por netcabo Sex Jul 10, 2009 2:48 pm10. “It’s Frank. Frank West. Remember that name ’cause the whole world’s gonna know it in three days when I get the scoop.”
Dead Rising
Dead Rising was the very first game I bought for the Xbox 360. In fact, it was the reason I decided to switch from the Xbox to the 360. Gamestop was offering $100 for your old Xbox in trade-in value towards a new 360. I took the bait. I wanted Dead Rising so badly. The hordes of zombies. The variety of weapons. The open world. The graphics!
Yes, Dead Rising has its flaws. The story is weak. The survivors in the mall are stupid. But God was it fun! Actually, rather than following the storyline, my friends and I would often just sit around watching each other kill as many zombies as possible before dying. Then, we’d pass the controller to the next guy and go again. We’d line ourselves up outside the hardware store and go at the zombies with chainsaws, sledge hammers, scythes, propane and more. 250, 300, 500 zombies dead and then we’d die. And we’d just keep playing. Dead Rising is on this list because it’s just so much fun to run around using anything you want to attack the zombie hordes.
Story? Who cares. This is just plain fun.
9. Ghost Recon
Ghost Recon is fantastic. I remember picking up the game and playing it and feeling that I truly was an American soldier caught in the middle of a massive coup in Mexico. The set pieces are stunning, the tactics are fun and realistic, and the story is amazing.
Set in 2014, Mexico suddenly dissolves into a coup. A military general tries to remove the president from power, and fearful of Mexico’s stability and it’s effects upon the US, the army sends in Ghost Recon soldiers to fight back against the coup. You work in squads, sending NPC’s to your left and right to flank, you use satellites to locate enemies, you have to think and when you take out a tank or snipe a soldier from five hundred yards it feels great.
Ghost Recon is so great because it puts you into a realistic story and because it doesn’t make you a singular hero. You’re part of a team and you don’t kill waves of enemy soldiers. You feel as though the story could almost be real.
8. “Let’s see, I’m Francis, and that’s grandpa Bill and, there’s zombies out here, open the goddamn door!”
Left4Dead
Left4Dead is one of the coolest games I’ve ever played. I bought it and played single player for a while and I was stunned. I thought it was so cool to finally play a game where I fight off hordes of Zombies as I try to escape a city. Then, I finally got my own internet (I’d been stealing my neighbor’s wireless forever and signed up for Xbox Live. And this is where Left4Dead excels.
Left4Dead offers a stunning array of multiplayer variety. And it is WAY too awesome. You can play through campaigns with 3 teammates online, blasting your way through five chapters that vary from a city escape to an airport to farmland and mountains. Hordes of zombies fly at your from all directions and the innovative, awesome AI director crafts tension and excitement like nothing ever before seen. The AI director directs the ebb and flow of the game – when hordes have attacked it waits until you are almost calm again, and then, with a howl, zombies will come flying from every direction.
There are boomers and hunters and smokers and witches and tanks. Different types of zombies that can vomit bile on you that attracts zombies, jump on you from a distance, pin you and claw at you, pull you in with a long tongue, scream and run at you, and charge, huge muscles throwing you across rooms.
Yes, Left4Dead’s campaign is intense, but even better is the versus mode. In which, a team of four survivors tries to get through a level while a team of four zombies tries to stop them. It’s amazingly fun – laugh out loud maniacally fun – to surround a group of survivors and pin them only to then see if you can survive their attacks as survivors when the roles are reversed. Buy it now if you don’t already own it!
7. “Find him… and close shut the jaws of Oblivion.”
Oblivion
I remember those were the first words out of my mouth when I played Oblivion. The vistas stretching forever. The grass swaying in the wind. The trees and the mountains and the sheer explorable area. I remember growing up with Morrowind and being stunned by its hugeness, but nothing could have prepared me for Oblivion. It was huge, it was GORGEOUS, and it was fun! There was so much to do. There were a million sidequests – hell, I didn’t even care about the main story. There were so many people to help, so many things to do, that I didn’t even get around to the main story until I was at least 30 hours into gaming.
Oblivion winds up on the list because it was the first truly next-generation game. It showcased how gorgeous graphics could be. How huge a world you could play in. And because it allowed exploration and customization to the max. Oblivion was a game that could truly be lived in.
6. “Yellow car!”
