PC game top 100

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xpoy
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PC game top 100

Post by xpoy » Wed Jul 08, 2009 5:30 pm

PC Gamer's Top 100 PC Games
11-Jan-2007 The full spectrum of PC gaming joy.
33 Comments
'Greatest' is a rather fuzzy word - we prefer 'best'. These are the 100 best games, today. We don't care how influential or ground-breaking something is - is it the best? Should you play it now, after everything that's come out since?

If the answer is no, it stays on the dusty archive shelf. That's not to say old games don't make the cut, of course: nothing has surpassed Elite at what it does, for example, and so a game made in 1984 is at- well, we'll let you see for yourself. Another rule for diversity's sake: if games in a series are similar, only the best one makes it. That's the one you should play, and the others aren't as essential once you have. Without further ado:

100 N
Release: 2004
Last year: 99
Platform games ought to have been the first to benefit from the physics revolution, but only N seems to have taken momentum, elasticity and ragdoll on board. As a tiny black ninja, you hurtle around smoothly contoured rooms arcing gracefully over electrified seeker-drones, weaving through sprays of bullets and outrunning homing missiles. It's fluid, kinetic and keyboard-smashingly difficult.

99 UPLINK
Release: 2001
Last year: 92
Beep. Beep. Beep. The awful sound of your illegal connection being traced in Uplink still haunts our nightmares. Despite being all interface, with no graphics to speak of, rerouting your modem through servers dotted across the globe is more cinematic than the pixel-shaded polygons modern games fling in our face. It's a matter of fidelity: if you were hacking into a bank or government database, this is what it would look like.

98 STARTOPIA
Release: 2001
Last year: 91
Management with imagination - a rare and delicious cocktail. Reclaiming a derelict space station, turning it into a exotic sci-fi resort as you go, had an feeling of excitement that real-world sims can't match. What you were creating was something outlandish and impossible: blue-winged sirens running your alien love-nests, drug-smoking hippy greys chilling on your terraformed biodeck, and bristly warmongers bashing imaginary foes in the Holographic Entertainment Suite.

97 HOSTILE WATERS
Release: 2001
Last year: 70
My tank is angry. His friend the helicopter? Absolutely furious. Hostile Waters put you in command of an army of resurrected warriors embedded in computer chips, fighting to rid the world of the last warlords, dictators and criminals. It spliced intricate strategy to frantic action, where you co-ordinated assaults on bases, and inched past radar installations, before calling in your friends to blast a way through. My tank is angry, but I'm so proud.

96 ANCHORHEAD
Release: 1998
Last year: 95
Text adventures - or interactive fiction, as they've become known - don't age. Graphics are surpassed, but interactive text will always be able to communicate things no visual game can. "These days," sighs the first passage of this sombre and atmospheric Lovecraftian adventure, "you often find yourself feeling confused and uprooted." There's no full-screen post-processing filter for that.

95 ZANGBANDTK
Release: 1989
Last year: 98
This is an RPG of harsh realities. Even the top-down graphics are harsh: primitive 16-colour tiles take the place of the original Angband's text characters. But the really galling part is having your mighty hero starve to death because he can't escape the paralysing attack of the lowly Gazer behind the door he just opened. Or losing your vampire warlord when the god of Chaos grants him the 'gift' of eternal sunshine. Or finding that the doors surrounding you are actually monsters. You get no save, no load and no respawn, and we wouldn't want it any other way.

94 COMMANDOS 2: MEN OF COURAGE
Release: 2001
Last year: 88
Courage? Pah. These were men of knives. Explosives. Sniper rifles. One was a woman. One was a dog. They were a dirty, motley crew of killers, and the fact that each had a unique talent made your slow, methodical route around enemy lines an elaborate and brutal game of chess. Using each in perfect orchestration to pass unscathed through a seemingly impossible situation was exquisitely satisfying.

93 ANACHRONOX
Release: 2001
Last year: 86
A sci-fi noir RPG that turns into an intergalactic thriller, Anachronox starts out small. Sly Boots is an out-of-work PI living in the ghettos of an artificial planet, getting beaten up for his debts. But with the help of a digital replica of his dead secretary, a tiny robot programmed to like him, and a mysterious new client offering good money for the location of alien artefacts, Sly's personal troubles are soon replaced with massive, world-destroying, universe-threatening disaster. A spectacular story laced with knowing humour made this game something truly special.

92 VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: BLOODLINES
Release: 2004
Last year: 85
Dark themes aren't rare in games, but they're seldom handled with maturity. Vampire is one of the few: its stories of sexual slavery, bloodsucking, schizophrenia and murder are all revealed through superbly written dialogue and clever plotlines. Delve deeper into the seedy vampire underworld of Santa Monica, and the tawdry tales you uncover get more and more disturbing, while your options start to push the limits of just how horrible you're willing to be, even within a game.

91 SID MEIER'S PIRATES!
Release: 2004
New Entry
Sid Meier teaches us many lessons about buccaneers, but none more important than this: they had very, very short attention spans. Pirates! (and it deserves that exclamation mark) is a continual bombardment of new opportunities. Maybe you start thinking about hooking up with your long-lost sister. But every second, some new temptation sails into view - be it a galleon loaded with Spanish gold, or a Governor's flirtatious daughter. You can't help but give in to such seductive experiences, to hoist the mainsail and load the cannons, to treat m'lady to a quick-step. And maybe a ruby you took from the captain of that Spanish galleon.

Before you know it, you're off on the high seas again. Your attention has shifted. You bought half of a treasure map from a dodgy bloke in a pub (just after you saved the busty bar-wench from the unwelcome attentions of a leering French officer). You're trying to match it to the now familiar cost. Maybe that bit of shore is part of Jamaica... which would make the X mark this spot.

But between you and the gold is a small army. You'll have to flank their artillery with your soldiers, maybe hide behind the palm trees in that grove. But that leaves you open to cavalry... Too late, the battle's over, and you've claimed the gold. Rather than split the booty between the crew, it's used to buy out the nearest town's supply of rum, because pirates are thirsty types, and Port Royale has already been drunk dry.

On the way back, you approach a Dutch sloop, and the captain tells you of a merchantman leaving a Dutch port. It has an escort - so at Port Royale, you buy a new type of cannon ammunition that will tear down sails, leaving ships dead in the water. The battle goes well - the escort is sunk without a problem. Rather than batter the boat from afar, you engage at close quarters, leaping aboard for a swordfight. The scrap goes back and forth - behind you, you can see your crew being beaten back. But you gain an edge, swing mightily, and the captain goes overboard. The rest of his shipmates surrender. And then... Where were you? Oh yes. Where's that sister?

90 SERIOUS SAM
Release: 2001
Last year: 78
Wave upon wave of screaming, headless, explosive mutants swarm towards you, and only wave upon wave of hot lead can stop them. No scripted sequences or real-world environments were necessary in the old days of top-down shooters, and that purity of play works perfectly in this FPS too.

