Top 200 Games of All Time: 20 - 11

20: Tomb Raider 2

• Year: 1997
• System: PS1

The first dungeon of Tomb Raider 2 has the best string of Indiana Jones-esque traps. Slide down the steep embankment, flip over the spikes, grasp the zip line, and land near a campfire. Wait? A campfire? In the back of this tomb? 

Yeah, Tomb Raider 2 did everything bigger. You're not killing as much innocent wild life. Instead, you're going after Mafia types in Italy, Antarctica, caves. Lara's mansion is opened up a little more and has plenty of secrets. You rode a damn snow mobile, a boat. Lara got vehicles for Christ sake. And you fight a god damned dragon for the finale. 

Tomb Raider 2 took the great concept of the first, but fixed many of the problems of the first. 

19: Star Craft

• Year: 1998
• System: PC

The ultimate rock paper scissor game. Star Craft hit a perfect balance between the three factions. 

Zerg allowed you to cheaply and quickly throw masses of weak creatures at your enemy, creating the term Zerg rush and forever changing a strategy in all RTS games. The Protoss cost a ton of money, but gave us "you must construct additional pylons." And then you had the Terran, which ended up defining the look of the space marine in everything Sci-fi for the next two decades. 

Star Craft is still played competitively 20 years later for a reason. There's not been many RTS games that have come close to the king. 

18: Resident Evil: REmake

• Year: 2002
• System: GameCube

It was sort of insane that Capcom did a from the ground up remake of the original Resident Evil, less than 10 years after it came out. But here we are, and it's a piece of history. 

There weren't many remakes at this point. Metal Gear Solid is sort of a spiritual remake of the NES games, but other than that, I can't think of any. 

And instead of just rebuilding the same game, but higher resolution, they redesigned the mansion to make more sense. They recorded new lines of dialogue. All the puzzles were changed. The game still looks good today, partially because of the tricks they did like model the candle light so that it still reflects off the walls.  

I've memorized basically every Resident Evil game to the point where I can do an almost no gun shot Resident Evil 2 run, but there's something about the twisting corridors of the mansion that still keeps the fog of war in my mind. 

17: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

• Year: 2005
• System: PS2

Metal Gear Solid 3 is a perfect James Bond game. Out of control super villains, some of the best of the

series. (Sniper battle with the old man, the flame throwing Cosmonaut, Bee guy, your fucking mentor)

It has the perfect music queues, even having a parody of the James Bond title sequence song while you climbed a 400 foot ladder. 

Yes, the camo system and the heal system are too many menus deep, but you forget about that because you are playing on a canvas. This game is art. 

You may have noticed by now that when a game is able to make me cry, it generally gets on this list. I cry every single time the credits roll on MGS3. Metal Gear Solid 3 has the best ending to any game ever made. 

I can't wait for Konami to package up all the Metal Gears again, so I can buy a Metal Gear collection for the sixth time. 

16: Condemned: Criminal Origins

• Year: 2005
• System: Xbox 360

Condemned: Criminal Origins was not on my radar. I don't even remember how I ended up with it. Probably some sale or something. 

Condemned is the greatest hits of horror. An abandoned department store filled with creepy mannequins. You've got the school at night time. And a god damned library from hell. 

Condemned is one of the scariest games I've ever played. It's one of the most intense thrillers I've ever played. Condemned belongs in the True Detective universe and would be widely regarded as the best season. All around, Condemned is a complete melding of genres. It makes you feel as if you're playing a true crime story. 

15: Diablo

• Year: 1997
• System: PC

I used to have a Christmas tradition. We would spend all day at my grandma's house, followed by my

aunt's house, just generally having to interact with way too many people. 

We would come home and all I would want to do was have some quiet and listen to some music. I've always been very excited about Christmas and unable to sleep, so I knew I would end up staying awake most of the night anyway. 

I would turn the 24 hour Christmas Story marathon on, boot up Diablo, and do a run and see how far I could get. 

Sure Diablo 2 is a better game, Darkstone may have some life improvements, but Diablo 1 has the memories. 

14: Demon's Souls

• Year: 2009
• System: PS3

This is one of the few unestablished franchises that I preordered a game based off a trailer. I don't know what it was about this trailer, but I felt like this was going to be big. Not only that, but I never buy deluxe editions, but I did that too. 