GTA IV
The first time I loaded up GTA IV on the 360 my jaw dropped. I had seen videos, witnessed demos, but never could I have imagined just how big, just how fully realized GTA IV would be. Liberty City was HUGE. I spent the first few hours just driving around exploring the city. I was stunned by the sheer detail. Every street was different. Every building was different. I discovered neat little neighborhoods with brick streets and townhouses, I explored the highways and cruised between Brooklyn and Queens (ahem, I mean, Broker and Dukes). I was floored.
And then, I played the actual game. This wasn’t the GTA of old. This was mature. The storyline involved family and choices. It involved a lead character with a heart – someone looking for a relationship and who reluctantly involves himself in the crime world after escaping eastern Europe and the Balkans so that he wouldn’t have to kill again. Then there are action scenes that make the jaw drop. Bank robberies and shootouts, hanging onto helicopters and jail breaks. GTA IV was a masterpiece in every sense of the word.
The only reason it isn’t higher on this list is because it just didn’t offer the same amount of after-game fun as the old GTA’s. I remember playing for hours on San Andreas, flying Jets and bombing cities, stealing Tanks and just screwing around. GTA IV is a serious game, and it didn’t allow for the same silliness, but I wish they had allowed for it after the main storyline was finished. If they had, it might be at number one.
5. “Bad news, Fenix. It didn’t work.”
Gears of War
Gears of War is fantastic. It is the video game equivalent of a blockbuster action flick. You have jacked-up dudes with machine guns that have chainsaw bayonets attached to them shooting invading Locust hordes from underneath their planet; you have a practically unlimited amount of ammunition, you have team mates like Cole Train who shout “Yeah baby!” and “Here comes the Cole Train!” You have Baird, the sarcastic engineer, and then there’s Marcus Fenix, the titular character who blazes through the game with grenades and sneers and blood abounding.
Not to mention, the story is fantastic. Serious questions have now been raised after two games, such as: “Are we really the bad guys? Did we force the Locust to defend themselves? Did we invade their planet?”
Gears of War features stunning graphics, amazing set pieces, and non-stop action that makes you feel like the ultimate badass. And at the end of the day, what’s gaming about other than playing badass characters??
4. “Nice shot lad, I think you blew his left off his left arm. Shock and blood loss will take care of the rest.”
Call of Duty 4
Call of Duty 4. Every time I think of Call of Duty 4 I think of the moment when my character is in a helicopter, fleeing a middle eastern city and a nuclear bomb explodes. The earth shakes, the helicopter rattles, and in the distance, dust and reverberations fill the air as the explosion nears at a rapid, frightening pace. “Am I going to escape,” you wonder. “Of course, of course I will!”
But you don’t. The helicopter crashes and you awake to a red screen. You crawl from the front of the helicopter to the back, trying to get out onto the street. You escape the helicopter and all around you is destruction. The walls of buildings are crumbling, and in the distance, a mushroom cloud. The screen fades and your character dies.
Never before had I witnessed a moment so engrossing in a game. Never before had I even witnessed a nuclear bomb from a first person perspective. Never before had I cared that my character had died. It was inescapable. It was just how it was. You died. Everything you fought for ended in death. And that is why Call of Duty 4 is ranked so highly. Not only was it a fantastic game to play with varied settings, stunning firefights and fascinating characters, it was a game with truly innovative ideas, a game that took a franchise on the decline, one that needed desperately to change things up and leave World War II, and became one of the most sought after games in the world. A game that will leave you breathless.
[b]3. “Wake up Mr. Freeman…”
The Orange Box
The Orange Box might just deserve to be number one. Why isn’t it? I suppose because it is a series of games instead of just one. How can I classify a game set that costs very little, includes 5 great games, and is made by one of the greatest developers of all time, Valve? You pretty much can’t.
Taken on it’s own, the Orange Box has one of the greatest games of all time – Half Life 2 – Half Life 2 Episodes 1 & 2 – Portal – and Team Fortress 2. It’s almost an overwhelmingly amount of goodness.
Half Life 2 is a story without comparison in the gaming world. Where Half Life took place in Black Mesa, a research facility in New Mexico, Half Life 2 finds Gordon Freeman, star of Half Life, reawakened fifteen or so years later to an earth conquered by an alien force. Humans are shepherded into City 17, an eastern European city, while the countryside is empty, used only for resources, prisons, and outpost to a few resistance pockets. Yes, the world of Half Life 2 and it’s episodes is amazing. It’s easy to get drawn into the world and imagine that there is indeed an alien force that has conquered our planet. That the world is empty outside the city walls. It is an amazing adventure and I cannot wait for Episode 3.
