100. Grand Theft Auto IV
Release Date: 2008
Last year: 15
Graham: I can’t stand Grand Theft Auto’s cruel, dull missions, so I used to be reliant on its buggy multiplayer if I wanted to have fun messing around in Liberty City. Thanks to a persistent modding community turning the game into a giant toybox, that’s no longer true. Now, when I visit the city, it’s packed with cars that can travel at infinite speed, and I’m a superman who carries a gravity gun. That the best way to enjoy this game has changed so much two years after its release is the perfect example of why PC gaming is great.
99. Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45
Release Date: 2006
Last year: New entry
Tim S: Quake 3 re-imagined by Remarque or Solzhenitsyn. An ecstasy of brutal fumbling, wild SMG fire, and cold, calculating elimination. What’s not to like?
98. Ultima Underworld II
Release Date: 1992
Last year: 90
Tony: It wasn’t just the graphics. You could pick stuff up. You could throw it. You could cast spells, repair your armour and fly. You could talk to the monsters. Wonderfully, richly, impossibly interactive, UUII was a game from the future. It took history a long time to catch up.
97. Max Payne
Release Date: 2001
Last year: New entry
Chris: Right when you start, you discover Max’s murdered wife and child in his own home at the hands of drug addicts. Has there ever been a beginning of a game more powerful or emotional? Exceptional noir writing and a gritty NYC underbelly setting made Max Payne one of the greats.
Rich: Nothing like trying to gracefully launch Max into a room, guns blazing, only to have him dive headfirst into a doorjamb and very slowly rub his hair down the wood as he floated to the ground. Get up, try again, get it right, and you feel like king of the underworld.
96. Football Manager 2011
Release Date: 2010
Last year: New entry
Craig: Training? Pah! My tactics? Wild and confusing. I’m more of a hands-on kind of manager, giving people calming talks, asking for their advice, before taking my team on a long, unbeaten run in Europe. I’ve no idea about football anymore, but there are enough switches to flick so that doesn’t matter.
Rich: After years of playing it safe and managing with a steady hand, I decided to go full-on mental in FM2011. I started insulting and praising players in the same breath, I changed my assistant manager’s registered name to ‘Wiggles’, and I brought in half of the Slovakian national team. All turned out to be good decisions, and all explain why I love managing footballs.
95. Audiosurf
Release Date: 2008
Last year: 92
Craig: Man up, everyone. Favourite song to surf? I’ll start: Girls Aloud’s ‘Biology’. It makes a super bouncy, fun track to dodge blocks to.
Graham: That was mine as well.
Rich: I like the songs that no one else is cool enough to like.
Craig: Ah, ‘Sound of the Underground’.
Tom: I like Feist’s version of Sea-Lion Woman – gentle opening, then bumpy with hand-claps, then batshit with a twisting guitar solo.
Cooper: Listening to music is fun and all, but if only there was a way to… play my music. Oh, there is? And it’s psychedelic euphoria? Awesome, sign me up. Audiosurf makes a game out of your MP3 library, creating interesting, unique experiences for each song. The ability to “surf” every single song (and compare stats on an online leaderboard) makes it one of the most replayable games of all time, and adds incentive to getting into new bands. Actually, I wonder what sort of level Willow Smith’s ‘Whip My Hair’ would make…
Josh: The faster, the better. I’ll toss in any punk rock I can find.
94. The Last Express
Release Date: 1997
Last year: New entry
Richard: It’s the eve of World War I, and Robert Cath is up to his ears in murder and intrigue on the Orient Express. Arguably Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner’s magnum opus, it’s one of the most atmospheric games ever made, notable for its use of real-time action and incredible attention to detail.
93. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Release Date: 2005
Last year: 96
Craig: Splinter Cell: Convicton came pretty close to digitally heisting my heart in the action-spy genre I love, but while the action is sharper, more brutal, it misses Chaos Theory’s wonderful characterisation of Sam: he threatens a man with death if he says “monkey” and has funny little chats with his boss. And the wonderful, tactile co-op is still the best of its kind.
92. Red Faction: Guerrilla
Release Date: 2009
Last year: New entry
Tom: The hostage rescue side quests made it for me. You’re charged with breaking into an EDF base, untying the three captured rebels inside, and driving off with them alive. But these hostages can die. It’s not game over, it just sucks. That makes me genuinely care about their survival, and I’ll rip buildings apart to make sure they get out alive.
91. Mount & Blade
Release Date: 2008
Last year: New entry
Evan: The progression of a campaign in M&B feels like one of those scenes from a movie where someone enters a street and starts walking toward the camera, inviting along butchers, housewives and other sidewalk-people to join their happy jaunt. The difference is: you’re a conquering swordsman or Robin Hooder, and you take that entourage of archers, pikemen and cavalry from castle to castle, liberating food from innocent farmers or slaying bandits along the way. Not to be overlooked for its graphics; it’s the joy of archery, the best sieging you’ll do in an action game, you can get married, and all while being a proper, open-ended RPG that makes you care about the troops you recruit in the same way that X-COM or Jagged Alliance might.
