(ARCHIVED) My Top 30 Favorite Games of All Time (If You Forced Me To Make an Arbitrary List of Them at Gunpoint)

I'm terrible at picking favorites; just comes with the autism, I guess. If you hand me two boxes of cereal and ask me to pick a favorite, unless you handed me a box of Coco Puffs and Sour Patch Kids (which existed at one point), I won't be able to give you a definitive answer. By nature, I am a stubborn and indecisive person. So what if you held a gun to my head and forced me to tell you what games I like the most? This list and the notes held within are an attempt to quantify what my answer might be. It should be worth noting that you might find some mid-ass gems in here. Again, going in line with the premise, these games are not technically my favorites of all time; they're just educated guesses.

Lone Survivor is the Mary & Max of video games. To a casual observer, that's a strange comparison for me to make. The reason I make that comparison is for one reason: as an autistic individual, the ending of Mary & Max is one that has stuck with me. It's solemnly bittersweet, but that lack of sentimentality allows the warmth of its final blow to resonate in such a way that it still sends reverberations throughout me when I think of it. In much the same way, Lone Survivor is an uncompromising portrait of grief, pain, and recovery that delivers itself in such a way that, all of these years later, I still respect it to hell and back. It may not be the greatest game of all time, but on a personal level, it means far more to me than its excellent soundtrack or eerie atmosphere would suggest.
It's easy to reduce Nier Automata to the sexualization of its main character. Jokes about that are easy to come by, and were directly encouraged by the strange, strange demeanor of its creative director. But honestly? I think that's unfair. Nier Automata is one of the finest uses of storytelling specific to this medium that I have ever seen. I'm sure the anime adaptation is good and all, but I doubt that it's anywhere near as effective as the game itself. That, combined with the atmosphere, music, and general combat make this such a wonderful game. Genuinely, if it weren't for the sexualization, I would recommend this to a lot more people, because I think it accurately portrays a lot of this medium's strengths.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is Rockstar at its very best. Of course, that comes with a few caveats. It still being a Rockstar game, it's trapped with the same issues their games have had with mission structure and the general feel of gameplay since the release of GTA IV. Missions are still absurdly linear set-pieces that rarely take more than the input of the developers into account. But unlike the GTA games, whose satirical nature occasionally brings the worst out of that framework, Red Dead Redemption 2 puts a lot more legwork into making you care. The world is engrossing, the characters are well-written (and given the amount of them, that's a fucking feat), and the overall melancholy that looms over the entire experience provides the story with a touch of poignancy that I didn't expect to be there. It's far from a perfect experience on an objective level, but as its strengths are happy to point out, you're missing out if that's the only way you judge your media.
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It ain't perfect, but it hits well above its weight, and for that reason, Red Dead Redemption 2 easily earns its spot at number three on my list.
I've heard people say that Katana ZERO is like a weeb's version of Hotline Miami, but I don't dig the interpretation. Beyond the aesthetic of cutting up a bunch of bad dudes with a sword while the game blares electronic music in your eyes, there's something surreal about Katana ZERO that appeals to me more than the average anime does. Hotline Miami works because it's a story that can only be understood through the lens of it being a game. You can adapt it, but you'd be pulling more from its sequel and its world-building than anything the first game offered. Katana ZERO flips the script somewhat. You could also make an adaptation of it, but you wouldn't come anywhere close to telling the story as effectively as the game does. There's always a sense that the surface level you're told to fix your gaze at is never the end of the story. It's a long and windy conspiracy told at an individual level rather than the long hallway of names and events that the typical conspiracy story plays into. You aren't a badass like Jason Bourne, nor are you suave like James Bond. I'm not going to spoil the true nature of who ZERO is because that would ruin the entire experience. It's not some shocking twist, but the game unravels it with such poignancy that I wouldn't dare ruin it for you. And then, when all of that's said and done, the game messes with your head. Again, I can't say much about this. A lot of what makes Katana ZERO my favorite game of all time is reserved for spoiler talk because it's not something that's immediately apparent upfront. But those moments have stuck with me like almost nothing else in the past few years, and they've made replaying this every now and then a pleasant decision.
A microcosm of counter-culture as defined through the purity of childhood. LittleBigPlanet 2 is everything a sequel should strive for: it takes the logline of its predecessor and not only improves it but adds to it. If the original LittleBigPlanet felt like a playground, LittleBigPlanet 2 feels like a game-ass game, and I am here for it. The online component may be dead, but while it was live, LBP2 was home to some of the most creative, inventive, and out-there creations I've ever seen in a digital space. Think cool houses next to games that wouldn't be out of place in a game jam and horror movies that are almost feature-length. It was, and in its preserved form still is, a delightful little thing to look back on, and I'm sure it's what sold my older brother (as well as so many others) on a career involving computers. I know its presence near the top of this list is a technicality, but godspeed, Media Molecule. Godspeed.
I don't believe Cyberpunk 2077 works as a Grand Theft Auto clone, but that's for an entirely different reason than you might expect. Grand Theft Auto wishes it could be this sincere, corny, and heartfelt. As much as I love Grand Theft Auto V, I honestly think Cyberpunk tells a better story about friendship against the odds of a decaying, decadent, and cynical society. I don't care how much of a hot-take that is; I agree to disagree if needs be.
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Cyberpunk finds beauty in an ugly, ugly place. On the surface, it's a game about saving yourself. The creator of the tabletop game that it's based on echoed that sentiment in a bit of promotional material released long before the game started production in proper. But peering through the paper-thin artifice of Night City, it becomes clear that its inherent ugliness belies the occasional warmth of its inhabitants. In a world run by corporate greed, sometimes it's fun if you stop for a second to ride a rollercoaster with the hologram in your head. Underwater cities and sentient vending machines punctuate a sense that not all is lost—a feeling only exacerbated by the many nomads roaming the badlands. It may be entirely predictable that a story set in a cyberpunk setting either revels in cynicism or learns to cope with itself, but Cyberpunk 2077's impressive production value and focus on immersion allow it to capitalize on those beats without ever feeling so rote that it's laughable.
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Understandably, Cyberpunk is not everything it could have been. But judging the experience as I played it, I still feel like there's a lot to love here that gets overlooked in the terminally online discussions about how it's the worst game ever and whatnot. If James Rolfe covered this, it would be funny for the glitches, but I'm not even sure it would touch the likes of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.
Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is a strange game.