89 ALIENS VERSUS PREDATOR
Release: 1999
Last year: 79
Never has playing as a heavily-armed marine left us feeling so vulnerable. In fact, within 60 seconds we panicked and shot up a mirror, and the next hour was mostly spent feeling manipulated and thick. But then, our lone marine is only in the soon-to-be-overrun base because he's overslept. Duh. So: darkness, strobe lights, aliens... dead.

88 SPACE RANGERS
Release: 2005
New Entry Pirates! on a galactic scale. Space Rangers puts you in space rather than the high seas, and lets you explore, trade, mine, plunder and more. What sets it apart is the variety of these tasks: one minute you're playing a fully fledged RTS to complete a mission planet-side, the next you're playing a lengthy text adventure to escape from prison on a world whose government you've irked. The sheer diversity captures perfectly the feeling of being in a huge and exotic universe.

87 TOMB RAIDER II
Release: 1999
Re-Entry
Arguably, Lara Croft has never looked better. Tomb Raider II built on the groundbreaking original with classic locations such as Venice and the Great Wall of China, better abilities, underwater enemies and hilariously stylised goons. And it didn't have idiotic boss characters on skateboards, either. While the first game unhinges before the end and later versions attained a stagnant bloat, TRII represents Lara at her best.

86 BATTLEZONE
Release: 1998
Last year: 81
Battlezone recognised that no real commander has a top-down view of the war. It was a first-person FPS, and you commanded your units simply by pointing at them, and then where you wanted them to go. You spent a lot of the game inside a huge tank, but it was when you scampered around the field as a tiny, vulnerable human that you really felt involved.

85 CALL OF CTHULHU
Release: 2006
New Entry
Whether you see it as an adventure with unusually good controls or a shooter that's trying something new, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a breath of fresh sea air. The spooky fishing village location is excellent, while the unusual FPS elements - bolting doors mid-chase, eavesdropping NPC conversations, investigating, not having a gun for ages, going stark staring mad - really engage. A great slice of weirdness.

84 DUKE NUKEM 3D
Release: 1996
Last year: 75
Doom defined the FPS, then Duke ripped it apart. A gleefully over-powered armoury included a quad-barrelled silenced machinegun, a shrink ray, a freezer gun, pipe bombs, laser trip-mines and twin rapid-fire rocket-launchers. Duke was an orgy of destruction rather than a carefully balanced shooter, yet the level design was a whole generation ahead of id Software.

83 HIDDEN & DANGEROUS
Release: 1999
Last year: 68
Spurning the stereotype of WWII as brutal chaos, H&D allowed you to handle ugly situations with elegance and finesse. Controlling one of your four-man team and ordering the others as you went, you could sneak through enemy territory slitting throats and taking out snipers. And if it all went wrong, there was always the Bren gun.

82 GIANTS: CITIZEN KABUTO
Release: 2001
Last year: 58
Giants' cartoon violence and comedy reached its height as you played giant Kabuto himself. Baddies swarm irritatingly below you. Stamp them? Scoop them up and eat them? Or, brilliantly, spike them on your horns and save them for later?

81 JEDI KNIGHT: MYSTERIES OF THE SITH
Release: 1998
Last year: 74
Of the long and diverse Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series, it's this expansion pack to the first Force-enabled game that sticks in the memory. Perspective alternated between the original Jedi Knight Kyle Katarn, and freelance ex-Imperial assassin Mara Jade (way ahead of you with the purple lightsaber thing, Samuel L). The set-pieces were outstanding: a spectacular skirmish in an Imperial hangar, dressing up as a Tusken Raider to infiltrate Jabba's palace, and fighting your own evil twin.

80 GROUND CONTROL: DARK CONSPIRACY
Release: 2000
Last year: 77
By giving us a handful of units and no means to create more, Ground Control denied us the easy RTS route of massing and rushing. Making the best of your units meant using the terrain: high ground increased your line of sight, and for scout units that translated to near omniscience. Just as well, since the star of the game was its long-range artillery. War machines the size of houses, rearing up on pistons to belch shells into the stratosphere, shaking the earth as they did so. You didn't want to be where those things landed.

xpoy
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Re: PC game top 100

Post by xpoy » Wed Jul 08, 2009 5:38 pm

79 TOCA RACE DRIVER 3
Release: 2006
New Entry
Race Driver may be relatively new, but those TOCA roots are as old as a nine year-old hill. The Race Driver tangent bravely jettisoned the titular TOCA cars (front-wheel drive, meh) before seeing RD3 suddenly explode into a riot of content. From karting to lawnmowers to rallycross to open-wheelers to monster trucks to classics to Australian V8s, it's a barrage of close, slithery, hard-fought fun.

78 FAHRENHEIT
Release: 2005
New Entry
How could you possibly play a murderer and the cops without catching yourself? Fahrenheit answers this with style, and the snowy, lonely opening mystery ensures you're hooked for the duration. How events unfold depends to an impressive degree on how you behave - as either confused murderer Lucas Kane or detectives Valenti and Miles. Play it more than once and get a new (lunatic) story.

77 HITMAN: BLOOD MONEY
Release: 2006
New Entry
Agent 47 is neither hero nor villain. He's simply and completely ruthless. And in Blood Money, your abilities finally match your lethal nature. If a guard suddenly pulls a gun on you as you approach, you can grab it out of his hand, elbow him in the face and shoot him to death with it in three swift movements. Extra style points for dropping it on his body before you walk away scot-free.

76 FREEDOM FORCE VS THE THIRD REICH
Release: 2005
Last year: 76
The Nazis have twisted time itself in order to win WWII. This sounds like a job for... Freedom Force! The game's irrepressible spirit is what makes it compelling. It's gaudy and overblown, but the characters are so assured of their own importance that you can't help but get caught up in the knowingly silly drama.

75 TRACKMANIA SUNRISE
Release: 2005
Last year: 44
It looks like a car game, but really it's a tricky puzzler requiring either considerable thought or the reflexes of a cat in a red cape. The speed is extreme, the control (especially in the air) improved over the original and the new modes are excellent. Anyone can play, making it a perfect lunchtime online time-eater.

74: MAX PAYNE 2: THE FALL OF MAX PAYNE
Release: 2003
Last year: 40
When a sequel is titled 'The Fall Of' its hero, and the first game started with his wife and child being murdered, you have an inkling that it may be heading into dark territory. In fact Max Payne 2 was just more grown-up: Max was no longer on a furious, hernia-inducing rampage of revenge, he was just a bitter husk of a man on the brink of suicide. In other words, the archetypal film noir protagonist. It helps that he's just become an ex-cop, has hallucinations, and is haunted by a killer dame he thought was dead.

Max Payne 2 spat on and polished the central appeal of the original - more bullet-time, slicker shooting, better weapons, and petrol bombs thrown in. In the gaming world, Max Payne invented finesse. We'd never played games with such deliberate, playful cool. It was the first time that what we did on screen was something people would buy a £5 cinema ticket to see. Even in the most action-packed shooters, even today, we either stand gormlessly still or hop wildly like inebriated marsupials while we spray fire at alien hordes or deranged criminals. Max dives. Repeatedly, at the drop of a hat, almost gratuitously. If the phone rang he'd be airborne in seconds. But in a dirty warehouse surrounded by gangsters blamming hot metal in your general direction, reclining mid-air is the best place to be. Particularly if you have time for headshots on all four thugs before you hit the ground.

