This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here: Huge success.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction

I normally wouldn’t ever include a recent release on any “top x” list be it a game, book, music or film but Portal has to be an exception. It is absolutely fantastic. I’ve said so before and I’m saying it again. I’m in good company:

Yahtzee liked it
Rock Paper Shotgun liked it
Penny Arcade liked it

But why? Why was it so good? There’s a simple answer:

The writing.

MASSIVE SPOILERS ENSUE (INCLUDING ENDING):
When Portal was released, some people experienced a bug which meant they didn’t get any sound. These people couldn’t understand why everyone else was raving about the game. To them it was a puzzle game with an interesting mechanic but it wasn’t the be all and end all of gameplay. Invariably, after getting the sound sorted out, the fishscales fell from their eyes and they raised their hands to the sky and worshipped at the temple of Valve.

If at first you don’t succeed, you fail. And the test will be terminated.’

GLaDOS is the reason that this game is so great. GLaDOS is the HAL9000 for the year that was 2007. Her sing-song voice guides you through the levels of the game, encouraging you gently, informing you about your surroundings before slowly declining into deranged murderousness (as all high-tech AI systems are, apparently, wont to do). The reason you, as a gamer, persist through the game is not to see if you can defeat the next level but to hear more lines of this increasingly unhinged character.

That’s not to say that it’s a bad game - anything but. It’s just that the sheer ingenuity of the game mechanics and puzzles are definitely second place behind the world that you find yourself in. The concept of the Weighted Companion Cube, for example, is in-fucking-spired. It’s a regular cube (used to hold triggers down, stand on etc.) but it has little pink hearts decorating it. But unlike the other cubes, when you pick it up, GLaDOS tells you to take care of it. So you do, up until the end of the level when you’re required to drop it into a furnace - an act which lets exit the level and prompts GLaDOS to say “You euthanised your faithful companion cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations.” Further on in the game, you can find hidden sections which contain pictures and graffiti regarding the WCC. It’s absolutely irrelevant to the game but it adds so much depth and character to the world.

Weeee are pleased that you made it through the final challenge where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are very very happy for your success. We are throwing a party in honour of your tremendous success.

After finally escaping an incineration of your very own, provided generously by GLaDOS, you make your way through the bowels of the testing center and come face to optical input device with the AI herself. I have played this particular section through several times for no other to listen to GLaDOS as she rants on at you. The absurdist humour is so black and so sharp that it makes the whole sequence a pleasure. I’d like to quote it for you all but that would be silly. Instead, here’s a video of the entire final “battle” including the ending credit sequence complete with that song.¹ (Transcription of all GLaDOS quotes here)

Portal is great. It’s more than a game, it’s an interactive experience that’s better than some films. If I could ever write anything which is even half as funny, imaginative or as sharp as Portal, I will not only feel that I’ve achieved something in my life but also that I deserve an extra slice of cake.

Goodbye.

Didn’t we have some fun though? Remember when the platform was sliding into the fire pit and I said ‘Goodbye’ and you were like “NO WAY!” and then I was all “We pretended we were going to murder you”? That was great!

¹Do I need to say that if you haven’t played Portal but intend to that you shouldn’t watch this? If I do, you’re probably not very clever and shouldn’t be here. There’s only room for one not very clever person here and that isn’t you!

I don’t have any more to add to this than I already said a short while ago so I won’t try. I’m including this game partly as the token console entry but also because the games are sheer, unadulterated fun. The sequel gets in because it’s got more stuff in it like drivable vehicles, disguises and it’s based on the original trilogy. Also, you get to rip Stormtroopers arms off if you play as Chewbacca. Or slap them in the face if you’re Leia. However, the best option is to get the collectors version of both games in one package.

The original trailer can be seen after the cut:
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I’ve already written about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas this year so I’m not going to harp on about it in depth. It had to make this list - or at least the series did and of the three games I’ve played, San Andreas makes it in account of it’s expansive game area, the extra customisation elements and, well, just the feel of it.

A friend introduced me to GTA:III one night when I was very, very drunk. He showed me how freeform it was and how you could mug people or carjack them on a whim and I was blown away. Of course, I was more blown away but little touches such as your character flipping the bird to drivers who honked their horn at him. What really got my attention, however, was the whole shaggina hooker in your car thing. I’d never seen that in a game before - I had to play this game. Vice City expanded the game by letting you own buildings, fly helicopters and introducing a cast that would put most low budget films to shame.

San Andreas was even bigger than Vice City, had more subgames, more character customisation and a slightly different feel despite identical gameplay and that’s why it’s on this list. It’s another game that I’ve still yet to finish but I’ve probably spent more time playing it than some of the other games in this list and I love it. That’s all I need to say.

This entry should be no surprise to anyone who’s worked out a pattern in my gaming habits or to anyone who knows anything at all about games. Although the mechanics of the game weren’t fundamentally different to it’s predecessors, Half-life stood head and shoulders above the competition because of the way it was designed and its heavy reliance on narrative driven gameplay. This was obvious from the moment you started the game with the legendary tramride sequence through the top secret Black Mesa research facility. The first 20 minutes or so of the game was spent setting up the arena that the game took place in. It was the calm before the storm. Then, during a highly dangerous experiment, all hell breaks loose and the walls came crashing down and everything that you had already seen had been changed.

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Deus Ex is a phenomenal game. I always thought that there was only me and a few other people who had played it and even now, seven years later, I’m stunned by the people who still reckon that it’s one of the best games ever. DX is a first person shooter but, like System Shocks 1 and 2 before it, features a heavy RPG element. But it makes even more of it than either of those two games do. It also has a fantastic story and sets up a rich, vibrant and heavily populated world.