And sure enough, Demon's Souls hit. (Maybe not as hard as Dark Souls) It was addictive to try to figure out how to get a better run. Fight your way back to the Tower Knight over and over again, only to get crushed over and over again. And when you just didn't have enough poison resistance, you could escape the poisoned swamp and go level up in the magic prison world instead. 

I'm glad we're going to get an HD remaster. This is still my favorite Souls game and I can't wait to play through it again. 

I sold my Deluxe Edition of Demon's Souls a few years later for $220. (Not bad for $80 purchase) and it funded me buying my jungle green Metal Gear Solid PSP. 

13: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

• Year: 2011
• System: PC

I didn't understand Deus Ex in the late 90s. I was still in the mindset that FPSs were run and gun, dodge

and hodge (?). I didn't know there was this thinking man's shooter. 

So when Deus Ex was rebooted with Human Revolution, it was a life affirming game. You can play Deus Ex guns a blazing, sneaking around, being charismatic as hell. There's even an achievement for beating the game without killing anyone. 

It's one of those games where you can see an alternate path and get frustrated because you don't have the perk to use it. 

The sequel was a little tone deaf and probably killed another game in the current series, but I'm hoping that Square will give the franchise another chance on the next generation. 

12: Duke Nukem 3D

• Year: 1996
• System: PC

Duke Nukem 3D was a refreshing pallet swap of Doom. While everything in Doom had sort of the same dark colors of the moon base, Duke Nukem 3D had brightly colored cities, apartments, and even a moon base. 

On top of that, the humor was perfect for 12 year old me. You could see pixelated boobies on the strippers. You could hear Duke quip sexual innuendos. I thought Duke Nukem was so cool, I actually wrote three Duke Nukem comic books. 

I had Duke fever so hard, I also learned how to setup a LAN so I could play deathmatches against my brothers in our house. I even got into the mod scene and figured out how to swap out map files to essentially have unlimited Duke Nukem. 

11: Final Fantasy IV

• Year: 1991
• System: SNES

Final Fantasy IV (North America) was the first time I felt like 2D sprites could convey real emotion.

You felt the hit when the twins sacrificed themselves. You wanted to rise to be a Paladin. 

And the sprites, look at that beautiful bastard next to this. That's a damn good looking sprite. 

Final Fantasy IV was the first time I felt games could be more than just a simple platformer or a simple sports game or a simple racing game.  If was the introduction to a lot of the Final Fantasy menu styles, job types, even names that are still used in Final Fantasy games. 

Final Fantasy IV still holds up as an epic adventure in some medieval setting. If you play a ROM, be sure not to save scum like your boy did. You may just save yourself in a dungeon you can't survive. 

• 200-191
• 190-181
• 180-171
• 170-161
• 160-151
• 150-141
• 140-131
• 130-121
• 120-111
• 110-101
• 100-91
• 90-81
• 80-71
• 70-61
• 60-51
• 50-41
• 40-31
• 30-21

Top 200 Games of All Time: 30 - 21

30: Amnesia: The Dark Descent

• Year: 2010
• System: PC

I don't know if I've played a game that has gotten me as worked up as Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The only weapon you have is light and that light is at a premium. 

You don't know why you wake up in a giant castle. And at first, you don't really know there's an evil lurking underneath. That is until the first time your torch blows out and all of a sudden, there's something going bump in the night. 

And you dig deeper into the catacombs, you come across the water monster, one of the scariest scenes in games ever. My heart was in my throat the entire time. Eventually you make your way to the dungeon where things get more and more tense. 

The Top 200 Games of All Time: 150 - 141

See games

• 200-191
• 190-181
• 180-171
• 170-161
• 160-151

150: Grand Theft Auto IV

• Year: 2008
• System: Xbox 360

Grand Theft Auto never really sunk in for me. I hated driving, I hated gun fights, I hated racing, I hated staying fit, getting hair cuts, driving across town, getting murdered by the dumb physics, driving across the neighborhood, the final missions, and driving in general. 

