Huh, I guess I never got around to doing my second list.
Okay here it goes.
Newer Games (2005-Present)
5)
Skyrim
The first Elder Scrolls game I truly got into. I remember getting
Oblivion at some point in 2006 or 2007 for my 360 when the guy who worked in the video game portion of my Hollywood Video said it would provide me with countless hours of entertainment. A bold claim but I was pretty desperate for something and there weren't many other options yet as the console was still in its infancy. In any case it was my first Elder Scrolls game and I was not use to the massive amount of freedom which actually made it very hard for me to figure out what was going on. I couldn't figure out how to level up nor did I really know what I was suppose to do. I also found the UI to be pretty piss poor for a console and ultimately abandoned the game.
Anyways after playing
Fallout 3 I learned how Bethesda games worked so when I got
Skyrim last year for 360 and I got quite absorbed. Sure there were things about it that still bugged me as with any Bethesda game, but that hasn't stopped me from sinking over 300 hours of my life into it. One of these days I'll actually get around to finishing it (as well as FO3, FO:NV, Oblivion, Morrowind, ect.) but as it stands I absolutely love the freedom to play quite a few different build sets.
4)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
Easily one of the most atmospheric and engaging games of all time, but not without its share of problems. I've heard that the expansion pack
Call of Pripyat fixes a lot of them, but I've yet to play it. What I do know is that I've sunk a great deal of time into a game that is very linear, but somehow manages to be both deeper and more intimate than a lot of other open-world games. I just downloaded the 2009 Complete Mod that fixes a lot of the problems so I'm pretty excited to re-play it and hope it can create the same sense of engagement I got out of playing it years ago.
3)
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Sadly one of the last AAA developed survival-horror games to be released that wasn't just a 3rd person shooter in the vein of
Resident Evil 4. This game was flawed in many ways, but it was also one of the scariest games I've ever played and one of the ones that made me feel incredibly uncomfortable with the killing of enemies. Sure they were all psychotic and out to kill you, but they were also the downtrodden and you're an FBI agent so bludgeoning a teenage runaway's skull in with a lead pipe was a little disquieting. I think that's what made part of the horror so effective, by tapping into the subconscious levels of privilege and guilt I think we all feel to some degree when we see the homeless.
2)
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
I really hate what this series has devolved into and I really hate how every other AAA publisher has screwed up the industry in an attempt to homogenize their IP in an attempt to tap the CoD market and get the same sales numbers by "widening the audience". I also hate how the series has really become the go-to catharsis for middle-to-upper class white people to blow off post-9/11 steam and spout their own racist/sexist/homophobic rhetoric, because up to this release, the series was a lot of fun. I remember how much fun I had playing the original
Call of Duty in 2003 when I was driving along the French countryside performing drive-bys on Nazis in a tiny blue car and thinking how this completely blew
Medal of Honor out of the water in every way possible.
Anyways as much as this game changed the landscape for AAA gaming, I can't deny that it's a well made and engaging game. From the intense escape of the first mission on the tanker to the stealth mission in Pripyat to the
the game really does engage you to a very scary degree and just showcases how much effort was put into it. I remember the buzz in 2007 around that game and how big it was going to be and it's a reputation that was not ill deserved.
It's just a shame the series got too big for its own good.
1)
The Walking Dead
Given the games I grew up playing, gameplay has always been secondary to me. Obviously it's important and there are some games that are a lot of fun just to play, but a game with a good story will always leave a bigger impact on me than anything else. Sadly it seems that game stories have really fallen off the list of importance this generation in favor of either letting players make their own story (a la Skyrim/Fallout 3) or just shunning story altogether and focusing on muliplayer. Anyways what I'm saying is that I grew up with games that had a strong story focus usually because gameplay was sh*t so you made up for it by having a good story, and I just thought that video games had good stories.
The Walking Dead was the first game to make me cry in a very long time. It was the first game to have a story that really stuck with me long after I turned off my 360. It was the first game I actually felt like talking about to people who weren't gamers. It was the first game in a long time that reminded me why I decided to continue playing video games after it seemed like maybe I was beginning to outgrow them, and for that TellTale Games has my eternal thanks.