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The Top 25 Video Game Villains of Every Subtype Imaginable
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<blockquote data-quote="CC13" data-source="post: 76204" data-attributes="member: 1151"><p>OK, we're back! First, here's an FAQ concerning this and future lists:</p><p></p><p>Q: How did you decide on the makeup of this list?</p><p>A: Each list gets ranked on a witch's brew of personality, gameplay, influence, timelessness and several other factors, to some greater or lesser degree. The interplay of all these elements on the lists is what gives each one its own unique personality. Here, gameplay and influence mostly carried the day, with personality and timelessness serving more as tie-breaking factors than primary ones for ranking purposes (although personality became noticeably more important by the time we reach the top 10 or so on this list). Gameplay will remain an important factor on all remaining lists, but influence may not be so easily quantified going forward...</p><p></p><p>Q: Hey! You snubbed one of my favorites!</p><p>A: Aside from the obligatory statement about how these lists are are at least somewhat subjective (and the obligatory joke that this isn't really a question), here are my justifications for some of the higher-profile snubs from the list:</p><p></p><p>-The Fleet (Rampart): As we have already discussed, 1990 wasn't a good year for Atari Games, but there was at least one incontrovertible bright spot: Rampart. As the progenitor of tower defense games, Rampart has had a huge influence on the face of gaming. Your objectives vary depending on whether you play single-player (where you attempt to fend off an invading fleet) or multiplayer (where you try to destroy the other players' castles), but the core mechanics remain the same: you have to enclose land on the map to give you more room to lay down cannons, then fire on your enemies, then repair the damage your enemies managed to do to you. If you fail to have any enclosed land under your control before the building phase's time is up, you are automatically defeated.</p><p></p><p>-The Helicopter (Armor Attack): 1980 was a bumper crop for the video arcade and arguably its best year ever. From Atari's <em>Battlezone</em> to Midway's <em>Wizard of Wor</em> to Stern's <em>Berzerk</em> to Williams' <em>Defender</em>, it seemed as though arcade manufacturers had all decided to send the Carter era out with a bang. The downside to all these amazing games coming out around the same time is that many other deserving titles got overlooked, including Cinematronics' <em>Armor Attack</em>. Basically, the game took the formula of Atari's <em>Combat</em>, added in a mobile-but-fragile helicopter that also partially governed the score for destroying enemy tanks depending on how many choppers you had downed and threw on a spiffy coat of vector-graphics paint. Though it was great fun (and also one of the premier titles on the ill-starred Vectrex), it didn't push the envelope quite enough for me at the time. That being said, I might reconsider if I ever have occasion to come back to this list and edit it, as Vectrex Regeneration has done a fantastic job of showing me what might have been for the Vectrex if not for The Great Video Game Crash of 1983.</p><p></p><p>-The Mystic Hurler (Fortress of Narzod): If there's one thing the Vectrex did superbly, it was shmups. The Vectrex port of Scramble could well be that game's definitive home version, while Vectrex fans often argue that MineStorm is better at being Asteroids than Asteroids and Solar Quest brought a surprising amount of depth to the table for an early-'80s single-screen shmup, but one game stood above all others on the little arcade cabinet that woulda, coulda, shoulda: Fortress of Narzod! Simulating depth by having you go into the screen was the least of FoN's bright ideas–careful ricocheting of your shots is the cornerstone of strategy (the shots bounce off the walls and can also kill <em>you</em> if they bounce back your way), while Warbirds can prove an invaluable asset if you shoot them at the right spot or an insufferable nuisance hanging ever outside your blaster's reach while they fire upon you with impunity. Later levels add Spikers (the ground enemies' shots) that split when you hit one with your bullets, just to make the fight even more hair-raising, but the greatest challenge of all awaits you if you can clear the Upper Roadway (something I have never personally achieved, despite holding the #7 score on the game's GameCenter leaderboard), you will face the Mystic Hurler, a cruel beast with an infinite supply of splitting Spikers and the ability to absorb six of your blasts before going down and taking the Fortress of Narzod with it. It's a tough road, but I'm sure I'll feel like I earned it once I finally reach the Mystic Hurler and show him who's the king of vector graphics!