It should go without saying that this is a list comprised entirely of my own opinions. I’m not saying that these are the best games of all time – I’m just saying that they’re my personal favorites. It doesn’t include games that I haven’t played, and there are many of those. I’ve never played through Ocarina of Time, I’ve never played GoldenEye, and I’ve never played a Splinter Cell game. I have a boxed copy of Clive Barker’s Undying that I have yet to play. Ditto Grim Fandango. I’ll get to these oldies someday. But for the time being, let’s dive into my favorites.

The bottom of the list is full of oldies, largely because they’re games that used to be amazing, and they’ve since been pushed further and further down the list. So for today, get ready for flashbacks to the eighties and nineties.

50-Puzzle Quest (Infinity Interactive, Nintendo DS, 2007)

The first of the puzzle genre mashups to make it onto my radar, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords drew me in with the promise of fighting the battles in an RPG by playing a bejeweled-like puzzle, and kept my interest with the variants on the main “battle” game wherein you’d craft items, capture enemies, and train mounts by solving puzzles. Like Scribblenauts, I suspect that this game was noteworthy primarily for its novelty. Still, it was fun working my warrior “Assface” up to fiftieth level and defeating the game’s big Lich boss.

49-Dance Dance Revolution USA (Konami, Sony Playstation, 2000)

Back in the day, I belonged to a group of friends who was fairly fanatic about DDR. The majority of us never played in arcades, but many of us had playstations, and DDR parties were common. I first encountered DDR at a dance camp in New Hampshire in September 2000. A year later, I could ace Smoke on the Water on maniac difficulty. Go me. I still have my DDR pads and my original Playstation. I plan to some day break them out and see if I’ve still got it.

48-Maniac Mansion (Lucasfilm Games, Commodore 64, 1987)

A few years back, I discovered a fan remake of Maniac Mansion called Maniac Mansion Deluxe which I could download and play on a modern PC. I did so, and was delighted to find that I still remembered how to get through all the game’s puzzles. I finished it in two evenings. But back when I first played it on my Commodore, before the era of The Internet, it took many months. During those months, I’d confer with other kids on the playground, exchanging strategies and learning what worked to get past Purple Tentacle and Dr. Fred. It was a different era, and to me Maniac Mansion is the best of the SCUMM games. More than twenty years later, the game still has an undeniable charm.

47-Jade Empire (BioWare, Microsoft Xbox, 2005)

While Jade Empire is by no means the best game BioWare has produced, I personally prefer it to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. I liked the fact that it’s an action RPG and that there was a fantastic story twist. Mass Effect was an action RPG, but it was a shooter to Jade Empire’s melee action. And KotOR had a great story twist, but the combat bored me. I also really liked Jade Empire’s single minigame – I only wish the game had offered 3-4 minigames rather than just the one. I suppose I’ll have to look to games like No More Heroes 2 for that kind of minigame variety.

46-Double Dragon II (Technos, Nintendo Entertainment System, 1990)
In the nineties, I was a big fan of the Double Dragon series, although I played only on the NES. I loved Double Dragon 2 and liked Double Dragon 3 very much as well. It was a sidescrolling beat-em-up that allowed for timing-based special moves like the super uppercut and the ultra-difficult super knee. When you got an enemy into a headlock, you had a choice of four different moves you could perform, and you could mix and match, ending with throwing the enemy either left or right. This enabled you to throw enemies off of cliffs, and I’d go through entire levels trying to send every enemy over one ledge or another. The variety of fighting options in this game were well before its time.

That’s the five on the list for this week. Stop back next week for games 45-41.

1998: Baldur’s Gate
The IP that put Bioware on the map is arguably still the best series they’ve ever produced. While in my opinion Dragon Age’s setting, storyline and characters surpassed those of Baldur’s Gate, there are still many things about Baldur’s Gate that remain superior: exploration, class and spell selection, and available PCs to name a few factors. There’s a reason that Baldur’s Gate remains a legendary name and a gold standard in RPGs.

2002: Neverwinter Nights
Without a doubt, the strongest feature of Neverwinter Nights was the Aurora engine’s make-your-own-adventure toolset. Many things about the Neverwinter Nights game engine bothered me, and despite completing the included single-player adventure, I never loved it.
I hated the fact that you couldn’t control an entire party of adventurers. Although I spent countless hours with the Aurora toolset, it never changed the fact that Neverwinter  couldn’t hold a candle to Candlekeep. I never played Neverwinter Nights 2.

2003: Knights of the Old Republic
Hailed by many as a better Star Wars story than George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, KotOR was met with much acclaim. But the lackluster combat was so very similar to the combat that had annoyed me so much in Neverwinter Nights. Although I appreciated the story, and very much enjoyed The Big Twist, the black and white good versus evil choices that determined your alignment on a very one-dimensional scale never struck much of a chord with me. I never played KotOR 2.

2005: Jade Empire
I enjoyed the gameplay of Jade Empire more than I had Neverwinter Nights or Knights of the Old Republic. It had a single-companion mechanic very much similar to Neverwinter Nights’s and a good guy/bad guy gauge similar to that in KotOR, but the combat was twitch-based. Sure, there were RPG aspects, but I got to manually jump, punch, kick, and dodge. I’ll grant you that by this point, the conversation system in Bioware games was getting very much same-old-same-old, but with much of the remainder of the game working so well, it was easy to overlook the staleness of the conversation mechanics. And Jade Empire had a storyline better than any of the previous Bioware games. Jade Empire 2 would be very nice.

2007: Mass Effect
TO hear some speak of it, Mass Effect was the second coming. The premise of a race of super-machines threatening humanity sounded absolutely fantastic. What we got in reality was a shooter that didn’t feel much like a shooter. It had a somewhat innovative conversation system, but the same black and white good vs evil mechanic that had bored me in KotOR was replaced by a black and white paragon vs renegade system. And the closest to unstoppable robots we ever got was the geth, a robotic race of utterly unremarkable peons for the PC to shoot at. Oh, and for some reason they could put people on giant spikes in order to change them into zombies. For some reason. I’m not in a hurry to play Mass Effect 2.

2009: Dragon Age Origins
Where to begin? Bioware took the one game they’d made which had been absolutely fantastic (Baldur’s Gate) and they did what they could to make it even better. And I’m not just talking about better graphics.

Firstly, the system of game mechanics. In the past, they’d used Dungeons and Dragons rules. Baldur’s Gate used 2nd Edition rules. Neverwinter Nights used 3.0. The current D&D ruleset is 4th Edition, and it’s dog crap. Bioware made the decision to create their own rule system, and I couldn’t be happier with it. It’s very different, but it’s probably my favorite RPG rule system other than Fallout’s SPECIAL system.

Secondly, they took that tired old black vs white good vs evil character alignment system and trashed it. In its place, they set up a system whereby each of your NPCs will have a different opinion of you based on their own values and their opinions of the various decisions you make throughout the game. It may sound like a small change, but in practice, it’s hugely different, and aside from making the game deeper, it leads you to care about the characters with whom you travel.

2011: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Oh, good. Another MMO. Based on a game that everyone other than myself loved. I’m not particularly interested.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

I never owned an XBox. Thus, I never had the pleasure of playing Jade Empire during its heyday. But when I heard of the enhanced remake being released for the PC, and heard Brandon raving about the game, I had to pick it up. I found the engine to be a bit dated, which is to be expected from a game that was originally released in 2005, but the gameplay was fun, the River Raid-like mini-game was fun, and the story was fantastic.

This is a game I kept after completing, and although there are a dozen games I’d like to replay first, I think of replaying this one often. If you’re planning on playing it, don’t let yourself be spoiled on the plot.