Recently a few friends of mine have posted their top 20 or top 25 favorite games of all time on their blogs.  Not to be outdone, I have compiled this list of my top twenty-six games of all time.  :)

26. Metroid:  Should I have included this?  I never truly played the game as it was meant to be played.  I just entered the “Justin Bailey” code and explored to see how far I could get.  This was how I would frequently spend several hours in the afternoon when I got home from school.  But this game was more or less my introduction to video games so I think it must be included.
25. New Super Mario Bros.:  I ranked this game kind of low because it is very recent and may not stand the test of time, but the game was fantastic.  It was a little on the easy side—I mean, I managed to get everything in the game without using any FAQs.  But it was great, and I liked that they resisted the urge to include elements like flying from SMB3 and SMW—you actually want to get fire flowers again!  What I’d really love to see next is New Super Mario Bros. 2, such that NSMB2:SMB2::NSMB:SMB.
24. Half Life 2:  Another one that might be higher if it weren’t for the fact that I am just now playing through it, but it has every indication of being a favorite.  With PC games I don’t mind waiting until they are cheaper and patched.  I consider any PC game straight out of the box to be more like a public beta than a final release.  But I’m a console gamer at heart.
23. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles In Time:  This may seem a little out of place, but it was a really fun beat-em-up game.  Not sure how well it would stand up now though.
22. Mario Kart: Double Dash:  This game was lots of fun as long as you played it the right way—two people to a kart.  I can imagine that I wouldn’t have liked this game so much if I hadn’t played through it with Garrison.  It suffered from the same problem as every other Mario Kart though: once you unlock every track you don’t really want to play anymore.
21. Goldeneye 007:  A classic.  Caverns and Frigate were my favorite levels.  I got all the cheat codes.  That was not an easy task—to get the last one I played the same stage (Facility on 00 Agent) over and over for like four hours straight!
20. Unreal Tournament:  The only FPS that I spent significant time on in multiplayer.  Morpheus r0x0r3d.
19. Donkey Kong Country:  The game that pushed the limits of 16-bit gaming to new levels.  I remember being on the phone with Peter as we tried to figure out where the last two secrets were, in order to get the coveted 101% rating.
18. Metal Gear Solid 2:  The only game for a Sony system that will make it on this list, this game was really cool.  I haven’t played MGS3 yet, maybe some day...
17. Super Mario Bros. 3:  What list would be complete without this game?  This was the upper limit of what an 8-bit system could do.  I have to confess that I never beat the game without Game Genie until I played the Super Mario All-Stars version much later.
16. Banjo-Kazooie:  3D platformers never managed to take hold like they did in 2D, but I liked them a lot, and this one was lots of fun.  I don’t really have a problem with collecting five thousand tokens in every level.
15. Animal Crossing:  I would be remiss as a list-maker if I didn’t include this game, even if it calls my sexual orientation into question.  Non-simultaneous multiplayer!  A game that you never really beat, you just sort of get tired of playing it!  Interesting sidenote: my in-laws love this game and have two avatars each.
14. Final Doom:  For those unaware, Final Doom was the Doom 2 engine, playing two complete, 32-level games (TNT: Evilution [sic] and The Plutonia Experiment).  I also loaded the “Ultimate Doom” levels (the original game plus a few new levels).  Anyway, I remember playing this when I was in high school.  Anytime I hear a song from Live’s “Secret Samadhi” album I think of this game, because I listened to it while playing for a while.  I also had a lot of fun creating a few Doom levels, and playing multiplayer with Garrison and Peter.  Of course, this was back in the day when you had to have no less than four phone lines to do a 1-on-1 death match: one for each computer and one for each person so that you could decide when your modem should call their modem.  Fun times.
13. Mega Man X:  I liked the X games much more than the main series, although I do have fond memories of holding “left” on controller 2 with my foot while playing Mega Man 3.  I remember X2 and X3 being pretty good too, but I never owned them, so only X1 is represented here.
12. Roller Coaster Tycoon:  Countless hours freshmen year of college were spent designing wicked roller coasters.  So much fun.  I’ve recently gotten Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, which is the same thing but 3D and you can ride the rides.  Only difference is I have less free time now.
11. Super Mario 64:  The first thing I did was climb a tree.  The second thing I did was jump in the moat.  So much freedom!  It was amazing!  I’d really like to see a remake of this game with modern graphics (kind of like Super Mario All Stars did with the original SMB games).
10. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest:  The best of the DKC games.  Graphics were actually improved from the first game, and gameplay was expanded, and the difficulty went up a little bit to more or less exactly where I would like it to be.
9. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem:  This game was amazing, with an unusually good storyline.  I went back through it two summers ago and still enjoyed the story.
8. Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time:  An amazing game, with innovative controls that allow you to easily do things that look incredibly cool.  Unfortunately the sequel sucked.  Anyone know if the third one was any good?  I never bothered to give it a try..
7. The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time:  Link made a transition into 3D flawlessly.  I can’t wait to play Twilight Princess this year.
6. Metroid Prime:  Another great transition to 3D (despite what Ryan says).  This game really felt more like a first-person Zelda game than a first person shooter.  All the exploration from Super Metroid was still there.  I didn’t like the sequel quite as much because it felt much more FPS-y, even though it was a decent game.
5. Super Mario RPG:  This is the only RPG I’ve ever really played unless you count the “sequels” Paper Mario and Paper Mario 2.  Owning only Nintendo systems has made it difficult to play them..  I really enjoyed watching Garrison play Skies of Arcadia though.
4. Super Metroid:  I remember the day I got this game I played for like six hours straight without a Player’s Guide or anything, made it all the way to that big room in Maridia where you use the Grapple Beam to get across the top of the room to the door going up, and there’s a platform under the door and you can use the grapple beam to spin all the way around it.  I eventually beat this game with 100% in less than three hours to get the best ending.
3. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island:  My favorite Mario game.  The graphics were a nice break from what everyone was used to, and the levels were really fun.  Too bad the “Yoshi’s Story” pseudo-sequels weren’t very good.  But now they’re actually making a true sequel for the DS!
2. The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker:  A lot of people shied away from this game because of the cartoon graphics, which is really a shame.  This is definitely my favorite Zelda game.  I loved the exploration and the vastness of the world (even if it was all water).

