Game No. 50. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Not much to say on this aside from it being the first Zelda title that I finished fully and my first experience with the OoT formula, I find this to be the best Zelda to date, even better than BoTW and OoT. It was the game that introduced me to motion controls and how natural an extention simple motion controls can be for games, later games like skyward sword complicated the tech too much and ruined it, in my opinion and motion controls never got quite as good again until PSVR adopted the move controllers in 2016. The game is a delightful balance of light airy vibes and some a shade darker than most Zelda affairs while still holding the upbeat and chirpy vibe at times and I love it. Great story, easily my favourite from the Zelda series and by far the best ending which came well deserved after such a long but always immensely enjoyable story.

There is a remastered version of this game which rounds off all the rough edges that the hardware at the time caused to the games presentation but without the wii mote and nunchuck it doesn't feel the same. The stars aligned for this game and I've yet to play a Zelda game that surpasses it and I've played five or six since, including BoTW.

#50 - Kirby's Return to Dreamland (Wii)

This is one of my favorite Wii games, and still a blast to play. My only complain is that we can't play as Meta Knight and the other characters in single player mode. I would go ahead and say that Kirby's Return to Dreamland is one of the finest 2D platform games ever!

No. 49 The Last of Us Part 2.

I've so many thoughts on this game I could write pages and pages and I think it gets a lot of hate it doesn't deserve. Yes, there are pointless throwaway characters that were never fleshed out so their deaths were meaningless, yes Joel getting the golf club was done in a disastrous way, yes the cut in the middle to Abby and resetting all progress is super jarring (although it's a bold choice to handle progression in a longer title), Yes the pacing is wonky etc. But what this game does well, it does extremely well, the themes of revenge and an eye for an eye hits hard and the game hits on some incredibly emotional beats not just in the story but in some of the combat sections as well. I've never seen such brutality in a video game, something I'm hardened against but at times the game made me physically ill with some of the kills and other times rushes of andrinaline while running through an enemies encounter after being caught and gunning everyone down. It has masterful emergent gameplay and like Red Dead Redemption 2 has yet to be mached in that next gen feel, esspecially in the animations department and minor details in stuff like the rope physics. The kills using some kind of random generation animation based on the situation is wild and leads to incredibly emergent scenes that look like they were scripted. The story while disjointed is pretty damn good when you dissect it. It forces you to feel certain emotions and it does it very well. I think some people weren't ready for this game.

There's a reason this game has such a high completion rate at 60% on ps4 and the pandemic lock down is only one factor, the game is simply addictive to play and gets it's hooks in early and they don't release until you've seen it through. Pandemic or not people wouldn't play that long on a bad game and this game is long indeed for a linear narrative game. I believe the people complaining to be a very small loud minority.

With the above said it is no. 49 on my list so it does have it's flaws as I've mentioned above but it's simply cause there are so many great games on my list that are less flawed. TLOU pt 2 is a 10/10 on a knifes edge for me despite it's flaws it makes up for them in other ways. Great game I plan on replaying next year.

Right, my top 50 is probably about as accurate as it's going to get, so here are the first set of clues for my first five games:

#50:

• Tonally the darkest entry in this long-running series

#49:

• Recruiting the Stars of Destiny part 2

#48:

• The second game in the second arc of this storyline spanning a dozen games (so far)

#47:

• A thousand-year-old immortal

#46

• Perform miracles with ink to revive the world

#46: Okami

Correct.

#50 - A beat'em up with a snarky newscaster One Must Fall 2097 Found out by Mnementh
#49 - You can't use the signature moves of the series in this title, but you can use some other person's equipment instead.
Hint 1 -  It's a Metroidvania kind of game where you have to go back to previous places once you found the necessary equipment to get to new places in them.
#48 - This gory, bloody game is other than for the blood and some yellow texts all in black and white
Hint 1 - The minigame challenges always end up with the announced getting killed in them by his assistant
#47 - Looks a lot like Metroid
Hint 1 - While it later got ported tp consoles, it came out on home computers first
#46 - Killing Spree! Unreal Tournament 2004 Kinda found out by Mnementh
#45 - A Jump'n run on a Disney license
#44 - An RTS that becomes more of a 4x over time in space and in real-time

#50 Tetris 99

The first game on this years list of 50 is Tetris 99. Tetris is sort of the grandfather of puzzle games but 99 is what I consider the best version of it. I really like the battle-royal format for Tetris where the increased speed as well as the increased amount of sent junk make for an intense experience.

Shoutout to Tetris for Gameboy and Tetris DS, two games that just as well could have been present. I like the game modes in Tetris DS more but being able to play against 98 other players won the spot for Switch version. 

The impact Tetris 99 have had is keeping my brain active through a time where meds and treatments made it mush. A short session of a few minutes made it an easy pick up game at a time when larger games felt to overwhelming. And the feeling of being the last man standing in Tetris invictus kept me coming back for more, and more often than not getting my ass kicked.

I'll hazard a guess at Majora's Mask

Sounds like it could be Madworld?