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

Originally Posted by Dandelion Cysts

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (Windows, 1998)
I'd loved the shareware of JJ1 and had never been able to get the full version, but dammit I was gonna have the sequel!
And I really can't overstate the effect that this game had on my life. The events it enabled probably literally saved my life.

Oh my god! When I was considering posting in this thread, hell yes this game was on my list! I played the absolute shit out of it as a kid (always played Spaz). I've never come across anyone else who played it before!

I couldn't put together a list though. Objectively I know that the games I mulled over including wouldn't be in a definitive top 20 list. Most of the ones having the biggest effect on me came free with the computer, things like G-Police, Fury 3, Descent: Destination Saturn. And some are purely for personal reasons. For instance, I know how villified FFVIII is and I understand why but as above with JJ2, honestly, that game was a fucking saving grace for me. My judgement is (partially) clouded by how important it was to me at the time.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

In no particular order. If a game was multiplatform, I refer to the platform I played it on.

Blood (DOS, May '97): Now, I grant you, Quake and Duke Nukem 3D had come out the prior year but I never got round to playing them until much later and by then they weren't exactly impressive. Going from Doom to this was amazing. The Build engine wasn't really 3D in any meaningful way, but the illusion was awfully convincing for the time. Dynamite, flare guns, ersatz flamethrowers... if you set human enemies on fire they ran around screaming. And, of course, the glorious GUNS AKIMBO, which more modern games need to remember thank-you-very-much. You're lucky if you get to dual-wield a couple of piddly pistols these days.

Deus Ex (Windows, June 2000): Though the visual design of DX is uncomfortably 90's-feeling by this point (all black leather and mirrorshades), the plot (though wildly overrated by some feral fans) still holds pretty damned well as videogame stories go (though this is a low bar). In the end what DX tried to do is a lot bigger than what it actually accomplished. It's praised as a game where you can be a pacifist — sort of, technically, if you want to abuse bugs, engine limitations, and the weak AI of the day. A game where you can choose how to deal with situations — so long as you're comfortable knowing the actual plot progression is totally linear. A game where your choices affect the ending — by pressing one of three buttons in the last room of the game. DX's reach far exceeded its grasp, but, to be fair, at least it tried to reach. That's more than most do.

Fallout 2 (Windows, September '98): This was, I think, the first PC game I ever bought at full retail price (the first game I bought at full retail was Jungle Hunt for the Atari 2600, and the less said about that the better). In those days the family PC had a 2GB hard drive, and FO2's 600MB "Humungous" install, which copied all the video content off the CD, always had a cramped place of pride. FO2 is goofy as hell by modern standards, full of the sort of eye-rolling shit that teenagers still like to hold up as "mature". ("Ha ha! His head exploded! Now I'm off to take drugs with the mafia and be a pornstar.") But at the time it was expansive and amazing and oh my gosh what's this and what's that over there and, frankly, as much as New Vegas is a tremendously better game, I still wish it would let me make called shots to the groin.

Final Fantasy VI/3 (April '94, SNES): Easily the best thing to come out of the franchise. Maybe not the best JRPG ever objectively, however you would measure that, but a damn fine contender. In my case I had the fortune of skipping FFIV (and I do mean fortune because it truly does not hold a candle) so a lot of the things that were functionally old hat like Chocobos and summons and wait, anybody can learn magic? were amazing to me. To go from COLLECT THE RAT TAIL TO PROVE YOUR COURAGE to this. The credit FFVI gets for having two world maps is slightly exaggerated in light of FFV, its immediate predecessor, but "Galuf's World" feels like a tiny nothing place compared to the World of Ruin. The sheer size of the cast, all their little backstories... I can't really praise FFVI for its "story" because the actual critical path of the game is pretty compact. Find Kefka. Punch. Repeat. But it all takes place surrounded by this fuckin'... circus of wonders. Holy fuck he has a chainsaw!

Worms Armageddon (Windows, May '99): Along with its immediate predecessor, Worms 2, this is probably my single favorite multiplayer title of all time. It's pretty simple. You have a team of worms. You want to kill the worms that aren't on your team. It's essentially the evolution of old artillery games like the DOS Gorillas; choose your velocity and angle of fire, and hope for the best. How Worms improved on the formula is the huge variety in the arsenal (and the ability to actually move around, but you could toggle that off if you liked). I won't call the physics model "detailed", but it was complex enough that every shot had a very real chance of turning into a hilarious clusterfuck wherein half the map goes up in a series of chained explosions and you find half your team underwater. It's a damned shame that the developers don't seem to understand what made these games magic and have spent the ensuing decade-plus creating shallow spinoffs and broken 3D experiments. Even worse is that the surviving online community for this game has taken the typical turn into a bunch of fetishist technicians enforcing dozens of pointless little rules, the "serious Smash players" of the PC platform.

