by marino
This is a running list of my Games of the Year. Are they the best games? Maybe not. Probably not even. But, they're mine.
So, where do we start? Well, my first gaming experience was thanks to a TI-99/4A that my mom had for transcribing/dictation work. But, I barely remember it aside from Car Wars and a couple others. I did buy one and a bunch of games a while back though. Regardless, I'm starting with...
That's right. I've been traveling north, west, south, and west since '87. It's the first great game I ever played. The kind of experience that leaves an indelible mark and solidifies a lifelong hobby. And that gold cartridge was downright magical.
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Probably the first truly great multiplayer gaming experience for me. Just countless hours running these missions, killing each by going too fast on the waterfall level, and just hoping that 30 lives were enough to make it.
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A wise man once said that if you had to objectively choose a "greatest game of all time", Tetris is probably the one. And when paired with the revolutionary Game Boy, a phenomenon was born. Do you understand how many AA batteries I killed before my dad smartened up and bought rechargeable ones?
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I know most people will probably say Mega Man 2 is the best, but they're wrong. It's 3 all day. I mean... you can slide! And you have a dog! A red guy with a whistle shows up! And you can shoot snakes at people! What's not to love here?
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Still the best 2D Mario. Just pure excellence from top to bottom. And it stands the test of time as it's still popular today with all sorts of speedruns and ROM hacks.
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No game is perfect. But, A Link to the Past is the most perfect. Easily my #1 console game of all time. At this point, I don't think anything will ever top it. Breath of the Wild got close, but LTTP is simply too pure and good.
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Mortal Kombat was a revolution. Never before had there been so much chatter among classmates as when we discovered MK. Collectively, no one seemed to care about Street Fighter anymore and rumors about crazy things that may or may not be in MK were relentless. The arcade version is from 1992, but our countless hours were primarily on home versions in 1993.
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Bigger, badder, and better in every conceivable way. More finishers, more secrets, more crazy ass rumors and speculation among friends, and much better gameplay that allowed for some creative combos.
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By this point, my friends and I were finding ways to get to the mall for the arcade. This was the pinnacle of MK fandom too thanks to the introduction of the internet. Dialing in and checking rat.org as often as possible for new move lists and rumors was a near daily occurrence. Weekly trips to the grocery store to scour every gaming magazine became required reading. Finding a cabinet in a random gas station or hotel and realizing you can be the one to unlock Mileena, Ermac, and Classic Sub-Zero was a treat.
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As they've done many times now, Nintendo welcomed us to the new generation with a genre-defining game for the ages. Moving Mario from 2D to 3D should not have been this good on the first shot, but they did it. The Nintendo 64 only had two games at launch, but most people didn't care.
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Being a Star Fox fan ain't been easy for the last 20 years or so, but Star Fox 64 was so good that it makes us continuously hopeful after countless disappointments. This was also the very first game I played at my first E3. My friend and I just had to know what the rumble felt like.
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Definitely the pinnacle of the Crash Bandicoot franchise and one of the best 3D platformers of all time if you ask me. This is where Naughty Dog found the perfect balance of goofy fun and sweaty controller difficulty. The game allows you to decide just how challenging you want it to be with its optional goals on every level.
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My #1 game of all time obviously has to be my 1999 GOTY. It consumed my life, for better or worse, and despite not playing it for well over a decade, I still think about it almost every day. I could talk about EQ for days on end. If you check out the wiki page for the game, you'll see what I mean.
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The Ruins of Kunark is arguably the best expansion, but the memories of the Velious era are more vivid to me personally. Every day, logging on felt like there was a possibility of an exciting adventure. Sure, sometimes you just ended up grinding for 11 hours in Velketor's Labyrinth, but many of those days turned into an all-hands-on-deck race between our guild and some other one when someone realized Dain Frostreaver had popped in Icewell Keep, King Tormax had spawned in Kael Drakkel, or holy shit someone spotted Lodizal roaming the shores of Iceclad Ocean. There's also my favorite zone of all time, Plane of Mischief. And I haven't even mentioned the whole Sleeper's Tomb drama.
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While Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is my personal favorite because it's where I fell in love with the series, THPS3 is inarguably the best one. The revert literally tied everything together making for the optimal trick system with a ridiculous amount of depth to master. It also pioneered online gaming on PS2 well before there was even an official method to do that.