Part Saturday Morning Cartoon, part remake of a flash game, part throwback, and part realization of its creator's childhood dreams. It's impossible for me not to love this game, at least on some level.

It's a deliberately clunky game with combat that only "gets good" when you're off the ground in segments that see you hurdling in the air, trying to control your speed and angle. To say that nothing on the market nowadays plays like this doesn't do it justice; the only games I know to compare this to are Another World and Blackthorne, both more than thirty years old at this point. The appeal of this game is limited because of that. I've seen some ask who this game is for, and while the answer to that is an increasingly specific list that starts to sound like a non-sequitur at points, the short answer to that question is me. This game is for me, it's firmly in my wheelhouse, and I love it.

I love the 2.5D art style, which sees gorgeous hand-drawn animation combined with stunningly minimalistic 3D backdrops. I love how campy the entire thing is; while it has moments of drama, hammy voice acting and silly dialog means that it almost never takes itself too seriously. But not in the annoying Ryan Reynolds way of, "make a quip every three seconds and look at the camera." Something is endearing about how goofy the entire thing is, which strangely makes its jarring shifts in tone work for me every time. I love the flying segments. They've never had controls that really work, and the improvements in Rocketbirds 2 mean that it's an objectively better game. But subjectively, the stiff controls in Hardboiled Chicken add to this feeling of never truly being on top of the game, and I prefer that. You're dogfighting with nothing but a jetpack and guns, and I love that the game doesn't go easy on you. I love the energetic music by New World Order, most of which was never composed for this game. But the developers loved it so much that they built their setpieces and cutscenes around it, and I love it. It honestly starts to feel like a playable music video, kind of like if Tony Scott made a game. And I adore every second of it. I love the crass, childish humor, too.

Technically, this isn't a game that you should ever expect to see on a Best Games of All Time List. Technically, I bought a physical copy of it off of eBay once I found out that that was a thing that I existed, and it's one of the grails in my holy collection.
Four players, Mexican Mission, Virus, Monkeys Only, Baseball Bats Only, One Hit Kill.

Do I need to say any more than that?

I have much more nostalgia for TimeSplitters 2, Ice Station, Hangar, and a map my brother made that was one square. But having revisited both games, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect is much easier to go back to. It has better shooting controls, its campaign is less frustrating, and there's just a lot more content on show overall.
Picking a favorite Jackbox pack is an arduous task because there isn't one that trumps the other. They all provide enjoyment on different levels, and although I prefer a few games over others, it's hard to deny that going through each one with a set of friends makes for good times.

