Back in 1990, I was in high school. I remember reading in a computer magazine that Ultima VI had been released for the Commodore 64. At the time, Ultima V was one of my favorite games of all time, and I really wanted to play the sequel. But for whatever reason – money, girls, college applications – I never bought the game. I really wish I had, as Ultima VI looks to have been at least as good and as complex as my beloved Ultima V.

I’ve currently got The Ultima 6 Project installed on my computer, which is a complete remake of the old game done in the engine for the original Dungeon Siege. I’d really like to play it, but like anything else, it’s all about how much free time I’ve got.

20- Ultima V (Origin, Commodore 64, 1988)
I’m a great lover of computer role-playing games, and Ultima V was the first truly great one I ever played. Before Dragon Age, before Baldur’s Gate, even before SSI’s Dungeons and Dragons Gold Box games, there was Ultima. Ultima V came out the same year as Pool of Radiance, just as Ultima IV had come out alongside Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale.

Initially, I found it amazing that you could attack enemies who were not directly above or to the side of you. You could actually fire an arrow at an orc who was five squares above and two squares over from you! The initiative system was complex: occasionally, one of your quicker characters would attack twice without a slower character getting a turn in-between. It was as if Mr. Fast attacked every 12 initiative segments but Mr. Slow only attacked every 15 segments. I loved that system.

But what really grabbed me about Ultima V was the story. Sure – it had me running back and forth, backtracking all over the huge world map many times, and took me literally years to complete, but when I was fourteen, I had that kind of time. At the outset, I learned that the evil Lord Blackthorne had taken over and was enforcing twisted versions of the eight virtues. Throughout the game, I traveled the world, picked up companions, battled enemies, and learned more of the story. I infiltrated the enemy’s ring of spies, joined the resistance, and learned mantras which let me meditate at the hidden shrines. (once I’d found them) I followed the path laid out in the journal portion of the game’s manual, which had me take a painstakingly specific route in my ship and transfer to a skiff, intentionally going down a whirlpool to enter the underworld. I then followed a river to the location where the Shadowlords had captured Lord British. There, I found Lord British’s amulet.

I undertook similar quests to get his sceptre and crown, both of which were essential. I had to talk to people to learn the magic passwords to each of the world’s eight dungeons, and then traverse each dungeon to the underworld for various reasons. Amongst those reasons was to collect the three shards of the shattered gem of Mondain, which allowed me to destroy the shadowlords. Of course, I had to follow a particular ritual and had to learn each shadowlord’s true name.

All of this took more hours than I can tell you. The story was complex, and I’ve only detailed the parts I remember now, more than two decades later. I spent hours each day for years. Ultima forces you to purchase ingredients for each spell that you cast, and there exist two ingredients that cannot be purchased, only gathered in the wild. You can ride horses, ships, skiffs, hot air balloons, and even a magic carpet – or else travel by moongate if you learn the phases of the moon properly to guide your travel.

More than twenty years later, Ultima V is a more complex game than any other I’ve played since. And I treasure the experience that I had in playing it.

19- Trine (Frozenbyte, Playstation 3, 2009)
If daddy Castlevania and mommy Gauntlet got together and had a child, it would be Trine. Trine is the modern-day evolution of these old two-dimensional sidescrolling platformers and action RPGs. The graphics and the soundtrack are both beautiful, and up to three people can play simultaneously. You get three characters to choose from, and each character is drastically different and has different ways to solve the same problems. I had an absolute blast playing Trine, as you can probably tell by the fact that it’s the only platinum trophy I’ve got on the Playstation 3. I busted my ass finishing the Tower of Sarek on Very Hard with zero deaths.

The game has three characters: Knight, Wizard, and Thief. The Knight has armor, sword and shield. His shield allows him to block attacks from any angle, which is very useful, and he’s got the best direct attack in the game. He can also jump and land on enemies, killing them mario-style. But he can’t swim. At all. In water, he sinks and drowns. The Thief is the best character in the game: she can jump high, grapple from any wooden surface, and has the game’s only ranged attack. And while swinging, if she hits an enemy, she’ll kick for massive damage. The thief is all about mobility. The wizard is the most difficult to use, but can be a lot of fun. When you play the wizard, you have a cursor which can be used to levitate objects or to create boxes and planks. You can drop things on enemies and crush them. This is the wizard’s only attack, which means that when enemies get close to you, you’re pretty much screwed.

