{"id":24444,"date":"2014-10-26T10:09:24","date_gmt":"2014-10-26T15:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24444"},"modified":"2014-10-26T13:57:18","modified_gmt":"2014-10-26T18:57:18","slug":"top-64-games-40-to-33","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24444","title":{"rendered":"Top 64 Games: 40 to 33"},"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. This list is just PC games, limited to the ones I’ve played and I thought were worth discussing. If you rage out because I left out your favorite game then you’re just making a fool of yourself. Also remember the rule: A particular franchise can only appear in the list once, so if Resident Evil 4<\/em> makes the list then Resident Evil 2<\/em> can’t.<\/p>\n

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

Also! Some people are having fun trying to identify the games in the header image. That’s actually a fun idea. I’ll post the answers for each image at the end of this series.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

40. Mass Effect 2<\/h3>\n

You want to see the future? It’s a constipated white guy holding a gun up to the camera – forever.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I didn’t like the game. It was dumb, it was ugly, and it was thematically disjointed. At the same time it had far better production values, bigger name voice actors, more mainstream gameplay, and more gameplay polish. Mass Effect 2 is at the very center of the BioWare vortex. This game is the bridge between old BioWare that focused on ideas and world-building and new the BioWare that focused on spectacle and style. <\/p>\n

After Mass Effect 2, “old BioWare” is gone and “new BioWare” is more popular than the old one ever was. Mass Effect 2 is the one game where both versions of the company existed at the same time. Yes, we got the Illusive Mary Sue and a team parceled out into fragments of Day One DLC. But we also got Legion, Mordin, Thane, Samara, and JacobHaha. Just kidding. Nobody likes Jacob.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

39. Nethack<\/h3>\n

Ossipewsk gratefully inherits all your possessions.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Nethack was not the original roguelike. The original roguelike was – and I hope this doesn’t need further explanation – called Rogue<\/em>. But Nethack made the genre famous and was wringing salty tears out of overly ambitious gamers long before the first inklings of Dark Souls appeared on the dry-erase board of a heartless and sadistic game developer. <\/p>\n

Its adherence to text tiles gives it ridiculous levels of interactivity: Examine things, kick things, throw things, use things, rub things, shoot things, ride on things, sit on things, engrave in things, dip things into other things, sacrifice things to gods. Pray, eat, drink, search steal and chat. <\/p>\n

It’s deep. It’s long. It’s completely unfair. It doesn’t even feel bad about it.<\/p>\n

38. Metro: Last Light<\/h3>\n

It begins with an apocalypse that wipes out humanity. Then monsters. Then Nazis. After that things take a turn for the worse.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Videogames rarely do well at adaptations. Translating the events of a book or movie into a game usually ends in a talky, poorly paced, un-fun disaster, and only part of the blame can be placed on the fact that most adaptations aren’t funded very well.<\/p>\n

Metro: Last Light avoids these mistakes by not<\/em> using the source material for story, but instead using it as a foundation of lore and worldbuilding. The result is a game with a solid grip on tone that doesn’t let story get in the way of the interactivity. The game also comes from Russia, giving us westerners a very different sort of apocalypse than what we’re used to.<\/p>\n

37. Duke Nukem 3D<\/h3>\n

Hail to that thing, maybe.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Ha ha! That videogame character referenced a movie I’ve seen! This is new and different! And look, I can flush toilets! See myself in the mirror! Turn lights on and off! Catchphrase!<\/p>\n

Like a lot of 90’s stuff, it hasn’t aged well. But for a brief moment, this thing represented a breath of fresh air and a new kind of playful interactivity for videogames. And the long-delayed sequel “Duke Nukem Whenever” joke kept us going for a decade and a half. <\/p>\n

36. Dark Souls<\/h3>\n

You don’t actually need to prepare to die. It just happens.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

A masterwork of game design that sets out to create a very specific tone with a tightly enforced set of mechanics, and executes it perfectly. At first the game feels hard and unfair. But as you refine your skills the game becomes reasonable, and if you stick with it long enough you might even find the challenge to become trivial. This is not true of a lot of modern games that attempt to funnel all players into a single experience, where skill has only a modest impact on outcomes. Here your success is driven entirely by skill and foreknowledge, and the game isn’t afraid to throw up a wall until you master the skills needed to proceed. <\/p>\n

I find it too stressful to enjoy, but I admire the game for what it does anyway. <\/p>\n

35. Wolfenstein<\/h3>\n

GET READY!<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The great-great grandfather of the manshoots. The springboard for id Software. It’s aged poorly and is really only notable for its legacy, but what a legacy.<\/p>\n

34. Kerbal Space Program<\/h3>\n

On one hand, these guys are adorable and it’s a shame to see them die in fiery explosions. On the other hand, they don’t seem to mind and they seem to be asking for it.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

As it turns out, this orbiting business is a lot of fun. There’s an entire game packaged in the rules of real-world space travel. It’s a creative puzzle game where you figure out how to get from A to B without running out of energy. Maybe you’ll attack the problem by trying to build better rockets, or maybe you’ll try to solve it with tricky slingshot orbital maneuvers. Either way is fun, and to get to the really tantalizing targets you’ll need to excel at both.<\/p>\n

Kerbal is notable for being the most educational game I’ve ever played. The mechanics are physics, and as you learn to play the game you’ll learn how the space program works. It’s one thing if Randal tells you that space is easy to reach and hard to STAY in<\/a>, but nothing teaches like experience. I learned why, in real rocket launches, they do a vertical burn that gradually curves east, then they do nothing for a while before doing another burn parallel with the equator. I’d always wondered about that. I mean, I could have looked it up, but I never got around to it. Then suddenly I had game mechanics that nudged me into this understanding though simple experience and experimentation. Along the way I got a sense of how geosynchronous satellites work and why we have so much junk<\/em> in space. <\/p>\n

33. Descent: Freespace – The Great War<\/h3>\n

Rejected titles include “Freespace: The Not-So-Great War”, “Freespace: The War That Was Pretty Great But Not As Good As Some Of The Other Wars”, and “Freespace: The War That, Upon Reflection, Probably Could Have Been Better”.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Descent: Freespace – The Great War<\/em> is usually held up as one of the greats of the space-fighter genre. The sequel – which I haven’t playedI own it through GoG. Got stuck trying to get it to recognize my controller. I’ll give it another go one of these days.<\/span> – is usually given the title of “best” of the form. <\/p>\n

I wonder how much of this is due to the simple fact that it’s one of the last? Developers had nailed down the essentials of this kind of gameplay as far back as X-Wing, which came out in 1993 – five years before Freespace. Since then it had been a simple process of polish through iteration. While I’ve heard lots of theories, I’ve never heard a really satisfying explanation for why this genre died. We just stopped making them.<\/p>\n

The “Descent” moniker is really unfortunate. At the time, Publisher Interplay was worried about name recognition so they slapped the name of their popular (but totally unrelated) indoor space shooter on the thing. It would be like Nintendo launching the Zelda franchise by calling it: Mario Brothers: The Legend of Zelda. Just dumb. <\/p>\n

The irony is that Freespace is now more renowned and remembered than Descent. <\/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. This list is just PC games, limited to the ones I’ve played and I thought were worth discussing. If you rage out because I left out your favorite game then […]<\/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-24444","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\/24444","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=24444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}