I'm going with 7 because it's one of the rare packs where all of the games are great, even if one or two get stale after a few times. Blather Round is a fun guessing game, while The Devils and the Details will challenge your group in ways that harken back to the friendship ruining days of Monopoly. Quiplash 3 is just more Quiplash, which is still a lot of fun. But arguably, the two games that steal the show are Champ'd Up and Talking Points. I'm not good at improvisation, so I'm more of a Champ'd Up kind of guy. But watching other people work around their limitations makes for seriously entertaining results--granted, the audience you're playing with puts in the effort.
Dishonored 2 is not only a fantastic stealth game but, like Hitman: Blood Money is also an engrossing litmus test for its player. There are so many things you can do in this that the developers simply never intended that it has a lot of replay value by virtue of giving most of its tools to the player.
I'm honestly shocked that there was a lot of controversy for Postal and Hatred, but nobody has ever talked about how you can pretty much become a spree killer in Hitman: Blood Money. I believe the difference is that it's really fucking funny in Hitman in a morbid but still overtly goofy way. But let's pretend you aren't playing Hitman: Blood Money to cause as much chaos as possible. This is still a fantastic stealth game. It may not give you as much leeway as something like 2016's Hitman does, but there's still a lot of emergent gameplay to mess around with, and it's endlessly enjoyable.
The plastic guitars may be gathering dust in my house by the minute, and nobody ever wanted to set up the drums or sing--but who cares? Get four people, name your band something cute like "The Band of Bruce," and play those drums to Red Barchetta and Testify by Rage Against the Machine until your fingers go numb.
Technically, Planet Coaster is a better game. Technically, I also don't care. Boot up sandbox mode, create an air-powered coaster, ruin the day of your guests. Try to drown your park's supervisor in a lake you've put far off in one of the corners of your park so he stops moaning about the fact that you're literally giving food away for free. Make all restrooms cost a dollar to use so every one of your guests pisses their pants. Create a kids rollercoaster, and then make it have a drop so intense that only parents are riding it. The sky may not be the limit, but the sky is still too far up there for me to touch it. If I want to screw around in a video for laughs, first I'll play The Sims 3, then I'll start playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 again.
I think Dark Souls gets a lot of credit as probably the most seminal game of the 2010s, but Hotline Miami is an easy contender for that spot, as well. It's weird, creepy, cryptic, and hyperviolent in a way that would inspire plenty of indie games after it. And honestly? I am here for it. I have played through the opening stages of this game more times than I can count. Hotline Miami is arcadey in the best ways possible while not letting its violence get the worst of it. I've seen this game described as whatever the video game version of an exploitation film is before, and I don't know if I totally agree with that analysis because the game is totally in on it. Without being pretentious or pompous, Hotline Miami makes you question video game violence, and I adore that.
Grand Theft Auto V is one of the most early-2010s games ever conceived, full of jokes about hipsters and jabs at smartphones that feel ancient nearly a decade later. But it's to the game's credit that I conveniently forget all of that before going in for another playthrough. Grand Theft Auto might not have the most compelling characters, the most well-written narrative, or the most emergent mission design. But say to my face when I've accidentally landed my buggy inside of the back of a pick-up truck.

The fact is, dated and shallow as its writing may be, the gameplay in Grand Theft Auto V is polished to a sheen. For a game of its time in the most transparent of ways, it almost feels timeless when you decide to stop following the story and do your own thing.
Listen, listen:

I know.

I'm aware that this game has quite the reputation on this website, and I don't think it's entirely unfounded. Setting aside the different culture the developer is from, there's something off about Intravenous's narrative framework. "What if Splinter Cell, but you murdered the homeless?" That sounds like satire, but I assure you, this thing is self-serious to the point of parody at times.

So why did I put this list?

Originally, I had Alpha Protocol on here. I said of the game at the time, I liked the choices I was allowed to make and the way they were presented. The game itself? Not so much.

Intravenous does something interesting: it provides you with choice, and it's fun. If you skip the boring story, ignore how needlessly crass this can get, and simply play the game, Intravenous is pretty good. Obviously not perfect, but I enjoy it for what it is.

If you're not a fan of this? I mean, can I blame you? Again, I get it. Not to everyone's liking, and more than enough people will find this to be utterly inexcusable at best. I still had fun, though, sooooo...

