Top 10 Games II: This Time, It's PERSONAL
Last year's thread challenged you to boil down your wealth of gaming experience to a mere 10 games that ranked above all others. Just about everyone's list was unsurprisingly filled with NES, Genesis, and SNES games, with a light smattering of titles from the later systems.
Today I'm asking the question everyone else was afraid to ask: what are your top 10 "modern" games?* You know, games that only go as far back as the watershed PS1/N64 era.
I'll begin:
1. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - One of the only games on this list to be carried over from my "Top 10 EVER" list, and for good reason: it fukkin rawks!!
2. Metal Gear Solid - Anyone else played this one? It's pretty good!
3. Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader - Best. Star Wars. Game. Ever. I had my GameCube about two years or so before I ended up getting this game, and for the life of me, I don't know why it took me so long.
4. Resident Evil 4 - It's easy enough to describe the gameplay of titles like Dead Space and Gears of War as "like Resident Evil 4," but how exactly would one have described RE4 to the uninitiated back then? Someone here at Sega-16 once said "like Tomb Raider," but in retrospect that's not entirely accurate. At all, actually.
No, Resident Evil 4, when I first played it, was as unlike any previous Resident Evil title as it was unlike any other game period that I had played up until that point.
5. Shadow of the Colossus - Here's a question that will go down for the ages: how can a game as imperfect as SotC be still be a "perfect" game? It's not a graphical showpiece by any means, the controls are clumsy and finnicky, and for half of the 6-8 quest you're pretty much just riding a horse and holding up a sword. But it's still just... sublime.
6. God of War 2 - the original God of War was great and all, but replaying it after playing through the subsequent titles is like going back to the first season of The Simpsons or The Family Guy. Yeah, the foundation is all there, but it's still pretty rough and everything looks off-model. God of War 2 improved on the original in every way imaginable. And the story - revolving around a wayward son struggling to reconnect with his estranged father - was positively touching.
7. Metroid Prime - It's Super Metroid in 3D. And first-person. You miss out on Kraid and Mother Brain but you get this big rock monster guy, so it all works out in the end.
8. Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence - Over the course of nearly an entire year, I played through the original three MGS titles. When I completed MGS2, I couldn't figure out what all the hate was about. It was a great game, I thought! Sure, the ending was ridiculously long-winded and I don't think I understood the plot at all, but I thought it was an entirely enjoyable game.
Then I got around to playing Snake Eater (sorry - Subsistence), and now I know I'll never play MGS2 again. Matter of fact, my experience with MGS3 was so good that it put a sour spin on most games I played that year.
9. Gear of War - it's like Resident Evil 4, only with better graphics, non-upgradeable weapons, and a cover system. And Resident Evil 5 is like Gears of War, only crappy. And Gears of War 2 is like Gears of War, only with a "2" after the title.
Gears of War is the only big, dumb game on this list, and I'm not entirely sure why it resonated so well with me. It wasn't the multiplayer, because that's not my cup of tea. It must have been because it was so much like Resident Evil 4.
10. Super Mario Galaxy - Nintendo jerked itself off while playing Super Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario 64, and this was the happy seed that it wiped on a tube sock and absently tossed in the hamper; right on the top rather than stuffed down at the very bottom.
Fortunately, the game ended up being a better surprise than the one mothers of twelve and thirteen year-olds get on laundry day. The game was awesome, in fact. Maybe not better than Mario 3 or 'World, but certainly better than any of the others.
