Top Ten of the Decade: Part 5

By Christos Reid

At the moment, a collective of Resolution regulars are busy penning their own personal top-ten lists.  The theme?  Favourite games of the decade.  Not the best, not the most polished, not the most influential.  Just favourite.  Next up: Christos, and ten games that made him love the noughties.

10. Fallout 3 (2007)
I don’t think I can adequately express how deep and terrifying my experience of this game was without settling back into the mindset I had while playing. I can summarise the mindset quite simply: the words “oh” and “shit,” repeated ad infinitum, whether I was shopping for new gear without enough money, or being chased by three really angry Mirelurks after stumbling across a nest of seemingly innocuous eggs.

You are the last hope of the post-nuclear wasteland that is Washington DC, a location that resonated with me deeply as my favourite “been there” place in the United States. To see the White House decimated, and the Washington Monument nothing but a glorified radio mast, is shocking to say the least. This is before you see everything from virtual reality, to aliens, to creatures made out of human arms and torsos, to your dad (finally!)… If there’s a list for every possibility, then it’s something I’d like to put aside four weeks to see.

9. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2004)
Take every time you’ve ever drawn an esteemed videogaming icon in your exercise book, and how many times you’ve wondered how great it would be if they suddenly sprang to life in all their two-dimensional glory. We’ve seen Mario in two dimensions for decades, but before the N64 brought us Paper Mario, we’d never seen him turn sideways, turn into a paper aeroplane or roll up into a tube.

The Thousand-Year Door brought the concept forward even more, by introducing deeper RPG battle mechanics, more upgrades and more characters. And it looked fantastic, years before the Unreal Engine showed us the Meat Cube and hordes of Locust.

The best part of all of it? Luigi’s side story, regaled to you if you ask him in town; its bizarre, B-movie parallel to your own quest a hilarious commentary on the struggle of the man in green.

8. Final Fantasy IX (2000)
I’d have loved to put the seventh instalment here, but that came out a couple years before the span of time we now take into consideration. However, if there’s any RPG that I loved anywhere near as much as the journey of Cloud and co, it’s most definitely Square Enix’s ninth perfect RPG. Set in a world of magic, airships, tyranny and politics, it goes for a far more whimsical approach to Final Fantasy’s traditional serious undertones of class and race. Following Zidane, a monkey-tailed thief with a penchant for witty retorts, it’s a journey to find himself by chasing a mysterious gentleman who happens to have the only other monkey-tail in existence. In that dimension, anyway.

No prizes for guessing who the main antagonist of the title is, of course. But it doesn’t take away from the massive amount of effort put into the mechanics and aesthetic appeal in comparison to VIII’s bland menus and unintuitive character progression system. For a game to become as associated with the high-class of Japanese fantasy as its 1998 predecessor has with science-fiction is nothing short of a massive achievement.

7. Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)
When the fourth (in a sense) instalment in the GTA franchise finally made its way into my 360, I could barely focus on starting it up due to the excitement I was experiencing. I had no PS2, no Xbox, just a GameCube, and only brief flirtations with the previous instalments at friends’ houses had allowed me just a whiff of the open-world potential this game could bring onto my television.

What happened over the next few days changed my perspective of sandbox gaming almost as much as a certain Nintendo game I’ll mention later. It was just so open ended, so close to the Manhattan we all know and love, and the protagonist was someone I could enjoy simply being while I cruised around Liberty City, capping heads and generally being a scary motherfucker of an immigrant.

But the moment that hooked me on the game, probably for the rest of my life, was not the characters, the weapons, or the fantastic multiplayer. It was when, between missions, I decided to go driving, for the sheer enjoyment of it. On a biker’s bike, cruising across a bridge, night sky ahead, listening to 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins, something told me this wasn’t just a game you had fun in. It was one you could live in.

6. SSX 3 (2003)
What is there to say about this game? I’ll try and extend it, as most of the time when describing it to anyone from my girlfriend to a toddler, I’ll end up saying the same thing: “it’s just… it’s so… just take this, and go play it.”

What they wrote on the box was something generic, something that told devious, devious lies about how it was similar to SSX Tricky in many ways. It wasn’t similar at all. What should have been written was this:

“This is the game that allows you to play a paranoid schizophrenic. This is the game that allows you to unbuckle his straightjacket. This is the game that allows you to strap him to a board and force him to outrun an avalanche whilst listening to a DJ talk about keggers and play The Ceasars at you.”

If I were in games PR, they’d make millions.

[Continues...]

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