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This month, we’re once again letting an editor take the floor to discuss his or her personal top 10 games of all time. This time, this impossible task fell on Marvin’s plate, who has now lost half of his hair and hasn’t been under as much stress in all his years on this planet.
A top 10 games ever? Let’s do it, dude! Give me a morning, and I’ll get into a few thousand words about why these ten games are the absolute top for me. Wait, did I say ‘absolute top’? Why then does it take three days before I even agree to a shortlist, and more days of worrying and shifting before finally a top 10 is created? Well, it turns out to be ridiculously difficult to distil my gamer career – short as it may be – to a top 10. Where does a masterpiece begin and nostalgia end? Where am I objective, where is my opinion influenced by the things I have already forgotten, where are the games that I have never even touched ?! Well, such a top 10 is extremely personal, and in a week’s time I probably won’t agree with this entire list anymore.
Nostalgia and feeling are the two most important factors, but I remain human and that’s how our brains work. What disappoints me the most is how much pain it hurts to not be able to include the games that I’ve always seen as the absolute top in my top 10. Narrative masterpieces like The Last of Us, new titles like Super Mario Odyssey (because that game does things to me), leading classics like Max Payne, time-consuming MMORPGs like ROSE Online (you don’t know what it is, I spent years of my life on it) … There are so many titles I want to put in the spotlight, but where there is no room for that this list already causes me about three trauma. I’m sorry games, but this is – at least today – what my top 10 favorites look like:
10. World of Warcraft (Wrath of the Lich King)
We kick off with the game that I, like so many others in this editorial team, lost most hours of my gamer career on. For that reason alone, World of Warcraft made it into this list, beating a host of other (offline) RPGs and MMOs like ROSE Online, Guild Wars 2 and Everquest 2. But that’s also due to the impossible amount of fun that Azeroth and environs brought me. Farmed mounts in Outland and Northrend to increase my ePenis, spend hours wandering through mysterious areas and questing, getting more excited about a new helmet than I am now about a new car … There is no game that I remember as much as World of Warcraft , and while I don’t like the game as much as I did at the time of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, I still run it regularly.
Now that a Classic Server has been announced, there is a chance that I will fully devote myself to it and then lose a few hundred hours of my life, but I already know that it will be worth it. Whether I will play that new expansion fanatically remains to be seen, but since my girlfriend is also on the WoW and it always a bit itchy to get a new character to the maximum level, I assume that I will also play Battle of Azeroth happily starts questing again. And cry because the Alliance is not getting an awesome race. Fie, Blizzard.
9. The Binding of Isaac
The 2D randomly generated dungeon crawler The Binding of Isaac looks like it should trigger a lot of nostalgic feelings in me, but it’s the game on this list that I started most recently. It is also the only game I have ever purchased for no less than four different platforms: PC, PS4, 3DS and recently Nintendo Switch, and I have never regretted it for a moment.
Discovering the different floors of Isaac’s basement, collecting items along the way, revealing secrets, shooting monsters and avoiding red balls is what it’s all about. The randomly generated fun that The Binding of Isaac offers me is timeless. Chances are that the game will be even higher on this list in five years’ time, but because it is already the game that I fall back on every week, place 9 is the minimum.
8. DOOM
For nostalgic reasons, I actually wanted to include the original DOOM in this list – uhh, scratch that. My love for Doom goes way beyond nostalgia; The fast-paced demon slaughterhouse that the original games and the reboot are all about has now been incorporated into my DNA and is one of the few things my brain needs besides oxygen to survive. So this is the DOOM reboot from 2016, a game that grabbed my balls and never let go. It embraces the classic blazing-fast gameplay of the originals, the level design is unparalleled and more complicated than 99 out of 100 shooters, the lack of story is addressed in too good a meta-way, and the music… Oh .
Mick Gordon’s music has become perhaps my favorite game soundtrack ever, purely because the hard mechanical sounds he conjures up from his 8-string guitar go together better with the demon violence than these Top 10 Games with a midlife crisis. In addition, it is the first djent soundtrack for a game that I consciously experience. DOOM is also the only single player game that completely disturbs my heartbeat, and the adrenaline that it unleashes cannot be compared to any other game for me.
7. Gothic
There are so many RPGs I want to put on this list that it hurts a hell of a lot not to be able to. Nostalgia is ultimately the deciding factor in this game, but in addition, this franchise and developer deserve some extra love as far as I’m concerned. The Gothic franchise is a classic RPG series that got me gaming like no other as a youth. The worlds were so damn well put together – with a ‘gigantic’ open world to discover, different groups and camps, unforgivable progression (finding out with trial & error which monsters and NPCs you can and cannot handle), possibilities to discover everything and a freedom that we only experience as a norm today.
Back in 2001, Gothic offered me some games like The Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Origins years later, and it’s not surprising that this is the game that really kicked off my love for RPGs – hell, my love for gaming. While my memory isn’t exactly bad, there is no other game I remember as much as Gothic. How I sneaked around camps at night to loot, and was invariably attacked by a guard, how slowly but surely I was able to overpower more and more people and suck my way through the different factions of the world … Call it nostalgia, but I love Gothic, and when I play it again I feel the love that developer Piranha Bytes put into the game again. That same love that I think the Germans still put into their games – yes, they just released a new game called Elex,
6. Fallout 3
That RPG love I described above culminated in 2008, the year I regained my love for single player gaming. Don’t get me wrong, I was still gaming almost daily around this time, but it wasn’t until Fallout 3 that I once again spent hours and hours and hours wandering through a game world. Although many people cannot see more than all those poo-brown and green-yellow shades, I saw an amazing world that has been affected by a drawing and unbelievably interesting moment in (fictional) time: the falling of the atomic bomb. The post-apocalyptic world was crying out to be explored, and that’s exactly what I did. I spent hundreds of hours on one playthrough, probing and looting every box in the Wasteland, and ending every quest.
