Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Shamus Young's Top 64 PC Games

Lemming42

Arcane
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
Messages
6,043
Location
The Satellite Of Love
Whatever the intention of the list (and that bewildering Sims 2 entry where he claims to not even like it), he's got an interesting selection of games there. No One Lives Forever has that Deus-Ex-style effect on me where if someone mentions it I have to go and install it immediately.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
48-41: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=24447

48. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX


top50_pacman.jpg



Yes! I found a way to sneak Pac-Man onto this PC gaming list. Maybe this is a cheat. The Pac-Man name is legend, but this isn’t a re-creation of the original and this version isn’t nearly as famous as the various 80′s versions.

Still, this feels like a genuine evolution of the idea. This is a better game, and not just because of the shiny graphics and head bobbing electronic soundtrack. There have been a lot of variants to the Pac-formula over the decades: Bigger mazes, giant Pac-Man, jumpingPac-Man, girl Pac-Man, quiz Pac-Man, Pac-Man with a pinball machine attached, or isometric Pac-Man. This is the first one since Ms. Pac-Man[1] that still felt like a game of the same lineage and also improved on the original formula.

47. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3



Link (YouTube)


There were a lot of various “management sims” put out by various teams at various times. You could run a hospital, a railway company, an airline, a farm, and a dozen other things. But the Rollercoaster games had a neat trick where you were using the somewhat dry and prosaic financial sim to build visually appealing thrill-rides. You were building things that were fun to ride and to look at.

46. Descent


descent_320.jpg



A game where you fly through tunnels in “real 3D”[2]

I can imagine an alternate history where this game had the kind of explosive popularity and endless clones that Doom and Quake enjoyed. It is a very strange alternate history. There were a few games that built on the Descent formula, although Forsaken is the only one I remember. Ultimately I think this genre – if you want to call shooting stuff while floating around so you can’t tell which way is up a “genre” – was doomed to be a niche from the beginning. The movement is nauseating for some, and the controls end up being significantly more complex than anything else this side of mech piloting.

Sadly, the series kind of lost its way. The first game had this dark cyberpunk vibe, like you were Han Solo by way of Bladerunner. The story was just a few paragraphs of occasional flavor text to preserve the mood. By the third game the protagonist had morphed into a grouchy hero in a Star Trek future, and his story was told in cutscenes that have aged very poorly. The color palette was drained a little, the contrast was muted, the brightness was boosted, and the result was a bland game that had lost its original charm and had very little to offer newcomers except confusing levels and disorienting gameplay[3].

Maybe an alternate future where this become a viable genre is unrealistic, but I would have liked it if this series had survived just a little longer.

45. Papers, Please


2013_papersplease.jpg



The rule in movies is “Show, don’t tell”. The rule in games is “Do, don’t show”. Papers, Please has almost nothing to say directly about its subject matter, but instead lets you participate in the utterly mundane horror of bureaucratic oppression. The mechanics perfectly show concepts that are hard to convincingly explain, such as how even a short list of seemingly reasonable regulations can make for chaos and confusion. You can see on one side some policy-maker concluding that issuing work permits would “simplify and streamline” the processing of visitors, and you can experience first-hand just how hilariously wrong this idea is. It’s a game with mechanics that work perfectly with the message, with art that wraps you in the desperation and smothering indifference of the Eastern bloc.

When we complain about ludonarrative dissonance, we’re usually complaining about games that have some kind of conflict between their mechanics and their tone, theme, story, or message: The main character is supposedly a fumbling aged alcoholic loser, but in gameplay he’s an unstoppable killing machine both before and after giving up the booze. You’re supposedly haunted by the deaths of twelve soldiers, but in gameplay you’ll kill a hundred guys and a couple dozen innocents in the process of doing some side-job for a modest paycheck at the behest of some idiot you barely know. But inPapers, Please the mechanics are the message, and the result is a wonderful of example of communicating through play.

44. Dungeon Keeper 2


top50_dungeonkeeper2.jpg



Ah Bullfrog. The development house that served as the secret lair for the madman Peter Molyneux, before he moved to Lionhead. Both companies made games that sounded brilliant on paper but always felt a little rough in execution. Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Black and White, Fable. The list of auteur experiments is long and equal parts distinguished and infamous.

