1: System Shock 2 -- Spurts of electronica blare as you run down corridors, unsure of what's around the next corner and not entirely prepared, emotionally or physically. Weapons are one trigger pull away from jamming and never effective enough to draw comfort from, and every shot of precious ammo fired feels like one step closer to death rather than safety. Enemies ask you to kill them as they try to kill you, and the horror and despair bleeds through. The lesson learned here should not be "let's all tell our story through a series of audio logs placed in the game world now," but somehow that's the only element retained in the lowest common denominator focus group era, even by System Shock 2's developers.
2: Planescape: Torment -- Torment's text is not dialogue, but the prose of a novel, richly evocative and complimentary to the game's graphics, at the perfect timing when a game's visuals could drive imagination forward rather than either necessitate it or stifle it. But playing Torment is very much playing a game, not reading a book, despite the 800,000 word script; it's merely a tool for immersion into the character of The Nameless One, to better play the role and make the choices that shape yours and his path through the story. Creator Chris Avellone began as a Dungeon Master for his friends, and is the Dungeon Master for the player here, doing all the work in carefully crafting the world and the scenarios but letting it feel like the player's own journey.
3: Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn -- Bioware's magnum opus, staggeringly robust in content, leveraging tropes of the fantasy genre effectively and inoffensively, and providing the utmost of epic quests to complete. Single sidequests can feel like entire campaigns, each fitting cohesively into the game world rather than as a self-contained planet of content to clear out in an irrelevant choose-your-own-order. Each piece of loot is hard-fought and has its own history and character, each new magic spell is a new piece to the strategic puzzle of combat, and strategy is called for many times over in the highly technical boss battles.
4: Kohan: Ahriman's Gift -- Strategy can be found in most any Real Time Strategy game, but mechanics tend to be at the forefront lest overall depth be sacrificed. K:AG requires no hand speed or hotkey use or mental checklist of multitasking, by slowing down the pace to the feeling of a turn-based strategy game playing out in real-time. In this it's able to focus on TBS-style depth while allowing it to be played in a competitive environment without the clunk of turns. In my more than 500 multiplayer matches of 30-120 minutes each and many additional hours spent devising builds and strategies on my own, I was challenged and inspired like no other game.
5: Wing Commander: Privateer -- I'm dropped into a hostile universe with the world's most ineffectual spaceship, no idea what to do or where to go or how to get there and no means even if I knew how. Out there in the great abyss, pirates, mercenaries, merchants, and military roam, living their lives and fighting their battles and in some cases waiting for someone with the world's most ineffectual spaceship to fly by with a bit of cargo in the hold, if even that, to be plucked out and taken and its hapless pilot fragged or enslaved. Map? Sorry, can't afford such luxuries. Jump drive? I don't even know where I am. Guns that work? Ah. Ha. Ha. No, all of that will have to come after the many trials by fire of basic survival in the attempts to secure some pocket change. If my balls are of sufficient density, maybe I'll progress a notch or two in the storyline before fundamentalist religious freaks feel the need to ram me with their extraordinarily pointy spaceships so that we both unpleasantly explode to a non-forthcoming afterlife. I'd better make the most of it.
6: Mount and Blade -- M&B sits with Dwarf Fortress in the category of incomplete blueprints for the best game ever made. This one isn't in ASCII, so it gets on the short list. It's an action game as a sort of medieval combat simulation, it's a strategy game as you play out wars for territorial control, it's a tactics game as you lead your army in battle personally and issue orders on the fly, and it's an RPG with full character progression and loot and quests and choices. If it's ever fully fleshed out in each category I'll be requiring the world's largest poopsock.
7: Deus Ex -- System Shock 2's brother in hybrid genius, and far more than the sum of its parts. Its linear progression of nonlinear hubs gives it focus and narrative power, while allowing for a meaningful sense of freedom and creative outlet moment to moment.
8. Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence -- Past this point, cinematic hallways sour. Here, a balance is struck, with cinematic storytelling setting the framework and complimenting the experience but not replacing player control. Within its constraints as a linear action game, too, a staggering amount of thought has been put into all the small details of what the player might think of and try to do outside of the box of numb linear progression, things that in many cases only a small subset might ever see but will nonetheless be rewarded for.
9: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind -- Balance. Morrowind laughs in the face of balance. At hour one your epic duel with a rat will likely end in a depressingly one-sided victory for the rat, and at hour one hundred you'll have broken the game mechanics in so many different ways that the only thing left to do is find even more ways to break the game. And that's how it succeeds: creativity is rewarded, not stifled, and power is there for the taking for the skilled or clever, not carefully structured in a linear progression. This freedom is paired with a complete lack of handholding, with quest destinations described to you through landmarks rather than given as a GPS marker, and no particular path laid out for you in general after being dropped into a foreign and hostile world. Enchant yourself a ring of jumping and leap for miles at a time, or devise your own bank heist and steal a kingdom's worth of treasures, or make potions of better potion making and keep drinking and making and drinking until you have the attributes of a god, it's all there to be exploited, a fantasy RPG sandbox with scant few constraints on the imagination.
10: X-COM: UFO Defense -- Under-funding nations draw my impotent ire. Terror missions grind my marines into a bloody splotch on the ground one blind corner turn at a time. Chrysalids haunt my dreams.