0. Mirror’s Edge
Release Date: 2009
Last year: 99
Tom: I only have to be mildly drunk before I start swearing this is the best game ever. It’s not, but between the fights there’s something absolutely unparalleled about the rough and tumble of scrambling around these rooftops and offices. You see yourself roll with every fall, feel every clamber, hear every breath and footfall, and at the same time you have a sense of how quiet and small it all is. Next to this vast, stingingly bright, bleach-clean city, you’re completely insignificant. Apparently that’s something I want to feel.
Rich: I ended up playing Mirror’s Edge on its hardest setting for no real reason. There, Faith feels as fragile as she looks: her tiny frame falling to two bullets. My awareness of her mortality bled into jumping sessions, and I’d find myself wincing as she smacked her ribs into white concrete. It also made running away into an artform: my feet and heart racing as I dodged sniper fire.
Graham: It has its problems, but what strikes me is that none of them feel like they’re the result of negligence. DICE didn’t make a single lazy assumption in designing their free-running shooter; they considered everything, from how interior design can help guide the player, to what Faith’s shoes should look like. Although not everything worked, that’s smart design. And hey, a lot of it did work. There’s no place in gaming I’d rather be than the gleaming city of Mirror’s Edge.
Tom S: Even Mirror’s Edge’s sewer level was a playground of primary colours interesting level design. There’s a huge underground room full of huge green and white pillars and a tiny door at the very top. After ten minutes of breathless scrambling and death defying leaps the guards appear. Cue the frantic escape in a hail of gun fire. In it’s best moments Mirror’s Edge truly captures the thrill of the chase. Running away like a coward has never been so exciting.
89. Gothic 2
Release Date: 2002
Last year: New entry
Desslock: A spiritual successor to the Ultima series, Gothic II was the first open-world RPG in the 3D age to feature NPCs that weren’t static, quest-doling kiosks. These inhabitants had their own chores and agendas, such as luring gullible do-gooders into a mugging and smoking from bongs. No cute pet dog in this one.
88. Dungeon Siege
Release Date: 2002
Last year: New entry
Josh: My friends and I spent an entire weekend at one house bashing our way through Dungeon Siege’s zombies, spiders and other ickies. Party combat systems, the ability to pause combat, and 3D graphics were welcome additions to the frantic clicking and character progression of Diablo. Man, that pack mule could kick some serious skeleton ass when it needed to.
87. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Release Date: 2006
Last year: New entry
Tony: That frantic, fumbling escape from your hotel room is reason enough to include this. There are other great, scary set-pieces, and behind the bugs and clunkiness, a genuine and admirable attempt to make a horror-adventure that’s both fun to play and true to the spirit of Call of Cthulhu.
86. StarCraft
Release Date: 1998
Last year: New entry
Rich: I only know of StarCraft in retrospect. My utter obsession with GomTV’s Global StarCraft II League means I spend hours listening to SC1 ex-players Tasteless and Artosis. For my own selfish needs, their eleven-year experience with the game makes my viewing experience immeasurably better; on another level, I realise that for a game to captivate a swathe of humanity like StarCraft did for a decade and a bit, it has to be special.
Dan: The quintessential edge-of-your-seat, fast-paced RTS. Mastering command of each of StarCraft’s three wildly diverse, yet intricately balanced races is a challenge that few will ever achieve, but it’s sure fun to try.
85. Sins of A Solar Empire
Release Date: 2008
Last year: New entry
Dan: Bombarding a planet from orbit, killing all its inhabitants and recolonizing it with your own people is a pretty good sin, I’d say.
Rich: Sometimes, when I was colonising space and sending vast capital ships to do ponderous combat against an agonisingly beautiful backdrop, I’d read the title of the game as “Bins of a Solar Empire” and laugh for ages.
Tom: Good one Rich.
84. Silent Hunter 3
Release Date: 2005
Last year: New entry
Andy: The sub sim genre really needed this one. After the disappointment of SH2, Ubisoft brought in an entirely new Romanian team to redefine the WWII submariner experience and boy did they nail it. I experienced real fear the first time I crash-dove my U-boat to escape the depth charges of a relentless British destroyer and that terror didn’t diminish one iota in the ensuing 40-minute cat-and-mouse struggle. Even Das Boot The Director’s Cut didn’t move me like this.
Tim S: The secret of SH3′s sublimity is right there in the title. Unlike 98% of combat games, this one doesn’t serve-up prey on silver platters. You must *hunt* for those rusty toilers of the sea, and the long hours of zigzagging and hopeful horizon-scanning ensure engagements, when they come, are sweatier than a stoker’s y-fronts. Thank God Ubisoft postponed the release in order to implement freelance-friendly campaigns.
