Well, everyone, it’s been two years
sense I started this blog, and once again it is time for an anniversary
post. Now last year’s post was dedicated
to panning the hell out of Korsgaard’s blog and he immediately wanted me to do
a post where I point out his best posts.
Well, that is not happening today as I wanted this post to be a bit more
personal. So to celebrate my two year
anniversary I’m counting down my personal fifteen favorite video games of all
time. As with most other top lists
they’ll be my least favorite of the group down to my personal favorite. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for
a while but never quite found the occasion to do it and this seems like as good
a time as any. So I humbly present to
you my personal favorite videogames of all time.
Number
15
Sonic
the Hedgehog 2
There really isn’t much of an
explanation as to why I like this game other than to say that I grew up with
it. It was the first videogame that I
remember playing regularly as a child and there was something that I always
found very appealing about an animal that could turn himself into a spinning
ball of death who was trying to rescue other animals from a mad doctor. Looking at it today it’s nothing special but
it has a big nostalgia factor for me just because it was one of the first
videogames that I ever played and I’d turn it back on any day just relive some
of those old memories of my preschool days.
Number
14
Spyro:
Year of the Dragon
Similar to the way Sonic was the first game that I really
got involved in, Spyro was the first
video game franchise that I ever invested myself in. I honestly don’t know why, but there was
something that I always found appealing about a small purple dragon saving the
world from various villains in all these parallel dimensions and Year of the
Dragon was my favorite and often considered the best of the franchise. It’s one of the first games that I ever
played where I found myself invested in the characters as much as the gameplay. I honestly cared about what happened to the
characters and whether or not Spyro succeeded in rescuing all of the dragon
eggs. It was also the first game that I
can think of where I played as different characters other than the main
protagonist. All of which had their own personalities,
were appealing in their own ways and had their own gameplay style which I just
loved. It also happened to be the final Spyro game by the franchise’s creators
Insomniac Games and also happened to be the last really good one as after this
game, none of them really had the same steam or appeal and I remember being
very underwhelmed by later installments of the franchise. Again, there really isn’t a whole lot more
to say other than it holds a big nostalgia value for me and is a game that
brings me back to my childhood playing an old PS1 game.
Number
13
Star Fox 64
There really isn’t anything to say
on this one other than to say that I loved the gameplay. It was the only flight simulator game that
I’ve ever really had the chance to play as I wasn’t aware that games like Wing Commander even existed and even if I was
I wouldn’t have been able to play them due to my family’s P.C. limits. So this game was basically the only real
exposer to the genera that I ever had and I loved every second of it. I played this game through again and again
and just loved shooting down enemies in my jet, blowing bosses out of the sky,
going head to head with Star Wolf and finally confronting Andross in the deep
reached of Venom. Again, it holds a bit
of nostalgia factor for me and I fondly look upon all the hours that I spend on
that game and know that not a second I spent on it was wasted.
Number
12
Gears
of War 2
I have to admit, the Gears of War franchise and I have, for
the most part, never quite seen eye to eye.
The first game had great gameplay and multiplayer but I could never
quite get passed how half-assed the plot and main story missions seemed in the
grand scheme of things. The third game
had this look that was far to polished and a storyline that confused me more than
anything else. And with the next
installment of the franchise a prequel, my patience with this series has all but
run out. However, I loved the second
game as if it were a child. The plot
this time around was radically improved, giving more depth to the world and
characters and giving us a more complete view of both. This time around, the stakes seemed higher
and our investment in the characters and story was at an all-time high and we
truly cared about what happened to both.
The gameplay also radically improved, giving us more weapons, more
enemies, and probably the first time Horde Mode was ever introduced to a
mainstream shooter, (but I’m not entirely sure about that). Again, not a whole lot to say about this one
other then I really enjoyed the story and gameplay.
