100 Favorite Video Games

Kyle

vondruke @ gmail.com AIM: ramboli

My parents moved to Virginia in the late 1970s because they were pseudo-hippie-holdover back-to-nature types and had read in the magazine Mother Earth News about a subsistence farming-based commune near Lexington. With such madcap experiences as an incredibly harsh winter, a horse almost biting my dad’s right nipple off through five or so layers of heavy winter clothing, and half-retarded hillbilly neighbors trying to make them eat squirrel meat, that lasted less than a year. But they stayed in Virginia, and that’s where I grew up; you can probably gather from the beginning of this paragraph that they raised me extolling the virtues of the outdoors, exercise, and so forth. However, like any other kid coming of age in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, I was partially raised by video games, no matter what my parents had to say about it. This list is far from perfect (Where the fuck are any of the Zork games? Why in Christ's name do I have Super Monkey Ball, Jr. on my list? Dammit, I left out Interstate ’76! Etc.), but it’s okay, because I’m writing about the games that have been important to me. And if you think I’m a low-life for it, feel free to IM me on my AOL Instant Messenger screenname of mike fireball 0 BUT SERIOUSLY FOLKS…

20. Super Monkey Ball, Jr. (GBA, 2002)

Basically, the idea behind this game was if you were in the mood to play Marble Madness but wanted to feel extra homosexual. When it initially came out, I played Super Monkey Ball on Game Cube with some friends faux-ironically, but when the “Junior” edition came out for Game Boy Advance, I immediately went out and bought it, though I felt like a pervert just for getting the game. In any case, it was an awesome game and played like a combination of Marble Madness and a million Shockwave mini-golf games, only without the distracting “Whack Slick Willy and Win $20!” or “Which of These Performers is Jennifer Lopez?” banner ads cluttering the screen.

Some people might not think it belongs on a list of the 100 best video games of all time, but to them I say, “You don’t know me so don’t even act like you do,” and also, “I’m going to remove your incisors with a pair of pliers and then shove them through your eyes with my thumbs! In real life!”

19. Altered Beast (Genesis, 1989)

I used to play this at my aunt and uncle’s house in Pittsburgh whenever we’d go there for Thanksgiving because my uncle was one of those “cool uncles” who played Sega and liked Ren & Stimpy, which is to say he was a pathetic pile of shit desperately trying to cling to a quickly-vanishing youth. Haha, only kidding, Uncle Peter. Please keep sending me $50 checks every month so I can continue not sending you thank you notes!

Anyway, this game taught me the word “naïf,” which I have probably only used in the context of being six or seven years old and reading a Calvin & Hobbes strip aloud to any family member in earshot. It was a game in which, every time you obtained a level- up orb, your character progressively transformed from a 98-pound Mars Volta fan into a Rob Liefield drawing, before finally turning into a level-appropriate animal. Hence the title of the game. In terms of gameplay, it really didn’t offer too great a deviation from the punch/kick the shit out of defenseless/diseased animals schema established by the likes of Castlevania, but the transformation aspect was what really made the game stand out. Also, the main bad guy looked kind of like Telly Savalas mixed with Jackie Coogan as Uncle Fester.

I would furthermore like to note that I almost just used this as my entire game description for Altered Beast:
Destinys2ndKid: WISE FWOM YOU GWAVE

18. ESPN College Hoops 2004 (PlayStation2, 2003)

Early in my first semester of college, a number of people from my suite and the next suite over bonded over EA Sports’ NCAA Football 2004. Given that my social interaction with these people was at the time limited to awkwardly standing in their rooms while I waited a seemingly interminable two minutes for my Easy Mac to cook, as the microwave I had brought with me didn’t work, I opted out of the NCAA league. By the end of the semester, though, I was friendly with everyone from both suites (save for one comically repugnant fellow who lived in my suite and whose roommate was a model of virtue for putting up with him), and I convinced my neighbor to buy a basketball game to revive the great tradition of imposing on the people who owned Playstation 2s by demanding to play games in their rooms.