83. The Curse of Monkey Island
Release Date: 1997
Last year: New entry
Josh: Technology finally caught up to the genius emerging from the Monkey Island franchise, allowing the devs and artists to craft a perfectly-fitting cartoon world brought to life by voice actors and fueled with the same off-the-wall humor and irreverent plot lines. And who can forget Murray, the demonic talking skull?
82. MechCommander
Release Date: 1998
Last year: 66
Evan: Match all this stuff together: the personal attachment you feel for your soldiers in X-COM; MechWarrior’s intense robot customization; Diablo’s easy loot; an RTS’ pace. MechCommander isn’t simply a tactical take on MechWarrior–it’s an incredible single-player process of salvaging robot parts and amassing a team of deathbots and skilled pilots, and it plays truer to the board game roots of the franchise than FASA’s first-person version.
81. Kings Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow
Release Date: 1992
Last year: New entry
Josh: Shipwrecked on a beach; a nightingale singing in a tree; battling a minotaur in the labyrinth. If none of those spark a deeply-rooted memory in your game upbringing, you’ve got grounds for suing your parents for neglect. KQVI was a pillar in early adventure games.
80. Grim Fandango
Release Date: 1998
Last year: 40
Ed: Dark, funny and full of more class than a classy cruiseliner filled with first class cabins that host round the clock classes teaching the class system. Grim Fandango is set in a limbo world of the dead, yet is full of appreciation for the deeper concepts of life. It is a tale that progresses so naturallly and wonderfully that by the end I was strangely moved, and ended up feeling more at peace with myself. If you’re crap at adventure games play it with a guide, though don’t rush through it too fast. Instead, take some time and allow yourself to soak up the story and atmosphere.
Tom F: I’ll second that – using a walkthrough just lets you enjoy the characters, the mood of the place and the fantastic visual imagination. There’s really no sense torturing yourself with the puzzles, they were never the point.
The amazing thing about Grim Fandango, apart from all that, was that your journey ended up being four years of your life. You reach a dead end in your search for Meche, and suddenly it’s a year later and you’re running a swanky club. Something felt very real and personal about that.
Tom S: One wonderful scene in Vena Cava has you mumbling nonsense rhymes into a microphone in a room full of dead beatniks. In many ways Grim Fandango is like a beat poem, drawing almost random elements together and fashioning them into something strange and inspired. It opens with a tale of corporate dysfunction set in aztec skyscrapers on the Mexican day of the dead, and goes on to tell a story of love, corruption and posthumous redemption in one of the most imaginative worlds I’ve ever encountered.
79. Galactic Civilizations II
Release Date: 2006
Last year: 74
Tom F: My graph is bigger than your graph, sing it.
Tom F: OK, that’s not helpful.
Tom F: I was going to say something about the sense of adventure that exploring and expanding across an undiscovered galaxy gives you, how its AI opponents feel like aggressively intelligent minds as passionate about victory as you are, the way custom building every ship in your fleet gives you extraordinary tactical flexibility and a personal attachment to your empire. Then I got distracted by a graph.
78. Crysis
Release Date: 2007
Last year: 76
Graham: There are two reasons why Crysis is great. One: it’s smart. The suit powers are a clever way to give you wonderful choices about how to approach the game, letting you play as a cloaked killer, a speeding train, or a human wrecking ball. They’re all fun, and when used in combination make you a free-running tank. Two: it’s so, so dumb. Like a lot of games, Crysis has the subtlety of a Bruckheimer action movie, but it’s unique in having the scale to match. As you travel across the game’s tropical paradise, mountains crack open, space ships blot out the sun, and nuclear explosions astonish.
Cooper: Crysis got a bad wrap because of the insane gaming rig necessary to play, but if you had a computer that could run it, Crysis was one of the best in the genre. The visuals were, obviously, stellar, but it was much more than that. Over time, the gameplay became… customizable. You could stealth in the middle of a group of enemies, grab one by the throat, throw him, drop a trip-mine, and run away before they even knew you were there. You were Batman mixed with the Predator mixed with The Flash, and it was freaking incredible. The expansion, Crysis: Warhead, turned down the plot and turned up the over-the-top gameplay, so, you know, it was also awesome.
Dan: I threw a turtle at a chicken.
Craig: That turtle had one day left till retirement. :(
77. Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Release Date: 1996
Last year: New entry
Dan: An opening cinematic that begins with a time-traveling Albert Einstein whacking Hitler and ends with the stirring Hell March theme, cinematics star a sexy spy and Joseph Stalin, and some of the best over-the-top superweapons ever to grace a fast-paced RTS make Red Alert one of the most memorable games ever.
Graham: I always preferred the sequel, for its Ray Wise opening (“I don’t give a wooden nickel about your legacy!”), but the original was similarly fantastic. In a world where still people struggle to make worthwhile singleplayer RTS campaigns, developers could do worse than aping Red Alerts silliness.
