#0: Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor (2008)

As I said before, this list is “genre based”, in that I tried to make sure that no basic gaming genre ended up with more than one entry. Whether this was a wise decision or one which ultimately renders the list pointless, I will let the pundits and historians argue over for time immemorial. Is it a travesty that I left off such definite top-10 material as Half-Life, Robotron: 2084, and Barbie Fashion Show? Of course. But I don’t care, because I am HOUSE.

However, I did have a tough time picking the 4X winner. As much admiration as I have for the Civ games, the fact is that there is one 4X game which I have played far more, and enjoyed far more, than any other, and it is Galactic Civilizations.

As much as I wanted to, though, I couldn’t, with any sense of integrity as a gaming expert, pick GC, because the fact is that when it was released in 2003, it was already way behind the times.

You could only play as one race (humans). Lots of other races in the game, but you could only play as that one. No multiplayer. No ship design — there were a handful of stock ships you could research, but that was all you got. The very thought of releasing a space 4X game with a straight face, in 2003, with these limitations, is almost inconceivable.

And yet, it was the most fun 4X game I’ve ever played. I loved it primarily for two reasons:

1. Even with the aforementioned limitations, it still had a perfect blend of style, panache, and charm that no other 4X game had ever matched. There was still a depth to it, multiple victory routes, a robust trading and diplomacy system, but it was all done so smoothly, with such great humor and obvious love, that it was even more impossible to put down than the most state-of-the-art 4X games. The game’s complexity was masked by a uniquely well-designed UI and a lighthearted (but not cartoonish) touch which made just one more turn way too compelling. And though it was clearly an independently developed game, the quality level was strikingly high. The graphics weren’t going to wow anybody, but too they weren’t a giveaway that it was an indie game. And it still has the best, most memorable orchestral soundtrack of any game I know.

2. I gained most of my GC experience while living in Boulder, CO, without a job, and recovering from getting my tits lopped off. Of course, now I’m so fat that they’ve grown back again, so the entire thing was a waste of time and money, but what was NOT a waste of time and money were the drugs that I was prescribed for the post-operative pain. These were Percoset and Ambien, to be taken together, and friends, to say that playing GC on Percoset and Ambien is the most fun thing ever is not an understatement. Of course, neither is it an understatement to say that anything you do while on Percoset and Ambien is the most fun thing ever, so this perhaps skewed my opinion somewhat.

No matter, it was definitely my favorite 4X game — my favorite computer game — ever.

Now, I put it away for a while, and waited patiently for Galactic Civilizations II to come out. Which it eventually did, in 2006. This was an important milestone, because GC2 finally brought the franchise into the 90s, adding such not-quite-obsolete-yet features as being able to play other races, being able to design ships, and introducing “3D” graphics, letting you rotate and zoom the map however you’d like.

This was all very exciting, and yet… something was wrong. For all of the new additions, something seemed to have been taken away. There was more to do, but doing it seemed clunkier. You could rotate and zoom the map, but it didn’t seem to add anything except slower framerates and difficulty finding a layout that made the map as easy to read as the old 2D map in the original game. The 3D ships looked clunky and added nothing. The humor and charm still seemed to be there, but even that part of the implementation seemed rough, unfinished. And you could play as any race, but all that seemed to change is what color the border around the screen was, and how your ships looked.

In short, it made me miss GalCiv. And that upset me so much that I just disavowed the franchise entirely.

Until!

On April 30, 2008, Stardock released Twilight of the Arnor, the second expansion pack for GC2. I hadn’t bought the first expansion, and certainly was not going to get this one. That’s when the reviews started showing up, claiming that this was no mere expansion pack. This was to be the last offering in the GC2 line, and the developers just went insane trying to put everything they could possibly manage into it, knowing it would have to hold off GC fans for at least a few years until GC3 came around.

I so much wanted to love this franchise again. I so much wanted to give it another chance. So finally, I caved.

So friends, here is the verdict:

Holy fucking shit.

