-Videogames would have never existed if it wasn’t because they are constructed by levels. These essential parts of videogames are as important as bricks are for a house, and without them we could have never experienced the frustration of not been able to catch that extra life, or of almost touch the finish line with the tip of our fingers. So I made this list, following only one rule, I gotta pick one level per videogame.

-Since Mario Kart exists, there is a level everybody has played over and over again, and that is the Rainbow Ride level. See it as a rollercoaster of shinny colours and beautiful music that demonstrates you that eating mushrooms can make you hallucinate. Rainbow Ride might be the trippiest level of the entire Mario Kart spin off, but it’s fun to play it, specially with your pals in a racing championship mode. Imagine you grab the red shell and you take one of those loops, fire the shell and there goes your partner, to the void, aaaaah…There’s no better rejoice than defeat your enemies with a calculated shot of a shell on the butt, and there’s no better level to play Mario Kart once and again but Rainbow Ride, unless you like all the other amazing levels as well.

-Blast processing at its pinnacle! The previous levels in the Sonic games are notorious for being hard as hell, but this level is just insanity: Bumpers, jumpers, buzzers, ramps, jumps, tunnels, lots and lots of rings, extra lives, spears, enemies all over the place, and speed like you had never seen before. After playing this game the ramps of this level will keep repeating inside your head over and over again, it doesn’t matter than in the background a casino night is happening, with it’s beautiful neon lights and all, what matters is that jump, grab the ring! Get one hundred and you achieve an extra life! H no, you are gonna fall! Oh damn, I gotta start from the beginning…sweet! Weeee, I am gonna take that bumper so good right now!

-Maybe the only level that will make you feel really inside the asteroid chase of Empire Strikes Back, with barrel rolls! Not even the Star Wars games can achieve the level of tension you have here, asteroids fly every where, you have to dodge them, make them explode, and when you can’t explode them just accelerate and you can miss them by barely a centimetre. Then you have to add crazy enemies like giant moths, spider web building space ships, and hollow cylinder like asteroids with turrets. But that doesn’t end there, nope, no sir, if you arrive to the end of the level passing through 9 special rings, you will enter into a histrionic and hallucinogen version of the warp zone, filled with colourful blocks, and trippy background colours, that will transport you to a completely different route and offer you the good ending of the Asteroid field level. But if you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter, you will have a very cool final battle against a space ship that shoots rainbow lasers! What’s with Nintendo and rainbows?

-Lava has never been so funny (and bad at the gamer) before Super Metroid’s lava based level. Norfair is notorious for having some of the trickiest jumps in the history of side-scrollers, and it makes you enter into the atmosphere of Metroid with just a snap of your fingers. The best super game ever demonstrates you that all you played to reach Norfair was nothing, this is the really difficult level of the game, for the variety of situations. When you thought lava was the biggest enemy, then it comes the temperature change, extreme hot that will make Samus suit to melt with her inside it. Norfair is also famous among gamers for being, among all the other levels of the awesome game, the level they remember the most, it might be for the lava, the extreme difficulty level or for how cool it is to shoot your ice beam and freeze lava monsters that pop from under the pits in the ground.

-Goldeneye can be proud of transforming the blockbuster with Pierce Brosnan into a perfect FPS environment, and the Facility level at the Russian dam is huge prove of it. This level is a perfect representation of the movie, it looks dirty, old, rusty, and it’s filled with crazy enemies that want to kill you. It’s also one of the longest levels of the entire game. When you are half way through the level, past the security consoles and the guards, you discover the stairs that go all the way down to the scientific lab research rooms, in which you have to look for Dr. Doak and get the device to enter the containers room to meet 006, and here is when the game gets exactly like the movie: you gotta place the explosives and blow up the tanks and then the bastard of Urumov shows up and kills 006, which forces you to escape to the next level. A genius of design and action, this level was played by gamers over and over again, and it was then ported to the multiplayer of Perfect Dark under the name of “Felicity”.

