Number 9

Harvest Moon 64

Some people just don't get it. Games aren't all about adventure, about world-spanning conquests or slaying demons or god-like manipulation of the environment or even trying to save the girl from the dragon. Sometimes the most profound experiences of a game come in the small things, in the ability to lose yoruself in a task that's familiar but constantly changing, in the experience of playing rather than the spectacle of the actions you're taking on-screen.

There was about a five-year stretch where Harvest Moon 64 was my favorite game of all time, and if you catch me on the right day then it still is. Let me tell you about Harvest Moon 64. It is an SNES-looking, poorly translated, glitchy mess of a game full of paper-thin characters, an absurdly cutesy art style, and a game experiences that promises nothing more or less than hundreds of hours of backbreaking labor in the fields, in mines, and chopping wood. And you know what? It's still more fun than almost any other game ever made.

Harvest Moon 64 differentiates itself from other games in several ways. One of those ways is the fact that it's a farming game. You farm, you work in the mines when the weather's no good for crops (oh God), you chop your own wood to fuel expansions for your house, you spend your time wooing one of five girls around town - eventually you might get married and have a child. The end result of the game involves receiving approval from your father. The whole of the game is built to let you live a life outside of your own, a simpler life with all the fat and extraneous stresses cut away, and it's the kind of game htat will make you romanticcize work that would forge a person into steel or break them altogether.

The other way it differentiates itself is urgency. Time in Harvest Moon is always moving except for when you're in buildings, so time management is always immensely important. Want to go visit more than a certain number of people today? THen you might not be able to chop all the wood you want. Want to work in the mines? Make sure everything else is put aside before you go in. Many games, particularly console games, will wait around for you to finish what you're doing no matter how dire, how urgent the scenario in the narrative is. Not Harvest Moon. Those tomatoes won't pick themselves, so get to it.

I haven't managed to communicate what makes Harvest Moon 64 so wonderful, but it's difficult to do so. If this game releases on the Virtual Console, and it should, then the service will have its most enduring and longest-lasting game.

5. Chrono Trigger

4. Super Mario 64

No. 4 Metal Gear Solid (PS also on PC, PS2, Gamecube and PSN)

Back in the late 90s, everyone was talking about this game. The story, the stealth mechanics, the guards throwing grenades down vent shafts, the boss fights! I however, didn't know what the fuss was about and ignored it... until I played the demo. I then went out and bought it the next day.

So much about this game felt fresh and innovative. The stealth mechanics were amazing; constantly hiding behind cover, ensuring you didn't leave footprints in the snow; using camera blind-spots. It was all new. The level design was also superb using the keycards to gain specific access to new areas but still immersing you into the idea that this was a top secret facility that you were infiltrating. Even backtracking was fun!

It also had the sublime Kojima style that rewarded clever and original thinking. The fight with Psycho Mantis is a clear example of this (switching controller input around). Most games and designers wouldn't dare breach the fourth-wall for fear it would destroy immersion, yet in MGS it they breach the fourth wall on numerous occasions yet it actually improves immersion into the game world. Other examples of rewarding original thinking by the player include having the wolves piss on a cardboard box, thereby enabling you to traverse their territory without getting attacked or using cigarette smoke to ID potential laser traps.

I haven't even mentioned the story which is probably the best in the series. It made you feel like you were truly in a movie and was a superb cinematic experience. It also had two seperate endings which always help with the replay value and didn't go too outlandish as happened in MGS2.

3.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 - I thought this would just be 'Super Mario Galaxy 1.5' at first, how wrong I was.  IMO this is the greatest platformer ever created.  It keeps what was so great about the original and adds to it.  This is an essential purchase for all gamers.  It alone is worth buying a Wii for.

2.

Final Fantasy VI - The best RPG and Square game ever made.  This has my favourite storyline and soundtrack of any game ever made.  With so many plot twists and turns this game kept me wanting more for months.  Every Final Fantasy game since has felt just a little disappointing to me after I have experienced this masterpiece. 

Number 8

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Sometimes, the best things in life are the things we didn't want in the first place.

Yeah, I was one of those people in utter disbelief at the Wind Waker reveal. It didn't make any sense to me at the time, in the wake of the infamous SpaceWorld video. But I waited, and I was calm about it, and I played the game, and you know what? It was magic. Magic.

Wind Waker is in many ways the most flawed Zelda game ever created, but the qualities that recommend it are so enormous and effecting that the flaws don't matter. I had fun sailing, listening to the music. The combat was great fun. The animation style, the visual design, the character expressions, everything cam together to make this enormous and enormously engaging world that challenged all of my assumptions about the series.

