This is a list of my favourite video games. I hope to update it now and then. Only the first ten or so are ordered. You should know I'm not a "gamey" game kind of person. I prefer an overall "electronic experience" over game mechanics.
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The most FUN I have ever had playing a video game. And it's a co-op game that I really only played with strangers and never played a raid (which is a massive part of the game's experience). I think if I had friends to play with, this would be insane. I am insanely jealous of the kids who get to grow up playing this with friends in high school. I never thought a game would surpass Total Annihilation as my favourite of all time because of the nostalgia advantage it had, but here we are. A real campaign was a big step up from Destiny 1 and winding in the grind early with meaningful public events with Heroic triggers was a game changer. The strikes lost some importance for grind purposes but their sumptuous settings and increased variety of game play made my first play-throughs of them some of my favourite moments in gaming ever. The Forsaken expansion made me fall in love with the game all over again and I treasured how they continued to innovate with the way they integrated public challenges with the campaign to make the early grind fun.
I've surely put more hours into this game than any other. I've never actually played the campaign mode (I should one day). Comp stomp after Comp stomp, looking to min-max in every possibly way, letting my imagination grow wild with all the units you could build. It was great fun to play against friends at a LAN party, except when it crashed four hours into a match (or the power went out in a storm).
Is there a perfect electronic experience? Journey was the first game I ever considered to be "perfect". Amazing to have a single sitting, emotional experience like this full of sights, sounds, music and fluid controls. The fact that you can share it with anonymous strangers made this an unbelievably unique experience when it was released.
All the fun of Grand Theft Auto (and much, much more fun) without the horrific bloodshed that completely undermines the game. The vast array of mission variety was also amazing and I love the way it fit into a perfectly contained "world". A sequel to this game with perhaps a female protagonist and possibly at an American "college" would be amazing. I guess if they can't build gambling into the game it will probably never happen.
Aesthetic perfection, stimulating puzzles and a journey that was surprisingly emotional despite eschewing a prominent narrative.
Pretty sure this is the fist game on this list where you are required to start dropping terms like "Ludonarrative dissonance" when justifying in your head why a game that involves massacring large numbers of humans can be a "good" game. Infinite is the sequel to "Bioshock" from 2007 (Bioshock 2 is just fan fiction), a game with an incredibly creative world and interesting gameplay mechanics but an ultimately disappointing narrative that excludes it from this list. Bioshock is a first person shooter but the primary opponents that you are required to kill are basically zombies and robotic security devices. I don't really want to write an essay about this, but although the robotic security devices return and ghost-like opponents are added in Infinite, you spend a good portion of the game slaughtering humans as part of the "game play". There is a narrative justification for this, and that is why you are playing the game, for it's intriguing, absorbing, narrative journey. I also realise that shooting people with guns that have different idealogical values to you is an essential part of the "American dream", which this game is playing off. I just wished they would have focused on platforming and shooting robots and made avoiding killing humans part of the game. The ending to the narrative haunted me for a long time, in a good, ethereal way. I am constantly thinking about re-playing it, I even bought the re-mastered version of it, but I haven't yet, and that is because of the human bloodshed that you are required to commit along the way.
The other essential game on this list that requires Ludonarrative dissonance to enjoy. Like a classic novel, it took me two years of failed attempts to get "into" this game after the amazing opening sequence before it eventually clicked and I devoured it like there was no tomorrow. At the time I said this was the greatest virtual reality game ever made and has no support, and probably never will support, VR goggles or any equivalent. Your immersion in an electronic "world" created by hundreds, maybe thousands of artists, was just leaps and bounds beyond anything else created before it came along. After a gameplay session of the "narrative" I would often enjoy pouring myself a whiskey in the real world and find a bar inside the game, play cards and fantasize that I was in that world for that moment, eavesdropping on all the other tales being told inside that virtual establishment. The story-telling as well, although clearly inspired by cinema, got to point where you realised, this just couldn't exist in any other medium. This was the first time I considered video game stories met their potential to surpass cinema. I have long considered this one of the greatest works of art of all time. The sequel might have surpassed it in all regards in terms of quantity and fidelity but it will never be as special as this "first" break in the barrier.
An insanely fun combination of puzzles and platforming in a perfect bite-size package. I loved the progression of this game, where each level you were building a new skill based on the foundations of the skills you had learned previously. By the end game you really felt like a super-hero combo-ing all these skills together.
Seeing pre-release footage of Assasins Creed, Bioshock, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare were what ultimately made me buy my first console in ten years but this was the game that actually made sure I would never regret spending all that money on a new 360. An incredible value package. A campaign with insanely epic "sets" that just took my breath away, close to perfect co-op integration, the crazy unique "forge" and video editor modes. The multiplayer was kinda alright as well :p
Probably my first introduction to puzzle games and possibly the first video game I fell in love with. I think the only version of this I own was on the Gameboy in monochrome and it did not satisfy my thirst for this game at all. I fell in love playing this on the Amiga at a neighbours house, and now that I'm writing this, I think I need to go find a way to buy this in colour right now on a system I currently use (I don't like my chances). Lemmings 2 adding lots of new "units" and "maps" was also such an exciting idea to me as a child and was perhaps the first sequel I was ever excited for. Ironically I don't think I ever played it because I didn't have a platform at home that could play it.