[GO10s] #1: Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3

Traditionally, whenever I considered making a top games list, I would ask myself “how do I rank these multiplayer games which I’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into, where my experience depended on how good I was, who I was playing with, and other community circumstances, rather than just the game itself?” I couldn’t come up with a good answer - I felt like I viewed those competitive titles just completely differently from anything single-player-focused at this point. Not as works of art (or entertainment), but as playing fields, the same way I never thought whether Basketball or Football is a better designed game, I just played whichever one I had the best opportunity to, and I tried my best at it. That’s kind of the thing - when you intentionally try to break the game to get the biggest advantage over your opponent, it’s hard to say whether the manner in which you’re able to do it is “good” or “bad”, I’m thinking in terms of “does it help me win”, not “do I enjoy this”.

The last part is especially crucial when it comes to fighting games in particular, because by design, there are periods of the game you will not enjoy. As the enemy scores a knockdown or otherwise locks you down in their flurry of offense, your gameplay is often limited to testing your reaction time and prediction ability, and if you succeed, then the reward will often be just the return to neutral state, not scoring any “victory points” or gaining any advantage, just denying the opponent theirs. I think Pat Miller put it right when he said that your goal as a fighting game player is to make the game as unpleasant to your opponent as possible, and it’s a tug-of-war where players try to snatch the fun away from one another. As such, your mileage will absolutely vary based on the pool of competitors available to you, your own talent, experience, and willingness to work at getting better.

But in recent years I’ve had plenty of opportunity to look for words to describe what I think makes one fighting game “better” than another, as titles such as Street Fighter V and DragonBall FighterZ have thoroughly disappointed me. It really didn’t feel like matter of personal preference at this point, but of design choices that, in my opinion, significantly reduced the gameplay complexity in crucial areas, allowing for less diversity of playstyles and focusing on just the superficial flair, when the genre’s history is full of titles that were able to achieve both. And one example of such is what I now realize has been my favorite game for many years now, 2011’s Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3.

[GO10s] #2: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

Ah, here it is, I finally did it - the cardinal sin of arbitrarily deciding to put only one entry out of the series on the list, when if I were to be true to my feelings, then I would probably bump the bottom 2 and just put the three Danganronpa games on #2-#4 spots. But I can’t help it, I just don’t think that would look well - so Danganronpa 2 and V3 get the shaft, and my favorite of the series, the original “Trigger Happy Havoc”, gets the glory of being my second favorite game of the decade.

Danganronpa seems to be the third visual novel-ish series that broke outside the constraints of the genre’s niche audience, at least here in the west. Just like Ace Attorney and Zero Escape, it features other gameplay elements than just making choose-your-adventure selections, which I bet is the actual biggest reason for why people would even check it out. But weirdly enough, it shares a lot more with the previous two series - investigations and court trials from Phoenix Wright’s adventures, and the premise of life-and-death games in enclosed areas, unsure of what the world outside of their confines is like, very much in spirit of 999. However, it’s completely different tonally from the other two, and in fact, it’s quite unlike anything else I know.

[GO10s] #3: The Last Guardian

With most of the games on this list, I initially got into them either excited, or at least with no preconceptions. That would be very hard for The Last Guardian, a game surrounded by controversy, polarizing reviews and near-universal agreement that one of the major functions of the game, commanding your animal companion, is bad, and if anything, the game succeeds despite it, not thanks to. However, a friend’s praises towards it made me decide to check it out for myself, and with each passing minute it became more and more clear that I’m playing an absolute masterpiece.

So this will be a short entry because I already wrote about this game once and I definitely stand up by everything I’ve said back then.

[GO10s] #4: The Last Of Us

Lost Legacy might be the closest entry in the series to recapture Uncharted 2’s lighting in the bottle, but there’s no doubt in my mind that The Last of Us is the best Naughty Dog game of the decade. It’s interesting to see a lineage in their entire studio history - starting with pure platforming games, introducing more action-adventure elements into the Jak series, then focusing on that in Uncharted, and finally cutting back on the large, bombastic action, and giving us a less athletic protagonist who can’t climb and jump quite like Drake, in order to tell a more solemn and human story. And boy did “less is more” work here.

[GO10s] #5: Celeste

Here’s an embarrassing confession - I don’t think I really like difficult, challenging games. Of course this is a subjective topic, I’m sure that some of the games I would consider “easy” are impenetrable for others and vice versa. But I certainly don’t feel the compulsion to finish every game I start, to beat any challenge put in front of me. After too many attempts where I feel like I’ve made no progress, I will give up. And even if I manage to succeed before my patience runs out, I rarely feel satisfied. The type of relief I get from that isn’t particularly enjoyable, I don’t intrinsically feel pride for overcoming an obstacle without proper context. At the same time, I always make sure that the games I play are sufficiently difficult, that they keep me on my toes and actually test my abilities, otherwise I rarely feel a sense of purpose in playing anything. It’s a weird middle ground I find myself in and I sometimes wonder just how much my gaming experiences differ from others because of it.

But one thing I know for sure is that I’m not the target masocore audience - I just don’t feel the type of compulsion and satisfaction they are supposed to elicit. I’m one of those weirdos that think Super Meat Boy is a pretty bad game, I never really enjoyed any of the Mario romhacks I’ve tried, and I don’t even enjoy watching playthroughs of I Wanna Be The Guy-likes, let alone playing any. And part of what makes Celeste so great is that despite the superficial similarities, it’s nothing like those games.

[GO10s] #6: The Talos Principle

There’s something about the existence of The Talos Principle that just brings a smile to my face. Maybe because of how ambitious and well executed it is? Maybe it’s the snob in me that is proud of appreciating a game that, despite it’s quality and high scores, doesn’t get brought up all that often (a quick look at 2014 game of the year lists where it’s nowhere to be found should be quite telling, even if some of it can be chalked up to its middle-of-December release date). Maybe I just really like the game.

In any case, here’s another first person puzzle game created by a studio most famous for their shooters. But unlike Valve giving out early signs that they might be interested in something like this with gravity gun hijinks in Half-Life 2, TTP came completely out of left field, following the release of three Serious Sam games, which themselves were traditional id-style mayhem. Quite frankly, if it weren’t for the company logo, I wouldn’t believe it’s the same people - not only the genre, but themes and aesthetic are just so completely divorced from their previous creations.

[GO10s] #7: Portal 2

Portal 2 is the second best game in the Portal series, and also the only one of the two that got released this decade.

To be fair, it’d be very hard to outdo the original game, because of how fresh and novel it was. It's been pretty much the first of its kind as far as first-person-puzzle-platformers go, it brought something new to the table with the portal gun, had a very unique setting along with unconventional at-the-time storytelling methods (both with the malfunctioning AI and messages hidden in the “cracks”), then there was the story twist half-way through, and finally, the memes. I think it’s pretty undisputable that Portal made a huge impact on the gaming industry and its audience, and it’s hard for me to imagine how a sequel could ever exceed that.