I sort of lucked into Grand Theft Auto IV. I was grocery shopping at a Wal Mart around midnight and saw the huge line. I sort of thought, what the hell, let's see if they still have a copy. Well, the ended up splitting the line to open another register and guess who was second all of a sudden? This guy. 

I took it home and let it download all night long. And when I got home from work the next day, I started my journey. 

Don't get me wrong, I still hated the driving and the gun play was still bad, but I liked the characters. I wanted to see what the game had to offer. I saw it through and generally enjoyed it. There was still one of those classic annoying Grand Theft Auto final missions where you're driving while shooting, my two least favorite things combined into one 20 minute mission. 

Where I got the most out of this game though is the sandbox online mode. My two friends and I would load up, get weapons, and then choose where we were going to dig in and see how long we could outlast the cops. 

149: Dragon Quest Builders 2

• Year: 2018
• System: Switch

This is going to be the most shameful thing I say in this entire project, but I've never played Minecraft. 

I skipped out on it when it first came out because I wasn't doing much computer gaming at the time. And then by the time it was available on consoles, Notch turned out to be a terrible person. 

But I get it. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is an absolute delight. The towns people give you a request (build a bathhouse, build a barn) and as you fulfill their requests, the town gets larger and you get more tools. I spent way too much time in the second village area building and building and un-necessary building. 

If I had one complaint, it's that the combat gets in the way of my fun. I think you could completely remove that aspect and the game would be better for it. 

148: Army Men 3D

• Year: 1999
• System: PS1

This is the best Toy Story game ever made. No, it's not a licensed Toy Story product, but you played as the little green army men against the tan army men. Most of the game takes place in what seem like real battle fields, but then the tan army gets a hold of a weapon that can harness the sun's power and melt the green army. 

This game advertised to kids had a vast array of kind of complicated missions. You might need to sweep a mine field, or sneak on your belly into an enemy encampment, or drive a tank through an entire battalion of tan soldiers. 

The best part was the split screen two player deathmatch mode. One day in a particularly hard fought battle with my brother, I accidentally found a secret path up a mountain and outside of the map. But it was designed out. It wasn't like I clipped through the map where I wasn't supposed to be. There was a mortar up there and a Tinker Toy. When I picked up the Tinker Toy, it flashed "key." I spent the next year in a web ring with a dozen other enthusiasts trying to uncover what the keys do. We found two other keys in the multiplayer levels, but never figured out what they did. 

Finally, I got the idea to just email 3DO and a few days later, I got something from one of the devs. He basically said the keys don't do anything, they just thought it would be a fun Easter Egg. 

147: Jackal 

• Year: 1986
• System: NES 

Jackal was inspired by 1980s love affair of everything American military was cool. Drive a jeep around

with your buddy firing machine guns and grenades at everything. 

Your objective is to clear the enemy out of maps while rescuing POWs. This was actually the part I enjoyed the most, you could blow a hole in the side of a building and between 1-5 POWs would jump into your jeep. Then at the halfway point and end point of the mission a helicopter would land and allow you to unload your crew while dodging rockets coming from tanks and foot soldiers.

The immediate thing you'll notice is the striking color pallet. Your army green jeep is dropped from an airplane onto bright orange desert. 

In some ways this was a more intelligent 1942. The enemies felt like they were real people in Jackal instead of just swarms driving face first into your guns. 

146: Zork: Grand Inquisitor

• Year: 1997
• System: PC

There was an 8 year period, where if you were going to release a PC game, it was either a flight simulator (Tie Fighter), a point-and-click adventure (Maniac Mansion), or a graphic adventure puzzle game (Myst). Zork fell in that last category, except unlike Myst, it didn't take itself seriously. 

Zork is basically Harry Potter meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's an entire world where magic and wizards exist in a sort of modern sense. The jokes all poke fun at how stupid everything is. 

It did have one thing in common with Myst, some of the puzzles were impossible without just trying every object on every object. I would've never gotten through this game without Gamefaqs. 

145: The Unholy War

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

The Unholy War was a surprise. When I was broke as can be, I would buy used PlayStation 1 games

from Blockbuster. I had only seen advertisements for the Unholy War, but I couldn't really understand what it was. It sort of looked like a third person fighting game with monsters, but maybe it had some real time strategy elements?

