Ten Foundational Games (2025 Edition)

Fun current social media trend is listing ten games to get to know eachother. Looking at these, you'd never guess what my first dedicated video game console was back in the Living days, would you?

Let's see what my picks say about me, shall we? Going clockwise from the bottom, we have…

Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo DS, 2005)

Something about this game really hits. The DS was positioned at a perfect time where it could render 3D, but with only 4 of god's own megabytes of RAM, the fidelity was limited. As a result, we get this perfect blend of 2D and 3D elements, that I feel like is at its most noticable in "Wild World". In fact, the entire top screen of this game was purely 2D, but it still felt organic and seamless with the 3D world below.

The flowers and items were all spritework, and the character textures were suitably low-resolution. Buildings and furniture made liberal use of stencil cutouts to convey details, rather than complex meshes. The game also famously allowed you to design your town's flag and tailor your own clothes by drawing on a 32x32 pixel canvas. Because everything else in the game was similarly low-res, this made it easier for your own designs to fit right in, even if you were a complete artistic novice.

I'm very fond of the way this game looks, but visuals aside, there's a lot of charm in the actual gameplay, too. Most notably, the villagers felt alive, and like they had actual agency. They could invite themselves over. They could need cheering up. They could get mad at you and say mean things. The villagers, to me, were the heart and soul of these games. But, given that these aspects of villager personality were all sanded off in "New Horizons", Nintendo clearly felt otherwise. Oh well.

Zoo Tycoon (PC, 2001)

One of the first PC games I remember really sinking hours into, "Zoo Tycoon" still represents the apex of the park-builder genre to me. Something that I feel modern takes on the formula all stumble over is the level of creative freedom; they offer too much of it. "Planet Zoo", for example, looked incredible in the lead-up to its release, but upon actually playing it, I was met with absolute decision paralysis, as the game basically demands that you hand-make every building and decoration from scratch. That's too much! This is is only compounded by the fact that it also eschews the placement grid. As a result, "Planet Zoo" feels more to me like CAD software that just happens to have zoo management systems tacked on.

By comparison, "Zoo Tycoon" still features a sufficiently-robust animal simulation, while helping keep design decisions managable by retaining that aformentioned placement grid. The result is a game which still promotes a lot of freedom of design, but at scale that matters. I don't want to be personally installing the decorative trim on my restroom exteriors, I want to be designing a scenic and efficient path for guests to traverse through my entire park.

While I never really learned the tools myself, I was alwasy impressed by this game's first-party custom content creation kit, called "APE" (Animal Project Editor). There are (or were?) some truly impressive mods made with these tools back in the day. The one I remember most clearly was a whole user-made expansion featuring birds and aviary pieces (which was noteworthy because the base game only featured a handful of terrestiral birds). Unfortunately, it seems that this pack has been lost to time as most fan-sites have long since stopped operating. I might still have it downloaded somewhere? If so, I'll try to get it up on archive.org.

Also, to this day, I think about a stream of green smiles or red frowns (and their accompnaying sound effects) streaming out of my head when something impacts my mood. I suspect that folks who were raised on "The Sims" have a similar affliction.

UPDATE: While digging through fan-sites trying to find the aformentioned user expansion, I found out that there's an officially-licensed Zoo Tycoon board game that got Kickstarted in 2023? Huh? It has 558 INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL MEEPLES??? What is going on.

Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2, 2004)

While the original "Sly Cooper" was a relatively standard early-2000s mascot-platformer fare, "Sly 2" elevated the franchise into a family-friendly crime drama. There are stakes, emotional and otherwise. The gameplay completely opens up; you can finally play as Sly's partners, and they're great. They make each chapter's heist really feel like a concerted team effort, rather than just something that happens as a result of completeing enough platforming levels.

In all likelihood, "Sly 2 is responsible for my keen interest in "Lupin the 3rd" later in life. I genuinely think the Venn Diagram of "Sly Cooper"/"Lupin the 3rd"/"Metal Gear Solid" is close to a single circle.

This game has exceptionally strong voice acting and writing for what it was. I firmly believe that the way that each chapter of the game starts with a character profile about that chapter's boss, almost always told through a retrospective, heavily influenced my tastes in character and world-building. It's such an iconic narrative style.

You should definitely give it a try, if you're able. I also don't feel that you necessarily need to have played the first game to enjoy this one. The plot of "Sly 1" is so light in comparison to this one, that you can honestly just read a summary, or even absorb the important parts from this game's opening chapter.

