Ex 'Final Fantasy' Owen Pallett Picks Top Five Video Games

Posted on Mar 5th 2010 12:30PM by Shelley White
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With 'Final Fantasy 13' finally becoming a reality for gamers outside of Japan, baroque-pop star Owen Pallett, the artist formerly known as Final Fantasy, has revealed to Spinner his top five video games of all time.

Despite shed his game-referencing stage name, there's still a place in his heart for the video games that consumed him as a teenager and once or twice a year, he will take a "three-day vacation" to park himself on the couch and do nothing but play a game. But Pallett admits he doesn't have the patience anymore to play video games on a regular basis. "Ironically, my attention span seems to have gotten shorter. I can read Tolstoy now, but I can't play an RPG."

5) 'Sin and Punishment'

I wanted to mention a Nintendo 64 game because it's probably my favourite console. I collect those games a little bit. I bought 'Sin and Punishment' when I was in Japan, but you can get it for the Wii now. It's made by my all-time favourite development team which is Treasure, they are responsible for 'Ikaruga,' 'Gradius V' and one of the most sought after cult games of all time, 'Radiant Silvergun.' 'Sin and Punishment' is almost like 'Crash Bandicoot,' just a walk and shoot sort of thing, and the plot makes no sense, but Treasure works on shoot-em-ups that are less like game design and more like choreography. It's like this beautifully executed dance routine.

4) 'Castlevania: Symphony of the Night'

This is the last of the old-guard 2D games. It's just awesome, pure fun. It's everything a 2D adventure should be. It was a very difficult game to find, but they just released it for the PlayStation network. I played it again a few months ago and it was everything I remembered.

3) 'Nethack'

It's an old Unix game, sort of a prototype for all the dungeon hack games like 'Diablo' or 'Neverwinter Nights.' It wasn't the first, but it's the most enduring and most detailed. It's all ASCII-II character and you control an @ symbol. You navigate a series of very blocky, text-based graphics and the level of detail and the amount of stuff you can do in the game is so deep. You can either play the game for 20 years and learn all its secrets or you can stumble around and figure stuff out for yourself. You get to a place where you can kill a cockatrice, and if you pick up the cockatrice corpse with your bare hands, you start to turn to stone. But if you pick it up with gloves then you can wield it as a weapon and turn your enemies to stone. It's an incredibly complicated and detailed game. And much of the gameplay is randomly generated, so you can play it again and again and again.

2) 'Tetris'

I think it's a really good example about how certain games can stimulate you in ways that no other form of entertainment can.

1) 'Ico'

It's such a nihilistic game. You're playing a boy who's been abandoned by his town. He finds himself in this castle, where he's going to be sacrificed to an evil black queen. And basically it's just about you escaping. The only pleasure you get from the game is architectural. You find this girl and you aren't sure if she's a ghost or real. And at the end of the game, you finally cross the bridge and you leave her behind. Then you end up on this beach and there's absolutely nothing to see and nothing to do. But it's almost like the juxtaposition from being in a beautiful castle and endangered. Your reward is being on this stark and eerie beach. Amazing.