Purchase your equipment here

                The main New York City map

           A haunted building being busted!

Well, I had to start somewhere so it may as well be here!  Ghostbusters was a licence of the smash hit movie.  It took a very simple free form game play and created a great little game.  The player starts by opening a new ‘Ghostbusters’ franchise.  They must choose one of several vehicles and spend initial money on several ghost busting items.  Once the business is set up, you are faced with a map of New York city.  This is a simple map showing buildings by blocks.  As the different blocks start flashing, this means there’s a ghost in a building there!  The player must move a ‘Ghostbusters’ icon to that block and drive to the building.

Play switches to a very simple, top down view driving section.  Controlling the vehicle that you chose earlier, you must drive along a straight stretch of road.  As you do so, ghosts come down the screen.  If you have purchased a ghost vacuum, you can Hoover them in for extra points.  The car pulls over and you have reached the haunted building.

The action flips to a one screen external view of a random building.  There is a ghost moving around the screen.  You control two matchstick men, one on either side of the screen.  By strategically positioning the two Ghostbusters, you can fire the plasma weapons and catch the ghost in your ghost box.  If you are successful, you get a nice little “Ghostbusters” sound file playing and you go back to the main city map screen to continue on and catch another ghost.  If not, the ghost knocks you over and a similar sweet “He slimed me” plays and you lose the one Ghostbuster.  Rather than lose a life completely, you can go and re-stock up on all equipment and lives in your Ghostbusters HQ.  Here you must also drop off any caught ghosts as you only have limited boxes to keep them in your car.  Game play is wonderful and the design is simple yet perfectly actioned.  Longevity is kept by being able to continue with the money you make to buy a new, better car and more equipment.  Everything’s in there including a rogue ‘Marshmallow Man’. Play it on emulator as it’s well worth a look.  A great way to kick off our Top 100.  It can only go downhill from here!

                                    Platform action

      Changing characters to get through the level

The Lost Vikings is a fantastic little game that I first played on the Amiga.  A platform puzzle game, it combines the two genres perfectly.  You control three Vikings who have been kidnapped by Aliens.  Using the abilities of the three characters, you must make your way level by level along the landscapes reaching each levels exit.

Each Viking has a special attribute.

One can run & jump, another can fire arrows and push and the third has the use of a shield that can block enemy fire as well as be used as a makeshift platform.  Using these skills both individually as well as in combination, the player makes his way through the games various levels.

The beauty of this game is in the game play.  Whilst the graphics are very good, it’s the combining of the three different skill sets that really pushes this game further than other platformers.  It really is a joy to play and the puzzles are all logical and fair.  You just need to use your brain to see how to overcome each obstacle.

                            Cue up for the break

                Pot the red then, screw back…

Before this game came along, there were only some poor substitutes for either Snooker or pool.  There were birds eye view games but nothing to really get your water flowing.  JWWS was written be the legendary programmer, Archer McLean and wow, what a job he did!  The game plays like a perfect simulation.  The graphics were the best of its kind.  The way the 3D camera panned around the snooker table was elegant.  Sound was also spot on.  Obviously at the time, we didn’t really have room on a floppy disc for commentators, but the sounds of the cue hitting the ball, the balls being potted and the crowd applauding were all done to perfection.

After his game, no-one dared bring out a 2D top down snooker game again…  Well, actually they did but those games fell into obscurity!

It’s not often that you get to say about a game that the whole package is simply excellent.  McLean really captured the whole experience of playing a snooker match.  The A.I. was also brilliant and this added to the game play experience.  Jimmy Whites has been updated since on the PC and PS2, but I don’t believe any of the sequels had the impact that this original one had.  Many other snooker games have also been made and obviously the technology makes them more sophisticated and the visuals are now extremely realistic.  But again, none of them capture the same magic the Jimmy White’s did.

                             Top down action ahoy!

                     Split screen Coin Op version

Crackdown is a conversion of a Coin Op video game.  Set in the future it is a top down action game.  Mixing cyber punk with Manga, Crackdown is a fantastic game.  It was very innovative at the time, although we were being subjected to wave after wave of ‘Gauntlet’ clones.  This had the Sci Fi background and a split screen for two players.  Players would either play in co-operation or against each other.  Making your way across the medium size levels, the main goal was to reach each levels exit point.  Using cool weapons the player must set timed bombs to destroy each level and them race against the clock to get out of the level before it blows!  A really nice game play feature was that the characters could back into the walls of the level thereby making bullets fly right past them.  The characters could sneak along the wall and the player would time his firing appropriately.  The graphics were Manga and therefore had a very cartoon style to them.  Sound was minimal but it wasn’t needed anyway.  This game was pure class and game play took precedence over everything else.  Crackdown didn’t have a huge impact on the arcade front.  It had it’s fifteen minutes of fame and then fell into obscurity.  The home versions were very good and if memory serves me right, the Amiga and megadrive versions were the best of the bunch.

