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We're in the thick of it now. My third list installment lists the games that I believe to be the thirtieth through twenty-first best games of all time. I haven't yet gotten a lot of feedback though. I'm still waiting for "OMG mniac manson sux wut about teh HALO???!!!!1", or maybe even some commentary on how Desktop Tower Defense should have been higher on my list.

The last list had a good amount older NES and Commodore titles. This list still has a couple Commodore games and even a Sega Master System title, but no NES. PC games win out on this list. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

#30: Pool of Radiance (C64) - The first of what would come to be known as the Gold Box Games, this 1988 masterpiece was the first game to use official Dungeons and Dragons rules in a video game. It allowed you to create your own party and engage in strategic combats. It contained most of the elements that I later loved in the Baldurs Gate series: lining up those lightning bolts just right, sneaking your thief around for the perfect backstab, or hitting a big group with a fireball before they could get close. Granted, the battles took five minutes to load, but I spent tons of time with this game and its sequels: Curse of the Azure Bonds and Secret of the Silver Blades. I also played a few of the Krynn spinoff games, but I can't remember all the names. The engine was so successful that it spawned many successors.

The plot of Pool of Radiance was that your band of adventurers from Phlan needed to clear out all the portions of the city that had been taken over by goblins, orcs, ogres, trolls, ettins, et cetera. As the game progresses, you discover that the evil creatures are being organized by Tyranthraxus, who turns out to be a possessed bronze dragon.

#29: Kenseiden (SMS) - Kenseiden was a side-scrolling platformer, like Castlevania and Super Mario. And it was the best game the Sega Master System had to offer.

Kenseiden stars Hayato, a samurai that has to fight against warlocks and evil spirits that plague 16th century Japan. The warlocks stole the five secret scrolls and the sword of the Dragon Lord. Hayato, who has dragon blood in his veins, must recover the scrolls and sword and enter the castle and kill the evil spirits.

This game, like Castlevania III, had branching routes that you could take through the game. I think I tried them all. Along these routes, you'd encounter bosses, who had the secret scrolls. As you gained the five secret scrolls, you'd gain abilities. One let you jump higher. Another let you attack while moving forward. Another gave you a very useful sweeping overhead attack that could hit enemies directly above. Most were extra attack methods.

So why is this obscure game so high up on my list? So people loved Gunstar Heroes, others loved Contra. I loved Kenseiden. I had borrowed a friend's Sega Master System, and this game was nearly the only thing I played. I played it over and over until eventually I beat the game. And I had a blast doing it.

#28: Fallout 2 (PC) - The Fallout franchise is an amazing series of games. The first one was great, but the second was even better. How many games do you know of in which you can sleep with a girl and get caught by her father who then forces you to marry her at shotgun-point? Thereafter the (useless) girl is your companion, and if she is killed in battle, your status changes from "married" to "separated". Black humor, indeed.

The game's setting and plot were amazing. And the game is very open-ended. You could help certain factions, which might make you enemies of other factions, and end up changing the world in ways that would be displayed to you in the game's ending cinematic.

The SPECIAL system devised for the original Fallout is still in place for the sequel, and it works amazingly well. It has ten skills, two of which your character may "tag" for faster development. You can also optionally select 2 traits, each of which grants certain benefits but also carries certain penalties. And every few levels you can also select a "perk" for your character, each of which has certain prerequisites. The SPECIAL system is one of the Fallout franchise's greatest assets. I'm glad they're keeping it for Fallout 3.

#27: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (PC) - Good games based on movies are really really hard to come by. Strange then that this is one of the best first person shooters I've ever played. A prequel to Pitch Black, Escape from Butcher Bay stars our favorite Furian in his most badass role yet.

While the game is primarily a First Person Shooter, it's got a lot of adventure and stealth elements, and some good hand-to-hand combat to boot. Towards the beginning of the game, you'll find yourself undertaking optional missions for other prison inmates and duking it out in a number of hand-to-hand prison brawls. As the game progresses, you'll discover the reason why it's so damn hard to get ahold of a good weapon - the prison guards' assault rifles are DNA encoded, and they shock anyone not authorized to use them.

The game's goal should be fairly obvious from the title. But along the way, there's plenty of plot to be had, and the voice acting is amongst the best of any game I've played. Partway through the game, Riddick meets the doctor mentioned in Pitch Black, and he puts The Shine on Riddick's eyes for a couple packs of Menthols. Thereafter, you can activate and deactivate your eyeshine by donning and removing the dark goggles. With eyeshine active, you can see in the dark. It becomes fun to shoot out the lights and sneak up on guards. Maybe this stealth element is one reason I liked the game so much.

The game's heads-up display is minimal. Rather than having an on-screen ammo count, there's an LED readout right on the weapon you're carrying. And your life is measured by small white squares in the corner, so the screen is very uncluttered.

All in all, the game is fantastic. It's in my stack of games to replay, and I'll probably install it once I finish replaying Baldur's Gate 2.

#26: Dungeon Keeper (PC) - Another title that's quite dated, but you can count Dungeon Keeper amongst other classics like Tetris, Pac Man, and Super Mario Brothers which just never seem to get old. I'll hang on to my copy, and I imagine I'll go back to playing it every five years or so for as long as I'm gaming.

