My favourite games of this generation

[madhair60]

GET YOUR OWN THREAD.

Anyway, I thought I'd list some of my favourites in a generation that completely changed my opinion on modern gaming, a generation that isn't even close to being over yet. And I thought I'd do it in list form, because everyone loves a list thread.

I haven't got any particular order in mind, but I know what the absolute best game is, so I'll save that one for last. What the hell, I'll make it ten. Tune in regularly for updates, unless I forget. Hassle me on MSN if I do, most of this is already written.

Now, to business.

10. Bioshock/Bioshock 2



Bioshock was the first game I ever played in HD, and by God it had an effect on me. It proved to me that graphics can become almost as important as game design in terms of keeping the player hooked - goodness knows I wasn't playing Bioshock's turgid final couple of hours for the fetch-quest gameplay.

Sadly, Bioshock falls down towards the end. After the incredible climax, it just keeps going for some reason. This is a problem a fair few games seem to have, butWAIT THIS IS ON MY TOP 10 LIST WHY AM I LISTING FLAWSSSss

The opening to Bioshock is the best opening to any game I've ever played. The plane crash, awakening to a sea of flame, the way the game subtly pushes you in the direction of the lighthouse, the initial descent into and reveal of Rapture, your first sight of a Big Daddy... goddamn, just remembering it makes me want to re-install and experience it again. It was incredible, absolutely revelatory, and got me interested in playing NEW games.

The sequel is, mechanically, much better. Plot-wise it's still excellent, but the sheeer impact of exploring Rapture for the first time is gone. People will tell you that Bioshock 2 sucks, but they are [censored]ing insane. Ignore their words, it's up there with the all-time greats. Deserves a lot more love, and has one section in particular that beats out anything Bioshock 1 managed to throw at us. I won't say what, for fear of spoilers.

There was a lot of crying about "choice" around Bioshock's release. Chat about whether or not to harvest the Little Sisters. Look, let's be sensible about this. The choice between murdering a child and not murdering a child is not exactly a difficult [censored]ing moral dilemma. Ignore all that "freedom" claptrap and just embrace Bioshock and its sequel for what they are. Brilliantly designed first-person shooters with some of the greatest atmosphere and mise-en-scene in the entire medium of videogames.

In conclusion, Bioshock takes the FPS and makes it something different, yet retains a comforting familiarity which I appreciate. Also, the spear gun in Bioshock 2 is just a classic.

[Balls]

I'm going to make this exact same thread.

But yes, agree on Bioshock 2 100%. It's impact may have been weakened but it did play far better and did give me [censored]loads of fun. If you like the first and not the second you're BSing.

[Beeth]

This is all well and good, except you still haven't produced that K-On review for your anime list that you promised us several times. What's happened to that? I thought you'd finished it and were trying to trim it down, last I heard.

[madhair60]

Thanks for your contribution in the form of complaining about other threads I have made. You couldn't have bumped the anime thread for that, rather than ruin this one within two posts?

Yes, I made two list threads I never finished. I probably won't finish this one. Either engage with it, which will likely motivate me to continue, or do what you're already doing and put me off making any effort.

The worst thing is I actually held off making this thread because I knew some [censored] would moan at me for not finishing my other lists. You lot, I swear.

Let's be honest, there's more content and effort put into that one anime thread entry than there is in basically any other threads. But yeah, you're right, I should have done that K-On thing first, because that's how forums work, isn't it. You have to finish one thread before you start another. WHY YOU BRINGING UP OLD STUFF, BEETH (if that is your real name).

why don't you make a thread which is just a list of the top posters again, cos that was [censored]ing riveting

p.s. I am well aware that this is a spectacular over-reaction. please ignore it. we can still be friends.

[Arch]

I've not played either Bioshock and I'm not particularly rushing to, since the only bit I've watched someone play of the first game is the major spoiler. Hard to get enthusiastic when you know what's going on before all the little tid-bits come into place.

Still, I'd like to try either of them if they're either dirt cheap or placed in my hands for free for no reason. Heard nothing but good things.

[Retro]

Somehow I figured you might do something like this, watching you on Steam and the like the past few months you've really been digging into a lot of these newer games.

Can't say I can guess for sure what your top slot would be from the games I've seen "Madhair60 is playing..." at the side of my desktop, but quite intrigued to see your explanation on a lot of them.

You can bet I'll be prodding you to update this.



Bioshock 1 is definitely everything you say. From one of the best game openings in history, to the horrifyingly daunting first fight with a Big Daddy ("Ok it's big and slow I'll stay over here and shoo-OH GOD THEY CAN DASH!?!") and the ever growing haunting feeling of the chaos that happened in this tiny little isolated world so far gone from human society.

The story twist of the generation was only an exceedingly nice cheery on the top of a very well made cake.

Jun 16, 2011 12:41:58 GMT Arch said:

Still, I'd like to try either of them if they're either dirt cheap or placed in my hands for free for no reason. Heard nothing but good things.

