10. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002)
Nintendo's mainline
franchises don't change very much. Mario and Link are always wearing the
same clothes and rocking the same basic moves — jump, slash, fireball,
hookshot — on a mission to save some kind of princess from some kind of
Bowser/Ganondorf. But the deceptively simple gameplay at the core of Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda belies the games' strength — they are easy to play but difficult to master. What sets The Wind Waker
apart, 10 years after its release, is its eccentric, eerily beautiful
cel-shading aesthetic. It's Nintendo's last great visual experiment, a
remnant from a bygone age before the iconic game company shifted its
focus toward redefining The Controller. Set in a gorgeous world halfway
between Hayao Miyazaki and Calvin & Hobbes, Wind Waker also looks ahead of its time now: At a moment when videogames were shifting toward cinematic realism, Wind Waker found a raw beauty in cartoonish primitivism.
9. Half-Life 2 (2004)
Valve's
futuristic first-person shooter deserves a place in the videogame
pantheon just for the introduction of the Gravity Gun. That single
innovation cemented a change that had been brewing for a long time. The
''environment'' wasn't just something you walked through while killing
people; post-Gravity Gun, it was an organic part of the experience, and
it could be the deadliest weapon of all. But Half-Life 2 also
set a new benchmark for in-game storytelling, eschewing cinematics in an
immersive storyline. (It's remarkable how few games took the basic
lessons of HL2 to heart...and it's depressing when an otherwise-stellar modern game like Assassin's Creed 3
ends with what amounts to a neverending poorly animated cartoon.) Best
of all, because Valve encouraged players to create their own
modifications, Half-Life 2 became a veritable laboratory for user experimentation.
8. World of Warcraft (2004)
World of Warcraft was never just a game. It was a way of life, the first truly successful social network, a whole epoch unto itself. The Warcraft
universe was always a kitchen-sink fantasy universe, which made it
inevitable that the franchise would create the world's most popular
massively multiplayer role-playing game. You could choose your own
creature — a dwarf, an elf, a bull-creature, a troll, and even a human
(though, why choose a human?). The game is impossibly huge, but everyone
follows the same basic path, starting with nothing and rising to
greatness by gaining skills, possessions, and friends. The great secret
of WoW is that it's the American Dream in fantasy clothes,
Horatio Alger dressed up as J.R.R. Tolkien. It's a game built off the
Puritan work ethic, enforcing a blue-collar sensibility by forcing you
to grind along; it rewards companionship; and it also made the phrase
''videogame addiction'' sound a little less funny.
7. Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
This
was the Decadent Era for videogames. Developers raced to pile on the
knick-knacks (minigames, celebrity voices, downloadable content,
relentless in-game achievements), and then there was Shadow of the Colossus. It took the twin peaks of decadence — the inventory-overflowing RPG Fantasy genre and the open-world post-Grand Theft Auto
environment — and reduced them to near-abstraction. You play as a man
in a strange, ruined, almost empty landscape. You're trying to bring a
dead girl back to life. You've got a sword, a bow, infinite arrows, and a
horse. You have to fight 16 monsters, each with their own particular
attack style and weakness. After a while, the monsters don't seem so
monstrous...and why are you killing them, anyway? Like many of the great
games of the decade, Colossus feels purposefully deconstructive. A more straightforward title would be Boss Fight: The Videogame. But it's also rapturously beautiful. Designer Fumito Ueda also made the great Ico (and is apparently still working on the perpetually delayed The Last Guardian), but Colossus
is his masterpiece, at once romantic and nihilistic. It's the
videogame-as-poetry, establishing a stripped-down style that would
influence the arty explorations of the indie movement, like Braid or Journey.
6. Wii Sports (2006)
Nintendo
looked out of touch and old-fashioned in an industry defined by the hip
Playstation 2 and the powerhouse Xbox. But that was before they changed
the rules of the game. The Wii practically invented a whole new
demographic: The Casual Gamer, somebody who wanted something a bit less
esoteric than gruff space marines stealing cars from androgynous elf
archers. And Wii Sports was the killer app for Nintendo's
motion-control gambit. The game took five simple sports — tennis,
baseball, bowling, golf, and boxing — and transformed them into the most
addictive arm-waving exercises ever. This was the precise moment when
games went mainstream. By ''mainstream,'' we mean that Grandma could
play, too. How mainstream? In 2009, Wii Sports was declared the bestselling videogame of all time.
5. BioShock (2007)
There
was always something fundamentally immoral about the shooting game.
