6.) Marvel Vs Capcom/Marvel Superheroes Vs Streetfighter
Remember when I said earlier that this was now the era of the Arcade port? It’s a thinly veiled secret in the gaming world about Capcom’s love of milking a concept and/or franchise for every possible dollar, and once arcade games like X-Men Vs Street Fighter started getting love, Capcom were dropping console ports literally every year. X-Men Vs Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes Vs Streetfighter, and Marvel VS Capcom were all released within a year of each other, with Marvel Vs Capcom being my personal favorite of the bunch. (I refused to buy XvS) Whattt? I can use Venom and Mega Man?! Capcom take all of my allowance money.
Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter was a different beast. It was just generally harder to play compared to MVC: it had harder bosses, trickier input commands, smarter CPU opponents, and less recognizable characters. I enjoyed both games almost equally, but I bet you can guess which one got the green light for followup sequels.
7.) NBA Street
There was a time when And-1 Street Basketball was everywhere and everything to a middle school kid like myself; it was truly a style over substance type of street basketball which placed more importance on how well you could handle a ball than just about any other fundamental aspect of basketball. I’ll touch on this more at a later time but essentially it was so big that EA sports (and several other game companies) created basketball games that catered to fans of that particular play style. Compared to the follow-up sequels, especially one in particular, NBA Street isn’t that great of a game and follows a very simple formula but it served as the originator for what was to come in the next few years. It was also much, MUCH better than Street Hoops.
8.) Kingdom Hearts
This game revolutionized my mini obsession with RPG’s at the time. The biggest drawback of an RPG is that they generally rely on turn based combat and require hours upon hours of grinding your character to their highest level to beat the more difficult missions within the game. Kingdom Hearts changed all that.
An RPG that played more like an Action-Adventure game? Goodbye allowance money. Some people criticized the overall concept of the game, since it required teaming up with Goofy and Donald Duck to find Mickey Mouse and save the world, but it did something that video games sometime forget to do, and that was to make things fun. What other game do you know that allows you to summon the Genie of the Lamp to fight Captain Hook? Exactly.
9.) Pokemon Silver/Gold
Even though I was slowly showing my handheld games less and less love as I got older, and I was starting to see just how much the jig was up in regards to Pokemon in general (Pokemon Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow had all been released by this point) Game Freak reeled me back in for one more run with Pokemon Gold and Silver.
A brand new story line, new Pokemon to capture, new gameplay features, and all other sorts of new revamps and tweaks were too tempting to pass up. Plus you could fight the original protagonist of the Red/Blue/Green/Yellow series as a final secret boss, which served as an unofficial send off to my years of early childhood.
10.) Spider-Man
If ever there was a case to show just how blinding the filter of nostalgia tinted lenses can be, you should really look no further than the graphics of the Playstation 1 Spider-Man game.I mean, we are talking Tekken 1 levels of block shaped character design. Outside of graphical woes and, once again, the obligatory ultra-difficult-for-no-clear-reason last boss level, this game is awesome.
Using the voice actors from the T.V. show, unlockable costumes, memorable boss fights, and featuring cameos from across the Marvel Universe, Playstation’s Spider-Man really served as the blueprint for most of the Spider-Man game titles we’ve gotten over the years. During the original Playstation era, this was probably the best superhero game out (Remember this was the era of Superman 64… *shudders)
