Your Top 20 games of all time, in 2020! Hindsight is 20:20!

DK was gooseberry fool, and M64 beats BK because I never liked how BK held back all the moves. It's especially annoying to go back and start it again and find that 90% of the moves are locked. M64 felt much more organic in discovering both the world and your way of getting around it, while BK felt too linear.

I'm so glad that at least one person other than myself mentioned No Mercy. That game was so strawberry floating good and came out during the peak of the Attitude Era.

Games I'm surprised haven't come up more:

Ico
Halo
Batman/Spiderman
Skyrim
God of War
TF2

Edit: DK64 has a metacritic score of 90 and the all-knowing N64 Magazine gave it 93% IIRC so it is/was definitely not gooseberry fool.

I played it through about 3 years ago and it was definitely as glorious as ever.

Arkham Asylum and Spider-Man would get in my list if I expanded to top 25.

Drumstick wrote:I'm so glad that at least one person other than myself mentioned No Mercy. That game was so strawberry floating good and came out during the peak of the Attitude Era.

Games I'm surprised haven't come up more:

Ico
Halo
Batman/Spiderman
Skyrim
God of War
TF2

Edit: DK64 has a metacritic score of 90 and the all-knowing N64 Magazine gave it 93% IIRC so it is/was definitely not gooseberry fool.

I played it through about 3 years ago and it was definitely as glorious as ever.

- Ico is pretty niche and actually not that good
- I mean this is basically a Nintendo forum, and I feel like Halo has been surpassed a lot
- Arkham Asylum maybe, I don’t remember anyone going nuts for SpiderMan. No doubt its quality but best game ever is a big stretch
- Get in the bin with Bethesda trash
- Probably one of the most over rated games this gen, though only because people went bananas for it. A GOTY in a pretty weak year but like SpiderMan in these kinds of lists I’d expect it to be a rarity
- Titanfall2? I just think not enough people have played it. I’d probably hear a case for it but I think you’d be getting into the 30’s/40’s for it to be showing up on fans lists

Captain Kinopio wrote:- Ico is pretty niche and actually not that good
- I mean this is basically a Nintendo forum, and I feel like Halo has been surpassed a lot
- Arkham Asylum maybe, I don’t remember anyone going nuts for SpiderMan. No doubt its quality but best game ever is a big stretch
- Get in the bin with Bethesda trash
- Probably one of the most over rated games this gen, though only because people went bananas for it. A GOTY in a pretty weak year but like SpiderMan in these kinds of lists I’d expect it to be a rarity
- Titanfall2? I just think not enough people have played it. I’d probably hear a case for it but I think you’d be getting into the 30’s/40’s for it to be showing up on fans lists

Team Fortress 2.

I am not super hot on any of those games, just assumed plenty here would be.

No one actually played Ico we all just said we did.

Ico is up there for me, just not top 20 when there is so much competition. I think it's my favourite of Ico/Shadow of the Colossus/The Last Guardian, but I really like them all for different reasons and they all play differently which makes them hard to compare even with their obvious similarities.

Red Dead Redemption 2
Final Fantasy VII (1997)
Xenoblade Chronicles
Metal Gear Solid 3
LoZ Ocarina of Time
Kingdom Hearts
Red Dead Redemption
LoZ Breath of the Wild
Halo
Portal 2

Rubix there filling in the gaps. I’ve played (started) Ico and Skyrim out of that lot. 2/2 nopes.

DK64 wasn’t bad, but I didn’t like the level design, the mini-games, the guns, the stupid number of collectibles, for some reason the game felt darker and more enclosed that Banjo outside the overworld, and I found that bloody jack-in-the-box too hard.

Drumstick wrote:

Captain Kinopio wrote:I mean this is basically a Nintendo forum

Working on it.

The eleven below would be on there, not sure about the rest of the top 20.

Resident Evil 4
Majora's Mask
Ocarina of Time
Paper Mario TTYD
GTA V
Witcher 3 GOTY
XCOM 2 GOTY
Fallout New Vegas GOTY
Oblivion GOTY
Yakuza 0
The Orange Box

Surely the Orange Box is cheating.

Drumstick wrote:I'm so glad that at least one person other than myself mentioned No Mercy. That game was so strawberry floating good and came out during the peak of the Attitude Era.

Games I'm surprised haven't come up more:

Ico
Halo
Batman/Spiderman
Skyrim
God of War
TF2

Edit: DK64 has a metacritic score of 90 and the all-knowing N64 Magazine gave it 93% IIRC so it is/was definitely not gooseberry fool.

I played it through about 3 years ago and it was definitely as glorious as ever.

Ico - Escort Quest: The Game
Halo - Bettered by Halo 3 in every department
Batman - decent game but overrated because of people's Batman hard-on
Spider-Man - haven't played it, might get around to it if it's ever on Plus.
Skyrim - weirdly I never really got on with this one despite loving Oblivion to bits
God of War - another one of Sony's AAA-by numbers games. Wasn't interested.
TF2 - looks like I was the only person to mention this

LoZ; Link's Awakening (GB)
LoZ; Ocarina of Time (N64)
Pokemon Blue )GB)
Guitar Hero 1 (PS2)
Skyrim (strawberry floating Everything)
REmake (GC)
CoD4;MW (360)
Halo 3 (360)
Ouendan (DS)
To The Moon (PC)
Portal (360)
Battlefield; BC2 (360)
Halo Wars (360)
Animal Crossing NH (Switch)
Alan Wake (360)
Mass Effect 2 (360)
Super Mario 64 (N64)
Civ5 (PC)
Goldeneye 007 (N64)
1080 Snowboarding (N64)

Not necessarily in order, and on another day there's a good 5/6 that would happily be replaced with different choices, but that was what came to mind. Very much voting in terms of memories and feelings rather than if/how they hold up today (which several absolutely do not).

