Thursday, March 13, 2008

Greatest video game ever?

I was just perusing kottke.org for the first time, and was reading a chronology of his life in the About section. This grabbed me:
1994: Sega NHL '94 is simply the greatest video game ever. My college roommate had a TV, and I had a Sega Genesis & NHL '94. At any given time between 9am and 10pm, 7 days a week, there were usually 2 to 6 people in our room playing that game. I'd leave for class with a bunch of folks watching or playing, coming back three hours later to find a completely different group worshipping at the shrine of NHL '94.
I think you can make a solid case for NHL 94 as best game ever--I was much younger when I played it, but I had the similar experience of playing this game for hours, day in and day out, every day (esp. in the summer). I'd go down to my friend Raja's house and I'd play as the Red Wings (Yzerman, Federov, Chelios, and fucking Coffee? Goodnight) and he'd play as the Kings (Wayne was a sentimental favorite) or Blackhawks (Roenick was a monster, as was Belfour). He beat me most of the time, but I beat him enough to where it was competitive and fun to play. Man.

To be fair, I haven't played many of the later generation sports games...for instance, I've never played any of the Madden games. So maybe there's someone out there who knows better.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Better than Street Fighter II? Resident Evil 4? Super Metroid? Super Mario 3? etc?

David Morris said...

Maybe. At the very least, it deserves to be in their company.

Let's also not forget others: I'm thinking Goldeneye (N64), WoW, maybe one of the Zelda games (Link to the Past?)... there should probably be a concerted effort to make some kind of list. I know I'm missing a lot of classics I've never played, like the new-generation sports games, classic RPGs (e.g. from the Final Fantasy series), Mario 64...