Drum roll please!

1. Super Smash Bros. Melee:  The best game to have in a dorm, hands down.  Junior year of college was awesome because of this game alone.  Garrison and I even organized tournaments.  I put the tournament posters back up on my site today, in case you’ve never seen them.  I wonder.. will we still be playing this game thirty years from now?  The gameplay is perfect and I think the graphics will hold up (unlike.. say.. Smash for the N64).  I am concerned that Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be unable to live up to this game.  I guess time will tell.

Some honorable mentions go out to the following great games, left out to give the list more variety: The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, Metroid Fusion, Metroid: Zero Mission, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble.

It is now year 20X5 of the history of the cosmos, and something terrible has happened.

<--- THIS IS NOT LONDON BRIDGE!

Today while making my lunch I had Fuse on in the background, and I saw a video by the girl from Black Eyed Peas called “London Bridge.”  Only, in the video she is not in front of London Bridge.  She is in front of Tower Bridge.  There have been three London Bridges in London.  The first one was the famous one and no longer exists.  The second one is currently located in Arizona.  The third one still stands, but there’s nothing special about it.  You’d think someone involved in the photo shoot would have said “You do realize that’s not London Bridge you’re posing in front of, right?”

For today’s installment I figured I’d give you guys an idea of where I work.  And if you’re someone from work, don’t worry—I have blurred out anything that might possibly be confidential.

Above you can see a pretty wide shot of my desk.

• Airplane:  This is a promotional poster that they gave us, one of a set of four, showing something that a customer has actually designed using our software.

