As it’s the start of the new year, we’ve already all been through the “best games of 2008″ spiel and are moving forward with what is to come in the new year.  Seeing as I’m rapidly approaching 30, it’s also an appropriate time to look at where the bloody hell all that time went and what games are the main culprits for eroding my youth.

This list would probably look pretty familiar to a lot of people, being your lives were probably decimated by some of these as well.  Also, you’d probably notice the pretty heavy Nintendo bias as that was my poison of choice until I had enough cash to start buying every console.  After that stage, well, I did buy every console and in a lot of cases I put a lot of time into rather old consoles and games.  I’ve poured weeks into Gex on the 3DO and various fighters on the Neo Geo CD, and spent a very long time playing Super Metroid on SNES in my 20’s after having never played it while in my teens.

For this list I haven’t listed every “generation”, only ones where I poured an immense amount of time into them, often to the detriment of my sleep, studies and sanity.  For example, amongst the 16-bit handhelds (of which only the GBA counts with the PC Engine GT a possibility if you stretch it), I played the GBA an absolute tonne but all the games I have were played somewhat equally.

The generation namings are something I’ve included as taken directly from Wikipedia.  I’ve been used to referring to generations via the bit count (ie 8-bit and 16-bit) but that falls down once you go past the 32-bit generation of the PS1 and N64.  Wikipedia’s one is nice and so I’ve used it (even if bit-era gamers won’t recognise it straight away)

Soo.. The list..

Third Generation Console (NES, Master System)

Winner - Super Mario Brothers 3 (NES)

Unlike all the games on this list, I never owned SMB3 until many years later when I entered my collector phase and bought a NES.  Instead, I played the bulk of this over at a friends place, when I used to take my Game Boy across and we used to play a variety of games (something that would continue when we both got a SNES).  However, not owning the game didn’t mean that I didn’t sink a ridiculous number of hours into either the playing the game or watching my friend or his brothers trying to beat the thing.  Until it was usurped by Super Mario World, we’d be constantly playing it and trying to beat it.  Many times the NES was left running until it overheated because they had almost finished it but there was no way to save (often overnight, much to the disgust and yelling of their parents).

Then came the SNES and eventually Super Mario All-Stars.  Yet again it was SMB3 that was played until my fingers bled, this time with the assistance of save points.  Eventually when I started earning money after uni I got my own NES, NES2, Famicom and Sharp Twin Famicom.  What did I play first?  Super Mario Brothers 3.  I even have a boxed copy for the Famicom.   The quality of the game is undeniable, and it kept me playing for years.

Fourth Generation Handheld (Game Boy, Game Gear, Atari Lynx)

Winner - Revenge of the Gator (Game Boy)

I’ve already given this game its own article.  Best game ever.  I still play it.  Whenever I get a system that supports emulators, I find a Gameboy emulator and play this game.  My recent Christmas was spent with a new M3 DS card, and in between helping write my list of DS games to get in the future (I’m still inclined to support good game design with a purchase) I was playing Revenge of the Gator.

Runner Up - Tetris (Game Boy)

Everyone I know has a strong, almost creepy association with Tetris.  It is the ultimate gamers game and the ultimate casual game.  The design is perfect and modifications made past the original Game Boy version only served to dilute this perfection.  I don’t own Tengen Tetris.  Yet.

Fourth Generation Console (SNES, Megadrive, PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo)

Winner - Super Mario World (SNES)

By time I got a SNES I had already poured a lot of hours into Super Mario Bros 3, and read a lot of Super Mario World reviews that said it was good but not quite as good as SMB3.

I disagree, this is the highpoint of 2D platforming.  I’ve played this game so much it’s verging on ridiculous.

To give you some degree of perspective, I played this game religiously until I got all 96 levels on the first save game.  Then I did it again for the other two save games.  I did this throughout high school whenever I got bored and none of my other games were doing it for me.  Delete save game, complete 96 levels, go off and play Shadowrun or Secret of Mana for a bit.

When it came time to move to the city for uni, I decided to leave my SNES at home to concentrate on studies.  All this meant was that every time I went back home, I used to unpack the SNES, fire up Super Mario World, delete a save game and complete 96 levels.

I played this game so much I used to be able to complete levels playing with my feet.

Runners Up - Shadowrun (SNES), Super Mario Kart (SNES)

Two very different games, two immense suckers of my time.  Shadowrun I loved for the cyberpunk setting, net hacking sections, team building and real time gunplay combat (albeit simple).  I finished the bloody thing, and over the years I don’t have a good success ratio in finishing any game, let alone long complex RPGs.   Super Mario Kart is in here purely for the Balloon game, which I still consider to be the best version in any of the Mario Karts.  Simple 2 player fun, and a staple of after school entertainment.