It's when you come out of slow-mo, the vinyl-scratch croak of reality accelerating back to its normal pace as your spent brass tinkles to the floor and the lifeless goons collapse as one, that's when you feel cool.

73 COMMAND & CONQUER: RED ALERT 2
Release: 2000
Last year: Re-Entry
Usually the definitive game of a genre stays fairly reserved and true to its roots, but C&C just went nuts. Quite apart from Red Alert's lunatic jump back from a far-future sci-fi setting to a steampunk reimagining of WWII, Red Alert 2 was defined by wonderfully bizarre units. The Crazy Ivan could fix dynamite to cows, the advanced Russian naval unit was a giant squid, and Yuri himself used telepathy as a weapon. Happy days.

72 NEVERWINTER NIGHTS
Release: 2002
Last year: 64
Not the greatest singleplayer RPG ever, but Neverwinter Nights was so much more. Dedicated Dungeon Masters could create and run their own D&D campaigns without all those pesky dice and bits of paper, and Neverwinter was also the prime source of our co-operative goblin-based fun before World of Warcraft arrived. Arguing over magic hats had never been so much fun.

71 SIM CITY 2000
Release: 1993
Last year: 72
Maxis tried to make SimCity 2000 neutral - a perfect simulation with no 'message'. But because it was such an accurate simulation, it ended up teaching us all kinds of political wisdom. Building more roads doesn't alleviate traffic, it breeds it. Technology will end pollution, but only if education gets the funding it needs. And if your nuclear power plant has a meltdown next to a volcano, Superman will turn up and save the day.

70 SPLINTER CELL: CHAOS THEORY
Release: 2005
Last year: 27
Taking an aptly stealthy approach to brilliance, the Splinter Cell series started slowly and snuck in feature after feature to end up with this: one of the best stealth games ever to crouch on a shelf. The co-operative multiplayer is inspired, forcing gamers to truly work together, physically helping each other reach those places other beers, and indeed men in black rubber, just can't reach. And why aren't all third-person cameras this good?

69 PERIMETER
Release: 2004
Last year: 65
How do you fight a fluid? That's the problem posed by Perimeter, a strategy game in which your units are able to combine, merge, separate and reform at whim. Bombers morph into underground drills. Tanks slip into infantry. Airships and helicopters dribble into each other, to become super-robots. Reacting to, and planning for, these changes is mind-boggling. But brilliant.

68 STARCRAFT
Release: 1998
Last year: 67
The king of the competitive RTS, the Counter-Strike of the strategy world, Starcraft earned its enormous cult of obsessive fans through the blood, sweat and RSI of rigorous testing, rebalancing, and 20 patches (one this year) to ensure the tension between the three different races is absolutely perfect. It takes that much work to make the sprawling mass of the alien Zerg matched against the more traditional human, and the devastating but bank-breaking Protoss super-units.

67 MAFIA: CITY OF LOST HEAVEN
Release: 2002
Last year: 66
The bustling, Depression-era city of Lost Heaven is a fantastic creation, but it's only the backdrop for what this game is really all about: an intelligently scripted, superbly acted tale of honour, love, guns and betrayal. Many games these days leave us with the impression they were coded by developers with a pile of rejected movie screenplays sitting in a drawer somewhere. Mafia is one of the very few instances where that is precisely why we like it.

66 SYNDICATE
Release: 1993
Last year: 63
Four agents in black trench-coats were the sinister face of your Syndicate, but their arms were what made it really special. The flamethrower caused ever-spreading chaos - often as fatal to your own agents as the enemy. The gauss gun annihilated anything it hit, and it could hit virtually anything. The minigun, though, was the signature weapon: four agents with one each were virtually unstoppable.

65 ELITE
Release: 1984
Last year: 60
Those simple white lines in speckled black space marked the transcendence of games from toys to worlds. There was no score, a baffling concept at the time; and you couldn't complete it, something mainstream games are only just starting to mimic 22 years later. You simply flew, explored, traded, fought, improved, lived. And for that, it has no equal.

64 NO ONE LIVES FOREVER
Release: 2000
Last year: 62
Falling out of a plane as it comes apart, raiding a flooded ship, blasting into space; NOLF had wonderful locations. It also had great level design, genuinely funny dialogue, amusing gadgets, daft secrets, a brilliant lead character in '60s superspy Cate Archer and more style than you could shake a Mary Quant handbag at.

63 GUILD WARS
Release: 2005
Last year: 15
Partying is hard, but it needn't be. In the face of constant demon invasions, MMORPG games make it hard to form new groups. Guild Wars streamlines the system to the point where a few clicks will get you into a party, and you'll be having fun within a minute. And real fun, too, such as hitting people - not the usual MMORPG grind.

62 SWAT 4
Release: 2005
Last year: 59
You might think a slow, serious police sim would lack in the twitch shooting stakes. You'd be wrong. Confronting an armed loon and having to shout a warning, then wait to see if he'll raise the gun to fire, or raise it to surrender... it's character building. Tension! Grim visuals, great weapons and gritty, real world locations all help offline, but it's the co-op multiplayer that really shines.

61 DIABLO 2: LORD OF DESTRUCTION
Release: 2000
Last year: 61
Diablo 2 and its expansion somehow improved on perfection. The fast-paced monster-bashing was expanded across five exotic parts of the world: bleak moors, blazing desert, dense jungle, the war-torn snowy north and the blasted wastes of Hell. By the end of it, your character was a god of whichever combat discipline you'd followed.

60 ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 3
Release: 2004
Last year: 69
It's that moment before the main event. When the kids are streaming onto your ride, towing their mums and dads behind them. Then the hill-climb, and that brief pause at the very summit. That's the moment you fall in love. The genius of RCT3 is that you can design and then ride incredible coasters with the guests of your park. Look at them, leaving the ride. Elated but exhausted. You'll feel exactly the same way.

59 THE LONGEST JOURNEY
Release: 2000
Last year: 54
The story of April Ryan, aimless art student in a futuristic Venice, quickly spans the length and breadth of two different worlds. A beautiful and unspoilt realm of magic, and the grimy but technologically advanced world she grew up in. An even starker contrast exists between the high-fantasy prophecy plot and the foul-mouthed and eccentric characters it involves. They're believable, and you're hooked.

58 DEUS EX: INVISIBLE WAR
Release: 2003
Last year: 73
Invisible War opened up a whole new toolset of approaches to tricky situations by introducing a proper physics system. Explosive barrels are nothing: here we had gas canisters that ruptured where they were shot, sprayed out neurotoxic stench as they span and tumbled, then exploded into a deadly cloud with the next hit. Toying with these alone led to more spectacular ambushes and tricks than its predecessor's entire armament.