Chris: The reason to keep FMV alive. Hell, the cutscenes in Red Alert were better than anything in the new Transformers movies. I almost felt bad for Stalin when Nadia poisoned him. Almost.
76. Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn
Release Date: 2000
Last year: 25
Richard: While the original was pretty shaky, Baldur’s Gate 2 took everything Bioware had learned about making RPGs and produced a classic – particularly the second chapter, which simply cuts your party loose to make money via hook, crook, or epic adventure. And when you’ve finishedn it, the expansion, Throne of Bhaal, manages to be even better.
Troy: All the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages in the world can’t escape the shadow of Bioware’s sprawling D&D epic. It had class specific hero quests, a giant world filled with loot and villains and dragons, and a second chapter that went on forever so you could explore the world before being rushed to the ending. It also gave birth to the now de rigeur and frequently annoying relationship mechanic, so it’s not all perfect. But when I am asked about my favorite RPG ever, BG2 is the easy and expected answer.
75. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
Release Date: 1999
Last year: New entry
Richard: Civilisation usually ends with a trip to Alpha Centauri. This is what happens next, as humanity breaks up into philosophical factions and sets out to tame the hostile unknown. With its mix of hard-science, genuine personality, and one of the most advanced strategy worlds ever, we’re still longing for a sequel.
Tom S: It’s Alpha Centauri’s personality that made it stand out. Each of the faction leaders had their own curious foibles. Lady Diedre had that Mind Worm fetish, Chairman Yang had his thing for nerve stapling his citizens and Colonel Santiago wanted to reinvent diplomacy by killing everyone who disagreed with her. They were all as mad as each other, and it was a pleasure to meet them all, and then annihilate them.
74. Burnout Paradise
Release Date: 2009
Last year: 75
John: I almost never replay games. I’m too busy and handsome. I’m on my fourth go through BP. And I don’t even like racing games that much. It’s madly splendid, letting you smash through, jump over, and race down for ever and ever and ever. Although if I ever hear Paradise City again I might blow up the Earth.
73. Zuma’s Revenge!
Release Date: 2009
Last year: New entry
Evan: Peggle for men.
Rich: What is Peggle for, then? Unstoppable global hyper-men?
Evan: Unicorn-loving billiards players. Zuma is the only PopCap game on our list because it takes the best mechanics of the dev’s other games and raises the tempo. You’re a Aztec frog-gun that spits colored balls into a snaking line of more colored balls to make matches. So like Tetris, it’s subtraction by addition–played with a time-limit–and it generates the same sort of narrow triumphs and almost-had-its. The feeling of nestling a ball just where it needs to be, in the nick of time, matches the emotion I get from a game-winning Counter-Strike headshot.
Tom: Peggle is better. This game is let down by its pegless design philosophy. No pegs is not nearly enough pegs.
72. Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
Release Date: 1994
Last year: New entry
Andy: I remember being blown away by game’s demand for over 30MB of hard disk space. Thirty freaking megabytes! What were those insane Origin developers thinking? I only had a 105MB drive in my 386 to start with. Once I got over my initial shock I was lost in this space romp for weeks. The cinematic cutscenes gave Mark Hamill a much-needed career boost (such as it was) and the space combat was as addictive as crack.
Rich: Mark Hammill went on to play Cock-Knocker in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. Wing Commander, what did you do.
71. Spelunky
Release Date: 2009
Last year: 51
Tom: I am not kidding or exaggerating or any wronger than usual when I say this is one of my ten favourite games of all time. Other games have randomly generated levels, but Spelunky is the only one where the randomised elements are the ones that produce the puzzles, hazards and mechanics of the game. Each one it generates isn’t just aesthetically fresh, it’s something you have to think about in a new way. A genuinely endless adventure.
Josh: LoL is still the only MOBA game that’s dared to innovate on DotA’s original formula, and it did so with great success. The added passive skills, persistent meta-game, brush to juke with, and new hero skill mechanics elevate the genre to a whole new level. And it embraced the most sensible business model for the genre: free-to-play.
Cooper: Also, the fact that every single game you’ll play in has ¾ of the players using premium (see: expensive) skins shows how much gamers are willing to embrace this F2P.
69. Flight Simulator 2004
Release Date: 2003
Last year: New entry
Andy: This is the one that really brought the series into the modern graphics era. FS9 improved its predecessor’s AutoGen scenery and ATC interaction significantly and the featured classic aircraft (celebrating “A Century of Flight”) were an absolute treat to fly. I still remember trying to re-create Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic crossing in the Spirit of St. Louis and marveling at his skill at keeping that flying gas tank aloft. The third-party mod community really adopted this chapter as its own too because there are still almost as many downloadable planes and scenery files for FS9 as there are for FSX.
