SPUDD 64’S TOP TEN FAVORITE VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME: 1
Talented artist and incredible friend, Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64) is counting down his top ten favorite video games. Enjoy!
- Kyle
SPOILER ALERT
This is it! This is the last one! And I write this without a shred of doubt or sarcasm…EarthBound is absolutely my favorite videogame EVER. And I think it’s probably the best videogame ever made. Seriously.
Why? Alright, check this out. My youngest brother gave me his Super Nintendo after he moved on to bigger better systems. I accepted it mostly out of curiosity, but this turned out to be a pivotal moment in my understanding of videogames. By the time I decided to finally hook the thing up to a TV and start playing some games, I had already played through Final Fantasy VII and some “Castlevania” games so I was no novice. Plus I had enough RPG experience to know that was the kind of game I really enjoyed.
Digging through that dusty box of SNES cartridges I came across EarthBound, a game I have never heard of. At all. The box art looked a little bit stupid too, with some big bulbously smooth golden guy. I figured it would be some kind of crazy platformer like Vectorman or Earthworm Jim so I figured I’d give it a try before pitching it. Yes, I just wrote “Pitching it.” I was going to throw away most of the games I had no interest in playing.
Within seconds of starting EarthBound I knew something was up. First off, it didn’t start like a typical platform. There was a lot of walking around, a lot of speech bubbles, and some weird stuff about a meteor falling. Even weirder, when I walked up to the meteor, a bee…yes, a BEE…started talking to me. Or something.
“In the future all is devastation?” What? And I was some dopey little kid in pajamas! And here this…bee…is telling me all about some horror from the future named Giygas that must be stopped here, in the past, or the future will be, well, devastated.
I kept playing and pretty soon I was wandering around my small little hometown of Onett. And coming from a small Midwestern town myself, it was really easy to identify with this kid Ness. It’s like I was playing the kid I grew up as.
Eventually I started meeting other friends. Jeff Andonuts. Prince Poo. Paula. I could name them, and they kind of formed into a party and…wait. This thing was an RPG? It’s like my head suddenly exploded. I couldn’t decide if EarthBound was stupidly awesome, hilariously fucked up, or both. So I kept going because I had to find out. And I wandered around on pink clouds…
…and inside a completely bizarre human-shaped tower named, appropriately enough, Dungeon Man…
…in addition to more strangeness than I could possibly describe here. By this time, I was hopelessly addicted to the game. Remember, my only other RPG experience had been playing Final Fantasy VII, a game full of magic and swords and robots and lasers and material and summons and larger than life fantasy cut-scenes. That, I thought, was what an RPG was. Not this thing. Not a 10 year old kid with a baseball bat and his friends. But, and I kid you not, I simply couldn’t stop playing.
I mean, seriously, how could you walk away from an RPG with enemies like the cookie-stealing Spiteful Crow…
…or the New Age Retro Hippie…
…or enemies that wanted to drown you in their own puke…
…or the miniboss of all minibosses, Master Belch himself, who greets your party’s arrival with a nice long huge burp…
Believe me, the above is not even the smallest portion of the incredible weirdness that goes on in EarthBound. There is also the land of Magicant, the realm inside your mind, where you can take your time, walk around and encounter the mental images of all the people you’ve seen so far in the game. All while you’re in your pajamas.
And of course, before you and your good friends finally travel even farther back in time to the final battle, the horrifying knockdown, drag-out struggle against Giygas, you learn that organic matter can’t survive the trip through time and space so your spirits must be housed in robot body duplicates. WTF?
And man is that last battle appropriately bizarre and horrific. After seemingly endless wandering through intestinal passages, you come across a colossal pile of bio-technological tubes and tentacles with a giant eyeball in the middle. The eye opens to reveal…your own head. Again, WTF? Then your rival, an annoying kid from your hometown named Pokey, descends in a spider-mech suit and is suddenly called Heavily Armed Pokey. After a long and weird battle, Pokey tires of the game and unleashes Giygas on you. Giygas, who has attacks whose form “you cannot grasp.” Do we need another WTF here?
Now, all of the above would be more than enough reason to celebrate a game as deliciously skewed as EarthBound. But what seals the deal here is the end, and the way the game plays out. Already, several times throughout the game, when the chips were down and you were close to giving up, the game would pause and some text would appear saying something like “You can do it! All you have to do is believe in yourself!” And man, as hokey as that sounds, that shit was awesome. Just awesome. Here’s the game talking to you! And there was no irony in it. None at all. It was as pure as a Saturday morning cartoon or a little league baseball game. Try hard! You can do it! You’re the hero!
And here, at the end of all things, up against an enemy you can barely survive, an enemy whose attacks “You cannot grasp,” the thing to do is pray. Not in a religious was, but in way that involves reaching out, asking everyone you’ve met in the game (and believe me, there were A LOT of characters) to help. So you do. You pray. Nine times.
And somehow, because you believed in yourself, because you tried hard, because you didn’t give up, and because your friends believed in you…you defeat Giygas. And you save the universe. Your robot bodies are spent and nearly destroyed. But it’s over. The war is over.
And like all the best stories and movies, the story doesn’t end there. You can wander around and explore the rest of the world and visit all the people you’ve met, to see what happened to them after the final battle.
You can spend hours doing this. But eventually, all things must come to an end, and you head back home, back to your little house in your little home town, and you go to sleep just the same way you were sleeping when the game began and the meteor fell.
But that pounding begins again! And your neighbor Picky brings over a letter from Pokey daring you to find him if you can!
Maybe there was nothing revolutionary, or drastically different even about EarthBound. But to this day, almost 20 years after playing my very first videogames, I have never had as much fun, been as emotionally invested, or cared so much about the characters in a game. Maybe the developers did the right thing by changing the focus of the RPG from doomed princes and tragic princesses to kids who played baseball and did good in science class. An awful lot of us were kids just like that, and an awful lot of us thought puke jokes were funny, thought hippies were weird and scary, and wished there were talking bees from the future. And who wouldn’t want to have a robot body, even if it was just for a little while. So EarthBound really succeeds because it puts you in the game, far more than even the most realistic first person shooter. EarthBound is the only game I can say that I feel like I didn’t just play it, I lived it. And for that reason, it will always be number one to me.
- Matt Kish (formerly known as Spudd 64)