SEAMAN

With my senior year of high school came the NATO bombing and a somewhat late fad for those pocket-sized pet sim clones every girl had attached to their wallet chain. Absolutely convinced  that no pet sim could ever be put to good use I came to one of my rich friend's Belgrade apartments two or three months afterwards and realised that Sega proved me wrong. Rearing a fish-like creature through its philogeny/ontogeny until a fully formed surly young man-fish starts conversing with you and making you feel like a failed father was confusing and wonderful at the same time. For a pre 00s game to have controls that primarily consist of talking into a special microphone, a life-like facial expressiveness of the main character, the impression you're left with that your character gains experience and wisdom as you talk to him on a number of serious and ludicrous topics (don't know what algorithms they used , but they did a great job here), and being able to hear some Leonard Nimoy on top of it all was a huge breakthrough for a simple game. And I still often think about the underlying themes or viewpoints the author might have wanted to express- why the fish, why the face, whether it has to do with Christianity, conformity, Creationism vs Evolutionism, a failed deiurge  or if it's just about the absurdity of family life and the distorted view that different generations might have of one another.

I wish other titles followed suit and explored  it more, maybe even develop a genre in its own right. This way we're left with AI assistants who are simly boring, and tell on you.

METAL SLUG

Does humour belong in music and games? It certainly does as it distorts and makes fun of a canon developed around an approach. Metal Slug is no exception - instead of coming up with an entirely different concept of a side-scrolling shoot 'em up, the game makes fun of our  herd-mentality understanding of wars that others fight somewhere in some developing countries. The comedy is implied in derision, in the awkward movements of the characters, their fear of losing lives in a battlefield that gets masked by their love for carnage and war toys, the thin storyline that cartoonish bodycount scenes try to make up for, the background that resembles a HOPA game that supports the bodycount approach - it's all hillarious and works incredibly well. The gameplay itself is addictive, the controls are just smooth enough to keep you glued to your seat while being sluggish enough to irk you. It is also one of those games that become even more interesting in a 2-player session as you  can now both recreate your childhood dominated by cultural heroes of cheap animations and movies (wrestlers,MOTUs,Cover Ups, Rambos, Commandos and all those other moments in popular history of the 80s that other games had immortalized as well). Every bromance naturally has to  include jumping on boats, wearing machines and wreaking havoc upon a made-up world. Another few thousand coins and your muscle memory reclaimed and you're there.

COMIX ZONE

Comix Zone was a dream come true for everyone old enough to play games at the time. The appeal of this game wasn't that it was a great  beat 'em up with excellent graphics, no. The magic of this game lies in the fact that it managed to succeed where ordinary comic books failed- at being visibly interactive. Sure, there were attempts at making comic books with alternate endings and branching points in it, but this game was the first to persuade us we were in an actual comic book with many comic book cliches being laughed at (the narrator, aide,stale lines of the main protagonist and its sign-of-the-times clothes etc). Being able to physically destroy the panels and its edges and to jump from one panel to the other was the most unique thing this 13-year old has ever seen.You can't move around as freely as you'd want to throughout the world of this comic and there are pointers indicating where you should/will go , but then again if you could it would be most unappealing to you as a reader of the comic book you are playing, wouldn't it? :)