Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
I’ve been playing since the NES and despite being from a low income family I had the luck of being able to play and own many consoles over the 3 decades of my life, plus some pc.
If you ask me right now? Resident Evil 4 (2005).
A before and after in gaming, to this day still extremely fun to play even for casuals but 20 years ago it was THE masterpiece. And everyone took notice of it, everyone played it, even players that didn’t cared about resident evil. The gameplay was so good that it got photocopied by everyone right after in the action genre.
Arguably the last big innovator in videogames minus Minecraft and… PUBG (Fortnite did it better I know).
Try to NOT pick your favourite game, that’s a different thing.
Since everyone’s just saying their favorite game, I’ll say The Finals!
It’s fuckin great! It’s the first FPS in years that gets me legit excited to play. I like that the game requires decent strategy, movement, and teamwork to get wins and not just good aim/luck. Everything about it feels fresh. Best of all it’s freaking free. A free AAA game in 2024 that’s more than decent and has an awesome dev team? Sign me up!
It’s wild to me that it’s not huge compared to games that go mainstream (not gonna mention names. lol), but I’ll appreciate it while it’s here.
I like the finals too. It’s the best arcade shooter I’ve played since halo. It’s just dumb fun.
Ive been hooked on deadlock recently
Final Fantasy 1 - It wasn’t the first RPG, but it pretty much defined the series. It still has tons of playability, I revisit it more or less every 5 years. I still have yet to beat Warmech, and only have encountered him a handful of times.
But most of all, it’s the game that saved Squaresoft. If it had failed, we would have missed out on so many great games, including ones also mentioned in this post.
Runners up have to be Donkey Kong, which brought us Mario, which in turn restored vitality into the at home console game industry, and Double Dragon, which brought us PVP and Co-op combat.
Honorable mention would have to be that Simpsons arcade game where Marge can fight with the vacuum cleaner and TMNT 2 - Two classic, very difficult, drain your change jar games. I’d throw Mega man 2 into that mix as well.
Probably Doom for being one of the first games with real mod support
And fear. Actual fear. I remember the demo scaring the shit out of us.
MP was top shit. game was revolutionary
it also went open source later!
I would usually have said Earthbound or Chrono Trigger, but this year I’ve been playing Sea of Stars and it truly seems better. I never thought I’d say it. The writing, art, music, gameplay, movement, puzzles, characters, all are aimed in the exact same direction as what CT was trying to do and it goes farther in every way.
How could anything exceed Chrono Trigger? Gotta check this out!
They were pretty deliberate about having very similar creative aims, standing on the shoulders; they even got Yasunori Mitsuda to help with their soundtrack. The game keeps on surprising me with its self awareness, beauty, and a depth of gameplay that keeps unfolding long after you think you have the measure of it.
XCOM
You better be talking about DOS X-COM UFO Defense or I’ll send a blaster bomb down your gullet :o
…I sadly didn’t know about the series until the new ones in 2012. I’ve played the hell out of them and do want to go back and play the DOS ones sometime.
The remakes are solid for sure but they’re pretty different games that don’t quite fully capture the spirit of open ended gameplay you could do in the originals.
For example:
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Grenade relay involving 5 soldiers passing across the map until it lands at the foot of a Muton your out of actions scout ended his turn next to
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Blow a hole in the roof of a landed UFO and drop your soldiers in behind aliens watching the doors expecting a conventional assault
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Drive a tank into a single family home to dig out an alien hiding in a closet
Amazing. Some of my favorite experiences in the new ones have also been creative problem-solving, like rocketing open a hole in a wall to allow my snipers to see through, or trying to carry my injured/dead soldiers with the good loot to extraction when I have to cut my losses and run.
Sounds like I should just go ahead and play the old ones too. I started one up earlier this year, but it wasn’t clear what all the buttons did, and I didn’t have the focus to figure it out. I need to look up the manual or watch a video or something.
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Tetris
Just about everyone has either played or heard of it. It is easy enough for young and old people alike to pick up. But it can get so challenging that even nowadays new records are broken regularly.
It’s simple. It’s fun. And will remain so for all eternity.
And the poor bastard that created it never made any money off it, IIRC
Kind of. Because the game was technically owned by the USSR he was not eligible to receive any royalties until his prior contracts expired. He has received royalties on it starting around 1996.
“Life is just loke tetris, it just gets harder until you die” Or something, can’t remember where i heard that.
Apparently some kid managed to “beat” it though so maybe it’s wrong now.
Yep! 13yo played it and reached the kill screen, absolutely insane accomplishment.
Your failures pile up, your achievements disappear.
This is such an absurd question. I mean, it’s weird in movies and books, weirder in music… but games?
I mean, Tetris. It’s Tetris, isn’t it?