And the answer is yes. It was a board game, where you could spawn more troops if you managed resources properly. And when you rode up on an enemy, the game would turn into a fighting game between the two chess pieces. 

This was one of the best two player games on the PlayStation. A game that flew under mosts radar, but should have been held up as one of the top games for the platform. 

144: Bust-a-Move 4

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

There's two ways to have your match color/shape puzzle games. The ones like Tetris and Dr. Mario where the pieces drop at you or the ones where you shoot a piece at the board, like Bust-a-Move. 

I always preferred the Bust-a-Move style games. I felt like my brain handled the anxiety better and I was able to see patterns and combos easier. 

Bust-a-Move features our favorite dinosaurs, Bubble and Bobble, firing colored orbs toward the top of the screen, trying to knock like colors down. I played this for hours on the PS1. It was an addiction. 

143: Borderlands

• Year: 2009
• System: Xbox 360

Diablo, but a first person shooter, with humor, a cool art style, and split screen co-op? Unheard of in the

modern era. I thought couch co-op was dead. There were too many nights where a buddy and I would sit on the couch, intention just to have a beer before going out, and just scrapping out plans and getting Borderlands drunk together. 

The excitement of the random stat die everytime you picked up a weapon. Wanting to know what psychopathic boss was waiting around the corner. Desperately trying to sprint from the spawn point before you partner died. Untouchable fun for games at the time. 

142: Sid Meier's Civilization VI

• Year: 2016
• System: Switch

I'm a strategy fiend. I've been waiting for something to come to a portable system forever. Civilization was teased on the Vita, but ultimately we got a phone game port. 

Civ VI works better than it has any right to be. The switch controls are incredibly intuitive for a game that usually you are shortcutting your way around a keyboard on. 

This is a classic, "One more turn" game. You start counting your moves until the next upgrade is finished. And when the enemy is at your gates, you have to decide to finish out other upgrades or immediately throw every military unit you can crank out at the threat. 

141: Gladiator 

• Year: 1995
• System: PC

The wild west of the shareware period of PC gaming had me playing some really weird shit that a dude

in his basement programmed. I spent hours downloading a single 500 KB game from "FreeGamedemos.com." 

Most of those games were crap and I would end up deleting them immediately, trying not to think too much of the wasted modem time. 

Gladiator by Forgotten Sages was one of those rare winners. You had a budget and could build out a team of adventurers to fight an enemy army. It was four player co-op, and my two brothers and I would crowd around a keyboard, trying to get at the 9 buttons we needed to move and attack. 

Gladiator is available on the Internet Archive to play. However, the pre-WASD keyboard mapping strikes again. It's basically unplayable because Esc is used so often, which is also the key to exit the emulator. 

Spoopy Games: Silent Hill

With Halloween quickly approaching, I figured I'll do what every other gaming blog and site does. It's time to cram lists of spooooookkky games down your throats.

Today, I'm focusing on the Silent Hill series.

A series that got in early on the survival horror game and one that Konami seemed to keep it's hands off of through the first several.

Silent Hill's foggy town was often used to sell the PlayStation 2. It's demonic scenes and story line kept large portions of the mainstream away from it. It's influence has spread to both games and film, becoming more than a Resident Evil clone. Silent Hill is a survival horror pillar that will forever be talked about in video game history.

My Favorite Hockey Games

I was left behind with hockey games early in the PS1 life. I liked my simple 2-3 button hockey. I couldn't understand how to flip pass, precision shoot, or play zone defense in the 3D world.

Things got too complicated for me and instead of doubling down and learning it, I just didn't play a single hockey game from NHL '97 (John Vanbiesbrouck cover) until NHL '13 (Claude Giroux).

I found I could run the net in NHL '13 and score sometimes. It was more fun with couch co-op with someone that knew what they were doing. With a friend, I could put together a pretty solid season.

Then I skipped a few years. Despite the cringiness of having to look at rival Jonathan Toews on my PlayStation home page lifting the cup, I bought NHL '16 and to my surprise the game clicked.

So, in honor of my boy Tarasenko being on the cover of NHL '17, I thought I'd dig out my favorite hockey video games of the past.