Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
I’ve been playing since the NES and despite being from a low income family I had the luck of being able to play and own many consoles over the 3 decades of my life, plus some pc.
If you ask me right now? Resident Evil 4 (2005).
A before and after in gaming, to this day still extremely fun to play even for casuals but 20 years ago it was THE masterpiece. And everyone took notice of it, everyone played it, even players that didn’t cared about resident evil. The gameplay was so good that it got photocopied by everyone right after in the action genre.
Arguably the last big innovator in videogames minus Minecraft and… PUBG (Fortnite did it better I know).
Try to NOT pick your favourite game, that’s a different thing.
ET for Atari, classic.
Dark Souls remastered taught me how to look at life differently. I now accept failure as part of the process of growing, not something that should be avoided at all costs.
Also it taught me how to parry like a G.
earthbound. my first RPG that I understood, plus SNES is GOAT.
You understood Earthbound? You understood the game that expects you to wait for like five minutes outside a waterfall without doing anything to progress?
I mean, the game is great, no lie, but understandable is not the first thing that comes to mind.
I understood the enemies actually there, not the invisible random ones from games like dragon quest. I had the guide book that came with the game :)
Earthbound was great!
Mass Effect 2
Masterpiece and my actual favourite game.
Never understood people’s obsession with RE4. It completely changed the series from survival horror to action shooter, as if we didn’t have enough of those already. One zombie used to be terrifying. Now there’s hundreds coming at you at once and they go down easily. They removed most of the puzzles too and dumbed down the ones they left. Somebody please tell me why everyone loves this game!?
Give me the first two Resident Evils over the 4th one any day. Hell, I rather play RE3 than RE4.
What’s more relevant to the world? What felt like an evolution? I love almost every RE but 4 did history for the entire gaming universe, not just horror.
Original x-com was great you had lots of research to do, bases to set up with defenses, manufacturing, storage, radars etc. Could make money from both loot and manufacturing your own products.
Then there was intercepting UFOs with your fighters followed by the actual missions were you could use all your researched gear, get loot, capture Aliens to interrogate for more research and level up your soldiers.
I still play the openxcom version now and again with various mods but yeah as a kid I used to play the original on the original PlayStation with its mouse and it’s without a doubt the game I’ve probably spent more time on than any other.
Wasn’t a huge fan of the remade ones to me the original is the best one.
Flashback A plateform game with a nice story telling. Graphics and music was unbelievable
Obligatory Dark Souls nomination. It is an almost perfect depiction of the hero’s journey with a captivating world filled with little moments of environmental story telling.
Runner up would be Metroid Prime 1 which similarly creates a very believable world you inhabit while playing.
Tetris
Just about everyone has either played or heard of it. It is easy enough for young and old people alike to pick up. But it can get so challenging that even nowadays new records are broken regularly.
It’s simple. It’s fun. And will remain so for all eternity.
And the poor bastard that created it never made any money off it, IIRC
Kind of. Because the game was technically owned by the USSR he was not eligible to receive any royalties until his prior contracts expired. He has received royalties on it starting around 1996.
“Life is just loke tetris, it just gets harder until you die” Or something, can’t remember where i heard that.
Apparently some kid managed to “beat” it though so maybe it’s wrong now.
Yep! 13yo played it and reached the kill screen, absolutely insane accomplishment.
Your failures pile up, your achievements disappear.
This is such an absurd question. I mean, it’s weird in movies and books, weirder in music… but games?
I mean, Tetris. It’s Tetris, isn’t it?
But then you’re out there going “so is Tetris better than Baldur’s Gate III”, which is a nonsensical sentence.
That’s a good question. Tetris has more levels but then again BG3 has better character customisation.
Weirdly, better sex scenes in Tetris.
When you rotate the T like one just right. 🥵 💦💦💦
Unironically true
I wanted to post a DOS game here I remembered called Sextris where the pieces were cartoony naked men and women in positions representing the shapes of the tetris pieces. But all I could find when I searched were versions of the regular game where nudie photos were slowly revealed as you cleared lines.
Hah. I remember Sextris. The great thing about it is that it was entirely unsexy, mostly just for laughs and actually not a bad version to play, for the standards of the time.
