All Time Top Ten

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

16. My list is better than all of yours (no it's not)

No order or ranking

Half-Life by Valve (for PC and Mac)
Changed every damn thing for first-person shooters and proved that single-player was very not dead. And it introduced a memorable silent protagonist to the world: Doctor Gordon Freeman.
"We are bad people! This is a bad experiment! Why did we usher forth the green apocalypse?”
(Note: the above quote is not from Half-Life, but from a machinima called “Freeman’s Mind”. Check it out.)

Thief: The Dark Project/Thief 2: The Metal Age by Irrational Games / Looking Glass Games (for PC)
Changed every damn thing for a first-person sneaker. Wait. There were no first-person sneakers until this one. Made you wait for that guard to finally wander down that corridor alone after a good 5 minutes so you could knock him out. Thief 2 was even better, somehow. And neither of them had a “boss battle” at the end.

Elite (for a helluva lot of computers, Commodore 64, Apple IIe, and Amiga included)
No Privateer, no Freelancer, no EVE, and no Star Citizen without this one. David Braben's shining star, still gleaming off in the distance 30 years later. I hear Braben's got a new version coming that even Chris Roberts (of Star Citizen) has come out and supported. They made their Kickstarter goal, so Elite: Dangerous will be developed. Hooray!

System Shock 2 by Irrational Games / Looking Glass Games (for PC)
[font color = "red"]"The Polito form is dead, insect. Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence? When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence. I am SHODAN."[/font]
Tell me you didn’t get a thrill of horror when you heard those words. Scared the crap outta me, I admit. This game didn’t pull any punches: you were supposed to be running for your life from oh-shit-what-is-that-thing-and-how-do-I-kill-it?, always low on health and ammo, and creeping through the levels peeking around every corner.

Deus Ex by Ion Storm (for PC)
Everything but the first hour or two is pure brilliance. Massive environments, skills galore (just don’t take swimming, ‘cause “It’s fairly useless”. Long and complex, nearly an entire sandbox for you to play in, and you could customize your play style to however you wanted. I ended up always being a sniper with a silenced rifle and machine gun, though.

Dungeon Master By FTL (for Amiga and Atari ST)
One of the best dungeon crawls I ever played. Eye of the Beholder was also pretty good, but Dungeon Master’s magic system was brilliant. And every single character could be every single class. The sequel; Chaos Strikes Back, was pretty much the same, but insanely more difficult. The dungeon itself was a multi-leveled maze that required patience, skill, and quick reflexes. The game was in stereo, too: wearing headphones was a plus because you could hear where the monsters were.

Homeworld by Relic (for PC)
Relic’s first real foray into gaming, and it blows the doors off of any other RTS of its day. Confusing as all hell for the traditional Real Time Strategy player, but our problem was we’ve been thinking in two dimensions. Homeworld changed all of that. Relic kept up the excellent work with Homeworld 2, Company of Heroes. and the Warhammer 40k Dawn of War franchise.

Freespace 2 by Volition (for PC)
Epic space combat on par with or better than nearly anything put out by Lucasarts. A sadly unfinished series, as Freespace 2 ended with not a bang, but a whimper. Oh, and a supernova. That the Shivans started. And Volition never got a chance to explain why they did that.

Portal (and Portal 2) by Valve (for PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and PS3)
If SHODAN had a daughter, I think she’d be GLaDOS.
Go ahead. Tell me Portal wasn't brilliant, and I'll just quote Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation. "Portal's great and if you don't like it you're stupid!

Best line, I think, was from Portal 2:
“I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?”
-Cave Johnson

Minecraft by Mojang (for PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Xbox 360 and Linux)
Must..dig...deeper. Spent way too many hours making everything from castles to secret doors to just exploring caves and trying to gear up to kill that damn dragon at the end. Which I still haven’t done yet.

Honorable Mentions:
Descent. Populous. World of Warcraft (Deny it all you want, but Blizzard did MMOs right). The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Mass Effect Trilogy (Yeah, all three of them), Supreme Commander, Interstate ‘76...this list will be updated.