Do you know how big a thing it is to not want something, and then have it change the way you look at the medium?

Me and the wife still play this game together, alternating play every time we get past a dungeon. The game is timeless - for so many reasons, it will never get old.

Number 7

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber

Best RPG of its generation right here, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. Of course, maybe that's not fair, because it's so much more than an RPG, too. It's part strategy game, part RPG, part long and storied quest through the best and worst that humanity has to offer. Ogre Battle is completely unique mechanically, and its appeal has never really been surpassed for me.

Ogre Battle 64 is huge - beyond huge, with my original playtime for the game clocking in at nearly 80 hours, and with an easy expectation of 60 for most players. It's huge in scope, huge in ambition, huge in execution. The classes available to you feel endless, and the ways that they work in tandem makes for many hundreds of ways that individual units in your army can function, so that gameplay variety can change enormously between playthroughs. Your options border on limitless, but never feel overwhelming. The game encourages you rather than overwhelming you. It is a thing of immense power.

Ogre Battle 64 was localized by Atlus before Atlus was any good, so many parts of the script feel peculiar or badly worded, but the power of the original story shines through, embodied in dozens of memorable characters (many of whom have their own specific theme songs) and entrenched in a war that spans an entire country. In many ways, this game has the best writing of any RPG to ever come out of Japan.

THe graphics are simple but gorgeous, the music is fantastic, the writing is excellent, the game is fun to play, and it's an enormous behemoth of a game that demands investment of time and energy and effort, rewarding the player hugely when they are willing to commit. I've beaten this game three or four times, even as huge as it is.

What more can I say?

Fight it out!

No. 3 Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Shivering Isles & DLC (PC, also on PS3 & X-box 360)

The elder scrolls games have always offered immense freedom and player choice, and Oblivion was no different. However, they also had their share of problems and the storytelling aspects weren't always as strong as perhaps they should have been. Oblivion's storytelling improved greatly upon those found in Morrowind but also added elements to make the game more immersive. Voice acting helped to bring you into the world, especially in the main quest. No longer did you attack something without hitting it; gone was the background die roll. Attacks were now based upon your own skill rather than purely based on stats. Mini-games meant a mixture skill as well as statistics contributed to aspects like lockpicking. And the guild quest-lines each had their own fully developed storylines that felt as if they belonged in their own seperate game.

The content of Elder scrolls games is always massive and Oblivion didn't dissappoint, but it also avoided much of the problems of generic tasks that open world games typically have. It incorporated some brilliant quests with ingenius and genuinely interesting tasks. One such example is the dark brotherhood quest which tasks you kill five people in a locked mansion without the others knowing. Each one becomes more paranoid and scared and each has their own biases as you kill each character. The fighters guild quest which tasks you go undercover to find out the secret behind the rival guild. Or the main-line quest where you witness the destruction of Kvatch and has you entering your first Oblivion gate. The storylines (Main and guilds) were all engaging and interesting and even the one-off questlines added to the sense that this was a vibarnt and living world.

However, for me, the quality described above is only half the story. The expansions, DLC, mods and the ingenuity of the modding community are what really boost this game up to third place. Officially, the Shivering Isles added a more vibrant and bizzare world more in line with Morrowind than traditional fantasy whilst the Kinghts of the Nine DLC added an opposite questline to the Dark Brotherhood. Unofficially the OOO mod, Kumiko manor, the Achaeology guild and saddle-bags (among many others) all added great content to an already brilliant game.

Number 6

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

I have a thing for forgiving games of their flaws when certain elements are superb, and no game on this list exemplifies that ideology better than this game right here. There are two parts to that: this is the most deeply flawed game on the list, but it has the single most outstanding quality in a particular area, which lifts the entire package up into the stratosphere.

The flaws are easy to think of and easy to list. In many ways the game is broken, full of enough glitches to make BioWare or Bethesda blush, with missing mission flags and bugs galore. The leveling system's cap has been removed, making all challenge in the endgame utterly trivial, and there's this sense of emptiness there, at the end, which left many people dissatisfied.

But you know what? It doesn't matter.

There is at least one thing this game does well, and at that it's the very best in the business: writing.

In KotOR2, Chris Avellone forged white-hot the most consistent, thematically tight, mind-bending narrative I have ever experienced in any game, a plot which would stand proudly as proper literature if it were not in the trappings of Star Wars, a story and characters that are simply the best that this medium has ever produced.

