32. Doom (PC)
I still get a little thrill when I remember a couple of grad students telling my mom about this obscenely violent game where you kill monsters with a chainsaw. "That sounds bad!" said my mom. "It is," they laughingly replied. "I HAVE to play it!" thought my 11-year-old self. Turns out these same grad students were upgrading our computer and kindly installed on it this ultraviolent masterpiece alongside a slew of King's Quest games. Oh boy, oh boy! Such was my anticipation that I probably experienced my first erection while booting this bad boy up, and somehow it was even better than I'd imagined (the game, not the erection). However, I was a little perplexed that chainsawing monsters wasn't even close to the best part of the game; instead, I was completely blown away by the sheer brilliance of Doom's labyrinthine level design. I'd never played anything like it before, and I haven't really played anything like it since. Thanks in large part to this incredible level design, Doom holds up extremely well almost 20 years later, feeling as fresh as a daisy and yet as comfortable as an old pair of shoes... an old pair of shoes that want to kill you.
