45. Assassin's Creed 2
I didn't play the first one, I'll say that right off the top, I heard not particularly flattering things, so i gave it a miss, but then the word on the street for the sequel was much better. Assassin's creed 2 is a great open world stealth game, set in Italy in the 15th century (sort of, yet also in 2012). The setting was great, it looked beautiful and was very different from any open world game you had played before.
As with all good open world's, there was plenty to do, both plot wise, and side mission wise to keep you playing for longer (if that's what you want). On the story side, you play as a man in the 21st century playing as an assassin in the 15th trying to uncover a secret plot by a secret organisation, but let's not spoil that too much. Gampelay can be fun, and challenging (just what you want really), with some assassination's holding you're hand too much, and not giving many options, but others letting you try all sorts of different methods. In addition to the stealth element, if you, like me, aren't very good at being sneaky, the combat is pretty good too, simple controls, but timing is key, and it looks great to boot.
For me, this was the height of the series, I just started Black Flag the other day, and though you can tell the series has advanced, you can still see that so much of the game has come from, or been influenced by 2. We'll just have to hope they can try and keep it fresh, given that Ubisoft has decided to turn it in to an annual cash cow.
44. Sonic R
Okay, I'll be honest, this game was terrible, it controlled so badly, the character's were so unbalanced it was mad, and who makes a 3D on foot racing game anyway? Yet still, I loved it, with it's whole 6 tracks and 1 hour game length time. I loved Sonic when I was young, and having a Saturn but no PS One, I didn't have a great choice in good games I could play, so naturally I was going to be getting sonic R. I hated it, and with friends we mocked it together, but then, i stopped playing it. I then realised, maybe i did like it in a way, and played some more. I got so good at it in the end, that within an hour, I could complete the game and unlock all the bonus characters (this became especially helpful when, after buying a PS One and leaving the Saturn on the shelf, going back to it, I found the memory wiped every time you turned it off, so if I wanted to use the bonus characters, I'd have to do it all over).
It was a good game to play multiplayer in the end too, whoever I was playing it, we would both appreciate it for what it was, and nothing more, just a silly racing game where you could play as a floating puppet version of a two tailed flying fox who could run at the speed of sound.
43. Street Fighter 2
Hadooken! (is that how you spell it?). I have never been a big fan of beat 'em ups. I always find i can rarely ever get to the end of the single player because I find them too hard towards the end, which leads me to frustration, which leads to me breaking something and turning the system off before I throw it through the window, yet still, this game was great. Yes, that definitely happened a few times whilst I was playing it, I had to get my game rage started early, I wouldn't want to have grown up without hearing "it's only a game" a million times over (which didn't help).
As you can probably tell from that, I preferred multiplayer. Whenever you played against someone else, you knew you could always beat them, and vice versa, and leering the special moves was vital. (down, right 120 degrees, right and a). You could spend a long time just trying to make sure you could get the special moves correct, that way, when someone just tried to to the arm thing E. Honda, the slide with M. Bison, the Electric with Blanka, or the million other moves that if you repeated over and over again you could win easily (not against the computer though, somehow), you had a way to prevent it from happening to you.
I suppose, to sum it up then, a great game to play with friends, even in this day and age (and now you can do it online so you don't have to see their hideous faces or make them squash), but you have to be patient, and have the skills to be able to get through the game solo.
42. WWE Smackdown! Here comes the pain.
Okay, so if you're not a wrestling fan, you wont give a damn about this. If you are then you will know that this game pretty much set what current WWE games, even today play like. It introduced the 2 button counter (sadly removed), the multiple grapple holds and moves and much more. It also had a great roster, even though wrestling was on the downturn from the attitude era, it still had some heat, much more so than now at least, and the roster reflected it with the likes of Goldberg, who got caught in a game in his short spell in WWE and the man on the box, BROCK LESNAR!!!! (thanks Paul).
It was also the last game that we got to see triple threat tag team ladder matches, which was very disappointing, as this was one of the match types i played the most, sure, they have 6 man money in the bank ladder matches on modern day games, but where's the fun of when you're AI tag team partner suddenly wins the match for you, when you're messing around with the announce table? Naturally it supported up to 6 player multiplayer, which was how many people the game would let you have in a match (and still is to this day, why?), not that i could ever get that many people interested in it.
Just look at the picture too, riding a bike around a parking lot while the other player tries to jump at you from the top of a lorry, what more could you want from a game like this. It's one of the 'pass the time games' (as i like to call them), which tends to be most sports games, where you can just play them while you're mind wonders, or while kind of watching TV as well, but this was one of the best of these every made.
41. Saints Row
Note, this picture may be from one of the sequels.
You might have been forgiven, before Saint's Row came out, that the GTA game series was nuts, as far as open world, car stealing, police fighting, hooker killing and gang busting games went, but Saints Row took it up to another level (so much so that GTA 4 was way too serious and was a huge let-down (for me anyway, lots of people don't agree, but each to their own I guess)). You could dress your custom character how you wanted, with clothes from all around the city bought fro different jobs, it had bizarre side missions, like insurance fraud, where you hurled yourself in front of oncoming traffic, and escort, where you drive around some important guy while a hooker gives him a 'good time' in the back.
I'll be honest, thinking about this game makes me realise that I'm not sure what was in Saints Row 1 and 2, I'm totally getting them mixed up. I do love the series as a whole though, even after 4 came in for a lot of criticism (but i liked that they tried something new, they had to with GTA 5 coming just weeks later). The series, and studio also sold for a pretty penny too when THQ went bust, i hope it wasn't this games fault (ooh, 2 THQ games in a row now).
Whichever bit was in 1 or 2, they were both great, with number 1 obviously laying the ground work for a fun series to rival what GTA had been doing so well before it, and has since (GTA 4 aside). It's zany antics, that just keep getting zanier with every game just make it stand out on it's own and not as just another GTA clone like so many others that came before it.
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