As you likely know, Resident Evil 4 heralded a rebirth for the series. And while I do miss some of the classic survival horror elements, Resident Evil 4 really is an excellent third-person shooter and action game. It’s got a lot of replayability, and some awesome set pieces. It uses quicktime events as well as I’ve ever seen them used in a game, and holds true to a lot of Resident Evil staples. As it’s seeming like the even-numbered titles in the series are the good ones, I have high hopes for Resident Evil 6.

9- Starcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, PC, 1998)

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I were in a Best Buy, and I pointed out to her a game on the shelf: Starcraft Battle Chest. How amazing is it that the game is twelve years old and still selling in a prominent place on store shelves? It’s just that good.

At this point, more than a decade later, I hardly need to talk about how amazing it was that Blizzard created three separate yet balanced factions which each had an entirely different play style and different tactics. We may take it for granted now, but it really is pretty impressive. I’ve reinstalled and replayed Starcraft 2 plenty of times, although I’ve only finished the single-player campaign once. I’m willing to believe that this slot in my list will soon be replaced by Starcraft 2, which I have yet to play.

8- Portal (Valve Software, PC, 2007)

If you read this site, you’re likely interested in video games. And if you’re interested in video games, you likely don’t need me to explain to you how awesome Portal was/is. Portal is a puzzle-platformer that introduced a simple concept and then stretched it six ways from Octember, and layered on some humor via everyone’s favorite passive-agressive psychotic artificial intelligence.

Dispire what a brief joy the game was, Portal is universally recognised as a kick-ass game. I, for one, agree.

7- Psychonauts (Double Fine, PC, 2005)

If you haven’t guessed by the name of this site, I really like Psychonauts. It’s hands-down the funniest game I’ve ever played. And while I can’t claim that humor games are my favorite genre, I’ve got huge appreciation for Psychonauts. At this point, I’ve only played Psychonauts start-to-finish twice, but I have no doubt that I’ll go back again someday and replay it a third time.

6- Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda, PC, 2006)

Oblivion had so much going for it. I’ll grant you that the engine wasn’t ideal, but seeing physics-based traps go off from a first-person perspective, gathering wild flowers to make potions, and fighting melee battles from a first-person perspective was only part of the game’s joy. Then, the modding community took a game which on its own was simply good, and they made it great. The GUI updates, improved AI, new music, and higher-resolution graphics that the modding community introduced were simply amazing.

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’ve been waiting a while for this one. If you didn’t know that this website takes its name from a location (the best location) in Psychonauts, then you probably haven’t played the game. If that’s the case, you’ve seriously missed out. Psychonauts is by far the funniest game I’ve ever played, and beyond that, it’s just a good game. Where else can you go on a misson to rescue your friends’ brains? In what other game can you summon a psychic janitor with a piece of bacon? And how many games let you enter the mind of an insane actress and battle the theater critics that plague her psyche?

Psychonauts is hilarious ridiculous fun. I’ve replayed the game start to finish, and likely will again at some point. That’s really what makes a game a Keeper.

Recently, I fired up the copy of Okami that’s been sitting on my shelf for months, gathering dust and cat hair. After the initial half hour of text-reading, when the game actually started, I was completely shocked at how good it looked. This is a Wii game, ported from the original Gamecube version – it’s not running on one of the consoles known to be graphics powerhouses. So why does this game look better than any photorealistic game I’ve ever seen? Because it’s not shooting for photorealism.

Okami looks like a cartoon. Not like a videogame. Somehow, the game manages to look like a really well done hand drawn anime. And whereas achieving true-to-life photorealism is still beyond the grasp of the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, or even high-end PCs, achieving cartoon-realism is doable. It just hasn’t been done in any game other than Okami.

“Cartoon-realism?”, I hear you say, “What the frell is that?” What I’m getting at is that normally you can tell when you’re looking at a video game and when you’re looking at a cartoon. You can tell which is which. But not with Okami. And the notion that a video game that looks like this is not only doable, but is doable on a last-generation console, is very exciting to me. Maybe we’ll see more.

Some of my very favorite games have been games that haven’t even attempted photorealism. Look at Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It’s a Nintendo game, of course, and Zelda’s art style has always been a bit cartoonish. But how about Psychonauts, another of my favorites? Not only is the art style in Psychonauts not photorealistic, I’d actually go so far as to call it anti-realistic. And I’m eagerly awaiting a sequel to Psychonauts at some point in the future.

The announcement of Beyond Good and Evil 2 thrilled me – it’s probably my favorite game of all time. But I feel very conflicted over the decision to make the game photorealistic. When I see Pey’j, I don’t want to see a freaky-looking realistic man-pig. I’d much rather see the friendly lovable cartoonish pig I grew to love, and cuteness somehow eludes a realistic pig-man.

When I played Uncharted, I enjoyed it. But the graphics annoyed me. Even in dark scenes, many characters and terrain elements had hints of shiny white highlighting, a side effect of the engine, I’m sure. And when I played Far Cry on the PC, back when it was considered a graphical masterpiece, the characters’ faces disturbed me. I remember commenting in my review of the game that the female lead had a bad case of TFP – Too Few Polygons – with the result that she looked mannish.

So although video games right now have chosen to take the road to photorealism, passing through uncanny valley and turning left at the corner of 3DEngine and OnlineCoOp, I’ll continue to appreciate those games that eschew photorealism for a style better suited to video gaming.

EDIT: Brandon pointed out to me that the original Okami was not a Gamecube game – it was a PS2 game. Oops!