I picked my Top 10, each with a description of how I got it and why it's there. Mostly in alphabetical order.
Assassin's Creed IIIt's not that I don't like the other games in the franchise, but there is something special about the second game. It was the first I played, a gift from a friend who had been anxious to get me more into modern gaming in a time when my PC was still only capable of playing LEGO games. He had a lot of passion for the franchise’s story, and was helpful for getting me more interested in game lore as a whole.
A lot of people mention big RPGs as their favourite games for the atmosphere. I don't usually feel all that much when I waltz around the worlds of Elder Scrolls or STALKER. There was something different with Assassin's Creed II, though. It felt...homely. It felt like somewhere comfortable, familiar, and yet with things to explore and find. I burned hours in that game simply to run around the Italian cities, with that beautiful soundtrack in the background keeping me stuck to my chair.
AudiosurfI don't very much like indie games, even though I'm an indie developer. That same damn friend who got me into Assassin's Creed II, however, gave me a USB full of content, and one such thing in his possession was a copy of Audiosurf (couldn't run it without first logging into his Steam account, but in those days we were account sharing just about everything).
Audiosurf is the one game I go back to whenever I'm stressed or annoyed. It forces you to stop thinking and to just focus, but it's not so blinding difficult or competitive that you don't bother trying in the first place. I've kinged myself on a couple dozen tracks, and clawing back a throne lost to some scrub always feels fantastic. It convinced me long before my game design studies that games don't need to just be about characters.
Halo 3There's only one word I need to say when people ask how I got into game development, but the longer version involves sitting in a computer lab back in Year 7, as a kid came around with a portable installer for Halo: Custom Edition. That multiplayer session changed everything. I was addicted. My cousin introduced me to Halo 2. Enough begging got me an Xbox 360 Arcade and Halo 3 Limited Edition for Christmas. After figuring out how to connect to Xbox Live (my first unrestricted access to the Internet), that friend from before taught me how to be a pro at competitive multiplayer, while another friend got me into the machinima and map development side. The ViDocs, Blog Posts, Podcasts, Editing Kit and so forth were my first steps into the world of making games. After all these years, it’s the only way that my brother and I can still communicate to each other.
Every good Halo game is like a toolbox. There's a fantastic underlying sandbox, but what you can do with that sandbox is defined by the tools accessible to you (aka the game mode). It means there's always different ways to play, new things to explore, and experiences to try. I was born and raised on Halo 3, and while both Halo 2 and ODST both compete for the best story and music crown, and Halo: Reach brought really important changes (like deeper character customisation and some general sandbox improvements), that third game in the franchise stands out as the pinnacle of my Halo years. Those are wonderful days I'll never be getting back.
While it's not my absolute favourite on this list, this franchise is the most important for my development as a person. One day, I should talk about it in more detail.
Mass Effect 2That guy who got me into machinima was obsessed with his Original Characters. If he played a game, he was playing as his OCs in that game. He always liked showing me, and the one he liked the most was his Mass Effect 2 version. It wasn't my first experience with Mass Effect, the first being a gift copy of the first game for the Xbox 360 from another friend. I gave up on the first game after Benezia glitched me out of the map and I lost hours of progress, but when he showed me the Self Delete Mission, I was convinced to try again, so thank forget the Christmas Steam Sale was just nearby.
I love story experiences. I played the forget out of KotOR II with cheats enabled simply so I could get to the juicy bits. The problem is that for many games, I'm always thinking mechanics, systems, design intent etc; it's rare to play a game and just lose myself in it, to imagine like my decisions have impact. Mass Effect's decision trees might be limited and artificial, but with a kick-ass soundtrack and the whole space opera vibe, I always found myself more drawn to this franchise than Fallout. It's always been hard to pick the best one, but Mass Effect 2 felt the most like it was my story. I was building the team. I made crucial choices. Those choices affected my ability to finish the job. And that soundtrack on the final mission...
Need for Speed: Most WantedMy very first racing game, based on my research into toddler Jobbo, was a demo of Gran Turismo. That was followed by V-Rally, Stock Car Racer and Jeremy McGrath’s Supercross 2000, so you can say that I've had a very close relationship with arcade racing games for a long part of my life. I became deeply attached to Need for Speed on account of a friend introducing me to the first Hot Pursuit (one of the few times I went to a friend’s house in Primary School), followed by my Mum impulse-purchasing Hot Pursuit 2, followed by when Pizza Hut did back-to-back yearly deals for the Underground games on my birthday (buy a pizza, get the game, on my loving birthday, TWICE IN A ROW). When I finally was earning some cash for myself and eyed out a PS2 copy of Need for Speed: Most Wanted Black Edition in Target, I was sold.
Most Wanted doesn't give a stuff that it's cheesy as all hell. It knows that it's not an accurate simulation. It knows the cops are either too easy or too OP. It doesn't care, because it's loving fun. It's the NFS game I spent the most time in. I didn't care for racing or challenges, I just wanted to do pursuits day in, day out. I still would if it ran on my PC.
Portal 2I had enjoyed the Orange Box. It came first as a loan of the Xbox 360 version from the Assassin's Creed friend, but later I got the PC real deal as a present from my parents for the PC. They weren't the absolute best games I had played at that point; in
"Seinfeld" Is Unfunny fashion, I'd been playing a lot of descendant games that took from them and did better. That’s not to say they weren’t fun to play, and I invested a fair bit of time in some of them. The one that stood out for me was Portal, which boggled my brain in ways I wasn't expecting from a quirky little First Person Shooter.