For my money, Dungeon Keeper (and its sequel, pictured above) were the most mechanically sound of the games. You could make a similar case for Fable, but Dungeon Keeper was much surer of its identity. Fable always seemed to be groping for a specific tone, theme, or idea, and never figured out what it was or who it was for.

43. Starflight II


splash_starflight2.jpg



Part adventure game, part space sim, part roleplaying game, the Starflight games (both of them) come from a strange era when we hadn’t yet mapped out the perimeter of our genre pigeonholes. It feels wild and random now, but it’s also a shining example of what you can accomplish with just some text and a few tiny images. This was big-idea sci-fi on a grand[4] scale. Elite is given credit as the progenitor of future space sims, but I have to give respect to Starflight for doing so much with story in such a limited medium.

42. King’s Quest III


top50_kq3.jpg



King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, The Colonel’s Bequest… Sierra had certainly found a niche they were happy with in the 80′s. They excelled at fiddly adventure games with dumb parsers, horrible arcade sequences, and batshit insane puzzles. But at the time we didn’t mind, because nobody else was doing any better. We didn’t have the internet so developers didn’t have people screaming at them over twitter how annoying this stuff was. So it took many iterations for everyone to sort out what worked and what didn’t. In fact, even when a far better template came along (we’ll get to that later in this list) it took Sierra a long time to adapt.

I think the Sierra formula actually suffered with the introduction of better graphics and voice acting. The step up in visual fidelity demanded a equivalent step up in the rest of the game, and they just didn’t have that. King’s Quest III retains a lot of its charm, and you can forgive its brain-dead parser, lame stair-climbing gameplay[5] and goofball puzzles because it still looks like the product of an era what that sort of thing was still okay.

41. Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast


top50_jedioutcast.jpg



What a strange franchise. It began as Dark Forces in 1995, a shooter of the DOOM variety. People played it, shot Storm Troopers, and – as with all Star Wars games without lightsabers – complained that they wanted lightsabers. So the sequel gave you one, and the entire franchise re-named itself mid-stream to “Jedi Knight”. The series reached its peak with Jedi Outcast in 2002, and still stands as one of the best examples of action swordplay in the world of games. That’s a shame really. It’s been a dozen years and few games have done better. (Not that Outcast was especially brilliant, but proper swordplay is hard.)
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,975
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
He seems to be doing this list to troll people, Sims 2 on a better position than Planescape Torment? I sometimes read shamus blog and he is a casual guy with a little liberal poisoning on the head but he isn't Fallout 3/Biodrone fanboy level of dumb. This list is just to generate controversy and to Infinitron harvest a new crop of butthurt.
What sort of casual would rank PST above The Sims, though?
 

TigerKnee

Arcane
Joined
Feb 24, 2012
Messages
1,920
I know who this guy is, but I'm not sure what possessed Infinitron to hold a magnet light towards him to attract the sharks.

Well, guess Infinitron's gonna Infinitron?
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
40-33: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=24444

40. Mass Effect 2


splash_masseffect2.jpg



I didn’t like the game. It was dumb, it was ugly, and it was thematically disjointed. At the same time it had far better production values, bigger name voice actors, more mainstream gameplay, and more gameplay polish. Mass Effect 2 is at the very center of the BioWare vortex. This game is the bridge between old BioWare that focused on ideas and world-building and new the BioWare that focused on spectacle and style.

After Mass Effect 2, “old BioWare” is gone and “new BioWare” is more popular than the old one ever was. Mass Effect 2 is the one game where both versions of the company existed at the same time. Yes, we got the Illusive Mary Sue and a team parceled out into fragments of Day One DLC. But we also got Legion, Mordin, Thane, Samara, and Jacob[1].

39. Nethack


top50_nethack.jpg



Nethack was not the original roguelike. The original roguelike was – and I hope this doesn’t need further explanation – called Rogue. But Nethack made the genre famous and was wringing salty tears out of overly ambitious gamers long before the first inklings of Dark Souls appeared on the dry-erase board of a heartless and sadistic game developer.

