The 100 best games of all time (2024)! (30-26) – That’s Gaming

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The 100 best games of all time (2024)! (35-31)

30. Ridge Racer (1993)

RRRRRRIIIIIIIIDDDDDGGGGGGGEEEEE Racer!!!! <- That’s how it sounded once at an E3 when a new part was announced, a true classic E3 moment. That made people laugh a bit at the time, as it was perhaps a little too enthusiastic for a racing game series that seemed past its prime. How different it was when we first saw footage of the original Ridge Racer in the arcade halls circa 1993. At that time, we were hugely accustomed to 2D games, and áf a game was in 3D at all, it often looked lumbering.

Ridge Racer is one of the first games that showed us what beauty awaited us in the “future. Sometimes we kind of feel sorry for today’s kids, who grow up with almost photorealistic games and with each generation of consoles there is not such a huge graphical step forward. Of course, we understand that we sound like old grandfathers now, but we still recommend that today’s parents still set your kids an accelerated course “from Pong to Sanuá Saga: Hellblade II” as an important part of education. Maybe then the “youth” might whine a little less about minor flaws in games and otherwise gain a little appreciation for how complicated making games actually is.

Oh yes, we were talking about Ridge Racer because it didn’t just make us fall off our chairs in the arcade halls. Even on the first PlayStation, a strong port of the game looked great and it also ran like a charm. In retrospect, it’s kind of strange that we were forced to control things with a d-pad back then, since there were no controllers on the market with thumb sticks yet. You also have to imagine that back then everything was Nintendo or SEGA when it came to consoles, and that Sony managed to win a place in the hearts of gamers particularly quickly with the PlayStation, because they understood that the most fun hobby ever at that time was still seen as “something for kids. In addition, the kids who had an NES, SNES or Mega Drive were now older. Games such as WipeOut, Tekken and Ridge Racer combined with the advertising style soon gave PlayStation a tough image. The rest is history.

29. Super Metroid (1994)

Creating a good atmosphere in games is surely not easy, especially when you have very limited resources at your disposal. Still, plenty of developers throughout history have been able to get a certain atmosphere in games right through clever gimmicks. Before Super Metroid came out, I’m sure there were a number of games that came out with good atmosphere, but the way this sci-fi adventure establishes an exciting setting is truly brilliant. The game comes from the mind of Yoshio Sakamoto, who worked as a designer on the first Metroid on the NES and later had the privilege of making several 2D Metroid games. He is also involved in the Wario Ware and Rhythm Heaven series.

Not only are the graphics to be savored, the sounds are also masterful and certainly add to the atmosphere. Despite the now widely mentioned atmosphere, the level design is the real star of the game. By now we are all familiar with the idea; make your way through the environments, gain new skills and go back to where you have already been to reach new places. Meanwhile, you shoot all sorts of alien scum to “space heaven” and puzzle your way to the evil Mother Brain. So that we are now so familiar with the concept that is now combined in the same breath with Castlevania (as in Metriovania games) comes largely from Super Metroid.

Incidentally, we knew with this part that there was a real woman “hidden” in that cool suit, named Samus. During the first installment on the NES, we didn’t know that yet, and since back then there was the stigma that gaming was mainly done by boys, there were also mostly male characters in games. Fat chance that until the end of the by far most boys thought they were dealing with a man or else a robot. In retrospect, that was a smart move on Nintendo’s part, as it showed that female characters could be cool too and that such a thing did not otherwise detract from gameplay. Fortunately, the medium has now matured a lot although we sometimes see with pain in our hearts that there is still a lot of fuss from certain gamers when a game is announced with a woman in the lead role.

28. Red Dead Redemption (2010)

Developer Rockstar is quite a household name these days, although they had to build it up first. The first two GTAs were fun, but no one at the time expected that series to grow into one of the greatest ever. When a cowboy game was announced by Rockstar, we immediately thought of a kind of “GTA in the Wild West,” and it turned out to be exactly that. Where in GTA you race through a city with cars, in Red Dead Redemption you go on horseback through vast landscapes and dusty towns.

Of course, you are free to go wherever you want and along the way you meet a variety of characters that belong in those old cowboy movies. The great thing about this game is that you feel like you’re walking around in one of those movies and that’s mainly because of the insane environments, brilliant soundtrack and the nice slow pace of everything you do. The story itself is also strong, in which you, as outlaw John Marston, must go after the leader of your old gang in order to avoid spending the rest of your life behind bars.

In Red Dead Redemption you can act like a cowboy with moral standards, but it’s even more fun to act like a real outlaw, as you well know. Yes, you too have tied up an innocent person with your lasso, placed them on your horse and finally laid them on the train tracks already tied up, waiting for a train to arrive. You even got an achievement from Rockstar for it, killers that they are. You could argue that this is the best cowboy game ever, were it not for the fact that an even better game came to reinforce the genre in 2018.

27. Mario Kart 8 (2014)

The first Mario Kart was already great, Mario Kart 64 was a fat party, but Mario Kart 8 is the best in the series. First of all, the game looks super sharp for a ten-year-old game, and it is also one of the first times we saw a 3D Super Mario in HD. On the Wii U, this game is already a fat winner and it also got a deluxe version on the Switch, which is packed with many tracks and characters. In addition, a huge expansion has since been released, giving you twice as many tracks, although not all of them are of the highest quality. There are a lot added that come from the cell phone version of Mario Kart, missing the super-sharp graphics that make the original tracks so appealing.

The game is fine to play by yourself, but playing with more people at once is much more fun! Here it does not matter whether you do this with a bunch of good friends, with your grandmother or as an important part of your children’s education. It always makes for a particularly happy pastime, and since you’re a long-time Mario Kart player, it’s a good learning experience for your companions when it comes to being able to stand your losses. Still, it will also generate some swearing, but in the right conditions, the swear words feel like well-deserved compliments.

We are on the eve of the announcement of the Switch 2, and sooner or later a new Mario Kart game is going to appear on it anyway. But how on earth can they make it even better than Mario Kart 8? Well, we think the only way to top this is with some sort of Mario Kart Ultimate, putting all the characters and tracks from all the previous parts into one game. Oh well, maybe that’s too easy again. We like to be surprised by Nintendo!

26. StarCraft II (2010)

From the category of “games we think are incredibly cool, but are very bad at” we find StarCraft II at number 26. Of course, we know our way around the many campaigns that are now playable, but once we start fighting other people we don’t often come out victorious. That doesn’t matter, because we do enjoy seeing how quickly the opponent manages to build his shit up. I guess the problem lies in our questionable patience, which often causes us to go on the attack with almost all of our men and, when an inevitable setback occurs, immediately lose all of our attack and defense.

StarCraft II was shown here in the Netherlands on a party boat of sorts in Amsterdam, where we got to see a cool presentation and were able to show through lan competitions to other writing game enthusiasts that we are not top StarCraft players. Several expansions have since been released, all giving a different take on the conflict and bringing new features.

We’ve been waiting for a new StarCraft for some time now, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to see anything new anytime soon. By the way, did you know that a StarCraft spin-off was once supposed to appear, but that game was cancelled? StarCraft Ghost was in development for a long time and was sort of a mix between StarCraft and Perfect Dark with a cool woman as the main character. So unfortunately the game was never released, but in our opinion it was almost finished, although it could also be that the concept went back to the drawing board several times before they pulled the plug.