You want the best cast of characters? Right here: from Atton to the Handmaiden to Darth Sion to T3-M4, every single character has their own motivations, their own secrets waiting to be wrested from them. They are believable, complex, alternatively weak and strong, each wounded, each hopeful. In any other game they would be the stand-out members of the cast, but each of them is only a single piece of the puzzle.

You want consistent meaning and theme? THis game got me and my wife talking for hours about Nietzsche, how one character in particular basically symbolizes him, how different philosophers would shape themselves in the face of the reality of the Force, and that's only the most basic, surface-level stuff. Themes of maternity and paternity run through, betrayal and family and what it would take to change the heart of a man, the constant struggle for power in the face of personal weakness. It's good. It's really good.

What's more is that Sith Lords has, in Kreia, the single best character that video games have ever produced. Kreia is the mentor character, a sort of inverse Obi-Wan Kenobi, and she is far and away the most complex and engaging character ever birthed by that continuity. I won't say what makes her so great; on some level I hope that a person will read this and decide to play it for the writing, because they should.

This game is something of a crippled god. It has a limp, a set to its bones that isn't quite right, but when it flexes its power can shake the foundations of the world.

Number 5

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

No piece of software has affected my life as much as Ocarina has. That's not hyperbole, either: my dwindling passion for games was fanned into an inferno by this game. I expanded my tastes in games and then other media because of this game. Hell, I met my wife because of this game.

What more is left to say about it, though? People have called it flawless, and that's true. Some people call it the best game of all time, and that's probably true too. Its final battle, regardless of difficulty, is seared into the brainpans of everyone who ever beat the game. There is an entire generation of gamers who can whistle at least a few ocarina tunes from memory even if they haven't played the game in over ten years. What more is there to say?

This is one of my favorite stories to tell about Ocarina of Time, related to its design, and I'm sorry if you've heard me say it before but it bears repeating.

In the first dungeon, in the first room, you are required to go up to the top floor and jump off, breaking through an enormous spiderweb in the center of the bottom floor. This isn't intuitive for some people, even though the webbing moves under you when you run over it, hinting at its elasticity and the limits thereof.

At the top floor there is a ledge that you can jump off of to hit the spider web and get into the basement, but many players would never think to do this - except that there is a rupee there. Out in the air, just far enough that you definitely have to jump to get it, is a rupee. The first time I played I made a flying leap for that rupee, fell approximately seventeen miles, and overshot the center of the web, stretching it to the limit without breakign it. A lightbulb went off in myhead, I ran back up to the top of the room, and jumped off again. Bull's-eye. That was my real introduction to this game, to this series, that one flawless piece of design that helped me get it when I might not have otherwise.

Ocarina of Time is full of moments like that, nuggets of genius and wonder that should be so intuitive but are so rare in almost any other series. It is in a class of its own.

Number 4

Shadow of the Colossus

Some games hit you harder than you would expect. There are times when expectations are astronomical, almost unreasonable, and the product that you are given surpasses them so utterly and completely that you are made to reconsider how much you are willing to hope for in games.

Last generation, Shadow of the Colossus was that game for me. I knew what I wanted out of it based on its first trailer - to kill giant monsters. What I got was quite a bit more than that.

Shadow of the Colossus is a game built on moments, where the fights themselves are punctuation marks at the end of long and terrible sentences whose syllables are formed in the lonely silence of running through an empty, ruined world. It's easy to talk about the monsters, but the world is harder - how do you convey the power of silence? There is a sense of quiet that comes upon you as you break tree cover and come out into a spring, and there may be times when you do not want to hunt, when you wish to go out and explore the land for what it is rather than for what it contains. It is not an enormous world by today's standards, but it feels so huge, so yawning as you race across it on the back of your horse, swept up in a wind that carries the dust of ages long past.

There are moments in this game that are possessed of such power that trying to put them to word would merely trivialize them, because so many of them involve no words at all. Narrative is conveyed through the fact of control, hints at reality given by the very act of making the hero move, and that is as much as I can.

Yes, the game is wonderful, and beautiful, and beautifully composed, with the best boss fights in the medium set against the backdrop of a world that manages to be lush and barren all at once, but how do you communicate the power of its silence? When a colossus falls there is a great crash, like mountains grinding together, and then nothing, the enormity and monstrosity of your deed communicated in the yawning space where thundering footsteps used to be. And it is a monstrous thing as the game questions you, and so many players never realize they are supposed to answer, and even those of us who do struggle onward, not caring enough to tear our eyes away. What power!

And in the end there is silence, silence filling the whole world.