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The bar, the superlative, the north star of gaming for me. I fell in love with this game's characters, setting, mechanics, and overall experience at first play and the intervening years have done little to weaken its grasp on me. I still try to play through this game once a year. This game demonstrated that it was possible to tell a story, develop characters and demonstrate their growth within the confines of game play as opposed to solely through cinematics. To me this is one of the few games that provides an example of one way that games can tell their own stories through their own means bereft of the trappings and limitations of other mediums.
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Note: I consider Half-Life 2 and Episodes One and Two to comprise one overall game. There is not a first person shooter released since this game that has not in some way borrowed from directly or been impacted in some subtle way by Half-Life 2. The shooting feels satisfying and responsive. The physics based puzzles are intuitive but not so simple that they deprive you of the sense of accomplishment that solving a good puzzle should provide. It is one of the only games where the narrative is told solely through game play and fully interactive in-game scenes. I consider Half-Life 2 to be the only game in which the silent protagonist not only works but is essential to the experience, and one of only two games ever to provide me with an emotional connection to an AI controlled partner, and the craft with which Valve builds this connection between the player as Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance is nothing short of ingenious. By far, the greatest First Person Shooter ever created in my opinion.
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I, like many I am sure, have to credit the first Endurance Run on this very site for allowing me to experience this wonderful game. By the end of my personal Persona 4 journey I had spent over 91 hours with the game having honestly enjoyed every single second of it. The characters are interesting, funny, and well written. The story which could have easily fallen all the way over the razor thin edge between absurdity and engaging fantasy never once faltered for me. The game play remained challenging through out but never once felt unfair or unnecessarily trying. One of the few RPGs in which I would gladly lose another ninety plus hours.
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Halo: Combat Evolved alone can claim responsibility for changing my mind about the first person shooter genre. Prior to playing this game, I had always hated FPS games. This game hooked me from the jump, and it remains one of the only shooters wherein I found nearly every encounter engaging and rewarding. The fine folks at Bungie went on to produce other good games in the series, but I believe that the original has yet to be topped.
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The original Metal Gear Solid was the first game I had played with full voice acting and the trappings of a "cinematic" approach to story telling. It also had the distinction of being the first stealth action game I had ever played. For the time, the mechanics and systems were intuitive and top notch, and the narrative and characterization were second to none. As the game wore on I found I didn't mind the long codec sequences or wordy cut-scenes, hell I came to look forward to them.
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Max Payne was one of countless games to be released in the shadows of The Matrix. These games attempted to make use of "bullet time's" fifteen minutes of fame, and initially, that had been the main draw for me. What I discovered was a kitschy, at times tongue in cheek NOIR story that I absolutely loved. The narrative delivery through comic panels narrated in Max's now ubiquitous monotone was a unique approach. The game frequently danced along the razor's edge of farce and gritty sincerity a balance which I think it struck perfectly with the exception of those dream sequences. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea anyway?
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