Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
I’ve been playing since the NES and despite being from a low income family I had the luck of being able to play and own many consoles over the 3 decades of my life, plus some pc.
If you ask me right now? Resident Evil 4 (2005).
A before and after in gaming, to this day still extremely fun to play even for casuals but 20 years ago it was THE masterpiece. And everyone took notice of it, everyone played it, even players that didn’t cared about resident evil. The gameplay was so good that it got photocopied by everyone right after in the action genre.
Arguably the last big innovator in videogames minus Minecraft and… PUBG (Fortnite did it better I know).
Try to NOT pick your favourite game, that’s a different thing.
Not a single game but a series. Legacy of Kain is still my absolute favorite not because of replay ability or anything like that but because of the story.
Grand Theft Auto 3.
You had to be there to see how absolutely groundbreaking that was at the time. Gaming had suddenly grown up.
It was like all the obvious limits in other games all just got pulled away at once. Explore a full city in 3D, drive around, shoot people, steal a tank.
And the sequel only improved on it, but I’ve honestly never been so awed by a game before or since. It’s like they were the first dev to finally figure out what the PS2 hardware was for. Everything before just felt like a slightly nicer version of what had come before. This was new.
I didn’t even look in this direction but I think you’re right
Well, I guess my answer could change depending on you how define “best,” but I think my answer has to be Dwarf Fortress. I’ve been playing it longer than some posters on here have been alive! The emergent narratives of your forts and your dorfs combined with the constant drip-feed of updates makes it endlessly replayable. The main game theme has been my last-call morning alarm basically since I had a cell phone that replaced an alarm clock. It’s a game I come back to time and again that has yet to get old. If anything, it’s getting too complex for my stupid ass lol
It doesn’t hold up but while it was happening I don’t think there was a better gaming experience than Vanilla WoW. Obviously for some it wasn’t the first MMO experience, but for many it was, and it was pure magic.
The random friends made, and mortal enemies you would drop everything you were doing to try and kill. Spending 6 hours clearing a dungeon(read wailing caverns) for the first time with random people you met in chat. Getting your first mount, walking into molten core with 39 other people and killing your first raid boss. Getting your first epic. The stupidity of barrens chat/whatever the equivalent the scumbag alliance had. The first time you had guild mates come to your rescue when some no-life higher level person was camping you and it devolving into an impromptu war between everyone in the zone and their friends. That time you pulled off an epic 1 v 2. Shit talking all the other classes in your guilds class chat during raids.
The drama ohh the drama, the e-gf/bf that became peoples husbands and wives, the guild leaders wife e-humping half the guild. Relationships destroyed because someone would rather spend their time in azeroth that just about anything else.
Drooling over the gear the best players on the server had. Battling on the front lines of alterac valley all night, going to bed and rejoining the same battle, sometimes to cheers from your fellow soldiers that you had rejoined the fight.
I don’t think there will ever be anything like it again, we know too much, have access to to much info, but for that brief period in time wow was the greatest game ever.
Left4Dead2. Infinitely replayable, multiplayer without being toxic (except Versus mode), simple enough for n00bs to not be a burden most of the time.
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Red Dead Redemption 2, no contest.
The game world is so close to feeling real… the physics and horse handling feel basically perfect. They took their time to make you feel like you were in 19th century America.
I’ll disagree with that, it’s sooo slow. Perhaps it’s just my ADHD but man it hurts to play sometimes 🥲
Yeah I agree. The world is incredible, but the missions and gameplay not so much.
Probably Doom for being one of the first games with real mod support
And fear. Actual fear. I remember the demo scaring the shit out of us.
it also went open source later!
I mean, come on, it has to be Minecraft. One of the most influential games of all time. There really is nothing like it
The Witcher 3.
I always answer with Super Mario World. It’s the best game. I won’t elaborate.
Super Mario World is my answer to “If someone who never played a video game before asks you to introduce them to gaming, what will you start with?”
Possibly becasue it’s a major entry point for me into gaming, but it’s also colorful, specifically designed to be beginner and child friendly, it’s whimsical, the controls aren’t that complicated (though there is a deep end to that pool) and being a 2D platformer it’s maybe not nausea inducing to people not used to 3D graphics.
Ocarina of time. All Zelda games since are to some degree compared to it in terms of how successful it is monetarily, gameplay and story-wise. So many modern adventure games are based on this one game. It’s the game that finally made target tracking in 3D work. It’s so well thought out, that a blind streamer is able to play the game probably better than I ever will. If most common people know of “zelda” it’s because of this game. There are so many memes from Zelda in general. It’s one of the few games from my childhood that I will replay for the rest of my life.
Halo 2
Portal 2 is THE highest rated game on Steam.
Doom or Tetris were probably the most influential ones?
Maybe Halo 3? The amount of content, the custom games, the competitive gaming, all of it was just so good and loved by so many people.