GOATED.
The Neverhood is brought to life in a way that few point-and-click adventures are. It bridges the gap between the eerie desolation of Myst and the goofy charm of something like Monkey Island but does so in its own way. It is a bizarre game set in an extraordinarily weird world; in other words, it feels more true to cartoons than games that are based on cartoons usually do.
I am not a fan of racing games, BUT: Burnout Paradise rules. Whenever I think of going vroom vroom in a game, I think of crashing into a wall at 18 quadrillion miles per hour, having my car implode due to the damage that causes, throwing my controller at the wall, rage quitting, and then booting up the game to do all of that again because, goddamn it, it's so much fun.
In which the button to kick things stopped working halfway through my playthrough because I broke it.

The biggest mistake Dying Light makes is trying to take itself seriously. I admire the courage to do something new, but Techland has never been the best when it comes to writing, and it's the same in Dying Light. This is compared to the whack-e-doodle fun you and three other people can partake in the open world, though. That game is a lot of fun and damn near one of the best zombie games I've ever played.
One of my favorite multiplayer games of all time. Ultimate Chicken Horse is a game where it's almost more fun to lose than it is to win, if only because it's entirely possible to make the game impossible, and I love that. The platforming feels as smooth as butter, and stages offer a great amount of variety to keep you coming back.
The New Order might be one of the greatest series revivals ever.

Capturing the spirit of its source material while improving on all of its obvious faults, there's nary a moment in The New Order where you aren't being seriously entertained. The set-pieces may not be as grand and destructive in scale as something like Call of Duty, but for what they are, they manage to both be tasteful and fucking awesome in the same breath. This game is gory, kicks ass, and takes names. The story's a lot of pulpy fun, the characters are surprisingly well written, and the art direction makes certain scenes look like paintings because it's that good.

The only real downsides that I can think of are that the cover system is too much of a hassle to bother with, and that the perks system kind of blows. While you can manually lean (which is rad as fuck), aiming in a suggested direction while in cover will lean for you. In theory, this is a fantastic idea. In execution, I'm trying to lean left, and the game's telling me that I want to go up. It's pretty janky and comes from an era in which this kind of mechanic had yet to be iterated seriously, so it only really makes sense that it sticks out like a sore thumb. Then there's the perks system, which is also a fantastic idea on paper. If you play in a specific way, you get rewarded for it in ways that help you play in that style more effectively. The problem is, the developers got it confused and, instead of dynamically tracking how a player is engaging with their game, tied almost every perk to a challenge. You can go throughout the whole game being as loud as possible, and you still won't complete the skill tree for that because you never killed 50 enemies while leaning out of the broken cover system. The good news is that this is extraordinarily easy to cheese. If the game asks you to backstab someone 20 times, you can reload a checkpoint 20 times, and every time counts. The number of times you do something is never reset, so if you really want to experience everything this game has to offer, you better prepare to absolutely obliterate anything resembling a solid pacing structure.

If it weren't for those two things, this would be higher up on this list. But as it stands, it's still excellent, and I appreciate what was done right.
A brief, touching experience that may not be the most reactive to your choices but goes out of its way to make it seem that way in the most convincing way possible. The Walking Dead's cast of characters is pretty memorable, and that ending always leaves me in tears. Or, it did before I decided that no game is worth playing six times, let alone five.
Persona 5 has an interesting reputation: it was released to glowing praise but has been reevaluated by its fans and onlookers in the years since. What was once widely considered the best gateway JRPG is now the game where you're given to option to date your homeroom teacher in between classes.

My inclusion of it on this list will undoubtedly raise a few eyebrows for that reason alone. But here's the thing: you're allowed to like media while being critical of its weaker aspects. I strongly disagree with anyone who says otherwise, and my main reasoning for that is Persona 5. To say that the writing is inconsistent is an understatement: set-ups for characters and chapters range from being well-thought-out to embarrassingly contrived in an irregular pattern. I already mentioned one of the most troubling aspects of this game's side-content. But your homeroom teacher is just one of a handful of adults that you can make your teenage protagonist romantically pursue--and no, it never gets less creepy. These are my main issues with Persona 5, and if I wanted to nitpick this game to death, I could.