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Admittedly, this expansion is where things started to go downhill a bit. Luclin was a bit of an unfinished mess when it released in 2001 due to the departure of Brad McQuaid and other key members of the team. SOE's answer to appease us was creating an expansion filled to the brim with raids upon the gods that govern Norrath. It was a non-stop race for countless raid targets, which was exciting, but also resulted in large numbers of burnout. Even I never saw Plane of Time myself as I took a break. But, 2002 wasn't a very good year for games, and I still have a lot of great memories from this era of EverQuest; mainly because of the people.
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Whether you wanna call the genre action sports, extreme sports, arcade sports, or whatever the hell else, SSX 3 is the best one ever made. It's also my favorite PS2 game overall and I own around 140 of them. Tricky was good, yes, but it was basically a special edition version of the original. SSX 3 takes everything that was great from those first two games and ratchets it up several notches. Plus, they introduced an entire mountain full of events that load seamlessly as you traverse down the peaks. It's still incredible.
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If SSX 3 is the best action sports game ever made, ESPN NFL 2K5 is the best traditional sports game ever made. It's so good, in fact, that it terrified Electronic Arts into buying the exclusive rights to the NFL license. When you make a game this great and sell it for $20, you're going to ruffle some feathers.
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You haven't lived until you sit in the back seat of a Black Hawk helicopter with your laptop open in Commander Mode™ dropping supplies and artillery strikes all while your ace pilot is swooping back and forth across the map capturing bases. Battlefield was never better than it was here.
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Oblivion was the first truly "next gen" game on Xbox 360 and is largely responsible for popularizing open world RPGs. It set the standard for that generation and blueprint for the next decade+. It might also be the beginning of my tradition of wandering off in a random direction and not touch the "main" quest for at least 50 hours.
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After years of working on licensed games, BioWare finally got a shot at something of their own creation. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic had introduced their brand of RPGs to a much wider audience and set the bar quite high, but they stepped up to the plate and hit a home run in their first at bat.
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Peter Molyneux promised a lot of wild shit over the years, but Fable II was the closest he ever got to delivering on those promises. It's got a good story and is incredibly fun to play no matter what type of character you choose to be. I also loved the online "bubbles" feature that let you see other people and trade with them even though it was a single player game. I don't know why that didn't catch on more prevalently.
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The first game was fine. But, with the sequel, Naughty Dog set the standard for what narrative action adventures games could be for many years to come. Incredible action set pieces. Great performances from the cast. A well-written story. Fun twists. It's the complete package.
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Truly one of the most well told stories in the history of games. BioWare "purists" didn't like the shift to a more action-based gameplay, but it works greatly. And the game is simply stacked with characters to care about. I've played through it several times and deciding who to take on missions is still agonizing. It's one of the best games of all time.
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I love this game and I am 100% part of the problem. By which I mean that I played over 250 hours on Xbox 360, then played it on Switch, and then put over 100 hours into it again on PS5 and got the Platinum Trophy. It's definitely the best thing Bethesda Game Studios has made to date. I'm just glad they're finally done fucking around in Fallout for a while so that we can get to The Elder Scrolls VI sometime this decade...maybe.
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The thing about Telltale Games' The Walking Dead is that it encompassed the whole year. It was an emotional journey, and, in a way, it felt like I was taking care of Clem that whole time. I feel like that's something that's lost on people who played it after all the episodes were out. Keep that hair short, Clem.
On My Top 100: #49
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As previously stated in 1992, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is my favorite console game of all time. So, the prospect of making a sequel was both exciting and worrying. How do you improve on perfection? How do you not fuck up a good thing? Well, they somehow beat the odds and made a worth sequel with a fun mechanic and great puzzles. And they also shook things up a bit with the non-linear path, which probably was a testing ground for a certain game later on in the series.
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2014 was notoriously not a great year for games, but there were two on my list that could've been #1 that were lightyears beyond the mediocrity of that year. I was immersed in Dragon Age Inquisition for around 180 hours and loved all of it. The conversations, personal relationships, and seemingly endless line of impossibly difficult, potentially world-altering decisions in Inquisition are BioWare at its best.
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I'd never played a Witcher game before this, but it took my #1 spot in 2015 with ease. The way the quests and storytelling here were interwoven throughout the game were lightyears ahead of any other game at the time and still ahead of many games now. I never did finish Blood & Wine, so I should do that now that the PS5 version is out. Hmm...
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