Tony’s top 10 games


1. Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time & Majora’s Mask.

Because the Legend of Zelda games have been the best, and Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask have been two of the best Zelda games I have ever played.
Ocarina of Time was when Link grew from a boy into a man, and in Majora’s Mask you had to help the people of the world instead of just saving it.
So many girls in the Zelda games, the best have came from the Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask games in my opinion.

2. Super Mario 3 & Super Mario Galaxy

Because for as far back as I have remembered Super Mario Bros games I have always loved, Super Mario Bros 3 was the best 2D Mario game while Super Mario Galaxy is the best of the 3D Mario games.
Just as the original Super Mario Bros = Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Bros 2 = Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Bros 3 = Super Mario Galaxy and it seems like Super Mario World for the 2D Mario games is also the way that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is going to turn out for the 3D Mario games.

3. Pokemon Red & Pokemon Stadium

Because the original Pokemon Red/Blue/Green and Yellow series on the GameBoy only had 150 Pokemon and also it was where it all began.
Collecting your own Pokemon and making a team of 6 monsters and getting all 8 Gym badges and defeating the Elite 4 plus my rival was one of the most rewarding things I ever did in Videogaming.

Pokemon Stadium for the N64 was the perfect company to Pokemon GameBoy games. You had the main cups, Gym Leader Castle, lots of Pokemon Minigames involving the original Pokemon and having to play the original GB Pokemon game in the GameBoy tower was perhaps the best alternative to a real 3D Pokemon Adventure.
If only they remembered how to do this in the Pokemon Battle Revolution for the Wii it could have been a better game.

4. Skies of Arcadia & Chrono Trigger

The Japanese RPGs have been my fav genre so it goes without saying that my fav 2D Japanese RPG is Chrono Trigger with the Time Travel and also every event in the game makes a difference later on from the past into the future.
At a time when Japanese RPGs were never released into Australia, Chrono Trigger was a game where I wanted to regain my lost childhood that I never got to have back then.

It took me at least 14 years to wait just to play this game, but it was worth it.
Skies of Arcadia was special and my fav when it comes to 3D Japanese RPGs.
No fixed camera, no cut scenes that go for more than 20 minutes and also you are able to read the text without listening to voice acting so you can go at your own pace.
Your main character was a young boy who wanted to become the best Air Pirate in all the skies and he stays positive even in darker moments.
Also you can interact with the cut scenes with responses from yourself and your main character can talk and does not stay silent all the time like other Japanese RPG protagonists.  
Great storyline and amazing characters, originally released on the SEGA Dreamcast I was lucky enough to get the Gamecube ported version of this game.

5. Hourglass of Summer & Phantom of Inferno

If you thought that Japanese RPGs had a hard time getting popular in the west before Final Fantasy 7, just spare a thought for all those people in the west who love Japanese Visual Novels.
But with the arrival of DVD technology one company by the name of AnimePlay took a stab at creating one of the first Visual Novel markets in the west that did not need a PC computer to play the games.
Released as Interactive DVD games, Hourglass of Summer and Phantom of Inferno were just 2 of 8 games being released as Interactive DVD games.
In the traditional Japanese Visual Novels, these games were about great storylines much like allot of the Japanese games where you dated girls.
Some of the games released were originally Hentai type of games but with the Hentai content removed just to fit within a western market. Perfectly Translated with subtitles in English but audio was pure Japanese.

Hourglass of Summer was all about a boy who liked this girl, but he was somehow transported to the end of summer vacation only to find out that the girl he liked had been killed in a road accident.
When the boy is transported back to his original time, he first has to get to know the girl that is about to die before summer ends and hopefully use this knowledge to change the future and save the girl he fell in love with.
You then realize that there are other characters involved like your childhood friend, your teacher, a girl who you hardly ever knew at school but you get to know allot more about her when you try to help her out too in order to stop the tragic events on that day that lead to your girlfriend’s death.