Its adherence to text tiles gives it ridiculous levels of interactivity: Examine things, kick things, throw things, use things, rub things, shoot things, ride on things, sit on things, engrave in things, dip things into other things, sacrifice things to gods. Pray, eat, drink, search steal and chat.

It’s deep. It’s long. It’s completely unfair. It doesn’t even feel bad about it.

38. Metro: Last Light


top50_metrolastlight.jpg



Videogames rarely do well at adaptations. Translating the events of a book or movie into a game usually ends in a talky, poorly paced, un-fun disaster, and only part of the blame can be placed on the fact that most adaptations aren’t funded very well.

Metro: Last Light avoids these mistakes by not using the source material for story, but instead using it as a foundation of lore and worldbuilding. The result is a game with a solid grip on tone that doesn’t let story get in the way of the interactivity. The game also comes from Russia, giving us westerners a very different sort of apocalypse than what we’re used to.

37. Duke Nukem 3D


top50_dukenukem.jpg



Ha ha! That videogame character referenced a movie I’ve seen! This is new and different! And look, I can flush toilets! See myself in the mirror! Turn lights on and off! Catchphrase!

Like a lot of 90′s stuff, it hasn’t aged well. But for a brief moment, this thing represented a breath of fresh air and a new kind of playful interactivity for videogames. And the long-delayed sequel “Duke Nukem Whenever” joke kept us going for a decade and a half.

36. Dark Souls


top50_dark_souls.jpg



A masterwork of game design that sets out to create a very specific tone with a tightly enforced set of mechanics, and executes it perfectly. At first the game feels hard and unfair. But as you refine your skills the game becomes reasonable, and if you stick with it long enough you might even find the challenge to become trivial. This is not true of a lot of modern games that attempt to funnel all players into a single experience, where skill has only a modest impact on outcomes. Here your success is driven entirely by skill and foreknowledge, and the game isn’t afraid to throw up a wall until you master the skills needed to proceed.

I find it too stressful to enjoy, but I admire the game for what it does anyway.

35. Wolfenstein


top50_wolfenstein.jpg



The great-great grandfather of the manshoots. The springboard for id Software. It’s aged poorly and is really only notable for its legacy, but what a legacy.

34. Kerbal Space Program


2013_kerbal.jpg



As it turns out, this orbiting business is a lot of fun. There’s an entire game packaged in the rules of real-world space travel. It’s a creative puzzle game where you figure out how to get from A to B without running out of energy. Maybe you’ll attack the problem by trying to build better rockets, or maybe you’ll try to solve it with tricky slingshot orbital maneuvers. Either way is fun, and to get to the really tantalizing targets you’ll need to excel at both.

Kerbal is notable for being the most educational game I’ve ever played. The mechanics are physics, and as you learn to play the game you’ll learn how the space program works. It’s one thing if Randal tells you that space is easy to reach and hard to STAY in, but nothing teaches like experience. I learned why, in real rocket launches, they do a vertical burn that gradually curves east, then they do nothing for a while before doing another burn parallel with the equator. I’d always wondered about that. I mean, I could have looked it up, but I never got around to it. Then suddenly I had game mechanics that nudged me into this understanding though simple experience and experimentation. Along the way I got a sense of how geosynchronous satellites work and why we have so much junk in space.

33. Descent: Freespace – The Great War


top50_freespace.jpg



Descent: Freespace – The Great War is usually held up as one of the greats of the space-fighter genre. The sequel – which I haven’t played[2] – is usually given the title of “best” of the form.

I wonder how much of this is due to the simple fact that it’s one of the last? Developers had nailed down the essentials of this kind of gameplay as far back as X-Wing, which came out in 1993 – five years before Freespace. Since then it had been a simple process of polish through iteration. While I’ve heard lots of theories, I’ve never heard a really satisfying explanation for why this genre died. We just stopped making them.

The “Descent” moniker is really unfortunate. At the time, Publisher Interplay was worried about name recognition so they slapped the name of their popular (but totally unrelated) indoor space shooter on the thing. It would be like Nintendo launching the Zelda franchise by calling it: Mario Brothers: The Legend of Zelda. Just dumb.

