The Most Remarkable Games I've Played

These aren't necessarily the games that I have the most nostalgia for or the ones that affected me the most in some way. Rather, they're the ones that I admire the most from a more objective perspective, or for just plain doing something remarkable and interesting that, in my opinion, has crystallized them in history. If you're reading this, please, play through one of them. I've also included a few different ways to play these games. Keep in mind that many of them can be emulated, but I won't mention that any more and I won't tell you how to get a hold of emulators.

You may ask, "why aren't there any new games on here"? Well, part of my criteria for this is seeing how much staying power a game has. Just because it was really fun last year doesn't mean that it will be remembered five or ten years from now - these games have stayed in my memory or in the public's memory because they are just that good.

List items

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  Doom

  (Released 1993, PC, later ported to practically everything with a screen) Wolfenstein 3D might the be first FPS, but it's Doom that really made the genre popular. And for damn good reason. I admire Doom very much for having very few mechanics but an amazing amount of depth. Each weapon is very different from one another and every single one has a use. Each enemy is also very different from another and they all require different approaches. Combine the variety of enemies and the variety of weapons together along with the mostly well-done levels full of health, ammo, and powerups, and there's a recipe for brilliant design. If Doom has any faults, it's that sometimes the keycard searches feel annoying, especially when you can't find that last one in this huge level. But I wouldn't trade those keycard searches for nothing. They force players to explore the level and learn how to navigate it well and find secrets and kill more enemies.

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  Super Metroid

  (Released 1994, SNES, later made available on the Wii eShop) To summarize what I think this game does well, uh, look at the Doom description. On top of all of that, though, it does exploration better than any game I've ever played. It's obviously designed for sequence breaking, and it's done very well. It's like the designers sat down and said "OK, if players break sequence this way then we need to make sure they can get out this way and..." etc. Incase you don't know, this game's idea of exploring to find items to open up new areas to explore more has been named "Metroidvania", due in part to this and in part to Castlevania Symphony of the Night. I've never played SotN. I'm sure it's brilliant, but Super Metroid came first. It's a game that exemplifies how to design an area so that players naturally come to where they need to be. There are no objective markers, no arrows on the map, no clear pointers. There's just enough subtle hints to let players know where they need to go, but not enough to let the player know that he's being led.

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  Half-Life

  (Released 1998, PC, on Steam and later ported to PS2 if you need a controller) If Doom is the game that popularized shooters, then Half-Life is the game that made players take them more seriously. Before this game, shooters had names like "Redneck Rampage" and "Duke Nukem" and "Shadow Warrior". There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but Half-Life had something else. It had some subtlety. It accomplished the feeling of being in your own action movie tale, something that no game had done before. All of those set pieces that make Call of Duty campaigns so action movie like, and that have become a major part of practically every triple A release since this game? Yeah, you can thank this game. Before this, things in shooters were much simpler. There was an enemy, you saw it, it shot you. Again, nothing wrong with that, but here, players were treated to things happening around them that they didn't cause, and they had to deal with it in some way. Like, for instance, an invincible set of tentacles that can't see, but can hear, and you have to get underneath it. How is the player going to deal with that? Oh, they have to activate the rocket that's right above its head. How? Go around the monster several times to activate different parts of the rocket.

  It's not that this game doesn't have faults. It does. Its last level, Xen, is so bad that I don't consider beating it necessary to be a full run of the game. It has jumping puzzles, none of which are all that great. But the things it does right, and the things it did for modern AAA gaming, are so clear if you sit down and play it.