This was supposed to be 4 Swords Adventures, but that has been put on hold indefinitely. (I have misplaced the disc. I was playing 4 Swords with the Wii, my brother wanted to play Smash Bros, so he took out 4 Swords and I am fairly sure he put it in the Smash Bros case. The problem is I don’t know where he put the Smash Bros case, so I can’t play anymore 4 Swords.) I turned to the next game on the list, Twilight Princess. Twilight Princess has a strange reputation; for a game that earned such high review scores and has such high sales, no one seems to like it all that much. After playing it through for the first time since it was brand new, that doesn’t seem fair. Twilight Princess is a flawed game, but it is also an incredibly ambitious game and largely well made.

More so than any other game in the series, Twilight Princess follows in the footsteps of Ocarina of Time. That was something that fans claimed to want and something that the Zelda series withheld for a long time. The games following Ocarina played mostly the same, but the structure and tone were quite different. Instead of Ocarina’s Hyrulian epic, Majora’s Mask was a nightmare sidestory and Wind Waker was a nautical cartoon. Both are fun games, but they didn’t feel much like Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past. Twilight Princess, despite its lupine digressions, was built on that model. It takes place in the traditional Hyrule, it follows the traditional structure. It is consciously a Zelda game. It feels a little like Nintendo saying goodbye to that kind of Zelda game. It had already moved away from that limiting structure, but they gave the fans one last romp through Hyrule.

In a move unusual for Nintendo, the game heavily invests in its story. It is full of scripted events and puts supreme effort into telling its tale, which it does well, with a few exceptions. Some reviewers lambast Nintendo for refusing to get in step with modern standards in regards to things like voice acting. Unlike most developers, Nintendo never embraced idea of the interactive experience; instead they continued to make games. The long time lack of voice acting in their games stems from that. Twilight Princess is one of the few times I really felt the lack. This game does have tremendous storytelling pretensions, but it doesn’t quite have the ability to realize them. The problem is not in the story it tries to tell; that is suitably epic and grandiose. It needs more than the grunts and slow moving dialogue that it has to tell that story.

It starts with young Link in the small village of Ordon; really letting the player get to know the inhabitants of the village while simultaneously learning the basics of how to play the game. That is the classic start to a Legend of Zelda game, essentially a tutorial that also does a lot of work narratively. From there it sticks largely to the same formula as usual, but greatly expanded. Each area of the game is bursting with new and intriguing characters, not the least of which is Midna, the replacement for Navi. She is an amazing character; strongly motivated and both mischievous and courageous. Outside of the big three of Link, Zelda and Ganon, I would call Midna the greatest creation in the series. Also great is the new villain Zant, though he falters greatly after his excellent introduction.  There are tons of side quests and extra secrets to find.  Some of this extra stuff is good, like the fun bug hunting mini-game, while some are not, like switching from 4 pieces of a heart to 5.  While the story never really goes far from being a Zelda story, it delivers it with a sense of grandeur that is only present in the most well regarded entries in the series.

The game is full of little compromises like the lack of voice acting. It adds the wolf transformation, but the player loses one of the item slots. While switching equipped items has been streamlined, the game makes the player switch them far more often. The context sensitive stuff, like picking up things off the ground or throwing vs dropping seems too finicky and somewhat imprecise. In all the controls in the Gamecube version feel just a little off, as though it lost some precision when the adapted it to the Wii control scheme. The controls are far from bad, but there are just enough times where things don’t seem to work right that it is worth distracting. The hunt the light bug segments are somewhat annoying, but they are also oddly paced. The areas where the bugs are hidden get progressively bigger and the hunt becomes more frustrating.