Tim S: The charisma of those historic crates also nudged me towards re-enactment. I’ll never forget my unaccelerated Vickers Vimy trip across the Atlantic in 2006 (http://bit.ly/f9Vsph). It managed to be both the most tedious thing I’ve ever done in a game and one of the most thought-provoking and satisfying.
68. Dwarf Fortress
Release Date: 2006
Last year: New entry
Graham: We choose to play Dwarf Fortress and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because it’s worth overcoming obtuse menus and arcane graphics for the rewards of the fantasy simulation that lies within. Before I started playing it, I’d read a lot about DF’s enormous detail – and fair enough, since this is a game where dwarves carve memorable events from their civilization’s history onto their coins. But I never realised how funny it would be. After ten hours of play, when my fortress flooded and my cheesemaker went insane and started biting everyone, I wasn’t frustrated. I laughed.
Troy: Yes, it is ASCII. Yes, it is punishingly hard to pick up casually. But no other game in the last five years has led to as many interesting stories about what just happened to little computer people. All those memorable events and that elaborate history are often just figments of our imagination, giving meaning and plot to very simple AI action. Hurrah for a game that feeds imagination. With a real budget and real art, this game could be huge. Bay 12 Games prefers to keep it small and free, and that itself is worth recognizing.
67. Anchorhead
Release Date: 1998
Last year: 97
Tony: Home alone on rainy Sunday afternoons, my treat to myself was to play this text adventure. Its low-key sense of gloom seeped out of the screen and into my bones. I poked around its twisty streets for so long it became a real place to me. And clue by innocuous clue, I uncovered the horror lurking below.
66. Torchlight
Release Date: 2009
Last year: New entry
Chris: Torchlight was my favorite friend with benefits: I could stop in, play for 15 minutes, quit out and feel satisfied without a lick of guilt. It also ran on a netbook—making it my ideal travel buddy. I wish my reallife dog would go to town and bring back cash.
Tom: It’s called the Draining Epic Boar Cannon of Venom, and it is a gun I have enchanted, socketed, re-enchanted, un-socketed, re-socketed, re-enchanted, re-enchanted and re-enchanted. Torchlight is as smart a progression of Diablo as Blizzard could manage, tailor made for the loot obsessive who wants that spectacular weapon they love to stay useful forever.
Cooper: At one point, I asked the Torchlight developers how long it took, from start to finish, to make the game. It was something like eight months. How could they put together something so stunning in such a short amount of time, but Blizzard can’t figure out how to finish Diablo III for 2015?
65. Zeno Clash
Release Date: 2009
Last year: New entry
Dan: What were they smoking? Whatever it was, it needs to be legalized, and perhaps made mandatory for game makers who are setting out to create a unique and interesting world.
Evan: How up-close and personal you get to that world and its inhabitants counted for something, too. You’re not just vaguely wandering a world filled with parrot-men, you’re battering them with elephant-femur swords and exploding gangly humanoid avocados across a Labyrinth-like scene. The combat system genuinely earns one of the titles we throw around freely about games: it’s actually visceral.
64. VVVVVV
Release Date: 2010
Last year: New entry
Graham: A Commodore 64-inspired platformer in which you can’t jump, but instead flip your character’s gravity to move between floor and ceiling. Its level design is immaculate, its characters are cute, its writing is funny, its soundtrack is so good I bought it and still listen to it regularly, and although some of its levels killed me a hundred times, I never stopped having fun. It is perfectly formed, and you can buy it now for £3.27.
˙puıɯ ɹnoʎ ǝlƃƃoq ʇɥƃıɯ ʇı ɥƃnoɥʇ ‘ʇı puǝɯɯoɔǝɹ ʎlƃıɥ p,ı :pǝ
63. SimCity 2000
Release Date: 1993
Last year: 81
Evan: Admit it: it was your evil ant farm for disasters, too. The crisp color of everything made cities that much more fun to wreck. Tornadoes were my favorite; I’d cheat my way to a five-minute metropolis, then deploy a twister or the giant floating eyeball-alien to knock it down. In 1993–before physics, before destructibility–this was the closest thing to gaming havoc that we had.
Chris: Sim City 2000 almost caused me to flunk my freshman year of high school (I also got detention for utilizing the “FUND” cheat during a PC class). I loved making long lines of parks only to pointlessly bulldoze over them to build polluting industrial zones.
62. Left 4 Dead 2
Release Date: 2009
Last year: New entry
Craig: The slapstick sequel, a game that sets me up for a post apocalypse full of clowns and electric guitar-based deaths. When the time comes, you’ll find me fending off Jockeys with a frying pan.
Rich: It teased with moments of mastery: when I got an M60 or a jar of boomer bile, it made me feel unstoppable and untouchable. Until the ammo ran out and the horde regrouped. Then it was back to sprinting and shrieking my way to the safehouse like a tiny baby man.
