Top 200 Games of All Time: 120-111

120: XCOM: Enemy Unknown

• Year: 2014
• System: PC

X-COM is a frustrating game in that it gives you the odds to hit. And there's something in your dumb caveman brain that makes you think, "ohh, 60% chance to hit. That's definitely going to hit." And then when the dice roll doesn't go your way, you have to quickly adjust and prepare to get pummeled the next turn. 

X-COM is hard, as it should be. This is a strategy game. You're supposed to fail sometimes, readjust, and come back at it. 

X-COM 2 didn't live up to the first game, instead opting to spike the difficulty in ways that I don't think are fair. Too often are you flanked by unmarked enemies, and your squad immediately gunned down. But X-COM 1 felt mostly fair. Thee enemy ambushes came where you expected them to. 

119: X-Men 2: The Clone Wars

• Year: 1995 
• System: Genesis

The first X-men game suffered from an Arcade quarter snatching mentality. Made difficult just to keep

you from seeing end credits. In fact, one mission was practically unbeatable without Nightcrawler's teleport ability. 

The Clone Wars fixed that. Not only were the missions and maps better designed, the powers more useful, but you also had your brother playing at the same time. 

The sprites were huge and had many frames of animation. Just everything looked so good. I know this was fairly late era Sega, but I'm still amazed at how this game holds up.

118: Syphon Filter 2

• Year: 2000
• System: PS1

Syphon Filter 1 suffered from being directly compared to Metal Gear Solid. They were both spy games, but very different spy games. Where Metal Gear is methodical, slow moving, plan out every move, Syphon Filter throws action at you. 

The opening scene to Syphon Filter 2 has you parachuting into a gun fight already happening. From there you go to a plane crash site, a train ride (while fighting terrorists of course), and eventually a biolab filled with armed guards.

Syphon Filter 2 took the good things from the first game and made them better. The controls were tighter, the story much more polished, and being a late era PS1 games, the graphics were incredible. (ahem... for a late era PS1 game)

117: Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• Year: 2015
• System: PC

This game has just too much. So much that I still haven't finished it. But I'm constantly thinking of

picking it back up. I find that it's replaced Game of Thrones in random nerd conversation. I can throw a Witcher 3 comment/question into most of my chats and get a response. 

I mean, one of the first things you see is the male character naked. And soon after you're burying a fetus to cleanse a curse. 

And the bar scene where Geralt said Yennifer roughly 47 times had my wife rolling on the floor with how dumb it was. 

Who would've thought some small Eastern European studio would come out with a genre shifting game in 2015. And who knows, if my dumbass does this again in a few years, there's a good chance this will move up the list 30-40 slots.

116: Super Smash Brothers: Melee

• Year: 2001
• System: Gamecube

There's definitely been more in a Smash. There's definitely games with Sonic and Snake. But Melee still stands at the top of the list of games you want to play in the dorms. 

The GameCube controller still is the standard for Smash Brothers. The maps from Melee are still the ones used at Evo. 

And I liked that Melee had an actual adventure mode where you played a fighting platformer. I liked that it had a classic arcade mode. I liked that you had to do specific things to unlock characters like beat Donkey Kong 10 times or play a mode for 20 hours, instead of characters just unlocking every 10 minutes. 

The Wii-U and the Switch games almost feel like too much is going on. There's too much flashiness. Too many trophies popping up. And before you can get your bearing, the fight is over. 

115: Cruisin' World

• Year: 1994
• System: Arcade

Who hasn't sat in the car next to your friend at an arcade, hear the muffled title song for Cruisin' world, 

choose the Egypt map, and off you go. 

Cruisin' World is one of the most recognizable bowling alley arcade cabinets. It's third on the list of things to buy when opening an alley, right after pins and shoes. 

Cruisin' USA was the template, but World is where you got the most diverse tracks. You had Germany with all it's jumps, the frustratingly curvy Italy, and if you wanted your quarter's worth the ever so long Florida. 

Cruisin' World has survived the crash of the arcade industry. You still find this cabinet in most places with more than 3 arcade machines. 

114: Fear Effect

• Year: 2000
• System: PS1

Fear Effect sort of reminded me of Mode 7 games of the SNES era. There was something different about the way this game looked. You couldn't really figure it out on your own and then you'd do a Yahoo! search (year 2000 people) and you would find out it was the backgrounds. 

They were alive and fully in 3D when most of the time for PS1 games, you would have pre-rendered backgrounds to save on processing power. 

So neon lights would sort of flicker on and off. A flying car would drive by. Waves would crash in the background. 

It looked really cool for the time, but because the backgrounds were so complex, the game came on four disks and was relatively short. But in the short period of time you had intrigue, spies, double crossing, puzzles, and of course, zombies. 

113: 007 Nightfire

• Year: 2003
• System: Gamecube

James Bond games are all over the place. You have bad ones like Rogue Agent, acceptable ones like

"The Duel," and classics like Goldeneye. 

Nightfire maybe didn't light the world on fire as much as Goldeneye did, but it's a great and deep game. You alternate mission types. Sometimes you're sneaking into a party to spy on people, sometimes you ride a snow mobile down a mountain at top speeds, and straight run and gun missions. 

For 2003, the models looked great. Most of these early PS2/Gamecube era games looked blocky, but Nightfire did great work.

The game was intelligent. It had mission structure like Perfect Dark where you might need to blend into a crowd to get access to a back hallway, then pick a lock, to get into a room to hack a computer. And sometimes you just needed to shoot your way out. 

112: Catherine

• Year: 2011
• System: PS3

I didn't know what the hell to expect from Catherine. It was in position 12 on my Gamefly queue and I guess every other game I wanted was already taken. So they sent it my way. 

What came in my mailbox was an addictive puzzler where you climbed a block mountain, running from this doom coming up behind you, manipulating and moving blocks so that you could keep progressing. 

It also was this weird Atlus style anime story about a possible demon / angel girlfriend and this guy getting manipulated and ultimately doing a bad thing and paying for it. 

Catherine has been re-released about a dozen times, so there's a good chance you've seen it somewhere, but haven't picked it up. 

111: Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy

• Year: 1991
• System: PC

They invented side scrolling on a PC for this game. SIDE SCROLLING! PCs couldn't handle it at the

time. That's why every game would sort of do the one screen, freeze, move the screen to the next screen. 

Many people tried to do Mario-esque games (that's how we got the Giana Sisters) on the computer, but John Carmack, revolutionary game designer, f*cking did it, just to prove he could. (Read Masters of Doom if you haven't, cause it's incredible). 

Commander Keen took your childhood fantasies and sort of made them work with a platformer. Keen went into battle with a football helmet on his head, a Pogo stick to jump, and a laser. They even had an overworld map before Mario 3 was out in the world. 

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