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.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Format: PC
Release date: 1993
I have 2 memories of this game that are separated by over 20 years.
Format: PC
Year: 1999
Here’s another game that was introduced to me by my uncle Dave (who to this day, does the best impression of the monk from the first game out of anyone I know – “WOLOLOOOH!”) Anyway, I learned more history from playing Age of Empires 2 than I ever did in school. I experienced the brutal horde of Attila the Hun as he ravaged old Europe. I followed the rise of El Cid, and helped Ghengis Khan flood across Asia. I can’t remember much else actually, because my mind always turns to making a plague of Persian elephants to send at my enemies, crushing all of their puny houses and stamping their cities into the dust, mwhahaha! Ah man, it’s an absolute classic game, the first strategy game I ever played and thanks to the recent HD remake, is still a lot of fun even 18 years later.
There’s not a lot I can say about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that hasn’t already been said, but here’s my take anyway. The game deservedly garnered a heap of attention when it came out for being a fantastic example of a JRPG, that happened to be made in France. Technically, ignoring the fact that the team includes a bunch of ex-Ubisoft veterans, it’s the debut title from developers Sandfall. And what a debut game it is.
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