Dark Cloud (PS2, 2001)

To this day I haven't seen another game like "Dark Cloud". A PS2 launch title, it combines town-building and dungeon-crawling in a way that's relatively simple but deeply enjoyable to me. As you explore a set number of randomly-generated floors in each area's dungeon, you'll encounter spheres called "georama" which contain buildings, or things that go in/around buildings, such as funriture, pets and people. Then, back in town, you assemble these things together in a grid to begin repopulation. It's a satisfying gameplay loop.

However, it does make the first few floors of the first dungeon disproportionately tedious to overcome, as you're initially operating without so much as general store to buy essentials like as food, water, and that sweet sweet Weapon Repair Powder.

That's the other thing about this game. While your party's characters are all pretty stock-standard RPG cast members, it's the weapons that are brilliant and unique. You can slot gems into them to bestow stats, elemental attunments, and monster-slaying proficiencies into them, and once the weapon itself has enough EXP, it can level up and permanently absorb those gems, freeing up the equip slots in the process. Once a weapon reaches a high enough level, you can synthsize it into a gem itself, allowing you to slot it in to a different weapon to grant a percentage of the original weapon's stats in the process.

But weapons have finite durability. And when it runs out, the weapon instantly breaks and is gone forever. Without a steady supply of Weapon Repair Powder, using any weapons you find besides your tiny little unbreakable dagger feels too risky. Oh, also, weapons are found randomly in dungeons, which means you can go many, many floors without ever finding one, forcing you to stick to the aformentioned tiny dagger for much longer than you'd like. Ugh.

But all that aside, it's a very enjoyable RPG. The people you liberate will all have requests about how their houses should be built, and where they'd like to live. Figuring out how to accomodate everyone's ideals simultaneously is a charming little puzzle. As will probably be a recurring note on these retrospectives (I am writing them out of order), I really enjoy the music in this game. I think the tune that plays in "Norune Village" is like, the canonical JRPG town theme.

If you'd rather watch someone play it instead of playing it yourself, STALKERALKER streamed her full Let's Play a while back.

Before we move on, I'd lke to share the only "Dark Cloud" meme I've ever seen in my entire afterlife.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2, 2004)

It's "Metal Gear Solid 3". Need I say more? I think this one's on everyone's list. You should play this one (and the rest of the franchise). You will enrich yourself in doing so.

As an aside, I think I can quote the entire script by memory. "After the end of World War 2… the world was split into two…"

Katamari Damacy (PS2, 2004)

My general opinion of this game can best be summarized by this viral post, from February 2023:

It's all true. This game taught me that games can truly be anything. Narrow industry perceptions of "conflicts" and "objectives" are blinders that stifle creative vision. This is what it's all about.

My favorite song from the franchise is "Cherry Blossom Color Season".

EverBlue 2 (PS2, 2002)

I never expected to love this game as much as I currently do. I originally purchased it when it was new, entranced by the of-the-era renders of sea creatures on the box. However after only a few hours of gameplay, I was attacked by a shark and died. This left a profound impression on me; after all, nothing in the game hinted at the existence of combat. And do be fair, I guess this doesn't really qualify as "combat" since you possess no means by which to fight back. Anyway, I set the game down and largely forgot about it until I got in to streaming.

Around rolls October of 2021. I'm a VTuber now, and I see that most of my peers are playing traditional horror games for the month. In my infinite wisdom, I resolve to play "EverBlue 2" on stream, citing that "it's a horror game to me, damn it!"

It turns out that when you're no longer in the single-digit age range, this game really hits, and isn't all that scary. The contrast between the low-res, pre-rendered surface and the lavishly detailed, full-3D ocean dives is so charming to me. I'm so glad I gave this game a second chance. There's quite a lot to do and find.

Actually, on that note, did you know that this game is the precursor to "Endless Ocean" for the Wii? It turns out that when ARIKA isn't making Tetris games or Fighting games, they put their hearts into diving games, which I have to imagine are hugely unprofitable for the company. But what really gets me is that, despite the titles, "EverBlue 2" feels way more "endless" than "Endless Ocean" ever does.

In the former, you can truly swim from end to end of the ocean map, exploring separate deep-sea dungeons (shipwrecks, ruins, etc) along the way. Meanwhile, in the latter, you are confined to a radius around your initial dive location. So while the actual map may be signifigantly larger, you will routinely hit invisible walls that really make you feel boxed in. ("Endless Ocean" also lacks, like, gameplay and intrigue, but that's a different complaint…)

There's not a ton of music in this game, but you should give the soundtrack a listen. Most of the underwater gameplay is actually totally devoid of scoring, which is used to good effect in he final stretch when a song suddenly comes on, alerting you to the presence of a sacred relic just out of sight. It's cool, man.

