OC HIGH / STUDENT NEWS AND VIEWS : video game : Top Video Games of 1994

Was 1994 the best year ever for the video game aficionado?

Speaking as someone whose experience dates back to Pong, I vote yes.

And although CD-based systems like 3DO and CD-i had strong offerings, and the 64-bit Jaguar showed tremendous promise, Sega and Nintendo successfully demonstrated the 16-bit format remains the boss.

In fact, two Super Nintendo games tied for my personal favorites of 1994 and lead my list of the best games I played this year.

When I fired up Super Metroid way back in April, I thought I’d found the best game of the year already and could sort of doze through the rest of 1994. This vast, incredibly detailed, innovative and engrossing shoot-’em-up maze kept me busy for weeks, and I’m still playing it.

But then Nintendo topped itself with the hugely successful release in November of Donkey Kong Country, the fastest-selling single-platform game in history. The wonderful graphics, great game play and imaginative interaction between the two main characters make DKC maybe the best game ever designed for a Nintendo platform.

So, with those two tied for No. 1, which games fill rest of the slots?

3. A newcomer to the video game scene, Playmates, scored big with Earthworm Jim for SNES. This bizarre and surrealistic tale of a lowly garden worm inflated to super-hero status by a lost spacesuit is a tour de force of graphic design and intricate programming.

4. Acclaim’s latest version of the controversial Mortal Kombat, MKII, made a great fighting game even better. And both the Genesis and SNES versions now have the oft-criticized, gory “finishing” moves much beloved by youthful gamers and hated by their parents.

5. Electronic Arts seems to make the Top 10 every year. This year, they make the list for a 3DO creation, Road Rash. They’ve done two versions for Genesis, but this one is the best, a devilishly amusing and highly illegal motorcycle race on public roads, with vastly improved control, better courses and a super-tough challenge.

6. Crystal Dynamics, a fairly new company making games for 3DO, scores twice, with Total Eclipse and Off-World Interceptor. TE, a wild space shooter, and O-WI, an interplanetary 4x4 death race with great graphics and nonstop action, are musts if you own a 3DO system.

7. Seen enough of Mega Man to last you for a while? Well, Capcom squeezed new life out of the titanium terror in Mega Man X for SNES. It’s the MM you’ve loved in a familiar yet all-new series of challenges.

8. Interplay’s complex and lifelike Blackthorne for SNES, which tells the tale of an exiled warrior who returns home to free his enslaved people, is worth playing just to watch the almost-human hero in action.

9. Atari scored with Wolfenstein 3D for Jaguar. This bloody, bizarre shooter, which puts you in a Nazi bunker with orders to shoot to kill, may not be the true test of 64-bit technology, but it will do until something better comes along.

10. Sega made the cut with its latest version of that hilarious hedgehog, Sonic. In Sonic 3, as he races through dozens of mazes, the whirling blue dervish continues to grow and to entertain.

Happy gaming in ’95.