The game has plenty of items to collect. Each level has two chests containing magic items. These can be anything from leg armor which reduces damage from hits (only the hits which connect with the character’s legs) to a magic necklace that lets the wizard create an extra box or plank. Each level also has a number of green experience vials. Collecting all of these is probably the most time-intensive achievement in the game, but the experience will allow your characters to go up levels. As they go up levels, the knight, thief, and wizard gain new abilities. which you can select. The knight gains a flaming sword, a magic thunder hammar, and the ability to charge. The thief can shoot multiple arrows or even a flaming arrow. And the wizard can create progressively more items, and eventually a floating platform.

Trine is probably tied with Pixeljunk Monsters for my favorite PSN game. If you’ve got a PS3 and haven’t picked up Trine, I heartily recommend it. It’s also available for PC on Steam.

18- Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo EAD, Nintendo Wii, 2007)
Let’s face it – first party Nintendo games are just good. Whether they’re Zelda, Mario, or Metroid, the games are just good. Mario’s latest evolution is Galaxy, and the games are wildly creative. It’s got levels where you swim underwater or fly, levels where you roll around atop a ball using only the Wii remote’s tilt, and levels where you jump around atop floating planetoids which pull you in with their gravity. In an age of 3d games, Mario Galaxy may be the only true 3d game – it’s often impossible to judge which way is up!

Mario Galaxy has you surfing atop a manta ray, transforming into a giant spring or a bumblebee, and playing in old-school 2d levels. There are boss creatures, hidden levels, and an extra level of replayability created by the comets, which turn levels you’ve already played into silver coin collecting games, sudden-death levels, or a race to collect everything inside a time limit. Mario Galaxy is certainly one of the best games on the Nintendo Wii.

17- Dead Space (Visceral Games, Playstation 3, 2008)
In a time when the survival horror genre has gone out of vogue in favor of games like Doom 3 and Resident Evil 5, Dead Space took a much-needed step in the right direction – backwards towards the survival horror classics of yesteryear. Don’t get me wrong – Dead Space is first and foremost a shooter – but it’s got the survival horror chops that Resident Evil has lost. I played Dead Space only at night, and generally while wearing a good pair of earphones. Good times.

Dead Space is one of the most atmospheric games I’ve ever played. There is no heads-up display to detract from the immersion, and the game’s sound design is amazing. When you enter a vacuum, the only cue you need is the sudden transition to the echoey, disconnected, inside-helmet soundscape that insulates you from the sounds of enemies rushing towards you. In space, no one can hear you scream.

If you know anything about Dead Space, you’ll likely know that in order to kill Necromorphs, you’ve got to cut off their arms and legs. I’ll admit that this mechanic, while novel, is hardly innovative. But it’s certainly no reason to roll your eyes and decide not to play the game. It has so much more going for it. The game’s weapons are the most diverse and fun to use I’ve seen since the last Doom game. The weapon and armor upgrade system involves welding new modules into specific nodes in your armor or weapon for different effects. And the story…

The setting of Dead Space is so rich that I can’t begin to absorb it all. But just knowing that the entire universe out there exists gives me the warm fuzzies. The immersive scenes at the game’s outset when approaching the Ishimura mining vessel really help to put you in character. They’ve gone with the Gordon Freeman silent protagonist approach with the character you play: Isaac Clarke (an amalgam of Isaac Aasimov and Arthur C Clarke) As the story progresses and you restore functionality to portions of the ship that allow you greater access to information about what has gone wrong, you’re gradulally exposed to more story through Bioshock-style audio and video recordings which are played on both wall-mounted displays and on your portable holo-projector which displays a screen right in front of you. You can even walk around while watching the video. Normally the recordings are placed where you’re unlikely to be attacked while viewing one.