The irony is that Freespace is now more renowned and remembered than Descent.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
32-25: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=24442

32. X-Com


xcom_geoscape1.gif



The game takes place in the distant future of… 1999. The premise is that you are in charge of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-Com) which has been created to counter a dangerous and growing threat from a race of aliens in flying saucers. Your job is to shoot down alien craft when you can, and then send in a squad of specially trained soldiers to engage them in a a little turn-based, hide-and-seek gunplay. The force you lead is multinational, and individual nations will adjust their monthly contributions to your coffers based on how well you protect them. You can try to protect clusters of small countries if you like, or you can put all your eggs in one basket and suck up to one of the big, rich countries. You’ll probably want control of the whole globe at some point, but it will take you a while before you have the budget and technology to pull that off.

Usually when they say a game was “before it’s time” they mean it was visionary. I suppose that’s true here. But X-Com was also before its time in the sense that computers weren’t really up to the job yet. Back in the day, the AI would sometimes take the better part of a minute to take its turn. (This process is little more than a single-frame screen flash on modern machines.) Even today, a proper game of X-Com can take days to complete. Back in 1994 the same game might take weeks, with most of the time spent waiting for the AI to do its thing.

The reboot wasn’t bad, but it’s been 20 years and we still don’t have anything that can hold a candle to the original in terms of high tension and engrossing depth.

31. Quake 3 Arena


top50_q3a.jpg



The people at Epic Games and the people at id Software both realized the same thing at the same time: We spend a fortune making these content-heavy corridor shooters, but players consume them in ten hours and then spend YEARS playing multiplayer deathmatch on user-made maps. So instead of making another story-game, why don’t we just make something designed to be a multiplayer shooter from the beginning?

Thus Unreal led to Unreal Tournament and Quake II led to Quake III Arena. I always preferred the more diverse game modes of UT, but Quake III Arena was the more popular. Also, Q3A lives on today with its original feel preserved, while Unreal Tournament continues to prostrate itself to a console audience that doesn’t care[1].

30. Tie Fighter


top50_tiefighter.jpg



I really like how the “Space Sim” genre is a giant formless blob of everything that has space and lasers in it. I suppose we can differentiate by calling this a “Space COMBAT Sim”, to differentiate it from a regular “Space Sim” like Elite.

Like Freespace a little further down the list[2] this is a game where you’re part of a fighter squadron and you shoot down other squadrons in epic space battles with lots of visible space-lasers, audible space-explosions, and a complete lack of Newtonian space-physics.

The beginning of the game has you flying useless brittle mass-produced imperial TIE fighters before chickening out after a few missions and letting you fly something with shields. Be Vader’s Wingman for a mission! Do sketchy stuff for the sketchy guy to advance your career! Run a checkpoint and scan for smugglers!

This entry is probably pretty good evidence of how corruptible this process is. TIE Fighter is only ranked above Freespace because I knew Josh would give me a hard time if I ranked this too low.

29. Borderlands 2


top50_borderlands2.jpg



The original Borderlands presented you with a goofball world of mayhem and carnage, but never did anything with it. It felt like the set-up for a joke with no punchline. Borderlands 2 delivers the punchline, expands the scope, refines the gameplay, and gives us a deliciously detestable Bad Guy to hate. Okay, the part where *spoiler* is killed for cheap melodrama doesn’t make any sense at all and comes off as more dumb than anything else. But there’s a great payoff for that moment in the DLC expansion Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, which is some of the best DLC ever made[3]

Borderlands 2 gives us great characters, nails the tone that the first game couldn’t quite sort out, and refines the gameplay. Also I guess it has some stuff about shooting and looting.

28. Unreal


top50_unreal.jpg



Conceptually, Unreal is the last of the old-school 90′s shooters in the lineage of Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake. You’re a nameless protagonist pushing through a linear sequence of semi-sensical locations and mowing down its inhabitants with a vast collection of completely impractical hardware. There are no voiced characters. Your only motivation is “survive by way of going forward”, with no clear end goal. As this game arrived, a new aesthetic was taking over that favored a more character-focused and story-driven approach. Perhaps that’s just as well. The “plotless shooter” thing doesn’t seem to go very well with photorealism, and feels more at home in the low-fi world of pixelated abstractions.