It’s kind of like asking for the best video.
It wouldn’t make sense to compare TV shows, movies, Youtube videos, TikToks, sporting events, commercials, journalistic footage, etc. all as a single category.
Idk. So do you ask for “best RPG” or something like that instead? Seems overly specific now.
I feel like this is just a question to learn more about other people. I don’t care if someone’s favourite is tetris when mine is sonic. I just wanna be reminded of fun games and hear a passionate argument as to why they think it should be top of my list :)
Yeah no, it’s a totally fair question and I get the spirit of it, but it’s still interesting to reflect on the way that video games have a pretty strange concept of genre or “format” vs. other media like video or print.
Maybe it’s cuz games are so heavily influenced by their associated hardware.
I mean, I guess everything is, right? Early printing press is mostly pamphlets not books (aside from the bible), and you don’t get TV shows without TVs.
Yeah it’s a good point. Wonder if we’ll ever see a tik tok video go up against a short film at the oscars ;)
Yeah, for sure. The real answer is the question is superfluous. There is no number one. I’d say you can’t even put together a top 10. It’s just not a thing you need to do or can do.
Is it? Minecraft is the most sold game, which to be fair Tetris held for a very long time.
You’re kinda making my point, that’s another absurd choice to have to make.
But no, it’s Tetris.
Well, I think there are multiple potential candidates depending on how you define greatness. I think these few are certainly the most influential:
- Super Mario Bros. Possibly the system it ran on was more important, but this game was a system seller for the system that single-handedly saved not only the entire video game industry, but probably the very concept of video games at a time when it was looking like it’d just be another fad that faded away right along with bellbottoms and pet rocks, with what was left of it remaining caged in Japan. Mario 1 was most people’s first platformer, I also have to think that the first damn goomba in 1-1 probably holds the crown for the highest kill count of any entity in the universe.
- Tetris. Infinitely playable and probably infinitely played, and you can get it to run on damn near everything. Everyone knows Tetris, even people who haven’t played it or any other video game.
- Doom. Just, Doom. Yes, Quake was more advanced. Yes, Quake was technically the actual technological forefather to the polygonal 3D games we play today, and many game engines still include tiny bits of Quake’s original code. But there would be no Quake without Doom. It certainly wasn’t the first FPS, but it’s the game that cemented the FPS formula for good and firmly established the x86 PC as not only a viable gaming platform, but the king of gaming platforms from that moment until this very day. Ever since Doom, outside of specialized arcade hardware the PC has been the powerhouse platform for the biggest, most technologically demanding games. After Doom game out everyone wanted their own “Doom clone” on their platform just to show that they weren’t just another me-too, also-ran.
- Street Fighter 2. The genre defining 1 on 1 fighting game template. Enough said.
- Chrono Trigger. This game showed everyone not what a console RPG was up until that point, but what a console RPG could be if you put actual effort and creativity into it and didn’t just crank out another grindy and soulless, swords-and-sorcery-go-kill-the-dragon yawn fest just to keep your franchise going. Its contemporary Final Fantasy games almost got there (especially 6), but Chrono went the full mile. The feats Chrono Trigger pulled off on the humble SNES as well as many of the innovations it brought forward were far ahead of its time and it took literal decades for the genre to catch up to it – including quite a few entries from its own studio.
- Final Fantasy 7. This game is objectively crap even compared to many of its peers. But there is no doubt that it was the next stepping stone from Chrono Trigger that finally firmly launched the console RPG into mainstream territory, made the genre as a whole truly successful, and was an awful lot of people’s first RPG. It probably made a significant and permanent contribution to the formation of weaboo culture, as well.
- Half Life 2. No, not the first Half Life. Not Opposing Force and not Blue Shift, either. There was never before any hype and anticipation for a video game like there was for Half Life 2. In the months leading up to its launch it was all anyone talked about. Not Doom 3, not the new Warcraft. Half Life 2. And of course with Half Life 2 came Steam, and we all know how that turned out. Sure, Steam itself started life as a patch delivery and server browsing platform for Counterstrike, but up until Half Life 2 appeared in it, nobody cared. The impact Half Life 2 had on everything is absolutely undeniable, and that doesn’t just include the horde of games that came after it attempting to imitate its unbroken linear first person narrative and setpiece based game design as a cash grab, not to mention that phase in first person shooters where seemingly everything suddenly had to have physics puzzles in it…
Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
This post right here, officer.
