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Some of the Best Game Levels of All Time
Ant writes "Destructoid has its own list (with screen shots) of some of the best levels of all time in computer and video games. Ranging from FPS titles to racing games, the list attempts to run down some of the best levels from a number of game genres." From the article: "Bark At The Moon - This is the Guitar Hero song you bust out when you want to impress your friends. Speaking as someone who has beaten the game on Expert, I don't really know why it was the last song in the game: apart from the second solo, which you can survive through strategic use of Star Power, the song is relatively easy. I personally have a much harder time getting through Cowboys From Hell. Nonetheless, the near-constant barrage of notes and chords and hammer-ons and hammer-offs make you look like a total badass, assuming you can pass it. And if you can't, well, there's always Ace of Spades."
I guess this is the worthless crap Zonk posts when his day of looking for anything remotely negative, real or imagined, against Sony and/or the PS3 comes up futile.
What? No Silent Cartographer?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
For me, nearly every level from Quake1 is a masterpiece of level design. In regard to the singleplayer maps, they're near perfect for what they were designed... however some (namely end and E4M3) also make excellent multiplayer maps. The deathmatch levels are also spectacular.
Quake 3's Q3DM16 and Q3DM17 are 2 of the best maps in the game for 1 on 1 deathmatch.
Bark at the moon is the only track in guitar hero that I enjoy.
Myth had some great levels, too. although I don't recall the names of them. I miss that game.
The original Counterstrike levels are all amazing. Especially the Dust and Aztec ones.
the original Prince of persia had a vast majority of its levels very well designed as well.
as to poor design... FEAR (for 360, at least) and Condemned (360) had some of the most poorly designed and unrealistic levels I've ever played. They feel like they were designed for a game and couldn't possibly exist in real life.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Why do people take nostalgic game levels and even attempt to post a top 10 list of something so vague? There are probably hundreds of levels that tickle just about every gamer who's ever played them.
'Tis not journalism to say that "world 1-1" in the original SMB was among the best levels ever built.
Sometimes you go so fast your ally dies. Then they steal lives off you.
God spoke to me.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Team Fortress 2Fort4 is hands down the greatest Game Level ever designed. This was Team Fortress, it defined the game. Its shocking it didn't get a mention.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Simple, yet effective. There isn't a more beautiful joy than picking up a sniper rifle, finding a level you like and taking an enemy's head clean off their shoulders from the other side of the map.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
...but the level in HL where you go up the stairs, through a door, and into a warehouse with catwalks, boxes, and, oh yeah, a squad of grenade-throwing marines. IIRC, that was the first pitched battle with marines you had in the game, and the first time I played through it, I could have sworn the marines were really people.
The scripting was great, and you tie that into the final confirmation that, yep, the marines are Not Your Friends...it was fantastic.
Unfortunately, of course, it really doesn't hold up as well in replay value, since the scripting becomes very predictable very quickly. But it's gotta be worth at least an honorable mention.
Then there's E1M1 in good old Doom, which is on the same level as SMB 1-1 for me in terms of knowing where everything is, and being able to run through it with my eyes closed.
Then there's Pokemon City in Super Smash Bros, which was the perfect peak of mayhem for that game.
I'm sure I'll think of more as the evening progresses, too.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
1. Top Ten Levels of all Time
2. The 20 Worst Games Ever
3. Games That Advanced The Art Of Storytelling
4. Today's Best Dreamcast Games
5. What Are Your Top Five 'Comfort' Games?
6. Next-Gen's Top 20 From Tokyo
7. The Top 5 Games of All Time
8. The Top 100 Best-Selling PC Games of the Century
9. ?????
10. Profit!
Seriously, it is getting ridiculous. I didn't even have to look back further than September this year. And none of those lists was any less arbitrary than this one.
blow your mind already
Come on guys. Vampire. The Hotel level. Best level of all time, in anything, ever. The game primes you for wading through a slaughterfest with some early kill-some-dudes missions, then dumps you in a level with creepy shit happening non-stop, and absolutely nothing to shoot/slash at. I convinced my girlfriend to play through the game until after the hotel level (maybe 2, 3 hours of gameplay in total). She was utterly terrified of the hotel, for like the hour it took her to play. Then the game crashed right afterwards.
