DORKFEST DEUX!

i actually wrote the first half of this post (which hopefully you've already read and clapped a lot about to yourself, either in your head or outloud) about a week ago, and am just now getting down to writing the second half. lest it appear that i wrote the entire thing today, let no such thought enter your head! i have lots of other things i need to do like hang out with my friends and make out with my girlfriend and be famous, which I AM!

now, on to the rest of the list!

5. Ghost Recon: Gold Edition - this game has pretty much ruined all other shooters for me. i like sitting down and blowing the fucking absolute shit out of the universe singlehandedly from time to time, just like the next guy. but for the majority of my FPS playing time, i'd like to play a game with brains. a game where you're just part of a larger world that's unfolding around you. a game where if you run at some dude with a machine gun and he sees you before you see him, he blows your goddamned face off instantly. ghost recon is that game.

it's incredibly difficult on the hardest setting, and thus especially pleasing. you die if you get shot once. always. well, not always. sometimes you get hit in the chest and then you can't run anymore even if you live. or you get hit in the leg and you have to drag it behind you. the bad guys die the same way. you don't have to wail on a dude for 45 seconds with a chainsaw before he dies. there aren't magic health packs that instantly heal your gunshot wounds, and no body armor. just you, your weapons, and your brain against lots of guys with sniper rifles and poor russian accents. you do get a lot of squad members, each able to be commanded or taken direct control of, and able to be outfitted with all sorts of different kits for different tasks. you can let a few of these guys die off if you're so inclined or if you make a mistake (the AI is actually pretty good once you learn how to micromanage it a bit), but the downside is your team carries over between levels and gains experience, so there's an incentive to try to keep everyone alive.

this is a really rewarding game that throws you into semi-sandbox situations and makes you figure out how best to survive. and it does it very, very well. if there was one complaint about the original game i could have made, it was that it was a tad bit too short (though certainly deep enough). fortunately, this situation was remedied with two expansion packs, both of which were awesome as and hard as hell.

this is actually an in-game demo, so you're not seeing it from the perspective of the player directly, but it should give you an idea of the pacing and feel of the game:


4. Baldur's Gate - this is another sort of catch-all nomination for Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale 2. they're all fantastic CRPGs, each with their good and bad (though mostly good) points, but i played the original first, and it was the one that hooked me. this game was good enough to convince me to sit down and read up on the minutiae of Dungeons and Dragons rules (then version 2; later i'd have to learn 3 and 3.5 to keep playing...fucking THACO!!!)

before i started playing BG for the first time, i'd never played anything other than the japanese-style console RPGs, what with their linear plots, turn-based battles, flashy graphics, and simplified rules systems. pschaw. BG blew this out of the water with a much more immersive experience, lots more to see and do (BG2 claimed to be 200 hours long; i don't know about that, but it took me at least 100) and a combat system that you actually had to consider fistfuls of variables constantly and your chance of victory still often came down to the roll of a die. the thing i remember most is the great feeling of wandering through one of the forests, having no idea what you'd find (often your next goal would be as vague as "go west and find the trolls" or somesuch, which led to hours upon hours of searching, but interesting searching, as you'd always find something; it just wasn't always what you wanted to find). there was also a great sort of built-in sense of immersion in that by the time you got to the end of the game, your characters would have leveled up and accumulated items in a way unique to that particular play through the game, so you could look at your +3 Holy Avenger and say "damn, i remember when i got that from King So-and-So in the Whatchamacallit Mire".

BG and BG2 went crazy with really involved stories and lots of exploration, interspersed with good dungeon crawling, and (at the end of BG2) really badass high-level spell battles with counterspell upon counterspell that necessitated that you were actually smart enough to keep up with all the spell relationships. IWD and IWD2 were more focused on combat and dungeon crawling, with less involved plots that were certainly interesting but mostly just excuses to Fuck Shit Up. some of the prolonged battle sequences in IWD2 were especially excellent. it's one thing to try to implement the D&D universe battle rules in such a way that you can survive a 3o second battle with some drow elves; it's entirely another to be so overrun by enemies that you have to start thinking in physical terms as well, retreating to a choke point and dropping a Grease spell on a bridge so that your archers can pick off the slower-moving but powerful lizard-men in the back while your fighters hold the front of the bridge against the faster-moving Yuan-Ti, and then you have to remember to drop a fireball to knock out the trolls before turning to face the spiders coming up behind you.

the gameplay doesn't look too exciting at a glance, but here's a glance anyway (this is a pretty low-quality video, but again, it's the best i could find easily that wasn't a speedrun):