Number
11
Halo
3
The Halo franchise is basically the one that got me into first person
shooters and this one is my all-time favorite of the franchise. Like Gears
of War 2, this time around the stakes in the storyline just seemed a lot
higher as Master Chief and The Arbiter rush to stop the Covenant from
activating the Halo Rings which will eradicate all life in the galaxy while
fighting an occasional attack from the Flood.
For the genera at the time, the characters were compelling and you cared
about what happened to them and when some of them died it was depressing. It also featured the best engine to date,
with vastly improved graphics over its predecessors, new weapons and very well
done levels and multiplayer that still holds up to this day. Truly one of the best shooters of the 7th
Generation consuls and one that I highly recommend that you play.
Number
10
God
of War
I may not have mentioned this before
on this site, but I am a huge fan of hack and slashers, Greek Mythology, and extreme
amounts of blood shed on screen. So when
I got my hands on God of War, it was
like the developers got their ideas directly out of my subconscious, (although
considering my Bane prediction for The
Dark Knight Rises I’m kind of worried now).
The game follows Kratos as he tries to exact revenge against Aries for
past slights and the rest is history. As
the game goes on, you slash through Cyclops, Minotaurs, Gorgons, undead
soldiers and other creatures that I can’t remember right now all in externally
bloody and over the top fashion until you confront the God of War himself in a
one on one battle to the death. The
second game is also noteworthy for its improvements in gameplay style and boss
fights but never came close to the novelty of the first game and I loved every
second of hacking though enemies in all the over the top fashion the series is
famous for. AND I STILL HAVEN’T PLAYED
THE THIRD GAME AND IT’S DRIVING ME INSANE!!!!
Number 9
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
The missions, the characters, the
multiplayer, and the over the top 24 style plot. I really can’t say much more about it then
that and that is all you need to know.
Number 8
Grand
Theft Auto: Vice City
This was probably the first rated M
game that I ever played, so a lot of the appeal of it came from the novelty of seeing and experiencing a lot of
these things. I first played the game
when I was around 12 and it blew my mind away.
Just being able to walk up to someone and shoot them to death or steal
their car or kill a hooker right after having sex with her was an extremely
novel experience for me at the time and I had never seen anything like it
before. Of course it also generated a
lot of controversy for these things but that actually made people like me want
to play it all the more. It also helped
that it had a really good story, characters and missions to boot. You play as Tommy Vercetti who is trying to
survive and prosper in the criminal underworld of Vice City and it follows him
from being a hired thug to becoming the most powerful criminal in the city and
the player actually gets invested in his fate and wants to see him
succeed. It also had a lot of great
supporting characters and a great cast of voice actors that included Ray Liotta,
Danny Trejo, William Fichtner, Burt Reynolds, and Gary Busey. While the graphics and gameplay have not aged
well, it’s still one of those games that I look back upon fondly and reminds me
that there was a time where these sorts of games could have been pulled from
the shelf. But they weren’t and it is
glorious.
Number 7
Rome: Total War
Now again, given all the games I review on this site, you probably would never have guessed that I was a fan of RTS games and Rome: Total War is one of the finest that I have ever played. To put it simply it was the first time that I had ever seen a game like it. Just seeing these massive armies collide with one another and how actual military tactics are necessary to win some battles was something that I had never seen before in an RTS. The same goes for the various troop strengths and weaknesses and how you can effectively play these to defeat a superior army. And then we had the campaign map and factions. Now, up until this point, most of what I had played was the Age of Empires games where most of the units and factions were interchangeable save for a few differences. In this game, however, what faction you choose affected your troop types, what buildings you could have, ect. It was also one of the first games where you actually conquered an enemy as opposed to just destroying all of his buildings and armies and where the economic state of you empire could cause it to collapse if you didn’t take good care of it. Like I said, there were a lot of first times with me on this game and I cannot wait to see what this group has in store for Rome 2. I highly recommend that you take a look at this game and see how to create and empire.
Number
6
Assassin’s
Creed II
Anyone who has been following this
blog sense its creation know that I completely adore this game and it’s one of
the few games that I ever gave a perfect score to before I really got my review
format down. As an unexpected result, I
never really said why I loved it so much.
