{"id":24442,"date":"2014-10-29T07:47:46","date_gmt":"2014-10-29T12:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24442"},"modified":"2014-11-03T19:40:51","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T00:40:51","slug":"top-64-games-25-to-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24442","title":{"rendered":"Top 64 Games: 32 to 25"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reminder: Try not to stress out too much about the order of the items on this list, what games made it and which ones didn’t. Just use this as an excuse to talk about \/ praise \/ eviscerate games we might not get to discuss very often. Read the intro<\/a> to learn why we’re doing this.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

32. X-Com<\/h3>\n

In the not too distant future…<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The game takes place in the distant future of… 1999. The premise is that you are in charge of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-Com) which has been created to counter a dangerous and growing threat from a race of aliens in flying saucers. Your job is to shoot down alien craft when you can, and then send in a squad of specially trained soldiers to engage them in a a little turn-based, hide-and-seek gunplay. The force you lead is multinational, and individual nations will adjust their monthly contributions to your coffers based on how well you protect them. You can try to protect clusters of small countries if you like, or you can put all your eggs in one basket and suck up to one of the big, rich countries. You'll probably want control of the whole globe at some point, but it will take you a while before you have the budget and technology to pull that off.<\/p>\n

Usually when they say a game was “before it’s time” they mean it was visionary. I suppose that’s true here. But X-Com was also before its time in the sense that computers weren’t really up to the job yet. Back in the day, the AI would sometimes take the better part of a minute to take its turn. (This process is little more than a single-frame screen flash on modern machines.) Even today, a proper game of X-Com can take days to complete. Back in 1994 the same game might take weeks, with most of the time spent waiting for the AI to do its thing. <\/p>\n

The reboot<\/a> wasn’t bad, but it’s been 20 years and we still don’t have anything that can hold a candle to the original in terms of high tension and engrossing depth.<\/p>\n

31. Quake 3 Arena<\/h3>\n

IMPRESSIVE<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The people at Epic Games and the people at id Software both realized the same thing at the same time: We spend a fortune making these content-heavy corridor shooters, but players consume them in ten hours and then spend YEARS playing multiplayer deathmatch on user-made maps. So instead of making another story-game, why don’t we just make something designed to be a multiplayer shooter from the beginning?<\/em><\/p>\n

Thus Unreal led to Unreal Tournament and Quake II led to Quake III Arena. I always preferred the more diverse game modes of UT, but Quake III Arena was the more popular. Also, Q3A lives on today<\/a> with its original feel preserved, while Unreal Tournament continues to prostrate itself to a console audience<\/a> that doesn’t careUnreal Tournament is supposedly getting an overhaul to bring it back to its roots, but to me this sounds like the empty, desperate promise of a habitually womanizing husband. I’ll believe it when I see it.<\/span>. <\/p>\n

30. Tie Fighter<\/h3>\n

Star TIE FIGHTER Wars. The stylized Star Wars marquee has always confused me a little.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I really like how the “Space Sim” genre is a giant formless blob of everything that has space and lasers in it. I suppose we can differentiate by calling this a “Space COMBAT Sim”, to differentiate it from a regular “Space Sim” like Elite. <\/p>\n

Like Freespace a little further down the listWhich is actually UP the list, since the list is in descending order. We apologize for any confusion, but hasten to add that we didn’t make these rules.<\/span> this is a game where you’re part of a fighter squadron and you shoot down other squadrons in epic space battles with lots of visible space-lasers, audible space-explosions, and a complete lack of Newtonian space-physics. <\/p>\n

The beginning of the game has you flying useless brittle mass-produced imperial TIE fighters before chickening out after a few missions and letting you fly something with shields. Be Vader’s Wingman for a mission! Do sketchy stuff for the sketchy guy to advance your career! Run a checkpoint and scan for smugglers! <\/p>\n

This entry is probably pretty good evidence of how corruptible this process is. TIE Fighter is only ranked above Freespace because I knew Josh would give me a hard time if I ranked this too low.<\/p>\n