Portal (Windows, October 2007): The trailers for TF2 are what persuaded me to buy the Orange Box and set my terrible Steam-hoarding habit in motion, but in the end I didn't play TF2 for months after my purchase. What really hooked me was Portal. In a lot of ways Portal 2 is a better game, with a longer, more complex story and more toys to play with, but P2 is also a game with a bunch of the rough edges smoothed away. I like rough edges. In Portal, people got excited about finding areas "behind the scenes". Portal 2 spends so much time "behind the scenes" that you can scarcely remember what the set looked like. A lot of games have tried to borrow from Portal's concepts and aesthetic in the intervening years, with almost total failure. (Portal had more going for it than just stamping "SCIENCE" on the side of a crate, guys.) It was greater than the sum of its parts, and now that Valve is pouring time and effort into sociopath-generator cash cow games like DOTA I don't know if we'll see its like again.

Team Fortress 2 (Windows, October 2007): I have probably played this game more than any other single game in my life, and it was only in January of this year that I threw off the shackles and sold off my collection of virtual hats. I don't really play it anymore; big changes in the environment are very few and far between these days and it grew stale for me. But, goddamn, while it lasted. Still one of the best, most balanced, most fun FPS experiences in the genre, with an utter refusal to take itself seriously. If you're tired of yet another round of M16s vs AKs, I've got a solution. Strap on your mechanical hand, grab a soda, and fill your piss jar: a fat Russian man has put a bomb in a wheelbarrow and he's coming our way.

Super Street Fighter II (SNES, June '94): The SNES pad, while perfectly serviceable, was not an ideal one for fighting games. The hours spent trying to consistently perform anything more complex than a QCF were ridiculous. But when I got it. When I got it! Oh, Dhalsim. You teleport so good. Look at you go. You're over there, and now you're over here. It seems that Cammy is unable to reach you. How unfortunate. SSF2 is important for so many more reasons than its role in introducing a young boy to the wide world of trolling: for example, it's the first fightgame with a GUI that acknowledged combos, and fixed most of the issues in the original SF2 to create a game that's still rock-solid to this day.

Civilization II (Windows, February '96): Civ 4 is by far the best of the Civ games (shut up about Alpha Centauri, I don't care), but Civ II is so ambitious and so goofy that I can't not love it (though I don't know if I'd actually want to play it). There is nothing about the FMV Advisors that is not amazing, and the great mods tools meant there were hundreds of dinosaur vs ninja pirate scenarios to try. They were all dumb, but it introduced me to mods as a concept.

Diablo (Windows, November '96): I love roguelikes. I do. If this list wasn't constrained to 20 years Rogue would be at the top of the list. Diablo took the core ideas of the roguelike (Random dungeon! Get to the bottom! Don't die! Go!) and gave them serviceable graphics and a functional GUI. Every roguelike since that isn't a stupid ASCII mess owes something to Blizzard, even if their output since has been... uninspiring. Fuck Diablo II, I ain't give a shit about your overworld or your goddamn plot.

Dungeon Keeper (Windows, June '97): I was never actually very good at Dungeon Keeper, but this didn't stop me playing the first dozen levels over and over. Everything about it is so relentlessly tongue-in-cheek. All the heros are idiots. All the monsters are idiots. Slap them and feed them chickens. Dungeon Keeper 2, unfortunately, resides in that awkward place in gaming history where developers felt they needed to render everything in 3D by giving each model about 3 polygons. Maybe it's just as good, but fuck, I can't even look at it.

Carmageddon II (Windows, November '98): Still the greatest car combat game of all time, and one of the first racing games to use any kind of significant damage model for the cars. Either you understand why ramming into the side of a school bus and watching it crumple is rad or you don't. Car combat should be about collisions, not circling the other guy with your peashooter machine gun.

Baldur's Gate (Windows, December '98): Holy shit why does this game need so many discs? What have we gotten ourselves into? A prime example of what Bioware can do when they haven't spent a decade letting their fans jerk them off into total complacency (and when their dumb goddamn ideas are reined in by the geniuses at Black Isle). BGII bloated into a melodramatic, incoherent mess, but the freshman showing of the game Bioware's been remaking over and over for their entire history is more or less what a D&D game should be: wander around, find some +1 longswords, and fight things in a cave. The awkward adaptation of what was even then a creaky and shopworn 2nd Edition ruleset makes it hard to go back to, but the D&D license has never seen a better love letter.

