Top Games of 2023

It's been another incredible year of games. I haven't had time to play everything I've wanted to. There's been a few games that likely have made my top 10 of all time. There's a few I haven't played, that will likely make that list as well. 

Zelda Tears of the Kingdom have changed the sandbox game. No longer can Rockstar or Bethesda phone in their open worlds.  

Balders Gate 3 has moved the line of what a Dungeons and Dragons based RPG should be. 

And Resident Evil 4 Remake is a masterclass in pacing. 

I played many games this year. I'll rank them all. Remember, these are games that I played this year, not necessarily games that came out in 2023. 

Final Fight

I recently got the Capcom beat-em-up collection for the Switch, which is such an interesting look into where games were heading in the late 80s and early 90s. 

Games like Double Dragon and River City Ransom took the world by storm and it seemed like as long as games were on a 2D plain, beat-em-ups were going to have a place in the world. 

I returned to Final Fight for the first time in probably 20 years at this point, and I got thoughts.

Backlog: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Like many Americans, my only exposure to Fire Emblem was the 37 sword characters in Smash Brothers. Fire Emblem just never sounded like a game for me. Maybe part of that was that I constantly got it confused with Dragon Quest. Maybe part of it was that both of those franchises are smashed in my brain as a throwback grinding JRPG. Something I loved in my childhood, but sadly do not have time for anymore. 

Fire Emblem: Three Houses came out when I was traveling a ton and I didn't have any Switch games that were holding my attention. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 40 - 31

40: Legend of Legaia

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

JRPGs were coming out left and right. There was a seemingly endless stream of money for the JRPG subgenre. Hell, Square Enix alone could keep you busy for years. 

Legend of Legaia changed the formula a little. Instead of completely battling via menus, Legend of Legaia had this fun combo system. You would build up a spirit bar and then string together a combo pressing a direction representing each arm and leg. And if you choose a specific combo, it would do extra damage. 

The story is a classic, "young boy in a village must save the world cause some otherworldly force bonded to him." And you run into the sheltered girl and the combat monk guy and god on an adventure resurrecting these magical trees that hold back the evil. The sound track is great, the color pallet really beautiful and bright, and it doesn't overstay it's welcome like other games.  

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.