1001 Games To Play Before You Die: February 2015

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

#0044 Sokoban

Man this one took me back. Remember Chip’s Challenge? A puzzle game that was included in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows 98? I had no idea that one of the key concepts of that game (pushing blocks) was introduced by a Japanese software house called Thinking Rabbit in 1982. That’s right, today we’re looking at none other than Sokoban!

First off, let me say just how hard this game was to find. Not because it’s rare, not at all. It’s the opposite that’s true really. There are SO many versions of this game, that I was completely unable to tell which version came first. So I settled on a nice flash version that you can see above. Courtesy to Sokoban.info for providing this amazing game free of charge.

Sokoban is a puzzle game developed by Hiroyuki Imabayashi. Basically, it’s “Walmart Truck Crew The Game”. In this game you play as a warehouse foreman, your job is to push crates (you can’t pull them) onto specific dots. When you push all your crates onto all the dots you move on to the next level. It is an extremely simple concept and has been implemented into nearly all genres of games. All Pokemon Games, nearly all Zelda games, Professor Layton, Prince of Persia, Half-Life (kinda), Tomb Raider, you name it. Basically it’s the block puzzle of all block puzzles.

What can I say, this game is a classic. It is a video game stripped only to its bare essentials. If video games had a minimalist movement, this would be a good contender. It is so simple that you can’t take a single element from it and still have a playable game. Story? None. Music and Sound? Not nesesary. All it needs are graphics good enough to distinguish what is what. It is so simple that it can be recreated FLAWLESSLY on the Atari 2600. That’s right, a console from 1977 with graphics that couldn’t even perfectly recreate Space Invaders can play this game without any hickups.

Being so simple makes the game nearly flawless, there’s not one bad thing I can say about this game. It’s addicting, I actually had to tear myself away in order to write this review. If you’re a fan of puzzle games, I’m sure you’d get a kick out of this. I’d tell all of you to go play this game, but, let’s face it, in one way or another, you already have. Now go play Pokemon, and move some rocks!

Up next: Tron

Why I'm taking this challenge

So! I’ve spent nearly my entire life as a Nintendo Fanboy. A rabid fanboy to the point where when my family got a brand new Playstation 2 back in ‘02 (One of the best consoles ever). I refused to play it. I refused to have anything to do with the company that stole my beloved Nintendo’s thunder! This fanboyism ran rampant in my gaming life through high school and even when I moved out to live with the woman who would one day become my wife. I still didn’t play anything but Nintendo consoles. In fact, it wasn’t until we were gifted an Xbox 360 did I FINALLY play a game on a different console. That was Bioshock, it was also the first shooter I had ever played.It became one of my favorite games of all time. The rest is history, I’ve been playing games on any console I want now.

That’s all well and good, but this means that there is an entire other gaming WORLD that I’ve never played. Never experienced in my life. I love shooters, but with the exception of the half-life series, and System shock 2, every shooter from Doom all the way up until Bioshock, I’ve never played. Not Quake, not CoD, not battlefield.

So, since I’ve missed out on nearly 30 years of gaming, I decided to take a challenge. My lovely wife got me a book called 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die I am going to play through every game in this book. Starting with Oregon Trail (1971) and finish with Bioshock Infinite (2013) I plan to do at least one generation per year. At least. And to help me keep track of what I've done, I started doing small reviews of every game.

At first I wrote these in the starment.net forums, but eventually they became too lengthy to only be posted there, so I created this blog to not only help keep me organized, but so others can follow along as well. It won't be easy, but I think it's worth it to play games that I may otherwise never have played.