5. Call of Duty 2
My childhood was packed with extremely fine shooters. From Doom to Painkiller and from Redneck Rampage to Quake; How my parents agreed is a mystery to me, but it is clear that I had a predilection for violence from an early age. Strangely enough, it is not one of those classic shooters that is high on my list, Call of Duty 2 gets that honor, partly because of the ridiculous amount of hours I put into it. I don’t know how it’s possible, but when I discovered ‘rifle only’ servers in Search & Destroy game mode, my life was over. Every spare time of the day I had to spend online in about three or four different maps (which were the most fun) – sometimes for weeks only in the Toujane map – and couldn’t sleep until I forced some overly rewarding quickscopes out of my mouse . The gameplay that rifles bring in the S&D setting is very simple on paper, but due to the skill involved and the clans that formed in this game mode alone, that simplicity approached perfection. The most fun shooter I’ve ever played hands down.
4. Mass Effect 2
From the best shooter I’ve ever played to the best RPG I’ve ever played. Mass Effect 2 proved to be a precursor to the ridiculous burning passion I have for franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars. In Mass Effect 2, you have an entire universe at your disposal, filled to the brim with collectibles and other junk, but it’s the very story that has made a lasting impact on me. Exploring new planets and encountering (at least for the player) new life forms is something that really appealed to me, and it once drew me to Star Trek.
The game is chock-full of iconic game moments that can still give me goosebumps when I think back to them. From deciding what to do with the Genophage to walking around and talking to your crew members on the ship; the dialogues are incredibly well written, the choices you can make as a player – highly polarizing as they are – feel like they are making a real impact and the combat and character progression on top of that is a treat. Mass Effect 2 has as much grandeur to me as say an Empire Strikes Back, and damn that says a lot.
3. Diablo 2
Man, how I love top-down action RPGs. If a maniac attacks spam with your mouse and gradually hopes for interesting enemies and phat loot: it has become a classic formula, one that I first encountered in Diablo 2. Blizzard’s almost hack & slash title has one of the best types of character progression I have ever encountered. From choosing one of the classes, to spending skill points and distributing talents in the talent tree, and of course gathering thick armor by making the fantastic world bosses a head smaller and customizing it with a good number of runes; there are ridiculous ways in which you can make your character truly unique in Dablo 2. Just the way that has kept me busy for years to create the perfect Hammerdin, for example, is enough for a third place. The world is also one of the most compelling and magical things that Blizzard has ever conceived and even the story of supreme demon Diablo (and later Baal) has a shiver running down my spine to this day. Diablo is love.
2. Pokémon Red
Pokémon and I have gone so far back by now that I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I fell head over heels in love with the franchise. Since that is probably the Saint Nicholas Eve when I got Pokémon Red for my Gameboy, it should and will be number 2 on this list (although I think Crystal as a whole is a better game. I now have Pokémon Red, Pokémon Gold and Silver and Pokémon Emerald played so many times that I can dream of Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn, and that’s what those damn cute Pokémon are to blame. Of course I already thought they were cute and fun to watch, but as the franchise matured, more tactical options were added. and suddenly I was daily busy with evolutions, natures and later also talents, not to mention the huge mountain of possible Pokémon combinations I’ve tried for my many teams. To this day I am addicted to both the old and new pocket monsters, and it itches like a to start collecting Pokémon cards again, but above all else, of all things in life, I look forward to to a new Pokémon game for the Switch. And that speaks volumes.
1. BioShock
It’s annoying that after Sven I’m the one who gets to make this list, because I choose the exact same game as my favorite. I would probably never have made this list without BioShock; without BioShock I would never have been crazy enough to apply for an internship at PU years ago; without BioShock, the ___ed passion I have for this fantastic medium probably wouldn’t be that great. Why? The story and setting are a wet dream come true for me, and the game came my way at a pivotal moment in my life. Before that, I didn’t know that games can convey a story so ridiculously well, and I was certainly not concerned with themes like faith and socialism and almost abstract concepts like freedom.
BioShock made me think as much as some of the best books I’ve ever read – and that comes from the mouth of a student of Dutch – and combined with the fantastic setting (which logically stems from the story) makes me have not played any other single-player game so often. I have now gone through the story about six times, the last time being the Remaster, which assured me for the sixth time that BioShock is the game I will go back to all my life, if only because of how unlikely important the shooter has been for my development as a gamer. Ken Levine, even if you never write a game again, you will forever be one of my greatest heroes. At least Rapture won’t take anyone away from me anymore.
Games that deserve some love for making me feel dirty: ROSE Online, Super Mario 2, Grim Fandango, Scratches, Max Payne, The Stanley Parable, Delta Force, Mario Kart Double Dash, Half-Life 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, Burnout Paradise , Need for Speed Undergound 2, GTA Vice City, Super Mario Odyssey.