Tim S: Behind the viscera and the vomit lie some delicious ethical dilemmas. I adore those moments when common-sense is telling you to leg it, and common decency is telling you to head back into some seething hell-hole in the vain hope of saving a cornered comrade.
61. Frontier: Elite 2
Release Date: 1993
Last year: 31
Craig: It’s nearly 18 years old, and I’m still waiting for a game to hook me as completely as this did back when I was 14. What’s remarkable is this space adventure, where you’re given no guidance on how to live in the 513982470 star systems, is its simplicity. The complicated balancing act of living in Eve Online is a barrier that Frontier doesn’t have. Five minutes to learn; a lifetime of adventure.
60. Counter-Strike: Source
Release Date: 2004
Last year: 13
Craig: When it came out, it felt so clean and precise, my first glimpse of the Source engine in full flow, Valve showing off that they could still pull off a hardcore shooter whenever they wanted to. I’m fickle, so having it in a new engine instantly elevated it over it’s older brother. Sharper headshots, sickening blood splats and the amazing ragdoll deaths.
Evan: God, that ragdoll. The greatest possible reward for blasting a counter-terrorist with my AK is watching him tumble over a guard rail and crumple into a pile of limbs.
Cooper: Besides Counter-Strike, what other game could cause mass debates with the naming of a weapon? Seriously, walk into a LAN center and say “AWP” and watch the chairs go flying. Counter-Strike: Source is a near-flawless transition of classic CS to the modern(ish) era, and contains some of the most addictive, pick-up and play combat of any online shooter.
59. Anachronox
Release Date: 2001
Last year: 61
Tony: There’s ‘unique’, and then there’s Anachronox – a ramshackle game that doesn’t know whether it’s film-noir, sci-fi comedy, a JRPG or a superhero comic. Your gun has 250 million different settings. One planet you visit gets cut in half, another shrinks and becomes your team-mate. Why aren’t there more games like this?
58. Day of The Tentacle
Release Date: 1993
Last year: 38
John: Monkey Island 2 can suck my tentacle. This is the best comedy adventure of all time. Constantly inventive and hilarious, the puzzles are better than anything previously or since. There should be some sort of law in place that says all games should feature fake barf and wooden teeth.
57. Dungeon Keeper
Release Date: 1997
Last year: 55
Tom S: Where to begin? There was the dark sense of humour, and the OCD pleasure of organising my dungeon and carving it out of the rock. Then there were the units themselves. Those squiggly sprites held more personality than most RPG characters I’ve met. They were selfish, spoiled little brats, but they were my brats. when I saw my Bile demons obliterate a host of Elves in a cloud of noxious farts, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride. Go get ‘em, lads.
56. Wurm Online
Release Date: 2006
Last year: New entry
Graham: Wurm Online is all about context-sensitive menus, with 20 clicks to build a wall and 40 to mine some rock, but over a single month and a hundred hours of play, I helped settle a fantasy world frontier. I built my own house, assisted in building a huge underground tunnel, and watched as my fellow villages started creating 3D models to plan a proposed village re-build. Play it with a good community and take down some bears, and clicking is always rewarded.
Ed: I lived in a hut with Jaz, protecting trees from overlogging. When Jaz’s wife started playing, I helped make her a nice cosy house next door to ours. Me and Jaz still lived together afterwards though. It was best not to ask.
55. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Release Date: 2003
Last year: 69
Rich: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was never about the shooting. I played the medic class like a guardian angel, skipping through rivulets of bullets to reach shot-up team-mates and nurse them back to health. These days, clever team play is as important to online FPSes as lethal mouse-skills – so I’m pinning the rise of objective-based shooters squarely on Enemy Territory’s proud Allied/evil Nazi chest.
54. Thief II: The Metal Age
Release Date: 2000
Last year: 9
Craig: Garret is a private eye in a Steampunk world. Back when there were new genres to explore, Thief birthed the stealth game. I love the first, but Thief 2 has more thievery in it, rooftops to explore, tortuously difficult mansions to vanish in. It’s the game that’s informed the way I play pretty every other game since: sitting in the dark, scoping for opportunity, making decisive movements.
53. System Shock
Release Date: 1994
Last year: New entry
Richard: Its engines haven’t dated well, but the System Shock series doesn’t need high technology to impress. It only needs SHODAN, its unforgettable villain, whose pitch-perfect voicework will chill your spine as you poke around her deep-space mausoleums to find out just what the hell happened. You pitiful insect, you…
52. Star Control 2
Release Date: 1990
Last year: 54
Desslock: A true hybrid, Star Control 2 was an open-ended, interstellar adventure with combat ripped out of Asteriods. You could easily actually lose if you were tardy in unraveling its universe’s mysteries, and yet the prospect of finding a precious rainbow world or being berated by new race of witty blobs tempted you to meander.