Then I beat the level in like seven minutes flat, replaying it. She still hates me.
Bard's Tale baby. Mangor's Castle??
They picked the opening sequence, which is very good, but for me the "Night of the Living Dead" bit where you're defending the house against hordes of zombies was better. And I think the Village level in Mercenary mode is best of all.
I quit!
It looks like someone wrote it in MS Word and used the export to HTML option. There's garbage characters all over it to the point where I couldn't read it any more.
What about Quake 2's "The Edge" map? I believe it was the greatest deathmatch map ever created. I played about 2,000 games in that thing, and it was always a lot of fun!
Secret Cow level in Diablo 2 (AKA Moo Moo Farms)...
It's great for being a joke brought to life, the sounds as you kill the hell bovines, being rather tough, and funky means of creating the level: Wirt's leg + Tome of Town Portal.
It fails to mention popular levels as for instance CS_dust in counterstrike, not to mention the freedom of GTA "Levels".
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
More than likely, someone forgot to invoke the arcane sequences required to make MySQL not barf horribly on unicode.
The Shalebridge Cradle [PDF] level of Thief:Deadly Shadows was an awesome level. Scary as hell and full of stifling atmosphere. I have a save-game at the very beginning of the level for those times I feel like reliving something truly creepy.
Trolling is a art,
Doom 2. Level 8. Tricks and Traps.
To resolve your angst, please follow these simple instructions:
1.Click the "Preferences" link at the top.
2.Goto the "Homepage" link.
3.Scroll down to "Customize Stories on the Homepage".
4.Select any sections and choose how to display each of them.
5.Profit.
Really, this time there is no bother - the system does what it needs to and you get to miss these fluff discussions.
liqbase
Quake II - Deathmatch level 8 (Warehouse)
It's a relatively simple enclosed area, has three (tecnically, four) levels, a bit of shadow to hide in, a few lifts, nice weapon placement, and with the Lithium mod, the grappling hook improves it even more.
Safecracker.
I tried for a week to figure out the timing of that last segment of the poison safe before seeing the trapdoor... and goats!
Return to Castle Wolfenstein: MP - Beach
So damn perfect, most decent servers keep it on all the time.
The level on Mercury has always been a favorite of mine.
Who's with me?
Greenhill and Ice Cap zones from the Sonic series.
Goldeneye 007's train level was super-fun, especially if you shoot that crate in the first car and get the magic RCP-90 and storm through the train slaying EVERYTHING with extreme prejudice. That RCP-90 was magic because it took all caliber of bullet. Not at all realistic, but damn if that ain't some ownage. It was like a cheat code but you weren't really cheating.
At the age of 9 it took me 3 hours of straight play to beat this level. In case the author doesn't know what level 4 is, it is the Ice level, then Snake, then Surfboard.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Very original level.
My diagnosis would be that the database is Unicode-friendly, but the Web server doesn't know about it. It still lists ISO-8859-1 in the header, and I bet if it just said UTF8 instead, things would be peachy.
Up to 8 people crammed into that tiny level.
1 health booster
1 rocket laucher
1 quad damage.
Perfection
I'm gonna need a spec.
The map where you had two very small areas on each side of the road....or thunder mountain or whatever it was called....real fun! Amazing game too!
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
Unreal Tournament. Morpheus.
I liked the part in Zorro when the masked hero goes into the grave. Spooky music.
Also, I liked the level in Necromancer when the trees are rooting their way through the ground to fall on the spider eggs.
Of course, my favorite was BallBlaster/BallBlazer, but it didn't really have levels.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The level in teenage mutant ninja turtles where you have to swim around and disarm the bombs. In fact, that whole game still rules.
Czech language for absolute beginners
Here are some of my favorite levels, in no particular order.
