Top Ten of the Decade: Part 4

5. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002)
I’ve been doing some calculations, and have established that Morrowind was roughly 7,483 times better than Oblivion.  Yes, Oblivion had the next-gen engine.  It had less of the bugs, it had voice acting, it had a tighter structure within its open world.  It was probably the more solid game.  But Morrowind had the charm.  It had the fascinating world, a heady mix of traditional fantasy and odd science-fiction.  It had the most creative architecture, and the more interesting script.  It had the better soundtrack.  No, scratch that: it had the best soundtrack.  It had more atmosphere and more depth than anything I’d played before.  It was my Game of the Ever for quite some time.

4. Half-Life 2 (2004)
Half-Life 2’s a bit rubbish these days.  No, seriously, go back and play it.  Episode 2 is still an astonishing first-person shooter, but Half-Life 2 feels restricting and distinctly last-gen.  Of course, that’s because it is.  You release a game as good as Half-Life 2, you basically end the generation.  There is no point in anyone bothering with that sort of game any more.

But hey, here’s a thing: Half-Life 2 isn’t just a singular product.  It’s effectively also a free engine, for anyone who wants to create their own stuff without learning how to code and without having to create hundreds and thousands of art assets.  As a mod tool, Half-Life 2 has served me astonishingly well.  And it’s spawned the likes of Dear Esther, Minerva and the upcoming Black Mesa mod. As a platform for creativity, there is no better.

3. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (2004)
One of my most-played games of the decade.  On release, it was a mess.  A complete atrocity.  It occasionally crashed to desktop. Sometimes you got stuck inside the scenery.  Plot essential characters wouldn’t turn up.  It was pretty difficult to actually get a fair way into the game without it resolutely breaking.  Releasing Bloodlines in that state, on the same day as Half-Life 2, was the nail in the coffin for Troika.

Several years later, it’s one of the most astonishing games in the world.  It’s been patched, repeatedly, by teams of eager and passionate fans.  And in its present state, it is an absolutely essential RPG, a true masterpiece of storytelling, a travelogue of a fascinating culture.  That so few games like this are made is so tragic.  But that this one exists makes me ecstatic every time I think about it.

2. Grand Theft Auto III (2001)
This very nearly ended up at number one, which surprised me.  In the end, it didn’t, which doesn’t, but there’s no denying that Grand Theft Auto III deserves a place right near the top of the list.  It birthed a new movement of open-world action-adventuring, and brought previously core gaming aggressively into the mainstream cultural eye.  It stole literally hundreds of hours of my then-teenage life (yeah, shut up, I was nearly old enough to play it), had me creased up in fits of laughter, and opened my eyes to new possibilities of game design.  It’s the game that finally convinced my friends that games could be awesome.  And that’s because Grand Theft Auto III is awesome, even now.  The fourth iteration may have refined the concept, but the third game absolutely pioneered it, maintaining Grand Theft Auto’s cathartic chaos but rendering it in the most extravagant, wonderful 3D world.  So many years later, it still stands out as a masterpiece.

1. Deus Ex (2000)
Of course it’s Deus Ex.  In the end, no matter how much entertainment GTA3 provided, nothing in the past ten years has matched Deus Ex.  I’m starting to wonder if anything ever will.

Because, nearly ten years later, no game has quite nailed what made Deus Ex so brilliant.  Its AI was atrocious, the stealth didn’t quite work, it was imbalanced, the story was awful and the voice work even worse… and yet the magic of those multiple options, those meaningful choices, the depth to its world, the unstoppable sense of cool that emerges from playing as hyper-agent J.C. Denton – all these things combine to the most ludicrously perfect degree of accuracy.

I didn’t get Deus Ex to start with.  Perhaps because its first mission isn’t great.  But I’m pretty sure that not a year has gone by in which I’ve not played through once more, and fallen in love all over again.  Its sequel, never mind the critics, was fabulous.  Bloodlines was even better.  Even Fallout 3 had a bloody good go at integrating Ion Storm’s decisions-decisions mechanics.  But no game, not ever, has matched the sparkling giant of ingenuity that is the first Deus Ex.  I strongly suspect that, if this list weren’t limited to just a decade, Deus Ex would still emerge some way ahead of the pack in an entirely deserved first place.

Pages: 1 2