Also noteworthy: Unreal is massive. The sheer number and variety of levels is daunting. They just don’t make them like this anymore.

27. Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas


top50_gtasa.jpg



San Andreas is the last of the “real” Grand Theft Auto games before the series lost its soul and became a grim, joyless, embittered screed against a strawman version of the American culture that made this series possible to begin with. After San Andreas, the series forgot how to have fun and seemed to become ashamed of its capacity for emergent mayhem, and became even more devoted to scripted sequences and DIAS gameplay.

San Andreas was a remix of the early 90′s gang movies (South Central, Boyz in The Hood, Juice, etc.) but still retained a bit of the gleeful mischief that made this series such a hit[4]. It would take Rockstar until GTA V – a full decade later – before they could offer us a playground as large and as varied as the one in San Andreas.

26. Doom


top50_doom.jpg



It made id Software into an industry giant, turned the developers into rockstars, generated a wave of game-violence panic, launched a huge and still active modding culture, established a distinctive new[5] design aesthetic, and solidified a set of mechanics based around high-speed projectile avoidance.

Also, it was pretty fun at the time.

25. Silent Hill 2


top50_silenthill2.jpg



The haters say that we don’t need another game about a slightly crazy man who goes to a haunted town to work out his inner demons. I say if we have room for a thousand games where you Save The World by Shooting All The Guys, then we have room for at least one more of these. Sadly, the Silent Hill franchise keeps mistaking itself for a monster-killing empowerment fantasy.

It’s a deeply disturbing game, but rewarding if you’re willing to dig down and try to figure out what it all means.
 
Last edited:

TheGreatOne

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
1,214
35. Wolfenstein
The great-great grandfather of the manshoots. The springboard for id Software. It’s aged poorly and is really only notable for its legacy, but what a legacy.
Definitely sounds like a top 35 game :MMaybe Ultima 2 is in the top 20?
 

Perkel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
15,810
His top 3:

Earthworm Jim. Thanks to it i discovered my sexuality
WET The Sexy Empire Lost my right hand virginity.
Ocarina of Time - Never played it but i heard it's good.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
24-17: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=24440

24. Eve Online


splash_eve.jpg



In contrast to the endless procession of doomed WoW-clones, here is an immensely successful online game that has not a single challenger. It’s not that games have gone out of business trying to imitate this success, it’s that in the eleven years since its launch, nobody has made a serious try at cutting out a piece of this market.

To a certain extent, that’s understandable. This is a scary game. It’s a space game where people shoot at each other with player-built weapons, from player-built ships, made from player-built parts, made from player-harvested raw materials in player-built factories. The factions are entirely shaped by players. Everything interesting about this world from its politics to its wars – is emergent.

If you’re looking to make a quick buck copying an established and proven formula, just about anything else is going to look safer than this.


23. Secret of Monkey Island


top50_monkeyisland.jpg



One day Ron Gilbert looked at everything that was wrong and stupid about adventure games and asked, “Why don’t we make a game that doesn’t do those things?” And then he did. And in one stroke he blew away everything Sierra had ever done. The jokes were better, and have aged better. (Space Quest jokes were very topical. Iran-contrajokes don’t have the sting now that they did in the 80′s[1].) The puzzles were still silly, but now they were silly in a fun way. The visuals were delicious. The music was some of the best in the business at the time, and still holds up really well today.

22. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time


top50_pop.jpg



The platforming flow in Sands of Time felt so good. It was natural and intuitive and yet sometimes challenging and heart-stopping. The visuals were a feast and the arc of the arrogant Prince who learned compassion and humility still resonates with me today. The later entries might have improved the gameplay[2] but they never hit that magic mix of Arabian fantasy, personal growth, and playful whimsy.

The puzzles were pretty good and the environments always managed to balance the need for interesting things to climb with the need to have rooms make sense.

I’d play through it more often, but the combat was a cruel chore[3].