Grim Fandango (PC, 1998)

Probably the least surprising entry on this entire list for a guy like me. This game upended my whole situation and dramatically altered the course of my afterlife. Manny Calavera is one of the all-time greats among skeletonkind, and inspired me to be as much like him as I could. The game takes place across four chapters, each represening a single Day of the Dead on four consecutive years. As a streamer, I committed to a bit that I call the "Real-Time Let's Play", where I would stream one chapter of this game on November 1st every year. Having completed that task, I began again in 2025 with developer commentary on.

This game gets a somewhat-deserved rap for having particularly unintuitive puzzles. I think this is largely due to the game's character writing and worldbuilding being too strong for its own good. There are quite a few situations that arise with solutions that only make sense to people already deeply ingrained within the cultural norms and rules of the underworld, or that have at least already spent a lot of time there.

For example, there's an early-game puzzle that requires mixing packing materials at Manny's office to cause a chemical reaction. Manny knows that this is how these things interact, but the player doesn't. And because Manny has been stuck in that dead-end job for years and years, he has no reason to specifically pontificate about this interaction out loud, to no one but himself. That would be ham-fisted. And there's absolutely no ham left on this guy's fists, I can promise you that.

As a fun piece of trivia, the same fellow composed the soundtrack for this game and the aformentioned "Sly 2". The track titled "Blue Hector" is probably my favorite from the score, but you won't find a bad song among the bunch.

WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne (PC, 2003)

WarCraft 3's "World Editor" is where I learned how to program. Using a language called JASS (Just Another Scripting Syntax), you could go beyond the confines of the drag-and-drop event editor and produce some truly impressive things. I've seen nearly every genre of game recreated in WarCraft 3, including arena shooters.

Unfortunately, in 2020, Blizzard decided to fully lobotomize themselves by releasing "WarCraft 3: Reforged", and in the same swift motion, permanently decommissioned the original WarCraft 3. I'm unclear on if the old custom maps still work, but I have to imagine that some percentage of them became lost or broken in the migration.

My favorite of these custom maps was "Island Troll Tribes", but…

DOTA 2 (PC, 2011)

…This led directly in to me playing DOTA 2 when it rolled out as a private beta back in 2011. I have a fun relationship with the MOBA genre. I call them "DOTAlikes", because I think "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena" is vague enough to describe basically every PvP game in existence, when in reality the term is typcially meant to convey the specificity of lane-pushers.

Anyway, a lot of people cite these types of games as being rage-enducing exercises in self-loathing. This is probably true, to a point. But in my case, DOTA taught me a valuable lesson in anger management: it bombards you with so many small grievances, that you swiftly learn that you simply cannot afford to mad at every little thing, or it really will burn you out completely. I think a lot of players fail to reach this epiphany and live in a hell of their own making. But I have achieved enlightenment and find DOTA to be a chill adventure. At the time of this writing, I'm a pretty good Warlock player.

It likely also helps that I've been playing consistently with the same friend since 2011. Some people go hang out at bars, we hang out in the offlane.

Pokemon Pearl (Nintendo DS, 2006)

If you're reading this, you probably already know me as a "Pokemon Guy"; I talk at length on stream about my adventues as an officially-certified "Pokemon Professor", which mostly just means that I am allowed to represent the company at official events. What you may not know is that my Pokemon journey started with "Pokemon Pearl". I don't have this game on the list because I think it's the best game in the franchise, but rather because it was my first.

When I tell people this, they tend to think that means that I'm signifigantly younger than I let on. This is not the case; in truth, I simply did not gain access to Nintendo products until most of the way through primary school. I never owned a GameBoy, despite co-existing with them for a long time.

If nothing else, "Pokemon Pearl" (and its related versions) get high praises for introducing online connectivity to the franchise, which opened the gates for serious competition that eventually became the modern VGC circuit. I also think the splitting of moves within types between Special and Physical damage classifications did some extremley heavy lifting in allowing certain Pokemon to become useful, and in expanding the future design space of the franchise.

Just this past weekend, I had to transfer up my Toys-R-Us promotional Arceus into the modern games, and I was taken aback by how much care and effort they put in to these games to allow them to fit together year after year. You can use DS Download Play to get an ad-hoc app that interacts with your Generation 4 cartridge to bring Pokemon into the Generation 5 games, and this app even has a minigame associated with it.

Anyway, while far from perfect, I look back on "Pokemon Pearl" quite fondly. It certainly altered the course of my life, even if I didn't realize it at the time. I have no shortage of posts and projects relating to the Pokemon franchise, if you'd like to look around.

Closing Remarks

Video games. Thank you to Margo for the lovely art used in the thumbnail.