Fifth Generation Console (Saturn, PS1, N64, 3DO, Jaguar)

Winners - Goldeneye (N64) / Mario Kart 64 (N64) / Castlevania Symphony of the Night (PS1)

Yes, a three way tie.  I can’t separate these games for the amount of hours they sucked out of my life during the late 90’s early 00’s.

You know how I mentioned earlier that when I moved to the city to go to university, I left my SNES at home so I’d concentrate more on studying?

As soon as it came out, I bought a Nintendo 64.  In hindsight, Mario 64 wasn’t the best thing to have in my residence room when exams were on.

However, it wasn’t until second year where the real time-decimation came about, and it was due to the four player modes of Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64.  I almost failed second year uni because of these games.  Somehow, the combination of ridiculously good multiplayer modes, four N64 controllers and living on campus with a bunch of bored university students caused a massive explosion in one-shot kill Goldeneye deathmatches and Mario Kart 64 balloon games.

Straight after dinner, some people went to play pool or chat in the common room.  A tribe of us retreated to one of several  rooms containing a N64 to snipe heads or shoot shells.  It didn’t matter that we were playing four player split screen on 32cm portable TV, there was enough screen space to see the fact that you just pulled off an impossible headshot.

Mario Kart related tantums caused one of my friends to break my bed by jumping on it.  One of my controllers was ejected out a window.  One friend got so bored during a day off he worked out how to break into my room via scaling an external wall so he could play Goldeneye single player.

Did I mention that these games caused a dramatic drop in study time and thus university grades?  Sorry Mum.

As the years progressed and the gameheads moved on from residence, Goldeneye and Mario Kart died down.  Then I made a logical leap and decided that surely I couldn’t spend more time gaming if I got myself a PS1.  I got the PS1, got a few games, played them for a bit and all was good.  Then I discovered eBay and got Castlevania Symphony of the Night.

Everyone knows it’s one of the best games ever.  I knew it at that stage, and having been a big fan of Castlevania IV (still the best pure Castlevania ever) and wanting to test this eBay thing I got myself a copy.  Turns out, it’s not only one of the best games ever but turned out to be a repeat-complete marvel the likes of Super Mario World.

Anyone into games knows the score by now, being that as you uncover the castle you get a percentage, up to 100%.  What people usually miss the first time around is that given certain conditions you get past the “completion” of the game and then get the castle upside down,  allowing you to play through a game twice the size you originally thought.  I was never hardcore enough to play much of the Richter games.  Instead I did complete unveils of both castles many times throughout the years, with SOTN replacing Super Mario World as my holiday “must complete” game.

To further continue my habit, I have since acquired the XBox Live Arcade version and the PSP version, with the PSP version still getting worked over at any opportunity.  Konami have changed things slightly with each subsequent version, finding a solid home on the GBA and an excellent home on the DS.  However, SOTN still reigns as the best of them.

Sixth Generation Console (Gamecube, PS2, XBox, Dreamcast)

Winner - Grand Theft Auto III (PS2)

I never played GTA1 or 2.  I didn’t like Vice City due to the 80’s theme (the 80’s can go DIAF).  San Andreas I didn’t mind but got bored of it.  Never bothered with the PSP games or their PS2 variants.  GTAIV I got sidetracked from and haven’t gone back to it.  The game that started the madness however, I played excessively.

Everyone knows the deal by now.  Cars, violence, hookers, repeat.  The main character was mute, the missions weren’t quite so indepth, the controls weren’t quite so smooth but my god it was a bloody good game.  The fact that I actually completed the missions right until the end was a rarity for me, but it was also a rarity in that I used to jump on just to do crazy jumps or go 5-star national emergency destruction sessions when I was bored or wanted to blow off some steam.

Did GTA3 or any of the other GTA games with their excessive violence or questionable moral code make me a bad person?  Not really (I was already pretty dubious).  What they did provide is pure unmitigated fun.  I knew where every fun car was parked by itself so I could steal them and have a hoon around.  I knew all the best places where you could avoid death by tank for long periods of time.   See kids, violence and depravity is worthwhile!

Runner Up - Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater II (Dreamcast)

I was late to the party with the Dreamcast.  Given that it was a bit of a flop in Australia and I was a uni student when it came out, I didn’t acquire one while it was still being sold in stores.  When I eventually did pick one up, it was secondhand and came with about 10 original games (plus about 40 burnt copies).  I had a Dreamcast, I had a tonne of games and I was on uni holidays for the next 3 months.  The game I ended up devoting most of that time to (and a lot of time afterwards) really suprised me.