When the sequel launched, I had to try it. The presence of a funny story, the aesthetics, the better puzzle design and more informative commentary...good times galore. Hell, I even spent time to get co-op working between my crush's (at the time) PS3 copy and my PC copy, and I put a lot of effort into my PTI maps (they were stuff, but this was High School, before I learned proper puzzle design). I still go back to it now, simply because the rush of completing puzzles was so addicting.
PsychonautsI'll cough it up; I don't remember how I found or started playing this game. That might be well suited though, because like the many dreams that form the psyches you're forced to claw through in this game, the beginning isn't the important bit. It was one of the games that helped me get my sister into gaming, and one of the first games I pushed myself for absolute 100% completion.
The art and audio are exemplary, with some fantastic comedy, and plenty to do. Having finished it three times over, I can say I always still find more to the game I haven't figured out yet, and that 3D Platformer thing is carried out so very well in this game, which not a lot of other games do well.
Sam & Max: Save The WorldSome of my best childhood memories come from the Royal Sydney Easter Show, an annual festival held for a couple of weeks in Homebush, with rides, exhibitions, animals, food and a forget load of things to buy. Every year, we'd go to the Easter Show and grab a couple showbags each from the Showbag Pavilion, where vendors would fill special bags to the brim with all kinds of crap. Some years I'd get fake guns or other cheap toys, most of them were loaded with food stuff, but my favourite was the PC Power Play bag, offering free gaming magazines alongside other gaming merch. One year, one of the mags included a demo disc featuring the Abe Lincoln Must Die episode (before it was eventually made free for the then upcoming election). It was a while before I got bored and dug through those demo discs, but Sam & Max is the only thing I remember for a good reason.
The esoteric humour and the mind-bending puzzles hooked me in. I couldn't stop. I devoured every episode of all the Telltale games, then Hit the Road, then the TV show, and then the comics, and I still want more. Mixing my favourite genres of detective/police work and wild adventure, you're never ready for the twists and turns of the narrative, but you absolutely love it anyway.
Star Wars: Battlefront IIMy cousin got me into Halo, but that wasn't the only franchise I picked up from him. After his permanent move from the UK back into Australia, we spent many weekends at his house, the Xbox as our patron. TimeSplitters 2, Halo 2, RalliSport Challenge 2...too many games to choose from (also including Rainbow Six: Vegas, which originally had this spot on the list), and that's barely a fraction of the list we would invest our time into. Probably the biggest 2, for a good long while, were Star Wars: Battlefront and its sequel. With my brother and uncle going head-to-head with my cousin and I in Galactic Conquest, many lazy afternoons were spent in the giant, curtained war-room plotting the destruction of the CIS at the hands of the glorious Republic.
Space Battles were always my favourite, for the sheer amount of flexibility. On one hand, I go out an dogfight Episode III-style, my brother and I vying for the title of Champion Ace Pilot First Class, but then when I got tired of shredding enemy forces, I could go behind the scenes, infiltrate their ship and take out their critical systems. Don't even get me started on the many hours spent in the Hero battle mode, or when we tried to take on the Gungan parasite in that one Extermination mode. There was never nothing to do, and through the four of us, campaigns could take hours. Well spent, well enjoyed hours. I miss those days a lot.
Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your ArsenalIt's only fair I save the best for last.
I'd spent years pestering my Mum about what I thought was the biggest issue in the world back in those days. There I was with a PS1 and a crappy old IBM Aptiva, while all my other friends were living life up on their GameCubes and High Definition graphics. Most of my games were demo copies or budget crap, and I was itching to get started with the next generation. My parents got me a PS2 one Christmas morning, with about 3 games and two controllers so I could include my brother in some splitscreen antics. On the top of the pile was an odd silver box, claiming to be a "Platinum" game; the cover showed some kind of kangaroo with a toaster on its back, spraying down a bunch of metallic Stormtroopers with the left-over slime from the Kid's Choice Awards ceremony. To be frank, that's not too far from the truth.
It's funny to think that I refused to play Ratchet & Clank 3 for months, after becoming so frustrated with the Florana level (the one right after the tutorial on Veldin) and the natives throwing their wall-hack boomerangs. Had I been distracted a little longer, I might have never replayed it again, given the tidal wave of games I would eventually be thrown into with the coming of my cousin and my High School friends. But alas, I went back, and I obliterated Florana. Then I got stuck at Marcadia. Then I did okay, until a certain path on Daxx...R&C3 might not be at the level of Dark Souls, but it was a lesson in perseverance for kid me. When my brother and I sat in that small bedroom, huddled around a 12" CRT, witnessing the moment that I landed one final rocket into Nefarious' smug face, that was the greatest victory of my life time at that point. Then, I did the campaign again. And again. I hunted down the secrets. I aimed for 100%. That’s not even including all the messing about in multiplayer, nor the exciting day we brought home the co-op focused sequel.
Ratchet & Clank 3 is the one game that I now believe I can beat anybody in, and it never fails to keep me entertained with the laughter or the music or the art or just the quality of the gameplay. Never even mind the fantastic developer commentary or the beta which helped me understand more of the developer process; this game showed me what it means to have fun in a video game. That is exactly why it is my favourite game.
