Some of you could argue that the decade isn’t over, but it seems that the majority of the gaming community thinks so because everyone has recently been talking about their ‘top ten of the decade’ . Usually I don’t agree with doing top ten lists for everything and anything, but it’s not a regular occurance for top ten of the decade lists to warrant an appearance. It’s every ten years…see? Anyway, here’s my list, which will be followed by Dan’s tomorrow, and then Alex’s on Wednesday. Enjoy, and then no doubt scoff at my opinion.
10. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Honestly, I can’t remember a good reason for why I was excited for this game (other than the multiplayer beta I was in). The first trailer that got put out wasn’t particularly amazing, and I didn’t find the Call of Duty franchise to be all that fantastic prior to this installment, but that made me (and thousands of other people, no doubt) buy it on the day of release. I was not disappointed. “Finally!” I said to myself as I headed home from skipping a physical education lesson at school, “A Call of Duty game that has modern firearms and stuff in it!”. As i’d already had a taste of the multiplayer, I didn’t hesitate to load up the single-player and get stuck right in. It had a story that was just far away from, and close enough to, reality. It had great multiplayer that kept me coming back for more, and replayability that came from it’s sheer brilliance. I’m sure we can all agree that we’ve played through the All Ghillied Up and Ghillie in the Mist missions more than any other, and to have a main character killed off before your very eyes was something that we hadn’t really seen in a video game before. Sadly, Infinity Ward decided that they’d do that to death in it’s sequel.
9. Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
I admit that I hadn’t actually played the original Diablo prior to playing Diablo II, but after picking this up after hearing all the hype, I didn’t hesitate to go and play it’s predecessor. The series apitimized the genre of loot-obsessed, running-everywhere, killing-everything, isometric style RPG click fests that we love today (that same genre that is probably nowadays referred to as the ‘Diablo clones’). I couldn’t help but feel the need to get to level ninety nine as soon as I could – then start all over again as a different class. Whether I was playing by myself, or on Blizzard’s Battle.net service with complete strangers, the need to get new loot and kick even more ass was just too much for me to stop playing. Sure, many of you would look at screenshots at this game and comment on how dated and terrible it looks. To you people, I say that you need a good kick in the pants. I think i’ll find myself saying similar further down my list as well. Diablo II is a lot of fun, and punishing at times, but it’s a damn good game – regardless of it’s appearance, you should go play this game right now.
8. Street Fighter IV
The lure of a good beat ‘em up is just too strong for some, but this was never an issue for me. I’d never gone much further than the Tekken series until a few years ago, when I was properly introduced into the Street Fighter series. Having played Street Fighter II and Street Fighter II: 3rd Strike within that introduction, I started to appreciate why everybody loved the series so much. It was simple, but devilishly complicated. Easy to learn, difficult to master. Havng heard how terrible the 3D incarnations of the series went though, I couldn’t help but have my doubts about Street Fighter IV. Regardless, I went and bought it on release day with two of my friends who’d never even touched a Street Fighter title before. After struggling through the arcade mode on a difficulty that proved too strong for me (an accidental setting) with a new character i’d never touched before (purely to unlock Cammy as a playable character), I didn’t give the two sitting on the couch beside me much reason for them to go buy it for themselves. A month or so after, they finally understood, and one of them purchased it (even surpassing my abilities with the game because he played it so much). The reason? Exactly what I said before – easy to learn, difficult to master. The new 3D engine helped as well, because the ‘new generation of gamer’ can’t stand anything that isn’t 3D, right? Old characters, new characters, a killer soundtrack, and good old ‘scream at your TV in intense excitement and glory’ moments, Street Fighter IV is a fantastic revival for the series. Super Street Fighter IV is coming soon, right? They skipped the Hyper and Turbo prefixes, so it has to be good, right?
7. Baldur’s Gate II
My word, look! It’s another 2D isometric atrocity! Screw you. I’m going to try and keep this entry short, because I could talk about this game for hours. Gripping storyline, great characters (both good and bad), with the same classic RPG gameplay that made the original Baldur’s Gate, as well as titles such as Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series such hits. Baldur’s Gate II is at the top of that list though, for reasons that you can only really understand if you play the game for yourself, if you’re willing to give it the time. Warriors, mages, rogues, dwarves, elves, human, orcs, all of that stuff – using a Dungeons & Dragons ruleset in the Infinity Engine. Now, if a woman were to come up to me saying that in some form of chat-up line, they’d have me straight away.
6. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
Being a huge fan of the Rainbow Six series that came before it, I was a little skeptical about hearing of Ghost Recon. It was primarily set outside. That bothered me, as I was too used to the tight corners and carefully planned room-to-room action sequences that occured while playing the Six games. Well, not only was I too used to it, but I loved it so damn much. I’m a sucker for tactical shooters, don’t you know. Anyhow, the first time I saw the sniper in a ghillie suit, and the first time I heard lines such as “He’s history.” and “Goodbye.” from my fellow ‘Ghosts’ once they’d downed a hostile, I was hooked. It took the slow pacing and tactical shooter elements from Rainbow Six into a broader scope, but at the same time taking those tactical elements and making them more streamlined. This didn’t have any pre-mission planning – you just went in, thought, and fought on the fly. Oh Clancy, you’d stolen my heart yet again.