But I can't deny that I had a really, really good time. The best parts of Persona 5 are kind of like the most insane scenes in Code Geass. It had me on the edge of my seat multiple times, enthusiastically shouting, "what is going on?" And when we're not talking about how exciting the plot gets as it unravels, there's the style. I am not a fan of JRPGs. My exposure to the genre has been limited, but I've played enough to know that they're generally not my kind of games. If more JRPGs start to look and play like Persona 5, I will probably be more invested in them going forward. Everything, from the UI to the characters and their world, ooze vibes effortlessly. The soundtrack's also good, but I'm pretty sure you know that by now.

Overall, not the most consistent experience I've ever had with a game. But I don't regret putting over a hundred hours into it, and I bet I'll do it again if Royal gets ported to anything that's not the PS4.
Sleeping Dogs has one of the best cover arts in recent memory. It's stunningly selective with color, and it looks to all be hand-drawn. It harkens back to a time when box art had more leeway to be creative and exciting. Given the game's technology, though, the artist was able to use the game as a point of reference. It gets close to looking like the actual game, but there's this element of being handcrafted that makes it oh-so compelling to fix your gaze upon. And then the publisher had to go and ruin it when they re-released it for more modern consoles.

This is a sentiment that perfectly describes the game itself. Sleeping Dogs could charitably be called a Grand Theft Auto clone, but its Open World busywork doesn't exactly elicit the same excitement that the earlier GTA games did. It has guns and a cover system but eschews most of that in favor of surprisingly in-depth hand-to-hand combat that often lends the game a playable martial arts movie flair that the standard point-and-shoot segments don't. Traversing the city is fun because it's well crafted and fun to look at, but cars feel too floaty for their own good and pick up speed too quickly. It's a well-crafted game with a lot of character held down by industry trends that dictated what mold it had to fit into. The developers make the best of this predicament, though, and the end result is a game that sometimes has more reach than grasp but grasps with enough strength to pull itself up consistently.

I will always have a soft spot for it in my heart.

But goddamn it, Square Enix, why did you have to change the cover art?
The Sims 3 is my go-to game for when I want to kick back, relax, and project myself onto two digital strangers who are falling in love for the first time. Is that sentence weird? The Sims 3 is my go-to game for when I want to kick back, relax, and watch a digital character grab a police officer by their legs and bodyslam into the concrete so hard that they instantly die. It's my favorite game where you can lock a toddler in a room with eight ovens that are catching fire because, deep down, I'm secretly a terrible person. It's my favorite game where I can write eight books in a row called things like "How I Poo Out My Peehole" and become a billionaire. It's my favorite game where I can cheat to place a hot tub outside of work, so the digital character I'm caring for isn't stressed out.

Obviously, if you try to do everything right, you end up doing a lot of things wrong or kind of iffy, and The Sims 3 is a prime example of this. But it's so much fun to screw around in the digital spaces it provides that I kind of don't care about any of that.
Probably one of the best Co-Op games ever made. Left 4 Dead 2 has a ton of fun characters, and the fact that all of the first game's content got carried over makes it the definitive package. I am putting it a little high up on here because once you've played through both campaigns, there really isn't a whole lot to keep you coming back other than morbid curiosity.
Yay, I can put GMod on here now!

Garry's Mod isn't so much a game as it's more akin to a stress ball. There are thousands of weapons to add to the game, an infinite number of enemies you can spawn in, and plenty of maps to play. But unlike many of the games on this list, these experiences aren't handcrafted. The joy of Garry's Mod is gaming at its simplest: you put someone with a gun in a room, tell them to shoot you, you shoot them, and then you do it all over again. Except this time, you have a car, or you're dropping them from 500 feet to see if they die from falling damage. Next time, you might spawn in a cage and lift yourself to the skies just to a dozen of the same NPCs fight each other for your entertainment. It does get old quickly once you realize that all of the maps are small, and when the game says a lot of its enjoyment factor comes from you, it means it. But that's why you play with other people.

That's why, many years ago, I played this with my brothers, with my cousins. That's why we put invisible sentries in front of the spawn point, why we sent people to space, froze them, and unfroze them.

Many of the games I have on this list are here because I have some nostalgic connection to them. The way that I approach my favorites is never through a lens of objectivity. If I wanted to be objective, I'd put The Last of Us on this list, even though I haven't played it in years.

In the case of Garry's Mod, it makes me think of my cousin's old house. It makes me think of the row of computers they all shared, the abundance of entertainment lying around that they never cared for. It reminds me of playing Smash Brothers on their Wii U, even though I don't "get" fighting games, just so I could be near them.

