[Question] Top 20 Games of the last 20 Years?

Only the last 20 years? Cuts out some proper classics on the Spectrum then, poor old Chuckie Egg...

Rather than post all 20 at once, I'll add as I think of things so in no particular order just yet:

Elite - BBC Micro and Acorn Archimedes - Too old technically but staying as an example of the good old days

Ok so I started playing this over 20 years ago but it was re-released on the Archimedes about 19 years ago so it counts. Elite wasn't a game I played, it was the game I played from the age of about 10 for a good three years. A space combat and trading game, it was, compared to modern offerings, pretty limited in scope. Hyperspace to a planet, close in on the space station, fight off some pirates, dock, sell your cargo, buy some stuff, repeat ad nauseum. Despite this however, it seemed incredibly vast in scope and given the other games around at the time, was pretty epic. If nothing else, Elite taught me about how markets work. You buy food cheap at an agricultural planet, sell it for more money at an industrial planet where you buy machinery, then fly to an agricultural planet and so forth. You could also mine asteroids for cargo, or attack cargo ships or do whatever really. The Archimedes version was a huge improvement in terms of AI with a lot more ships and with those ships behaving independently of your ship. You'd come across a pitched space battle, hang around and try not to get involved and eventually the cops would show up and break it up for example. Incredible game and years ahead of it's time really.

Transport Tycoon - PC

There have been many building shit sims, primarily your Sim Citys and Civilisations but I always preferred the Sid Meia Tycoon games, with Transport Tycoon being my all time favourite. Build railways and truck stops, connect towns and industries and end up with a massive, fuck off great transport network all over the planet, fucking over your rivals in the process. It was great in the way you had to consider the big picture, planning the movement of resources over the network, but also manage the minute details, building complex systems of signals and points to allow as many trains as possible to co-exist on a small number of tracks. Also it had an awesome smooth-jazz soundtrack.

Xcom UFO and Enemy Unknown - PC

Strategy rpg action from when the Japs had just about got their heads round plumbing sims, the first couple of Xcom games were brutally unforgiving strategy combat games with rpg overtones. Build your base, try to shoot down a ufo, send out the troops to take a look, try not to cry when they get massacred. We used to play this multi-player with four of us sitting round a pc, controlling a couple of soldiers each and I still have UFO installed on my laptop now. I maintain there have been no finer strategy rpgs released before or since.

Soul Blade - Playstation

Tekken was good but Soul Blade was better. With a smaller range of combos than Tekken, it was conceivable to learn all of them, for every character and I did. For my first year of university, I did little other than play Soul Blade. Nobody could beat me regularly, even after all my mates also played it all year. I was still playing Sophitia with the Sword Breaker and beating Siegfried with the Soul Edge. A mate caught me once playing practice mode against the AI on highest setting, just blocking combos for hours on end. I've never got so into a game before or since.

Chocks Away - Acorn Archimedes - Too old technically but staying as an example of the good old days

I doubt anyone else ever played this but it's a 3d bi-plane sim. Great fun on your own but fucking hilarious split-screen with a mate. It's a real shame the Archimedes never took off as a platform because they were technically lightyears ahead of equivalent PC's, especially when it came to chucking polygons about and the pitched dogfights above angry enemy airbases you could have in Chocks Away were like nothing else available at the time.

Killer Instinct - SNES

Yes, Street Fighter was technically better and has survived the test of time but I'll always have a soft spot for Killer Instinct. I just loved the flow of the game, how when you got into the zone the moves flowed from one into another and you could properly humiliate people when you set your mind to it. There's also no more satisfying feeling in gaming than beating someone with the 48 hit combo.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 - Xbox

I know they never finished it and it has incredible flaws but KOTOR2 is one of the only rpgs where you really can do what you want more or less and your actions actually do affect the world around you. Every jrpg ever makes you set characters into certain roles and things like Mass Effect pretend they give you choice but give you a choice of two things then the ending is basically determined by a single choice near the end anyway. In KOTOR 2 you can be an evil Sith Lord, frying rooms full of mooks in a single blast of lightning or a gun-slinging good guy, ignoring jedi powers in favour of being fucking handy with a couple of pistols or literally anything in between. More to the point, you can make all your buddies be the same thing if you want. This gives the game so much more replay value than any Final Fantasy game and I think the fact it doesn't have an ending actually helps this. Plus points being that it's Star Wars and the sound of a light saber swooshing around makes me feel like a five year old at Christmas, no matter how old I get.