Unreal Tournament - CTF Facing Worlds
This is a classic CTF level that scales to large populations quite well. With enough people, you end up having "sniper wars" trying to take out the other team's snipers at the two sniper levels on the towers... so that they don't take out your players.
There was a "Special Edition" of this map that moves all the spawn points behind the towers, as well as a sequel that wasn't quite as good as the original.
Duke Nukem 3D - Rabid Transit
Duke had lots of fun levels, this one just happens to be fun for multiplayer because of the subway running around the zone.
Super Mario Bros 3. - World 7 Fortress
One of the fortresses in World 7 is this huge, abandoned fortress... however, the exits are hidden. One of the P blocks in this stage turns the entire first room into coins, which is lots of fun to collect... even if you do miss your chance to go through the blue door that only appears when it's active.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - Hydrocity
Both Acts of Hydrocity have some fun parts, such as running along the top of water or outrunning a wall coming to crush you... while underwater.
Mario Kart: Double Dash!! - Pipe Plaza
My friends love this multiplayer arena. It's great because you can launch surprise attacks on people by jumping from the upper level to the lower one.
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages - lvl 6. Mermaid Grotto
Mermaid Grotto is interesting because you have to solve puzzles in both the past and present in order to reach the end of the dungeon. Your actions in the past affect the present.
Day of the Tentacle - Future (2193AD)
Purple Tentacle has taken over the world and turned the humans into pets. Need I say more?
Oh well, I could think of more, I'm sure, but I'm outta time.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Um... pick... well...
any of the free fly ones. Especially the final, fight-star-wolf-and-kill-them one before going into the tunnel to fight Andross.
Shalebridge Cradle.
A level so perfectly designed, it scares the crap out of me just thinking about it!
Just another harmless drunk
...or at least until another sig makes me spit Coke® all over my screen.
Coke and the Coca-Cola name are registered trademarks of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company,look out! There's one near you!
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
Top 10 Gaming Eras, In no particular order:
1. The NES Era - That was a great era.
2. The "Vision" Era (Colecovision, Intellivison) - Ooh, that was a good era, too.
3. The PS2 Era - Fantastic era!
4. The Atari 2600 Era - A fundamental era.
5. The 16-bit Era (SNES, Genesis) - Who could forget that era!
6. The 32-bit Era (PS1, N64) - At least twice as good as the 16-bit era.
And let's not forget those awkward transition eras:
6. The Turbografx 16 Era - Not really 16-bit, but still incrementally better than the NES.
7. The Saturn Era - Too soon for 32-bit?
8. The Vectrex Era - Too late for monochrome vector graphics?
9. The 360 Era - Only time will tell.
And finally...
10. The future Era - Where all of today's problems become nostalgic fodder for tomorrow's old people.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
The battleship levels (and other kind of auto-scrolling levels) are actually more annoying than interesting. They may have been good when they came out, but now it's more used as a crutch than anything.
If the character can already keep up with the camera (e.g. as in the Tool Assisted Demos), those levels are more tedious than anything since there's almost nothing to.
Some auto-scroll levels are badly designed as well, since you have to do a series of jumps within the first 1.5 seconds of the level.
Thief : Haunted Cathedral (I was so terrified the first time I heard an undead knight the hair on my head stood up and I kept looking over my shoulder (IRL) in fear of something coming up behind me.), Return to Haunted Cathedral (Somwhow on this level the AI seemed so much better than the AI I had ever seen in any other game including Thief itself, never mind that I'm a sucker for the undead.)
: Ok, Ok, I don't know the name of the mission but it's the mission where you parachute into France on D-Day. It was fantastic watching bombers being knocked out of the sky only to fall through a barn roof and scramble in the hopes of not dying. That alone made the mission worthwhile.
HL: We've Got Hostiles (Fantastic intro music, the best name of a game level ever... besdies, killing "the good guy" is fun)
HL2: The Bridge (I have a minor fear of heights, this put the hooks into me), Ravenholm (I nearly cried in Ravenholm. It's perhaps the most beautiful level both in play and in immersiveness that I've ever played in a FPS)
Alice: The Hatter Levels (for me the Hatter levels are as twisted as the game gets and really puts a face to Alice's despair.), Mechanica (If you have ANY chance of motion sickness do not play Mechanica.)