Phantom of Inferno follows along a story of how a boy has been kidnapped and brainwashed into becoming an assassin and he has a girl partner to help him with his first few missions.
Following an attempt to try and escape, he then gets involved with the Japanese Mafia in New York and there is a murder involved. He falls in love with a girl in New York only to get her involved in the mess and then in Japan where he and his female assassin partner flee for their safety they find information about the innocent daughter of the Japanese Mafia who is currently a High School student and has no knowledge of her rich family’s involvement in organized crime.

Most of the time Japanese Visual Novels have only been known to be Dating Sims and even Rape sims no thanks to Rapelay, but these few other visual Novels by AnimePlay prove that there is more than just porn to these amazing Videogames from Japan that even though they have virtually no gameplay, they prove to be able to produce some of the best examples of storytelling in Videogame History.
Even though they are not really considered as Videogames, I still have these two Visual Novels in my top 10 Videogames.

6. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time & Viewtiful Joe

Both different games released around the same time, Viewtiful Joe and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time are two of the best Platform games I have played that have not game from Nintendo.
What Viewtiful Joe and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time have over the other 2D/3D Platformers is that they are able to manipulate time and are able to still be great with their pure and simple game mechanics.
The heros also have great girls who play as their love interests with Joe having to save Silvia only for her to become a Super Hero girl too.
While the Prince has got Princess Farah who is his only companion because of the Sands of Time destroying the land and everyone with it.
Later on in the game their relationship becomes closer in a spa bath that is perhaps the best love scene in a Videogame I have ever seen.

7. Sega Soccer Slam & Beach Spikers

Sport is one of my other Game genres that I like, and though all the Soccer/Football games that I have played, I have enjoyed SEGA Soccer Slam the best. Fantasy Football at its best with funny characters who had their own personalities and a mixture of male and female characters that made a rare game of multi gender football that is hard to find in any realistic football match.
SEGA Soccer Slam was made by the same people who went on to develop the Super Mario Strikers series who were the first western developer to try and do a Mario game with Nintendo’s permission and to also make a good Mario sports game out of it.
Perhaps the best thing about it was that SEGA Soccer Slam was just a simple game of 3 on 3 soccer with two extra for goalies and they did not go overboard with bonus goals like they do in the Mario Strikers Series.

SEGA Beach Spikers: Virtua Beach Volleyball is perhaps the best Beach Volleyball game I have played.
The Camera is not fixed, when the girl spikes the ball the camera focuses on their back so the player can have a feel of where they are spiking the ball.
Serving and hitting the ball is balanced with a power meter that lets you know if you have control of the ball when hitting.
Pure simple fun where you can do the simple things easy without being too complicated or lazy with the control system.
I can say, some of the girl on girl action when you talk to your team partner and then when you win a match is better than anything Dead or Alive Extreme have ever done without being too perverted.
These two sport games I had for the GameCube are the best examples of sport games I want to make when I make Videogames in the future.

8. Super Mario Kart & Mario Kart Wii

As much as I like sport in Videogames, I also like racing.
Just as I like to keep my sport games the fantasy type of sport, I like to keep my racing games the fantasy type of racing.
And none does it better than the Mario Kart series.
Starting from the SNES with Super Mario Kart, to Mario Kart Wii on the Nintendo Wii, the Mario Kart racing games have been more than just racing.
You have to win with a bit of luck with the items helping you out.

