Top 100 Games of All Time

Anyone who was a child in the 90’s knows about Oregon Trail, we all played it on school computers and a lucky few of us on home machines. But did anyone else play Oregon Trail 2? It had all the same mechanics but instead came with pictures and a little more depth; including new disease, new events, added mini games, and just overall more polish.

You would choose your starting location, name the people in your party, decide your starting career (difficulty), purchase your starting supplies, and then hit the trail to the west coast! You would be scored at the end of the game which would push you to play again choosing a harder difficulty to try and get a better score.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I also thought Oregon Trail 2 came with fun facts? I need to spin this game up agian to double check.

Super Mario World could be argued to be one of the most iconic games of all time. Super Mario 3 is the sequel to the sequel, but in reality is the true sequel as Super Mario 2 has the odd history of being a re-skin of a different game.

Unlike Super Mario 1, where you mostly have a linear progression (not counting the secret warp pipes), Super Mario 3 brings in an overworld that lets you make choices and play a couple mini games for items. That’s the secret sauce that brings this game to the list. The challenge, splendor, and charisma of Super Mario but with a friendlier edge (although still very difficult).

I never beat Super Mario 3 but as my daughter grows up I might try to beat it with her as it just slaps even 37 years later.

I’m the only real world person I know who played The Sims Online. Probably because at the time no one really had internet that I knew of and no one in my age range was either allowed to play online or really liked the Sims. I loved it so much I actually learned to type by playing the Sims Online (take that Mavis Beacon). The actual game is a blend of the sims 1 on the slowest speed and a RPG chat room. I found a roommate, I bought land, I at one time got a girlfriend, all while being a 12 year old pretending to be 15 (woah real old!).

There was even a time where I was talking smack about a mafia in game, they sent someone pretending to be a nice stranger who then became my roommate. This real world person while I was away, trashed my home, filled every square with a pile of garbage and then left my house. After that I never talked bad about the mafia and a online friend helped me clean up.

I also have a memory of showing one of my family friends (basically a cool uncle) what game I was playing and it was my character making Jam in a room with probably 6 other people also making Jam. He said something like, ‘You’re just making Jam?’ and I was so excited “Yeah! It’s how I earn my money!”, what a game, what a time to be alive.

The first racing game on the list!

It has a wonderful soundtrack, plenty of secrets, lots of levels, and overall an adventure mode that Mario Kart failed to provide. I would recommend this to any kid as it’s really family friendly and just fun. Is there a lot of depth to it? Not really. Does it need depth? No.

I recently replayed a little bit on my Steam Deck and it held up alright. Lots of nostalgia holding it up but overall I had fun.

While I was trading stock in the Neopets stock exchange I was also flying Boeing 747’s from New York to London, Cessna's from Spokane to Seattle and other planes to other places. This game let me explore the entire globe and it taught me the basics of flight mechanics.

I would attempt loop de loops in 747’s, if someone in my family traveled somewhere I would recreate the flight in the simulator, and I would take a joy ride around Chicago, New York, and Tokyo. It was so cool that just a few CD’s could contain the whole world and I will never forget it.

This game is higher on my list than Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) because the entire world fits on a CD, yes it doesn’t look as good but to give a kid, nay; a person, the entire world on a disc is pretty cool (vs downloading 100+GB of files just for your area in the world).

Spelunker ends up on my list because I love it. I don’t recommend it. The game is hard, it’s nearly impossible to even get to the 2nd level and I don’t think anyone other than myself and my mom have played it. I tried to show a few friends growing up the wonder of Spelunker but you can only have so much fun to the first obstacle in the game, so many times.

You play a guy spelunking a cave, he rides down this little elevator and if you jump just a pixel to high off the elevator you die, if you jump a pixel to low off the elevator you die, it plays an annoying song and then you lose 1 of your 3 (or 4) lives. If you manage to make it off the elevator, you then run right until you find another obstacle, something that seems pretty innocuous but it bumps you and moves you a little too fast and you die.

But if you manage to kick a little ass and make some progress a timer bar runs out and a ghost appears. This thing floats through the wall and finds your character, you can use a flare to scare him off, but he will be back, and you only have so many flares.

The game is brutal and I wonder how many levels there are…

Hotline Miami has a bumpin’ sound track, slick fast gameplay, over the top violence, and a David Lynch-esq story. I’m a sucker for games that let me kill enemies in 1 hit and in turn enemies only need 1 hit to get me. Rainbow Six: Vegas had a terrorist hunt that you could crank up the difficulty and the bad guys only needed to shoot you a couple times for you to die and in turn you only needed to shoot them a couple times. This lead to tense, slow crawls, through casinos and buildings that really ramped up the gameplay. Hotline Miami does this every single level but removes the slow crawl and rewards you for going fast. You end up running through a level 50 times before beating it but the run that you succeeded on feels so good.

It also does this little game mechanic of turning off the fun music after you beat the level with a record scratch esq sound, then you must walk back to the starting spot over all the bodies. Maybe forcing you to ask the question, why did I just murder all these gangsters, were they gangsters? Did they deserve this?

How did they pack this entire game onto 2 discs!!! I don’t know. Even without grinding the game itself is hours and hours of story and dialog, with choices and side stories that you can completely miss! FFVII was always in my gaming zeitgeist but it wasn’t until I got it for the nintendo switch in 2017 that I actually played it, and boy did I play it!

The switch let me get pass the slow bullshit that was acceptable in the early 2000’s by allowing my to speed the game at x3 during combat. So I could grind if I wanted to, which I did. I got that Golden Chocobo, I beat most the giant Weapons, unlocked the knights of the nine attack, etc.

Few games have such an incredible cinematic ending fight.

I had a hard time deciding if Sins should be above or below X4. They are both Sci fi games about manging ships and stuff. X4 is a wonderful sandbox, Sins is a true RTS and I think because of it’s RTS limitations it just plays better. But they shouldn’t be in the same category it was just weird these two ended up next to each other.

Anyways, Sins is an RTS, it’s a really really really good RTS. It moves fast, can get really big, and does a great job stopping my least favorite problem with RTS: size creep. Sometimes you can just build a blob of death in an RTS and then steam roll every other army, that blog is basically a victory blog and there’s no good reason to split it, just blitzkreig right through to the capital and no one can stop you.

Sins implements a heavy tax on upgrading your army size, and this heavy tax is roll-back-able. So once you go larger it hits your economy hard. This makes it to where

I mean come on. This is the king of sandbox open world games. It’s so low on my list as I think the game mechanics are bad, but it’s on the list at all because of the driving, world, mini games, and story.

Anytime GTAV makes you shoot stuff it just feels bad, but if you couldn’t get out of your car it wouldn’t feel as fleshed out. Your character feels like a big sluggish rock, aiming is boring, they game throws tons of enemies at you and it’s hard to tell where they are, just everything about it bothers me.

But then you hop in a car and all is well.

I used to get on a stationary bike, hold a controller, and bike while biking in GTAV and see how far I could get before I was done. It was a lot of fun and I need to do it again.

What Remains of Edith Finch is not a long game. I think my wife and I back when we were child free and dating, beat it over a weekend. At the time I enjoyed it but, it really stuck with me. It’s aged like a fine wine in my mind; the game deals with the subject of death (and even includes a child death) but it doesn’t ever cut too deep. It just knocks a story out and makes you laugh a little, cry a little, and get a chance to explore a fictional PNW mansion straight from a Wes Anderson film without the pretention.

I just recommend it and hope it holds up.