I’m not a big player of sports games (even though I really enjoy playing and watching sport on TV), and so when the original Tony Hawk games came out on the PS1 I didn’t bat an eyelid and didn’t even consider getting them.  Although I knew they were good games, they didn’t seem like my cup of tea (being a non-skater and having a low level of tolerance for getting sideswiped and hit by dickhead skaters around uni).  So, with THPS2 being thrust on me, I gave it a bash and found out that not only did I love the mechanics and feel, but I played it so excessively that every flat surface in the real world became an area to grind on, and I was looking for a way to combo to the next grind area.  I didn’t play it for a huge length of time (obsessively for 3 months, at a medium level after that) but it wins an award for consuming an entire holiday.  Tony Hawk 3 and 4 I bought but never quite got into as much.

Home Computers (PC, Apple, C64, Amiga)

Winner - World of Warcraft (PC)

Hoooooooo boy.  Yep.  I’m a WoW player.  I started off having fun learning about the game, levelling my hunter and talking to my real-life friends who were all in the same guild.  It was IRC with graphics.  I got to level 60, did a little bit of pretty poor raiding with the guild after it had split off and reformed to try and raid (albeit with the same people in the previous guild).  The PVP honour system changed, so I ground up some High Warlord gear in preparation for Burning Crusade.  The expansion came out, I got to level 70 and became an officer in the guild.  We finally did some decent raiding, and had cleared Karazhan, Gruuls and was working on Void Reaver and Lurker.  Being an Aussie on a US server started to suck, so we joined the migration of the top Aussie guild on the server and we resettled on an Oceanic server.  From clearing Kara I jumped straight into T6 and by the end we were one of two Horde guilds on the server to kill Kil’Jaeden.  Wrath of the Lich King launched and we’re one of the top raiding guilds on the server (like it really matters currently anyway)

Note how I haven’t mentioned the gameplay in the above.  The reason that WoW has kept me playing over the years has been the meta game.  It’s been the organisation, it’s been working in groups, it’s been learning new strategies and executing them.  A lot of the game is quite boring.  Reputation grinds and farming in particular are pains (I would have said levelling, but WoTLK levelling was quite fun).  For truly hardcore raiders, the dedication of time required is severe, although we run on a casual 3 night a week raid schedule, of which I usually make two of those due to real life.  Other guilds maintain 4 or 5 night a week raiding schedules, which is punishing.

WoW is a game that can keep you playing and keep you interested for many different reasons.  For me it’s still a big IRC channel to talk to my mates.  It’s a way of translating and applying indepth theories on game mechanics in a way that I’ve never done with a game before.  It can be relaxing or intense, depending on what you choose to do.

After 4 years, after all the changes, all the additions and subtractions it still keeps me interested enough to keep logging in, and that is a success by any means.

It’s also the reason why I don’t have many modern generation games on my most-played list..

Arcade

Winner - Street Fighter II

When I was growing up, the breadth and choice in arcade gaming was pretty thin.  You had the old beaten-down classics in fish and chip shops or milkbars.  You had the modern but unknown cabinets they used to put in the kids areas of the clubs (I played a lot of Willow while waiting for dinner).  They had the few cabinets in the shopping center and then you had the single dark, dingy and understocked arcade where you’d probably get robbed by the local teen thugs if you went in there with coins.

For years, my only real arcade gaming was on the Street Fighter II upright cabinet parked outside the local Target, and I would always put some coins into it when I was there.   I wasn’t much good at it, and I eventually got the SNES version at home but the feel of the arcade stick and buttons always drew me back.  When the local show (ie fair with rides, stalls, food etc) arrived each year I STILL used to spend a fair proportion of my time bashing away at SFII in the dodgy tent full of decrepit machines.

A formative moment in my youth occurred when I was playing single player mode and a young guy turned up, put money in the machine and pressed the P2 button while I was still playing.  He looked at me with a smug look on his face, thinking that he’d beat me easily and push me off the machine so he could play.  I was irritated but he was bigger so just looked at him and started the game.  Wiped the floor with him.  He looked pissed off, and left while I kept playing.  Came back a minute later looking angry, put money in and challenged again.  I wiped the floor with him again.  He threw a few choice expletives in my direction, looked for all money like he was going to punch me and then stormed off.  Thus I experienced being in the receiving end of gaming rage as well as beating a bully at his own game.  Very very satisfying, and a feeling which wouldn’t be uncommon amongst young arcade gamers.

In summary..

Much like any other young male growing up in my generation, I’ve been a big gamer and continued to be as I migrated into adulthood.  If I could pick one game for sheer amount of time running, it’d have to be World of Warcraft (through my habit of logging in and AFKing while doing other stuff).  That undersells it a bit, because the amount of playtime it’s given me also dwarfs all other games I’ve played.

However, if I could pick games for not only amount of time played but also longevity and the sheer joy they’ve given me, it’d have to be a tie between Super Mario World on the SNES and Revenge of the Gator on the Game Boy.  Two examples of simple concentrated gaming goodness that I challenge anyone not to love.