Indisputably in second place on the list, is the monumental 'Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic'. How can something be better than 'Super Mario 64'? I don't know, but it happened in this Star Wars game, the quintessential role-playing game that sucks the player into it's rich world and amazing story helped by it's seamless, perfect gameplay.
In fact, the game has a "Star Warsy-story" more "Star Wars" than real Star Wars movies! Besides maybe the original; A New Hope. A classic battle between good and evil, or in Star Wars terms, light and dark. The hook is that the player decides through a long process of actions during events in the story, choices and conversations with companions and others, whether or not he or she sympathizes with either the light, or the dark. Each side of course has far reaching consequences in the end-game and the pay-off at the end here is grand.
It includes what's probably the greatest gaming twist ever told, and I never even saw it coming. In a cutscene with amazing, revealing screenplay, and I doubt this is still a spoiler to anyone but skip a sentence if it is, it will slowly dawn on you that you are in fact, the Dark Lord of the Sith that the entire Galaxy is afraid of and simultaneously admires. Your memory wiped and your strings now pulled by your closest companion. I fell off my chair; mind blown. If you play the game more and more times you'll start to notice there actually were plenty of subtle hints to this fact all throughout the game, but you'll just don't realize the shocking fact until it's too late.
The game came after I got turned off of console gaming and I played it on a personal computer instead, further cementing my idea of the home computer's superiority during this era. It was the sheer brilliance and perfection of this game that made me stay away from consoles and rather game on computers for several more years. There was no way a console could offer anything better than this. Even though I have played through it multiple times, I recently bought and downloaded it on a tablet. Still a perfect game, and one of the few of which I never want to see the end-credits roll.