Then, there’s portal, the stunning, unique game in which you use a portal gun to manipulate walls and space to solve puzzles. And Team Fortress 2, perhaps the most addicting multiplayer game I’ve played.
The Orange Box is a rounded game set that is the best buy available for Xbox 360 owners and just barely missed out on the number 1 spot.
2. “War. War never changes.”
Fallout 3
How do you sum up a game as huge, as stunning, as gorgeous and frightening and vivid and fun as Fallout 3? I guess the only word that I could use for Fallout 3 would be “Awesome.”
Fallout 3 is a stunning game from start to finish. You begin the game with your birth – you come out of your mother and into the world of Vault 13. And Vault 13 is confined, you live in it for an hour or two of gametime and you feel its claustrophobic walls, its dark alleys and you begin to wonder what’s outside those walls. And when you finally do emerge into the sun and the glare dies down and you look upon the vast wasteland you feel overwhelmed.
Fallout 3 is not only a world that feels alive and full of its own lore, but also it is a world that is infinitely explorable and unrestricted. Venture into the city but beware of the raiders who will kill your low-level character quickly, encounter a radscorpion and feel fear as you run out of precious ammo and are stuck in a deep, dank cave. Hear rumors about Oasis and try to find it. (Halfway through the game I had a great desire to see green trees and made it my quest – and it was significant quest) to find the hidden vale of living plants.
Fallout 3 has a great story, countless hours of sidequests, and a huge world that’s all yours to explore. It is awesome in every sense of the word.
1. “Would you kindly…”
Bioshock
Bioshock is #1 on my list because of everything it did. It had the most stunning graphics I had ever seen. It had intelligent, frightening AI. It was oozing in atmosphere. It was addictive. The story was thoroughly fleshed out and not only fun and scary, but intelligent. It was a world that, while fantastical, was also believable. I felt like I was living through the horror of Rapture. Every emotion was real, every piece of action was fantastic. I don’t think there was a single moment when I thought, “Okay, come on, let’s get this over with.” It was stunning from start to finish. And it showed me what games in the next-gen (now, finally, just current gen) could be.
Dead Rising
Dead Rising was the very first game I bought for the Xbox 360. In fact, it was the reason I decided to switch from the Xbox to the 360. Gamestop was offering $100 for your old Xbox in trade-in value towards a new 360. I took the bait. I wanted Dead Rising so badly. The hordes of zombies. The variety of weapons. The open world. The graphics!
Yes, Dead Rising has its flaws. The story is weak. The survivors in the mall are stupid. But God was it fun! Actually, rather than following the storyline, my friends and I would often just sit around watching each other kill as many zombies as possible before dying. Then, we’d pass the controller to the next guy and go again. We’d line ourselves up outside the hardware store and go at the zombies with chainsaws, sledge hammers, scythes, propane and more. 250, 300, 500 zombies dead and then we’d die. And we’d just keep playing. Dead Rising is on this list because it’s just so much fun to run around using anything you want to attack the zombie hordes.
Story? Who cares. This is just plain fun.
9. Ghost Recon
Ghost Recon is fantastic. I remember picking up the game and playing it and feeling that I truly was an American soldier caught in the middle of a massive coup in Mexico. The set pieces are stunning, the tactics are fun and realistic, and the story is amazing.
Set in 2014, Mexico suddenly dissolves into a coup. A military general tries to remove the president from power, and fearful of Mexico’s stability and it’s effects upon the US, the army sends in Ghost Recon soldiers to fight back against the coup. You work in squads, sending NPC’s to your left and right to flank, you use satellites to locate enemies, you have to think and when you take out a tank or snipe a soldier from five hundred yards it feels great.
Ghost Recon is so great because it puts you into a realistic story and because it doesn’t make you a singular hero. You’re part of a team and you don’t kill waves of enemy soldiers. You feel as though the story could almost be real.
8. “Let’s see, I’m Francis, and that’s grandpa Bill and, there’s zombies out here, open the goddamn door!”
Left4Dead
Left4Dead is one of the coolest games I’ve ever played. I bought it and played single player for a while and I was stunned. I thought it was so cool to finally play a game where I fight off hordes of Zombies as I try to escape a city. Then, I finally got my own internet (I’d been stealing my neighbor’s wireless forever and signed up for Xbox Live. And this is where Left4Dead excels.
