My Top 10 Games:
The following are my 10 favorite games of all time. They are listed in no particular order, as I found myself incapable of ranking them in any way that I found satisfactory.
Super Mario World
Nintendo
This was the first video game that I ever played, and will therefore always hold a special place in my memory. In addition to its nostalgia value, I consider this game to be epitome of classic platforming gameplay, with its use of a world map, selctable paths through levels, various power ups, and cut scenes to convey the simple story. It also introduced many things that have become staples of the Mario series, including Yoshi, the plumber's now ever-present prehistoric mount.
The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Nintendo
This game brought the Zelda series, well known games during the 2D era, into the third dimension in one of the smoothest console transitions that I witnessed as a gamer. Nintendo managed to keep the combat style, dungeon system, and puzzles from the classic games, while making them all slightly more complicated by adding the extra dimension of height. They also introduced the music-based system that continued to be used successfully in Zelda games for some time, and included a very intricate story that managed to utilize frequent time travel in an understandable manner, which remains quite a feat for any medium today, including video games.
Metal Gear Solid
Kojima Productions (Konami)
This is really one of my favorite game series, and it's difficult to pick a particular title to include on this list, so I'll us e this entry for them all. This series combined a unique style of stealth gameplay, which rewards players for going out of their way to avoid killing enemies, with a very intricate story, including enough cutscenes in the later games to make several full length movies, and enough twists to keep fans speculating about what could happen next (as well as what exactly had already happened) between games. The story telling alone made all of these games unforgetable. There's also the fact that few other games will allow the player to infiltrate a top-secret government facility by hiding under a cardboard box.
Final Fantasy IX
Squaresoft
While a majority of Final Fantasy players tend to prefer VII, I consider FFIX to be Square's true masterpiece of the PSX era. It maintained the turn-based RPG gameplay of the classic series, while including three-dimensional graphics, both in and out of combat. The style of FFIX combined the medieval settings of most of the earlier games in the series, with the more modern, sci-fi style of FFVII and VIII. The storyline also made many refferences to the previous games in the series. Square intended for FFIX to be a last tribute to everything that the series had been, before they began diving in to new systems of gameplay in games for the Playstation 2, and beyond, and they pulled it off very well, combining nostalgia with unique plotline elements, and some minor changes to gameplay.
Star Wars Galaxies (Pre-CU)
Sony Online Entertainment
Star Wars Galaxies is the perfect example of a great game, ruined (twice) by changes ordered by organizations not directly involved in game design. This was the first MMORPG that I played, and while it could be repetitive in terms of combat, and lacked a complete endgame for a majority of its lifetime, its uniquely customizeable class system, and uninhibited playstyle kept it interesting. It would later be changed drastically, primarilly because Lucas Arts threatened to withdraw the Star Wars liscense if the game was not made more like World of Warcraft, due to that games better subscription numbers. This lead to Galaxies becomming a bad rip-off of WoW, and cost the game many of its players. While I have played many MMOs since (including WoW, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Ragnarok Online), none of them has offered the customizeability of the original Star Wars Galaxies. For the moment I place my hopes in the hands of Bioware's new Star Wars MMO, based on the Knights of the Old Republic series. Speaking of which...
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Bioware
KoTOR stands out amongst the many games that I have played for several reasons. Firstly, it utilized a combat system based on a queue, which combined the aspects of turn-based, and live-action RPGs. More importantly, however, was the game's approach to storytelling. During conversations with most of the npcs in the game, the player could choose from several conversation options, which would alter the story's path, as well as the character's affiliation. The ability to change the way that individual quests, as well as the game as a whole progressed gave the game a very high replayability value, because you could go through it dozens of times, and never have things turn out exactly the same twice. While the production of sequals was somewhat problematic (KoTOR 2 was made by Obsidian, not Bioware, and it ended on a cliffhanger which it seems will never be picked up directly), the series remains alive in the form of an MMORPG which I can only hope will live up to the playstyle and story depth of the original game, despite the inherent problems of story-driven multiplayer games.
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Nintendo
While I am not a fan of fighting games in general, I make an exception in the case of the Smash Bros. series. This is due primarily to its platformer-like stages, and throw-based kill system, which unlike most fighters, does not depend directly on nay kind of absolute HP system. This, combined with the fast pace of the game which made button-mashing difficult to use in place of a real strategy made it feel like a more balanced game than most. This was particularly true of Melee, which played faster than the original Super Smash Bros., or Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and, with the exception of certain "top tier" characters, was considered largely fair. It also introduced me to another series of games, through the inclusion of two characters, Marth and Roy, from Fire Emblem, which was released for the first time in the US shortly after SSBM was released, likely due to the latter's popularity.
Fire Emblem (7)
Nintendo
This series, which began on the Famicon in Japan, was not released in the US for quite some time. The first Fire Emblem game to be released in the US was Fire Emblem 7 in Japan, for the Game Boy Advance, and its popularity has ensured that all subsequent games have been released worldwide. Fire Emblem combines the elements of turn-based strategy games, and RPGs. Unlike in most turn-based strategy games, units are not produced during combat. Each unit is an individual character, who is recruited, either through the story, or by performing a specific action in a mission. If a character dies in any mission, they are unusable for the rest of the game. This makes the game tedious or many players, as it is easily possible to spend hours on a mission, only to have an enemy unit score a lucky hit on one of your weaker characters, forcing you to restart, or lose that character permanently. While this can be annoying at times, I generally find the challenge of getting through the game without losing any units to be one of the major draws of the series.
Star Fox 64
Nintendo
This game consumed a majority of my spare time when it was first released (back when I was in elementary school), and it's one of the few N64 games that I still play to this day. Star Fox 64 offered several diverging paths through the game, based on the completion of certain events during the missions, some of which seemed very minor until they were completed. As this game was released in the era before online walkthroughs became popular, discovering each secret way of completing a level allowed me to spend hours playing the same game many times over, without it ever getting boring. The fact that it was a starfighter game with forced movement, meaning that i you missed a secret path you would have to start the level, or possibly the game, over in order to try to find it again, made it that much more challenging, and that much more rewarding, when you found the secret area that you were looking for. The game also offered a multiplayer mode, with many unlockables, which added to the replayability.
Megaman Battlenetwork
Capcom
This game combined the elements of RPGs, like character statistics, and random encounters, and action adventure games, with an entirely unique real-time, grid-based combat system, which involved attack "chips," which could be repeatedly chosen after a certain amount of time, adding a turn-based element to the real-time action portion of the game. This was one of the most inovative game series that I have played in recent years, and while the formula got old after the first few games, especially in the story department, the idea of a new type of gameplay was exciting in and of itself. It also gave new life to the classic Megaman franchise, by setting the game in an alternate world, so that longterm plotlines from the twenty-year-old series would not put limits on the game world, by forcing it to exist within an established timeline.