I almost included Civ 5, it feels wrong not to include a civ game. I think the only thing holding the series back for me is the bad AI and their approach to difficulty (that is, unfair stacking of buffs/debuffs rather than the AI getting better)

Yea, I must admit, playing on higher difficulties doesn't feel more 'real' or necessarily more 'challenging', it just kinda feels like it turns into a puzzle game of making sure all the right tiles are optimised rather than there being any actual variety of strategy. It just sort of turns into a massive strawberry floating Sudoku of which combination of tiles will beat the AI, as opposed to really feeling like you're a leader of burgeoning society.

The easier difficulties are where the fun is at; you can at least play pretend that your benevolent policies are doing what you wanted them to.

I couldn't do a top 20, tbh.

1. The Witness
2. Celeste
3. Outer Wilds
4. Portal
5. Breath of the Wild
6. Braid
7. Portal 2
8. Super Mario Odyssey
9. Half-Life 2
10. Deus Ex
    ----
11. Cave Story
12. Super Mario World
13. Psychonauts
14. Shovel Knight
15. Rock Band 2
16. Link to the Past
17. Guitar Hero 2
18. Fez
19. Dishonored
20. SSX3

There. Done. Now don't ask me to do that again.

These are games I like, which correlates with but is not exactly the same as games I think are good.

Dark Souls ⸻ This stands out above other Soulslikes for me because of its highly interconnected and nonlinear world.

Deus Ex ⸻ I like its classic cyberpunk exploration of the power of the ultra-wealthy; very detailed world and nonlinear level design; and the way optional side-quests and small choices change the details of the story as you play.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ⸻ While in this cluster of RPGs I would say Morrowind was a richer world, New Vegas had a better story, and Skyrim was a more bombastic AAA experience, I think Oblivion had a balance of the three that was uniquely impressive for its time, and I got more deeply into it than I had done with any other game before.

Fallout: New Vegas ⸻ Its writing really made every faction and quest worth thinking about. I think that's a huge achievement for such a large RPG.

Half-Life ⸻ Just fantastic environmental storytelling.

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past / Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ⸻ Obviously you could put any classic Zelda here! I think A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time are special to me because they were two of the first games I played. They really introduced me to how fun it could be to explore and problem-solve and fight in a virtual world.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ⸻ I think this has the most immersive and fun open world ever.

Metroid Prime ⸻ Incredible atmosphere. I love the feeling of being alone and gradually exploring this strange planet.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door ⸻ I don't think I would ordinarily think of this (I was wondering "surely there's a classic JRPG I like" and my mind went to Final Fantasy VI and Bravely Default at first, so shout out to those too I guess!), but I was reminded by the announcement of the new one on Switch that this is the funniest JRPG I've ever played, one of the few I played all the way to the end without getting bored.

Pokemon: HeartGold ⸻ It is the perfect Pokemon game. Shout out to Let's Go Eevee, my second-favourite. I like the modern gens too, but it's harder to pin down one that stands out; I thought the theming and tone of Sun was good, and the wild area in Shield is an advance I hope they keep moving forward.

Portal ⸻ Despite getting a bit memeified, I think it was such a phenomenon for a reason: it combined mind-binding puzzles, creepy backstory, and very funny writing into something which was brilliantly discordant and at the time incredibly unique.

Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword / Sid Meier's Civilization V: Brave New World ⸻ The Civilization games are to my recollection the only "proper" strategy games (by this I mean not tactics-RPG) I've ever enjoyed playing. I like their moderate, balanced level of complexity, which often feels like a board game, and cartoonish but still evocative depiction of history.

Super Mario Bros. 3 / Super Mario World ⸻ Everything on the Super Mario All Stars + World cartridge is timeless platforming and it could all be here. I think World is a better game because the secret routes and addition of the spin-jump give it even greater variety in its levels than previous games; but personally I find myself replaying Bros. 3 more often because it is so pick-up-and-play.

Super Mario 64 ⸻ I think Odyssey is a great game, obviously having a modern polish, but fundamentally it's great because it recaptures the magic of 64 and I personally have a deeper connection to the latter: both from playing it as a kid, and from "Watch for Rolling Rocks in 0.5 A-presses" being one of my favourite videos.

Team Fortress 2 (2009 era) ⸻ It has since become an almost entirely different game, but in its golden age between the Medic Update in early 2008 and the Soldier/Demoman Update at the end of 2009 this was the best multiplayer game of all time.

Here are a few weirder choices which I would probably redact if I spent more time thinking about it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 ⸻ It's not a great game, but I had a brilliant time with it on the multiplayer. [See edit.]

Psychonauts ⸻ Such an out-there concept implemented in a really endearing way.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero ⸻ Really good platformer, underrated.

EDIT: Particularly unsure about Modern Warfare 2 despite how fondly I look back on it, as if I include that then by exactly the same reasoning I could easily include Counter-Strike: Source, Minecraft, and Overwatch. I had a very good time playing all of these with friends (many from on here!) but they're not my favourite games in and of themselves, if that makes sense. Some of my favourite gaming memories are associated with them though. Hmm!

OldSoulCyborg wrote:SSX3

This almost made it for me! It does almost everything right, glad to see it in another list

I think pro skater 3 just edges it for overall "best extreme sports game" but that probably depends on how I'm feeling when you ask me

i loved tf2 but had no one to play it with at the time
Ico is great and people who dont like it are muppets