Left4Dead offers a stunning array of multiplayer variety. And it is WAY too awesome. You can play through campaigns with 3 teammates online, blasting your way through five chapters that vary from a city escape to an airport to farmland and mountains. Hordes of zombies fly at your from all directions and the innovative, awesome AI director crafts tension and excitement like nothing ever before seen. The AI director directs the ebb and flow of the game – when hordes have attacked it waits until you are almost calm again, and then, with a howl, zombies will come flying from every direction.
There are boomers and hunters and smokers and witches and tanks. Different types of zombies that can vomit bile on you that attracts zombies, jump on you from a distance, pin you and claw at you, pull you in with a long tongue, scream and run at you, and charge, huge muscles throwing you across rooms.
Yes, Left4Dead’s campaign is intense, but even better is the versus mode. In which, a team of four survivors tries to get through a level while a team of four zombies tries to stop them. It’s amazingly fun – laugh out loud maniacally fun – to surround a group of survivors and pin them only to then see if you can survive their attacks as survivors when the roles are reversed. Buy it now if you don’t already own it!
7. “Find him… and close shut the jaws of Oblivion.”
Oblivion
I remember those were the first words out of my mouth when I played Oblivion. The vistas stretching forever. The grass swaying in the wind. The trees and the mountains and the sheer explorable area. I remember growing up with Morrowind and being stunned by its hugeness, but nothing could have prepared me for Oblivion. It was huge, it was GORGEOUS, and it was fun! There was so much to do. There were a million sidequests – hell, I didn’t even care about the main story. There were so many people to help, so many things to do, that I didn’t even get around to the main story until I was at least 30 hours into gaming.
Oblivion winds up on the list because it was the first truly next-generation game. It showcased how gorgeous graphics could be. How huge a world you could play in. And because it allowed exploration and customization to the max. Oblivion was a game that could truly be lived in.
6. “Yellow car!”
GTA IV
The first time I loaded up GTA IV on the 360 my jaw dropped. I had seen videos, witnessed demos, but never could I have imagined just how big, just how fully realized GTA IV would be. Liberty City was HUGE. I spent the first few hours just driving around exploring the city. I was stunned by the sheer detail. Every street was different. Every building was different. I discovered neat little neighborhoods with brick streets and townhouses, I explored the highways and cruised between Brooklyn and Queens (ahem, I mean, Broker and Dukes). I was floored.
And then, I played the actual game. This wasn’t the GTA of old. This was mature. The storyline involved family and choices. It involved a lead character with a heart – someone looking for a relationship and who reluctantly involves himself in the crime world after escaping eastern Europe and the Balkans so that he wouldn’t have to kill again. Then there are action scenes that make the jaw drop. Bank robberies and shootouts, hanging onto helicopters and jail breaks. GTA IV was a masterpiece in every sense of the word.
The only reason it isn’t higher on this list is because it just didn’t offer the same amount of after-game fun as the old GTA’s. I remember playing for hours on San Andreas, flying Jets and bombing cities, stealing Tanks and just screwing around. GTA IV is a serious game, and it didn’t allow for the same silliness, but I wish they had allowed for it after the main storyline was finished. If they had, it might be at number one.
5. “Bad news, Fenix. It didn’t work.”
Gears of War
Gears of War is fantastic. It is the video game equivalent of a blockbuster action flick. You have jacked-up dudes with machine guns that have chainsaw bayonets attached to them shooting invading Locust hordes from underneath their planet; you have a practically unlimited amount of ammunition, you have team mates like Cole Train who shout “Yeah baby!” and “Here comes the Cole Train!” You have Baird, the sarcastic engineer, and then there’s Marcus Fenix, the titular character who blazes through the game with grenades and sneers and blood abounding.
Not to mention, the story is fantastic. Serious questions have now been raised after two games, such as: “Are we really the bad guys? Did we force the Locust to defend themselves? Did we invade their planet?”
Gears of War features stunning graphics, amazing set pieces, and non-stop action that makes you feel like the ultimate badass. And at the end of the day, what’s gaming about other than playing badass characters??
4. “Nice shot lad, I think you blew his left off his left arm. Shock and blood loss will take care of the rest.”