A part of my heart breaks every time I have to remind myself that they sold their house years ago. The rest of it falls off when I remember what the last time we visited them was like. One cousin married; I haven't seen him in years. The other two were cramped in this basement that was only recently added to their house. Their computers were against the wall like they used to be, and there was a television next to them. But we never used it. I've never come closer to being alone in a room, trapped with my own thoughts like I was on that occasion. I usually don't mind being with myself, but this was a special occasion. We used to blow each other up in Garry's Mod, have lightsaber fights that turned into firefights. We'd laugh, we'd yell, and by the time we left, we eagerly awaited our next visit. One time, one of our cousins ragged on about how he missed us just after we left. He wanted to spend more time with us.

But at some point, you have to face the fact that you don't particularly care for your aunt and uncle and, try as you might to run from it, you can't escape the reality that those who live under their roof are bound to become them. I suppose that's why I've been so eagerly fascinated by the one who got away; maybe he was the glue that kept everything together.

As I think about Garry's Mod under these circumstances, it's easy to piece together that I view this game in the same light. I revere it for what it was to me at the time; it was an inspirational safe haven where the stupidest shit you could do wasn't discouraged. You could get into fights, but you could also stage plays with ragdolls. You could mess around with noclip, mess around with props, bring life to what was a template.

My father is the person who introduced me to the Half-Life series when I was younger. Like Myst, they were one of the games he played in front of us. We made jokes as he played it and watched him in the same way we'd watch digital celebrities do the same thing in the years to come. But Garry's Mod is the reason I've installed and uninstalled Half-Life 2 a dozen times. It's why I'm eager to admit that I will finish it one day, even if today isn't that day. Maybe if you move past the template, past your memories of drawing on a whiteboard, you'll remember what you were supposed to learn all along.

I like to write these things with the intent of them having a purpose. But I have to admit that I have nothing to say here; no grand statement, no searing critique, just my memories and the heartburn of using them to piece together my present. I'm tempted to say that my current lack of enthusiasm for Garry's Mod makes it ineligible for this list, but it got this much out of me, so it can't be in vain.
Postal 2 is a bizarre case of a game being so dated that it's genuinely endearing. It isn't dated in the sense that the Sega CD and its catalog of mid-90s FMV games are, but it holds the same punkish attitude and pumps it up to 11. It's of the time in the sense that this was an attack on the same politicians who condemned the original game and Grand Theft Auto, and then some.

But what makes Postal 2 so much fun to go back to isn't its outrageous attitude but its content. A big issue that many older Open World games have is that they have interesting worlds with some really fun emergent gameplay, but the gameplay doesn't hold the test of time. If you go into Vice City expecting there to be a functional camera, you'll be disappointed to find that all the right stick does is force you into a first-person mode where you can't move around. But Postal 2 has an ace up its sleeve that the earlier GTA games don't: it's not trying to be ambitious. There's a world you can explore, but the developers don't hide that it's small. Using vehicles is out of the question, and it's a First Person Shooter, so it doesn't need to worry about pesky things such as camera controls. The result of that, and nearly two decades of patches and updates, is that it's a breeze to go back to nowadays.

It's clearly not a perfect game, and the edge factor will automatically neuter its appeal to those looking for something decidedly less 2003. But my enjoyment of Postal 2 far outweighs the sheer number of times it's made me groan.
I have never played Shadow President seriously, but I still have a lot of fun every time I play it. Call it simplistic, archaic, or whathaveyounot. It's really funny to cause as much chaos as possible within a short timeframe. Shadow President would be higher on the list if this were at all intentional, but I still respect it as is.
It's really, really hard to write about a game that I like when it actively reminds me of my personal life in ways that hurt. It hurts that nobody seems to take that into consideration, and that bullshit apologia tends to be in full force when I call it into question. Town of Salem easily has one of the most excruciatingly pretentious communities I've ever come across, and that's if it's not also vitriolic, misanthropic, and outright ableist. When the people in Town of Salem suck, they leave nothing but bitter resentment behind.
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But when they're fun, easy-going, and a blast to hang out with, they're damn near some of the coolest people around! The reason that Town of Salem is on this list at all is that I can't ignore some of the wild fun I've had with this game in the past. At its very best, Town of Salem is the only party game I've ever played that works with strangers. It's funny, absurd, intense, and insane. As fun as it is to play with ingenuity in-tact, it's also just a blast to do plays so stupid that you can't help but laugh hysterically at the screen when they work.
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I fucking hate this game, but I also fucking love it, too.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Ultrakill. I've chosen to go with this as the poster for this section due to its previous presence on this list, but also because out of all the games I'm about to list, it gets the closest to being on the list.

