My Top 25
Mmm, River City Ransom. “BARF!”
My last post probably gave you some idea of what sort of games I like.
So you can get even more idea of where I’m coming from, and can decide now if we’ll never agree and you can thus make a graceful exit (door opens outwards), here is a list of my top 25 favourite games. There’s a few that are stiff to miss out, but this is basically it. I originally drew up a huge list of my favourite games on each platform, it was long and boring, and I won’t subject you to it.
Bear in mind a few things: I keep both a literal stack of unplayed games that I get cheaply, and a figurative stack of digital files from steam weekend discounts, impulse sales, and so on, and the pile is currently up to about 80 games. Also, I could only own one console per generation before becoming an adult and being able to buy as many systems as I want, so I may have missed your particular favourite. My exposure in particular to non-RPG PS1 games, XBOX games, and Sega games post-Megadrive is limited, because I never owned the systems. Lastly, these are my personal favourites. I may have played -better- games, but sometimes something about a game just sticks with you.
River City Ransom
Crystalis
Mutant League Football
Shining Force 2
Snatcher
Shadowrun (SNES)
Super Mario Kart
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Planetfall
Wasteland
System Shock 2
Knights of the Old Republic
Vampire: Bloodlines
Planescape: Torment
Deus Ex
Fallout 3
Grim Fandango
Psychonauts
Baldur’s Gate/2
World of Warcraft
Super Mario 64
Shadow of the Colossus
ICO
Rez
Why yes, I do like cyberpunk, post-apoc, Tim Schafer, and Bioware. Why do you ask? I generally like moody FPS games, western RPGs, quirky adventure games, the unique, and anything with some form of experience and/or loot grind. Mmm, purplz.
This month, all going to plan, I will sit down with Brutal Legend, and Dragon Age: Origins, both of which have the potential to be in there, based on my usual preferences. Something like Diablo 2, Mass Effect, Majora’s Mask, Okami, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half-Life 2 or any of a host of other Infocom text adventures could be in there if I wrote this on a different day.
But I didn’t.
So they aren’t.
What about my least favourite games? Well, I don’t really have the patience to tackle JRPGs anymore, unless they review very, very highly. It’s not active hate, I just don’t love them the way I did as a kid, when the longer the game, the more the value.
Real Time Strategy is another genre I don’t have much love for – I enjoyed Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, but I tried to play through Warcraft 3 to get more of the World of Warcraft background story, and I just couldn’t do it. The style of play seems foreign to my gaming skill set and just not enjoyable to me.
I don’t like 1 on 1 fighting games, either. I don’t want to remember a million moves, I don’t enjoy the blocking techniques, and I don’t like getting my shit fucked up by a guy hitting an 80-hit combo that I can’t do anything about.
Perhaps my biggest pet hate crosses genre lines: aggressively mediocre games. I’m not talking about the truly crappy like Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, E.T. or Altered Beast, but the games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, that have a framework of competency that leads you to believe they could have been something good, but have all the life sucked out of them.
My least favourite game? Halo. I’m not fond of FPS on a console at the best of times, so take this with a grain of salt, but I found this game massively uninspired. It had a colour palette like it was CGA all over again. Its way of ‘extending’ the game (and thus the value) was to make you run back through the levels, in reverse. And this was the company that made Marathon. They had a good track record. They knew better. Of course, it sold by the truckload and has a devoted team of fanboys. The series sells massively. It rated well. What do I know?
Picture shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. If it makes you feel any better, I cropped it myself.
