Welcome back to the All-Team Countdown’s Top 10 Favorite Video Games.
With this countdown, Jon Johnston and I will be counting down our top 10 video games of all time. You can find the countdown background at the link for #10, but as you probably know, Jon and I grew up playing different video games because I grew up in the greatest era of all time and Jon grew up in another.
If you want to catch up on the countdown, here you go: 10th place.
Nate’s 9th Place – Assassin’s Creed
Do you want to learn something about history? So maybe grab a few history books. If you want to feel like you’re the same character at different times throughout human history, then Assassin’s Creed might be for you.
In the image above, the character is a present-day person who can live through the memories of their ancestors using a device called the animus. To see also : How can GamStop users win while playing video games?. In the first installation of this series, you are thrown into one of the Crusades in the Holy Land.
What I loved about this series was the ability to sneak in and out of hiding while playing the role of an assassin. They work great because you have different situations popping up here and there to sneak out undetected after you’ve killed the bad guy.
Or to be able to climb high cathedrals or mosques or whatever and swan dive “into the asphalt” as one band would say. Well, not in the asphalt, but usually in a pile of hay, as if you wouldn’t break every bone if your body died immediately.
This was the first of its kind in my experience, and the additional games that followed the original were just as fun.
I have to say that I am biased and my favorite so far has been Assassin’s Creed III, which is set during the Revolutionary War. You will meet George Washington, Ben Franklin among others and fight in some of the biggest battles during the war.
I still have to get to some others. Which ones am I missing?
Jon’s 9th Place – Defender
Does an arcade game count as a video game? I say yes because back in 1981, when this game was released, we really had few game consoles. Read also : How do I start playing with my voice in video games?.
I don’t remember the layout of the lower level of the Nebraska student body in the early 80’s, but along two walls was a row of video games, er, arcade games. One of those games was Defender. I put TOO MANY quarters into this damn game.
I guess most people would choose Pac Man or Donkey Kong in this slot. Both games were bad for me; I had the reaction time of a drunken sloth even when I was in my early 20s.
I wasn’t interested in PacMan. The idea of me running around eating ghosts… meh. Jumping barrels? Who cares?
A short chubby guy jumping over barrels thrown by a gorilla? Whatever.
Shoot evil aliens and save people from a fate worse than death? I’m in favor!
Defender looks simple enough, right?
Defender worked like any other video game of the era. Beat this level and the next one includes more. More aliens fire more missiles, bullets, whatever, until there is no chance for you to survive to make it to the next round.
What I learned was – if you couldn’t shoot whatever evil was coming at you, I wasn’t interested.
You know damn well I’ve been playing Missile Command a lot. Zaxxon was another one. Then there was Battlezone. Look at the level of sophistication! Graphics!
This Battlezone video represents every game ever played; the way you maneuvered, and how no matter what you did, the game would tire of you and kill you by sending one of those homing missiles at you. You’d either shoot too soon or the damn thing would come from the side before you had time to turn around and kill it.
The people who made these games knew exactly what they were doing; take your money for a few minutes of fun. They knew you’d watch another guy get 15 minutes in one quarter and think, “That doesn’t look that hard. I can do that.”
What you didn’t know was this guy who had already spent $60,000 in coins and barely slept or ate that week.
Defender was my favorite game of this era.
I’m going with the years…
And As Always…
Join us in the comments section and count down your favorite top 10 games with us. I’ve enjoyed it so far. To see also : Amazon Prime Video has just received a major upgrade that has been widely missed. I hope we get more of my era?! 🙂
