50: Hunter Hunted
- Year: 1996
- System: PC
Aliens have enslaved humans and these Minotaur looking creatures and make them fight for entertainment. You control Jake or Garethe Den (I'll let you figure out which one is the Minotaur) and work together trying to rebuild a car to escape the aliens.
Every level has objectives and exits you must find. And the best part of the game is there are 20 or so co-op levels where you and a friend can play split screen and try to reach the objectives together.
I still have a disk copy of Hunter Hunted, but in a terrible Twilight Zone like episode, no disk drive to be found. I check GOG, Steam, and the Epic Game Store at least a few time a year waiting to see if this gets added to the library.
49: Mass Effect
- Year: 2007
- System: Xbox 360
Mass Effect was the first game on the Xbox 360 to feel huge to me. That first mission you run Eden 
Prime, Bioware gets your buy in on the universe. You quickly start realizing that there was an alliance between humans and aliens, and that there's a trader in your midst.
And soon you get promoted to the first human Spectre to bring the rogue Spectre to justice. And over the next 50 or so hours the world evolves, you player becomes more powerful, and you unravel a much more nefarious plot than a rogue Spectre.
48: Persona 5 Royal
- Year: 2020
- System: PS4
Persona 5 had high expectations. Persona 4 Golden set the world on fire and the followup had a lot of potential to fail. But thank god, Persona 5 became the best selling game in the series.
In Persona 5, you assemble a Phantom Thieves crew. A sort of heist crew that can get into bad people's hearts and change it from the inside.
Royal added an entire extra third of a game, new characters, new areas, new systems to an already incredibly deep game.
47: Prey
- Year: 2017
- System: PS4
This was a reboot of the Prey franchise. You remember that game for the Xbox 360 where you started 
the game in a bar and were a Native American? Well, they completely rebooted it. Instead, this time you're exploring the space station where all sorts of crazy experiments happened including alien stuff!
Of course, the aliens got out, and soon turned most of the space station into corpses.
Prey didn't get the attention I think it deserved. It had elements of Dead Space, Portal, Alien. There were set pieces that rivaled Naughty Dog. There were scares that rivaled The Thing. There was backstory that rivaled Half Life.
I loved every minute of the 30 hours I spent exploring the ship. Checking every corner and desk for everything I could find about the world.
46: Silent Hill
- Year: 1999
- System: PS1
Did you see a shadow? Did you hear some insect clicking from a dark corner? Was that your daughter in the fog?
There was one night where I was playing late with my brothers. I walked through some sort of conference room in the school and I tried to use the phone, but the cord was cut. As I tried to leave the room, the phone rang in the room. I answered and my ghost daughter was on the line. Cut to 30 seconds later where my actual phone rang in real life and just about sent all three of us through the ceiling.
45: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Blacklist
- Year: 2013
- System: Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 generation of Splinter Cell games too the franchise to another level. 
Instead of being incredibly slow and methodical games where you are crawling shadow to shadow, you got tools to "John Wick" your way through a situation if need be.
It also got away from the Tom Clancy over explaining of military terms and using abbreviations and set up a plot you could understand.
The best part about Blacklist though was the co-op. My buddy and I re-ran every mission a billion times, trying to get more efficient, trying to get further in full stealth, trying to get further into the 20 beers we had in the fridge.
44: Super Mario Bros 3
- Year: 1988
- System: NES
So when I was watching the Wizard in theaters and the ending revealed Super Mario Bros 3, I lost my damn mind.
The game did not disappoint. Something as simple as having an overworld map with branching paths and secrets added so much to a game. You had the Tanooki suit, the frog suit, the P-wing, flying ships, 8 bosses.
Mario 3 essentially created the template for everything Mario going forward.
43: Twisted Metal 2
- Year: 1996
- System: PS1
Car combat... you better believe it made the list at least once. Car combat was life from like 1996-2000. 
Vigilante 8, Rogue Trip, and Twisted Metal.
Most of these games felt the same, but the maps are what made them and the way Twisted Metal 2 made their levels dynamic was a game changer. You had the Eiffel Tower in Paris you could destroy opening up new parts of the map. There were the billion paths through the New York Rooftops, almost every building had some way to get inside or destroy the building. (And the bikini clad Statue of Liberty) And what I thought was the coolest, Antarctica, where chunks of glacier would drop the longer you played.
42: Tony Hawk's Pro-Skater 2
- Year: 2000
- System: PS1
But we all know THPS2 is the far superior game. And there's even an argument that THPS3 is better than that.
Some of the most iconic maps were in THPS2 like The hanger, School 2, and the Skatestreet Skatepark.
An entire summer was spent re-running levels, collecting everything, with the ultimate goal of being able to play as Spider-man in Skate Heaven.
41: Super Mario Galaxy
- Year: 2007
- System: Wii
Super Mario Sunshine has it's fans, but ultimately, it was the first major miss for the Italian plumber. 
(You know, cause we don't even consider the Virtual Boy)
So expectations were low for the next Mario. But then the Wii brought a bunch of people back into gaming. So there was a hungry population of people that just remembered Mario 3 and Super Mario World.
Galaxy did not disappoint. Arguably the best Mario game ever made, Galaxy managed to capture the child-like magic of the first time you went to the mushroom kingdom. Across the world, adults were wagging their Wii-motes, craning their necks to match where Mario was running around the planet, and learning how to use gravity or the lack there of to the advantage.
Rumor is, Galaxy HD is coming to Switch next year and I can't wait.
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