If we absolutely have to pick just one, I think Doom is probably the most important of the bunch.
There is no doom without Wolfenstein…
And there is no Wolfenstein 3D without Catacomb Abyss.
Most games iterated on a previous entry. But without the stepping stone of Doom, it is unlikely that Wolfenstein alone would have catapulted the FPS genre as far as it’s gone nearly as quickly.
It’s funny how the games that shaped our personal childhood shaped that belief… Holy shit the first catacomb game was a shitty gauntlet game. Cool history buddy down the rabbit hole.
I’ll still play doom from time to time - so it’s not history for me (similar status to pacman , tetris a few other old games)
I haven’t played cat abyss or wolfenstein since, well, since about 1993.
I dont play quake or duke nukem3d either.
What you are telling me is you still talk to you mom from time to time but you haven’t seen you grandma since 93 and never talk to you aunt. I haven’t talked to you mom since that night… Oh shit how old are you again?
John Carmack’s lighting and raytracing code is what catapulted the FPS genre forward; without Doom/id there is no Quake engine and with no Quake engine (or the iterations thereof) you’re missing the core component of 90% of shooters for the next decade.
Someone else could have built it eventually, but Carmack just laying down this crisp and functional framework and licensing it out to everyone to use in their own games was a huge step in comparison to what would have otherwise been a hundred isolated game devs trying to implement good lighting engines on their own.
Final Fantasy VII was my first RPG. It had a good (but sometimes difficult to follow) story, lots of quirky characters, Full Motion Video sequences, and a musical score that nears perfection. Hearing those songs today doesn’t just remind me of the game, it brings me back to all the emotional moments in the story where I felt like I was actually there, feeling what those characters felt and being there fighting along beside them.
A lot of how I feel about that game may be related to the fact that I was a teenager when I experienced it, but the lasting impression of that experience is why I think it is one of the greatest games of all time.
Copy this entire comment but replace “Final Fantasy VII” with “Morrowind” and you have my story.
I never played any Final Fantasy game until I was an adult and a couple years ago I picked up FFVII to finally play it, and three extended breaks and one full restart later and I’m barely halfway through the main story by my rough estimate the last time I played it - which was probably about a year ago. I just can’t get hooked into it for some reason that I couldn’t tell you. I played and enjoyed FFX (twice!) and I like the newer ones, but new final fantasy is essentially Devil May Cry now so I don’t really count those as the same. But I think what it is is I’ve just been spoiled by newer games and old school FFVII is just too crunchy for me now. Which is weird to say because see above about Morrowind, which I do still play up to the modern day, but it again makes sense because I grew up playing that one.
As someone who knows and loves the original, do you have opinions on the remake? I played a brief bit of it once at a friend’s place and I liked it, it doesn’t seem very turn based anymore but I like that I suppose. It felt good to play. I didn’t have a reference for it story wise to the original at the time, I hadn’t played it yet. I hear it doesn’t contain the whole story.
7 always felt dated and ugly for me, even back then, 8 was the real deal.
As someone who liked FF7 a lot as a kid,and a bunch of other FF games, I really like remake.
I think 1 thing you have to know going in, is it isn’t FF7 just in a new engine with updated combat, and I think remake is a bit of a bad name for it.
Reimagining might be better.
You are correct that it isn’t the whole game, but it takes Midgard and makes a handful of setup hours from the first game, a good 40 hours of compelling story and world building(with some side stuff as well). It is very clearly a different story with changes that are interesting, but could very easily go off the rails if it isn’t properly managed.
It also has some incredible improvements to certain characters and even to areas of Midgard expanding on what was a very small part of the original games.
Combat is very good at mixing turn based actions(skills and spells and items), with action based combos. Dodging is a bit of a bait and is more positioning because you don’t get i-frames to actually dodge, blocking is important but doesn’t feel great(I heard it is improved in rebirth). The ability to switch characters and how unique they all feel is really enjoyable to me as well.