</p><p></p><p>-The Reptilons (Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters): I love '50s kitsch (I <em>am</em> a MSTie, after all), but Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters doesn't quite do it for me. The Hall joystick makes for tight gameplay and the Gauntlet-esque action is pretty fun, but I've always despised 3/4-isometric view games. I still play this one from time to time, but I usually spend my time on games that do a bit more for me.</p><p></p><p>-The Xybots (Xybots): Speaking of Gauntlet, Xybots was very nearly Gauntlet III, but management informed the design team that fantasy was so five minutes ago, so they came up with a sci-fi theme instead. The results was Xybots, a fantastic little corridor shooter often marked as the first free-roaming third-person shooter ever released. The game mechanics owe a considerable amount to Gauntlet, with constantly decreasing health and multiple exits from some levels being only two design ideas Xybots has in common with the series, but Xybots also has much more frequent speech, a shop where you can buy items with coins scattered through the levels, a pretty rad soundtrack and tough boss battles with the Master Xybot to its name, among other things. If I had occasion to take a mulligan on the past list, I might end up putting The Xybots in there.</p><p></p><p>Q: What other lists do you have planned for the future?</p><p>A: I have 8 Top 25 Video Games Villains lists already written (Nintendo, non-Squeenix JRPGs, pre-1991 Western PC games, Sega, Square Enix, Western console & arcade games of the '90s, Western PC games of the '90s & Western console & handheld games since 2001), in addition to at least 3 more that are still in the planning phases (new-school Japanese games, old-school Japanese games & Western PC games since 2001). Also, keep your eyes peeled for some surprises, because you never can tell what I have up my sleeve!</p><p></p><p>Q: Why do you divide up video gaming the way you do?</p><p>A: To my mind, this method really is the only way that allows for sensible comparisons between games. It really doesn't make for a fair comparison to look at, say, BioShock on one hand and Armor Attack on the other–not only has the available technology skyrocketed in power since Armor Attack's day, but the expectations of narrative & world-building have also left most of the games of Armor Attack's day behind. Thus, a temporal component was necessary to keep these expectations from unduly dinging deserving old-school games & characters. The cutoff years I chose were not chosen capriciously, either, as 1991 gave us Street Fighter II (a literal game-changer for arcades everywhere), Sonic the Hedgehog, who spearheaded the first real challenge to Nintendo's dominance of the North American & Japanese video game markets) and the incorporation of numerous influential American PC game developers, including Blizzard Entertainment, Bungie Studios, Epic Games and id Software, while 2001 gave us The Grid (Midway's final arcade game), the XBox (the first broadly successful American-made video game console since 1980), the Game Boy Advance (the first real step forward for handheld gaming's processing power) and Windows XP (the default OS of PC gaming for over a decade).</p><p></p><p>The arcade/console vs. PC divide is admittedly at least partly a product of an America-centric viewpoint. To most American gamers, arcades are far closer kin to consoles than PCs, since most of the memorable old-school arcade conversions that came to the States landed on the NES (with Berzerk, Bionic Commando and Contra leading the pack, at least IMHO). In addition, the consoles-vs.-PCs war rages even to this day, with consoles having the clear upper hand commercially, but being looked down upon by PC gamers for their relative inflexibility and closed-shop natures (consoles require you to have a dev kit to make games for them).</p><p></p><p>Finally, the Japanese-Western divide has been the defining cultural line of video gaming since the 1970s, although it didn't become more widely known until the mid-1980s. Japan and the West are still the two main cultural blocs in terms of video games (though South Korea has also made its presence felt as of late, mostly in the mobile scene), switching off who sets the tone for gaming every 10-20 years (we're definitely in a Western-dominated age now, BTW). You can see this phenomenon at work in how poorly each region's most emblematic genre–the JRPG and the FPS, respectively–translate across cultural lines, although the JRPG has arguably translated slightly better to the West than the FPS has to Japan.