Jump on Steam, Bioshock 1 is regularly on sale for only a couple quid.

[madhair60]

Ya, Bioshock 1 and 2 were something like £3.99 each the other week, though I got my Bioshock 1 for £1.50 from a charity shop. I'm lucky like that.

I never mentioned Bioshock 2's multiplayer. I should have mentioned that it is awesome, fleshed out, and surprisingly story-focused. It's also basically impossible to get into now.

[ShayMay]

I must confess to never having played either of the Bioshock games, for much the same reason as Arch - Slendy screamed the spoiler in my face like a [censored]ing monkey [censored] before I ever had the chance to play it.

Actually, thinking on it, that is a bit of a lie - I did play Bioshock 1 for about 15 minutes or so and remember it being bloody scary.

Look forward to more.

[Retro]

The big problem I had with Bioshock 2 multiplayer is it's strange mouse controls. The sensitivity is ramped WAY up to the point it's almost uncontrollable. I struggled to even get a single kill and could clearly see everyone else doing the same. Even at lowest it's like trying to control a greased bouncy ball. Given I grew up on Unreal and play lately on TF2, twitch shooting is something I can do, but this one took it waaaaaay past it.

Great multiplayer visual design though.

I've yet to actually finish Bioshock 2. But what I've played I enjoyed. Being the hunter instead of the hunted is a great manner of gameplay change as is the beefier weapons to make larger conflicts out of. Going toe to toe with a Big Daddy, drill to drill, it particularly fun.

I think the reason I fell away from it was twofold.

- I had recently replayed Bioshock 1. Got Bioshocked out.

- Computer got rebuilt, so I lost my save game. Never like replaying so often.

I'll maybe come back to it in a year. Perhaps post-Bioshock Infinite when I wanna go back to Rapture again.

[Balls]

This list actually interests me a lot as I'm not a PC gamer. Not simply because of preference, but I've never had an up to date PC.

Knowing Stu lacks any current gen consoles means this is all gonna be stuff available on PC and will help me with my decision to possibly get a half decent PC this year.

[Samface]

Woo! I've been replaying these just lately. I'm about three-quarters of the way through Minerva's Den.

The opening to the first game is undoubtedly one of my defining experiences of gaming. When the plane crashed, I stayed bobbing in the water for a bit because the graphics were so impressive I presumed the opening cutscene was still going on. The reveal of Rapture gave me goosebumps. The whale swimming right past you made me jump and swear.

I prefer the first one - the second one's arguably a better game, as there's more to the gameplay, but the first one's such a beautifully complete package. It's understandable why Irrational didn't return to make the second one - there was arguably no real need to return to Rapture. Not that 2's not still great, but it does seem kind of diluted. Also, it kind of bugs me how Lamb's presented as one of the big cheeses in Rapture despite the fact that she didn't get so much as a mention in the first game. Obviously that's 'cos she hadn't been thunked up yet, but making out that she was a major rival to Ryan and yet you went through the first game without so much as a mention of her means that it kind of comes off like fanfiction where the author writes a character into a show and all the real characters act like they've been there the whole time.

Man that was a convoluted explanation. Anyway.

[Beeth]

Jun 16, 2011 12:26:23 GMT madhair60 said:

p.s. I am well aware that this is a spectacular over-reaction. please ignore it. we can still be friends.

No worries <3

[Arch_one_zero_one]

I'm pretty much the same as Retro, in that I completed Bioshock 1, and loved every second of it, then tried to play the sequel right afterwards. I got about a quarter of the way through before Pokemon pulled me away. I think I'll enjoy re-visiting Rapture more with a bit of a break anyway.

[madhair60]

9. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare



You wouldn't know it from the screenshot, but you're looking at arguably the greatest single mission in gaming history.

Tense to the point of being almost unbearable, All Ghillied Up is the absolute high point of a game consisting of nothing but. Modern Warfare is a revelation - a military FPS that's neither po-faced nor repetitive, CoD 4 smacks every other instalment in the series in the balls. It's so good it makes other war shooters difficult to take seriously. It sets the bar so high my arthritic 6'7" frame could limbo under it. With a giraffe balanced on my crotch. With a ladder in its mouth.

The sheer quality of CoD 4 - while obvious to me - only truly sank in when, post-game, I was enthusing to Sin about which missions I enjoyed the most, listing white-knuckle set-piece after set-piece, until he turned to me and said, "Stu, you've just listed every mission."

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. My only complaint is that there's not enough of it.

[madhair60]

Also, just because it's the greatest analogy ever conceived, I'm posting this here.

Stu says:
*Modern Warfare 2 is far from an atrocity
*It's like the Blackpool Tower compared to the Eiffel Tower.
*Once you've seen the Eiffel Tower the Blackpool Tower just looks [censored], but it's actually a very impressive bit of architecture.