The main reason for this is the fact that the game radically improved on
its predecessor in nearly every way. The
first game had a very head scratchily confusing plot that was so historically
inaccurate it was painful, characters who clearly had great stories to them but
failed to be properly told, and gameplay that was painfully repetitive and had
you doing the same things over and over again.
All of these faults, however, were completely gone by the time the
sequel came around. Our main character
Ezio was an extremely compelling protagonist and watching his journey from a
hot headed punk with only a desire for revenge to a disciplined assassin is one
of the best I have ever seen in a videogame.
The storyline itself was also very well done and pitted Ezio in the
middle of the politics of the Italian City States and went out of its way to
stay relatively historically accurate.
The supporting characters were very fleshed out and extremely
entertaining and this version of Leonardo Da Vinci remains one of my favorite
supporting characters of all time. And
of course, we have the gameplay. Unlike
the first one, this game had missions that required different ways of thinking
and approaching a target and never seemed to repeat itself. You also got a large range of weapons that
the first game utterly lacked, along with a city that you were tasked to
rebuild in order to gain funds for these sorts of things.
In a nutshell this game improved
upon everything the first game did and in my personal opinion this is sequel
making 101 for any aspiring videogame makes out there. Even if you didn’t like the first game or
have heard about the less then positive things said about Revelations, this game is more then worth your time, energy and
money, and I can only hope that
Assassin’s Creed III is able to recapture even a fracture of what this game
had.
Number
5
Dragon
Age: Origins
I’ve already talked about this game
at length during last year’s Dragon Aegathon
for the release of Dragon Age 2 but believe
it or not, there is still more for me to say.
One of the things that I left out was simply how well this game executed
its relatively standard issue story.
Each of the missions for the various factions of Ferelden often required
you to make choices that often didn’t lead to happy outcomes and only rarely
solved the underlying problems between the races and even then it seemed like a
temporary measure. The actual race and
class you choose also has a profound effect on the way other characters
interact with you, often treating you like dirt if you happen to be an elf or a
castless dwarf. To put it simply the
story had subtext in its writing that elevated it past being a basic high
fantasy story and no video game of the genera before or sense has ever matched
it. The characters also helped to
elevate the game but this is the thing that has seemed to have the most lasting
effect. For me, this was the high
fantasy video game that killed all others.
After playing this game I just couldn’t go back to the standard issue
storylines and one note characters of games like The Elder Scrolls and Fable and ensured that games like Dragon’s Dogma and Kingdom of
Amalur: Reckoning were doomed from the start.
And I can only hope that Dragon
Age III is able to have the same level of intelligence as this game as
well as a similar level of story and characters. Make it happen BioWare! Don’t let us down again!
Number
4
Final
Fantasy X
This is another game that has a big
nostalgia factor for me, in that this was probably the first game that I ever
played where I was completely invested in the plot and characters. As we all know the story follows a group of travelers
as they try to defeat an evil monster known only as Sin who constantly wreaks
havoc upon the world of Spira. Looking
back at it, there was a lot and I mean A LOT of wired goofy stuff in the story
and a lot of annoying characters but these odd things never hindered my enjoyment
of the game. I was fully invested into
this world and characters within the first hour of playing and has sense
provided me with many hours of entertainment.
It’s one of the few game that I could honestly recommend to anyone who
likes RPGs and playing it provided me with some of the most fun I ever had
playing a videogame.
Number
3
Fallout
3
I think that by now it is well
established that I am not a fan of Bethesda Studios or their Elder Scrolls games. Whenever I
tell this to gamers they usually look at me like I committed some crime against
humanity or something. I’m sorry but for
me it just comes down to the storylines and characters and just how bare boned
and the open world gameplay just doesn’t make up for that for me. However, Fallout
3 has always been that one beacon of
hope that I have for the company that they can make great stories and
characters along with great open world environments. For starters, in my opinion, the open world
gameplay in this game is Bethesda’s best.
