ah, the good ol mario brothers. no other series of games has been as long lived on any console as the mario series has been on nintendo. from humble 8-bit beginnings to full three dimensional glory, mario has come a long way in the last 2 decades. arguably the best games in the series, super mario 3 and mario 64 are without rival. i remember the first time i ever beat mario 3, i got a screen that said 'thank you mario, but our princess is in another castle!' i almost chunked my nintendo out the window. but i think the reason mario 3 and mario 64 did so well were their imaginative levels, and easy to learn gameplay. yes, i think its fair to say that the mario franchise is one of the best games of all time ever.

Final Fantasy VIII

man, where do i start with this one. i know everyone is going to disagree with me, and youre dead wrong for doing so, but FF8 *has* to be the best Final Fantasy game. evar. yes, its even better than VI and VII, so in the immortal words of barrett wallace, "shu'up dammit!" anyways, ff8. i dont even know where to begin on this one. first of all, the musical score was flawless. go ahead and try to disagree with me if you want, but you know 'Liberi Fatali' is the best piece of music to ever grace a videogame. evar. the battle system was slightly different in FF8 than it had been in previous Final Fantasy games in that in order to use magic, you had to first steal or 'draw' it from your enemies. the use of the junction system to allocate magic and abilities allowed for total customization of your characters. even moreso than the materia system in FF7 or the job system in FF5. the story in FF8 is never dull or boring. you are squall leonheart, a member of SeeD, an elite mercenary force, whose purpose is to fight and defeat the sorceress. the cinematic scenes are impressive, even by today's standards. the only downpoint i had with this game is the overabundant lack of character development. every character had a story, sure, but you dont find anything out about anybody until the middle of the 3rd disc, well toward the end of the game. but that aside, FF8 is a damn good game, and shame on you for reading this instead of playing it.

Half-Life

if you want a good first person shooter, look no further than the original Half-Life. you take on the role of Gordon Freeman, a scientist at the Black Mesa Research Facility, who, to make a long story quite short, has a rather bad day at the office. the experiment he is conducting goes terribly awry and opens a gateway to an alien homeworld. its your job to beat the sh!t out of the aliens and marines with nothing more than your hazmat suit and your +1 crowbar of smite. half-life debuted back in 1998, and it continues to occupy hardcore gamers today. the game had a very gripping and intense storyline that never let down, which is something that is rather unheard of for first person shooters, since most FPS games are nothing but fragfest shootemups. the difficulty of Half-Life is absolutely insane. no matter how good you are at videogames, there will be parts of this game that will make you cry. seriously. you'll question your faith in god once you reach the lambda labs, or the alien homeworld for that matter. the game has an appropriate mix of action, tactics, and puzzles. and unlike most FPS games, you cant beat this game in a single afternoon. well, you can, but like i said, there will be points where you'll want to murder your computer with an instrument of stabbity death because the game gets so difficult, so its good to take a break once in a while. if there was one thing i didnt like about Half-Life, its the fact that it spawned CounterStrike, which is by far the most horribly annoying first person shooter in history. evar. but all in all, half-life is addictive, and a lot of fun to play. if you like computer games, or you have a desk job that you hate, you owe it to yourself to play Half-Life.

Tetris

you have got to be a communist if you dont like this game. or maybe youre a communist if you DO like this game. i dont know. hands down though, this has got to be one of the most popular, if not THE most popular game in history. its so easy that even your grandmother could play it. even then, its terribly addictive and way too much fun to play. once upon a time, in cold war-era soviet russia, a computer programmer by the name of Alexey Pajitnov coded out a game that consisted of a series of falling tiles. it became popular in moscow, then eastern europe, the all of europe, then it hit the states. a few litigous battles later, tetris owned, and the rest is history...

Chrono Trigger

ah, the absolute best game ever created, and my #1 favorite game of all time ever, Chrono Trigger. so perfect. so flawless. in Chrono Trigger, you take on the role of the silent oritagonist, Crono, as he and his friends travel through different eras in time in order to stop the end of the world at the hands (or spikes) of the evil Lavos, in the year 1999 AD. character development was perfect in this game. everyone had at least some kind of story. CT has insane amounts of replay value. well over ten different endings, and numerous sidequests throughout the different eras in time. the music in this game was done by none other than Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda, two of the best composers in the business. the game locales were designed by Yuji Horii of Dragon Quest fame. the characters were designed by Akira Toriyama of dragonball fame. the game was directed and produced by the man himself, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man behind every single Final Fantasy game. together, those five people composed the 'dream team' that made Chrono Trigger the penultimate game that it is. there is nothing that i dont like about Chrono Trigger. it is the definition of perfection. also worth noting is Chrono Cross, the sequel to Chrono Trigger. although not quite as good as CT in my opinion (its damn close though), it continues the story, and is awesome in its own right. you seriously failed life if youve never played CT/CC.