So we got College Hoops, and it was amazing. More recently, a friend and I have invested in College Hoops 2005, but apparently, they were rushed in developing it, and it sadly shows; the opposing team can perform Max Fischer backflips down the court without having backcourt violations called on them, the character models for the on-the-court fans seem to be recycled from the first Alone in the Dark game, simply being in possession of the ball will get you called for charging, and so forth. But 2004 was sheer perfection, and its only technical faults (e.g. violent upwards acceleration midway through a dunk if you perform one with a player under 6’4” or so) only served to make the game more humorous and enjoyable. I remember with great fondness creating a team composed of caricatures of our suitemates, William Howard Taft, and the sexually predatory then-dean of the University of Virginia’s Echols Scholar program and pitting it against the likes of Liberty University, whom we’d stacked with the greatest conceivable player, an eight-foot juggernaut with perfect stats.

Those were simpler times, times when Ol’ Man Withers would let us youngins catch crawdads in the crick runnin’ through his property, meemaw would always have a pie coolin’ on the windowsill, and I could skip class every day to play a basketball video game because I had placed some ridiculous sense of importance on winning a fictional national championship in said game.

17. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (PC, 2002)

As opposed as I generally am to the somewhat recent video game trend of having a grizzled, vaguely troubled protagonist with the deepest, gravelliest voice possible taken out of self-imposed retirement to perform the actions of the game you’re playing, I always kind of thought Splinter Cell managed to overcome these clichés by just being a great game.

I recently downloaded a demo of the third game in the Splinter Cell series, and to tell you the truth, I’m getting a little tired of playing a game wherein I basically have to act like Rondo Hatton as The Creeper, all hiding in darkness and listening in on conversations. But it was still fresh in the first game, and fucking up terrorists’ shit has rarely been as much fun. I don’t even really remember the storyline, I just remember that you flit around the world, going wherever there are ample shadows to perform operations that realistically would in no way be undertaken by a solitary 50+ year-old man in a wetsuit. Tom Clancy may be a military geek who looks like Fat Oliver North and Tom Arnold had a baby, but he created some pretty decent intellectual property with Splinter Cell.

16. Bases Loaded III (NES, 1991)

When I was seven or so, I became obsessed with this game. I would invariably play as team ‘N’, which I presumed to be some form of New York City-based club. My star player was “Marati,” whose .316 batting average, in hindsight, could have stood for some improvement. I mean, .316 is certainly nothing to scoff at, but considering he was supposed to carrying his team, he’s no Barry Bonds. oh wait, he just got a bad case of skier’s thumb, held a press conference to say he was quitting because of it, and took a piss in a reporter’s mouth nm. Well, now that that awkward reference to current sporting events is over with (just be glad I didn’t try to work in a reference to Mr. Baseball, starring Tom Selleck…and I am aware that Barry Bonds’ lifetime average is only .300, I’m just referring to latter-day Bonds), onto my story…

When I was about thirteen, I got our Nintendo out of the drawer it was being kept in and began playing again. I enjoyed such games as Phantom Fighter, Skate or Die 2, and Snake, Rattle, and Roll (any one of which should probably be on this list instead of a number of items…), but, as when I was younger, my most played game was Bases Loaded III. Again, I always played as ‘N’, and again, I always considered Marati to be my team’s lord and savior. So one day, my brother and I had gotten into a fight over something silly, and I slammed and locked my door. Mere minutes later, he began pounding on my door, demanding to be let in because he had a surprise to show me. Naturally, I assumed this to be a ruse of some kind, so I didn’t unlock the door. Eventually, I heard him stomp away from my door and go downstairs. Then I heard a repeated, forceful pounding noise. He was smashing my Bases Loaded III cartridge with a hammer. The cartridge seemed surprisingly salvageable, but when I tried to play it later, I just got a muddled black screen with weird white bars where players and other sprites should’ve been. The big surprise he wanted to show me was the ninja mask our mom had made him for Halloween when he was six, as he had just found it in his closet. He would’ve been sixteen when this happened. In conclusion, Bases Loaded III was a fun game to play.

15. Donkey Kong Country (SNES, 1994)

I can’t believe how well this game’s graphics hold up. My parents never let us have a console beyond the NES, but I was always unfairly biased towards the Genesis; this game changed my mind. I really can’t think any failings in Donkey Kong Country, other than perhaps the awkward attempts at humor that occur during interactions with Cranky Kong. The CG cartoon of Donkey Kong Country, on the other hand, was laughably bad. The voice of Donkey Kong sounded like a generic “surfer dude” character from a show like Freakazoid, the voice of Diddy sounded like some overly-energetic nebbish, and I don’t really remember what the voice of King K. Rool sounded like, so I’ll go out on a limb and say “like a gay.”

