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This week, Joystiq is doing a feature they're calling Ten Years, Ten Games in which they have each of their editors list out their favorite ten games of the past ten years. Not "the best" games, but rather a list of personal favorites. I think that's an important distinction.

Every time I try to list out my own favorites, I'm left with Beyond Good and Evil (11 years old), Baldur's Gate (16 years old), Resident Evil 2 (16 years old), and Street Fighter 2 (17 years old) at the top of the list. I could go on forever about the old games I loved, but it's going to be far more interesting to come up with something a bit fresher, so when I want to hit something I've written about before, I'll just link to my previous writing - I have a feeling this post will be full of links like that.

So many of the games that the Joystiq writers are gushing about just didn't appeal to me. I've always felt that Mass Effect and Bioshock were overrated. I actually strongly disliked Uncharted 2. Amnesia didn't really appeal to me - hiding in the dark gets boring pretty quickly. And I'm flat-out terrified to even try Dark Souls, so I won't be listing it anywhere here.

In general, the games that have strong stories and good characters are the ones that really stand out in my mind, but if I find myself going back continually to re-play a game I've finished, that's also a positive mark. Nearly every game on this list meets these criteria. Here are my ten.

The first game should come as no surprise. It barely squeaked in time-wise, as it's ten years old: Half-Life 2. My original review from nine years ago, which I just linked, pretty much says it all. Read it for teh detailz.

While I'll fully admit that much of its greatness is about how ahead of its time it was, it does still hold up nearly a decade later. The engine delivers graphics that look better on a 9-year-old machine than some other more recent games do on a modern machine! I still remember the moment when I fought my way out onto a beach and stopped to stare at a stunningly beautiful sunset, and then got shot while I was admiring the scenery.

Also, while it's technically not the same game, the ending of Half-Life 2 episode 2 has the most emotional moment I've ever experienced in a video game. Period.

Although I played and enjoyed Skyrim, I've got to say that I liked Oblivion better. While Skyrim was newer and thus looked better, fighting dragons was never half as fun as closing Oblivion gates. In Oblivion, the world was being invaded by the demonic Daedra through horrific gaping red magical gates, and it was the player’s job to save the world by venturing into a realm that might as well have been Hell. It was epic. In Skyrim, the plot involves killing dragons because they’re kind of mean. The dragons in Skyrim were never as much of a threat as the Daedra were in Oblivion.

Secondly Oblivion's mods were so much better. There were so many mods I'd have liked to have seen in Skyrim. They may have been added since I played, as I know that Steam added some excellent mod support, but while I was playing they were sadly lacking.

I put a scandalous amount of time into Oblivion. I enjoyed the diverse environments, and I grew to know a lot of the areas very well - they felt like real and familiar places in a way that I hadn't experienced in a game since Ultima V back on my Commodore 64. Tamriel remains one of my favorite game settings ever.

Dragon Age: Origins is very possibly the best computer role-playing game that I've ever played.

Dragon Age has tactical combat just as well-implemented as that in the Infinity Engine. It's got great characters and well-written dialogue. It's got that particular flavor of monolithic implacable enemy that I've loved in so many fantasy tales, whether the enemy flavor is Archdemon/Darkspawn, Shai'tan/Trolloc, Sauron/Orc, or Brona/Skull Bearer. And it has an excellently realized setting involving sorcerers who long ago explored that other realm from which dreams originate called The Fade and entered the mysterious Black City. In doing so, they released a corruption that changed them into demons. Now, all sorcerers face the the possibility of being possessed and turned into demonic abominations. A religious group polices them. This is but a small slice of the setting's rich mythology. It's fantastic.

Dragon Age: Origins is a big game, and I played it start to finish two and a half times. I haven't played the console version, but from my understanding the gameplay is very different. The PC version's ability to zoom all the way back and play tactically was key for me though. I love the game, but I can't imagine I'd have enjoyed it half as much on a console.

Alistair and I fought through the game as brothers, Grey Wardens both. I felt a real cameraderie with his character that I've not felt in other games. When I was captured near the games 75% mark, I lost my best magical weapon, and somehow losing that awesome item ended up being a memorable sacrifice - I didn't want to reload and "cheat" to keep the item, because it felt like the loss had meaning. Dragon Age: Origins was an experience for me, and I loved it.

Minecraft has been my fallback game of choice lately. I've often commented that I don't play games that don't have endings, and perhaps this is why - without an ending, the game is an endless time sink. I'm presently playing on a very small server where only two of us play with any regularity, although three kids occasionally hop on. My friend and I have modeled the world very loosely on the Ultima series, and initially we created a walled town named Britain and a small village named Paws together. I created a huge castle with stained glass windows depicting Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde and plopped down a massive Nether Portal at the end - that got named Stonegate after the home of the Shadowlords in Ultima V. I've also created an infinite experience points machine based on a monster grinder tower, a chicken cooker, and a seven-story tower with a hidden piston door and a black stained clay cylindrical roof.

More recently, I found a desert village and named it Moonglow. I walled it off with cobblestone walls and laid down sandstone slabs in other areas to minimize monster spawning. I've built a huge wheat field since I can't grow grass in the desert, a town gate which automatically closes at night, and I've discovered an abandoned mineshaft directly beneath the village and a desert temple within sight of the town walls. My daughter discovered a second village within sight of the first. It's a great spot - the only issue is how far away it is from our original town, so I build a path through the nether (and through a nether fortress) so that you can get back and forth quickly. I'm now in the process of creating a Nether railroad which will provide quick travel from Britain to Moonglow and to a faraway jungle biome.