I’ve been saying for years that developers should base a long-running franchise on a series of themes and situations, rather than trying to tell a set of connected stories. This series is exhibit A. I did not want to see what happened after the events of Sands of Time[4]. What I wanted was another game with platforming, puzzles, and swordplay set in an Arabian-esque world. Play as a street rat. Play as someone cursed by a genie. Play as a princess. You know – mix things up, rather than grafting endlessly muddled and convoluted bits onto a story that had already ended perfectly.

And now we get annual Assassins Creed instead of this, and it suffers from the same problem. Only moreso. Stupid Ubisoft.

21. Fallout


top50_fallout.jpg



Looking back, the most amazing thing about Fallout to me is the extreme lack of hand-holding. A generation after the bombs fell, you’re sent out from your nuclear fallout shelter to find some hardware to repair your water purification system. The vault overseer gives you a thin lead, which doesn’t pan out. Thus you find yourself alone in a hostile world with no idea how to proceed. You basically have to spend a few weeks exploring the wasteland and getting to know the place before you pick up the next breadcrumb.

No AAA game today would dare to leave players adrift like that. And to be fair, even back in 1997 a lot of players didn’t like playing a game where you had a time limit and no clue how to proceed. It makes the game frustrating if you’re just looking to “beat” a videogame, but if you like to explore a world and don’t want to feel like you’re just following a fixed path set down by a game designer, then this kind of liberal approach to player agency can feel really good[5].

Also, the game nailed a wonderful dark comedy vibe, which Bethesda completely misunderstood as goofball comedy in Fallout 3, like they can’t tell the difference between Dr. Strangelove and Adam Sandler movies. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

20. Saints Row The Third


saintsrow3_8.jpg



When Grand Theft Auto cast aside the crown of “Gleeful Open-World Mayhem Simulator”, Saints Row picked the crown up and wore it on its crotch, pelvic-thrusting into a new era of ridiculous stupidity. While GTA wanted to ram you through its fixed story with fixed characters, Saints Row lets you make just about anyone you want – whether they would fit with the designer’s vision for a gang leader or not.

It almost feels like the designer wants you to have fun, and isn’t sneering at you for being a stupid shallow consumerist phony.

19. Team Fortress 2


top50_tf2.jpg



This game marks the point where Valve left the videogame business and began selling virtual hats. It’s also a good illustration of the problem with making online shooters: Everyone assumes you just need to make a “balanced” game and you’re good. But Team Fortress 2 has more than simply balanced classes. It has style. Charm. I could take a dozen screenshots from online shooters of the last decade and very few people would be able to match the game with the screenshot. But everyone recognizes TF2, even people who have never played it. TF2 has a sense of humor and playfulness about it, which matters when you’re spending hundreds of hours with a game.

Also, the classes aren’t just “balanced”, they’re radically different. Team Fortress 2 feels like nine different games that share the same space.

18. Max Payne


top50_maxpayne.jpg



Like Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and No One Lives Forever, Max Payne is a product of that magical golden age when graphics were just good enough to be able to sell a mood or art style but not quite so good that we had to start cutting down the size and scope of our games to pay for them. It couldn’t last, and I’m not saying we’d be better off if graphics hadn’t advanced at all, but it shows that we did lose something.

I liked all three Max Payne titles. But for me the first one was the one that won my heart.

17. Thief II: The Metal Age


top50_thief2.jpg



While a lot can be said of the Shalebridge Cradle as one of the best levels in gaming[6], one level is not enough to earn you a place on this list. And the rest of Thief: Deadly Shadows[7] does not measure up. (Small levels, inadvertently hokey story, terrible cutscenes.)

But Thief II is strong in every way that its sequel wasn’t. The levels were massive, giving you hours of gameplay without ever hitting a single loading screen. It used the great live-action-but-also-animated cutscenes that were so successful in the first game. They didn’t wow us the way Starcraft cutscenes (two years earlier) did, but now 14 years later they have retained their charm while Starcraft’s 1998 CGI looks dated and silly.

Sadly, the in-game graphics haven’t aged nearly as well. Thief II technically came out at the start of the golden age, when environments were still cheap but juuust good enough that characters could emote and show bits of environmental detail. But Thief II was still using the same engine from the original Thief game from two years earlier, and even then it had looked kind of dated. So Thief II looked really pathetic compared to its contemporaries.