To call this an expansion pack really does not tell the story. Much more accurate would be to call it Galactic Civilizations 2.5. You have to understand what they did here:

- All races now have their own tech tree and look/feel. That’s 12 different tech trees for 12 different races and 12 different themes. That is frigging huge. Now there is a reason to play other races, and feel like you’re not just playing the Red guy or the Green guy.

- The entire graphic engine was overhauled. The map all of a sudden seems to jump to life, and the ships have all been overhauled to look, there’s no other way to put it, bad ass.

- The UI has undergone countless changes and now runs smoother than a roll-on deodorant. Ship design is still available, but now the computer will design them for you if you don’t feel like having to micromanage that stuff.

- All of the wit and whimsy shines through more magnificently than ever.

- Ladies and gentlemen, the FUN is BACK.

And when the fun is back in the GC world, that can only mean one thing:

Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor is the 0th best game of all time.

(And the music is still fabulous.)

#1: Civilization IV (2005)

My history with the Civilization games is checkered at best. I remember when the original first came out. I was right there in line to buy it the day it was released. I bought it along with another game which I don’t remember. I brought them both home and started playing the other game. I hadn’t even opened Civilization when Doug “Finsternis” Linder came over, saw the box, said “I’ve heard this is really good, can I borrow it?” and I said sure.

He left with the box that night, and I never got it back. I didn’t much care, either. I’ve had a lifelong ego struggle with this man, and even back then I knew that if there was something he liked so much that I couldn’t get even a borrowed copy back from him, it certainly wasn’t anything I wanted anything to do with. So I missed it. That’s okay, I didn’t even know what a “4X” game was.

To the uninitiated: “4X” refers to “explore, expand, exploit, exterminate”, a type of strategy game in which you generally find yourself in the middle of a large, unknown map, then set about 1) exploring the area, 2) building cities or military units in order to expand the amount of territory and resources you control, 3) wash, rinse, repeat until you’ve blown up all the competing players or otherwise found a way to victory or defeat.

My very first experience with a 4X game would come later, ironically with a much older game. I had to work late one night, just to monitor some overnight job for hours on end, and that same Doug “Finsternis” Linder handed me a worn, dogeared floppy disk with a game called Empire on it, and suggest I use that to while away the long, boring hours. Well, it had been years since he’d played it, so I figured that was enough time for the “Doug germs” to die and fall off of the game’s packaging, so I loaded that sucker up.

I started a game of Empire, and before I was able to finish it, and before I knew it, it was 3 AM and the job was over and it was time to go. I never went back to Empire because of the obsolete graphics and unwieldy user interface, and also because I could still smell some Doug on it, but one thing I learned that night was that the 4X genre was the finest, most addictive, most compelling genre of computer game that I would ever come across.

As an aside, I’d like to give you a sense of how terribly addictive this type of game can be. There is another venerable 4X franchise, set in space, called “Galactic Civilizations”. I was a huge fan of the first game and played it for countless hours while I was taking my year-and-a-half “finding myself” tour of the country. At the end of a game, if your score was high enough, you could have it automatically posted to the GalCiv website for all to see.

All I remember was that there was one guy, named “Technician”, who would play the game every single day, once a day, with the game set to the exact same settings every day — highest difficulty level, small galaxy, same number and type of enemies. He owned the first page or two of the all-time high score list. He had obviously mastered the game, at least with these (extremely difficult) settings, as he would win every single day. Not a loss on his record.

I looked back through the history, and he had been doing this for months. More than a handful of months, at that. Once a day. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening. Eventually I asked the guy, you’ve obviously mastered the game, you’re obviously never going to lose, why on Earth would you do this day after day, month after month?

He said, simply, he enjoyed it.

That’s how addictive it is.

Shortly after that first encounter with Empire, Empire Deluxe was released, and that remains to this day the only computer game I’ve ever faked an illness so I could stay home and play it the day after I got it.

I told Doug about my affinity for these games, and he suggested I go back and try Civilization, since it was, in his words, like “super-Empire”. I couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful, but still my repugnance for this man’s tastes and suggestions was stronger than my desire for a super-Empire game, so still I steered clear.