-If Square-Enix can be proud of something, that’s of Kingdom Hearts’ level design. Make classic Disney movies look good in 3D is something that many will consider impossible, but this masters of conception make it more than possible. The Disney castle is the example of how Mickey Mouse’s house looks like, with a garden filled with bush statues of his classic movie sidekicks, and a library filled with books, plus a throne room that’s bigger than a football stadium of the first league. The Timeless River is, by far, the best representation of a classic Disney film in a videogame. Make Donald, Goofy and the rest of Disney character look good was “easy” since there are designs of them, but make the heartless and Sora look like part of that world without a break, it’s some achievement only the best ones can achieve. Timeless River is a perfect link between the most classic past and the most revolutionary future.

-The entire game is divided in levels, at which the scariest the most, but “The sewers” are just so kicking ass cool as scary and gritty. Leon faces here no zombies, no big clawed monsters, but giant insects! For a few moments it feels like you just stepped into the movie “Mimic” (Guillermo del Toro’s anal rape experience, I recommend every single one of you to watch it, it’s a brilliant movie, visually). The music doesn’t start until you put your feet on the smelly water and then it stops, like your breath, when you hear the thumping of the heavy bodies of the Novistadores, which to make things more difficult, are invisible, can climb up walls and ceiling, and they spit acid. This alien homage to creature and monster movies is completed with the discovery of the sewers turned into an improvised prison, inside which Leon will have to find a way to escape.

-This is an amazing level for interaction, fun and entertainment. For a few minutes you will think you are in one of those action movies, jumping from car to car in a never ending super highway chase. If you add the use of items and destructive moves, you have a level that makes the Rainbow Ride of Mario Kart look like a walk in the park. Fast paced action, platforms pop here and there, the big blue ship appears as the major platform in the level, but then it disappears and you are left to the mini flying ships and the unstable platforms. Then it comes a jump and the track disappear for some seconds, then you have a loop and the world is seen upside down, oh my god, there’s so much going on in this level it’s hard to come up with a way to describe and make you feel like what it really is.

“Tall, tall mountain” features some of the coolest things in the entire Mario 64 game. First of all, it’s a huge mountain, probably the highest one you have ever seen in a videogame, and even though is childish, is kicking cool to jump from it to land in your back and kiss goodbye to half of your life. Then you find a false wall and you enter a secret slide, which happens to be both the coolest and hardest slide of the entire game (even harder than the “Cold, cold mountain” level, and that was hard). Then you find a cloud that blows air to you and makes you lose your cap, then you find a water fall, moles throw you rocks, there’s a maze in the wall, a maze in the wall!!! And mushrooms hide a star in the void, and then you are again back to the beginning of the level, because you either failed at aiming with the cannon, you threw yourself too many times from the top of the mountain, or just because you wanted to re experience that again for yourself. Sweet!

I have to be honest, I never found the Water temple to be a hard level, maybe because I could make my mind without a problem, but we have to admit, it’s so hard, it’s awesome. You have to control the water level in every single of the floors, you have to take a careful account of all your keys, and most important, you have to face yourself. This game brings back Dark Link, which already appeared in a Link to the past, and turns him into a mean sneaky assassin that will attack you at any chance. For it’s time, the N64 demonstrated some beautiful and solid water effects, waves, splashes, bubbles and jet streams of water by the minute. This level will make you cringe, cry, but also go “awww” and mesmerize you with it’s difficulty gorgeousness. The final battle against “Morpha” will bring you back memories if you are a 80’s kid and you love James Cameron movies, which is a good parallelism to end this review, since his movies are as hard in the making as the completion of this almost impossible but absolutely original “Rubbick Cube” of videogame levels.

I based my selection of levels basically on the ones that bring more differences between each other, the ones that are unique. I also wanted to keep it out of the current generation of consoles, since every day you see an amazing level after the other, like the design of the Portals from the videogame Portal.

List by james_corck