Micro Machines V3 - Playstation

This game, a multi-tap, gallons of beer and kilos of weed is my weekend nights from the age of 17 to about 19. Every weekend, a horde of people at Dave's house, getting hammered, playing Micro Machines. No two races ever the same, no one person dominating, the level where you have to float across a pond on a lily pad never taking less than half an hour. Ultimate party game of the mid-90s.

Halo 2 - Xbox

Controversial choice and yes, the campaign is fucking atrocious but Halo 2 was the first console game I played a lot of online and will always have a special place in my heart as a result. Also, Halo 2 actually had objective games where people tried to get the objective. Assault games and capture the flag games didn't just turn into BR deathmatch every time like games of H3 and 4 always do. There were loads of different ways to win too. Setting the evening's objective as "Piss about in a Warthog as much as possible" resulted in winning more games in a row than ever trying to play properly. Custom games of King of the Hill on Midships with no shields and pistols as starting weapons with 16 people taking over three hours for someone to hit the 3 minute winning time, games of plasma grenade tag the length of blood gultch and so forth, Halo 2 was always more fun than the follow ups as there were a lot more people playing who didn't take it too seriously.

Ghost Recon 2 Summit Strike - Xbox

Not a standout game technically, I mainly love this game for the co-op games I used to play with a bunch of other English guys. Every session was a laugh, nobody took it too seriously, we'd often stop to give someone time to skin up a joint or grab a beer and without trying too hard, we actually got fucking good at it with only one ridiculous mission with randomly spawning badguys denying us a completion clean sweep on the highest difficulty setting. Of particular note was one night a random American joined in and tried to take it very seriously. Everyone got fucked off with him and by unspoken agreement, every game would start with someone shooting the guy in the leg with a pistol. Not fatal so he couldn't boot us but made him walk at half speed for the whole match. Despite this, the guy never quit and played with us for five hours straight. What a twat.

Syndicate - PC

Syndicate was an isometric strategy combat game that was a massive rip-off of Blade Runner and featured a team of cyborgs completing various combat-based missions in a futuristic city. More importantly it was, like most games made in the good old days before naughty kids were diagnosed as ADHD and medicated into insensibility rather than given an educational slap, incredibly fucking difficult. Starting off reasonably enough, you controlled your borgs and saved up cash afterwards to spend on newer, better guns and upgrades to your team improving their accuracy and reaction time. You could adjust these factors at will during the game leading to the hilarity of setting accuracy to zero and opening up on a massive crowd of civilians with miniguns. The game had a landmark bit of kit, the persuadatron, that allowed you to brainwash people into following you acting as human shields and allowing you to then brainwash cops and enemy agents. Best use of this was getting one agent to persuade every civilian on a busy level, getting everyone into a single car then having another agent blow it up, watching concentric rings of burning civilians running away from the wreckage. Never stopped being funny. There was an expansion pack, US revolt or something, the first level of which was a harder version of the last level of the original. Needless to say, I got about two levels in and gave up.

GTA Vice City - PS2

Aka best GTA, hands down. Funniest GTA, best range of different types of missions GTA, best taking over real estate GTA, best radio stations GTA, the list goes on. San Andreas is a close second but Vice City is definitely the best of an incredible series, at least until the 17th September...

Lylat Wars - N64

Called Star Fox 64 in the US but Lylat Wars in Europe (Because of a spectrum game called Star Fox), this was basically the only thing I ever used my N64 for. Like Tails, I played this and played this trying to work out how to get the alternate routes, back in the days when if you wanted to see everything in a game you had to get good at it, not just look it up on Gamefaqs. The script is hilarious, the levels are nicely balanced and the multiplayer is indeed awesome.

Time Crisis 2 - Arcade

Me and my mate Rich used to play this every Saturday when we were in town. We must have spent hundreds of quid on it and the bastard game is so tough towards the end, we got too good at the early stages before we managed to finish it, shooting at people before they actually appeared. Best use of an arcade cabinet and a shame it didn't translate too well to home consoles (Although Vampire Night on a projector with a G-Con is pretty mental).

Wipeout - Playstation

Wipeout should go down in history as the game that killed Sega and Nintendo. When the Playstation came out, it was fun enough playing Worms and Ridge Racer but it was just a fucking expensive re-hash of the Snes at that point. Then Wipeout got released and console gaming became grown-up. Everybody bought a PS, everybody bought Wipeout, everybody was much better at it stoned. Proper music, mental visuals, it was just mind-blowing when it came out and I still remember laughing at the one kid who insisted it wasn't as good as F-Zero. Nobody liked that kid and he grew up to be a traffic warden, there's probably a moral in that somewhere. To this day I am still awful at every Wipeout game unless I am heavily stoned, at which point I become merely a bit shit.

