DORKFEST - Top 10 PC Games EVAR...

...within all of the universe!

so i was sitting here thinking to myself: "self, what's the best way that i could totally take the image of myself i've created by blogging about short stories, poetry, songwriting, and various other creatively cool things, and totally destroy that image, leaving in its ashes the image of a guy who is really just a huge loser and who desperately needs new glasses frames?" and the answer hit me like a blast from a Terran Siege Tank. i would craft a top 10 list of the best PC games in the FUCKING UNIVERSE, both uncovering my intense love (since the age of 5) for video games and my intense love for enumerating things.

brace yourself, and prepared to be browbeaten with a whirlwind of subjective enumeration!

based on how carried away i got with this list, i'm only including numbers 6 through 10 in this post. 1 through 5 will follow. didn't want to overwhelm nobody.

Honorable Mention: Max Payne 2 - i just had to throw this in there. i loved both of the Max Payne games, and a lot of people who wrote them off because they "cashed in" on the at-the-time gimmicky mechanic of "Bullet Time" really missed how well said mechanic was refined in the second game. it became a strategy; not something to make the game look cool, but something that really had to be used to keep you alive in certain situations, and intelligently conserved in other situations so that you'd have enough left over to survive the first type of situations i mentioned. still with me?

the story was great too; this game was one of the first PC games to ship in a DVD-style case, and it made it seem more like a film than a game, which in a lot of ways it is. the story plays out through a series of graphic-novel pages, actually drawn and put into the game. there are comic-book-panel slideshows between levels with voiceovers by the characters a la an audiobook. and the film noir-style story is one of my favorite narrative told in a videogame that isn't 100 hours long and is translated from japanese. some of the twists in the story flat-out floored me, and i found myself surprisingly drawn to the characters and what happened to them so much so that i was hesitant to finish the game, as it seemed certain a few of the main characters were going to die at the end. that's more in tents than backpacking.

10. Prince of Persia - i love all three of the PC games in the "new" version of this series, and part two is especially notable for its exploration mechanic and its fighting system (say what you will about the lame-ass storyline), but it was the first one that i played first, the first one that i fell in love with first, and the first one that i finished at 5am one night when i had to get up for class at 7, just because i had to see how the story ended. this game is also the reason i went out and bought an analog gamepad for my computer, which was something i swore i'd never throw down the money for. it's an incredible game in terms of story and presentation, and uniqueness of ambiance, but why stop there? it's a really hard-to-describe combination of puzzle solving, exploring, platforming (a good platformer gets to my heart faster a girl with red hair, a motorcycle and a warlock guitar), and combat that just gets everything right. there was never a point in this entire game (it's not long, but it's not short either) where i was frustrated, annoyed, or anything short of completely enthralled. all the points at which i was stuck turned out to be just a problem with me not approaching a particular puzzle correctly, and after i took some time to think things out and approach the problem from a different angle, a solution always presented itself. i honestly can't think of another game i've ever played that was as perfectly paced and tweaked (and that's counting Chrono Trigger, Starcraft, and Ocarina of Time). if i had one complaint it's that the game is so dependent on its (fucking brilliant) puzzles, that once you finish it, it's sort of hard to recapture that original magic once you know the answers. and that's not even a critique; it's more like a backhanded compliment.

here's a video of some of the badass platforming:


9. Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast - this is another sort of nod to a few games, namely Dark Forces, Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, and then the Jedi Knight 2 series. i suppose technically this would be Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, and its sequel would be Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast 2: Jedi Academy, but that makes my head explode. so i'll just call it Outcast.

this was, for me, the high-water mark of the Jedi Knight game series. there were parts in the earlier games that i liked much more, but the whole point of being a Jedi Knight is of course to have force powers, to use them to kick people's asses, and then to carve those asses in half with your lightsaber. when this game came out, the technology was finally in place to do that in a meaningful way. sure, the previous games were awesome, but it became sort of pointless to use the lightsaber even when you'd mastered it; it was essentially a melee weapon that you madly hacked with when in reality you had an arsenal of shitkicking projectile blasters, riflers, microwavers, nucleofiers, fissonators, etc. the lightsaber fights became a button-mashing affiar, and though the game was good, it just basically made me think "i can't wait until they make the next one, so you can do this, and this, and this..."