Argue all you want to about how the process of firing a gun at a digital
person is just a gameplay mechanic. It's still a genre built on killing
hundreds of people — and the people you're killing have become steadily
more realistic (both graphically and emotionally) as games have
evolved. BioShock takes that immortality to its logical
extreme. Set in an undersea metropolis that feels like a retro-future
utopia designed by Ayn Rand, the game initially just feels like the most
gorgeously art-directed shooter ever. Certainly, the look of BioShock
was incredibly influential — as was the game's mixture of superpowered
attacks. But then you get to the twist — ''Would you kindly?'' — and the
game reveals itself as a sharp, insidious self-critique. Featuring one
of the great ambiguous figures in game history — the mysterious Andrew
Ryan — BioShock doesn't just ask if you're a good person. It
questions the whole nature of ''goodness'' in a genre that requires you
to kill everyone in sight.
4. Portal (2007)
A psychotic computer, a teleportation gun, and the eternal promise of cake. That's all there is, really, to Portal, a darkly funny mini-masterpiece. Originally released alongside Half-Life 2 on ''The Orange Box'' compilation — this was a very good decade for Valve — Portal
is a ''shooter'' with just one gun — the Aperture Science Handheld
Portal Device. Using the device requires you to constantly remap your
own brain, as the game literally deconstructs the very idea of videogame
space. But the game isn't just a cerebral puzzle. It's also a ton of
fun, thanks to GLaDOS, the curiously endearing homicidal A.I. voiced by
Ellen McLain, the flat-out most original videogame character ever. She
makes Portal into the best geometry lesson you've ever had.
3. Mass Effect 2 (2010)
BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy is the
great modern space opera. Not because the games are so huge (although
they are massive, expansive, filled with possibility and rich
characterization), but because BioWare allowed you to create your own
character, and then force that character to make a few thousand
decisions during the adventure. The idea of a ''good-evil'' spectrum
became popular in the past decade, but Mass Effect avoided those easy moral questions with the ''Paragon-Renegade'' system. More to the point, Mass Effect
managed to gamify the whole idea of storytelling. Every conversation
was a new opportunity to define your character, to turn them into a
lover or a fighter, a weary old warrior or a sociopath. The franchise
hit a high point in its second entry, which featured a relatively simple
Ur-plot — it's Dirty Dozen in Space — that foregrounded the
best ensemble cast of the decade. Cool kids know that it's best to play
as a female, so you can enjoy the career-best work of videogame
voice-over queen Jennifer Hale.
2. Red Dead Redemption (2010)
Rockstar Games built its brand off the Grand Theft Auto series, which took a hyperrealistic open-world setting and layered in mature content — bad language and hookers and criminal protagonists, oh my! — but the developer's masterpiece is the rare videogame that goes beyond ''mature content'' and feels genuinely mature. Protagonist John Marston is a murderer, but he's also a father desperate to create a better life for his family. Redemption
sets his journey against the most vibrant open-world ever made for a
videogame — a frontier-verse set in the wild frontier, the even wilder
Mexican border, and a sterile civilized town on the edge of modernity.
The game manages the nifty trick of feeling like John Ford, Sam
Peckinpah, and Sergio Leone all at once. It also features one of the
great videogame endings, a Greek tragedy of a finale that might just be
the most cynical statement ever made by a popular videogame company. Put
simply, violence begets violence.
1. Batman: Arkham City (2011)
Rocksteady Studios broke the licensed-videogame curse with 2009's Arkham Asylum,
an above-average stealth-action bruiser. But that was just a warm-up
for this expansive sequel, a garish and glorious pop epic that combined
all the great advancements of the seventh console generation era, and
then threw in Batman as a cherry on top. You play as the Caped Crusader
on the worst night of his life, dying from poison and trapped in an
apocalyptic prison city. It's a simple idea — Escape from New York
with a batarang — but the gameplay is addictive. More to the point, in a
period that saw the Superhero become the defining hero of American pop
culture, Arkham City folds decades of Bat lore (the space-age
sci-fi, the '90s cartoon, Frank Miller, Christopher Nolan) into one
engaging and nightmarish descent. Forget The Dark Knight, this is the definitive superhero adventure of the decade.
We need your help! Click here to vote for the best videogame since 2002. The winner will be announced live at Spike TV's VGAs on Dec. 7!
We need your help! Click here to vote for the best videogame since 2002. The winner will be announced live at Spike TV's VGAs on Dec. 7!