5. Team Fortress 2
I waited eight years for this game. Eight years. After becoming hopelessly addicted to Team Fortress Classic in 1999, I discovered that Team Fortress 2 had been announced that very year, sporting a modern war theme with a command hierarchy allowing for a commander to utilise such abilities as calling parachute drops into enemy territory, and have a birds-eye view of the battlefield. Sounds great, right? Seven years after (seven years in which news on the title was pretty much non-existant), we were presented with Team Fortress 2 – the crazy, Pixar Studios-esque graphical aesthetic using, class based first person shooter including all of our favourites, all of which was announced in a trailer donning catchy music and still shots of all the different classes shown in their new eccentricised appearances. The same trailer which made me jump out of my chair in an internet gaming café in Spain, grabbing hold of my father beside me, and saying “It’s here, it’s here!”. There are few games that can draw me into their competetive arena, but Team Fortress 2, purely because while playing it, it gave me a lot of memories from me playing Team Fortress Classic on such maps as Dustbowl and 2Fort. Valve also kept updating the game, and still are, so that new content is coming at a steady stream, and the gameplay never gets old. I think the cartoon-ish aesthetic perfectly matches the insane gameplay that Team Fortress has always provided, and each class having their very own personality and unique look only adds to the sheer enjoyment that goes along side Team Fortress 2.
4. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Rogue Spear: Urban Operations
I’m going to admit that this game is a bit of a cheat to be in this list. The original Rogue Spear was released in 1999, whereas Urban Operations, an expansion pack, was released in the year 2000. Though I suppose it’s not really a cheat, because Urban Operations added the mod functionality to the game that made it what it was. A brilliant online community filled with clever map creators and mod-makers, as well as atactical player base with their deception and precision aiming made Urban Operations a blast to play. Rogue Spear took the original Rainbow Six formula, and twisted it slightly in some areas to make it less of a simulator and more of a mainstream FPS, but in all the right places. It still had the mission planning, it still had the punishing (almost) one hit one kill gameplay element, and that fantastic feeling of accomplishment once you’d completed a mission flawlessly. This game is the apitomy of the tactical shooter genre, and I only wish that the Rainbow Six series could be revived by going back to its roots. Sadly, that isn’t going to happen, as UbiSoft said it themselves, but I don’t blame them. I just don’t think it’d attract the amount of buyers that a game company needs these days. It never used to be like that.
3. Neverwinter Nights
It felt like Baldur’s Gate in a 3D engine…but not. Regardless, I put hundreds of hours playing this RPG from the creators of Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins themselves, BioWare. It had the same in-depth gameplay and action-pausing strategy of the Baldur’s Gate series, but added so much to the world by simply having the Aurora toolset beside it, which allowed for entire worlds to be created by players of the game. Those worlds could then be put onto an internet server, so that persistant worlds could be born. It was sort of like playing an MMO, but with a much tighter story element anywhere you went, as well as steadily accesible gameplay as you went, no matter how much the modders tweaked it. Now, I never join roleplay servers in games – I think it’s, well, lame, to be honest with you. But Neverwinter broke that rule. I found myself on many a weekend pretending I was a human paladin of Tyr over the internet, while occasionally diving back out to play some single-player in the original campaign, and the expansions that came later, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark.
2. Counter-Strike
If you have a computer, and you play games on it, you’ve no doubt heard of Counter-Strike. Released in 2000, and being in beta and alpha stages in the year before it, Counter-Strike revolutionised the online multiplayer first person shooter forever. Whether you were rescuing hostages, or planting and defusing bombs, Counter-Strike had a winning game formula that pits Counter-Terrorists against Terrorists in all sorts of environments. Last time I checked, Counter-Strike is the third most played game on Valve’s Steam platform, with Counter-Strike: Source (a re-crafting of the original in the, at the time, new Source engine) just in front of it. Thousands and thousands of dollars have been won playing this title by many a professional gaming team, and I just thought I should let you know that the next time you play Call of Duty’s Search and Destroy gametype – you’re playing Counter-Strike. Also, you know it’s good when your own father still regards it as the best online shooter he’s ever played. I suppose I owe it to him that I played it in the first place. Then again, he’s stuck playing Flight Simulator these days.
1. Tribes 2
Anyone that knows me well enough will tell you that I have an incredibly admiration and love for the Tribes series, and in particular, Tribes 2. If my memory serves me well, it is one of the first, if not the first, first person shooter that allowed for sixty four players to duke it out in one huge battlefield that including vehicles, floating bases, and allowed for easy to learn, difficult to master jetpacking brilliance. The common game mode was capture the flag, and that involved every member on either team picking some sort of role , whether it be offense or defence based. You could be a flag runner, or an offensive support guy, or a bomber pilot. You could be a heavy mortar-wielding defense juggernaut, or a flag escort gliding around on a hover bike. With three armour sets to choose from (light, medium, heavy – each with their own respective loss in speed and gain in health), an array of weapons to use, as well as backpacks suited for any role imaginable, Tribes 2, in my mind, is the definitive team-based first person shooter. Did I mention there are jetpacks? You weren’t just stuck to the ground like in Quake or Counter-Strike, you could take combat to the skies – and that was the main reason why the Tribes series was seperate from the rest of the pack. I still play Tribes 2 to this day, even when the official master servers were taken down. That’s because others play it too, and they hosted their own master servers to make it playable on. That’s how good it is – people are willing to spend money ten years later to keep this game running. Tribes 2 is phenomenal.
Good article. Obviously I would have some of my own variations in this list (Having not played all of them), but it looks like a fair list; well written. Good times running around Ghost Recon with grenade launchers.