</p><p></p><p>Now that that's done, here's the tally of all the correct guesses for this countdown:</p><p>D1 (Madam Q): Sean DonCarlos</p><p>D2 (The Masked Warrior): DrainoBraino/netizen</p><p>H1 (The Bees): N/A (Really? The clue wasn't <em>that</em> tough...)</p><p>H2 (The Dracons): jkonami</p><p>H3 (Mukor): Fungi</p><p>25 (Zachary Graves): dtown8532</p><p>24 (The Xenos): Fungi</p><p>23 (Flotsam): DrainoBraino</p><p>22 (Coily): DrainoBraino/netizen</p><p>21 (The Wizard of Wor): jkonami</p><p>20 (The Marble Munchers): DrainoBraino</p><p>19 (The Mad Bomber): Kolchak357</p><p>18 (Harry Hooligan): DrainoBraino (1/2)</p><p>17 (The Chefs): Kolchak357 (1/2)</p><p>16 (The 'Invincible?' Pterodactyl): netizen (1/2)</p><p>15 (Mr. Big): netizen</p><p>14 (The Host): SKILL_SHOT</p><p>13 (Malkil): netizen</p><p>12 (The Emperor of Blobolonia): Sean DonCarlos</p><p>11 (Singe): netizen</p><p>10 (The Qotile): DrainoBraino</p><p>9 (The Whole Neighborhood): DrainoBraino</p><p>8 (The Robotrons): DrainoBraino</p><p>7 (The Crocodiles) DrainoBraino</p><p>6 (The Irata): DeeEff/Sean DonCarlos</p><p>5 (The Centipede): Squid</p><p>4 (Sinistar): DrainoBraino</p><p>3 (Evil Otto): DeeEff/Kolchak357</p><p>2 (Big Brother): DeeEff/Sean DonCarlos</p><p>1 (The Duck-Dragons): DrainoBraino</p><p></p><p>Here are the final standings, from the lowest score to the highest, totaling 27.5 out of a possible 30 points:</p><p>1 point: dtown8532, SKILL_SHOT, Squid</p><p>1.5 points: DeeEff</p><p>2 points: Fungi, jkonami, Kolchak357</p><p>3 points: Sean DonCarlos</p><p>4.5 points: netizen</p><p>9.5 points: DrainoBraino</p><p></p><p>DrainoBraino takes this one in a blowout, catching fire in the Top 10, where he claimed 7 out of 10 possible points (I told you things would get easier higher up the list!), while netizen takes a respectable second, getting 3.5 of his 4.5 points in the middle third of the countdown. Both of you should watch for a PM from me with your options for the list you want me to do–I'll announce your selections once you get back to me.</p><p></p><p><strong>Next Time on The Top 25 Video Game Villains of Every Subtype Imaginable</strong>: I announce the next two planned lists and start off with DrainoBraino's list of choice!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="CC13, post: 76204, member: 1151"] OK, we're back! First, here's an FAQ concerning this and future lists: Q: How did you decide on the makeup of this list? A: Each list gets ranked on a witch's brew of personality, gameplay, influence, timelessness and several other factors, to some greater or lesser degree. The interplay of all these elements on the lists is what gives each one its own unique personality. Here, gameplay and influence mostly carried the day, with personality and timelessness serving more as tie-breaking factors than primary ones for ranking purposes (although personality became noticeably more important by the time we reach the top 10 or so on this list). Gameplay will remain an important factor on all remaining lists, but influence may not be so easily quantified going forward... Q: Hey! You snubbed one of my favorites! A: Aside from the obligatory statement about how these lists are are at least somewhat subjective (and the obligatory joke that this isn't really a question), here are my justifications for some of the higher-profile snubs from the list: -The Fleet (Rampart): As we have already discussed, 1990 wasn't a good year for Atari Games, but there was at least one incontrovertible bright spot: Rampart. As the progenitor of tower defense games, Rampart has had a huge influence on the face of gaming. Your objectives vary depending on whether you play single-player (where you attempt to fend off an invading fleet) or multiplayer (where you try to destroy the other players' castles), but the core mechanics remain the same: you have to enclose land on the map to give you more room to lay down cannons, then fire on your enemies, then repair the damage your enemies managed to do to you. If you fail to have any enclosed land under your control before the building phase's time is up, you are automatically defeated. -The Helicopter (Armor Attack): 1980 was a bumper crop for the video arcade and arguably its best year ever. From Atari's [I]Battlezone[/I] to Midway's [I]Wizard of Wor[/I] to Stern's [I]Berzerk[/I] to Williams' [I]Defender[/I], it seemed as though arcade manufacturers had all decided to send the Carter era out with a bang. The downside to all these amazing games coming out around the same time is that many other deserving titles got overlooked, including Cinematronics' [I]Armor Attack[/I]. Basically, the game took the formula of Atari's [I]Combat[/I], added in a mobile-but-fragile helicopter that also partially governed the score for destroying enemy tanks depending on how many choppers you had downed and threw on a spiffy coat of vector-graphics paint. Though it was great fun (and also one of the premier titles on the ill-starred Vectrex), it didn't push the envelope quite enough for me at the time. That being said, I might reconsider if I ever have occasion to come back to this list and edit it, as Vectrex Regeneration has done a fantastic job of showing me what might have been for the Vectrex if not for The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. -The Mystic Hurler (Fortress of Narzod): If there's one thing the Vectrex did superbly, it was shmups. The Vectrex port of Scramble could well be that game's definitive home version, while Vectrex fans often argue that MineStorm is better at being Asteroids than Asteroids and Solar Quest brought a surprising amount of depth to the table for an early-'80s single-screen shmup, but one game stood above all others on the little arcade cabinet that woulda, coulda, shoulda: Fortress of Narzod! Simulating depth by having you go into the screen was the least of FoN's bright ideas–careful ricocheting of your shots is the cornerstone of strategy (the shots bounce off the walls and can also kill [I]you[/I] if they bounce back your way), while Warbirds can prove an invaluable asset if you shoot them at the right spot or an insufferable nuisance hanging ever outside your blaster's reach while they fire upon you with impunity. Later levels add Spikers (the ground enemies' shots) that split when you hit one with your bullets, just to make the fight even more hair-raising, but the greatest challenge of all awaits you if you can clear the Upper Roadway (something I have never personally achieved, despite holding the #7 score on the game's GameCenter leaderboard), you will face the Mystic Hurler, a cruel beast with an infinite supply of splitting Spikers and the ability to absorb six of your blasts before going down and taking the Fortress of Narzod with it. It's a tough road, but I'm sure I'll feel like I earned it once I finally reach the Mystic Hurler and show him who's the king of vector graphics! -The Reptilons (Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters): I love '50s kitsch (I [I]am[/I] a MSTie, after all), but Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters doesn't quite do it for me. The Hall joystick makes for tight gameplay and the Gauntlet-esque action is pretty fun, but I've always despised 3/4-isometric view games. I still play this one from time to time, but I usually spend my time on games that do a bit more for me. -The Xybots (Xybots): Speaking of Gauntlet, Xybots was very nearly Gauntlet III, but management informed the design team that fantasy was so five minutes ago, so they came up with a sci-fi theme instead. The results was Xybots, a fantastic little corridor shooter often marked as the first free-roaming third-person shooter ever released. The game mechanics owe a considerable amount to Gauntlet, with constantly decreasing health and multiple exits from some levels being only two design ideas Xybots has in common with the series, but Xybots also has much more frequent speech, a shop where you can buy items with coins scattered through the levels, a pretty rad soundtrack and tough boss battles with the Master Xybot to its name, among other things. If I had occasion to take a mulligan on the past list, I might end up putting The Xybots in there. Q: What other lists do you have planned for the future? A: I have 8 Top 25 Video Games Villains lists already written (Nintendo, non-Squeenix JRPGs, pre-1991 Western PC games, Sega, Square Enix, Western console & arcade games of the '90s, Western PC games of the '90s & Western console & handheld games since 2001), in addition to at least 3 more that are still in the planning phases (new-school Japanese games, old-school Japanese games & Western PC games since 2001). Also, keep your eyes peeled for some surprises, because you never can tell what I have up my sleeve! Q: Why do you divide up video gaming the way you do? A: To my