SPUDD 64’S TOP TEN FAVORITE VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME: 3
Talented artist and incredible friend, Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64) is counting down his top ten favorite video games. Enjoy!
- Kyle
A true classic in every since of the word!
So much has been written about the many “Zelda” games that there is really not a lot more that can be said about the mechanics, the innovation, the design, and so on. So I won’t. Instead, let me tell you a story.
As I mentioned, I played a lot of videogames from the 1980s on, although there were quite a few breaks. Mostly, I played these games on my younger brothers’ systems (they had an NES and later an SNES as well as a TurboGrafx) and in college a few of my roommates has an SNES. So while I was able to sample almost every game that came out, I was never able to spend a lot of time with any of them because I didn’t own the console. Beating Super Mario Bros. 2 (the first videogame I ever beat) was a bit of a fluke because I spent so much time in my younger brothers’ bedroom playing that game that I pissed both of them off for weeks.
That all changed when I got out of college. By this time, both of my younger brothers were adults and had moved on to PlayStations and Nintendo 64s. After a visit home one weekend, my youngest brother Zach hauled this dusty box out from under his bed and said “Here. You were always playing this thing. You can have it.” And inside was that first generation SNES complete with controllers and a crapload of games. Quite a few of the cartridges were no longer functional, but two notable games were. Earthbound (much more on that one soon) and The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past.
I had PLAYED some of the very first Zelda game, but never nearly enough to complete it. Honestly, at that time, much of the charm was lost on me so I never regretted not being able to finish. But now, as an adult in his late 20s, there was something really appealing about those simple adventures of Link. So I hauled the SNES home and after a quick trip to Radio Shack to buy the necessary equipment to connect the SNES to my TV (it really was that old) I sat down and gave it my undivided attention.
For hours.
Which turned into weeks.
And I even bought one of those small, black and white, badly typeset game guides to help me when I got stuck. Because when I was playing this, we didn’t have a home computer. Or the internet. Hardly anyone did!
But that didn’t mean jack! I LOVED this game! I played just to play! Days would go by where I didn’t even bother with the plot, I just wandered around talking to people in the game!
I can’t explain it, but there was something so charming, so engrossing, so incredibly FUN about this game that I never wanted it to end. So you can probably guess what happened next, right? After weeks of playing this thing, I had exhausted just about everything I could do. It was time to finally see how it ended. And then…the Dark World! The adventure was only half over! I think I woke up my wife and my roommate screaming with glee when I discovered that incredibly cool Dark Hyrule, and how it looked just like the evil twin of Light Hyrule.
And man, let me tell you about those Dark Hyrule trees. It is ridiculous, and honestly a little embarrassing, to admit how much Nintendo videogames have affected my own art and drawing style. And these Dark Hyrule trees, as well as the Great Deku Tree of later Zelda games, has been showing up in my art and my comics, in one way or another, for over a decade. I guess I just love the world of Zelda that much.
Since then, I have played every Zelda game Nintendo has put out. The Ocarina Of Time, Majora’s Mask, The Wind Waker, The Four Swords Adventure, The Phantom Hourglass and The Twilight Princess. I think I missed those two “Oracle” games somewhere, but I played all the rest. And I love ‘em. I love ‘em all. I don’t have a bad word to say about any of them. But still, to this day, my absolute favorite and the crowning jewel in the Zelda crown is, to me, A Link To The Past. Nothin’ better.
- Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64)