Game Dev Studio. An absolutely fantastic gem of a tycoon game that's sadly not gotten the recognition it deserves. It's impossible to mod now, and I've spent way more time cheating in it than actually playing it. That doesn't disqualify it from this list, but I prefer its cousin, Intravenous, a hell of a lot more.

Max Payne 3. An ultra-violent dive into grit and grime whose clear-cut cinematic influences combine potently and compellingly with its stylistic touches, Max Payne 3 is a blast from start to finish. It's more honest about its linear structure than most of Rockstar's other output, which is great! ...but it does mean that this has significantly less replayability than those games, which is something that I tend to value a lot. Love it, and I still think it's a more consistently entertaining game than GTA V, but V just barely inches it off this list.

Half-Life 2. I've never beaten it. Keep trying, though. About the greatest memory I have tied to it was when I was watching my dad play it when I was a kid, and I sang the phrase "the pile of dead guys" enthusiastically as he cheesed the game and killed a ton of enemies in one specific spot.

Dishonored. Got really close to being on this list, but I think its sequel has better gameplay.

Rocketbirds 2. One of the most underrated games of all time. In an earlier edit, I called it a guilty pleasure. That's a lie. RB2 is just a straight-up pleasure. It's way better than the first game and has a fantastic Co-Op mode. HOWEVER, I will always think a little less of it because I was raised on RB1. No shame, I'm just biased.

Far Cry 3. I know this game is great, and had I not replayed it recently and done everything but the collectibles, it would have been on this list. It's fun in short bursts, the developers just didn't know when the call it quits and hit the copy-paste button a little too much. Still better than 5, though.

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Had I written this list five or four years ago, this would have been in my top ten, easily. But I've never been able to beat it due to bugs and confusing design. Outside of that, a lot of the fetch and follow quests do not hold up nearly as well as the community seems to think they do, and it's a shame because it makes the wonderful atmosphere feel wasted on lackluster material.

Hotline Miami 2. I get that this is a great game that, in many ways, outdoes its predecessor. But I prefer the first game.

Spelunky 2. One hit kill deathmatch with whips that do the Lord's work, and throwable mounts that cause chaos as soon as the round starts is amazing. Damn near some of the most fun I've had with a multiplayer game recently. However, I'm not really that big on roguelikes, and I've barely put any time into its singleplayer campaign.

The New Hitman Trilogy. I know these games are better than Blood Money; I just haven't gotten into them yet.

Skyrim. This is a tricky one for me because on hand, whenever I pick up Skyrim, I have a ton of fun with it. But on the other hand, it becomes boorish pretty quickly due to a narrative that's drier than an asexual's ideal wet dream, and I just don't jive with that. Maybe one day, but not today.

Tabletop Simulator. This game can be tons of fun with the right game chosen and the right people present. Sadly, the last time I tried to get into a group that played it, it was filled with people that I didn't agree with politically, and I respectfully left out of no obligation other than to keep myself happy. Again, maybe one day. But not today.

Audiosurf 2. I love listening to music, and playing my songs in Audiosurf 2 can be loads of fun. But the community kind of died recently; YouTube implementation always sucked and compared to Beat Hazard 2, it's starting to feel dated.

Sub Rosa. Like Tabletop Simulator, really fun with the right people. But good fucking luck with that.

Turbo Overkill. In some ways, this outdoes Ultrakill. But my fingers hurt whenever I'm done with a session of it. Really, really good, but super exhausting.

Alpha Protocol. Originally on this list, but I've since reevaluated that and realized it was more a case of recency bias. It's a good game that's exceptionally flawed, and I still love it. But if I'm limited to only 30 games, there are better options.

Mafia II. Also previously on this list. Removed for roughly the same reason that Max Payne 3 didn't make the cut, although I have to admit that I have slightly less reverence for this than I do for that game. I still respect Mafia II, though! It still holds up pretty well and it's a fun game. But it's not best-of-all-time worthy. To be honest, both this and Saints Row 3 were added to pad out the list because I didn't know what else to add.

1 Comment


27 days ago

I have no real desire to keep updating this list, so it is ARCHIVED. Meaning, this may no longer represent my current taste in games.

Because god knows, I know my taste is pretty bad right now lol


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