Medal Of Honor
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Mute City from F-Zero for SNES
Mario Circuit 1 from Mario Kart for SNES
sig.
The Seventh Crystal by "Saturnine", for Thief 2. Not only is it a well-designed, challenging mission with an immersive, dramatic storyline, atmospheric and spooky setting, and an innovative use of scripted cutscenes, but it contains the single most startling, adrenaline-pounding moment of any level of any game I've ever played.
And the brethren went away edified.
...is LUNIX!!!!!!!!111111one
"Shipping... And Receiving"
It's a thing of beauty -- perfect atmosphere, layout, puzzles, enemies, and environmental detail. As a game designer, this level has always humbled me.
...Falling Ship
Donkey Kong cement factory level.
Golden Eye's Facility Level. It was excellent as a multi-player level and excellent to play when trying to beat the clock. Not to mention, their was the bug where at the end of the level where you could go up to the second level and the enemies would run up to the door below to the entrance of floor you were on. Either by lack of coder insight or some game bug they never opened the door to kill you. That meant you could camp out and just mow them down from above as an endless sea of enemies poured out from the other side of the main room. Once you ran out of ammo, you simply would simply run back down stairs and open the door and 'click' instant refill of 400 rounds! Man, those were the good ole days.
My favorite battle is from the SNES game cybernator. You play as a 30 foot tall powered mech. After a raid where you kick a space station's ass, you end up falling to earth and igniting in the atmosphere. Of course enemies try to follow you and fight you as you fall to your inevitable doom. (Might as well kill them so hell won't be too lonely.) At the last second the dropship picks you up (google video Battlestar Galactica's "Battle of New Caprica".)
The games manual describes this level as "makes the Battle of Waterloo look like the Invasion of Grenada. I don't know if there is enough bad guys to justify that, but it does earn my favorite level award. Also, this level seamlessly transitioned into the next level.
What, no Sokoban? No Astral Plane? I'd like to see this guy even make it halfway to the castle!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Not sure if this counts as a 'level', per se, but the final puzzle in Myst III: Exile (with the tapestries and symbols based on words in the Journal) is definitely an all-time fav. It's sort of 'aha!', but it's still a very beautiful puzzle. I'm also shocked that Dust or Dust2 didn't make it in from CS. I'm not really into that kind of game, but I've played enough to know how wildly popular those two levels are.
Unpleasantries.
If so, then for sure CTF-OSR-ZombieJuice would win hands down. Screenshot and download link.
The wii is the revolution, comrade!
Max Payne 2, Address Unknown levels were pretty cool. The ones set in the bizarre funhouse.
The single most played map that was played back in the day was a rare Doom mod called Blastem. That map is as perfect as I've ever seen. So much that I tried recreating it as often as possible (Unreal,Quake3) but never as good as the original.
Kudos on miscounting (which happens more often then not. Sometimes they call it honorable meantion) However You forgot the hand held era, and the add-on era (second half of the 16 bit era)
Now what you need to do to get a slash dot article about it, expand each one til it's a page each. Or instead just put the line on each page, and make a random quote/joke about it. You're almost there.
Yay for websites which claim to be iso-8859-1, but are actually UTF-8.
I personally found level 3 of Space Invaders particularly compelling.
You're asked to clear a minefield... in an unshielded TIE Interceptor, while four TIE Advanceds "watch." If you survive clearing the minefield, the T/A's attack. "He's the Emperor's stool pigeon!"
You get to try and live long enough until the Emperor's cavalry arrives. Then, they ask you to race across the battlefield and inspect a shuttle approaching a Rebel cruiser and confirm that the Admiral is on board trying to defect. And blast it.
That was a pretty cool level in 1994.
If you've never taken a ship down the whirlpool, you missed out. Be sure to bring some gold to bribe the guards!
* Super Metroid levels. any of them.
