These are the greatest games of the decade in my view. How to define greatness? It's the combination of high quality and grand importance or significance. I'm not saying these games affected you; they affected me, and I'd argue they affected gaming itself. I'm doubling the list to make room for unobvious choices I feel strongly about but that don't reasonably deserve to crack a top-10. This list also expresses my particular bias for games based around fictional ideas and characters -- I mean no offense by neglecting certain genres that may affect you more than they affect me, but to me the most moving games are ones with characters in them.
This is the decade in games in which the balance of power switched from the East to the West. The Japan-dominated '90s gave way to Western-developed games this decade, specifically starting in 2001 with the back-to-back releases of Grand Theft Auto III and Halo: Combat Evolved; BioWare's work in the role-playing genre with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic also substantially contributed.
This was a rough decade in many ways, but for game players it was fantastic so long as they kept playing.
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An eye-opening experience with an impeccable, classic sense of style -- still the finest style of any Grand Theft Auto game, and considering that series is always the standard-setter, that's saying a lot. I have the GTA III soundtrack forever imprinted in my memory and so, so many moments of that game were sublime. I know a lot of people thought Vice City was even better and in some ways, so did I. But GTA III is the game that started it all, and is the game that I think is most responsible for the advancement of the medium (for better and for worse) this decade. When I first played this game, I remember the feeling sinking in that it really was OK to run red lights, crash into things, even run people over and worse... what a shocking, strange, awesome sensation to have from a game.
One of the finest first-person shooters ever made, combining probably the best world design for such a game (right up there with Half-Life) and finally nailing the controls on console. Also bringing vehicles into the mix, proving that "first-person shooter" is really a misnomer. Halo was also a remarkably innovative game, though for some reason it's fashionable to ignore that. But where would today's shooters be without a grenade button, without recharging health, without limits on the number of weapons you can carry, and so on? Today's shooters are still trying to live up to Halo's standard.
This game blew me away when it first came out, and I remember it being difficult to explain exactly why -- because, sure, World of Warcraft was similar to gamesl like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot and it clearly owes a lot to them. But it was better, hands-down. It ruthlessly eliminated the frustration and the slog from those games, leaving only the cumpulsion and a far superior moment-to-moment experience than any other MMO before, or after (at least to date), has achieved. Along with the #1 and #2 games on this list, I think this one is undeniable.
Some Zelda aficionados are quick to dismiss this game as a reskinning of Ocarina of Time, which they consider superior. But man... what a reskinning. This is probably the most artistically inspired game I've ever played, and the world was so cohesively realized and so filled with detail that simply standing still and doing nothing in it was pleasurable for me. And the experience of playing happened to be outstanding. This game also holds a special place in my heart for being one of the two games I've ever played that interested my wife, who watched me play through the whole thing with interest (whereas she's aggressively indifferent toward every other game).
The bleeding edge of high-quality game production. Still a game that looks so good and whose atmosphere is so well realized that newer games can barely begin to compete. Resident Evil 4 is one of a small number of games that just absolutely blew me away with its presentation. To this day I have absolutely no idea how they could have created that world and those creatures. My best guess is that the creatures really do exist and were motion captured. The Jack Krauser level, while deplorable in retrospect for its use of quick-time events, was one of the most amazing gaming experiences I'd ever had for its time. This was also a remarkably brave game, filled with a righteous indignation for not settling. It took a franchise that was still plenty popular and successful but rebooted it anyway, for the best. If only all good videogame franchises cared as much to do a thing like this.
This was so asking to be a trainwreck, but again, it underscores the theme of '00 - '09 of Western developers beginning to surpass their Japanese counterparts. As with Zelda, Metroid Prime is an incredibly well detailed and fully realized gameworld, and one of the best games I've ever played. Few games have managed to make me feel like I really was in some sort of incredible, faraway place like this game. Fewer still made me think I was a female bounty hunter with a gun for an arm.
Metal Gear Solids 3 and 4 are superior games. But Metal Gear Solid 2 was a one-of-a-kind event I'll never forget. How on Earth they kept the Raiden thing under wraps still boggles my mind, and the treachery of this game -- the meta relationship between the creator and his fanbase paying off in the reveal of Raiden as the protagonist -- is something that I think helped define the decade and how community became a stronger influence, for better and for worse, on game development and design. God bless Kojima for putting his fans in their place. With Metal Gear Solid 2, he reminded everyone that there's a reason the designers are the designers and the fans are the fans. It's an arrogant point but an important one with truth to it.
Orange Box is sort of a cheat since it's multiple games in one, and make no mistake, I put it here for Portal and not for Half-Life 2. But I also put it here over Portal itself because it's (at last) an acknowledgment that a game can't be all things to all people -- so the solution is really to provide multiple games for multiple tastes. Sadly, most shooters are still expected to serve single-player and multiplayer game players in equal measure, but the Orange Box really had it right: Provide sublime single-player experiences designed purely for those audiences, and sublime multiplayer experiences designed purely for those audiences. Who's ever going to top this?
This one is harder for me to defend, but then again, there's nothing anyone can do to change how I feel about it. Max Payne upped the ante for action games with truly cinematic experiences, and yet what was so great about it was that it had its own identity. Yes, it was influenced by movies. But unlike so many other games before and after, it wasn't trying to be the movies, drawing influence from them only up to a point. It turned out to be a very distinct, extremely well presented and intense action game, which I think set a standard for shooters (the dominant genre) all through this year. I loved this game and remember it vividly in all respects even though I played it nearly a decade ago. I think it raised the bar for the sort of quality that could be expected from a game.
There were a lot of amazing role-playing games in the decade but this was the one that truly made me feel as though I could do anything and that the game would back me up. It also found a near-perfect balance of sandbox-style play as well as good, strong narrative -- the Dark Brotherhood questline, in particular, is one of the best stories I've experienced in an RPG, with some ruthless and brilliantly imagined twists and turns. Oblivion was just an exhilirating game for me, and a perfect example of how the best RPGs are easy to forgive for their faults because of their surpassing qualities.