The Best Games of my Life


A friend on Facebook posted a list of their favourite movies, listed in the year they came out, which I immediately followed up with my own list. There’s only one rule: you must pick your favourite for all of the years that you’ve been alive, and you can only pick one per year. I decided to give it a go for videogames. It’s a lot trickier than you might think! Some years have featured an abundance of incredible titles, whereas other years it’s easy to pick out a clear winner in your mind. So, without further ado, here’s my list of favourite games, one per year since I was born. This was insanely difficult…

1986: Metroid
1987: Bubble Ghost
1988: Super Mario Bros. 3
1989: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles


1990: Castle of Illusions
1991: Lemmings
1992: Sonic the Hedgehog 2
1993: The 7th Guest
1994: Sonic & Knuckles
1995: Worms
1996: Pokémon Red
1997: Final Fantasy VII


1998: Zelda: Ocarina of Time
1999: Age of Empires 2
(Now things start to get REALLY hard…)
2000: Deus Ex (NARROWLY beats Perfect Dark)
2001: Ico, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Return to Castle Wolfenstein AND Silent Hill 2 all in the same year!? That’s an impossible decision……….it should go to Ico, but I didn’t play it until many years later… the teenage me would have to give it to Conker’s BFD.


2002: Battlefield 1942
2003: Max Payne 2
2004: World of Warcraft (beats my beloved Half Life 2 and the incredible GTA San Andreas)
2005: Shadow of the Colossus
2006: Company of Heroes (beats Just Cause and Elder Scrolls Oblivion)
2007: Portal


2008: Grand Theft Auto 4 (just beats Fallout 3… honourable mention to Mirror’s Edge)
2009: Uncharted 2
2010: Heavy Rain (Holy CRAP 2010 was amazing: Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption, Just Cause 2, Limbo, WoW: Cataclysm, VVVVVV, Alan Wake, Amnesia… had to give it to Heavy Rain for putting me through the most emotional gaming experience of my life.)
2011: Skyrim (another insane year – Minecraft, Battlefield 3, Bastion, Dark Souls, Batman Arkham City…)
2012: Dragon’s Dogma


2013: The Last of Us (narrowly beating the best Splinter Cell game in the franchise, Blacklist, as well as Outlast, PayDay 2, The Stanley Parable, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, and GTA 5…what a year)
2014: Hearthstone (honourable mention for Legend of Grimrock 2)
2015: Just Cause 3
2016: The Last Guardian (just manages to beat the excellent Firewatch, the latest Hitman ‘episodes’ and Overwatch)
2017: I WISH I was playing Zelda Breath of the Wild, but it’ll have to wait until I get back from my travels. 2017 has a lot of potential to look forward to.

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