I would have to wait for Civilization II to truly get my first taste of the game that I bought and never played, lo those many years ago.

It was, truly, super-Empire. Turns and hours just melted away for weeks on end. It was, and still is, hard to believe that a game could have that strong a hold on a player for that much time. It truly is one of those games which just never gives you a reason to stop playing, all the way up until the game ends, which in Civ II’s case could have been 10-20 hours in the future. And then there’s not that much reason to not fire it right back up again.

Since those days, 4X games have come and gone, even another Civ game had come and gone. People didn’t like Civ III but at that time in my life I wasn’t playing games much, so I’m not sure why.

Then Civ IV came out and it was like that night with Empire all over again. I was under the spell again. The perfect gaming genre had won me over again. But this was different. You could fire up the worst 4X game in the world and it’ll still draw you in for a few hours before you realize how much it sucks. As my hours with Civ IV went on, though, it began to occur to me that this might not just be the best genre, but the perfect entry into it.

The graphics were, for the first time, not merely functional, but very beautiful. The lush landscapes seem to come alive on your screen in a way no 4X game has managed. In one of the more impressive special effects I’ve seen in any game of any kind, you may seamlessly zoom in to a single city square, and hear all of the bustle and music within the city, and then zoom back out again so far that you are floating in the solar system, seeing and rotating the entire globe, hearing nothing but wind and emptiness. Sure, you can’t hear wind in space, that’s not the point. Does it affect the strategy or game design? No. Does it finally raise the 4X genre to the level of art?

Absolutely, and with poetic flourish.

The rest of the game is similarly polished and wonderful. World Wonders, when accomplished, bring back the little movies from Civ II, but this time fully computer-generated and magnificent. Leonard Nimoy’s voice resonates with the perfect balance of studiousness and whimsy. The icons are all clear. Everything you need to know about the game is no more than two mouse clicks away. Everything is spelled correctly. Search the game from nook to cranny, and everything is just right.

On the gameplay front, 4X has never been deeper. It is not just about territory. Layers upon layers of shifting power overlay the landscape, offering countless ways to “expand and exploit”, from religion, to cultural influence, to economic power, to resource monopolization. It is like several games in one, all being played at the same time, and all brutally effective at sucking away your time and brainpower.

And they even managed to make the gameplay smoother than all of the predecessors. Games are mercifully shorter now, without losing any of the punch.

This is the desert island game, the last and only game you will ever need. You will never be done with it, and the only way to lose is to stop playing. Everything else is endlessly joyous, endlessly fun, and essentially flawless.

Civilization IV is the greatest game of all time.

#2: Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999)

Before there was Mall Tycoon, and Zoo Tycoon, and Crackhouse Tycoon, and Auschwitz Tycoon, there was Rollercoaster Tycoon. Let me start the review with the end of the review, which is that there still has never been a better “building” game, and RCT does what it does with such perfection, freedom, and joy, that it shakes free from the bonds of its own genre to become one of the greatest games in history (some would say, the second best.)

But besides all that, it’s important to point out that RCT is one of two games, along with Microsoft Flight Simulator, which actually changed my life in a non-trivial way.

The background is that I’d loved coasters as a child, and spent significant chunks of time “designing” and drawing coasters wherever I could, on blackboards, in the margins on papers, on book covers, etc. Something about the mixture of the elegant curves of the structure, along with the promise of fun and excitement, just spoke to me. The family’s yearly trip to Kings Dominion was the highlight of my young life. I wanted to be a roller coaster when I grew up.

Then, something happened, I grew up, I left home, and coasters just disappeared from my life.

In 1999, my coworker Justin and I saw a downloadable demo and (on company time and equipment), installed it and fired it up. We both sat there transfixed, fiddling with the controls, realizing that, holy crap, this would actually let you build the coasters you had rolling around in your head all these years. Seems he was in the same boat, and something about this game was rekindling flames which once burned brightly in our youths but were sadly extinguished. We vowed that day to go out and buy the game the day it was released. And we did.