I am eagerly looking forward to Rebirth on PC cause I ain’t buying a PS5.
Remake in my opinion is significantly better than 16 which I think is pretty mid, and I would recommend it as long as you don’t expect a 1 to 1 of the original.
FFVII Remake and Rebirth I think are really good games overall. The [nearly] completely different combat system from the original is fresh and engaging.
The story starts to deviate from the original near the end of Remake, and continues into Rebirth. I also think this is a welcome change (as long as it doesn’t stray too far from the original). But for everyone who never made it through the original, I imagine it can feel slow, confusing, and lacking, so I would actually encourage those players (unless you really hate spoilers) to watch a story synopsis youtube video of the original Final Fantasy VII. It will help.
Oh, and for the most part the new games still nail the music. Love love love it.
Steam came out a while before hl2, but agree with everything else you said
Brilliant rundown. No notes. 👏
Portal
My pick was portal 2. Only game that made me cry when I beat it.
Man the last boss fight it’s just chef kiss
The Opera bit man…
I keep meaning to finish the sequel…
YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE SEQUEL?!?!
No but seriously Portal 2 might be the only game to beat out Portal as the best story/puzzle game ever made.
It got to be Goat Simulator for sure:
- Top notch graphics.
- Full of features, even some not intended by the developers.
- You can hurt and get hurt, so it’s BDSM-friendly.
- Open sandbox.
- It’s more recognisable than Tetris. Tetris is easy to confuse with some Tetris knock-off, Goat Simulator is instantly “yup, this is Goat Simulator”.
- It’s deeper in lore and philosophy than Chrono Trigger.
- Zelda’s worldbuilding pales in comparison with Goat Simulator’s.
- Requires more strategy than Diablo and FFA combined.
- You play it as a goat dammit. Everything else is just fluff.
Note
This is a joke answer. Don’t take it seriously.
For me it’s between this masterpiece and Untitled Goose Game.
The unofficial sequel to Untitled Goose Game is Little Kitty, Big City.
Despite this being a joke, I gotta try it now.
I was looking through my friends list in Steam. I found out I have a family member with 2700+ hours in Goat Simulator. I don’t even know how to begin to ask about this.
Outer Wilds. Any explanation that I give would be massive spoilers, but it captures a genre, aesthetic, and theme that, in my experience, has been virtually unused by any other game before and still remains extremely underutilized
I came to say Outer Wilds as well. Honestly changed my perspective on what a video game can be and I can’t find any other game that gives me that same feeling. The only bad thing about Outer Wilds is you can only really experience it once
I’m four hours in and just don’t get it
That’s fine. 4 hours isn’t enough to really get into the meat of the game yet. If you feel like you’re kinda stumbling around a bit without quite knowing what the goal of the game is, that’s normal. The game is specifically designed to not give you any objectives, and a big part of making the game enjoyable is to not try to judge the game by regular game design conventions. There are no win conditions, no lose conditions, no objectives, and the game becomes much more enjoyable if you just play the game in the way that you think makes the most sense. You’ll just need to have a bit of faith that there is actually an end, you just never get told how to get to the end.
If you’re struggling with not crashing, then that’s a different issue altogether, and honestly my advice is to just use autopilot. Make sure to disable autopilot if you start to see that autopilot is going to crash you into the sun.
I get it might not be for everyone. Until the main thing happened the first time I wasn’t sold either, but personally, the game does an amazing job at making me naturally and fervently curious about what the heck was going on
You’re basically dropped into a huge set of mysteries.
You get to explore, at your leisure, anything you want.
There’s places and dialog and written records that contain clues and references to different threads of those interconnected mysteries.
As you play, read, explore you uncover more and more and what happened, is happening, and will happen start to make sense and you build a picture in your mind of what’s going on.
There’s no unlocks or progress except for these moments of discovery. And as you learn and discover more you can get access to new places to dig into the mystery because you have acquired the knowledge that lets you do it.
What part don’t you get? If you can be more specific, people might be able to help you out with some largely spoiler-free hints.
