The next in my definitive list of best games of all time was another no-brainer. It's one of the few games that I played from start to finish with no other games taking up my gaming time. When I was playing this one, it's all I wanted to play. And it's also one of the best examples of why games from the past should stay in the past, no matter how nostalgic we may feel.
Wings from Cinemaware was one of the first arcade flight sims for the Commodore Amiga. I had an Amiga 2000 with 40-meg hard drive and a Commodore 1084s monitor with stereo speakers. I bought Wings on a lark when I was at the local software store thinking it would be something fun to play every once in a while. How wrong I was! It was something fun to play every waking minute until I finished! It was quite challenging, and I re-started the game many times, but in the end it was one of the finest gaming experiences I've ever had.
In Wings, you play the part of an American flyer who goes to England during WW1 to give them aid against the Huns. From the moment I first heard the drums and military music, I knew this was no ordinary arcade game. You would fly several different types of missions from balloon-busting, patrols to my least favorite, the strafing runs. Graphics were very good for it's day, but it's also the reason no one should play it now. I recently gave it a try via an Amiga emulator I found, and it was just painful to look at. I'll just keep it fresh in my memory thank you very much.
Anyway, you'd take off via a short cut scene and then be flying around using a joystick preferably. One of the awesome features of Wings was you could tell where the enemies were by where you were looking. Your viewpoint was just behind the pilot's head, and if he looked to the right, you knew there were enemies there. So in this way, you didn't have to keep flying in circles looking for the bad guys. The frame rate was choppy, even for it's time, but for some reason it just didn't matter. Strafing runs were the exception as it was a more 3rd person isometric viewpoint, almost a side-scroller. You'd fly from right to left shooting at moving trains, AA guns, infantry, etc. all the while they were shooting back. You could tell how things were going by how shot up your plane got. If there were tons of holes, you knew you were about to hit the dirt.
I can't emphasize how stirring the music was. It was the first game ever where I realized how important music was to the gaming experience. In between missions, you would write in a journal (actually, it was done for you, you just read it) about recent events in the war. I remember one journal entry in particular where a beloved member of the ground crew was killed in a raid the previous day. The music was so somber while reading it that I was actually moved. Sheer genius. During missions, it was very upbeat, military-themed with lots of percussion. If I could find this music today, I'd put it on my Ipod.
I mentioned earlier that I restarted the game several times. I did this because Cinemaware had a sort-of contest. If you sent them a disc with your saved game that had a certain condition, they sent you a very cool-looking patch (that I still have somewhere). The condition is you had to survive the entire war without dying once. So if you were ever shot down while at a high altitude, you had to start all over. If you were low enough, you had a chance of making it alive. It got very frustrating to make it almost all the way only to get hit by a lucky bullet and become a lawn dart. After several weeks of trying, I finally did it and got my patch.
If you were into gaming at the time (around 1989), you'd certainly agree that Wings should be on any person's best of all time list. It set standards that are still being set today, although the flight sim genre is pretty much in a death spiral itself. As I said, as far as selections go, this one was a no-brainer.