In Dungeon Keeper, you play the omniscient lord of a dungeon, into which stumble foolish do-gooders and adventurers trying to slay your monsters and steal your treasures. You've got to dig out a dungeon and build rooms. You mine gold, store it in a treasure room, and protect it with traps and guardian monsters. You've got to lure monsters and train them. And you've got to keep your creatures happy so they won't leave.

The economy and management aspects can get complicated, but the game is still always a lot of fun. And I think it's the first game I played multi-player via LAN in my friend Rich's basement.

#25: Autoduel (C64) - Another old Commodore game? Yeah, but it's one of the best. I've written about this one many times before. I wrote about it back in 2005 as part of my retro gaming trip, I wrote about how I'd like to see it remade, and I used it as a comparison when I wrote about Mexican Motor Mafia. It was even part of my very first post ever about video games in 2004.

Autoduel was a beautiful translation of the Car Wars tabletop game. You could purchase and customize your own car, picking different body types, tires, engines, and armors for 4 sides of the car plus the roof and undercarriage. The weapons for cars were incredibly diverse, and included the simple machine gun, recoilless rifle, 1-shot rockets, flamethrowers, smokescreens and oilslicks, mines, spikedroppers, and even lasers. These could be front, side, or rear-mounted, and you could switch between weapons during combat so as to drive alongside an enemy while shooting at him, or hit him while he was chasing you. I always liked circling another car with a side-mounted machinegun. The available options were awesome.

The game let you could buy clones to ensure your survival in case of a fatal encounter, salvage the remains of defeated cars, go on delivery missions, assassination missions, or work for the FBI. It was an ambitious game for the time, and I'd love to play an updated version.

#24: Far Cry (PC) - Another not-so-old game, and one of the better shooters I've ever played. I'm not talking about the lame XBox remakes where your character gets superpowers, I'm talking about the original PC version of Far Cry where you've got no powers, just guns. And the bad guys are tough as all hell. This is probably the hardest shooter I've ever played. And I played at the medium difficulty level. I think the first time I played through I was entirely unable to sneak up on anyone - stealth in Far Cry is actually possible, but incredibly difficult. Better have the knife or the silenced machinegun handy.

At the time of the game's release, the graphics were impressive. They actually still hold up well, even if they're not as good as the graphics in Half-Life 2. When I wrote my review after first playing the game, I had a lot of complaints. And that review got one of the most interesting comments I've ever gotten on this site, telling me to "stop flippin mocking" and asking me to compare Far Cry to other games of its "jenre", and not just Half-Life 2.

Anyway, I'm left with many fond memories of Far Cry, and I've replayed it a couple times, although I didn't complete it on either replay like I did the first time.

#23: Shadow of the Colossus: (PS2) - Shadow of the Colossus was brilliant for its cinematic presentation and its simplicity. Throughout the game, you do not level up or gain more powerful equipment. You simply ride from place to place and battle Colossi. Your only gauges are a life meter and a grip meter which determines how long you can hold on to a colossus you're climbing before you'll lose your grip and fall. And climbing some of them is quite the ordeal, especially when it's flying or swimming underwater.

The story is a bit vague. Why are you doing all this? Because a magical spirit has told you that if you do, it will return your dead girlfriend to life. There's a bit more exposition towards the end, but the overall story is still a bit vague. Perhaps if I'd played Ico I'd understand more.

Each battle is amazingly epic, and as much a puzzle as it is a boss battle. Figuring out what you have to do in order to climb a colossus or in order to harm it is generally the most difficult part. The second most difficult part is to find the thing in the first place. The first few are easy to find, but after a while it turns into a wild goose chase. You can find out more in my review.

#22: Thief: Deadly Shadows (PC) - The most recent Thief game was my favorite in the series. I know some folks who'll want to strangle me for this, but I didn't enjoy the first two titles in the series very much.

For someone who loves stealth games as much as I do, it's surprising that I waited as long as I did to try the Thief series. This was the first of them that I tried, and I absolutely loved it. The dual goals of accomplishing a specific mission along with the side goal of stealing valuables makes for some excellent gameplay. Of course, I always enjoyed taking out the guards more than sneaking past them. I played many of the missions on hard, and died plenty of times.

The stealth in this game not only takes into account standard fare such as lighting conditions, where you can extinguish lights to make sneaking through an area easier, it also allows you multiple speeds of slow movement and takes into account the material of the floor when determining the amount of noise you'll make. You can get water arrows to put out torches and moss arrows to make a floor softer and thus quieter. Like Tenchu, there are lots of sneaky and useful gimmicks to buy.

The game implements lockpicking very well, and has a haunted house level that was amazingly well done. Overall, the game is a keeper, and I'll definately replay it someday. You can check out my review here.

#21: Point Blank (Arcade) - In college, I put more quarters into the Street Fighter 2 machines at CCSU's arcade than I'd like to admit. But aside from that, there was Point Blank.

Point Blank is quite simply the best light gun game ever created. Instead of moving through each level shooting zombies or terrorists, at the start of each level in Point Blank, you're presented with four stages and must choose them one by one. The stages include things like shooting cut-out ninjas who pop up all over the place, protecting Dr. Dan from various things (erupting volcano, attacking skeletons, flying saucers, sharks) or hitting pop-up bullseye targets. The variety and the comedy of it all is what makes Point Blank such a fantastic game. It's got everything from a Concentration-like memory game and many other Brain Age-like tests to carnival type games. It's really creative, and a lot of fun to play two player.

So that's my list of games 30-21. Come on back next week and check out the games that for me take the high half of the top 20 list.