Game of the Decade (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, September 09, 2019, 17:53 (1691 days ago) @ Cody Miller

A few quick contenders, off the top of my head:

• God of War - Easily a “Best Game of All Time” contender in my books, so it makes a Game if the Decade list without breaking a sweat.

• The Last of Us - Characters like that don’t come along every day.

• Horizon Zero Dawn - For me, HZD is to world building what TLoU is to character development.

• Titanfall 2 - My favourite shooter of all time, with movement and traversal mechanics that are so freeing and thrilling, it’s an absolute joy just to run and jump and swing around the world. Having a best-in-class action/shooter game built around that takes it to another level, but it’d probably make my list even without those elements.

• Halo Reach - The ultimate Halo game, in my eyes. Pretty much everything I loved about the franchise, executed better and/or taken farther than ever before, then put into 1 awesome game.

• Splinter Cell Blacklist - I’m partial to the SC series, and Blacklist has my favourite campaign of the bunch. But the real star of the show was the Spies vs Mercs multiplayer mode. One of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had, and criminally under-played.

• Destiny - It’s a sloppy hot mess of a game in certain ways (probably the furthest from “perfect” out of all the games on this list) and yet it’s utterly unique, filled with brilliant moments, and a fantastic collection of activities. It’s my “Cheers”, or my “weekly poker game with the guys... (that I go to almost every night...)

• Transformers: Fall of Cybertron - Ya’ll will probably call me crazy for this one, but FoC is one of the most fun all-out action games I’ve ever played. It’s a fantasy-come-true for 6 year old me.

There are a few other games that I think are worth mentioning. I’m not sure they’re “game of the decade” contenders, but they are special in ways that make me think they at least deserve pointing out and remembering.

• Assassin’s Creed - I’m not even sure which specific game to talk about here, but the AC series has morphed into something special in recent years, especially the last 2 games. They’re impossibly huge and crazy and strange, they’re incoherent in certain ways and then surprisingly tight and effective in others. They build such well-realized recreations of historical places that they added a guided museum-tour style mode to Origins, complete with narrations and information plaques. But they’ll also throw you into the Greek underworld and make you fight Gods and mythical creatures. The whole thing is just nuts, and beautiful, and the locations are burned into my memory in the same way as real places that I’ve visited in my life.

• GTA V - In many ways, I don’t like this game at all. But the incredible scope and of the things you can do will occasionally lead to moments I couldn’t believe I was experiencing.

• Journey/Limbo/Ori and the Blind Forest - They’re all smaller games, but they’re all jaw-droppingly beautiful in their own ways.

• Spider-Man - I’m actually tempted to put that one on my main list, but I’d need to let some more time pass to see how it sits in my memory. It’s everything to Spider-Man that Arkham Asylum was to Batman (which would definitely be on my list, if not for the fact that it came out in 2009). The movement in Spider-Man is Titanfall 2 levels of fun, the combat is great, and the story is surprisingly well done. Absolutely worth playing.