Dean’s Ten Best Games of All Time

I narrowed my list of the top 20 games to the top 10 games of all time.  Here it is. Â Anyway, just a day more on the blog here and I’m off to VentureBeat.  I added one I forgot about.  If I could choose 11, I would add Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, for the D-Day landing scene. 

Halo, 2001, Xbox, Bungie/Microsoft.  This game redefined gaming for me on a lot of levels.  It showed what it meant to have fun doing something fun every moment of the game.  A good enough story.  Great music and sound.  Wide-open environments.  Cool physics for the vehicles like the Warthog.  Before this console title, shooters were the domain of the PC.  It’s a game where it all comes together. 

Gears of War, 2006, Xbox 360, Epic Games/Microsoft.  I don’t know how I forgot about CliffyB’s game, which held together on a lot of different fronts.  It was immersive.  The game play took time to get accustomed to, to the point where I had to unlearn the Halo style of gun play, but the artistic environment, story, andÂ kept me going.  Multiplayer was actually a lot of fun as well, underscoring the intensity of close combat. 

Wing Commander, 1990, PC, Origin Systems.  I remember playing this on a 486 computer and thinking the cut scenes were fantastic.  You played a human space fighter pilot saving the galaxy from the big cats of the Kilrathi race.  It was good old fashioned flight sim combat in space.  Sort of like the Battle of Midway in outer space. 

Doom, 1993, PC, id Software.  This was the game that started the first-person shooter genre.  Well, maybe not.  Wolfenstein 3-D preceded it.  But Doom put this genre on the map.  I can still remember the fear I felt when walking into a dark corridor and hearing the growl of a demon.  You just had to start firing and running backward and hope the demons would die before you ran out of bullets. 

Starcraft, 1998, PC, Blizzard Entertainment.  This three-way sci-fi war introduced high-quality, high-speed online game play for a real-time strategy game.  For every defensive or offensive force, there was a counter-balance.  If you moved fast enough and were crafty, you could take your enemy by surprise.  This title has crossed 9 million sold and is still played competitively in places such as South Korea. 

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.  2007, Xbox 360, PS 3, PC, Infinity Ward/Activision.  This title is also new.  But it delivered the best FPS graphics to date, had great game play, intense fighting scenes, and the strongest multiplayer gaming of any game that Iâ€™ve ever played. 

SimCity, 1989, PC, Maxis.  This game put Will Wright on the map and opened a new vector in gaming.  The city-building, God game genre turned into a franchise.  It was great fun to build a city and then watch it go up in flames.  Then you had to dispatch fire trucks to put out the fires.  I never understood the negatives of heavy taxation until I played this simulation. 

Wii Sports, 2006, Wii, Nintendo.  You could say that this is game inherited the mantle of Pong.  It revived gaming and drew in a broad audience and introduced players young and old to the Wii-mote control.  It was brilliant in its simplicity.  My then-three-year-old played this game against my then-73-year-old mother-in-law. 

Sid Meierâ€™s Civilization IV, 2005, PC, Firaxis Games/2K Games.  Everybody loves this franchise but in my opinion it took them a while to get it right.  The interface was refined and it enabled you to concentrate on building your civilization from a single city to an empire.  And, as the ads suggested, I always wanted to play â€œjust one more turn.â€

The Sims, 2000, PC, Maxis/Electronic Arts.  This was a simulation of family life that might have seemed utterly dull to anybody except its creator, Will Wright, who labored on it as a Skunk Works project for seven years.  It turned out to be a great idea.  It added the lexicon of Simlish to mass culture, and more than 98 million copies have been sold in the history of the franchise.