Hey fans,

just curious, so I'll try and start for myself.

I think "The Last of Us" on PS3 was extraordinary. It sort of brougt me back to were things are now, and could be heading, in games. For starters, the story is about a sci-fi vision of the USA where a virus destroyed most of the population. People either died or mutated to clickers, mutants who are no longer human. You start out as a man finding a young girl who seriously asserts she is immune to the virus. If you find anyone who can understand why, an antivirus might be created. The ending is sort of weird, though...

It's a shooter for the most part, and you are shooting the clickers.

However, it is also a steady reflection on everything we have come to regard as obvious, and given, it probably helps you understand what people a hundred years ago in Europe must have felt like when war was more all-day. I liked that. I thought it was really immersive, the characters steadily pondering on every "wonder" in life they encounter, be it a zoo, children's books, whatever.

What's yours?
Pete

[sek929]

That's not an easy question to answer. Some older games are incredibly fun to play, but very shallow on story and character development. Newer games are beautifully rendered and have depth of plot, but aren't always easy to pick up and start having a blast immediately. Skyrim is like walking around in a painting, Last of Us was a gritty depressing experience, Portal was a near-perfect blend of gameplay and immersion, Metro 2033 & Last Light have the best atmosphere I've ever experience, Fallout presents an amazing amount of lore and world-building, Battlefield is a bombastic online clusterf**k simulator, and the list goes on... It's impossible for me to objectively say newer games are better because they're just fresher in my mind. However, I'm not going to cop out and go all high-brow, so I'll go with my usual answer...

If I had to pick only one videogame to play for the rest of my life I would choose Super Metroid. Super Metroid is a perfect game on every conceivable level. When I first played it at a friend's house I was utterly dumbfounded with how cool it was, and over the years I've re-visited it and discovered new things about it every time. It is the pinnacle of the platforming genre, but also has a sprawling map to explore and all sorts of secrets to find.

The art looks as good today as it did in 1994. The world is exotic and colorful without coming off as childish and the deeper you descend into the planet the more menacing your surroundings become. The ambient music, different for each area you are in, is quite possibly the high point of the "world-building' SM does. Starts off quietly reserved in the overworld, slides into oddly funky in the first few areas, twists into moody and dark at the 3/4 mark and ends off with a imperial-style-march of doom. Easily the best score written for any game I've ever played.

Of course a pretty game is nothing without being fun to play, and fun to play is the name of the game. My only critique is that the game does get a bit easy once you become a spinning indestructible murder blade of a doom, but you can always cheat and bypass most of the game and end up in the final area horribly unprepared if that's your sort of thing. Cheating is not only possible, but actually encouraged by the way the game is set up. Even at the very start of the game you can use a wall-jumping technique to reach areas you might not have considered possible without getting certain upgrades first. There is a whole culture around SM for not only speed-running, but beating the game with the least amount of items possible, which side-steps several bosses and has you running around in areas constantly taking damage because you don't even get the most basic suit in the game. Samus has all sorts of special abilities that are never really apparent or actually needed to beat the game, but once you learn these techniques the whole game can be played in an entirely different order. You're supposed to learn them by finding strange friendly creatures in very secret areas that teach you these tricks by showing them to you, no dialogue, no tool tips.

Finally the game controls are perfect, as you would expect from the flawless Super Nintendo controller, and even the trickiest wall-jump timing can be pulled off without fighting the buttons into submission. The difficulty scales in step with your ever-expanding arsenal and each new ability or upgrade sets off a burst of remembered impassable areas from earlier in your travels. It's the marriage of the open world dungeon crawl of Zelda and the platforming of Mario all mixed together into a game that has no equal.

Honorable mentions: Portal, Half-Life 2, Zelda: Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time, Bioshock, GTA3, Fallout 3, System Shock 2.

[mattyb]

CoD2. The game, the mates that I made - that I still see some summers, the nights bullshitting about all sorts of stuff while drunk and playing on all-rifles servers. More than CoDUO, I think that it set the bar for future online FPSes. The story wasn't bad, but the online was a blast.

[P]

By the "oh my god it's four in the morning!!!"-measure, there can only be one answer: Alpha Centauri. The gameplay was the Civ series refined to its essence (later Civs started cutting stuff and making something different, but 1, 2 and SMAC were evolutions on an idea), the story was really clever, the replayability was the best I've seen...

That doesn't mean that it was perfect, because it wasn't. There were clear flaws, but they were deep enough in that you could forgive it by then... If you didn't get stuck on the boring appearance at launch, that is.

Honorable mentions to a lot of 16bit games. SM being mentioned already, the shoutout goes to Chrono Trigger, a 16bit RPG in the FF tradition.

[subego]

I'm going with GTA III for the simple reason it was finally realized in many cases punishing you for failure is not fun.

The Secret of Monkey Island gets a mention for the exact same reason.

Hmm... Yes, there are a few more for me here, too. I really thought WarCraft 3 was great. To be honest, I also thought the same about the second part. I liked Civilization and The Settlers. I always misses Anno on the Mac, really, but that might be a German phanomenon...
I liked XIII, which had a cartoon style that was really cool. No one mentioned Deus Ex, still great...

[boy8cookie]

Toss up between CoD:MW and Diablo 2:LoD. Both for the experience of playing with friends.

[subego]

In that department, I miss quad-screen Halo.

[Mike Wuerthele]

Co-op campaign/multiplayer death match Halo 3, ODST, Reach. Online buddies alone clinched it for me. We've all since gone our separate ways, but still get together from time to time for mayhem.

Myth 2 came to mind, and lots of add-ons, lego, world war 2, and great online playing...

[KCrosbie]

For me, hands down it's Counter-Strike 1.6/Source. I played that game for years during my college days. It's the only game I ever joined a clan where we had our own website and server as mods. We entered MLG tournaments which required us to really think strategically as a team and communicate to either take the other team down or complete the objective. I studied all the maps like hell and knew them like the back of my hand. If I rushed I knew exactly where I'd run into an enemy if they were rushing as well. The game offered so many player created maps, rules and other game types like gun game which really mixed the game play up nicely. To this day, I still play either CS: Source or the more recent Global Offense.

BTW, if any of you play this, hit me up. I'd be more than happy to hand your ass on a silver platter. My bro Stogie knows this is a fact.

Props to you Sek for mentioning Super Metroid. You should check out Metroid Fusion if you haven't played it.

[Inteldrour]

For me Xbox Halo ... it's the best mp game with my friends everyday