by notnert427
I made this with the qualifier that if it's a game in a series, I could only choose one. This meant no Super Mario World, no Burnout: Paradise, no Hitman: Blood Money, etc. as much as I would have otherwise included them, but it would have gotten a little redundant to feature three Forza Horizon games, so I had to make some hard choices. On to the list!
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Everything about this speaks to me. It can be played as a tactical stealth game, or you can throw an exploding baseball at a target's face in front of dozens of witnesses. It is as serious or as dumb as you want to make it, and it's a blast either way. Pulling the marionette strings on a giant sandbox of NPCs is amazing. Never has a game rewarded creativity more. It can hold your hand to some scripted moments, you can piece them together on your own, or you can create your own greatness. The dialogue and voicework is hilarious and self-aware, and there is so much depth to each map with easter eggs everywhere. Thanks to IO smartly including HITMAN 2016 in HITMAN 2, I don't have to choose between them. I've dumped countless hours in HITMAN and still feel like I'm just scratching the surface. It is the best game.
Goldeneye proved that you could do a console FPS, but Halo: CE proved that you could do a console FPS extremely well. Do I even really need to make the case here? This game somehow still plays better than most shooters, and thanks to various graphical refreshes over the years, visually still works as well despite its age. Honestly, if the original game had never existed, you could release the visually updated version now and it would still become a classic. It's that good and holds up that well. I fire up the campaign often to this day. I look forward to the MCC's impending PC release so it can find some new or renewed love there. This is a perfect video game, and I have a hard time not putting it atop my list.
Bond movies have always been fairly cool, but licensed games have mostly been trash. I still have a soft spot for Bond in general and Goldeneye as a movie, but some of it is cringe-inducing now. The game Goldeneye, though? Fucking excellent. It was the first game that proved an FPS could work on a console. Yeah, the N64 controller is a bit shit, but we made it work. I wholly rejected the PC crowd shitting on Goldeneye and still do. I'm glad you liked Quake. I liked Goldeneye. It's a graphical nightmare now, and Dan's Die Another Friday series proved that not all of the gameplay holds up, but it was incredible at the time for both its campaign and multiplayer and completely deserves its place among the annals of gaming history. I will die on that hill.
All respect to Mario 1 & 2 and The Legend of Zelda, but this is peak NES and peak Mario. It had fun and key powerups, puzzles, secrets, and was an incredibly tight platformer with enough difficulty to challenge me and keep me coming back to it over and over again as a kid. This game was a moment, and it probably deserves a lot of credit for video games garnering mainstream acceptance. It seemed like overnight the world went from only the nerdy kids playing games to you being some weirdo if you weren't playing Mario 3. There wasn't too much of a stigma left after this came out. Culturally, it thus commands a high spot on the list, and the substance of the game is obviously still there as well.
This may end up climbing higher on the list. All of the Forza Horizon games are fantastic, but this one is the best, thanks to the addition of seasons and how incredible it looks and plays in 4K HDR. This is far beyond what I thought consoles were capable of in terms of overall visual quality and scope. They've achieved perfection with this game and I literally have no idea how they could improve it. You can go as deep down the gearhead tuning rabbit hole as you want, you can create liveries to your heart's delight, or you can hop in some supercar and just hit some sick jumps. It's fun no matter how you play it, and it's my go-to game when I need to unwind and cruise. Five fucking stars.
This is a game that was so good that my non-video game-playing father would kick us off the Nintendo to play it, reminding us when we protested that he was the one who bought the Nintendo. I'm not sure he's played a game since, but The Legend of Zelda was undeniable. It featured a high level of difficulty, a varied and interesting world, arcane/complex dungeons, and secrets galore. It's an adventure in the truest and best sense, and its nostalgia still hits me hard. I'm not sure how many times I've played through it, but it's enough to have memorized the long list of bombable areas, how to navigate dungeons, etc. That says enough for its quality right there.
The sheer amount of time I put into this game keeps it high on my list. It's an all-time classic racing game, and in a world where the Forza games don't exist, it's the best racing game ever made. It looked mind-blowing at the time, and played well to boot. It was also a very deep game with a huge roster of cars and tracks, along with a quality soundtrack. I remember rigging intricate rubber band systems on my controller to run endurance races that were exactly that. I was playing it even when I wasn't playing it. It had the first loot box I can recall, with your car and its color as a prize reward at the end of a long race series or endurance race being a HUGE fucking moment that would make or break you. I 100%ed this game and got every car I wanted in every color I wanted, and that's something.
Koopa Troopa Beach is kart racing perfected. There is enough skill, bullshit, and rubber-banding in this game to make it a great time even to this day. Seriously, some friends and I still pop some beers and fire this shit up every now and then, and it's still fun as hell. I guess they've made technically "better" Mario Karts since, but this one best captures the simplistic fun, IMO. I can't even count all of the photo finishes we've had due to well-fired green shells, bullshit lightnings, unavoidable bananas, etc. No game has precipitated more yells and laughter for my friends and I. It is taken both way too seriously and not seriously at all by us at the same time, and it's the goddamn best.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is a truly great stealth game, and it cracks my top ten based on finally showing up on Xbox One backwards compatibility. Parts of it show their age, but it's still really good. Moreover, one thing that is sadly lost to time, but will always be remembered fondly in my mind, is the Spies v. Mercs multiplayer. I can't even really describe it adequately to people who didn't experience it. It was an amazing, but unfortunately brief time in which voice chat/online gaming was still new enough that people hadn't considered being awful to each other yet. You could co-op multiplayer with some rando, if one of you died, the other cheered you on instead of quitting out, and even the guys you were playing against would talk about how fun it was regardless of W or L afterwards. Consistently. I swear to God this happened, and it was a magical time. Best multiplayer experience ever.
OG Titanfall is an underappreciated gem. What that game did to somewhat revitalize an FPS genre that was becoming increasingly stale should not be forgotten. It absolutely nailed mobility, a development which many games since have tried to imitate, but few have successfully duplicated. Additionally, the smart pistol and the stalker/chase gameplay style it encouraged was among my favorite multiplayer experiences ever. I was happy to see Titanfall 2 receive some critical/gamer acclaim, despite not being a sales darling from EA making a classically dumbass EA decision. I will continue to hope that they make a Titanfall 3 with a continuation of Titanfall 2's surprisingly great campaign and bring back the smart pistol from OG Titanfall.