Call of Duty 4
Call of Duty 4. Every time I think of Call of Duty 4 I think of the moment when my character is in a helicopter, fleeing a middle eastern city and a nuclear bomb explodes. The earth shakes, the helicopter rattles, and in the distance, dust and reverberations fill the air as the explosion nears at a rapid, frightening pace. “Am I going to escape,” you wonder. “Of course, of course I will!”
But you don’t. The helicopter crashes and you awake to a red screen. You crawl from the front of the helicopter to the back, trying to get out onto the street. You escape the helicopter and all around you is destruction. The walls of buildings are crumbling, and in the distance, a mushroom cloud. The screen fades and your character dies.
Never before had I witnessed a moment so engrossing in a game. Never before had I even witnessed a nuclear bomb from a first person perspective. Never before had I cared that my character had died. It was inescapable. It was just how it was. You died. Everything you fought for ended in death. And that is why Call of Duty 4 is ranked so highly. Not only was it a fantastic game to play with varied settings, stunning firefights and fascinating characters, it was a game with truly innovative ideas, a game that took a franchise on the decline, one that needed desperately to change things up and leave World War II, and became one of the most sought after games in the world. A game that will leave you breathless.
[b]3. “Wake up Mr. Freeman…”
The Orange Box
The Orange Box might just deserve to be number one. Why isn’t it? I suppose because it is a series of games instead of just one. How can I classify a game set that costs very little, includes 5 great games, and is made by one of the greatest developers of all time, Valve? You pretty much can’t.
Taken on it’s own, the Orange Box has one of the greatest games of all time – Half Life 2 – Half Life 2 Episodes 1 & 2 – Portal – and Team Fortress 2. It’s almost an overwhelmingly amount of goodness.
Half Life 2 is a story without comparison in the gaming world. Where Half Life took place in Black Mesa, a research facility in New Mexico, Half Life 2 finds Gordon Freeman, star of Half Life, reawakened fifteen or so years later to an earth conquered by an alien force. Humans are shepherded into City 17, an eastern European city, while the countryside is empty, used only for resources, prisons, and outpost to a few resistance pockets. Yes, the world of Half Life 2 and it’s episodes is amazing. It’s easy to get drawn into the world and imagine that there is indeed an alien force that has conquered our planet. That the world is empty outside the city walls. It is an amazing adventure and I cannot wait for Episode 3.
Then, there’s portal, the stunning, unique game in which you use a portal gun to manipulate walls and space to solve puzzles. And Team Fortress 2, perhaps the most addicting multiplayer game I’ve played.
The Orange Box is a rounded game set that is the best buy available for Xbox 360 owners and just barely missed out on the number 1 spot.
2. “War. War never changes.”
Fallout 3
How do you sum up a game as huge, as stunning, as gorgeous and frightening and vivid and fun as Fallout 3? I guess the only word that I could use for Fallout 3 would be “Awesome.”
Fallout 3 is a stunning game from start to finish. You begin the game with your birth – you come out of your mother and into the world of Vault 13. And Vault 13 is confined, you live in it for an hour or two of gametime and you feel its claustrophobic walls, its dark alleys and you begin to wonder what’s outside those walls. And when you finally do emerge into the sun and the glare dies down and you look upon the vast wasteland you feel overwhelmed.
Fallout 3 is not only a world that feels alive and full of its own lore, but also it is a world that is infinitely explorable and unrestricted. Venture into the city but beware of the raiders who will kill your low-level character quickly, encounter a radscorpion and feel fear as you run out of precious ammo and are stuck in a deep, dank cave. Hear rumors about Oasis and try to find it. (Halfway through the game I had a great desire to see green trees and made it my quest – and it was significant quest) to find the hidden vale of living plants.
Fallout 3 has a great story, countless hours of sidequests, and a huge world that’s all yours to explore. It is awesome in every sense of the word.
1. “Would you kindly…”
Bioshock
Bioshock is #1 on my list because of everything it did. It had the most stunning graphics I had ever seen. It had intelligent, frightening AI. It was oozing in atmosphere. It was addictive. The story was thoroughly fleshed out and not only fun and scary, but intelligent. It was a world that, while fantastical, was also believable. I felt like I was living through the horror of Rapture. Every emotion was real, every piece of action was fantastic. I don’t think there was a single moment when I thought, “Okay, come on, let’s get this over with.” It was stunning from start to finish. And it showed me what games in the next-gen (now, finally, just current gen) could be.