9. Super Smash Bros Brawl & Soul Calibur 4

To be honest, I am not that much good a fighting games.
There are two genres of games that I am frankly horrible at. Shooting games and Fighting games.
Even though I have known a few good shooting games, I have yet to find one that I am really good at. This brings me to the fighting games and two of which I have had a blast with my friends in multiplayer as well as having a good time single player.
Super Smash Bros Brawl was a series that goes as far back as the N64 and I have always loved to use so many Nintendo Characters in fighting games.
With Super Smash Bros Melee on the GameCube, the series started to have some great 1 player modes where you went though a single player adventure mode and you had to collect trophies that paid homage to Nintendo’s history.
Super Smash Bros series went that extra step further with the Wii’s version of Super Smash Bros Brawl with the inclusion of the classic R.O.B who was the Robot from the original NES and also two characters who are not from Nintendo at all. Solid Snake was from Konami and Mature gamers would know him as far back as the original Metal Gear from the NES.
However it was the inclusion of Sonic the Hedgehog in Brawl that was the biggest surprise allowing old time Nintendo and SEGA fans to see who was better out of Mario and Sonic.
The console wars of the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis days of the early to mid 90s back again.

Soul Calibur is one of those special fighting games when a noob and have a chance to match it with the Pro fighter Gamer.
Soul Calibur originally started on the Dreamcast and before that on the PlayStation with Soul Edge.
I got to know about the Soul Calibur series when Nintendo allowed Namco to use Link from the Legend of Zelda in Soul Calibur 2 on the Gamecube version.
And aside from playing as Link in a real fighting type of game where other characters had their own lethal weapons, I was able to know about all the characters in the series and how they were either there to obtain Soul Edge to gain power or they were trying to find Soul Edge so they could destroy the Evil Sword that was corrupting the world.
In Soul Calibur 3 the story modes took a more deeper story with each character having their own special ending and not just a bunch of text too.
Soul Calibur 3 also allowed you to make your own character by having the same movements from the original characters but you can customise your own fighter to he or she can be who ever you wanted. But the customisation would be better in the next game that was Soul Calibur 4.
Soul Calibur 4 allowed characters from the Star Wars universe to join in on the action and that is where I felt the best in the series had arrived.
With just about the best in the series, I would pick Soul Calibur 4 over Soul Calibur 2 but if only Link from the Legend of Zelda would have stayed in the series number 4 could have been even better for me.


10. DeBlob & Puzzle Quest

In Australia, there are a fair few Developers Downunder who make Videogames.
But because of their location and the restrictions on Western Developers to make movie or cartoon series tie-ins with games, not many people in the Australian Game Development ever get close to competing with the best from Japan.
The most likely an Australian Developer will find limited success with developing an Australian sport type of game like AFL, NRL or even Cricket where the genre is not taken up by the American sporting market.
Until recently a few years ago, I was finally able to discover a few great games to be made in Australia, the country where I live.

Infinite Interactive are the Australian Developers behind Puzzle Quest. A puzzle game that is allot like Bejewelled except it takes more of a Western RPG style of game where you play as an Avatar Hero and you battle monsters in a puzzle type of game where you have to line up 3 colors in a row or even line up 3 skulls to score massive damage against your opponent.
But be careful because what ever damage you cause to your opponent might also be reversed back to you.
There is the Quest mode, but you can easily just play the Puzzle side of the game without even worrying about the boring Quest mode since it is not necessary to just having some fun playing a puzzle game and defeating a high level monster at the same time.

Blue Tongue Studio’s DeBlob is Australia’s answer to Mario, a little Blob who can paint the town Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, Orange, Purple and even Brown.
At a time of Government control and all the color being sucked out of the world. (Much like the Australian Government is sucking all the fun out of Videogames by always blocking the R18+ rating for Videogames in Australia and also with the Internet Filter threatening to ruin the Online Gaming world for Aussies with already slow and snail Broadband)
The little blob is a member of a group of Freedom fighters as they try to bring Color back to the world.
Funny cut scenes and great music to mix into the colors that you use. Simple and fin platforming gameplay that rivals Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii.
Even though it does not refer to anything about the Australian Government, it does have a real sense of feeling that creativity and art is best when there are no censorship restrictions.
Perhaps Australia could one day be a free country for gamers and Anime/Manga Otaku.



There you go, here are my top 10 or my top 20 games. Sorry if I had to group them into a group of two games together.