51. Quake 3
Release Date: 1999
Last year: 22
Graham: The finest deathmatch and capture the flag game ever made. Yeah, I’ve played Unreal Tournament, and I enjoy it, and I know it’s higher placed in the Top 100 this year, but those losers are wrong. Quake 3 is multiplayer gaming distilled into its purest form. Its power-ups are perfectly balanced, its levels reward experience and allow for wondrous aerobic feats of death, and its weapons are the most satisfying in gaming. Fuck Facing Worlds.
Tom S: Neptune’s Pride somehow distills an elegant and simple set of rules into the perfect betrayal simulator. Attacks take days, defeat is a long and painful process and there’s no way to win without backstabbing your fellow players. It’s a dark work of brilliance that tested my friendships as much as much as my strategic ability.
Ed: Neptune’s Pride is like the “I Know what you did last summer” dark secret between me and my friends. We all pulled off some spectacularly dirty tricks, and no one person walked away completely untarnished. Beneath its simple surface, it’s a dark game of charades that spill into even the non-gaming world. At one point I’d set alarms to go off throughout the night at 3 hour intervals, so I could wake up, make some moves and check that no-one was moving against me. Which of course they were, because they’d set alarms for the exact same reasons.
49. Battle of Britain 2
Release Date: 1999
Last year: 70
Tim S: Dozens of WW2 flight sims deliver thrilling, challenging dogfights. Only one, this one, manages to make those dogfights feel earth-shatteringly important. In the amazing unscripted campaigns every downed Dornier and savaged Stuka is a personal landmark, a step – a tiny step – towards British salvation. “Per Ardua ad Astra” indeed.
48. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
Release Date: 2007
Last year: New entry
Tom: The stars of the first Supreme Commander weren’t the massive experimental units, for the most part. There were three tiers of deathbots before you got to those, each five times more massive, devastating and expensive than the last. It was about building dozens of factories, and streaming out enough deathbots to dominate enough of the map to produce enough mass to afford the next tier up. Then: stream out more.
On a 25 square kilometer map, that’s just a very satisfying, physically simulated version of a normal RTS. On a 6,561 square kilometer map, it’s an apocalypse. Your mind goes into overdrive trying to manage eighteen separate assault groups, balance and defend dozens of income sources while ramping up production to meet your snowballing wealth.
But throughout it all, the game takes care of the boring stuff for you: units defend themselves intelligently while moving, they organise themselves in optimal formations and stay in them come hell or high water. With three clicks, you can tell hundreds of air transports to ferry everything each of your ten factories produces 40 kilometers across the map, avoiding that anti-air on the southern peninsula, then returning to pick up anyone still needing a ride.
Forged Alliance took it further, stripping away useless interface clutter, letting you copy vast chunks of your base to be replicated elsewhere, and adding a whole new race with a strategic bomber the size of Corfu. It still looks great today, it runs marvelously on modern machines, and every gamer should play it properly at least once. It doesn’t have to be on a 6,561 square kilometer map, but it should be on the biggest one you can comfortably manage.
47. Battlefield 2
Release Date: 2005
Last year: 36
Norm: Thanks, Battlefield 2, for almost getting me kicked out of university. You made me care about game stats and rankings over grade point averages, and taught me that a kill-to-death ratio of under 2.0 is shameful. The 71 first-place Gold Medals I earned are still a badge of honor in my online gaming career.
Craig: I never cared about my K/D ratio or gold medals or badges of honour. I was too busy running for the jets, taking them high into the air and jumping out. Private Human Missile Pearson reporting for duty, sir!
Tom: I cared passionately about my kill-to-death ratio. My distaste for the enemy was nothing on my livid, roaring hatred for anyone on my team one place higher up the scoreboard than me. NO. GET DOWN. There is a MEDAL for topping that shit, and I MUST HAVE IT.
I did win some medals – I was a Medic, and I’d supplement my kill count with dozens of revives on dead players. I felt pretty good about myself. I’d even lead squads, risking my neck for my men – so long as none of them were scoring higher than me.
Then, after a long and happy career, I looked at my stats page. Kills to deaths? Not good, but that’s ok, I was a Medic. Score per minute? Not good, but that’s ok, I did a lot to help my team that wasn’t always rewarded. Wins to losses? Oh. Oh God.
Apparently I acted as some kind of bad luck charm, or perhaps just a terrible-teamplay charm, because having me on your side made you about 15% less likely to win. In a 64 player game, that’s impressively bad.
Rich: I was a medic too. Medic-five!
46. Star Wars: TIE Fighter
Release Date: 1994
Last year: 73
Dan: Face it: the Imperials’ fighters are just plain cooler than the Rebels’. Need proof? Just listen to the sounds that each makes when they fly by. An X-Wing goes “whoooooosh!” A TIE Fighter goes “WRRRAAAAAAARWAR!” Winner: TIE Fighter.
Rich: They got the noise from mixing an elephant’s scream with a car driving on a wet road, dont’chaknow. I still maintain X-wings are cooler, because you get to say “lock S-foils in attack position”. Oh dear, I’ve started talking about Star Wars again.
