To me, a Perfect Game is a video game that you cannot add or subtract any elements without making it worse. Lemme give you an example:
Peggle is a perfect game
Peggle is pachinko if it was skill based and didn't smell like cigarettes. Peggle is pinball for people who hate action. Peggle is Sniper Elite, Unicorn Edition. It's the absolute perfect balance between skill and luck.
I would argue that you cannot make this game better by addition OR subtraction; every piece serves its purpose. We have several sequels and spiritual sequels to point to for this. Peggle 2 and Blast are, of course, abominations. But even cool games like Peglin have less overall appeal than Peggle. I'm not even sure adding more levels would really improve it - Peggle Nights is okay but the maps are absolutely weaker than the originals.
I have several other examples (Crazy Taxi, Katamari Damacy, Super Monkey Ball) but I wanna hear yours. What are your perfect games?
Outrun
The fact that races are usually like 10 minutes long max and there's multiple paths, so you just replay it over and over, and it's possible to get really good with it. Plus the music and vibes are excellent. Subsequent Outrun super-scaler games didn't really have the same longevity.
Ace Combat 4
Just a really good translation of air combat and flight simulation into a console experience. Looks great and runs great.
Ridge Racer Type 4
Vibes and endless replay-ability. Some of the best music and menu design. Car design is excellent. Each car is subtly different, and the way you unlock them means finishing races in a certain order.
Actual arcade cab only, you need the physical free-spinning steering wheel or the game simply doesn't work. I owned one for a few years, but gave it up when I moved from Washington state of Ontario, thinking I could easily buy another one for less than it would cost me to pay for the weight on the moving truck. This didn't quite turn out to be true; Pole Positions are notoriously fickle machines with a large number of irreplacable custom chips, placed in a board sandwich that easily overheats. Finding an original machine in working order nowadays is very, very difficult; many are now "Pi Position" machines running a hacked build of MAME on a Raspberry Pi with a custom hardware interface. There's also an FPGA replacement project that has been vaporware for decades at this point.
A game lasts a maximum of about 5 minutes; you do a qualifying lap, then you drive three laps, getting bonus points for the number of cars passed. A timer keeps you from hogging the machine forever and will ruthlessly cut off your game if you play too badly.
It looks like a racing game, but it is not a racing game at all; the race it simulates makes absolutely no physical sense. There are always more cars ahead of you, in varying patterns. They are always driving much slower than you, so you have to pass them. No, it's a dodging game, a procedural speed attack bullet hell with stock cars.
This game is fundamentally about threading needles with exquisitely precise control, with the occasional necessity to physically throw the wheel as fast as it will turn and catch it at precisely correct moment. When you're learning the game, a subtle movement of the wheel is the difference between passing a car or bumping its tire and exploding, losing huge amounts of time and momentum. Once you can complete a race without crashing, one extra tick on the optical steering sensor can be the difference between taking a turn at speed and starting a skid, losing speed which will take agonising seconds to regain. And of course, the faster you're going, the easier it is to spin out and crash. You learn this game in your body.
High level play is so unforgiving that the top two scores on Twin Galaxies have stood since 1984. The #2 score was eventually tied in 2021; the #1 score is 50 extra points, and no one has been able to figure out where the extra passed car could have come from.
Pole Position 2 adds some more courses, and I have had the chance to try them once or twice, but I don't see a reason to.