• Rubik’s Tetrahedron:  I think this is actually a knock-off, not made by Rubik’s.  I picked it up at Stephanie’s family’s yard sale for a quarter.  It is pretty simple to solve, I can do it in like five minutes and I never had to look up any “strategy” to figure it out.

• Decoy pen:  I am very protective of my pens.  It seems that whatever pen is located on the edge of my desk is always the one that is borrowed “for just a second” and never returned.  So I keep a cheap pen there as a decoy.  Even though both types of pen are available in the supply room.. they might stop stocking the good ones right when I need one.

• Post-it notes:  Post-it notes with Unix commands I use frequently enough that I need to keep them handy, but infrequently enough that I haven’t memorized them.

• vi cheat sheets:  The vi cheat sheets that I have mentioned before.

• Chair:  My chair.  Not much to it.

• Three boxen:  Three out of four computers I manage.  The fourth is actually in the corner, under the desk.  You can see it behind the chair but I didn’t label it.  One is my main workstation, two are only used to run test scripts overnight, and one is used for collection and overnight builds of our team’s code.

Here you have the other side of my cube.

• Trash can:  I think that is self-explanatory.

• Good pens:  This is where I keep the non-decoy pens.

• Chess board:  The chessboard I mentioned in my second blog post.

• Simpsons quotes:  These quotes from a Simpsons calendar were once on my dorm room door.  Some of them are very politically incorrect, but no one has said anything in two years.

• White board:  I have blurred out the only information that could get me into trouble for putting on the web, the rest is just notes from two different conversations.  Oh, it is sitting sideways because I have nothing to hang it from the wall with.

Last but not least, we have a closer view of what I am looking at for eight hours a day.

• Watch:  I cannot use a keyboard with my watch on, so as soon as I get to work it comes off.

• Wedding photo:  A picture from our wedding that is not on this site because I have never gotten around to scanning the pictures that we got from the photographer.  It is Stephanie next to our getaway car.  The other picture (obscured by an apple juice bottle) is one that Meredith took on the day we got engaged.

• Double-pen:  A double-headed pen that makes me uneasy.  Highlighter end is neon-greenish-yellow, pen end is black.

• Binary clock:  The binary clock that my mother-in-law gave me at a wedding shower.  Ten points to the first person who can correctly tell me what time it reads.
  Hint:  it is in BCD mode, and the MSB is the top-most light in each column.
  Update:  Jonah gets the ten points for correctly identifying the time as 08:21:50.

• Black keyboard:  I spray painted my keyboard black four years ago (an idea I have to admit I copied from Garrison… imitation is the sincerest form of flattery though, right?).  I decided I’d bring it in to work.  If you work for a software company and need to see the labels on the keys, I don’t want you anywhere near my computer.

• Rear-view mirror:  I hate it when people sneak up behind me.  There was an episode of Seinfeld about this.  I got this two dollar mirror, which I think is more effective than giving all my sidling coworkers boxes of Tic-Tacs.

• telnet session:  I spend a lot of time in telnet.  I think my orange on black color scheme is easy on the eyes, and delightfully old school.

• “Curly”:  You can’t see him very well (in fact, you can see him better in the first picture), but there is this little alien-like figurine with a magnet on his head that holds paperclips (like this, only in red).  I got this in Fort Lauderdale when we were visiting Stephanie’s sister last spring.

• Apple juice:  Coke products (including Minute Maid juices) are provided for us for free.  I always drink a bottle of apple juice in the morning.  Each bottle contains 250% of your daily requirement of Vitamin C!

• Calendar:  A calendar layout I came up with.  There are no breaks between the months except an extra-bold line, and no weekends, but there is the week number.  On the left side of my monitor I also have a one-inch-wide version of the calendar that is invaluable.

Well that’s my crib!  Goodbye, MTV!

It’s a “Jump To Conclusions” mat.