57 OUTCAST
Release: 1999
Last year: 57
It's one of those sublimely weird chapters in our gaming lives, isolated from any context or explanation. We woke up on a strange planet, alone except for a tribe of non-hostile aliens speaking in a language we didn't understand. Soon enough, we were their messiah, and it only got stranger from there.

56 HOMEWORLD
Release: 1999
Last year: 56
Majestic. Soulful. Atmospheric. Downbeat. Not words we usually associate with strategy games. Homeworld is different. It is the only strategy game in this chart that manages to create a mood other than euphoria or tension. Homeworld is important not just because of its mechanics, not just because it was the first time we were asked to control vast fleets in space. It was important because it made our battles matter.

So: majestic. Homeworld opens with the Kushan preparing their great achievement: the Mothership. A malfunctioning satellite has discovered 'alien' technology buried underneath the desert, revealing that they did not originate on this barren world. They discover a map to a distant planet. Hiigara, or home. Their civilisation is transformed: every resource is ploughed into seeking this world. Next: soulful. Embedded in the heart of the Mothership is a neuroscientist turned cyborg, Karan S'jet. She is Fleet Command, the Hiigaran messiah, leading her people to the promised land. There are references to Islam (Hiigara is very similar to the term Hegira - Mohammed's flight from Mecca) and Judaism (the journey of the Kushani is also a parallel of the Jewish exodus).

Then, atmospheric. There are no wasted sentences. Just pure function. The most emotion you'll see from your pilots is a quizzical "We're running on vapours here, Fleet," when you forget to refuel your ships. There is no screaming, no "I got your back, red six!" There's too much at stake to let your pilots become flustered. Other than the (horrific) title piece, a prog rock monstrosity by Yes, your battles are accompanied by mournful classical compositions. Finally, downbeat. Homeworld ends on a bitter-sweet note, as the Kushan come to regret the path of destruction they've caused. It finishes with the beautiful lines, "So much destruction, so many lives lost, for this place.

The conflict will never be forgotten. No longer Fleet Command, Karan S'jet survived extraction from the Mothership's core. She insisted that she would be the last person to disembark and set foot on the Homeworld."

55 FABLE
Release: 2005
New Entry
We all play RPGs differently, but it doesn't often show. One undead warlock looks much like another. Fable's central idea is that your entire appearance is determined by your behaviour - not just choices between good and evil, but brawn versus brains. What's the point of your looks? To get girls, of course - each has their preferences, and everything you've done with your poor hero comes back to haunt his chances of getting hitched.

54 INDIANA JONES AND THE FATE OF ATLANTIS
Release: 1992
Re-Entry
LucasArts adventures are typecast as comedies, so this action adventure tends to get overlooked by the misty-eyed nostalgics. Yet it captured the atmosphere of the films impeccably - even the interactive intro created a cinematic pre-credits feel. It had all the makings of a great Indy film: alluring yet sultry love-interest? Check. Exotic locations? Check. Nazis? Big check. Cheesy sunset-kiss ending? Of course.

53 HALO
Release: 2003
Last year: 43
Halo has great ideas both large and small. The defining ring-world setting and grand sci-fi story are inspired, while gaming elements still 'inspire' others even now. Recharging health (as opposed to pickups) most recently popped up in Call of Duty 2, for instance, while the weapon limit has reduced loadouts in many a game.

52UFO: ENEMY UNKNOWN
Release: 1994
Last year: 53
You can trace Rome: Total War's success directly back to the two-tier strategy and tactics pioneered here. UFO asked players to repel an alien invasion, first by building and equipping bases with anti-ET technology, then by sending out troops to landing sites for a scrap. What occurred on one layer affected the other: recovered space-parts could be sold on, or used in your research efforts. UFO remains perfectly playable today.

51 UT2004
Release: 2004
Last year: 28
Online shooters are at their most fun when the weapon in your hands has the power to kill your opponent with just one blast . The genius of UT is that this is nearly always the case; the second fire on the Assault Rifle you start with will generally do it. The Biorifle kerplodes foes with one heavy glob, the rocket launcher can fire a triple-burst for certain death, the flak cannon shreds anything at point-blank range. And then, of course, there's the pilotable nuclear weapon, the Redeemer.

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Re: PC game top 100

Post by Balthazar » Wed Jul 08, 2009 7:16 pm

Continue please :P

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Re: PC game top 100

Post by xpoy » Wed Jul 08, 2009 8:19 pm

50 SILENT HUNTER III
Release: 2005
Release: 47
Manning a submarine would be extremely difficult in real life. That's why, in Silent Hunter III, it's extremely difficult. But that's also why, when you finally load, aim and fire your torpedo perfectly, at exactly the right depth, it's one of the most exquisite pleasures in gaming to watch the enemy ship buckle, ignite, bisect and finally sink, belching black smoke, into the tranquil waters of the Atlantic.
49 GT LEGENDS
Release: 2005
Last year: New Entry
Combine the wonderful-tactility of SimBin's heavily modified ISI engine with raucous, extrovert, dinosaurs-just-before-the-meteor supercars and you have driving heaven. Seriously upgraded from its GTR beginnings, Legends sports an authentically drift-friendly tyre model that lets you really hang it out in these under-braked, overpowered beauties. Sideways. It's the most exuberant sim for years, due to a subject choice every bit as inspired as the ageing Grand Prix Legends.

48 PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER 5
Release: 2005
Last year: 35
Time to smother our PC pride: consoles spawned the best football game we've got and we're lucky to have it. Konami's Pro Evo 5 is the connoisseur's choice. If there was ever a game based on feeling, this is it. It just feels like football; even for average players it can seem as if there's a touch of Maradonna running through your blood as a perfect through-ball meets the on-running forward and the net bulges.
47 FALLOUT 2
Release: 1998
Last year: 55
One word: atmosphere. The Fallout series' desperate, dusty, washed-out world owes as much to classic Western films as nuclear holocaust science. Broken, wasted towns filled with broken, wasted people litter the radioactive landscape. You wield rusting rifles and meat-cleavers rather than shiny high-tech stuff. Bottle-caps are the currency. With a solid RPG system on top, Fallout 2's legendary status is secure.

46 GRIM FANDANGO
Release: 31
Last year: 1998
"Phew," says Manuel Calavera, as his giant monster mechanic reveals that he's added hydraulic stilts to their flame-licked hotrod hearse. "I was getting worried our transportation wasn't ostentatious enough." He's a grim reaper, an insurgent, a casino proprietor, a charmer, a deep-sea diver, and a man who just wants to save one last soul. His adventure through the Mexican land-of-the-dead is one of the greatest noir classics of our time.

45 FOOTBALL MANAGER
Release: 2005
Release: 37
Football Manager is a route into a fantasy all fans indulge in: that of managing their favourite club. Its genius is in never breaking the fiction. Rare is the result that doesn't make sense, or that could never occur in reality. Sure, Ronaldo, Donaldo and Ronaldinho are all playing for Stoke City, but this is no idle daydream. Stoke just need the right tactics, the right training regime, and the right direction... And there we go. There's the fantasy.

