43 Games I Haven't Reviewed Yet

For years, I've been doing mini-reviews of my video games. I started with the "100 Games" project in January 2013, and since then have done a roundup of everything I beat each year. But that means that some games got left out - ones I didn't include on my initial list.

Not getting on the original 100 Games list doesn't mean these games are bad. On the contrary, I rather enjoyed quite a few of them, and some of them probably deserved to make the list. I never claimed to be good at ranking stuff, as fun as it is.

As usual, only games I cared about enough to see to the end get listed here, and everything I haven't already written about is up for grabs. Sifting through my Backloggery turned up 43 entries' worth of games (a few games are combined into one entry). Instead of trying to rank them, I'll cover them alphabetically.

I've also linked a gameplay video for each game. It's a longplay whenever one is available. Looking at how few games DIDN'T have a complete longplay up on YouTube speaks volumes as to how good longplayers are at doing their job.

GB's 100 Games: 5-1

I cannot believe I wrote this whole thing nonstop every day (save the one-day Chatzy Madness break). But it's finally over. We've seen good games, bad games, and so-bad-they're-good games. Games I cribbed characters from to make RP characters, games I played in my early childhood, games I played last year. Games I played in an arcade, games I played on compilations, games I played on Virtual Console, games I found at garage sales, at Wal-Mart, at GameStop, got as Christmas presents, the works. Shooting games, fighting games, role-playing games, platform games and beat-em-up games.

In short, a freakin' truckload of vidya, representing the last twenty years of my life.

And now it's time to finally finish it. My favorite five games ever made. Suffice it to say, if anything ever beats these juggernauts I will be so hyped and you will never hear the end of it.

GB's 100 Games: 20-16

 
It feels like it's been ages since I began this series, and now the final twenty entries are here. These were the games that truly hooked me. I played them top to bottom and fell in love with their miniature worlds.

Let's begin.

GB's 100 Games: 35-31

As we reach the upper echelons of the 100 Games, we are starting to pass from "games that were pretty great" into "classics". Right now it's a bit of a hazy zone between the two categories.

Five different games from five different systems are the stars of today's installment. And yes, all five systems are from Nintendo. Again, though, a fair mix of the known and the unknown here, plus the highest-rated licensed game!

GB's 100 Games: 40-36

The list continues its' unstoppable march towards the mighty final ten games. As for todays' batch, one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong.

GB's 100 Games: 45-41

As you've probably guessed from the list so far, I'm a bit of a Nintendo loyalist. I was a Sega fan in the early and mid-90s before Pokemon drove me to Nintendo. In recent years I've been taking advantage of my brother's purchases of a PS2 and Xbox 360 to branch out a bit, but I've always had a connection to family-friendly Nintendo fare, and it makes up the backbone of my collection.

Here, we have five different games from four different time periods - pre-Nintendo, Nintendo, late Nintendo, and the branching-out period. And only two of them are actually Nintendo-produced games, so... variety, I guess?

GB's 100 Games: 60-56

A pretty motley crew in today's installment. We've got a couple obscure titles, a spinoff, and a port/remake up for evaluation, plus a company famous for doing only one thing finally deciding to make a game that did something else.

GB's 100 Games: 65-61

Another day, another group of five video games I'd like to share. Today's batch includes games from across my entire life, some obscure and some less so.

GB's 100 Games: 80-76

I should probably mention at this point that from here until around 35th place I had very little idea of where to rank what, so it's just gonna be sort of a flood of "GB liked this" rather than any definitive ranking. I know I said when we started this wasn't a straight ranking, but it's especially evident here. I have no idea why some games are in one place and some are in another, so let's just take them as they come and when we near the end things should get less muddled as the true giants begin to emerge.

So! With that said, away we go with the next batch of five games. With Mario and Pokemon returning for the second batch in a row, it's mostly Nintendo here again with one exception: Ariel's favorite shmup!

GB's 100 Games: 85-81

Nintendo Home Consoles from the 2000s Edition!

After this next installment, GB's 100 Games will have covered twenty entries across seven systems. And we still haven't seen any entries from my N64, DS, and GBA collections, so look out for those plus more of every other system (except the poor old Game Gear) as we continue to climb the ranks of gaming.

An interesting theme in this set of five is "Games my brother bought that I wound up liking more than him", which has happened numerous times in the last decade. I can usually sense when he buys a new game whether he's going to actually play it or not, and I'm usually right.

GB's 100 Games: 90-86

 
Time now for another five entries in GB's 100 Games. Lots of crusty old classics here, and while some may be familiar, others are a bit more obscure...

GB's 100 Games: 95-91

This installment of GB's 100 Games is chock-full of Big Dumb Vidya Games. As I've mentioned in the past, Big Dumb Vidya Games are essentially the junk food of gaming. They tend to lurk in bargain bins and deliver cheap enjoyment by focusing on basic but enjoyable gameplay. No less than three such games have made it into today's lineup.

Gaming Retrospective (Part 5)

The N64 well was running dry. To my dismay, it was dying out even though we'd only just gotten it less than a couple years ago. Now, there were new systems in town: The PlayStation 2, the GameCube, and the Xbox. I had a problem. My brother wanted to get a PS2. I wanted a GameCube. As our savings grew, I was increasingly worried that we'd miss out on the Cube and buy the PS2 instead. I needed a way to bring my brother back to Nintendo.

I got my wish in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, which I occasionally grabbed off the magazine rack if the issue looked cool (my first issue featured a Pokemon Gold and Silver preview, my second was about the Game Boy Advance, and my third I simply purchased because I wanted something video game-y to read). Anyway, this issue featured a review of Super Smash Brothers Melee, and it sounded like an amazing game. My brother and I had rented and loved the original Smash Brothers, and the glowing reviews of its sequel swayed my brother into wanting a Cube as well. The number one line from the review that we both loved (perhaps because we were both still kids in 2002) was "If the first game made you happy, the sequel will make you crap your pants with glee".

And so we got the Cube, but not with Smash Brothers because the store was out of copies. Our first game was Luigi's Mansion. But we had a problem. A BIG problem. You see, the Cube was our first disc-based system. We didn't know how they worked. We didn't get a memory card.

Ever tried to play a GameCube with no memory card? It's not fun. Ever seen the first twenty minutes of Luigi's Mansion two dozen times? I have. The N64 wound up retaking its position as alpha console, the stunted Cube getting neglected. It wasn't until Christmas of that year that we finally got SSBM and a memory card.

I've played a ton of great games on the Cube, and I might go so far as to call it my favorite system overall. I have more GameCube games than any other type of video game. I continued buying and playing new games for it well into the Wii's appearance.

GB's GameCube Favorites:
-Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Top contender for favorite game of all time)
-Skies of Arcadia Legends (Another contender)
-Super Smash Brothers Melee
-Mortal Kombat Deception
-Animal Crossing
-Kirby Air Ride
-Super Mario Sunshine
-Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee
-Mario Kart: Double Dash
-Sonic Adventure 2 Battle
-Sonic Mega Collection (Highly recommended if you don't have a Genesis)
-Lego Star Wars 2