The Best Games I've Never Played

I’m a bad person. I’ve never played Metal Gear Solid. I’ve also never played Final Fantasy IV. Or Super Metroid. Or StarCraft. Name the required reading for almost any given genre, and there’s a good chance I’ve never touched it. I’m a jerk, and I know it. But at least I feel bad, right? At least I want to play them, right? Still, while some excuses are better than others, my responses of, “No, sir or madam, I have not yet played that,” have mostly been met with incredulity and derision. Woe and insults unto me for these great games I’ve never played.

5. Metal Gear Solid

I already touched on this, so I’ll get it out of the way quickly. I was a late adopter of the PlayStation, so the only games I owned for the system were Chrono Cross and The Legend of Dragoon—flawed gems that I remember very fondly. So, Metal Gear Solid slipped by unnoticed, not unlike its main character (awful joke; please forgive me).

A large part of this is that if my 12-year-old self had said, “Why mother, it would be just capital if you could purchase this game for me that involves a spy killing people with knives!” he’d have been laughed at grounded. (The accursed M-rating was the bane of many a child’s existence.) And by now, the game looks so dated that I’d have a rough time enjoying it without the sense of nostalgia that pulls me back to my PlayStation JRPGs. Sure, there’s The Twin Snakes, but that’s a bit pricey right now.

4. Metroid: Zero Mission

Let me at least assure you that I have played most of the Metroid series—Prime and the original NES game included, as well as the astonishingly mediocre Prime: Hunters. And, yes, people, I played Other M, a purchase for which I currently have mixed feelings. Zero Mission, however, is widely regarded as one of the best in the series, both for its faithful recreation of the original Metroid and its numerous updates that update the experience for modern audiences.

I’ve never fought Kraid or Mother Brain in the dozens of hours I’ve sunk into Metroid games. Is that not slightly weird? To be honest, I didn’t really get into the series until Trilogy hit the Wii, and I got to replay Fusion after Diabetus’s hilarious, frustrating Let’s Play. But I’ve still played precious little of the original Metroid, and Zero Mission just never materialized, much as I was interested in playing.

3. Shenmue

I don’t want to make a “sailors!” joke, and you don’t want me to, either. Let’s skip it. There was a lot working against this game when it came out: I didn’t own a Dreamcast, I hardly bought any games, and Nintendo nor a JRPG made anything I bought. Even if I had bought it, I don’t think I would have really “gotten” it at the time.

Shenmue borrowed heavily from old martial arts films starring Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, and I just wasn’t into them at the time. The hokey voice acting and general weirdness of the cast would have turned me off almost right away, and the homages to classic martial arts cinema would have been lost on me. The things I’d have once counted as negatives now hold a lot of appeal for me. I love martial arts films, especially the cheesy, over-the-top ones.

2. Deus Ex

Yes, this is a thing that happened. I’ve never played Deus Ex. And it’s probably the game I’m most ridiculed for missing. In my flimsy defense, I was never really a big PC gamer until I got hold of League of Legends and Fallout: New Vegas. That was in 2011. Fans and critics lauded Deus Ex for its great storytelling and branching paths that allowed for a variety of play styles, from stealth and hacking to foregoing anything resembling finesse and shooting everyone in the face.

Followed by the less impressive Deus Ex: Invisible War, the original looked all the better for it. And now that the third title, Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s been out for almost a year, you’d think I’d have finally played it by now. But nope, I still haven’t touched it. And do you want to know the worst part? I’ve had it in my Steam library for months.

1. Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Rare was a great studio, back in the day, releasing dozens of classic titles: Donkey Kong Country, Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazooie… and on, and on. If ever there were a third-party developer that justified the purchase of a system, Rare was it for the Nintendo 64. That’s probably why Nintendo gave Rare the freedom to take off the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers hoodie and make a game in which a pile of excrement curses at players in a musical number. ...Or maybe put it back on, in this case.

Like Metal Gear Solid, the M-rating it carried undid Conker’s for me. It was the epitome of crude humor, mixing the silliness of Looney Tunes with the vulgarity of South Park. It nailed it, taping a series of obscenities to the fourth wall and smashing through it all with a bulldozer. And putting all that aside, the game was damn good. It looked and sounded great and had tons of content. If I could go back in time and slap my younger self across the face with the cartridge, it would’ve happened by now. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is the best game I’ve never played.