Sights and Sounds
My submission for Pangburn master's list .
I focuses on the titles I feel are the more seminal, genre defining or simply part of the gaming canon.
I focuses on the titles I feel are the more seminal, genre defining or simply part of the gaming canon.
10 Games
Shinki Mikami is one of the best minds of this industry. Resident Evil 4 is his masterpiece. Everything from enemies, movement and pacing is immaculately designed and makes it the closest game to theoretical perfection.
It's DMC 1 and needs no itroduction. It layed the fundamentals for the entire action genre and it still a masterpiece to this day.
If DMC is all about stylish play, NGB is instead about efficency. Amazing enemy design and mechanics pulled directly from fighting games force you to learn all of you tools if you want to survive. The essence system is still one of the most genius piece of design ever created and cements the game into the olympus of action games.
The game that showed the world what Kojima was capable of, blending cinematic flair, engaging stealth gameplay and prophetic storytelling. It's a testament to the fact that you can be both gameplay focuses and cinematic.
Batsugun can be considered the first real bullet hell game and one of the first to utilize a small hitbox to facilitate that kind of gameplay. Dodonpachi, however, is the first game to perfect that formula, cementing the canon of the genre and making Cave become the face of it.
While Doom 1 mixed western and eastern design sensibility with a good dose of DnD to give us the progenitor of fps, Doom 2 refined the formula even more. Arguably the best enemy roster of any fps and it being thr birthplace of countless wads, cement it as one of the most important games ever created.
The most elegant arcade puzzle game that will ever exist. It has became part of the culture of most of the world and it's still incredibly engaging even in its base form. It's Tetris!
Wizardry is THE dungeon crawler, while the first entry hasn't aged that well the, it's still a seminal title that influenced and helped to shaper CRPGs as a whole. That influence arriving even east, bolstering the birth of jrpgs and influencing the industry to this day.
Yuji Horii took the dungeon crawling from Wizardry, the overworld exploration of Ultima, simplified the controls cor consoles and created the modern jrpg. Even after all this years the game is still fun to play and still shows that same spark of passion.
Before the Souls were a mass market phenomenon, Miyazaki built on King's Field to create a 3d dungeon crawler. Incredible atmosphere, unique ideas, great boss design and player freedom at the front show you can have it all. A true gem that unfortunately did not manage to pass one some of its more genius ideas to the rest of the franchise.
