I don't even know why I'm making this list any more. When we did the Community GOTG thread, about two years back, I was inspired to catch up on all the games I missed. It was exhausting but I'd say I checked off everything I wanted to try out or play. I'm kind of excited by the prospect of not stressing out over games any more. Just playing whatever I want, whenever I have the time. But I still feel like I need to post this stupid list to have some kind of closure. I'm sure I'll look at it in two days and hate it ("Why the hell did I put Game X so high?"), but I can't let myself change the order any more. I need to just post this and be done with it.
So this is my Top 30, plus 33 runners-up that I really, really liked. Its been a great generation. 2D games finally came back, better than they've ever been since the SNES. 3D games kept getting better, maybe a little homogenous at times, but there was variety out there if you looked for it. In one week, "The Phantom Pain" will come out and I feel like that's when the new generation is going to kick off for reals.
Eligibility and other notes, in the spoiler tag:
I allowed any game that had a release on X360, PS3, Wii or DS. I also allowed any game that was released on PC or iOS in the years 2006 thru 2012. I did buy a second-hand PSP but barely played it. No PSP games made the cut.
The one big game that's missing is GTA5. I played it on PS4 and have a damn hard time thinking of it as an Old-Gen game or comparing it to Red Dead Redemption. It just looks so much better graphically than almost every game on this list, and felt like a New-Gen experience for me, I couldn't make the comparison.
About half the games in my Top 40 are games I played in the past couple years. So I guess it was worth it to pound through all those games, even if it was really stressful.
Year-wise, the big winners seem to be 2011 (with 11 games by my count) and 2012 (with 9 games by my count).
In the Top 40, there were four Wii games, two DS games, and four iOS/PC exclusive games. Everything else had some sort of PS360 release.
2018 Edit: Changed from Top 40 to Top 30. Swapped Minecraft and Phoenix Wright for the #30 spot.
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Its a janky bloated stupid mess of a game and I fell for it hard. Maybe the story doesn't make sense if you think about it too hard. Maybe the choice and consequence isn't as deep as it seemed when I played through it five years ago. Maybe (almost certainly) it wouldn't hold up to a second playthrough. But I just love the world of Fallout too much, and this is the first Bethesda game I really deep-dived into. It was such a massive singular experience for me that I couldn't give #1 to anything else. That first moment when I stepped out of the vault, the sun-glare hit my eyes, and I saw the horizon in the distance, I knew I was in for something special.
The game that would almost certainly take the top spot if I could've given it more time. My experience with this game is apparently not the typical one. I chose an oddball class (mage), and played the game as a glass-cannon, constantly dodging around like a maniac. Then a few hours after I got the Lordvessel, "Real Life" got in the way and I had to give it up. Maybe some day I'll find the time to restart. I don't think any game had ever made me feel as tense and excited as Dark Souls did. And the sense of exploration and interconnection of the world is like almost nothing else. When I found that elevator at the top of Undead Burg and I saw where it was taking me, I was truly stunned.
Just a really tight, compact experience with great dark humor to go with the puzzle solving. Glados is maybe the best new character of the last generation. Plus the whole thing with the actual portals was amazing back in 2007. It might still be amazing in 2015 actually. I haven't played this in a long time and very few games have borrowed that idea to try and put their own spin on it. Portal 2 is every bit as amazing, but I thought the humor went too over-the-top and was starting to get corny.
Deus Ex finally gets its worthy successor. I mean I liked Human Revolution too, but I think the gameplay of Dishonored is much more tense, the movement felt better, you always seem to have a ton of options with all the different abilities... Trying different things out and seeing how the world reacted to my actions was really fascinating. What put it over the top was the superb art direction and atmosphere they put together. They've created an amazing new world, I can't wait for the sequel.
I still have unfinished business with this game. I want to play it with the expansion in Ironman mode. I want to then keep playing it on increasing difficulties. My first experience through the game was pretty intense, but it only left me wanting more.
This might seem surprisingly high, but Super Hexagon became the new Tetris for me in a way. Simple to learn, but incredibly hard to master. The first difficulty seemed impossibly fast the first time I played... Now it feels very slow, almost like I'm sleepwalking through it. Every so often I'll pick this game up and have an amazing run, doing so much better than I thought I was capable of. I've still got three more difficulties to conquer. Maybe some day...
If I were to rate the Mass Effect trilogy as a whole, it would be much lower... The first game kind of sucked but it was worth playing through on easy to see the incredible world and story. Mass Effect 2 was more Action-Adventure, and barely an RPG, but whatever. They nailed the controls, they darkened and intensified the tone, and I was drawn deeply into the world in a way that very few games can do. By the end of it, I was extremely excited for Mass Effect 3 and it looked very possible that this trilogy could be considered one of the all-time great game franchises. Part of what made ME2 seem so great was how it set you up for an even better sequel. But they couldn't stick the landing. I didn't think the ME3 ending was the most horrible thing ever, but overall the game's story-telling was not great. Acceptable by video-game standards but nothing exceptional. Mass Effect 2 looks worse in retrospect because of that. In an alternate universe, this game sits in the #1 spot, sharing it with Mass Effect 3. As it is, I still look back on the game fondly enough for it to be in my top ten.
The best superhero game ever. I've been a fan of Batman: The Animated Series since I was ten, so this game spoke directly to my personal tastes. Plus it had a revolutionary melee combat system that's still being copied, six years later. Arkham City was great too, but I definitely preferred the tight, metroid-ish style of AA.
As of this writing, I finished the game less than 24 hours ago. It was at times an incredibly frustrating experience. Even five years after release, its still pretty damn buggy. The PC version may or may not have destroyed my graphics card. The Xbox version had a tendency to lock up at load screens between areas, forcing me to restart. Having said that... There's something special about this game. It doesn't have the time-and-place factor that Fallout 3 had for me of course. But the character/level progression is arguably a lot better and would give me more reasons to replay the game if I had the time. Hardcore mode provided more realism to the game, which I really liked. The writing isn't THAT much better than FO3, but it is better overall and in some spots its exceptional (Vault 11 in particular was a standout for me). The factions are more complex and I had to make actual difficult choices. The way Fallout's world reacts to your actions is as amazing as ever. I was gonna have it just share the #1 spot as a footnote to Fallout 3, but New Vegas deserves its own spot in my top ten.
The game that really got me back into video-games after I'd been sort of out of the loop for a few years. It managed to be a perfectly paced thrill ride and a great challenge at the same time. Incredible atmosphere, best soundtrack of the generation, and arguably the 2nd best soundtrack in all video-games (behind the HLM2 soundtrack). And a minimalist, intriguing story. Not bad for a two-man indie dev team.