29. Borderlands 2<\/h3>\n

Screenshot from the DLC Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, which is so good you should buy the game, play through the first 30 levels, then get this DLC. I’m not kidding.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The original Borderlands presented you with a goofball world of mayhem and carnage, but never did anything with it. It felt like the set-up for a joke with no punchline. Borderlands 2 delivers the punchline, expands the scope, refines the gameplay, and gives us a deliciously detestable Bad Guy to hate. Okay, the part where [spoiler] is killed for cheap melodrama doesn’t make any sense at all and comes off as more dumb than anything else. But there’s a great payoff for that moment in the DLC expansion Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep<\/em>, which is some of the best DLC ever made But maybe I’m biased because it’s kind of a videogame version of DM of the Rings<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Borderlands 2 gives us great characters, nails the tone that the first game couldn’t quite sort out, and refines the gameplay. Also I guess it has some stuff about shooting and looting.<\/p>\n

28. Unreal<\/h3>\n

One of the last shooters to support SOFTWARE ONLY. Like, no graphics card needed. Crazy!<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Conceptually, Unreal is the last of the old-school 90’s shooters in the lineage of Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake. You’re a nameless protagonist pushing through a linear sequence of semi-sensical locations and mowing down its inhabitants with a vast collection of completely impractical hardware. There are no voiced characters. Your only motivation is “survive by way of going forward”, with no clear end goal. As this game arrived, a new aesthetic was taking over that favored a more character-focused and story-driven approach. Perhaps that’s just as well. The “plotless shooter” thing doesn’t seem to go very well with photorealism, and feels more at home in the low-fi world of pixelated abstractions. <\/p>\n

Also noteworthy: Unreal is massive<\/em>. The sheer number and variety of levels is daunting. They just don’t make them like this anymore. <\/p>\n

27. Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas<\/h3>\n

A Grand Theft Auto game SO GOOD, it’s nearly as fun as Saints Row 2!<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

San Andreas is the last of the “real” Grand Theft Auto games before the series lost its soul and became a grim, joyless, embittered screed against a strawman version of the American culture that made this series possible to begin with<\/a>. After San Andreas, the series forgot how to have fun and seemed to become ashamed of its capacity for emergent mayhem, and became even more<\/em> devoted to scripted sequences and DIAS<\/a> gameplay. <\/p>\n

San Andreas was a remix of the early 90’s gang movies (South Central, Boyz in The Hood, Juice, etc.) but still retained a bit of the gleeful mischief that made this series such a hitAlthough I always thought the turf war mechanic was in pretty bad taste. Just a little too close to the real thing for me.<\/span>. It would take Rockstar until GTA V – a full decade later – before they could offer us a playground as large and as varied as the one in San Andreas. <\/p>\n

26. Doom<\/h3>\n

You want story? We put it in the README.TXT<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

It made id Software into an industry giant, turned the developers into rockstars, generated a wave of game-violence panic, launched a huge and still active modding culture, established a distinctive newNew to games, at least.<\/span> design aesthetic, and solidified a set of mechanics based around high-speed projectile avoidance.<\/p>\n

Also, it was pretty fun at the time. <\/p>\n

25. Silent Hill 2<\/h3>\n

Don’t gaze too long into the abyss, because that’s rude and the abyss doesn’t like it.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The haters say that we don’t need another game about a slightly crazy man who goes to a haunted town to work out his inner demons. I say if we have room for a thousand games where you Save The World by Shooting All The Guys, then we have room for at least one more of these. Sadly, the Silent Hill franchise keeps mistaking itself for a monster-killing empowerment fantasy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s a deeply disturbing game, but rewarding if you’re willing to dig down and try to figure out what it all means<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reminder: Try not to stress out too much about the order of the items on this list, what games made it and which ones didn’t. Just use this as an excuse to talk about \/ praise \/ eviscerate games we might not get to discuss very often. Read the intro to learn why we’re doing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}