But then you’re out there going “so is Tetris better than Baldur’s Gate III”, which is a nonsensical sentence.
It’s kind of like asking for the best video.
It wouldn’t make sense to compare TV shows, movies, Youtube videos, TikToks, sporting events, commercials, journalistic footage, etc. all as a single category.
Idk. So do you ask for “best RPG” or something like that instead? Seems overly specific now.
I feel like this is just a question to learn more about other people. I don’t care if someone’s favourite is tetris when mine is sonic. I just wanna be reminded of fun games and hear a passionate argument as to why they think it should be top of my list :)
Yeah no, it’s a totally fair question and I get the spirit of it, but it’s still interesting to reflect on the way that video games have a pretty strange concept of genre or “format” vs. other media like video or print.
Maybe it’s cuz games are so heavily influenced by their associated hardware.
I mean, I guess everything is, right? Early printing press is mostly pamphlets not books (aside from the bible), and you don’t get TV shows without TVs.
Yeah it’s a good point. Wonder if we’ll ever see a tik tok video go up against a short film at the oscars ;)
Yeah, for sure. The real answer is the question is superfluous. There is no number one. I’d say you can’t even put together a top 10. It’s just not a thing you need to do or can do.
That’s a good question. Tetris has more levels but then again BG3 has better character customisation.
Weirdly, better sex scenes in Tetris.
When you rotate the T like one just right. 🥵 💦💦💦
Unironically true
I wanted to post a DOS game here I remembered called Sextris where the pieces were cartoony naked men and women in positions representing the shapes of the tetris pieces. But all I could find when I searched were versions of the regular game where nudie photos were slowly revealed as you cleared lines.
Hah. I remember Sextris. The great thing about it is that it was entirely unsexy, mostly just for laughs and actually not a bad version to play, for the standards of the time.
Is it? Minecraft is the most sold game, which to be fair Tetris held for a very long time.
You’re kinda making my point, that’s another absurd choice to have to make.
But no, it’s Tetris.
Halo 2
Grandia II
Grand Theft Auto 3.
You had to be there to see how absolutely groundbreaking that was at the time. Gaming had suddenly grown up.
It was like all the obvious limits in other games all just got pulled away at once. Explore a full city in 3D, drive around, shoot people, steal a tank.
And the sequel only improved on it, but I’ve honestly never been so awed by a game before or since. It’s like they were the first dev to finally figure out what the PS2 hardware was for. Everything before just felt like a slightly nicer version of what had come before. This was new.
I didn’t even look in this direction but I think you’re right
Marathon, by Bungie. From the box it came in, to the hugeness of the spaceship, the coolness of the story, all the secrets, and the fan community that sprang up to research and theorize.
And then they made it open source so anybody could play it on any computer.
It’s not favorite game to play any more, but it was the greatest game to me.
It has its flaws but I’ve never had more fun than playing halo 3 custom games back in the day. You could do and make almost anything! I haven’t felt that playing any game since.
Metal Gear Solid. Every stealth game that has come out since has borrowed something from MGS. Also it is the first game I can really remember that nailed that cinematic video game feel we see so often these days.
MGS also brought us what I lovingly refer to as the “Metal Gear Solid Voice Acting Benchmark.”
Is your big budget first party title not voice acted? Why the fuck not? Konami managed to make every single line of dialog in Metal Gear Solid voice acted, without exception, apparently by hiring randos off the street if they had to. So what’s your excuse?
I’m lookin’ at you, Nintendo.
Absolutely! The voice acting was like nothing else at the time! MGS totally raised the bar and changed the landscape for what we come to expect out of a game. It’s a true masterpiece.
Mount and Blade Warband.
So many games you start off or become something great. In Skyrim you’re the dragonborn, you become great but you were always going to. The world is huge and immersive, but you’re always going to be important in the world.
In warband, you’re a nobody. You’ll always be a nobody unless you do something. Trade, fight, quest or scheme. The world will continue with or without you. Your favourite faction might get wiped out and you can do something about it or not. There’s no guarantee of victory, and what you decide as a win condition is up to you.
It is the ultimate sandbox, but the original is janky. The solution; mods. An incredibly dedicated modding community elevates this game into my most played game. The lord of the rings mod is both the best way to get into the game and in my opinion the best video game adaptation of a movie (just in front of kotor).
TL:DR: Warband makes it ok to suck and makes you earn your victory. You might not think that’s fun, but trust me it can be.
Dam you. Its on my wishlist and I dont need to buy more! Loved the original too
Other people have already said it, but it’s Tetris.
Its the only game ever made that I would describe as “perfect”.
It takes seconds to learn how to play, while the skill ceiling is in the stratosphere. It’s endlessly replayable, the music is iconic, and it’s available for basically any platform made in the last 40 years.