One part where the game absolutely doesn’t falter is in the dungeons. The game doesn’t have the usual easy starter dungeon; it gets right into the meat. There are a lot of them in this game and they are almost uniformly great. They are expansive and challenging. Puzzles span multiple rooms and require creative uses of all Link’s abilities. While they largely follow Ocarina’s set up of themes, but the dungeons are greatly different from their predecessors. Like much the rest of the game, the dungeons are at their best when they echo Ocarina without copying it directly. Despite Nintendo’s own word on the matter, I would say any Zelda timeline is at best nebulous. However, this game is clearly a sequel to Ocarina, albeit a distant one. The world of Twilight Princess is a decayed echo of Ocarina of Time. That comes through in the dungeons. Like the Temple of Time that seems to be built on the ruins of the Forest Temple. In all they are some truly excellent dungeons.

There are enough niggling problems that I can’t really call Twilight Princess one of the better Legend of Zelda games. I rank it just on the bottom side of the middle of the pack. None of its flaws are especially big, they are all small things. Unfortunately, there are just enough of them that it occasionally makes playing the thing a horrible chore. These flaws hold back what is truly and excellent game underneath them.

I am just finishing up my first year on the farm in Harvest Moon Grand Bazaar. I’m watching my Peach trees grow and getting pretty cozy with the Mayor’s daughter. The Harvest Moon series is one I have a lot or respect for. I often opine about the preponderance of violent video games. I don’t care that there are violent video games, only that there sometimes seem to only be violent video games. Not every game has to be about murder and revenge and the Harvest Moon series is proof of that. Unfortunately, it is not a series that seems to have a lot of money behind it. A new one hits handhelds every year it seems, only slightly improved from the previous year’s version. It is a problem, but one that is usually confined to uber-series like Call of Duty and sports franchises. Harvest Moon is tiny compared to those, but it does have its loyal fans. I consider myself one, though more in theory than practice, since I haven’t played most of the games in the series.

My biggest experience with the series is with the N64 game. The original SNES game feels like something of a rough draft. It has many of the elements of later games in the series. Harvest Moon 64 seems like the ideas of that first game fully realized. I have occasionally sampled the series since then, but outside of some ambitious games in the Gamecube/PS2 era, it has mostly felt like more of the same. The bulk of them aren’t bad games by any means, but they haven’t showed much evolution from the 64 version. Still, I felt the urge to play some Harvest Moon and since it seems that Harvest Moon 64 will never be rereleased, I picked up HM Grand Bazaar, which had a largely good reputation.

After one year of game time, I am enjoying it quite a bit. I have a good handle on my farm and what I want to do. I really like that the game seems to have a completely new cast. As much as I like HM64, the games I played after it seemed to rely a little too heavily on returning characters from that game. Yes, there were always new townsfolk and the old ones were often adjusted somewhat, but it felt kind of the same. Here, the rather small village is full of new, or at least new to me, characters. I have enjoyed getting to know the inhabitants of this village. My one problem is that it does seem really small. Maybe I am misremembering what the old games were like, but it doesn’t feel like there are many characters here, as interesting as they may be.

With one big exception, things have been both expanded and streamlined from HM64. There are more crops, more recipes and simple more things to do. Before, players were fairly constrained in what they did with their farm each season. There were few crops to choose from and only a couple of kinds of animals. Now not only are there more crops to choose from, players can also plant trees to make an orchard or grow tea. I haven’t done the math to determine which option makes the most money, but at least there are options. The big problem is this games big hook. The Bazaar from the title is new way the player has to sell their goods. In previous games, there is a delivery box to dump everything the player has to sell in. Someone comes by at the end of every day to take the contents of the box to market and the player gets their money. In Grand Bazaar, the player hordes their stuff in their initially limited storage and on the weekend runs a stall at the weekly to sell the goods. It isn’t a bad idea, except that the game doesn’t do anything interesting with it. It isn’t fun to run the stall. It doesn’t change the amount of money the player would normally get. The Bazaar merely takes something that was simple, dumping grown crops in the pick-up box, and makes it complex and time consuming. One day a week the player has to spend standing in one spot occasionally tapping the “A” button to sell turnips. It would be more useful if the Bazaar was monthly instead of weekly, but that would too greatly restrict the flow of money. The whole system is the biggest flaw of the game.

