Hope everyone had a nice Christmas, and got as much loot as I did (electric blanket~!). Back to the countdown.

#6 Baseball Stars (NES - 1989)

What it’s about: Duh, it’s baseball. No MLB license, just a variety of wacky made-up teams. You can play as the Lovely Ladies or SNK Crushers, or make up your own team and boost their stats through winning. There’s also a season mode, where you can play up to five other teams in a 125 game season, plus there’s stat tracking in all the big categories.

Why it’s here: The mechanics. I’ve touched on this before, but Baseball Stars feels like baseball more than any other NES game. RBI baseball, while fondly remembered, had terrible fielding (I wish I had a nickel for every dribbler that turned into a triple). Bases Loaded has an enormous field, plus the hitting was very awkward. Baseball Stars basically stole the RBI control setup and improved the fielding, allowing you to dive or jump for line drives. The field is just the right size, too, so you can cover a lot of ground in the field but the ball can find gaps as well.

Building your own team is very addicting – with every win, you get a certain amount of money to boost stats. Boosted stats make your team better, which means more wins, which means more money, which means even bigger stats. It’s a vicious cycle.

The stat tracking was big - it was the first time any stats were tracked on the NES. It wasn’t perfect (you could see each player’s average and home runs, but RBI’s were only tracked for the top ten league leaders), but it was something.

The game also included the mercy rule, where if an inning ended with one team up by 10 or more runs, they automatically won. It made it easy to play a bunch of games in a short amount of time.

Downsides? No MLB license. That's about it.

Personal memories: Getting this for Christmas ’89 and spending the winter building the Hot Rods. When that team got erased, I built an even better team (the name escapes me, it was probably lame) that was ridiculously jacked. Through a 125 game season, no one hit below .600. My top player had 100 home runs and 200+ RBI’s.

Getting the ROM on my computer like two years ago and playing it regularly since. This is a game that came out over fifteen years ago, by the way. If someone could make a Baseball Stars ROM with modern day MLB players, I would crap my pants.

Next: Crime pays.

#7 Fire Pro D (Dreamcast)

What it's about: More wrestling! Only this one was made in Japan by a Japanese company (Spike) for a Japanese audience, and unsurprisingly, focuses on the various Japanese companies (although due to loose Japan copyright rules, there are quite a few Americans in the game)

Why it's here: As I alluded to in the previous post, making a good wrestling game is hard. With football or baseball games, it's not hard to match up the mechanics of what happens on the field to video game controls. But how do you present a fake sport as an actual athletic contest? As the legion of truly shitty wrestling games will tell you, it ain’t easy. Well, the Fire Pro series, which has remained largely unchanged since the early 90's, gets it right. The grapple system is easy to pick up, and built in a way to make a match more authentic (you have to start with lower impact moves and build your way up to bigger moves). There's a ton of wrestlers, moves, arenas, and match types. There was also a program for a while where Spike would create new moves and put them on the internet, so you could download them. An amazing cool deal that helped keep the game up to date.

Downsides? Yeah, the 2-D graphics are a little outdated these days, but it does allow you to fit more wrestlers on the screen in the form of 8-man tags and battle royals. It's also in Japanese, but it was made for Japan, so I can't really ding it for that. The storyline mode is just "you have to beat everyone else," but that's still fun.

Personal Memories: Buying a Dreamcast just to play this game (granted, the system was only $50 at the time). Spending most of the winter of 2001 playing this game. Finally beating Dynamite Kid after about 8 tries.

I actually have Fire Pro Returns for the PS2, but since it just came out it didn't feel right putting it on the list right now. Maybe in a few years.

Next: we hit the national pastime...

#8 WWF Wrestlefest (Arcade - 1991)

What it's about: Pick from WWF stars Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior, Earthquake, Sgt. Slaughter, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, "The Million Dollar Man" Ted Dibiase, Mr. Perfect, Big Bossman, and Smash and Crush of Demolition and challenge for the Legion of Doom's tag belts or go solo and try to win the Royal Rumble. And yes, I remembered the whole roster off the top of my head.

Why it's here: Wrestling games for the NES were pretty terrible back in the late 80's early 90's. Actually, I take that back - there were some great wrestling games (Pro Wrestling and Tecmo World Wrestling). WWF games were uniformly terrible, especially Wresltemania, one of the most dissapointing rentals of my life.

No, for a quality WWF experience you had to go the arcade. There was a previous game, WWF Superstars that came out a few years earlier, but Wrestlefest was a huge step forward - more wrestlers, more moves, more options, and even some low grade announcing ("Mr. Perfect...climbs to the top rope.")

Whoever worked on this did their homework - everyone had almost all of their signature moves (Hogan had the big boot and legdrop, Warrior did the flying tackle, gorilla press, and running splash). Sgt. Slaughter even had his Atomic Noogie~~!!!