However, when given the choice between the boxy sprawling levels of Thief II and the bump-mapped closet maps of Thief: Deadly Shadows, it’s no contest. This was the series at its best, and we’re still waiting for a proper sequel.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
16-9: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=24438

16. Civilization IV





Civilization is one of those games that seemed to spring fully-formed from the mind of its creators. It took us several years of iteration to figure out adventure games, or shooters. But the essentials of Civilization were there from the earliest stages: Cities,taxes, tech tree, accelerating timescale, diplomacy. Since then it’s been a matter of balance and refinement.

Any of the Civ games would be worthy of this list, and I debated whether Alpha Centauri should be counted as a Civilization game. Clearly it’s of the same lineage, and the only reason the name is different is because of business reasons. And when you’re compiling a list of “top games”, the last thing you care about is the politics of idiotic IP wars between ninny publishers. From a purely gameplay standpoint, Alpha Centauri fits in the series better than Civilization V, which greatly altered the combat by moving to hex grids and removing unit stacks.

But ultimately I think I want to give the top honors to Civ IV. It’s a stellar entry in the series (although they’re all pretty good) and it hasBaba Yetu.

15. Sim City 4


top50_simcity4.jpg



In contrast to Civilization, Sim City is a series that seems to have struggled to nail down which elements worked and which didn’t. Is this supposed to be a simulation of something realistic? Or is this really just about creative building? Or is the player here to build a city that can survive random disasters? Is the player looking for options, or challenges?

The first game was pretty shallow and doesn’t hold up well at all today. The next three games[1] we all fine entries, but I’m giving the place of honor to Sim City 4 because it’s the last one that was good.

14. BioShock


top50_bioshock.jpg



This game isn’t nearly as smart as it pretends to be, but it’s pretty smart for a shooter. It’s not nearly as deep, complex, or open as its “Shock” forebears, but it’s practically an RPG sandbox compared to its contemporaries. Everything after the meeting with Ryan is pretty much a dumb waste of time, and the final boss fight is stupid and infantile in both a mechanical and narrative sense – but the Ryan meeting is still one of the best in modern gaming. And its atrocious DRM was the first of a bad breed of obnoxious customer abuse, a trend that lingers to this day.

And now that I’ve said all that, I have no idea what this thing is doing so high on the list. Ultimately I guess I have to give BioShock credit for keeping the flame of “smart(ish) exploration-driven shooters” alive. Also it was very pretty and the water effects still look glorious seven years later.

13. Batman: Arkham City


arkhamcity_joker.jpg



Batman has been in a lot of videogames, and most of them are not good[2]. In fact, superhero games in general have always struggled to reconcile the need for challenging gameplay with the inherent empowerment of the superhero genre. But the Arkam Batman games did for superhero games what the Marvel Movieverse did for superhero films. They didn’t just top everything that came before, they did so by a long shot and made it look easy.

Sure, you could button-mash your way to victory like a thug, but the game made you feel like an ass for taking the lazy way through. It was exhilarating to get the rhythm of the game down and dispatch a whole crowd of mooks without taking a single hit. The animations were both fluid and brutal. Add in exquisite art, the best voice acting in the business, some serviceable puzzles, and a solid grasp of their source material, and you have a formula that no other team has been able to match, not even when they were handed the blueprints.

12. Skyrim



Link (YouTube)


Which Elder Scrolls should make the list? Should it be the talky, obtuse, deep and vast world of Morrowind? Or do we give the spot to Skyrim, the shallow glamorous meme-spawning dragon-punching spectacle that served as fertile ground for a massive library of aggressively ambitious mods?

While I’ll always love Morrowind for its depth, it’s exquisite world-building, its fascinating themes, and its fantastical environments, it also gave us cliff racers. So Skyrim it is.

11. Left 4 Dead


top50_l4d.jpg



There is some debate among the community between Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. While I don’t have the numbers to prove it, I have this sneaking suspicion that if you asked them, a lot of the staunch L4D1 fans would be co-op players and the L4D2 fans would be PvP fans.