3. Doom 2 - holy shit, Doom 2. how do i love thee? let me count the ways. okay, actually not. there's been enough enumeration already. but this game scored a lot of firsts for me. first "3D" game - it wasn't real 3D, but let's not split hairs, first game that i actually had to use the mouse to play, first game i had to sneak to my friend's house to play because my dad wouldn't let me install it on his computer, etc. there is just something about the feel of this game that makes it so fun that i still make a point of playing through it once or twice a year. i liked the original Doom just as much, and in some respects more than this sequel, but mostly the sequel was just more, more, more of everything. and in Doom, that's never a bad thing. i don't know that i really need to say anymore about this one. if you don't know Doom already, you wouldn't have read this far in the list anyway.

here's a video:


2. Medieval: Total War - i had a really hard time choosing #1 between these two. i played this game so much for about a three year period after buying it that it actually played a part in influencing me to becoming a medieval lit scholar (which i have since given up on). it was such a historically intelligent, brilliant gaming experience that it was hard for me (being the nerd that i am) to not think constantly about medieval politics, geography, etc. even when not playing, and i just had to know more about the period in which this game was set. since this game, there have been two sequels, both of which have been graphically more amazing and engaging, but for me they still can't beat the original Medieval.

this game was played largely on a strategy map, a la risk. you moved pieces around, adjusted taxes, tried to marry your princesses into other empires' families, tried to make your princes into decent generals, built armies, built defenses, converted people to your religion, etc. the map game itself would have been enough to be a fun game. but then, when your armies collided with other armies, the map gave way to a full 3D battle screen, where your armies would fight it out to see who controlled a particular province, or border, etc. but the absolute best part of this (aside from the strategy of battle, which i'll get to) is that your efforts in the map game would spill over into the battle game. if you managed to finagle a fight into happening in mountainous terrain, you'd fight in 3D mountains. or plains. or desert. or the beach. in winter, or summer, etc. if you'd built up your castle and the enemy was laying siege to it, in the battle they'd be besieging a huge castle with tons of walls. if you'd failed to do so, they'd be attacking a hut surrounded by wooden poles. if your particular battle group was led by your king's bastard son that nobody liked because he was a child molester (it happens), there was a greater chance that they would, staring down the maw of a huge enemy army, just run away and ignore orders.

this game was so deep it was disgusting. add to all the play-by-play strategy the fact that you could play as 14 different factions (almohads, danes, english, french, etc.) and you could literally play through the game (conquering the whole of the western world probably took near-on 50 hours) 14 times and have a completely different gameplay experience every single time. add to all of this amazing bullshit the expansion pack, which partitioned up britain, scotland and ireland as they were during the viking invasions and centered the action around those three islands, and you have a game that you pretty much could never, ever possibly say "been there, done that". this game probably has the highest replay value of any game of any system i've ever played. ever. INSERT MORE HYPERBOLE HERE!!!

here's a movie, which will probably look pretty boring (it also doesn't have any sound, but this is the best i can do):


1. Starcraft - i've been playing this game for nine years and i love it so much that just now, as i was searching youtube for a gameplay video, i heard the terran level startup music and realized that i unconsciously had a huge grin on my face. i had a hard time picking #1, but i decided to choose Starcraft, mostly because:
1) i've been playing it forever and there's never been a time i've stopped playing it for any other reason than because i got another game that i wanted to play instead until i got sick of that game. then it was back to Starcraft.
2) it's deep enough that just a few months ago, playing through the second zerg campaign for the first time, i had only the most recent of many epiphanies concerning game strategy that pretty much completely changed the way i play the game. this happens once every 30 or so hours of gaemplay time, and i think that's pretty amazing, and really speaks to how well put together and balanced this game is.

i won't say this game originated the approach, but this was the first game to really popularize and (in my opinion) successfully execute the gaming approach that makes up the backbone of pretty much every RTS game out there nowadays. you collect resources, you build bases, and then you build an army (climbing the tech tree using your resources to learn how to do awesome things like use Ghosts to drop nukes on hapless opponents). eventually you use this army to crush other people who don't look like you and/or who disagree with your existential/religious philosophy. it's really that simple, but there are so many little details and twists happening within that formula with Starcraft - not to mention the fantastic story - that it pretty much never gets old.

the main conceit that keeps Starcraft fresh is the differences in the three races. not only does playing as a different race necessitate a very different approach to winning the game, you also have to consider how playing as a Terran requires you to respond to playing against the Protoss, compared to against the Zerg, compared to against another Terran. and Blizzard has done such and insanely good job balancing this game (they still release patches almost 10 years later, every months, containing new tweaks and adjustments) that there never is a "best" race for anything, and never an obvious achilles heel to be found unless an unfortunate player creates one for him/herself.

the more i write about it, the more i think i made the right choice for #1. and more i sort of want to play Starcraft right the hell now. in fact, i think i will. but first, have a movie. i was going to just post a normal gameplay video, but i thought it might be better to post this ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NUTS video from national geographic about the 2005 korean Starcraft national championship, or world championship or something. this is absolutely surreal:


thanks for indulging me if you read this far. i needed to make up for my lack of madden screenshots somehow. so hopefully this'll keep my nerd quotient high for a few months until i think of something else.