Anyway, my point is this: Donkey Kong Country was an amazing game, and if it were more innovative in any way other than graphically, I’m sure it would rank higher on my list. As it is, I’ll just stick with #15 and a chance to badmouth a kids’ TV show that had its series premiere well after I was too old to be watching it. But that doesn't mean I lack the capacity to be sincerely grateful for a game I genuinely loved as a kid.

14. Rampage (Arcade, 1986)

Until they added Go-Karts, this game was the only reason I went to Putt-Putt as a kid. You played as one of three enormous mutants, and the purpose of the game was to ravage cities and towns across the country, leaving behind mangled corpses and sobbing orphans in your wake. The wholesale destruction of all major American cities would probably be frowned on today, but in the 1980s, waste and devastation were the ultimate goal in life. I think there was a mini-game portion of Rampage in which you just tried to see what percentage of the United States’ domestic oil reserves you could drink in two minutes. The most titillating portion of the game came if you played as Lizzie, the lizard creature (get it? Yeah, the other names don’t really work that way…the ape is George and the werewolf is Ralph), and died, because death meant your character would shrink down to human form and scuttle off, embarrassed; Lizzie was a woman, and I’m pretty sure I saw her vagina once. You just have to look real fast.

But I seriously have a special place in my heart for this game, and it's my genuine belief that Rampage, in a very roundabout way, led to the likes of the Grand Theft Auto series today, for I don't know of any game that came before this that took advantage of American gamers' not entirely latent desire to just destroy shit for no reason. In this way, the game might be a fairly depressing reflection on American consumerist culture, but for a five-year-old me at the Putt-Putt arcade, it was just an opportunity to punch buildings and eat people.

13. Mortal Kombat II (Arcade, 1996)

For a little while, all I knew about Mortal Kombat was that Mad Magazine said “fa fa fa” to Tipper Gore for trying to censor it. Then I played it at a trashy neighbor’s house and was instantly hooked. The second one only improved on the first, and I believe it was with the second one that came blatantly untrue rumors of alternate fatalities called “babalities,” “nudalities” and so forth. I played this and later, Mortal Kombat III for hours on end in Mindboggle, my mall’s arcade, and Showbiz, which was just Chuck E. Cheese’s, but apparently named in honor of a male stripper.

Later, when Mortal Kombat 4 came out in the arcades, I played against a middle-aged guy at Mindboggle who had a tattoo of the Mortal Kombat logo on his big flabby arm. I told this story for weeks thereafter just so I could use the zany quip “He may have won, but I think we all know who the real loser was in that situation.” So not only was I fat and falling out of favor with girls at this point in my life, I was also overly confident in my own nimble wit, peppering my speech with little gems of one-liners like that one. Fortunately, I grew like 6 inches the summer after middle school, thinned out, and realized what a fuckwit I was. But I can still appreciate Mortal Kombat II for having granted me a chance to be the “cheapest” video game player alive by simply sweepkicking anyone who came near me and for being one of the reasons I couldn’t hold onto my allowance for more than three days at a time until I was fourteen or so.

12. Streets of Rage 2 (Genesis, 1992)

This is the game that introduced me to the German Suplex. It’s basically a differently stylized version of River City Ransom, but with the RPG-ish elements taken out. The key difference, though, from River City Ransom is that Streets of Rage 2 follows its era’s tradition of having its final boss be a man in an oversized suit. I guess they’re all supposed to be yuppie drug kingpins of some kind, but they just kind of make me wonder what the gaming industry of the late ‘80s and early ’90s had against David Byrne.

You could play as various street toughs with appropriately tough and onomatopoeiatic names, except for Skate, who just kind of looked like Tracy Chapman. That’s why I was always Axel. Unfortunately, [some combination of a Beverly Hills Cop joke and a Guns ‘n’ Roses joke]. In any case, this was a delightful game, and my memories of it are only tainted by the havoc that mass consumption of Yoohoo and Pringles and staying up all night playing Sega wreaked on my stomach and body during various sleepovers during which Streets of Rage 2 was played.

11. Max Payne 2 (PC, 2003)

The Max Payne games are utterly ridiculous and over-the-top, but they are able to contend that they’re this way on purpose because they’re supposed to be all film noir-ish/graphic novel-ey. The second one, however, is a lot better at transcending self-conscious ridiculousness in that it no longer contains the embarrassing factor of the skinny, acne-scarred geek (like a white Seal with a perpetual angry smirk) who wrote the game posing as Max Payne for the little comic book-inspired interstitials. Also, the game play is a lot tighter and most importantly, there are rag doll physics. When I was playing through the game the first time, I spent at least an hour shooting one guy in the face with a sniper rifle, watching his body twist and turn and bounce off of things as it fell about 100 feet, then quick-loading right before I encountered him and doing it over again.

Also, if you go into debug mode, you can play as the nude model of a character whose name I seem to recall as being Mona Sax, which sounds like it should be a dirty pun, but is really just vaguely suggestive, and maybe not even that. Being able to see her naked was a huge step for me—a person who had at one time had spent twenty or more minutes trying to find just the right place in Tomb Raider to shoot the butler and type “I LOVE PONIES!!!!” so that I could see a steamy, all-nude sex scene, which was all just a fabrication by some mean-spirited gamewinners.com user who liked to play jokes on thirteen- year-olds who would probably shoot everyone in their families if they were promised that they could see boobies—but alas, Max Payne 2 came out too late in my teenage years for this shocking display of nudity to be anything but a humorous diversion. Anyway, my conclusion is thus: Mona Sax gots some tig ol' bitties, and this is why you should run—don’t walk!—to your local retailer to purchase Max Payne 2 today!

10. Halo (XBox, 2001)

My best friend has no concept of savings, so all his income is disposable. So naturally, he spends a great deal of his money on XBox games. The first XBox game he got and the one we spent countless hours playing (“Sword Dude” was a particularly vile foe) was Halo. Halo basically took the Xen portion of Half-Life and made it a little less weird, then added indoor levels. For me, though, this was the second console game after Goldeneye to get the first-person shooter right. It was just so fun to play, although there is sadly an interesting phenomenon that arises after playing for a while, one that I have confirmed with a number of other Halo players: one day, it just gets suddenly tiresome and unplayable. But for a few months there, in spite of the aliens’ ridiculous English-language sputterings, Halo was absolutely amazing, and I find it kind of depressing that most of my memories of conversations with friends from my senior year of high school coincide with memories of shooting rockets at each other in what we called “Ferngully Pass.”

…Hey, wait a minute. This game description isn’t funny or interesting in the least. Just pretend I said, “more like gay-lo,” which would also work if I were talking about how I am not a fan of Ben Affleck’s ex-girlfriend!

9. Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee (PC, 1997)

What with the main character’s lack of a nose, protuberant eyes, emaciated form, and generally bizarre appearance, you might say he looked more than a bit like Michael Jackson! It’s quite humorous that Michael Jackson Wacko Jacko is a man of many contras Micha Wacko Wa The character design in the Oddworld games has really been what’s pushed them into greatness. With the graphics stripped away, Abe’s Oddysee is largely just an occasionally frustrating platformer with hints of Lemmings thrown in. But the character and environment design immerse you fully into the world the game creators have made, and it’s surprising how well this game holds up, both in terms of gameplay and graphics, almost a decade after its creation.

Unfortunately, the main bad guys sounding identical to Strong Bad makes me feel kind of like I’ve accidentally stumbled into an alcohol-free party being held by a bunch of guys with ponytails and unfortunate facial hair who are talking about "funny" websites and quoting such films as Office Space. But only a little bit. Mostly, it’s just a great game in which the number of jumping puzzles and the frustrating inability to command more than one NPC to follow you anywhere (something that was addressed in the sequel, Abe’s Exoddus, which was superior in a number of ways, but also just more of the same in many ways, so I’m not including it on my list) are outweighed by the genius designs and the somewhat unsubtle but quite heartfelt environmental and social commentary.

8. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (NES, 1987)

I was going to throw in a “Mike Tyson earbiting=lol” style joke, but then I figured two strikethrough-heavy paragraphs right next to one another would have been a bit much. So I guess I’d just like to say that my least favorite part of this game is the final boss level, wherein Mike Tyson rapes you. Haha, I am only “joshing.”

Anyway, I bought this game at a neighborhood garage sale in 1991 or so because my brother had just gotten a Power Glove, and I figured this combination of boxing game and glove would enable me to experience virtual reality, a technological buzzword that was so exciting that even four years later, when I tried “virtual reality” in the lobby of a hotel in Las Vegas, I couldn’t stop bragging about it, even writing school essays—in which the topic was supposed to be something that had surprised me in the last year—about how I was surprised at “how cool virtual reality was,” even though I was secretly disappointed. Alas, it was not to be, for you actually punched by awkwardly flicking your fingers and outstretching your hand, much like a baby or TERRY SCHIAVO YES I WENT THERE.

But in spite of the disillusionment I felt by being let down by the Power Glove (is it still resisting an “It’s so bad! LITERALLY!” joke to mention it here in parentheses as something I’m resisting? Truly a Zen koan for the ages), I discovered an amazing game, one in which negative racial stereotypes are actively engaged for maximum laffos, but one which is undeniably fun on every level. Controls are so simple, but each opponent has some secret to beating him, and it’s this, combined with the mounting level of difficulty that comes with each opponent, that makes the game so addictive. Also, Doc looks like Reginald VelJohnson! And other jokes!

7. Myst (PC, 1993)

The game plays like a PowerPoint presentation, but I’ll forgive it because it’s so evocative and beautifully designed. I was eight when it came out, so I had to get the Prima hintbook, although in retrospect, I don’t know how shit like entering specific stardates in that dentist’s chair would ever occur to anyone naturally.

Anyway, although their performances as “Sirrus” and “Achenar” are so over-the-top as to shame anyone with a reasonable concept of human dignity, Robin and Rand Miller really knew how to create a sense of a fully immersive, self-contained universe just with still renderings (with a few video clips thrown in here and there) and pretty stark, simple music and sound effects. It’s too bad the series seems to be slipping from what was perhaps the most well-known computer game in the world (other than maybe Ski-Free) to games that no one except maybe a few creepy grad students would ever buy. No matter what becomes of the franchise, though, I’ll always have the first Myst.

6. Duck Hunt (NES, 1984)

Over 50% of the Internet is actually comprised of websites whose content consists solely or at least predominantly of “lol i wish u could shoot the dogg in duk hunt.” I never had this complaint, though, because I was fucking amazing at Duck Hunt. When I was very young, I just held the light gun up to the screen as though I were executing a Viet Cong spy, but when I hit age eight or so, I realized how the game was intended to be played. To this day, I defy anyone to get more perfects in a row than me in Duck Hunt. It cannot be done. I would even posit that King Kong ain’t got nothing on me. As regards Duck Hunt.

I was just glad I wasn’t one of those kids whose parents made them play the skeet-shooting levels instead. My parents must’ve understood that I Am A Real American and that it was part of my very being to kill other living creatures. I guess that’s why I got a truck with eight “hemis” in the engine for my sixteenth birthday and also why I am writing about video games I played as a child on a website devoted to commenting snarkily on popular culture.

5. Super Mario Brothers 3 (NES, 1988)

I feel like for a game so significant, I should formulate some complex theory for how it’s actually an allegory on Manifest Destiny or the life of Christ or something, but it’s already Tuesday evening, and all I can think of is the phrase “Captain Lou Albano.”

I suppose the problem with writing about something like Mario 3 is that pretty much anything I could say would go without saying. So I guess I’ll just comment that Mario is adorable in a Tanooki suit and also that I got an inordinate amount of joy out of playing a two-player game and hitting A every time the other player walked over my position, thus bringing us to the original Mario Brothers mini-game, a method by which I would be a dick and steal the other player’s end-of-level cards. I would moreover like to point out that this game is the pinnacle of Bowser as an enemy, as he had by now moved beyond the Mario 1 stage of being indefensible against jumping over his head, but has not yet reached Super Mario World levels of absurdity, all riding around in a clown head like a creepy shriner in a small town Christmas parade.

Mike's Comments: My favorite part is when you go to get that first Warp Whistle in World 1-3. I don't even use the thing. I just like the method of getting to it.

mike fireball 0: The one where you duck on top of a white block & you fall behind it for some stupid reason.
mike fireball 0: I never understood that.
kbp: i like that part because it's like clicking Send To Back in Microsoft Publisher.
kbp: haha nothing can touch me!!!
mike fireball 0: hahahaha, that's going in the post.

4. Prince of Persia (PC, 1989)

Before its good name got besmirched by a mediocre Tomb Raider clone, then unbesmirched by an excellent remake/sequel/re-envisioning of the original, only to be besmirched again by a mediocre sequel to said re-envisioning, Prince of Persia was an amazing game created by Jordan Mechner.

