The first real inkling of Kojima’s future insanity is found in what appears on the surface to be a relatively straightforward third-person stealth game. It has a strong claim on being the best fighting game ever made. For everything else SF2 is (including kind of weirdly racist at times), that’s all you really need to remember about it. I’d wager there isn’t another game on this list still being played professionally all over the world. #45) Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. Probably the pinnacle of the series to this day. It’s much better looking, plays better, generally feels better.

Just look at MKII in comparison to the first one. Who cares about the horrible textures when you’re flying by them at a thousand miles per hour? Extremely fast and challenging, F-Zero X is more sensory overload than precise gaming experience. The second, and in my opinion, best F-Zero game stands as the epitome of everything the series should be. Known as “Out of This World” in the States and “Outer World” in Japan, Another World is weird, sparse, imaginative and highly influential - even outside its genre, where young developers such as Hideo Kojima and Fumito Ueda latched onto its austere aesthetic vision and cinematic cutscenes. #48) Another World. Delphine Software, 1991. Loud, offensive and staggeringly controversial (it’s hard to conceive of a game receiving the kind of backlash today that MKI did 25 years ago), it’s also maybe not as good of a game as you remember. If the 90s were the Golden Age of fighting games, the first few Mortal Kombat releases were their Punk phase. One of the best platformers of its day has not held up very well by contemporary standards, but it’s still a fun enough diversion. I put some grades on these games, but they’re not super important, and really just represent letter grades translated to numbers (9.5 = A+, 9.0 = A, on so on). Some of the former games are the pinnacle of their craft, and while some of the latter are pale versions of what would eventually be industry classics, others are still among the best ever made, despite looking like shit.

The transition from 2D to 3D was full of trials and tribulations, but it was a necessary one. I don’t know if the 1990s were the best decade for video games, but they were certainly the most transformative.

Arcade games for mac 1990s