I guess a changeup of some kind is coming to the Harvest Moon series this fall. I don’t know how it is going to shake out when all is said and done, but unless this split in the series turns into no Harvest Moon games, then it will likely be a good change. For a long time this series has been stuck in two ways. The first is that there hasn’t been much evolution on the gameplay side. I may not have played all the games from the start to now, but the ones I have played are largely the same. That is not necessarily a problem, but with a series that has seen an annual release for the better part of a decade it is tiring. I don’t know if it is lack of time, money or ambition, but the series hasn’t really evolved since it came to the DS and even that seemed to be sliding back from the somewhat more ambitious Gamecube games. The other problem the series faces is its localization. I don’t mean to slander the fine folks at Natsume, but their localizations have been flawed. I would guess that most of those problems come from lack of resources. They just don’t have the time or manpower to do as good a job as everyone would like. This fall, though, there will be essentially two Harvest Moon games, each attempting to fix at least one of these flaws. Natsume is publishing a game titled Harvest Moon. It looks to be a significant departure from the previous games in the series, most likely due to the fact that it has a different developer. It is a different game, but Natsume owns the name Harvest Moon. This new HM game looks to take some inspiration from Minecraft, attempting to make a much more player driven game. The original developer, a part of Marvelous Entertainment, is still making farming games, though. Story of Seasons is the “true” continuation to the classic series, and looks to play much like the previous releases, with localization now being handled XSeed. Xseed has proven themselves to quite adept, maybe not Atlus good but a close second. So this new could have a much more flavorful story. However this split in the series shakes out, it should be interesting for players. I hope it is a shot in the arm for this series, sparking new evolutions and advances without sacrificing the series considerable charms.

I’ve been playing Resident Evil 5 with my brother in short bursts the last few weeks. Though certainly enjoyable, it has quickly become clear why this game doesn’t enjoy the near universal acclaim that its predecessor does: it isn’t scary in the least. Not that Resident Evil 4 was all that scary, it wasn’t. It was, though, still nominally a horror game, albeit one straddling the line between horror and action. Resident Evil 5 has strayed far from that line. What made the Resident Evil series so enjoyable, despite being kind of clunky and constrained, was the novelty of playing essentially a schlocky horror movie. It if not created then at least popularized the Survival Horror genre. Resident Evil 5, as well made as it may be, is not a Survival Horror game.

I am not an expert on horror or on the Resident Evil series. You can count the number of horror movies I’ve watched on one hand, even If you count horror comedies like Shaun of the Dead. I avoid horror movies like the plague. I am a big scaredy baby and I derive no joy from scaring myself with horror films. I was occasionally mocked in college for leaving the common area of my dorm suite whenever the group chose a scary movie. Oddly, I do generally enjoy horror games. I don’t play a whole terrible lot of them, but I tend to enjoy them when I do. Mostly it is because the gameplay of survival horror games is somewhat slower and more thoughtful than most action games. Resident Evil, at least in its original incarnation, exemplifies this trend. I have neither played every game in the series, nor do I obsess over the mythology, but I have some experience with the series. I fiddled around with the first game on the Playstation, and beat one path of RE2, but I never touched RE3 or Code Veronica. I did play the REmake and RE0 on the Gamecube. Then came RE4, and it shook the whole series up, being pretty much the best action game ever made while keeping one foot in the survival horror realm. Most would agree that RE4 isn’t scary; many would argue that no RE game has ever really been scary. They aren’t wrong, but recall that I am a big scaredy baby. Resident Evil 4, despite not being all that scary, managed to freak me out pretty regularly. While I greatly enjoyed that game, the vagaries of one console ownership kept from playing further in the series for the better part of a decade.

