My Top 5 Favorite Video Games Ever
Friday, June 19th, 2009I love video games. If you were to total up all the time I’ve spent in my life doing various things, playing video games would only be dwarfed by time spent sleeping. Ever since my parents brought home that Atari 2600, I have had a controller or a keyboard/mouse combo seemingly grafted to my hands.
The following list represents a combination of my personal enjoyment with the game over extended period of time with a nod toward very balanced gameplay. High replay value is a necessity for games on this list because there is no way that a game I’ve played for less than 200 hours is going to make a list this small. Each and every game on this list is a game that I could be happy playing exclusively for the rest of my life.
Without further preamble, I hereby present my list of the best freaking video games ever.
- World of Warcraft. Without reservation, I place WoW at the top of my personal list of best games ever made. The game is friendly toward new players in a way that Everquest never was. The leveling curve is fast enough to keep you interested without feeling so easy that you don’t care. Every single class is playable and enjoyable, and the sheer amount of side quests, random easter eggs, and collection items mean there is always something new to do. On top of that, Blizzard releases new content at a rate that almost makes you mad because you’re not done with the other stuff yet. No game is perfect, but WoW is damned close.
- Final Fantasy. I continue to love later sequels in the franchise, but in terms of sheer replay value, no other game in the series can compare with the first one. Final Fantasy for the NES had some serious gameplay issues, but it was so ridiculously fun that you didn’t really care. With the different character classes in your four-person party, the game encouraged you from the outset to try different strategies in order to experience the game in new and exciting ways. Final Fantasy’s game design offers a cornucopia of choices without any one of them being “wrong”. The remakes for the Wonderswan, GBA, and PSP fixed nearly everything that was wrong or frustrating in the original and subsequently took even more hours out of my life.
- Pokémon Red/Blue. Every Pokémon game has completely taken over my life in sequence, but I’m going to give the crown to the original, which seized hold of my very existence in a way that very few other games have. There was never a moment of my free time that didn’t involve taking my Color Game Boy out of my pocket and playing for a minute or two. Pokémon took all of the choice that Final Fantasy offered, cranked that level of choice up by a factor of 25, and added the addictive collector mentality of CCG games like Magic the Gathering. Simply put, this was the sort of game that was truly impossible for me to dislike. It was designed to stimulate every part of my brain that brings me pleasure.
- Starcraft. When Starcraft came out way back when I was in college, I enjoyed it casually. I played through the single-player mode. I watched my friends Richard and George play over the LAN for hours and hours. I really liked Starcraft. Coming back to it after playing Warcraft 3 for a while, however, I learned to truly love it. Starcraft is the best RTS game ever created. The wildly different races are nearly perfectly balanced — so balanced, in fact, that playing the game well requires an understanding of what’s popular in the current meta-game. A great economy wins Starcraft games, but picture perfect micro-management of troops can often turn a game completely around. Every unit has a counter that will decimate it, requiring players to actively seek out actionable intelligence on their enemy’s moves. If you never seen a professional Starcraft match from the Korean leagues, you’re really missing out. Starcraft may well be the best video game ever made.
- The Legend of Zelda. When we got our NES, Super Mario Brothers was a great game. It was fun and exciting, but honestly, it was a lot like games my family had played at the arcades — albeit on a much grander scale. The Legend of Zelda, however, was something else entirely. It completely changed the way I played and thought about video games. Here was a game that refused to be beaten in your first sitting, a game that required you to save your progress for later sessions. Zelda was an action game, but it required you to level up your hero’s abilities in order to defeat later challenges. Boss fights weren’t just a matter of mashing buttons; you had to figure out weaknesses and strategies to emerge victorious. And just when you finally beat the Big Bad and rescued the princess, the game turned 90 degrees and gave you a completely different and harder version of the game to beat all over again. The Legend of Zelda made me the gamer I am today.