Outcast was the next one, and it hit the ball out of the park. the story was great, the shooting mechanics were even great, the force powers were actually useful, and oh my god when you finally got the lightsaber, ass-kicking was unleashed, but in a way that required intelligence, reflexes, and actually learning to use the combat system. trust me, to finish this game on the highest skill level, you had to learn how to actually fight with the lightsaber. and it was awesome. and it looked good too; no game for my money before or since has so correctly hit the nail on the head when it comes to portraying the star wars universe. Academy (the sequel) was good in parts, but focused too much on saber combat; this game was delightfully balanced and generally let you decide how you wanted to play. you could even usually manage to take down sith using your guns if you were smart about it, without getting a laser or five batted right back into your face a la that dude on the sail barge in Return of the Jedi.

here's a display of lightsaber goodness and then some force-push action:


8. Serious Sam (and the Second Encounter) - Serious Sam did for me what Doom 3 and pretty much every other shooter since 1994 has failed to do: recreate the crazy, run-and-gun feeling of Doom and Doom 2, only in a full 3d world. and on top of that, it was just funny. i got blown up so many times by the kamikazee head-bomb guys early on because i just could not stop laughing long enough to shoot them. this game and its expansion were just about the most straight-up fun i'd had playing a game for five years or so when i got them, and i haven't found anything to match them since. Serious Sam 2 was good as well, but never matched the pace and freneticism of 100s-of-ogres-running-at-you-at-once madness of the original. it's still always a great feeling standing on top of a hill, looking a mile into the distance and seeing 200 undead skeleton horses bearing down on you, noting that you only have 100 rockets left and knowing that you'll have to kill at least 100 of them with just your knife, and that it's just time to man up. good times.

here's a video. it starts off sort of slow, but towards the middle starts to show the insanity that i'm talking about:


7. Star Wars: Alliance - notable for the fact that it was the conclusion of sorts to the fantastic X-wing/TIE Fighter series of the mid-90s, and in my opinion is the best game of the series. but this selection is also a tip of the hat to X-Wing and TIE Fighter. to this day people talk about how great TIE Fighter was, and it was great. i frittered away 150 dollars on joysticks just so i could play X-wing and then TIE Fighter (there really weren't many other games that you needed a joystick for, especially when they still connected through the LPT port), and i was about 12 or so. that was not a small amount of money when i was 12. shit, it's not a small amount of money now.

but Alliance, for my money (literally) had a much better, more involved story, with tons of scripted events happening while you were flying missions (and crazy plot twists like you wouldn't believe), an extremely involved single-player campaign, ability to unlock all campaign missions and play them again piloting any craft, and then, on top of it all, the ability to set up a skirmish using whatever objectives and craft on up to four different sides that you saw fit. it was like having your own star wars space sandbox to geek over. i wanted to go along with the crowd and say "hey, TIE Fighter was the best space-sim for the PC in the heyday of great space-sims", but then i remember the first time i started the asteriod belt mission and saw the miles-long super star destroyer (which would literally take a minute or so to fly past in the game it was so big) and i remember that this was really the first game that made me feel like i was part of a movie, or some humongous adventure bigger than just my small character's part. even TIE Fighter didn't do that.

here's a video of the climactic battle of endor (awesome video, though i daresay i could take the dude easily in a dogfight...):


6. Unreal Tournament - this game holds the dubious honor of being the only game that's ever, EVER convinced me to play online. i have suffered so many comments in the vein of "u got pwned, n00b!" because of this game that i'm almost mad at it. almost.

UT brilliantly took the speed, carnage, and disregard for people without blindingly fast mouse hands of the Doom series and turned it into a sport. so many games have capture the flag, deathmatch, and countless other multiplayer modes now that it's hard to imagine that this by itself could have been somewhat of an innovation in 1999, but it was. other games had done some of these things already, but not as well, and not as prettily. and on top of the fun that came with earning the respect of your five cyber-buddies by making a clutch headshot with seconds on the clock to give your team the victory, UT also had an excellent bot system, which meant that anytime you wanted to take on any of the game's modes or maps offline, you could expect to be seriously challenged by the AI. i've been playing this game for almost nine years and i still can't beat it on the highest skill level. they're THAT freakishly good.

add to the mix a great old-school techno soundtrack and fantastic presentation values and you've got a game that i can still easily find good matches for online at any hour of the day, nine years after its release.

i tried for something like 45 minutes to find a video that recreates the insanity of online play, and couldn't find one that didn't have someone's homemade-ass techno music playing over it (or choral piece in latin for the real melodramediennes). here's the best i could do: