Top Five Video Games

Fellow blogger Sean Twist is currently showcasing his Top Five Video Games of the Last Five Years (he's done #s 5 and 4 so far). Never one to shy away from shamelessly stealing a blog topic from elsewhere, I figured I might produce my own list. In my case, it's simply the Top Five Video Games, since I've only really been playing them for about eight years now, as hard as that may be to believe if you've been one of the many to suffer at my hands in a First Person Shooter (and yes, that was a joke).

5) Unreal Tournament (PC):

I can still hear the unmistakable "head shot!" voice-over that rewarded you whenever you made that perfect cranial contact in this way-too-fun online offering. With one of the deadliest-ever rocket launchers in gaming history - if you timed it right, you could fire six rockets at once, and effect a mini nuclear detonation! - it was the perfect game for a noob like me, especially if I wanted to piss off a much better player who'd been trash-talking up to that point.

4) Star Wars Jedi Knight (Dark Forces II) (PC):

This was the one that got me into video games (for the first time; in my 30s!). You can read all about it here. As they say, you never quite forget your first time!

3) Aliens Vs Predator (PC):

I finally ventured into the online gaming community with AVP, and it opened up possibilities that I'd never imagined up to that point. Things like: you can play against opponents way tougher than any A.I. that come with the game, you can chat with those hardcore folk while you try to kill them, and you can even play 12 to 16 hours straight, if your wife goes out of town to visit her mother! Ironically, I picked up this game at Future Shop as a total impulse purchase, simply because I saw the cover and thought it'd be cool to play against the Aliens from one of my favourite movie franchises. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay later, that turned out to be $40 very well spent!

2) Resistance: Fall of Man (PS/3):

Speaking of money well spent, this $70 game paid for itself many times over, by the time I'd played through the offline game twice and worked myself up from Private to Supreme Commander over the course of several months. This was one of the few games I've ever played online where I'd say that I actually achieved some above-average skill. I was soon able to consistently finish in the top third of any game I played, and often in the top 10%. And of course it was a treat having all those evenings where Boneman and I would spend an hour or two killing Chimera and humans... or trying to get our headsets to work!

1) Battlefield 1942/Vietnam (PC):

It was a close call between this and R:FoM, but I've got to give the nod to the Battlefield series. The work gang met up online every Wednesday night for nearly a year, just on the strength of BF:1942 and BF:Vietnam. And will I ever forget the night that we practiced jumping from one helicopter to another (without dying)? Or the recording we made of one of our sessions, that we then played back on a projector at work, while we all laughed so hard that we almost cried? Or my amazing ability to fly helicopters in every single way, as long as it didn't involve landing? Those were some great memories that simply had to make this my all-time favourite game (OK, I cheated and it's 2 games... but it seemed like one long, happy experience!)

Honourable mention goes to Ratchet & Clank (PS/2) for the long hours Vicki and I spent hunting gold bolts (after finishing the game once already), Ico (PS/2) for its amazing visuals and challenging puzzles, and Halo/Halo 2 for the incredible fun that Tammy and I had playing each in Co-operative Mode.

[Edit Jan 19/08: My enjoyment of Half Life 2: The Orange Box on the XBox 360 has reminded me that I foolishly omitted Half Life 2 - on the PC - from my honourable mentions above. It definitely would fit in my Top 10 somewhere.]