm. You could fuck people over. Create random alliances and then stab your partner in the back. As Young Link I'd be all over the board. Dropping bombs, slicing, dicing and praying for good pokeballs. Some people took Falcon to a corner, powered up his fire punch and then FALCON PUNCHED (Falc...Falcon...Falcon PUNCH) some poor ice climber ass hole off the board. You could be heroic or diabolic. You could wait by the edge of Green Green and DOWN B with pickachu so no one could get back on the board. That goddam lightning bolt. Or DOWN B with Donkey Kong and pound the ground for ten minutes. I'd have to sit on the other side of Hyrule and try to shoot arrows to stop the pounding. Everyone has their characters in fighting games. But with Super Smash we were playing violent with otherwise seemingly harmless characters. And once that hammer drops from the sky, time freezes, you watch it cartwheel down, then slowly Link, Kirby, Luigi and Ganandorf all sprint to it forgetting to fight each other. Then you finally grab the hammer! Everyone is already at 90%! They're as good as...shit, the top of the hammer fell off.

9. The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker

This is suicide. But I don't care. If Cosmo has taught me nothing else...ahem... it's taught me to do countdowns in reverse. That way people will read about fucking Michael Cera instead of just seeing Brad Pitt is first and moving on. I'm not sure what list those two guys would be on together. Guess I'll have to pick up and Teen Vogue and see. Gamers are too busy humping Ocarina Of Time to give a shout out to any other Zelda games, especially ones where he's a kid and looks like Disney designed the environments. I guess I'm not a normal Zelda fan. I loved the cell shading. Sure, Twilight Princess was good but something about Windwaker made it exceedingly more fun. It wasn't the sailing. When you have to look for those 8 shards I wanted to smash my controller through tiny links skull. But the environments were pristine and vivid and interacted great. When I could run and suddenly halt on the beach and see sand spray or shoot arrows at the orange crabs and watch them burrow, thats when I saw where games were headed. It was complete immersion. I'd blot out time and forget about my soda condensing on the nightstand. Fighting pirates from my little boat or getting sucked up in the hurricanes or wondering how the hell I was supposed to be those screaming skeletons. I was engulfed in giant rats with rusty sabers and venus fly traps that could be taken out with one good boomerang lock on. Ocarina of Time may be one of the defining gems in the video game cannon but Windwaker was a defining game in a childhood.

10. Pokemon (Red and Blue)

I picked Bulbasaur. I'll just get that out of the way first so you can judge where my Pokemon experience went from there. In that little room, picking between three pokeballs. Fire. Water. Earth? I guess I picked earth, or plants or whatever Bulbasaur was supposed to be. Apart from Oreo's, this was my first addiction as a human being. I don't think breast milk counts as an addiction. And I think this is also the only catch phrase invented that was actually true! You did have to catch them all. No matter how many goddam times you had to walk in the safari zone praying to stumble on a Kangaskhan. The little screen would blur to black and the music would start pumping. You ran into a pokemon! Oh God please, this one time let it be...fuck! Rattata again! Then you straight up killed him out of spite.

The open-world gameplay elements were phenomenal. Steadily pushing you forward with Team Rocket Battles and gyms to conquer but also allowing leeway to explore tall grass and get lost in the blue caves. Or swim out in the ocean and run into a million goldeens. This was the first game where I was forced to make choices. Should I save my ultra ball? Should I feel bad for team rocket? Should I evolve my pokemon? Should I save or destroy? The game offered you the questions and it wasn't until after that you realized the consequences. After living on Sonic side scrollers and bash bash bash of Street Fighter, it was a whole new world to be able to decide fates of characters. Cause really, everyone knows whats going to happen if you fight someone who is good with Dhalsim. You're toast.

Hi. My Name Is Shane and I Like Sega Genesis.

Possessions can tell me what's important. If I'm at a new girlfriends house for the first time and see her DVD collection consists of 5 movies, 3 of which are the Pirates of the Caribbean "trilogy", it's a safe bet to say I won't be buying her a promise ring. What people find important is often attached and more accurately displayed through the things they spend money on and revere. While lists can be trite, they can also help show what people find most important. Numbers don't lie. Unless gravity shifts then numbers can be a little sketchy. Here's another top 10 video game list and guess what...there is no 2d mario on it. Eat shit Game Informer. OK, maybe I just played through Mario 3 a week ago but only because I wanted to be raccoon Mario. I'd like to visit Japan to see if there is some weird raccoon genus that can fly cause here in Merica, our raccoons eat out of the garbage and keep all four feet on the amber waves of grain. Top 10 starts now.

SRH