That world is actually Earth in the year 2052. Traditionally cyberpunk in it’s outlook, the world has gone to shit - a new plague known as the Gray Death is ravaging the population but there is no cure, only a synthetic vaccine, known as Ambrosia, that’s in short supply. Terrorism is on the increase around the world and martial law has been declared in almost all major cities. You play J.C. Denton, a “nano-augmented” UNATCO (United Nations Anti-Terrorist COalition) agent - a super soldier with enhanced reflexes, strength and perception. (Yes, that’s right - they didn’t just have the ability to rebuild this man, they made it so he could be upgraded too).
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In the comments about Dan’s Top 20 game list, Matt said “The best Star Wars game level ever is was the Battle Of Endor in [Rogue Squadron 2: Rebel Leader].” He was partly correct: he got the right level but the wrong game.

X-Wing Alliance was the final part (to date) of the X-Wing series of games - the original 1993 game X-Wing being the game that incentivised me to buy a PC (and then learn how to use DOS to manage memory which in turn led me to getting a temporary job with a company which in turn led me to becoming a software developer. That fucking game has a lot to fucking answer for!) X-Wing wasn’t just a shooter like the Star Wars arcade game was previously or that Rogue Squadron and it’s spawn that followed would subsequently be, it was a space combat sim that stuck you in the cockpit of an X-Wing Fighter flying against the forces of the Empire. 1994 saw the release of TIE Fighter, the obvious successor to X-Wing which stuck you in the cockpit of, unsurprisingly, a TIE Fighter flying against the inferior pilots of the Rebel scum. TIE Fighter makes it into many top games lists and is a classic in it’s own right. After the slight misfire of the multiplayer game, X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter, X-Wing Alliance was released in 1999. But enough of the history! Let’s get on with me telling you how good this game is.
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By rights I probably shouldn’t include System Shock 2 in this list because I’m not even half way through it. Despite being released in ‘99, it bypassed me totally. What can I say? 1999 was a good year in gaming and I had a lot of other stuff to get through. Anyway, the world was going to end and playing this game didn’t quite make the Top 20 list of things I need to do before I die. I’ve had it for a while now but I’ve never been able to get it to run properly under Windows XP until this year, with a last concerted effort, I did so.

Since then I’ve spent most of my time wondering why I didn’t do this a long time ago. What prompted me to get it installed was the release of Bioshock which is designed by many members of the same team that developed Shock 2 and which has been universally described as a “spiritual successor” to the game in so far as it doesn’t take place in the same universe but has similar game mechanics and elements. I haven’t played Bioshock as my PC won’t handle it but from watching some of the movies of it, it’s stunning and is on my wishlist for when I get a bigger, better, faster and harder rig. But enough about something that isn’t System Shock 2 and more about why this game has made it onto the list.
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(Updated with an afterthought below)

Back to the realms of the CRPG now. In 1998, Bioware released Baldur’s Gate - a game based on the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset and built using the Infinity engine. The Infinity engine would be subsequently used in severeal further D&D games including Baldur’s Gate 2 and the Icewind Dale series of games but first there was Planescape: Torment.

Torment starts out in the fictional city of Sigil, itself part of the D&D Planescape setting, and leads the character through several planes of existence (including a lesser level of hell and a dimension inhabited by walking cubes). Although it’s related to Dungeons and Dragons, the game world bears little to no relation to the usual Tolkien-esque fantasy world of elves and dwarves, goblins and trolls. As Wikipedia describes it, the Planescape setting “crossed Victorian era trappings with a pseudo-steampunk design and attitude.”

The story revolves around the player character known only as the Nameless one. You wake up in a mortuary with an amnesia in and companion called Morte who happens to be a floating skull. He tells you what happened - chiefly that you’ve died and that you’ve come back to life and that this is not the first time. The goal of the game is to regain your memory and uncover the mystery of this repetitive reincarnation.
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For a Star Wars fan(atic) there’s been a suprising dearth of SW games on this list so far. That’s about to change and we start with Jedi Knight. Or, to give it it’s full title, Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Dark Forces 2.

While id were paving the way with titles like Doom and Quake, Lucasarts were hot on their heels with their own FPS titles set in the expanded Star Wars universe. The first of these was the 1995 game Dark Forces. While it followed Doom, the graphics engine that it used (called, obviously, the JEDI engine) was actually more advanced than that used by id Software. Unlike Doom, levels in Dark Forces could be constructed with rooms above rooms, allowing for multi-storey buildings and so on. (One of the best levels in the game - Level 6: Imperial Detention Facility - used this to excellent effect with one of the best FPS puzzles ever.)
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Quakeworld was the revamped multiplayer aspect of id Software’s landmark 3D first person shooter game, Quake. I want to make the distinction between the multiplayer and the single player parts of the game beause, to be brutally honest, I absolutely loathed the single player portion of Quake. I appreciated the technical achievement and the historical importance of the game (in terms of PC gaming) but as a game, I just did not like it at all. I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the graphics, I hated the colour palette they used and I was bored by the fact there was limited story or involvement. Okay, the word loathe is a bit a harsh - it would be remiss of me not to mention the one thing that it had in it’s favour that I really liked: a soundtrack created by avid gamer and Mr Nine Inch Nails himself, Trent Reznor. But when it came to multiplayer Quake deathmatch, it was a totally different experience.
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