For example, do you not get ‘what the goal is’ (this is a legitimate concern, and someone might be able to give you a direction to pursue for example)
Don’t feel bad if you don’t click with it. I love puzzle oriented games and while this was the most unique experience ever in a game (and I suggest all people try it), it was really a mental challenge getting through this game. I actually abandoned the DLC, because I honestly reached my limit. You have to really love repetition.
I saw the question, came to post this only to see yours.
It truly is a unique experience. I jokingly say to my family that if I ever have some kind of temporary amnesia prompt me to play that.
I also occasionally watch let’s plays of streamers to vicariously experience some of those moments of realization as the story unfolds.
Seriously play it if you haven’t and avoid streams, videos, etc like the plague. The game progression is 100% knowledge based. So spoilers really do take away part of the experience.
Thanks! I have it but haven’t played it yet. This may be what finally gets me out of my video game rut!
One of those games I’ll never understand the hype, I despise Fortnite but I get it. But this, looks just meh
I got the game because of a video review that struck me with how little it gave away. Because it bent over backwards to avoid spoiling it.
I played it for 5 minutes and thought, standard tutorial level design and the models could use some work.
10 minutes after that I was on my way with a code and just headed to explore. A few minutes later something crazy happened, and I was struck thinking “what just happened”
A few hours later I was pulling on a thread of exploration when I saw some celestial event that reminded me about another thread of another mystery and made me go “ohhhh, so I need to go here and check this out at a certain point in the orbit”
One crazy weekend was over and I had felt wonder, sadness, frustration, melancholy and hope in such amazingly timed waves of intrigue and discovery that I wish I could do it again.
It may not be to everyone’s taste and I get looking at the initial style and thinking there’s cut corners but there aren’t.
I will spoil one technical detail. The entire solar system is emulated in real time. Things and events are inter connected in ways that I’m personally shocked they ever got the game to run on the Nintendo Switch. It’s a technical masterpiece even if it doesn’t look it at first glance.
Not Outer Worlds, which is a shooter, Outer Wilds is a story based… Um… I feel like anything more than that is a spoiler
Easy best game I’ve ever played.
I’m talking about that one
Looks? So you’ve never played it? Then you can’t comment. Only way to actually get it is to play it or at least watch someone play it blindly.
Not really
Yes, really. There’s an exception to literally every single rule. And this game was an exception to many people’s rules. Could be yours too. You won’t know until you experience it. You can pretend you know what it is all you want meanwhile, but that’s all it is, pretending.
Again, not really. You don’t have to agree with me but don’t try to tell me what to feel or rate.
Again, yes really. I’m sorry you’re offended, but that’s just how some things are. When you don’t understand something, it’s not because you’re stupid, it’s because you haven’t tried to understand it. And you’ve literally admitted to not trying to understand outer wilds.
And that’s that. It’s fine, you don’t have to. But every thing you think you know or feel about it is made up, since you’ve never actually experienced it. Imagine going on Google maps and rating some place you’ve never been to. Or those people that give ratings to books and movies that aren’t out yet. That’s you in this situation. And well… now THAT is something I’ll never understand.
According to YOU. Not me
Yep. By far the best game ever made. It’s not even close. It’s truly an experience. I wish I could play it again. I’ve watched so many streams of people playing it for the first time just trying to recapture some of the magic for myself.
I’ve heard so many friends say this. And I have the game but it’s like I forget it’s there and so I’ve never played it. I need to fucking play it…thanks for not spoiling anything and reminding me :)
Yeah not a big gamer, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played so far. Loved Myst and Riven when I was younger, and it scratches that itch. I think I only played like 10-15 hours before I got too busy to play anything. I should really get back on it to see it through
Grand Theft Auto 3.
You had to be there to see how absolutely groundbreaking that was at the time. Gaming had suddenly grown up.
It was like all the obvious limits in other games all just got pulled away at once. Explore a full city in 3D, drive around, shoot people, steal a tank.
And the sequel only improved on it, but I’ve honestly never been so awed by a game before or since. It’s like they were the first dev to finally figure out what the PS2 hardware was for. Everything before just felt like a slightly nicer version of what had come before. This was new.
I didn’t even look in this direction but I think you’re right