 Our heroe’s running around the lush landscape

             Check out that bad boy fire magic!

       Sh*t!  Do we really have to fight that thing?

There are many different types of RPG.  Grandia II uses Manga style graphics mixed with 3D free roaming  locations, all lovingly held together with a progressive and detailed storyline.  The Japaneseyness of this game comes through from the word go.  Cheesy dialogue with relationships coming out of every nook and cranny.  The characters are all bright and colourful and they all move nicely around.  The battle is turn based, which is my preferred type if truth be known.  The actions available to you in battle are very unique and have a great feeling to them.  Double attacks as well as the usual magic and power ups are all present here.  The battles later on in the game take on epic proportions as you fight monsters with literally thousands of Hit Points.  All good stuff, in fact it’s arguably the best RPG on the ill fated, yet wonderful console, The Sega Dreamcast!  Unlike the FF series, Grandia doesn’t have amazing rendered scenes but there’s just something about the way it plays that makes it stand out from the crowd.  It just feels nice!  Some people would have gone for ‘Skies of Arcadia’ as the DC’s best RPG, but for me, Grandia wins by quite a few furlongs.  They converted the game to the PS2 a short while ago so give it a whirl on Sony’s machine if you never bought a Dreamcast (Shame on you!).

                 This is the xbox version of DOA3

         Nice short skirts – ‘what it’s all about!

   Thighs, legs, breasts and, oh yeah, fighting!

Now, I’m not the biggest beat em up fan in the world.  Which is why you won’t find too many beat em ups here in the Top 100.  But some of them are a little bit special.  The DOA series is one of them.  Now let’s not beat around the bush here, DOA hit the headlines because it showed all the female characters’ breasts bouncing up and down like never before!  However, once you move past the breasts (no mean feat) you actually get a lush looking, great playing beat em up.  #2 Came out on Dreamcast & then #3 on the Xbox.  Both were lush looking, great playing beat em ups.

So why this series, here at #95?  Well, as I said, it’s not my favourite genre, but there’s just something about the DOA series that captures my imagination.  And whilst you’d think it was simply the breasts, it genuinely isn’t.  It just seems to have a great look and feel.  It’s a complete package and.. and  ..  Ok, well, I guess the outrageous act of giving the female fighters huge knockers appeals to my sense of humour!

I’m reluctant to admit that because it kind of demeans the quality of the game, but trust me; it’s a great series!

 See that chopper?  You’re gonna fly that you are.

                                      See?  Told you.

             Doing some Solid Snake stealth stuff

                       8-bit espionage at its best

Now, I know for a fact that a whole bunch of you people will never have heard of this game.  A C64?  Isn’t that some sort of old computer?  Well, yes it was, but it was SO much more to those of us who experienced it!

Infiltrator was a very clever game.  Part adventure, part military sim, part helicopter simulation, part stealth em up.

This game was doing all these things long before Metal Gear Solid was an itch in its daddies pants.  Actually, that may not be true as the MSX version of MGS was released around the same era (not sure exactly when).  But the 8-bit incarnations of Snake weren’t a patch on this bad boy!

You played the role of  ‘Captain Johnny "Jimbo-Baby" McGibbits’.  (The manual took a stab at being ‘funny’.  It wasn’t), a top soldier.  Your mission was to infiltrate the different HQ’s of the mad dictator ™.

You’d have to first of all fly to the bases using your trusty chopper.  This was a very simple (by today’s standards) flight sim section that had you flying and possibly dog fighting against enemy helicopters.  If you were clever enough to get the password, they’d leave you alone, if not, they’d attack you!

Once past the aerial part of the game, you’d land at the bases and would need to make your way inside. From then on, you would sneak around all the rooms looking for your objectives.

Whilst this could easily have been a nightmare cacophony of genres, it was so fantastically coded that it worked a treat.  I loved this game and blew many days and weeks playing it.

um..  The title screen

Side on, jumping platform heaven!

 The Amiga’s MI 2025

     An in-game screenshot of 2025

           The original IM on C64

“We have a visitor.  Stay a while, stay foreveeeEEEERR!”

