I’m counting down my five best games of 2015 starting today at the fifth spot.

Rare Replay

It goes above and beyond what a collection of 30 classics should need to do.

Back around 2003 or so, the game compilation really took off. The DVD finally allowed a company’s entire history to be at the fingertips of the player. I had all three of the Midway Arcade Treasures games, several of the Namco Museums, and both of the functionally identical Sega Genesis collections on the PS2 and XBOX 360. This medium died once we realized that people would pay five dollars for one NES game rather than 40 dollars for 20 NES games sometime around 2007 or so, which is a shame, because it was one of the few game genres (If you can call ‘several games on one disc’ a genre) that I was basically guaranteed to buy. I even bought that way too expensive Super Mario All-Stars rerelease on the Wii.

Rare Replay brought the compilation back at one dollar per title. I would’ve loved this even if the game had just been a menu of thirty games, but the added features were what cemented this at the top spot. I love game history, and this was the first compilation to contain those sort of features to teach it to have games from both before and after my lifetime. Rare’s existence was what pushed me towards the XBOX 360 in 2008 – Though Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts wasn’t exactly what I wanted at the time, I still owe the developer some thanks for pushing me to the console that defined 2009 through 2014 for me, and it’s great to have the ability to see that game and ones like it again through an older mindset.

Besides, the best game on this compilation is RC Pro-Am, one of the few games released before 1990 that could seriously be considered one of my favorite games of all time, and I would’ve paid for the right to play it easily again anyway. The other 29 games are like a really neat bonus.