When I was in fifth grade, I was a safety patrol, but I only went to my post about 3 times over the course of the entire school year, because I was always in homeroom, either playing the Prince of Persia demo that was on the class Macintosh or watching someone else play it and wishing I was playing. I’d still go to the safety patrol pizza parties and ice cream socials, telling Mrs. Chenault, the head of the program, that yes, I would absolutely be at my post from now on. But I couldn’t betray Prince of Persia.

That summer, I got the Prince of Persia collection as a birthday present, and I couldn’t have been more overjoyed. Prince of Persia 2 turned out to contain hard puzzles involving skeletons and magic carpets, so I stuck with the original. And I couldn’t have made a better choice. The game was fairly simple and straightforward, but its fluidity and goriness made it a graphical treat despite the fact that the prince was just a yellowish blob dressed like your grandpa before bed (i.e., crisp, white linen pajamas). There existed a slightly modified version that ran on the same engine but contained updated sprites, but I wasn’t having none of that jive. I was perfectly happy with my humanoid blobs, and I have a soft spot for anything Prince of Persia-related to this day, which is perhaps why I bothered to play through the aforementioned Prince of Persia 3-D (the original name-besmircher) more than once.

3. The Curse of Monkey Island (PC, 1997)

Slashdot users and their ilk would surely ejaculate all over themselves with rage to see anyone rank the Curse of Monkey Island above the first two games, but I make no apologies. As a kid, I was always too impatient for the first few incarnations of adventure gaming, thinking (rightly so, I do believe) that text-based games were for people who think reciting the Lumberjack Song is the pinnacle of comedy, but also that even early graphical adventures like the first couple Monkey Islands were frustrating in their insistence on making you wait twenty while your character moved cumbersomely across a single screen and other such bullcorn. For me, the Curse of Monkey Island improved on the originals by incorporating easier operation, improved character design and graphics, and charming as Hell voice acting without losing the humor or spirit of the originals. I really love most of the LucasArts games, and, save for Grim Fandango, this one is at the top of the pile for me.

2. Half-Life (PC, 1998)

The thing about video games for me has been that, unlike the conception I think a lot of people have about anyone who knows what an Internet is, they’ve always been a social event. I play computer games by myself from time to time now, but I never did as a kid (and I certainly didn’t play Nintendo games by myself).

So to me, Half-Life doesn’t really represent a great leap forward in FPS gameplay that I couldn’t have seen coming so much as it brings to mind memories of being a ridiculous, chubby preteen who controlled Gordon Freeman’s movement while my best friend Graham controlled his weapons. Granted, I would get mad at Graham for wasting ammo when we could’ve just as easily gone through that entire level with just the crowbar, you jerk!, but on the whole, Half-Life was to us the greatest game ever made; we didn’t care why.

On a side note, seven years later, I still refer to the head crabs in the Half-Life games as turkeys, because dammit, that’s what they look like.

1. Half-Life 2 (PC, 2004)

The backlash against Half-Life 2 came, just as I knew it would, but I think it would be fair of me to say that the general consensus was that it was one of the greatest games ever made. And for good reason; as might have become obvious over the course of this list, I am a sucker for good graphics, and I’d have to think it’s going to take at least a year or so for any engine to even come close to eclipsing Source in terms of sheer graphical ability, and even when that day comes, I don’t think whatever engine and game unseats Half-Life 2 will be nearly as scaleable.

At the same time, though, I obviously don’t give graphics priority over gameplay, and Half-Life 2 is downright the most playable game I’ve ever put my hands on. I can go back and play the same sections over and over because it’s just fun as hell to fling rotary saw blades into zombies, to launch Combine soldiers into some gelatinous substance that liquefies them, to take down enormous Striders with a barrage of rockets, and so on. I just mentioned in my description of the first Half-Life that (adventure games aside) games usually have to have some social aspect for me to be interested, but for me, Half-Life 2 overcame that, offering the kind of outright fun usually only experienced with other people. Maybe complaints that the game’s too linear or that it sacrifices style for realism are legitimate, but to be honest, I really don’t care because I’m having too much fun to notice. I eagerly waited six years for Half-Life 2 to be released, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least.

Oh, also I like to smash people’s heads with toilets in multi-player because toilets=lol

 

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