Many, many hours were spent with the game that weekend. That’s the point where we realized that Six Flags Great Adventure was just down the road, and after not having had the joy of clickety-clacking up a lift hill for far too many years, we got our ride on in a big way.

And, man, that was it. We were both gleefully, immaturely hooked all over again. This newly re-found obsession culminated in a two week trip spanning most of the northeast quadrant of the country, and the enjoyment of over 120 different coasters all over the US in about a two-year span. Coasters were my life, all over again, and it was a time which I will always remember fondly, and which was just too much fun to begin to describe.

And all of that can be traced directly back to this game, which reminded me of one of the great loves of my life.

None of that is enough to qualify it for being the second best game of all time, though. What IS enough, is that it is about a hundred games in one, and manages to do them all superbly, and tie them together into a magnificent whole, with unlimited replay, and unlimited capacity for creative expression and, damn it all to hell, fun.

The coaster building part was revolutionary. The economic model was perfect. The animations and individual tracking of thousands of park visitors was astounding. The pathway design, park decoration, theme building, landscaping, and advertising parts, all perfectly able to occupy hours of time on their own, were nothing but beautiful, in terms of UI design, pacing, variety, graphics, sound, all of it. The game world is a huge canvas, full of unlimited potential, onto which your only job was to paint a good time.

And that’s the last thing which makes RCT special. It is one of the few games that have been purely about fun, and in which nothing bad could ever happen. Look at the other games in this list. In one way or another, they are all about killing something, or not getting killed, or avoiding disaster, or blowing something up, or struggling through obstacles, etc, etc. This is the case for 99% of all games ever, as far as I can tell. RCT had none of that. The worst that could happen was, other than a little nausea, people would be sad that you didn’t have rides they wanted to ride on. Nobody to kill, nobody to be killed, no treasures to protect. The purpose of the game was to generate as much fun and joy as you could. If you didn’t do well, you only generated a little joy. If you excelled, you created much joy. The currency of the game was fun and excitement. Even the granddaddy, SimCity (which could have very well been on this list itself), forced you to deal with things like crime, and fire, and natural disasters, and pollution.

RCT’s world, and its gameplay, were a perfect respite for all of life’s struggles and ills. You had fun creating fun. There was really no way to lose. The ultimate tool for putting a smile on your face.

The fact that it did everything so goddamn great was just a bonus.

NOTE: The game originally scheduled for this slot was CounterStrike. But then I thought, well, that’s not really fair to Half-Life, which could also be right in the same spot. But I don’t want to fill up the rest of the list with games of the same genre, so I knew I had to pick one. Totally different games, of course, but the FPS genre definitely needed to be represented by one of them. I went back and forth on it a lot. Counterstrike, Half-Life? Half-Life, Counterstrike? Multiplayer mayhem with a bunch of 14 year olds with foul mouths, or boxes and barrels as far as the eye can see?

It was a difficult decision, but late last night, after much soul-searching, as well as searching for CDs in the unpacked cardboard boxes in the garage and reinstalling games, the answer finally became clear:

#3: FAR CRY (2004)

The most vivid recollection I have of any moment in my history of computer gaming occurred about 30 seconds after I loaded up Wolfenstein 3D for the first time. I downloaded it just because I had been a fan of the 2D version of the game, and didn’t really have any idea what I was about to experience, so when the first screen came up and had me staring straight at the door to my cell, I thought, “hey, cool!” and started hunting around the keyboard to figure out what I needed to type to make the door open. In the middle of this exercise, my arm accidentally brushed my mouse… That’s when I looked up at the screen, and everything had… changed. I grabbed the mouse and moved it around a little, and the room spun and skewed right along with the mouse movements.

Hooooly shit.

In my little universe, the whole world of gaming had completely changed in that one little moment. There had never been anything like it. You were there, and you had full range of motion. You could do whatever you want (except, in Wolfie’s case, go up or down or eat anything other than chicken legs and dog food.) The FPS genre had been born.