45. The Sims 3
Release Date: 2009
Last year: New entry
Troy: Also known in my house as the mistress collection game. It’s often derided as a game about eating or peeing, but The Sims is really a game about humanity and how we choose to fill our time. The Sims captures the ennui of life, the thrill of love and the quest for the right living room set to match the wallpaper. We measure our lives in coffee spoons, and frequency of woo-hoo.
Graham: My favourite thing to do was to visit the graveyard and explore the catacombs beneath. You wouldn’t be able to see what was happening, but choices would pop-up asking you whether you wanted to turn left, turn right, open that chest, explore deeper, turn back, and so forth. Sometimes you’d come out with a flashy, valuable artefact, and sometimes you’d come out covered in mud, traumatised into a life-long desire to hang out in graveyards. That’s life.
Cooper: Load up The Sims. Play for ten minutes. Look at the clock. Realize it has actually been six hours. This describes an average encounter with The Sims, a game that truly shatters the barriers between “hardcore” and “casual” gamers. Casual gamers will enjoy living out their wildest fantasies, while the hardcore crowd builds mansions comprised of nothing but swimming pools and acting out psychological experiments by removing all of the doors from a house.
44. Planetside
Release Date: 2003
Last year: New entry
Rich: I used to fly escorts for the New Conglomerate. I’d stand next to my royal blue reaver gunship on my spawn island, nonchalantly rifling through my inventory – a pilot for hire. A fat-bellied dropship would rumble by, jet engines superheating the air directly below it. “Anyone want to take a base?” I’d spit out my imaginary gum and hop into my craft’s cockpit, gun the engines and lift off. As the rest of the squad dropped in on the target from the sky, I stayed above, bursting high value tanks and buggies with missiles and lancing incoming troops with my chaingun. When the job was complete, I’d fall into formation and deliver my allies home. In Planetside, my feet never touched the ground. I miss it terribly.
43. Medal of Honour: Allied Assault
Release Date: 2002
Last year: New entry
Rich: The cradle of life for the modern FPS. Allied Assault understood pacing and the deployment of cinematic moments better than nearly any of its predecessors, and set the seedbed for the global takeover of the Call of Duty brand. I’m not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing, but in 2002, this kind of fresh, film-infleunced, globe-trotting man-shoot was the pinnacle of shooting mans.
42. Mass Effect 2
Release Date: 2010
Last year: New entry
Chris: I remember playing through the beginning and exclaiming “holy #%$@!” as I gazed at a planet from a hole in the Normandy’s shattered hull. ME2 was filled with these cinematic moments. Battling the final boss—a skyscraper-sized metal skeleton—was better than a ride at Six Flags.
Dan: Possibly the best ending level (the part before the giant Terminator) of any RPG ever.
Rich: It made you feel like you were assembling a ragtag bunch of the universe’s best and badassest desperadoes – and you were their leader. By this point in the series, my Shepard had a mythology and a defined moral compass: getting to imprint that on the deepest, best thought-out sci-fi galaxy in recent memory is a teenage dream come true.
Tom: The claim that ‘Y is back and Xier than ever’ never excited me until the Y was the Shepard I made for Mass Effect, and the X was ‘high-polycount’. I am basically in love with her, so getting to play that character again in a much prettier game, with more satisfying combat, was total nerd overload.
Rich: You’re not as in love with your Shepard as I am in love with Tali. Oh, Tali.
Tom: Fuck Tali. I did exactly the right thing on her loyalty mission, but because my fancy speech skill wasn’t high enough yet, she hated me for it. Later: “A suicide mission? For someone with technical skills? I know just the twat.”
Tom S: The thing I remember about Mass Effect 2 is the M-920 Cain Nuke Launcher. I made that goddamn gun as soon as I could, and I carried it around on my goddamn back for the entire game, but never encountered anything large enough to warrant the ridiculous overkill of a nuclear explosion. Then I saw that end boss. I whipped the cannon off my back and one-shotted it in the goddamn eyeball. It was the best of days.
41. Doom
Release Date: 1993
Last year: New entry
Richard: Playing Doom, it’s hard to remember it was released in 1993. Its engine may be obsolete, but it’s still an amazingly fun game, with satisfying weapons, an array of unforgettable enemies, and some of the best music ever. You might download it for a retro-kick, but you’ll soon be sucked right back into its hellish clutches.
Chris: For me, Doom was all about the sounds. The rocket launcher’s foom-pa!, the Baron of Hell’s growl, the unmistakable (and terrifying) noise from the Cyberdemon’s mechanical legs—this was the first game that I needed speakers and a decent soundcard to play. The Imp fireball’s swoosh still gives me chills.
Read The Rest http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/16/the-100-best-pc-games-of-all-time/7/
(From Pcgamer)
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