44 BEYOND GOOD & EVIL
Release: 2003
Release: 49
Jade, the uncommonly compassionate heroine of this action/adventure/stealth hybrid, is a reporter. Usually in games that means 'was a reporter, now shoots everything on sight'. But Jade exposes the conspiracy behind a planet-wide war with her camera. She investigates, she photographs, and ultimately she brings down the evil corporation behind it all.

43 IL2: STURMOVIK
Release: 2001
Last year: 26
There is a gap between game and simulation, between 'pure fun' and 'beyond comprehension'. Key to understanding IL-2 is realising that you can find that gap on your own - the game will supply as much help as you need to get airborne and bombing. Even with the aids turned on, you still feel like a pilot, navigating by landmarks, swinging into formations, and bombing
German tanks on the Russian front.

42 GALACTIC
CIVILIZATIONS II
Release: 2006
New Entry
Your race finally crack space travel and send their first colony ship to the nearest habitable planet. That's when GalCiv2 starts. Turn by turn you expand. Settle on every uninhabited planet and win influence through sheer weight of numbers, or use technology to crush alien races. Either way, it's the story of your race, and the universe is sculpted by your philosophy.

41 FAR CRY
Release: 2004
Last year: 22
As FPS after FPS struggled to look more hellish than the last, Far Cry wandered in with a hankie on its head, socks and shoes in hand, paddling. The vast open spaces of its tropical islands contrasted wonderfully with the dark secrets within. Far Cry even presaged the TV phenomena that is Lost. It showed that there's more to games than gloomy, post-apocalyptic worlds.

40 RISE & FALL: CIVILIZATIONS
AT WAR
Release: 2006
New Entry
Within your RTS-style army is a hero - who you can take direct control of at any point. Are your archers having problems scaling the Egyptian walls? Whip into Alexander's body and beat back the defenders yourself. The tipping point in battles comes not when you overwhelm your opponent with sheer weight of numbers, but when you get stuck in personally.

39 COMBAT MISSION: AFRIKA CORPS
Release: 2004
Last year: 36
The standard for war-gaming has been steadily rising. Combat Mission's WWII re-enactments are the best route into the scene. Take turns to plan, and then enact the next 60 seconds of battle. You won't ever forget the first time you cause a rout in German defences, when a stray grenade sets a parched corn-field ablaze. You won't forget, and you won't stop playing.

38 PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
Release: 2003
Last year: 33
It's the game that revitalised platforming for the modern age, by adding fluidity. Jumping is a simple and mechanical process - to really enjoy the cavernous, intricate environments a 3D engine and a superb art team can create, we needed to be able to flip, skip, swing, dance and vault around these spaces. In Sands of Time, we could.

37 DOOM 2: HELL ON EARTH
Release: 1994
Last year: 42
We don't do 'classics' in the PC Gamer Top 100. Being influential or important doesn't make a game any more fun to play, and if something's been superseded, we ruthlessly exclude it. Doom 2 hasn't been replaced because nothing it inspired actually surpassed it. That's partly because of id Software's colourful imagination, which later sadly became more reserved and conservative. Doom 2's visions of both Hell and Earth were exotic and diverse. The pressure to create realistic environments has quashed the kind of reckless creativity that begat Doom's nonsensical, ever-moving, trap-laden levels.

The level-maker's freedom to make whatever he or she felt like was also a product of the technology: Doom's monsters and items were sprites, simple flat 2D entities that required little processor power. That meant it thought nothing of - in the classic level Barrels of Fun - chucking 40 demons into a room filled with 50 explosive barrels and just seeing what happened. Not only did the barrels detonate in chain-reaction, but the different types of monsters kept hitting each other by accident and starting fights amongst themselves - exactly the kind of chaos that would break modern game engines.

The ability to swamp you with masses of enemies gave Doom - and particularly Doom 2 - another advantage: they could be weaker. The double-barrelled shotgun would frequently kill four men in a single blast - unheard of these days. It gave each weapon a feeling of enormous power that's lacking in Quake or Doom 3, where nothing goes down in one hit. Even your humble punch caused enemies to explode in a shower of gore with the Berserk power-up. And at the other end of the scale, the BFG 9000 simply annihilated everything within sight - a ridiculous amount of power to put in the player's hands. No one puts weapons like that in their games any more - it gives the player the ability to make a mockery of the toughest challenge the game can throw at them. But that's exactly why it was such great fun - it gave us the power, not the designers.

36 ULTIMA VII: THE BLACK GATE
Release: 1994
Last year: 41
The world of Britannia was huge and richly detailed, and the ways in which you could interact with it were many and varied. Yet Ultima VII was effortless to play. This was the first RPG where the game world filled the whole screen, without a sidebar full of interface clutter. There was no interface. You were in Britannia and you interacted directly with it. Later RPGs with pre-rendered graphics would look prettier, but they would never give us as much.

35 RICHARD BURNS RALLY
Release: 2004
New Entry
RBR took driving sim physics to a new, almost autistic level - the developers asked questions even the Subaru WRC team had to look up. And the results, allied to 3D track surfaces which throw in the problems of ruts, puddles, awkward crests and berms, were astonishing. For loose surface driving, RBR remains peerless. A dedicated mod community keeps the flame alight.

34 CALL OF DUTY
Release: 2003
Last year: 13
Call of Duty redefined our expectations of the WWII shooter and cemented it as a genre in its own right. There's a clear line of development from Medal of Honour, but CoD set all the dials to 11. The result was an epically noisy bombardment of chaotic battles, evolving objectives, horde-like invasions and Oh. My. God. set-pieces.

33 TIE FIGHTER
Release: 1994
Last year: 30
It was a courageous move. By ditching the Rebel Alliance, and asking players to join the Empire, LucasArts risked alienating their audience. Yet working for the baddies had an upside: their Navy was better equipped, they had access to secret societies, and you got to fly alongside Darth "NOOOOO!" Vader. Now that takes courage.

32 ULTIMA UNDERWORLD II
Release: 1992
Last year: 34
The first-person RPG was born with the Ultima Underworld games. In the second, and greatest, of the series you travelled from one fantastic world to another. And then another. And another. Foes could be fought, spells could be cast, and NPCs could be talked to interminably. And it was all, incredibly, in texture-mapped 3D. You were really there. Every FPS that lets you do more than shoot stuff can trace its origins back to this incredible breakthrough.

31 FREESPACE 2
Release: 1999
Last year: 48
The moment a capital ship lights up its ion cannon, you know you're in love. Dive! Dive out of the line of fire, twisting your body with the joystick. You're safe - the laser screeched past your craft, and hit its target: the enemy. That's right. You're just one pilot in this war, and, like it or not, if you get in the way of laser fire from a friendly ship, well, tough. You'll be vaporised, but that's a small price to pay in a war for survival.

