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.
I recently played through Cult of the Lamb, a satirical take on the concept of running a demonic cult. It turns horrific things like sacrificial rituals, cannibalism and straight up gaslighting abuse into hilarious amusements by filtering everything through its cartoonish lens. You are a sheep, after all, and all your followers are sycophantic anthropomorphic […]
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
I’ve been pretty absent from PC gaming for some time, since moving to Canada in early 2017, because I haven’t had a proper computer to play games on. That has recently changed, since I got myself set up with a new gaming rig that can handle pretty much anything that’s out at the moment. I […]
VVVVVV is one of the only 2D platform games that I have completed from start to finish, which makes it special to me. I became obsessed with Veni Vidi Vici, an entirely optional sequence of deadly traps that teases you with a collectible orb right in the very first room, which is blocked off by a tiny box. You can’t jump in the traditional way as most other platformer’s, so the only way to overcome the box is by leaping up through the ridiculously cruel chambers above, navigating your way to the top…and then back down again.
Portal is one of those games that sprang out of nowhere, taking everyone by surprise and causing a storm all across the internet. With almost no hype, and zero expectations, it came bundled as a throwaway extra in The Orange Box, arguably the best game bundle ever made.
Format: PS3
Release date: 2010
Heavy Rain is more like an interactive movie than a game, and it is mostly excellent. It’s a game about choices and living with the consequences. I played it through twice myself, just to see how different decisions affect the story and its ultimate conclusion, but to say that my first try was emotional would be the understatement of the century. This game almost broke me. I’ll tell you how soon, but first I want to recount the story of one of my friend’s choices… Like I said, watching Heavy Rain is just like watching a movie, but watching your friend play Heavy Rain gives you an amusing bit of insight into their psychology. The results can be hilarious.
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