I can list 50 games I love with no issue, but refining a list of my personal top 50 is much more complicated. Do modern-day masterpieces such as Red Dead Redemption II stand on equal ground to games I loved when I was younger like Fantastic Dizzy? I thought Mirror's Edge was amazing when I played it years ago but does it stand alongside games that defined my teenage years like Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2?
It's a struggle to find the balance between games that are truly amazing and those which are important to me for other reasons. Maybe I played a game for hundreds of hours with my best friends and as such find it deeply important to me, or maybe I played a game at the exact right time in my life where it truly resonated with me.
I think I've managed to do a decent enough job, though.
Showing 1-10 of 50 items
I don't think anything like Guitar Hero or Rock Band will ever work again. Who is going to spend money on plastic drums and guitars in 2021 so that they can pretend to play rock music our dads could sing along to? It was awesome that it happened though. I remember feeling so cool when I'd play through Lay Down by Priestess or Knights of Cydonia by Muse. It was a 20-inch Fisherprice axe but in the middle of a song you were really shredding and practicing so that you wouldn't miss one note. The whole Guitar Hero franchise took me on a wild ride but the third had the songs I wanted to go back to. The addition of coop-play made it a great game to bust out with friends as well.
The best installment in an amazing series of games. Murder mystery meets CSI meets Law and Order, Ace Attorney stands alone in the "dramatic court drama" subgenre of games. In a game that's 99.9% scrolling text and cycling between 5 sprites, Phoenix Wright stands on its impeccable writing to entice players. You watch a several-second animated introduction to a case and then are thrown into the investigation. As any self-motivated defense lawyer would, you visit the crime scene yourself and perform illegal vigilantism in order to procure evidence and witness testimony. The result of this reaches its climax in the courtroom where you counter testimony with evidence and facts, while over the top characters crack whips or spit coffee at the stand. The music is beyond catchy, the twists are mind-boggling and the characters are ones you'll never forget. Phoenix Wright is so much fun to play through every time.
If I cry playing your game then it's impressive. I can probably count the amount on one hand. TWD was Telltale's magnum opus before eventually falling apart. They took a popular IP at the time and overlaid their completely original story inside the universe. Clem and Lee go from town to town trying to locate the girl's parents while Lee tries to repent from the troubled life he led before the outbreak. The game doesn't shy away from long dialogue and slower pacing and it's to its own strength, by the end of the game you deeply understand the main characters as well as key side characters before the end of the game. This also came out around the time that decision-making in videogames was a big deal and TWD delivered with different endings to scenarios as well as characters that would live or die depending on your decisions. Choices felt hard and intimidating, choosing to kill innocents or spare guilty with varying results. As a whole, TWD is some amazing character-driven story-telling that paved the way for games like The Last of Us and Detroit: Become Human.