Fallout: New Vegas (Windows, October 2010): Remember Black Isle? Sure you do, I just mentioned them. They kind of ceased to exist when Interplay messily shat out its own intestines, but the brilliant bastards that worked there didn't sit on their laurels. Some of them left to form Troika when the writing was on the wall: Troika put out three fantastic, under-appreciated RPGs and died young. Everyone else formed Obsidian, a company who, by any reasonable metric, owns the moral claim to Fallout, if not the legal one. While Fallout 3 is a perfectly good game in the serviceable sort of way Bethesda games always are, and the very existence and success of Fallout 3 is what made New Vegas possible, New Vegas is unquestionably what Fallout 3 should have been: actually a sequel to the events of Fallout 2. And a damn fine sequel, at times horrifically dark but not afraid to laugh at its own self-seriousness. While Fallout 3's example of TOUGH MORAL CHOICE was "Nuke an innocent settlement/Don't", most of the dilemmas in New Vegas present situations with no real easy answers. In the end, you'll have to throw your weight behind one of the horrifically flawed powers battling for this slice of desert, or engage in merciless treachery and seize the throne for yourself. Also, there's a ghoul voiced by Danny Trejo if that other stuff doesn't grab you. That's how you use a VA budget! You don't just hire one AAA-lister and let the janitor voice the other 999 characters! Fuck!

Unreal Tournament (Windows, November '99: While TF2 has an edge in providing an overall varied FPS game, in terms of pure deathmatch UT99 stands on top of the mountain and is likely to stay there as long as the industry is still designing FPS games for dual twiddlesticks. There are precious few things in the genre like landing a shock combo at that clutch moment.

Neverwinter Nights (Windows, June 2002): While Baldur's Gate was inarguably a better game, what made Neverwinter Nights important was its tools: with enough time and effort you could map your D&D campaign in 3D (admittedly 2002-era your-hands-are-cubes 3D) and play Dungeon Master online in real time. In the end, the tools were too unfriendly for most and the net result was a bunch of dumb "persistent worlds" which existed mostly as exercises in masochism. The grand dream of a user-friendly D&D visualizer is yet to be, and with the D&D owners actively turning away from technology and modern design it will probably never happen. The high water mark.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Windows, October 2004): Maybe GTA5 will unsaddle this majestic beast, but I doubt it. Rockstar takes themselves way too seriously these days. GTASA is Every Reason Open-World Games Are Good wrapped up in a tight package. Or, actually, a pretty big package. San Andreas predates the modern design convention of excising content that you don't expect every single player to see, so get there and just explore miles and miles of small towns and rambling countryside. Or just follow the damn train. That's all you had to do, CJ!

Saints Row 2 (Windows, January 2009): No, Rockstar. We don't want to go bowling with our cousin. Why would we want to do that? What we want to do is play in traffic. What we want to do is wear a hot dog suit and drive an ATV through a mall. And if you could include alarmingly dark and merciless storyline cinematics that play in-engine so we have to mercy-kill our friends while still wearing the hot dog suit, that would just be... oh. Hi, Volition. You guys are good. I like you.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Windows, March 2006): I spent more time modding Oblivion than I did playing it, and for every hour spent actually doing a marked quest I spent 10 hours throwing plates at NPCs and fleeing madly across the world on a stolen horse. There's just so much stuff, to the point where it feels less like a game and more like a big dumb toybox. I played Skyrim for like 2 hours. It didn't grab me. I don't know why.

Titan Quest (Windows, June 2006): Whatever genre Diablo II/III belong in, Titan Quest is that genre done right. Who wants to fight yet more demons and skeletons? I mean, you can fight those if you want. We got those too. We also got some centaurs, some giants, some neanderthals over there. How about a yeti? We got a big-ass yeti. Take a whirlwind tour of the ancient world from Greece to Egypt to Babylon to China, follow the Silk Road, Ascend to Olympus, slay a Titan, and get some sweet loot direct from Zeus! And when you're done sightseeing, go ahead and descend into the Underworld and fight Hades and his pet Cerberus. No rush. Oh, and the classes? Eh, fuck it. Pick two. They're all pretty rad. Now go club a satyr upside the head and watch his body fly off a cliff.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.