The characters were large and detailed, a marked improvement over WWF Superstars. The control scheme was really genius, in my opinion. Remember, this was an arcade game, so things had to be kept simple. You had two buttons to tap when you locked up. If you hit one, you would do a move (and the move varied on how much damage was done) or you threw the guy into the ropes. One button was a punch, the other made you run. After 30 seconds of gameplay you knew what you were doing.

Downsides? For some reason, the computer could taunt and you couldn't. Plus the cage match was lame, as all you could do was ram a guy into the steel. Plus, why wasn't Demolition the final tag team? Who wouldn't rather play as L.O.D.? The game could be cheap as hell, too, but it was an arcade game, and arcade games are designed to seprate you from your quarters.

Personal memories: God, where to start?

I remember the summer of '91 when my friend Andy and I were in the arcade (we went in the morning so we had our choice of games). We planned on beating WWF Superstars by teaming up as Hogan and Warrior, but something got fucked up. He wanted to try again, but I decided to roam along the arcade until I came across Wrestlefest. Needless to say, if we had $500 worth of quarters we would have spent evey last dime that day.

There was the time I demolished three other guys in a trash talk filled Royal Rumble with the Warrior. And the time I sat on a bunch of guys with Earthquake.

The day I downloaded the ROM may have been the happiest of my life. Wrestlefest on my computer, for free? What a world.

By the way, we're not done with wrestling games. Not even close. Sorry.

The Shadow counts 'em doooown.

#9 Starfox 64

What it's about: Giant monkey head General Andross has invaded the Lilac system again (how do I remember this stuff?) in this sequel to the SNES hit. You, as Fox McCloud, must lead your team of animal fighter pilots through a variety of missions.

Why it's here: I had played the SNES version, which seemed like a good idea but the Super Nintendo just didn't have the technology to pull it off. No such problems on the beefed up N64 - the animation is smooth as silk, the backgrounds are gorgeous, and the characters show a lot of well, character, and actually speak (including the hyper-annoying Slippy the toad, which is one of the few downsides).

But the controls are the key - Starfox 64 boasts the best controls of any video game I've ever played. Steering is fluid and responsive, simple enough to pick up but with just enough tricks (barrell rolls, loops) to make things interesting.

The missions are fairly varied (they added a tank and submarine level), plus you can take several different routes to complete the game. There are a million cool touches, from your evil counterpart Star Wolf to the ID4 level to the ending if you make it through the hard way. Plus the tank level where you attack the train is one of my favorite gaming experiences ever.

Downsides? Besides Slippy the Toad, there is the fact that game isn't very hard, and you wish it was longer. But for a game like this to have the replay value it does says a lot.

Not for nothing, this game also included the "Rumble Pack," which caused your controller to shake if you took a hit. It's a standard feature on the PS2, but this was the first to explore that technology. Warrants a mention.

Personal memories: Playing the hell out of this game in college when I got an N64. I never even owned my own copy - I think I just borrowed Ken Heffernan's and never returned it. Sorry Ken. There was also the time I shattered Dan Dancause's high score by 100+ points. Eat it bitch.

Long time no post. Let's do something special for December. Let's do...the ten greatest video games of all time as chosen by me.

Note: I was a pretty big video game geek but I've probably played .0001% of the video games released through the years. So I'm woefully unqualified to make these decisions, but what can you do?

#10 Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (Arcade)

What it's about: 8 weirdoes from around the planet fight each other. Beat the other weirdoes, and you fight four boss weirdoes, including a Mike Tyson clone and a Spanish ninja.

Why it's on the list: Maybe the most influential game of the past 15 years. Seriously, how many fighting games owe pretty much everything to SFII - a hundred? Two hundred?

Beyond influence, it's just a phenomally fun game, especially playing against another person (the trash talk potential was through the roof). The characters were all interesting, and the controls were easy enough to get into, but complex enough that they took time to master. Everyone reading this probably got their ass kicked by that guy who was just a little too good with Ken or Ryu.

Personal memories: The first time I ever beat another human being. Once I got the hang of Chun Li's headstomp, I managed to beat this other guy with just a sliver of energy left in front of about 15 people at Playoff Arcade. Then I played my friend Sean, who I'm pretty sure let me beat him, just so I could have a winning streak (still one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for me).

Later on I kicked this guy's ass five straight times with E. Honda.

There's was also the movie, which was ridiculous for two reasons:

1. They took out the street fighting, making it into a wacky adventure movie.
2. They cast Raul Julia as M. Bison, the main bad guy and supposed baddest man on the planet. Yes, Raul Julia's last screen appearance was getting beat up by Jean Claude Van-Damme.