With these words, old timers such as myself will instantly remember the classic IM series.  What can be said about a game that’s a classic in every sense of the word?

Why pay some Hollywood studio bucketloads of money for a licence when you can just turn the name of the licence around and make a game based on a very similar principle?  How did they get away with it?  Probably because games were small fry back then and legalese hadn’t been sorted out yet.

Impossible Mission 2 is the sequel the great Impossible Mission. At first glance, the two games are both very similar looking, but the sequel just has so much more depth and plays even better than the first.  Both MI games probably deserve the cult label of ‘classic’.  I’ve decided to name the second in this top 100 list simply because it was the better of the two games and indeed, they are both quite similar.

There was also a lesser known Amiga version of the game called Impossible Mission 2025.  This was a 16bot update with a more sci-fi twist.  The game came with a version of the original built in for free.

Each of the versions actually plays very similar to each other, with some obvious gameplay alterations.

Te principle was quite simple.  You made your way from room to room trying to find the various different parts of a code.  Each room had its own little puzzle to overcome. From having to avoid moving robots, to figuring out how to move various lifts that would take you to platform you required.

The game had a quite unique ‘search’ function.   Where you basically had to stand in front of any obstacle, press ‘up’ on the joystick and the character would slowly search that object.  A small ‘search’ bar would appear showing you how long it would take.  This often became a cat and mouse affair of you having to search for a second, move to avoid a robot, then search for another second, then move to avoid the robot again etc etc until you had complete your search.

The game also required you to logon to the computers in many of the rooms to either reset the lifts, or to enter the code if you had it.

The game was a joy to play and was a huge success.  A definite candidate for Next-Gen update I reckon!

That’s Conrad in his Jeans.  The green guy is a

   bad ass alien who’s gonna kick your arse!

Most of the game you view the world from just

  behind Conrad.  It’s not brilliant, but it’ll do.

Switching to your gun, the view closes in to just behind Conrad’s head, letting you target better.

Fade to Black was the sequel to the French developer – ‘Delphine’s massively acclaimed ‘Flashback’.

This time around, we saw the trilogy’s hero – ‘Conrad B Hart’ (not the coolest of names huh?  But then it’s a French deveoper, so we can forgive them that) take on nasty aliens in 3D!

Using a close up-behind the shoulder cam view of the world, the player controls Conrad through a really cool game.  The graphics at the time were outstanding and there wasn’t too many games of this ilk.

The biggest let down however, and I know it’s not one that everyone will agree with me on, was the difficulty level.  This game was fricking tough man!  I remember getting stuck from the word go as the aliens come at you thick and fast – and they ain’t no dumb aliens either.  This game was as tough as old boots and not many people managed to see beyond the first level or two.

Of course, at the time, I was a wee boy, but I reckon if I took this on now, I’d kick its arse.

Still, the difficulty level didn’t detract from a fantastic and unique (at the time) game.  The 3D graphics in a platform shoot em up was sheer joy and I loved playing this game no end!

Conrad moved around smoothly as he was made up of polygons – again, quite a unique feature and one that Delphine used before in ‘Another World’.

F2B is placed here at #92 and don’t be surprised if you find ‘Flashback’ a bit further on in this list.  If it is there, the reasoning would be that the two games are SO different.  One is a side view platform game, the other is a genre busting 3D action adventure!

     This was top class graphics a few years ago!

           That’s some serious visual damage

Up close n realistc!

       This was a real top game back in the day

TOCA 2 is the sequel (The hint is in the name) of the rather excellent TOCA from Codemasters.

TOCA itself was a great little game, but by heck it was seriously hard.  Race after race, you’d find yourself being left behind by the AI driven cars.  Now, I’m not putting TOCA 2 in here simply because its easier than the first game.  This second game is overall just a lot classier than the first.  The graphics were outstanding – probably the best on the PSX and now, with the playability having been tweaked, the game played wonderfully.  It no longer felt as though you were being cheated by sliding into a corner, if you did, you had no one but yourself to blame.

There are three main things that stand out for me in this game - the controls, the graphics and realistic tracks.

The controls were sublime – it really made you feel like you were in control of these cars.  Personally, I think the controls for TOCA 2 are better than the GT series.

The graphics were top notch.  The Codies got each car model perfectly right and the visible damage was just so cool.

The tracks were all based on real ones and at the time, they were pretty damn close.  I remember driving around Donnington shouting ‘I’ve been there! I’ve stood RIGHT on that spot!”  Erm….

Anyway.  This was a great game and came extremely close to racing perfection for me!