Unlike the Elder Scrolls
games, their wasn’t really any limits on what they could do and the quests you
undertake range from fending off super mutant attacks, to fighting a war
against the Enclave, to trying to find a violin in a vault full of people who
have been driven insane, to trying to escape from an alien abduction. The enemies, (while not scientifically
accurate to a how radiation would mutate them but who really cares?), have an
incredible variety to them, ranging from bandits who will kill you for a penny,
to super mutants who just seem to want to kill and eat, to various mutated
animals that are just survive in the world, to entire political factions that
are trying to take over the world. It is
a game that truly knows how to mix the horrors one would face in a
post-apocalyptic world.
And
as I mentioned before, the storyline and characters were surprisingly good,
especially considering the developers.
Like Dragon Age: Origins,
the story is relatively simple in nature, but manages to put a lot of subtle
subtext into it. Unlike games like Skyrim or Oblivion, you really get a feel for this world and what a hell hold
it is and it really feels like it’s a world that desperately needs a savior. The main storyline mostly consists of your
character trying to find his/her father and eventually gets caught up in a war
over a massive water purifier and it’s up for you to decide if you want to be
the savior of this world and give water to all or damn it. It’s difficult for me to explain what made it
so good but anyone who has played this game knows exactly what I mean and it’s
a modern game that I can recommend to everyone.
Truly one of the best games of the 7th Generation era.
Number
2
The
Mass Effect Trilogy
Yea, I know this is cheating, but
for me the Mass Effect Trilogy is one
complete story arc that tells one of the best Space Opera stories ever created. Now, I already went over at length what made
these games so good earlier this year so I’m just going to give you the cliff
notes. The first game had what was one
of the, (if not the), best storylines
that I have ever seen in a video game.
Like Dragon Age: Origins it
was a story that was ripe with themes involving racial prejudice, very
believably politics and told a grand epic story and created a fantastic
universe for it all to take place in.
The second game radically improved upon the graphics, gameplay with a
brand new paragon/renegade trigger, and gave us a cast of fleshed out
characters along with a questionably ally.
Mass Effect 3 is where
everything hit the fan and you were forced into a direct war with the Reapers
and made you play diplomat and often made you choose between races and
sometimes your friends. If there is one
fault to be found with this trilogy it would be with the ending, but even that
I would argue was more or less fixed by the extended cut ending. Check it out if you haven’t because it a
series that is more than worth your time.
And
At Number One
My
Favorite Game of All Time Is
Age
of Mythology
Now
this is a game that I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if none of you had heard
of, as it seems to be a game that was lost in time. This was a game that was released back in
2002 under the development of now defunct Ensemble Studios, the creators of the
Age of Empires games. For me, this
was the game that truly got me into gaming.
It was the first game sense Star
Fox 64 that I played religiously and kept going through my favorite campaign
missions over and over again. It was
really the first time I had seen clear distinction between factions in an RTS
and being the lover of mythology that I am I just loved being able to summon
creatures from Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology to devastate my
enemies. And surprisingly, it told a
grand epic story to boot. Now for some
reason, up until this point, most adaptations of mythology always seemed to
have had Hades as their main villain and this is the game that seemed to set
off a chain reaction of adaptations where this changed. The story follows Arkantos, and admiral of
Atlantis, (obviously before the city sunk), as he journeys across the world trying
to stop the Cyclops Gargarensis from releasing the Titans from Tartarus and
becomes directly involved in many stories in classical mythology, including
fighting the Trojan War, bringing the Egyptian god Osiris back to life and
forging a new hammer for Thor. It’s a
game that truly blew me away and is one that I would go back to and play any
day. It was as good then as it is now
and it remains my favorite game of all time.
And
those are my personal favorite games of all time. To those of you who read this whole thing,
thank you for bearing with me. Two years
have gone by sense I started this blog and let’s hope that this year was a lot
more productive then the last. Again,
thanks for being with me for so long and please continue to do so. So until next time, this is The Illusive One Sighing
off.
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