30 EVE ONLINE
Release: 2003
Last year: 38
There are more players in EVE's single world than in any other MMO's. It is, in other words, the most multiplayer game ever. The result is an enormous in-game culture. The stars are divided into territory controlled by gigantic conglomerations of players, brittle alliances between tight-knit corporations that fluctuate and clash every day. And none of it is controlled, preordained or even predicted by the developers.

29 BROTHERS IN ARMS: EARNED IN BLOOD
Release: 2005
Last year: 32
While Road to Hill 30 introduced realistically chaotic - rather than bombastic - gunplay to the WWII genre, it was EiB that nailed the formula. Decent AI became deadly AI, with the ability to outflank your flanking manoeuvre (those flankers), and the bigger maps let you use the buildings within them more frequently. A brilliant two-player co-op mode increased longevity, as do those single-player battles that play out differently every time.

28 SACRIFICE
Release: 2000
Last year: 39
Never had we seen its like before: earthquakes ripping apart floating landscapes, volcanoes erupting, dancing vicars dragging the souls of the fallen in giant syringes, stone lizards and big-eyed zombies hurling rocks at each other. And above all this, five gods, warring for your affection as you commanded teams of warriors, battling for control of mighty altars. We will never see its like again.

27 MONKEY ISLAND 2
Release: 1992
Last year: 50
Guybrush Threepwood - the indestructible hero with the infinitely capacious coat - was not so indestructible this time around. He could survive a room full of TNT when it went off, but if he failed to ricochet his grog-thickened spit off enough pots and pans to extinguish the candle burning the rope suspending him above a pit of acid, he'd meet a fizzy end. Cut back to the game's intro, where Guybrush is recounting his adventures to Elaine: "You're trying to tell me you died?" "Er, no, that can't be right."

26 SYSTEM SHOCK 2
Release: 1999
Last year: 12
"Hurry, run!" - words that still send a chill down the spine of anyone who's played the scariest FPS/RPG ever made. It was the urgent groan of the pipe-wielding zombies who roamed the corridors of the huge spaceship Von Braun - just before they clubbed you to death. They were warning you about themselves. Somewhere inside there was a helpless human being, aware of the atrocity it was about to commit.

xpoy
Posts: 669
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Re: PC game top 100

Post by xpoy » Wed Jul 08, 2009 8:21 pm

25 OPERATION FLASHPOINT
Release: 2001
Last year: 23
War happens at far longer range than games can usually simulate. Flashpoint threw everything out of the window: flow, pacing, balance, engine limitations - and just made it happen. You were fighting in a country, and you could see to the horizon in every direction. You could be killed from the horizon, too, so you spent much of the game hugging bushes and trees, just too scared to expose yourself. It doesn't get more authentic than that.

24 WARCRAFT III
Release: 2002
Last year: 18
It goes without saying that a Blizzard game will be perfectly balanced, and give you elegantly crafted units that each serve a single tactical purpose. Where Warcraft III surprised was the excellent narrative - every mission was there to draw you through an intricate story, and the key characters joined in with the battles. At the middle of it all was Prince Arthas and his massacre of an infected village and subsequent exile. Strategy has rarely been so perfectly produced.

23 BALDUR'S GATE II
Release: 2000
Last year: 11
She's vulnerable; naive. She needs someone. She makes it clear she likes you. But your other friends clearly don't approve, and there's jealousy. What do you do? Not the sort of dilemma you'd expect to face in a beardy fantasy RPG, but it's one of the reasons Bioware's classically styled epic ranks so high. Endless clever touches make this a joy, but none more than the beautifully brought-to-life characters.

22 DARWINIA
Release: 2005
Last year: 21
Your primary units have virtually no AI. You have to directly control them at all times to blast back the viral infection you're fighting. Luckily, this is enormous fun: the digital pink worms screech as your lasers scorch them white-hot, snakes and eggs crumble in the glowing blast of your grenades, and when a torrent of your rockets slam into a Soul Destroyer's head-section just as it swoops down to destroy you, its enormous flying body shatters into a thousand neon polygons.

21 PSYCHONAUTS
Release: 2005
Last year: 51
A game whose every nuance of design serves its central theme: exploring people's heads. Delving into the mind of a giant fish monster, you discover that it's as scared of you as you are of it. You're enormous inside its head, stomping on the fishy inhabitants, climbing skyscrapers and swiping at fish-piloted planes. You literally play on people's fears and eccentricities.

20 TOTAL ANNIHILATION
Release: 1997
Last year: 45
Replaying TA today is like discovering an alien artefact that fell to Earth thousands of years ago: it's an RTS far in advance of anything mankind has made, bristling with masterstrokes of which the human mind can barely conceive. Your starting unit is the most powerful in the game, able to kill anything in one hit, build anything, swim, and take huge amounts of damage. But the enemy has one too, and if either of you lose it, it's all over. It's you.

19 DAY OF THE TENTACLE
Release: 1993
Last year: 20
Adventure games were a hotly contested subject this year. Only those that were truly brilliant as games - not just stories or scripts - made it in. Day of the Tentacle rules supreme over them all. Funny and brilliantly written, but more to the point it had ingenious puzzles. Playing three characters trapped in different periods of time, you twigged that simple and ridiculous actions in the past could have life-saving consequences in the future.

18 CITY OF HEROES
Release: 2005
Last year: 19
City of Heroes is all about your character, and the game doesn't just allow you to create one that's extraordinary and unique, it forces you to. Walk around Paragon City - or better, fly - and you'll see that every one of its player-controlled inhabitants has been made with pride, love and attention to detail. No one gets past that character creation tool with a generic or dull concept. It's just too inspiring.

17 DAWN OF WAR
Release: 2004
Last year: 25 '
Turtling' is the practice of building up your base and army to an enormous size before invading. Dawn of War doesn't stop you doing it, but it very subtly coaxes you out of your shell: there are always a few more control points just outside the perimeter of your territory, and capturing them will give you much-needed funds. Before you know it, you've crossed into enemy territory, and the dogs of war are well and truly loose.

16 QUAKE III ARENA
Release: 1999
Last year: 16
Quake's switch to multiplayer-only worked because the movement and weaponry were so finely balanced. On the right map (such as DM17) QIII remains arguably the purest multiplayer FPS experience available. Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2 or Call of Duty 2 may have introduced exciting new elements, but nothing has seriously bettered QIII's perfectly milled core of rocket-jumping, splash-damaging, shotgun-pumping, gib-spraying and railgunning fury.

15 COUNTER-STRIKE: SOURCE
Release: 2004
Last year: 17
The cracking of a human skull is a very distinctive sound. That short, sharp 'puck!' is characteristic of the CS experience: sudden, brutal death. When one player spots another, one or both are seconds away from having their brains blown out. And this is death in a more meaningful sense than in other multiplayer games: you're out for the round, which in game terms is forever.

This volatility cuts both ways: on the one hand, you're acutely aware that you might die at any moment. On the other, it's an enormous feeling of power to know that you can kill someone the second you see them. This tension between fear and bloodlust is what makes Counter-Strike. It's not about the killing or the dying, it's the moments in between. The frantic looking around when you enter a room, checking every dark corner you've ever been shot from.