Super Monkey Ball - Gamecube

I never played beyond easy mode and with good reason, the main game is awful and frustrating and annoying. Monkey Target, the mini-game where you fly a hang-glider and try to land on targets in the sea however is incredible. So simple, so easy to learn, so hard to master, so satisfying the first time you land on a 500 point buoy without using the sticky power-up. Again, a game to play when fucked but such a good game to play fucked.

Quake - PC

Doom was great and Rise of the Triad was hilarious but it was Quake that really sold me on FPS games. Not only was it in jerky 3d, it was online, using a crappy modem and Barry's World and that was INSANE. In efforts to reduce ping, we used to play Quake with all the textures turned off. The corridors were plain white, friendlies were blue cubes, enemies red cubes and pickups green cubes. Ran at a ping of about 15 on dial-up. Rocket jumping, spawn killing, stupid, illegal character mods that added a massive spike to people's chests so you could see them coming, Quake had everything. I was even in a clan! It's a shame buying a rig capable of playing modern games is so prohibitively expensive because a lot of my happiest gaming memories seem to be on PC.

Final Fantasy XII - PS2

VII was the first I played, VIII was annoying, IX was for a long time my favourite, X was terrible then XII came along and was spectacular. Gone was the need to hammer the X button forever to win meaningless fights, this one was all about the setup and there's a weird sense of satisfaction at setting up your equipment and gambits just right to deal with every fight you come across in a certain area. XII has as much random silly shit as the others but for whatever reason, I could actually be bothered to track it down this time and I ended up with all the summons and killing all the optional bosses, something I've never bothered with in a FF game before. Sure the story is bollocks but they always are and I really liked the way that you're not really playing as the hero, at least not if you believe Balthier. I don't really have FF nostalgia and actually I really enjoyed FFXIII and XIII-2 but XII is the standout of the series for me.

Shin Megami Tensei Lucifer's Call - PS2

Nocturne in the US? Who knows. Anyway, the problem with most jrpgs is that they are very easy and this makes them dull. Even the "tougher" ones just require hours of boring levelling to get past any challenges. SMT is hard as balls and I love it for that. Random battles can easily kill you if you're unprepared, there are no areas in the game where you're safe from random battles and if you've got your party setup wrong, no amount of levelling will get you through. Not gonna lie, I used a guide heavily for the optional stuff in this but I did beat the devil and got the true demon ending which was a properly satisfying achievement in my book. This much mythology rolled into a game this tough is a perfect blend for me.

Pokémon Black - DS

All the pokemon games are basically the same and all of them are oddly addictive but Black was the first one that had a decent online trading mechanic meaning it was the first one in which you could realistically collect 'em all without needing a mate with the other version. I've spent hundreds of hours on this and almost got them all!

Burnout 3 Takedown - Xbox

As much a test of your reactions as a test of your racing skill, Takedown remains for me the pinnacle of online racing games. None of this open-world jumping through billboards bullshit, no hidden cars or driving between races, you got a list of races, you got a car, you got boost for driving into oncoming traffic and you held the boost button down all the time, hoping not to hit a bus. Fun in single player, Takedown was incredible online. Total silence over the headset followed by a torrent of swearing as someone took a corner too wide and smashed followed by even more swearing as the next person round the corner hit the wreckage. Revenge was a great game too but Takedown was the best.

Championship Manager 2 - PC

First time I saw my housemates at uni playing Champ Manager, I thought it looked like the most pointless, dull game ever. Lists of stats, no graphics at all and basically just football, which I have limited interest in at the best of times. Then they suggested I play it. Then I lost months of my life, doing nothing else but playing Championship Manager. It's the most weirdly addictive game ever, impossible to stop once you start playing. You'll start the season then want to just see how the first round of the FA cup goes, then just a couple more matches, then it's Champions League qualifiers and so on and so forth until suddenly it's five in the morning. Through playing CM2 I went from someone who knew little about football to someone who knew who was likely to win the Brazillian second division. The game is genuinely life destroying if you're not careful.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Seems a weird arbitrary cut-off point. Why not just call it 30 years and include everything since 1983, thereby capturing everything since playing computer games became realistically something you could do at home except Pong? Anyway, rules is rules so no Elite I guess. Pretty sure everything else on there is still valid though, UFO was 1994 and Transport Tycoon 1994 too. Wikipedia doesn't have a month of release for Syndicate so I'll assume it was after August in 1993 when I add that, primarily because without Syndicate in there the whole concept is meaningless anyway.

Edit: Oops, Chocks Away was 1990. All the best games came out before kids these days were born...

There's nowhere I can't reach.