Skummy's Top 100 Video Games Of All Time

[Skummy]

I warned you that I might do this, so here it is. Skummy's top 100 video games of all time, in something approaching a coherent descending numerical fashion.

100. Space Funeral

Genre: RPG

Developer: thecatamites

Format: PC

Released: 2010

"Your mother and I think you should leave"

Space Funeral is glorious. A disastrously ugly mindfuck of a game, constructed in RPG Maker 2003 - a tool that I wasted many, many hours of my teenage years on - and for what purpose? Who knows?

It follows the adventures of Philip - a perpetually crying man - and Leg Horse - a twisted mess of limbs who only wishes to return to its true form - through a world that is in turn hilarious, baffling, and genuinely one of the most horrifying and unsettling settings of any game I have ever played. Every single option, every move you make, every NPC you talk to...it's all a reminder of how hopeless your life is, and how deeply harrowing the world you occupy is. Everything defies convention. It's soundtracked by, amongst others, the phenomenal cult Japanese noise act Les Rallizes Denudes and Ruth White's haunting electronic renditions of the works of Baudelaire, with a side helping of creepy European jazz.

Many have tried to replicate its surreal atmosphere and cult success, and some have gone so far as to create unofficial sequels, each one feeling like a hackneyed attempt at mimicking the original, full of self-conscious "irreverence", wacky humour and knowingly "dark" dialogue. None have ever matched the sheer unfathomable fucked up weirdness of Space Funeral. There's nothing else like it. And that's probably for the best.

[SRN]

That.

Sounds.

Awesome.

[Sousa]

self-conscious "irreverence", wacky humour and knowingly "dark" dialogue

So in order to make a sequel to a weird unorthodox game they made Tales from the Crypt?

[Skummy]

99. Mountain

Genre: Mountain Simulator

Developer: David O'Reilly

Format: PC

Released: 2014

Mountain is the perfect game if you like to be constantly reminded of the simultaneous beauty and the inevitable death of all things. Which is how I spend most of my free time.

The only game more perfectly nihilistic, that more perfectly summed up the futility of existence, was a broken Pac-Man knock-off on my sister's old phone, in which the third level never ended, even after you ate all the pills. You were just left in an empty maze, being chased by ghosts. No purpose, just to survive. You'd consumed and consumed and consumed until all that was left for you was the ever-encroaching inevitably of death. That broken Pac-Man game is not on this list, but maybe it should be.

Mountain, however, is on this list. It's a game where you do next to nothing. What you do do affects nothing. Life continues exactly as it would with or without your involvement.

Your mountain is a reflection of your psyche. From there onwards, all you can do is watch as the abstracted form of your mental state takes shape in front of you, grows, and eventually dies. And there's nothing you can do about it. You can play music, you can make time go faster or slower, but your destiny is set in stone. Everything ends. Everything dies.

It's a God simulator, but a God simulator where - after creation - you are powerless to intervene. Your only control is the shapes you draw that generate the mountain in the first place, and then all you can do is watch what happens. Watch as your mountain, the physical form created from your thoughts, grows grass and trees, supports life, gets covered in its first layer of snow, becomes beautiful. Then watch as it is pummelled to death by objects being flung at it, and it eventually withers away, piled up with unconnected, unrelated junk. A few clocks. A bin. A giant die. A crashed plane. And then it dies.


Everything ends. And there's nothing you can do about it.

[Skummy]

It's a bit silly that I only managed to make it two utterly absurd entries into this list, isn't it?

[JasonM]

On 26-4-2017 at 16:22, Skummy said:

It's a bit silly that I only managed to make it two utterly absurd entries into this list, isn't it?

We're proud of you either way, Skummy.

[Liam]

It's the taking part that counts.

[METALMAN]

Interested to see which FIFA game you're going to rank highest here.

[Bobfoc]

Did you actually have a list of a hundred games written out or were you going to make it up as you went along?

[Skummy]

10 hours ago, metalman said:

Interested to see which FIFA game you're going to rank highest here.

World Cup Italia '90 on the Mega Drive might have made the list. I was shit hot as West Germany.

2 hours ago, Bobfoc said:

Did you actually have a list of a hundred games written out or were you going to make it up as you went along?

I was making it up as I went along, with a vague idea of a fair few of the games that would feature. I'll maybe pick up where I left off some time.