In the fifteen years since, FPS and the technology behind it have enjoyed something of a binary relationship, as each continued to push the other forward to greater and greater heights. Things absolutely inconceivable even a handful of years ago have become commonplace. Unprecented levels of immersion and reality are achieved seemingly with every new release.

And yet, for the most part, every FPS game is still just Wolfenstein. You’d grab your gun, you’d go through some corridors, you’d shoot some bad guys, wash, rinse, repeat. Doom came out, which was Wolfenstein with stairs and demons and blinking lights. Half-Life came out and revolutionized the frigging genre, but when you stopped to really look at it, it’s still just Wolfie, with some trains and vehicles (and boxes and barrels) thrown in. Even in Half-Life 2, with its expansive outdoor environments, the gameplay is no different from when you are inside. You’re still pretty much in well-defined (often contrived) corridors, running through the levels like a well-armed rat in a maze, looking for chicken legs and dog food.

Far Cry starts out much the same way, and as you head down the first corridor, it is difficult to think that this is going to be anything more than another souped-up, high-tech version of Wolfenstein 3D.

And then you climb up out of that sewer and get your first look at the lush foliage, swaying palm trees, and expansive white beaches which lay in front of you.

Hoooooly shit.

If Far Cry had just done the whole “expansive playfield” thing, and just done the “pretty island” thing, it wouldn’t have been anything special. What makes it special is that it does absolutely everything else within its gorgeous environment right. Your very first experience outside the sewer, sneaking from hut to hut, is just exhilirating. Swimming through the cove, avoiding patrol boats and trying to get to the hole in the side of the carrier is spine-tingling. Hiding in the bushes and taking out some smug asshole with a headshot from 200 yards away is wonderful. And sitting in the middle of a huge hill, hearing footsteps searching for you, while the palm trees continue to sway, tropical birds flood the sky above you, and the great, shining blue expanse of ocean hissing behind you is just not an experience that you are going to get in any other game at any other price. It is the most replayable FPS I know, not because anything’s different the second or third time, but just because, wow. It’s like a virtual Club Med, but one where you get to shoot people in the face.

It came out well before Half-Life 2, and outdoes it in nearly every respect, except for Far Cry’s middle section, which essentially is Half-Life 2, and which is its weakest element. HL2′s vaunted physics engine has nothing over Far Cry except for silly puzzles involving the gravity gun. Doom 3 does not even come close.

It is the best entry yet in the world of first-person shooters, and deserves any accolade you can throw at it.

Epilogue: In my Caltrops review, I mention that at the time (and even as early as two weeks ago) I didn’t have a computer capable of running Far Cry at anything over the lowest graphical settings. Even at those lame settings, it was an unforgettable experience. I reinstalled last night to try it out on my new fancy graphics card, and set all the settings to “very high”, and it’s almost like a brand new game. Stunning. Phenomenal. And really, really good.

#4: ASTEROIDS

Asteroids is one of those games which gets exponentially better the better you get at it. I know this for a fact because it is one of only three games I can think of (including the next game on this list) which I ever considered myself really, genuinely good at.

For a while, it was inconceivable to me that anyone could possibly think that Asteroids was not, by far, the greatest coin-operated arcade game that has ever been. Then I got a chance to see some people play it, and what I saw was a lot of spinning around in the center of the screen, firing almost blindly out into the sea of angular vector shapes, stopping only to hit the “hyperspace” button whenever a rock got too close to the ship.

I can see how, when played in this fashion, the game would seem to be something less than incredible. However, every true Asteroids enthusiast can remember the first time they ventured over to try out that “thrust” button, then did his first “dodge-spin-fire” move. The game changes completely once you break this barrier, and the pure beauty and brilliance of its seemingly simple design begin to be uncovered.

It is still one of the few games in game history which offer the player complete freedom of movement, and the playfield is remarkably big in comparison to your ship, so there’s a lot of that freedom. As much as could be expected from an early video game, for all intents and purposes, you do feel cast out into a huge, uncaring universe to fend for yourself against harsh natural elements (and an occasional alien), and there’s nothing there to save you except for your own wits, techniques and strategies.

Asteroids is still used as training and practice for air traffic controllers, and for good reason. After you play for a while and gain some level of skill, your field and acuity of vision really begin to increase, to the point where while you cannot list one-by-one every rock on the screen, you realize that you instinctively still know where they all are, where they’re going, and what patterns they will take a half-second, a second, two seconds from now. You begin to see the entire screen all at once. Once you attain that level of what can only be called “enlightenment”, you begin to react instinctively. The game experience becomes fluid, as if you are in a never-ending dance with the rocks, and while you realize you are expending no energy thinking about what to do, still your fingers know where to move. The game begins to play you.

It is an exhilirating experience, and one which I believe is unique, definitely in arcade gaming, and possibly in video gaming in a larger sense.

And it still only costs a quarter.

#5: WARCRAFT III

I felt almost ashamed, picking up my box of WarCraft III and heading to the checkout aisle that fateful day. I had many reasons for this shame, but chief among them were these:

1. For the first and only time I could remember, at least in the world of gaming, I was succumbing to group mentality. I swear, when you walked into Frye’s Electronics that day, there was no way to avoid running into hundreds of boxes of WC3. If you discount the giant stand-up display which hit you when you first walked in, and which housed a couple hundred copies, and then went on to discount the four shelves stocked to the hilt with more boxes (and action figures and other hazerai), then you’d still be left with hundreds MORE boxes which clogged little displays at the end of each aisle lining the entire computer software section. Obviously, if you did not own WarCraft III, this instant, you were a completely worthless piece of human garbage, who was going to be forced to leave the store in a special line, at the end of which a group of store employees would point at you and laugh as you sulked out the door. Never mind that I hadn’t played any of the previous WarCrafts. Never mind that I hadn’t played ANY real-time strategy game, save for the first couple tutorial missions of “classics” like Earth: 2150 and Conquest: Frontier Wars, which were bought, installed, fiddled with for 30 minutes and then never touched again. Never mind all that, I just HAD to HAVE THIS GAME! WHATEVER IT WAS! BECAUSE EVERYONE WAS BUYING IT! Pathetic.

2. There were four different box designs, each featuring the visage of a representative from one of the four races portrayed in the game. I chose the Night Elf box because her face was so goddamn hot. I had just turned 30, but felt like the 14-year-old drooling nerd boy which I realize I was, just 16 years hence.

Naturally, I was happy to finally get out of there, go home, install the game, lick the front of the box a few times, and finally get back into the whole RTS game!

And just as naturally, after the first tutorial mission fired up, and I had to draw a box around a guy and then right click somewhere, I remembered that I hated RTS games. Oh well.

But full price at that time was $60, and I’d be damned if I was gonna shell out that kind of jing, and suffer the humiliation of succumbing to my sheeplike surrender to groupthink and marketing, just to give up after 30 minutes. So I pressed on.

Given my checkered history with computer games, I think the best and only review I need give to WC3 is that it is the first, and as of this writing, still the only, RTS game that I’ve ever completed.

What made it different? To me, the difference between WC3 and the rest of the RTS world is, I would later find out, what really separates all of the Blizzard RTS games from their competitors, and that is: STYLE.

You could go all “eh, all RTSes are basically just harvest, build, rush” and while that may be true to an extent, what kept me harvesting, building, and rushing with WC3 long after I’d have shelved a lesser game was the consistent richness and quality of the world that it created, and the perfection to which it attains these goals. It tells a story with the artistry of the deftest bard. It oozes style, and always in support of the greater vision of the game. Everthing about the game is like this. The opening cinematic is the best opening cinematic I’ve ever seen. The main menu is still the greatest main menu I’ve click around in a game. The whole thing is just solid.

And besides that, you have just a rock-solid RTS game, with just enough complexity to keep you on your toes and provide the richness and variety of strategies which you’d want, without straying too far from the tried-and-true conventions. “Hero” units, as well as the occasional non-base-building missions, give a nod to RPG-style character building, which provides a much needed and welcome break from the hordes (pun slightly intended) of faceless warriors which you’ll be cranking out by the hundreds.

After completing WC3, I went back to WC2 to learn a little about the game’s lineage, and to see why some people still maintained that the previous game was better. For its time, and budget, it too was an exemplary picture of how solid a product could be brought out if a company was committed enough. But to me, it still seemed like nothing but preamble to the glorious, unmatched main course which WarCraft III ended up bringing to the table.

And come on, that Night Elf was hot.

#7: GRAND THEFT AUTO III

Perhaps the greatest testament to this game’s greatness, if you can get past the astonishing technical achievement it represented, is the fact that it might have been even better without the actual “game” part of it. If they’d packaged it up and shipped it out with the instructions, “Here, here’s a fucked up city. Do whatever the fuck you want”, it would still rank at least seventh on this list. My greatest memories of this game have nothing to do with the storyline, or any of the missions, or any of the characters. In fact, I cannot, sitting here writing this, remember what the story was, or who any of the characters were, including the PC.

What I do remember is spending hour after hour whipping around town, stealing the coolest car I could find, seeing what goofy shit and brutal violence I could let loose upon Liberty City, a city so perfectly and vividly realized that I would occasionally even stop for red lights. There was and never will be a reason to do it, but every once in a while, I’d do it anyway. Then I’d shoot a cop in the head and steal his car. It’s that kind of game.

Is the game bad for our children? Yes, yes, it most definitely is. It is the first and only game I’ve ever felt that about. Even its sequels, rife with foul language and nakediddity pale in comparison, because the shock had worn off. But this game is definitely bad for our children, and also our society at large. I myself looked at the world differently for the weeks after I binged nearly 10 hours a day on this game. I saw a car on the street, and for a moment it flashed in my head that I had the means to get that car. It occurred to me I could steal that old lady’s purse. I could use the handbrake to slide around corners. And there must be a gun store near here somewhere.

And this all glosses past the fact that one of the hidden mini-games included (the taxi) was essentially identical to Crazy Taxi, which another publisher was asking full price for. And in GTA3, it is merely an afterthought, something to while away the time when you got bored with the rest of it. Which you never, ever would.

So it is one of the most amazing achievements in computer gaming history, and also a game that nobody should have been allowed to play, and is responsible for most of society’s ills to this day. I don’t know how to resolve this conflict other than by saying that GTA3 is the seventh best game of all time. And writing this review, I feel it possibly should have been higher. But, the save system sucked (happy, Jonsey?) so, seventh it is.

#8: SUPER MARIO 64 (1996)

I can count on two (2) fingers the number of times I’ve fired up a game and had an instant sense of being overwhelmed, that what I was seeing could not possibly be, and the only word I could conjure up from my bewildered head was Keanu’s “whoa”. The first time was Wolfenstein 3D, when I first pushed the mouse around. The only other time it happened was with Super Mario 64.

I had gotten an N64 as a Christmas gift. It would not have been my first choice. All the cool kids were getting PlayStations, and I’d already put the Nintendo brand, and the little red-overall-wearing wop behind me. But, not wanting to be rude, I plugged it in, threw in Mario 64 and got dumped outside the castle, left to do… what? Who knows. I don’t even remember, it’s been so long. But I pushed the controller in a few different directions, just to see what happens. Whoa.

One thing I do remember is that the technical excellence of the game was overshadowed only by the fact that it was definitely the highest game I have ever played. As in, the people who designed and produced the game were most definitely on a combination of acid, weed, mushrooms, nitrous, vodka cranberries, and pop rocks. If I was the police, playing this game, I would instantly arrest everyone involved in its production because, damn, no sober person could think of a tenth of the crazy shit that goes on in this game.

So the guy from Donkey Kong made good one more time, and he just happened to do it in the eighth best game of all time.

(PS: Along with Mario 64, I also got WaveRace 64, which just happens to be the 11th best game of all time, but unfortunately for it, this is just a top 10 list.)