Multiplayer shooters live or die by their maps. The intuitive flow, distribution of sniping spots, number of alternate routes and chokepoints define the game. It's no coincidence that Counter-Strike's maps are so perfectly pitched in all those respects. The original mod was released with just three maps, but the textures were freely available for players to make their own. They did, and the explosion of 'unofficial' maps swamped the meagre official offerings. Those that are still on server rotation today have been played non-stop for seven years by around 200,000 gamers, jointly putting in an average of 121,000,000 million man-hours each month. No other game's map selection has undergone such crushingly intense scrutiny by the players. Only the truly perfect arenas have survived.

In Counter-Strike: Source, these have been given an elegant re-imagining by Valve's art team for the HL2 engine - a process that involved physically painting screenshots of the original in watercolour, then re-making the map in accordance with this embellished vision. It shows - we're now splattering Counter-Terrorist brains all over veritable Monets. But that's not the only reason we prefer the Source version. The weapon sounds, blood splatters and ragdolls are all exactly as they should be: understated and unsettlingly realistic. When you can die at any moment in a game, every frame of it has to look exactly right.

14 RISE OF NATIONS
Release: 2003
Last year: 14
Running a civilisation is a full-time job, and Rise of Nations isn't just in real-time, it's about eighty-seven million times faster. You've always got more to do than you have time or resources for - advancing the sciences, setting up trade routes, training an army, building universities and founding cities. This constant stream of things to attend to is narcotically addictive.

13 KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC
Release: 2003
Last year: 9
Would you weep for the Wookiees? Force (ahem) yourself to play this RPG as a Dark Jedi and you'll be faced with condemning a whole population of rug-folk to slavery. Our evil facade crumbled: we couldn't do it. Such is the storytelling power of this game, its well-rounded characters and excellent dialogue making for an RPG everyone can love.

12 F.E.A.R.
Release: 2005
New Entry
A truly brilliant game is one that ruins other truly brilliant games for you. After playing FEAR, the inability to kick enemies in the face in every other FPS makes it feel like our legs are tied together. How can any game not have a slow-mo key? Why don't other shotguns feel this right? Why, more importantly, don't they literally blow your enemies in twain? Why can't everything be a little more like FEAR?

11 PLANESCAPE: TORMENT
Release: 1999
Last year: 8
As games get harder and harder to make, we're losing something: wealth of ideas. Since Planescape only used graphics to set the scene, and conveyed most of what went on through text, it had a richness that can't be matched when everything has to be represented graphically. A staggering 800,000-word script wove the epic story of your undying protagonist, his many misdeeds, and a past that will haunt you forever.

10 THE SIMS 2
Release: 2004
Last year: 10
A true example of people power: the power of modelling ordinary people. What appears to be a simple doll-house simulator quickly turns into a storytelling device, as your characters live their lives. Who will they reject? Who will they fall in love with? And why has the Venus Fly Trap just eaten my girlfriend?

9 GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN
ANDREAS
Release: 2005
Last year: 5
The biggest and best version of what many regard as the biggest and best game ever. From the peaks of its high mountains to the troughs of the Hot Coffee debacle, no game has packed more amusing, nasty, nastily amusing or amusingly nasty content into one world. Or indeed, three giant cities. Some think freedom of choice will lead to the end of civilisation, but if it means chance collisions between quad bikes and light aircraft at 500ft, we're all for it.

8 THIEF: DEADLY SHADOWS
Release: 2004
Last year: 7
Many of the best games let you to see the challenge ahead, and choose your approach. Thief was never so generous - you learned your environment by creeping around it, negotiating its hazards as you discovered them. Thief DS's optional third-person view - a sharp break from previous games - enabled us to see not only how well hidden we were, but also how vulnerable.

7 ROME: TOTAL WAR
Release: 2004
Last year: 2
From a handful of soldiers to international diplomacy and everything in between: Total War has always done scale brilliantly. Rome is the series' peak. Successfully besieging Rome itself, overcoming its towering walls and charging thousands of men and horses through its streets is one of PC gaming's sweetest moments. Endless hours of sweating over the strategy map pay off on the battlefield in spectacular style.

6 CIVILIZATION IV
Release: 2006
Last year: 24
It's that time when, playing as the Britons, you sacked Rome. Or when playing as Germany, you invaded west - through Poland and France, into Britain, and didn't stop, across the Atlantic, through the US, and into Russia. Whether founding your own religion, seeking the counsel of Great People, or assimilating enemy cities by making your own too wondrous to resist, Civ IV creates more memorable moments than any of its predecessors.

5 WORLD OF WARCRAFT
Release: 2005
Last year: 3
Games used to be things we completed - challenges we devoured with relish, defeated, then put back in their boxes. World of Warcraft is not the first to go beyond that, to become more like a place than a pastime. But it's the only one that keeps drawing us back, that is still played routinely by half the office.

We're hardly unusual in this respect: as of May this year, World of Warcraft has more active subscribers than every other major MMOG put together. Clearly, there is something about this that makes it special.

There's all the usual Blizzard flair, of course - each little system, from fishing to auctioneering, is perfectly crafted to hook you with its slick mechanics and shiny rewards. Grown men shouldn't get this excited about finding a new sewing pattern. But WoW is about more than just what you do - it's about where you are. This is the most sumptuous world in gaming, and that's enormously important to how often you feel like going back there. Because you're going somewhere when you click that 'Log In' button, not just playing something. World of Warcraft contains every fantasy setting imaginable, and every last one of them is depicted with a sense of place and atmosphere. Crumbling temples in the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale, thick-trunked baobab trees in the cracked dusty earth of The Barrens, the proud stone silhouette of Ironforge jutting from its snow-smoothed mountain perch, the gentle hush of a waterfall tumbling behind the rickety wooden harbour town of Booty Bay, the cosy leaf-carpeted enclosure formed by Teldrassil's densely meshed canopy of purple-petaled trees... these places are embedded in our memories forever.

4 BATTLEFIELD 2
Release: 2005
Last year: 6
It's unusual for a game as highly placed as Battlefield 2 to go up in our charts, particularly with no shortage of highly placed new entries. The reason? Simply that its dusty carnage keeps drawing us back, and each time we scamper through those yellow streets something spectacular happens. It's a game that gives the impression of chaos better than any other, without actually being random. You do occasionally explode with no warning, thanks to an unheard incoming artillery strike, but that's part of the tension. It wouldn't feel like war if we were ever entirely safe.

It's precisely this pandemonium that gives Battlefield 2 its emotional resonance. Not the fear of death - we experience that in most games - but the camaraderie. We ought to feel it with our team-mates in every game, but only Battlefield 2 knows how to forge relationships between allied players. Everyone has a way of helping each other. The Medic revives, the Engineer fixes, the Sniper covers, the Anti-Tank eliminates threats, the Assault takes the flak, and the Special Forces... well, if you've ever seen the enemy tank that was about to kill you go up in flames, and one of these guys walk out coolly from behind the smoking wreckage, you'll know their usefulness.