I’ve been saying it for years, and CBS finally listened:  tribes in the next season of Survivor will be divided by race.  They got the ball rolling when they cast a family of black people with the last name “Black” in The Amazing Race two seasons ago, giving us the great “black family, you’ve been eliminated” line.  Now there really is going to be a black team.  Watch and see if your race wins!

I have a couple of unrelated topics to discuss today...

I’ve made several little updates to my website lately, most of which I have mentioned on the homepage.  Most recently I’ve given the photos page a new feature, where each directory now has a thumbnail, made up of four photos beneath it.  I’m still not totally pleased with the way it looks, and part of the problem is the dark background.  I got the inspiration from this article, which produces some impressive results.  Only problem with that method is that the height of the thumbnails will depend on the images involved, and I wanted them to be all the same size.  I may just get over that, or write some code to crop the images.  I’ve also encountered a problem where PHP crashes if I try to generate too many images at once.  I think I know what the problem is, and in C++ I’d just use a pointer and be done with it, but I don’t know that PHP has those.

Firefox has been crashing a lot for me since the last patch, usually when I load several pages with Flash ads.  Penny Arcade and Joystiq in particular would consistently crash Firefox.  Has anyone else had this problem?  It doesn’t seem to happen for me at home, but happens a lot at work.  The only two differences between home and work are: 1) I leave my Firefox session open for about a week at a time, so that it will remain the first icon on my taskbar and so that I won’t have to reenter a bunch of passwords; and 2) I am going through a proxy server at work.  I tried updating my flash player but that didn’t do anything.  I did find an extension called Flashblock, which (you’d never guess this from the name) blocks flash content.  Since I’ve used it I haven’t had any problems.  I’d recommend it even if you’re not having problems.

One last question—does anyone have any recommendations for video editing/DVD making in Windows?  I’d like to be able to create simple menus, just a jpeg in the background and a list of video clips to jump to.  Nothing fancy really.  I have just never gotten around to transferring our videos from the wedding and Hawaii to DVD, since my old PC just didn’t have the power to do it.  I’ve used Adobe Premiere before, but I wasn’t very impressed by it.  Any other suggestions?

I don’t consider yesterday’s post to be a real post, just a few questions for the world.  Feel free to keep responding to it, but I’m going to go on with a more typical post.

So my grandfather does not wear a seat belt in a vehicle.  This is something that drives me crazy.  When my dad was driving the van from Oak Island down to Myrtle Beach one day during our vacation, my grandfather was in the passenger seat with no seat belt, while we were going down Highway 17 at 60+ miles per hour.  I’m not sure why he does this.  I’ve been told something about needing to be able to get out of the car if there is an accident.  I’m not really sure if that’s true or not though.  But then I got to thinking—why is it illegal to not wear a seat belt?  I mean, the government can require that cars have seat belts, and it can make sure that people are educated about them.  Buy why is it the government’s responsibility to make sure that we use them?  If I don’t use a seat belt, I am not harming anyone else.  I mean, there is no law requiring that I eat three servings of fruits and vegetables a day, although that probably has a similar statistical effect on my life expectancy.  All that being said, I still don’t understand why anyone would opt to not use a seat belt, and I would probably use much harsher words to describe such a person were I not closely related to one.

I just learned something about human behavior while exploring this topic:  there is a phenomenon called risk compensation, which was “discovered” when researchers were trying to figure out why laws requiring seat belts to be worn didn’t reduce the injury or fatality rates from traffic accidents.  It seems that if you give people a safety feature—say, seat belts, air bags, or anti-lock breaks—they will drive more recklessly, so that the level of risk stays more or less the same.  So my grandfather being in the passenger seat without a seat belt may have made the rest of my family safer, by causing my dad to drive more cautiously.  And it may actually be true that you drive better after one or two beers, because you are being extra careful.  However, I wouldn’t recommend explaining that to a police officer.

Stick shifts and safety belts, bucket seats have all got to go
When I’m driving in my car, it makes my baby seem so far