Minecraft is like Legos. You're creating things yourself, and so the only limits to what you can do are the limits of your own creativity - this is why the game has done so amazingly well. I haven't yet delved into mods, although that's exactly the kind of thing I generally love about PC gaming. I'm sure I will at some point. Sigh - I really don't have the spare time for this.

Heavy Rain is my favorite Playstation 3 game. There are a lot of things that I like about the game - it's an excellent murder mystery that kept me guessing until the end - but one element that really stood out to me was the fact that you never have to replay a minute of Heavy Rain. You can't, in fact. When you fail a challenge or make a hasty decision, you then have to live with that decision or that failure. When I contrast that with games like Dead Space, where I'm repeatedly dying in an unskippable thirty-second display of gore, I'm left wondering why more games don't emulate Heavy Rain. When you're aware that any decision is indelible and every action is immutable, you choose very carefully and proceed very cautiously. It makes for a very edge-of-your-seat gaming experience. If the character you're playing does die, then you don't get a second try unless you erase your save entirely and start the game from the very beginning - things simply proceed, and that character is dead. I've always thought that this formula would work amazingly well for a survival horror game, but no developers have yet picked up that thread, so I can only keep hoping.

Pixeljunk Monsters is a very different game than the others I've listed here previously - it's what I think of as a casual game. But after seven years of playing the game on three platforms, I still find myself going back to it on a regular basis. I've gotten every trophy for the game on Playstation 3, and I bought a PSP specifically to play the mobile version. You can't in any way equate or compare it to the big story games, and that's okay.

Pixeljunk Monsters is simply my favorite tower defense game. A lot of the levels are really hard. I managed to perfectly clear every level on the Playstation 3 version, but it wasn't easy. Now I'm (very slowly) going back through all those levels on the PC, and I've got access to a lot of tower types that never existed on the Playstation. I'm not putting as much time or thought into the game today as I was a few years ago, but I'm far from finished with Pixeljunk Monsters.

Adventure games have never been my favorite. Point-and-clicking has just never been a whole lot of fun for me. I had fun with Maniac Mansion back in the day, but having to use a clay pot with a hammer in order to find the hidden key in the pot seems punishingly unintuitive. This kind of forced difficulty has given traditional adventure games a bad rap.

The Walking Dead first appeared on my radar when I heard it compared to Quantic Dream's games. I loved Indigo Prophecy despite its ridiculous ending, and I loved Heavy Rain, so the invocation of those names held some power for me. The characters and the situations in The Walking Dead blew me away. The A or B choices felt a bit played out and overly transparent after the first couple times, but they were rare enough so as to not be a huge issue.

I could write an entire post on why Clementine is one of my favorite video game characters of all time. If I'd forgotten from season one, the stuff she goes through in the first episode of season two clinches it. The story of Lee and Clementine's ragtag band struggling to survive was well told, and a prime example of good mature storytelling written for adults.

I don't always agree with the majority on which games are the best, but it's hard to put together a list like this and not include Portal. Valve makes good stuff. Before Portal, Who could have imagined a first person shooter without guns? Or without another living character in the game?

Portal was short but sweet. It gave us "the cake is a lie", it gave us one of the best game villains in memory, and it gave us "Still Alive". It's hard to believe that it's been seven years since the game was released.

One of the more recent games on this list is Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. At the game's outset, the two sons of a farmer find that their father has fallen ill shortly after their mother passed away - they must trek to a faraway land to get the water of life to save their father.

I'd suggest that you avoid spoilers if you plan to play Brothers, and if you haven't played then you should. This game is about the journey and about the story. You experience the brothers' relationship through their long and emotional journey, which is impressive given the total lack of dialogue. The game manages to tell a coherent story without using a single spoken word - all the voices are non-words, like in Shadow of the Colossus or The Sims.

The brothers travel through beautiful and diverse environments, solving puzzles, platforming, helping other characters, fleeing and hiding from enemies. They see things that are wondrous and horrifying, travelling aboveground and belowground, by riverboat and by air.

You control the brothers with the two thumbsticks, directing one boy with each thumb, which occasionally gets awkward but overall works well. The game's puzzles are interesting and challenging without being overly difficult. The environments are fantastic, and the scenarios are diverse and a lot of fun.

Dishonored has been the first game in years that scratched my stealth game itch. I've got an odd history with stealth games: I loved the original Tenchu, loved Thief: Deadly Shadows, and really loved Beyond Good and Evil, but hadn't found much else in the stealth genre I could sink my teeth into. I never enjoyed Splinter Cell, and didn't even love the Metal Gear Solid games despite my general preference for absurdity.

I played through Dishonored two or three times, and got a ton of achievements, including the one where you complete the game without ever having been seen and without killing anyone.

In emulating the Thief series, Dishonored is as Steampunk as they come - there's no shortage of whale-oil-powered machines, goggles, and robotic catbird seats with killer flame arrow projectors.

But perhaps the best thing about Dishonored is that it gives you so many ways to approach any given situation - not merely stealth or melee. You can teleport around, possess enemies, or arrange their indirect demise. It's all a lot of fun.

And that's my top ten of the past decade. It was hard to eliminate gems like Shadow of the Colossus, Atom Zombie Smasher, and Psychonauts from the list, but that's what you get when you can only include ten.