All-Time Favorites
It's kind of hard to really assign a number to these, so let's ignore the order for the most part. These are all games I absolutely love the shit out of, though.
List items
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Fallout 3 is without a doubt one of my favorite games of all time, if not my absolute favorite game of all time. I'm not entirely sure why, but a lot of it can be summed up in the feeling you get exploring the bleak, green-tinted ruins of civilization while simultaneously listening to the heartfelt 1950's crooning coming out of your Pipboy, all the while being worried about what might pop out from around the corner. Add that to the humor and personality Bethesda crammed into each and every NPC in the world and you get a title that can't be beat.
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Beyond Good & Evil could possibly be the only game on this list that, on paper, checks all the boxes specific to me for a true claim to my number one spot. Everything about this game is great, from the color palate to the tone, to the design, to the humor, to the mash-up various gameplay genres (including photography!). Sure, there's a lot wrong with it too and I'll admit it's not perfect, but it's just got so much heart. (BG&E2, where are you?)
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I'm not really sure why Bully: Scholarship Edition has it's own giantbomb entry, now that I'm looking at it.
In any case, Bully had a living, breathing world I just enjoyed exploring with characters I found myself appreciating far more than they really deserved just because the game is put together so well. It truly is a case of a game being greater than the sum of its parts.
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TLJ has the most amazing sense of wonder and really does bring to life not one, but two worlds that your mind always feels like it's capable of extrapolating more of in infinite directions. Stark and Arcadia feel like real places that the story happens to instead of being in service of. It's the best kind of adventure, one you feel like you could get lost in, that sticks to your ribs, but the ribs in your MIND, your brain ribs, and it becomes one of those building block games that informs your tastes and who you are as a gamer. Well, for me, anyway. (Goddamn I love this game.)
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Behind one of the worst titles ever strung together by human thought is one of the greatest puzzle games ever created. That it was able to be turned into a compelling multiplayer game is just the feather in Capybara's cap. I'm not normally one for anime, and even less often am I one for pseudo-anime (which usually suffers from Trying Too Hard Syndrome), but the look of M&M:CoH (ugh, not even a functional acronym) grows on you until you can't help but love it along with everything else about the game. It's got charm in spades, and the music is absolutely amazing. What really works is the puzzle mechanics. I probably put 50 hours into my first playthrough and I wasn't once bored, which is insane for a game that is ostensibly played entirely on a large grid with everything else just being window dressing. It saddens me to no end that I only discovered this game after it was released on XBLA.
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If this list is surprisingly like the list of games I've beaten, it's because I only ever seem to really beat games I absolutely love. I guess I'm easy to distract. Klonoa has always had my attention though, and even as much as I've liked the sequels, none have really taking the crown from the first game in the series. More than Sonic, I feel like Klonoa is my posterchild for the "Blue Skies in Games" movement.
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In the last 10 years, you'd be hard-pressed to find a game that's more perfect than Batman: Arkham Asylum. The puzzle pieces just fit together so fucking well. I'm not sure if games are art, but this game is poetry in design.
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I wasn't sure what to put up on here, other than knowing I loved Portal. But Portal 1, or Portal 2? Then it hit me - As much as I loved Portal 1, playing through the Flash map pack, or homemade maps, it lost something critical. GLaDOS is key to the Portal experience. Portal 1, by itself, is too sterile to get the nod, while well after the release of Portal 2, I was enjoying myself with homemade maps and multi-player. Not everything rested on GLaDOS' comic delivery anymore. The more varied mechanics, the fascinating level design, and the depth and fun of co-op really make Portal 2 the complete package.
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I'm beginning to see a trend in what I consider my "favorite" games. Limbo I loved for the mood. At first glance you'd think they'd be going for a horror feel, or just something disquieting, but the general feel of Limbo, if I had to pin it down, is melancholy. It's a beautiful piece of work.
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I'll do the rest of these later. (And really, what is there to say about ME2 that hasn't already been said somewhere?)
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(Seems really soon to add this to my list. I'll have to revisit this later, but right now this feels right.)
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