I’m all about the co-op, and I’m all about the first game. It launched a little sub-genre[3] of 4-player co-op games like Killing Floor and Payday. It was fun and funny completely nailed the direct-to-cable action schlock vibe. The AI director gave the game massive replay value and the varying banter kept the quiet moments fresh. Also, the game had quiet moments, which is something games still struggle with.

It also has a bit of a personal legacy with me: Left 4 Dead is how I met Josh, Randy, and Rutskarn. Which means the seeds of Spoiler Warning and our weekly podcast were planted in L4D. It also inspiredPixel City. It inspired Left 4 Dumb.

10. Knights of the Old Republic


top50_kotor.jpg



When people talk about “classic BioWare” they’re only really talking about three games: KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect[4]. Those are the upbeat, character-driven, lore-rich, tonally consistent games with lots of worldbuilding and really awkward RPG mechanics. Earlier games aren’t as celebrated and don’t have those quirks that we came to associate with the BioWare name. And the later games went the way of broad spectacle-driven power fantasy.

But for a brief time BioWare gave players something they just weren’t getting elsewhere, and in that time they built a rabid fanbase[5]. It’s very possible that everything we’ve come to associate with the “classic BioWare” aesthetic came from a tiny handful of writers. (And possibly just Drew Karpyshyn all by his lonesome.)

KOTOR was the first game of that brief BioWare golden age, and it was one of the rare titles to capture the mood of classic Star Wars.

We’ll never forget you, Trask.

9. Master of Orion 2


top50_moo.jpg



It’s been 18 years, and this game still stands at the top of its genre. (I’ll allow for the people who insist MOO1 is better than the sequel. They’re very close to each other and very far above the alternatives.) Every game since then has lost their way by adding endless and pointless complexity (Master of Orion 3 is abominable) or leaves out a lot of really appealing depth. The focus on sleek graphics has harmed a lot of the newer titles by robbing them of their ability to gracefully abstract concepts into click-and-drag icons.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
When people talk about “classic BioWare” they’re only really talking about three games: KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect
WUT?

Yep, Shamus gonna Shamus. He really sees those games as THE Bioware "Golden Age", even though they were just a sparse transition period between classic PC Bioware and console-EA Bioware - only three games over a period of 6 years.
 
Last edited:

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
Patron
Joined
Feb 2, 2007
Messages
17,274
Location
Terra da Garoa
I fail to see how there's a big "console focus" jump from ME1 to ME3. I actually read this as "DA2 made me sad ;_;"
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I fail to see how there's a big "console focus" jump from ME1 to ME3. I actually read this as "DA2 made me sad ;_;"

Actually, he doesn't seem to give much of a fuck about the Dragon Age series.

Shamus seems to have given up on traditional top-down RPGs after NWN2 OC and never looked back (can't blame him amirite?). He never talks about them and doesn't seem to play them, which is really weird for a guy who built his reputation on RPGs and still seems to view himself as a "roleplaying guy" as far as I can tell.
 
Last edited:

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
Patron
Joined
Feb 2, 2007
Messages
17,274
Location
Terra da Garoa
Man, God bless the Codex. The game journo that probably enjoys classic-style RPGs the most today is Jason from Kotaku... we're doomed.
 

felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
Patron
Joined
Feb 2, 2007
Messages
17,274
Location
Terra da Garoa
Actually no, the guy posted a lot about Pillars of Eternity, and was the only journalist that liked my book project enough to post about it.

And I contacted nearly all of them, Mr. Young included.
 

dnf

Pedophile
Dumbfuck Shitposter
Joined
Nov 4, 2011
Messages
5,885
Actually no, the guy posted a lot about Pillars of Eternity, and was the only journalist that liked my book project enough to post about it.

And I contacted nearly all of them, Mr. Young included.
He Needs moar oldskool creds
 

TheGreatOne

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
1,214
L4D almost as high as MoO2 :lol: Such a mediocre and forgettable game, nothing special nor ground breaking about it, and it's no where near as timeless, fun and well designed as CS and Quake, it's not even Halo tier.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom