I’ve been trying to break down exactly what I value in games. What I find fun, what kinds of games I’m drawn to. It’s a hard thing to quantify exactly what makes a game good, especially trying to determine a trend across all the games I’ve liked. So I’m making this page as a kind of analysis and breakdown of the games that have been strong, memorable parts of my life.
As I find more interesting metrics, I plan to post them, as well as update this post. But hopefully the 10 games themselves will remain static, unless there’s some moment of “HOW ON EARTH COULD I FORGET TO INCLUDE CATWOMAN?!”
Unordered 10 Impactful Games
- Rez
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves
- Portal
- Braid
- Marathon
- Super Mario World
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
- Civilization
- Final Fantasy VI
- Planetfall
These are the games that, over my life, I played the hell out of. Ones that I was obsessed with. Ones that impressed me to my core. That haunted my dreams when I wasn’t playing them. Ones that I will evangelize to people who haven’t played them.
There are many other games I loved, enjoyed immensely, and replay from time to time. But in the interests of keeping the list to 10, I just went with the ones that had a profound impact or rose to the level of obsession for me.
Note that I’ve limited this list to video and computer games, or else I would have to include Dungeons & Dragons, Diplomacy, and several others.
(Not meant to be a “top 10” of any sort or a declaration of industry impact or anything.)
Metacritic
- 93: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
- 93: Braid
- 92: Super Mario World
- 92: Final Fantasy VI
- 91: Rez
- 90: Portal
- 88: Sly 2: Band of Thieves
In places where a game had more than one rating due to remakes or multiple platform releases, I went with the highest rating. Marathon, Civilization, and Planetfall have no Metacritic rankings. The Super Mario World and Final Fantasy VI rankings come from the GameBoy Advance re-releases.
This yields an average Metacritic ranking of 91.2, which would seem to indicate that the games which mattered most to me are also games that the industry as a whole (or at least the press) also consider to be paragons.
Chronologically Sorted
- 1983: Planetfall
- 1990: Super Mario World
- 1991: Civilization
- 1994: Final Fantasy VI
- 1994: Marathon
- 1997: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
- 2001: Rez
- 2004: Sly 2: Band of Thieves
- 2007: Portal
- 2008: Braid
At first I was troubled that there was too much clustering in recent years, but this has an average of 2.8 years between games. If you throw out the first 7-year gap, that drops to 2.25. I would be comfortable with either number.
Genres and Demographics
- Rez: music-based rail shooter
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves: adventure platformer
- Portal: first-person puzzler
- Braid: puzzle platformer
- Marathon: first-person shooter
- Super Mario World: action platformer
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: action exploration RPG
- Civilization: strategy simulation
- Final Fantasy VI: RPG
- Planetfall: text adventure
So breaking that down:
- 3 games that could be classified as platformers
- 2 first-person games
- 7 games with strong story elements
- 4 games where the story is absolutely endemic to the game’s quality
- 2 shooters (and one had very strong story)
- 5 games with gameplay focused around puzzles
- 3 games with majority gameplay focused around puzzles
- 4 games made by Japanese developers
- 6 games made by American developers
- 0 games made by anyone else
- 2 games that lose a substantial amount of (if not all) impact after first play-through
- 1 game that is meant to be played through multiple times for most enjoyment
- 3 games that expose fairly complex numerical models to the player
- 4 games that are continuing titles in a series
- 3 games that kicked off a series
- 1 game that is rumored to be the start of a series
- 2 games that stand alone
- 4 PC/Mac games
- 6 console games
- 1 Dreamcast game (I played on PS2 originally)
- 1 PlayStation 2 game
- 1 Xbox 360 game
- 2 Super Nintendo games
- 1 PlayStation game