Now I’ve played RE5, and despite being largely similar to RE4 it is a lesser game. The biggest thing missing is that it isn’t scary; not in the slightest. Why not? Because the game is co-op. One of the few things that kept RE4 somewhat unsettling is that, for the most part, you are alone. Leon is alone in a village full of people that are becoming monsters. It is a scary premise. In RE5, Chris is flanked constantly by a teammate. It doesn’t greatly change how the game plays, but it does greatly change the psychology of the game. Instead of a lone survivor facing danger around every corner, you play as part of a tag team ruthlessly taking apart everything that stands in your way. It is scary to be alone, but significantly less so with a partner. Especially since, like all Resident Evil games, the scares in this game are all cheap jump scares. It is all spring loaded cats. Those things tend to lose their effect when you are not alone and already tense. In RE4, you hear that chainsaw start off screen and it freaks you out. You have to find its wielder or you will die. Resident Evil 5 is less scary because there appears to be a safety net in the form of Sheva. RE5 isn’t actually any easier, the player is no less likely to die than in its predecessor, but it seems different all the same. It all comes down to that second player.

Otherwise, the game is pretty great. And playing co-op is a ton of fun. They smoothed off the rest of the adventure portions of the game, leaving it to be mostly shooting. There is much less inventory management and the like. The story and setting is still classic Resident Evil, evil corporations and zombie plagues. It has the same general array of weapons and enemies. Primarily, it is more Resident Evil 4 and who didn’t want that?

I probably spend too much time thinking about the history of video games. Sometimes it is because my younger brothers ask me about old games; sometimes it is just that I like old games. An idea that often comes to me is the idea of setting up a video game canon, like the western literary canon. Yes, the idea of the literary canon has faced some criticism in the last couple of decades, but it is absolutely a useful tool if not a perfect one. If someone wants to study the history of video games, having a video game canon seems like a good first step to make that easier. 1up.com did two essential games lists back in the day that would have made a good place to start, but they seem to be lost to the ether. (It has come to my attention that USGamer.net is doing a video series of Essential NES Games, which is a good starting point for that specific system.) So we need a new place to start. Not that I am in a position to make such a list; for anyone to assume that they could would be the height of arrogance. But I am going to put forth a list of fifty games, too small a number to be anywhere near complete, as a starting point.

The question is how are “essential” games determined? I think there is a difference between what is essential and what is best. Not that most of the games generally determined to be the “best games ever” don’t deserve to be on this list, only that being one of the best is only one aspect considered. Take, for instance, the Mega Man series. I would say that the series deserves to be represented on this list, but which game or games? Do you put the first one since it was the first? What about the ever ongoing argument about which game is better, Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3? What about all the subsequent subseries? For this initial rough draft list, I’ve only put Mega Man 2 on this list. It and 3 are essentially equally good, but MM2 has the fact that it is the game that really put the series on the map. It was the hit that secured the Blue Bomber’s place in the gaming pantheon. I’ve also put Mega Man X on the list. It is a great game in its own right and it was a seismic shift in the fortunes of that series. That is an example of the thought process I had as I put together this list. TO be on the is list, a game has to be some combination of excellent, influential or popular. So a game like Mortal Kombat, which I don’t much like, is important enough to the history of video games that it makes the list. It was certainly popular and definitely influential. For someone to understand the landscape of video games in the early ’90’s, one needs to experience Mortal Kombat right alongside games like Street Fighter 2 and Super Metroid.

That being said, I know there are holes in my knowledge. I don’t play a lot of computer games, so my knowledge of them is vague at best. Also, I am largely kind of a Nintendo goon, so Sega and the Arcade are obscenely underrepresented. Lastly, I have deliberately left off everything from the last 5 years or so. Not because there are no great or important games coming out, but because it is hard to gauge a games importance without a little history to look back over. All that is fine though, the point of this list is not to be comprehensive; the point is to spark thought and discussion. Eventually may evolve into a useful tool to help people explore the games that made this medium what it is now.  The list below started out chronological,  but all fifty games didn’t come to me at once and when I finished it was close to seventy games long so I had to edit it.  Instead of going back and spending a few minutes putting it in the correct order, I figured it was good enough as is. Et Voila:

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