mind, this method really is the only way that allows for sensible comparisons between games. It really doesn't make for a fair comparison to look at, say, BioShock on one hand and Armor Attack on the other–not only has the available technology skyrocketed in power since Armor Attack's day, but the expectations of narrative & world-building have also left most of the games of Armor Attack's day behind. Thus, a temporal component was necessary to keep these expectations from unduly dinging deserving old-school games & characters. The cutoff years I chose were not chosen capriciously, either, as 1991 gave us Street Fighter II (a literal game-changer for arcades everywhere), Sonic the Hedgehog, who spearheaded the first real challenge to Nintendo's dominance of the North American & Japanese video game markets) and the incorporation of numerous influential American PC game developers, including Blizzard Entertainment, Bungie Studios, Epic Games and id Software, while 2001 gave us The Grid (Midway's final arcade game), the XBox (the first broadly successful American-made video game console since 1980), the Game Boy Advance (the first real step forward for handheld gaming's processing power) and Windows XP (the default OS of PC gaming for over a decade). The arcade/console vs. PC divide is admittedly at least partly a product of an America-centric viewpoint. To most American gamers, arcades are far closer kin to consoles than PCs, since most of the memorable old-school arcade conversions that came to the States landed on the NES (with Berzerk, Bionic Commando and Contra leading the pack, at least IMHO). In addition, the consoles-vs.-PCs war rages even to this day, with consoles having the clear upper hand commercially, but being looked down upon by PC gamers for their relative inflexibility and closed-shop natures (consoles require you to have a dev kit to make games for them). Finally, the Japanese-Western divide has been the defining cultural line of video gaming since the 1970s, although it didn't become more widely known until the mid-1980s. Japan and the West are still the two main cultural blocs in terms of video games (though South Korea has also made its presence felt as of late, mostly in the mobile scene), switching off who sets the tone for gaming every 10-20 years (we're definitely in a Western-dominated age now, BTW). You can see this phenomenon at work in how poorly each region's most emblematic genre–the JRPG and the FPS, respectively–translate across cultural lines, although the JRPG has arguably translated slightly better to the West than the FPS has to Japan. Now that that's done, here's the tally of all the correct guesses for this countdown: D1 (Madam Q): Sean DonCarlos D2 (The Masked Warrior): DrainoBraino/netizen H1 (The Bees): N/A (Really? The clue wasn't [I]that[/I] tough...) H2 (The Dracons): jkonami H3 (Mukor): Fungi 25 (Zachary Graves): dtown8532 24 (The Xenos): Fungi 23 (Flotsam): DrainoBraino 22 (Coily): DrainoBraino/netizen 21 (The Wizard of Wor): jkonami 20 (The Marble Munchers): DrainoBraino 19 (The Mad Bomber): Kolchak357 18 (Harry Hooligan): DrainoBraino (1/2) 17 (The Chefs): Kolchak357 (1/2) 16 (The 'Invincible?' Pterodactyl): netizen (1/2) 15 (Mr. Big): netizen 14 (The Host): SKILL_SHOT 13 (Malkil): netizen 12 (The Emperor of Blobolonia): Sean DonCarlos 11 (Singe): netizen 10 (The Qotile): DrainoBraino 9 (The Whole Neighborhood): DrainoBraino 8 (The Robotrons): DrainoBraino 7 (The Crocodiles) DrainoBraino 6 (The Irata): DeeEff/Sean DonCarlos 5 (The Centipede): Squid 4 (Sinistar): DrainoBraino 3 (Evil Otto): DeeEff/Kolchak357 2 (Big Brother): DeeEff/Sean DonCarlos 1 (The Duck-Dragons): DrainoBraino Here are the final standings, from the lowest score to the highest, totaling 27.5 out of a possible 30 points: 1 point: dtown8532, SKILL_SHOT, Squid 1.5 points: DeeEff 2 points: Fungi, jkonami, Kolchak357 3 points: Sean DonCarlos 4.5 points: netizen 9.5 points: DrainoBraino DrainoBraino takes this one in a blowout, catching fire in the Top 10, where he claimed 7 out of 10 possible points (I told you things would get easier higher up the list!), while netizen takes a respectable second, getting 3.5 of his 4.5 points in the middle third of the countdown. Both of you should watch for a PM from me with your options for the list you want me to do–I'll announce your selections once you get back to me. [B]Next Time on The Top 25 Video Game Villains of Every Subtype Imaginable[/B]: I announce the next two planned lists and start off with DrainoBraino's list of choice! [/QUOTE]
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