* Zelda dungeons. any of them.
* Sonic the Hedgehog levels. any of them.
there are probably more from my 20+ years worth of gaming memory, but none as striking as those...
I don't feel like it...
ZZT! Pyro! Stellar Crusades! Buck Rogers!
Well, OK how about the Gold Box AD&D games? or Gauntlet?
Wizard needs food, badly!
This one I can actually see as being a decent article. If for nothing else than trendspotting.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
How could this article make a list of best game levels and not include DooM? All this horror/hell-techno gothic stile pretty much defined how level and moster designs are done for FPS games.
--Coder
Level 5 of Rez... can't think of the name of the song off-hand (the one that repeats the line "...The mind killer.") It's one of the most gorgeous gaming experiences I've ever had. I highly suggest you check it if you haven't.
6. The 32-bit Era (PS1, N64) - At least twice as good as the 16-bit era.
I have to disagree here. PS1 and N64 marked the transfer from 2D into 3D graphics. While this works for some game types - RPGs and others which don't require accurate controls or good situation awareness - it killed platformers. You just can't get the same level of control and situation awareness in 3D than you can get in 2D.
3D games also take much more resources to develop than 2D ones, since there still aren't any good 3D modellers - and with "good" I mean "learning curve is flatter than himalaya" - and especially not ones that would make content suitable for real-time game engines where the minimum polygon count is a must. They usually look worse too, especially if you compare games running in the same resolution.
So no, 32-bit era is not "twice as good as 16-bit era". It is the era where many of the problems of current games (spiraling development costs) originate. It has some good games - Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Cross - but they sure as Hell aren't twice as good as their predecessors (FF6 and Chrono Trigger).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I can't believe some of these didn't make the list.
Dark Forces/Jedi Knight : Falling Ship level.
Thief III : The Cradle.
I second whomever said the levels from Myth - The Fallen Lords.
I also second the original 2Fort4 from Quakeworld Team Fortress.
I want to throw in America's Army : Pipeline for a nod. Best from that game, IMHO.
I agree with the Beyond Good and Evil level from the article, a great, underrated game.
Original Starcraft Terran Campaign Mission 3? The one where you have to defend the base for 30 minutes while 90% of the map is Zerg controlled. Best moment is at when they send everything they've got at you with 5 minutes left on the clock. Most awesome experience ever in an RTS.
Insert Sig Here
Oh man, I remember playing this back in the mid 90s after I picked up a Roland LAPC-1 off of Ebay. The LAPC-1 was a full size card and could only fit in my crappy PC with the cover off, but the music it made blew me away. I had no idea that the Roland would really sound that much better than the Adlib I had been using.
Those old Sierra games had absolutely fantastic soundtracks.
Anybody know why new games with streamed soundtracks sound kinda crappy? Or is that just my nostalgia acting up again?
Woosh!
Horrible list IMHO. I think none of the levels in Mario Kart 64 sans starroad is something special. Funny to see he mentions that MK64 track since it is nothing special I think. And the Raven level in HL2 was only made to show off the engine of the game. Interesting that people found it so good they replayed just that section.
My homepage: www.erkan.se
Giant. Green. Clockwork. Shoe.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Level 5 100% shootdown video
And you are right, that level is amazing all the way until the very end, it gives me chills.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned Psychonauts yet. The Milkman Conspiracy level, and Lungfishopolis, are sheer genius. Definitely rated up there for the best game levels of all time.
OK so it was a pretty crap game, but the last level (before the logos, which i refuse to count as a level) with all the smiths was pretty cool. Far from perfect but the first time i did it i really got a sense of "if you see an agent you do what we do.....RUN, RUN YOUR ASS OFF". The survival aspect of it makes it memorable for me even if the game overall was rather forgettable
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
Deck16 ftw
If you play Q3A in capture the flag mode, you must try actf38 "Feel the Base", from the Alliance level pack. It's so perfect it makes me want to cry just for remembering it.
factor 966971: 966971
"Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy"
This is a sig. Deal with it.