[Retro]

Noting Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare out is a grand choice. To this day it remains the go to game for a military shooter single player. Hell, it's multiplayer only lost cos Battlefield came back into the scene out of no-where with Bad Company 2 and blew the bar to Mars.

But back on COD4, it's campaign, as Stu mentions, set the bar for military shooters. Plausable, authentic and dramatic without ever over-extending it's boundries in the direction of Hollywood flare to please the dumber part of the COD fanbase that formed after this game hit the scene.

All Ghillied Up is the crown jewel of the game, yes, but the real quality lies in the sheer number of little touches. From seeing the animations of your squadmates become more urgent and frantic post-nuclear launch to get in and stop it to the wonderfully written dialogue of Price and Gaz. It's all brilliant work. Very doubtful that the COD series will ever hit this high bar ever again. Especially not after the atrocity (Yes, that was me in Stu's quote) that was MW2's story.

[Lost Mercenary]

Agree whole heatedly with Modern Warfare. What a game.

Quite possibly one of the best shooters ever made and I can't honestly think of another game before this where you got to play as an SAS soldier instead of an American trooper. (Feel free to correct me on that though as I'm not 100% certain). It was a real breathe of fresh air in a genre that had begun to stagnate.

SPOILER: Click to show

MW2 though. What the hell happened? Infinity Ward thought that because that one scene of a soldier you're controlling dying a slow horrific death in first person view was so popular (and very well deservedly so) that doing it 3 or 4 more bloody times would make it even more so? There are just no words.

I think the one scene I truly enjoyed was the final mission and the last fight where you pull a knife out of your chest and lob it in Shepard's eye.

[madhair60]

Great spoilers there LM.

[Lost Mercenary]

Opps. Soz about that

[madhair60]

S'right.

Aaaanyway, on with the list.

8. Batman - Arkham Asylum



This is a success for me in several ways.

First, its gorgeous, imaginative game world. I was cynical about how a single location could provide any cosmetic variety, but developers Rocksteady knocked it out the park. Poison Ivy's overgrown lair, the outskirts of Arkham island, the scarecrow levels (which are covered at such enthusiastic length elsewhere, I won't bother now)... it's tour-de-force of getting the most out of a setting.

Second, the gameplay. Batman games had always been traditionally clunky, his supposed agility hampered by poor controls. Not in Arkham Asylum - there's never a time when your ambitions are hamstrung by a poor control scheme. You see the other end of the room, and you know how to get to it. The (brilliant) Detective Mode helps with this, showing all the interactive scenery in the room, rendering enemies as red skellingtons. It's simply the best implementation of stealth into an action game I've ever seen. In fact, the only issue with 'Tec Mode is that I simply left it on too much, denying myself the chance to take in the sumptiously rendered rooms and hallways of Arkham.

Third impressive thing? They took Batman, the most overblown franchise in the entire world, which had somehow convinced people that a giant bat chasing a clown is serious business, and they disguised all the wank with such brilliant gameplay I managed to overcome my prior dislike and have a ball.

Sure, there are low points (stand up and take a bow, Killer Croc, and that [censored]ing excuse for final boss), but the high is so consistent, and so very high.

Dirt cheap now. Get it in, even if you hate Batman.

[Moo]

Jun 17, 2011 8:49:24 GMT madhair60 said:

a giant bat chasing a clown is serious business

I wish I had space for this in my sig line.

[madhair60]

Just remove Nam's unfunny one

[Moo]

K.

[ShayMay]

All of the bosses besides Scarecrow are dull as dishwater, but the game really shines everywhere else. Every stealth section is potentially my favourite moment in modern gaming, the design being near-flawless. The combat, despite my omnipresent incompetence, is simple and flows really nicely - you can't just button-mash. The Riddler riddles will keep you busy for AGES trying to collect 'em all, and the reward for doing so is as satisfying as a good long poo. Finally, there are TONS of references and cameos for the comic book geeks to pick up on*.

Arkham Asylum. You'd have to be bat[censored] insane to miss out on it**.

*I used Wikipedia, like.
**argh hagh

[Retro]

Arkham Asylum I had the wonder of acquiring for free from work due to winning an incentive scheme of sales. So that threw me into a better way of enjoying it almost immediately. I imagined that this would help it sell itself to me.

...it didn't need it. Gods I loved this game, from the satisfying combat system to the accessable and intuitive control scheme. Usually to make something "accessable" is shorthand for "dumbing it down for console sales" but in this case it struck as the proper meaning of the term, to instead be easy to do what you want without losing the depth and wealth of potential that a more complete gameplay experience offers a player.

Indeed, normally I don't bother with challenge maps, but I keep coming back to Arkham's to strive for those top ratings, working out elaborate "bat schemes." It's all so satisfying when a plan comes together, or indeed in this case, a licenced game.

Biggest surprise of it's year?

You bet.