These are the simplest bonds between players, but Battlefield 2 also operates on another level: the chain of command. A team's commander orders the squad leaders, the squad leaders order the squad members, and the squadless wander aimlessly. Becoming a squad leader is actually a small sacrifice - members can respawn at your position, but you're stuck with the standard spawn points. As a squad member, you're grateful to your leader for providing you with this advantage by giving it up himself. That goodwill greases the normally abrasive interactions between players quick to blame each other, and lets the squad run smoothly.

The commander takes the biggest sacrifice of all: he has no score of his own, and instead lives and dies with his team's overall performance. The only things he can directly take credit for are the artillery strikes, and no matter how strategically vital one might be, every friendly soldier killed counts double against your score. It makes commanding noble, and to serve an honour.

3 DEUS EX
Release: 2000
Last year: 4
With all the intellectualising that goes on about the revered FPS/RPG hybrid Deus Ex, anyone who hasn't played it could be forgiven for thinking it was a terribly serious and rather dry experience. Nothing could be further from the truth - Deus Ex is a comedy of errors. Your errors.

You're a multi-talented secret agent who stumbles upon an international conspiracy via a series of globe-trotting infiltration missions, but you're amazingly bad at it. Each little aspect of the game is actually fairly easy - almost everyone can be killed with one shot to the head, enemies are extremely nearsighted, you can hack any computer in the game with the skill points you start with, and most locked doors can be removed with the plentiful explosives littered around. But the enemies and obstacles come intertwined, and pretty soon whatever mix of stealth, violence and subterfuge you attempt will start to go horribly, hilariously wrong.

There is, of course, more to the game than repeated disasters. There's the formulating of these doomed plans, for example. More than any other FPS, your brain has to work overtime to come up with a way through the mess of intersecting hazards in your path. You have to visualise four independent patrol routes, consider when to interrupt or evade them, how you want any nearby explosives placed and when you want them to blow. None of this would be necessary if you were the bullet-eating super-soldier every other FPS seems to cast you as, but despite your nano-augmented backstory, you're all too human in Deus Ex. Nor would you need to think so carefully if the game had levels in the traditional sense - instead, each mission presents you with a building and the surrounding grounds, and finding a way past security is up to you.

But it's not until after it's all gone wrong that Deus Ex really comes into it's own. You're out of ammo, you've lost your legs, you're choking on your own gas grenade and every alarm in the building has been tripped. Now come up with a plan. It's not about thinking on your feet, it's about thinking on the stumps where your feet used to be.

2 HALF-LIFE 2 & EPISODE ONE
Release: 2004
Last year: 1
Just in case we'd forgotten what made Half-Life 2 special - and we hadn't, by the way - Episode One exemplifies everything we love. The seemingly trivial fact that NPCs are able to touch each other convincingly looks so natural you forget that no other game can do it.

Yet it's not the technology that's exciting, it's what Valve do with it. Alyx giving her father a casual peck on the cheek, Dog picking up a van and hurling it, Judith tenderly helping Eli sit down after his Citadel ordeal. Touching is the physical manifestation of the relationships between these people, and their relationships are what make them interesting in the first place. We've seen longing, guilt, resentment, terror, intimacy, disgust and a whole lot of love, all from texture-mapped polygons.

Oh yes, and then there's the game. As with the original Half-Life, it's the pacing that sets it above other shooters. Each section has you doing something different: weaponlessly fleeing the police, mincing zombies in traps, dashing through Strider-infested streets, commanding armies of antlions, fixing just enough of a broken Citadel to escape before it explodes. Each is long, gloriously long - never just a passing gimmick. You're at it for hours, and at each stage the difficulty climbs. By the time you leave Ravenholm, you're a broken man. By the time you clamber out of the airboat, your land-lubber knees are wobbly. And when you're riding out of City 17 for the final time at the end of Episode One, you share Gordon Freeman's exhaustion from the sheer number of gruellingly intense battles you've fought there.

What Episode One really drove home is something else only Valve can do - mix game and character. When the low zombie moan behind you turns out to be Alyx teasing you, you've moved from an action scene to an emotional moment - in this case one involving more affection toward a game character than seems decent. And when an actual zombie grunts somewhere off in the dark - "That was you, right?" - you're back in the action. When character and action mix together this well, the resulting cocktail is incredibly seductive.

1 THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION
Release: 2006
New entry
The success - not to mention brilliance - of Oblivion is a vindication of ambition. It says that it's worth biting off more than you can easily chew if the morsel is tasty enough. No one else makes games like this. If you're going to make a game this huge, with this much to do in it, you make it massively multiplayer so you can charge a monthly fee. If you're going to put the effort in to get first-person melee combat right where so many have failed, you put it in a straightforward action game, you don't spend years building a hugely complicated RPG around it. If you're going to blow such a huge chunk of your budget and DVD space on voice-acting, you make damn sure everyone hears it - you don't do it in a game so open-ended that 70% of players will only see 30% of the content. It is, at every stage, insane. It's game design suicide, without an ounce of commercial sensibility or canny streamlining about it. These people just did everything. And miraculously, it paid off. In one of those rare moments we delight in, the game at the top of the sales charts was genuinely the best one out there. People put their money where their mouths were, and their money said "We love vast and open-ended singleplayer RPGs with visceral combat and wonderfully rich storylines. Also pretty forests."

One of the things that distinguishes games from films and other media is that they make you feel good about yourself. When you kill someone in a deathmatch game you feel you've achieved something, proved yourself superior to someone else. But the even more intoxicating power of games is to make you feel like your character. It's Oblivion's unique ability to make you feel like an adventurer. In contrived, linear or abstracted games, the illusion is always being undermined by physical constraints, the artificiality of environments, the unconvincing feel of supposedly physical combat. Here, you step out of the Imperial Sewers into a big, intimidating world in which nasty things can beat you senseless - not just make a large negative number appear above your head when they pretend to swipe.

Striding out into that, taking on whatever it throws at you, and living out your own story as you see fit, is an amazingly close approximation of the experience of a hero. In a book or film, there's a disconnection between your experience and that of the protagonist - you know his experiences are predetermined, he doesn't. It's the same in a lot of games, too - what you see and do in HL2 is determined by Valve in advance. When you set out in Oblivion, no one knows what life you're going to lead - not even the people who created the game. And that's as it should be. A hero doesn't choose what perils he encounters, only where he goes. How he faces those perils - that's up to him.



Tried, goto bed /:^[

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Re: PC game top 100

Post by zuzuf » Wed Jul 08, 2009 8:54 pm

Ta should be first
=>;-D Penguin Powered

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Re: PC game top 100

Post by Balthazar » Thu Jul 09, 2009 6:21 am

Or at least in top 5, where Fallout should be also located.

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Re: PC game top 100

Post by xpoy » Thu Jul 09, 2009 6:25 am

TA had be first RTS(really total strategy) /:^]

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