I could write a whole lot more about Dead Space, but as this list nears the higher-ranked games, I should struggle for brevity and call it quits for this week.

So what about the game settings I do like?

Ultima
I first entered Sosaria when I got a copy of Ultima III for my tenth birthday. Sosaria was a crude world, like the worlds of Ultima I and Ultima II before it. Later, I played Ultima IV, which introduced the world of Brittania. Somewhere between ultima IV and Ultima V, I fell in love with Brittania. Between those two games, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I’d spent a thousand hours in Brittania. Don’t be shocked – I’ve heard of at least one person who took 15 years to finish the game. On summer vacations, I’d spend all day playing, and stay up until well after midnight.

The game’s crude graphics didn’t exactly lend a vivid sense of realism, but they forced me to use my imagination in the same way that reading a book does. As I travelled south down the coast from Britain to Paws, I imagined the seashore, and envisioned what that must look like. When I exited the eighth level of a dungeon into the Underworld, I thought of just how dark the sunless world must be, and imagined the dank smell of stagnant air. Travelling through the poisonous swamps near the village of Cove brought to mind visions of The Swamp of Sadness from the Neverending Story, except with more disease and rotted overgrowth. The game’s poor graphics forced me to use my imagination. To me, that was a vivid world, and I grew to know it well.

Starcraft
Starcraft doesn’t have much in the way of landscape – just different maps that you fight on. But somehow, the setting calls to me. It’s a space opera, and the races are far more interesting than Klingons, Wookiees and Sebacians. When Starcraft: Ghost was annnounced, I was very excited to enter that world and see Mutalisks and Ultralisks up close. Walking amongst Protoss pylons in top-down Starcraft is one thing, but to envision a Terran Command Center lifting off or a zergling ambush from first-person perspective is fairly exciting. I would absolutely love to see a game in the Starcraft setting that is not a RTS.

Beyond Good and Evil
It’s not the geography of Hillys that calls to me, but rather its inhabitants. In real life, we think of ethnic diversity in terms of Caucasians, Asians, Africans, and Hispanics. On planet Hillys, the inhabitants aren’t only the human descendants of Apes. They’ve also descended from pigs, rhinos, cats, sharks, and hippos. The notion seems so wildly creative.

Half-Life 2
The opening of Half-Life 2 expresses so effectively the oppressive atmosphere that exists in City 17. The people of planet Earth have been conquered by an alien invasion, and the cities are nothing more than internment camps – even the names of the cities have been taken away. This is an excellent example of the “showing rather than telling” technique of authorship. They show you the horribly oppressed people and then put a crowbar in your hands and let you fight for them.

The story is as epic as the Star Wars trilogy and the setting as rich as any I’ve seen. This page does a fantastic job of laying out the timeline, filling in the backstory, and putting forth theories as to the motives of the mysterious G-Man. I’m eagerly waiting for Half-Life 2 episode 3, mainly to see where the story goes.

Oblivion
I never played Morrowind or any of the other Elder Scrolls games before Oblivion. But when I heard all the buzz about Oblivion on a discussion board I frequent, I had to try it. Oblivion is one of the most atmospheric games I’ve ever played – from the sunny mountain peaks to the swampy villages to the eerie Ayleid ruins.

Tamriel is one of those game worlds where I can easily envision the routes from place to place. The game locations seemed like real places to me. The game’s landmarks and road signs are distinct, and the terrain is varied such that I can find the way from Bruma to Chorrol without even having to consult the map.

Dragon Age
Perhaps more than any of the other game worlds listed above, the world of Dragon Age has been fleshed out wonderfully. The circle of mages that are watched over by templars to ensure that their magic doesn’t enable them to be posessed by demonic forces. The dwarven caste system, so rigid, so unfair. The seven old gods being gradually corrupted by the darkspawn, leading to blights. The enslavement of elvenkind by humanity, which has been abolished, and which has lead to the current split in the elven race. It’s all so intriguing – I’m totally absorbed in this world and its story.

I’d be interested to hear comments from other readers – what is your favorite video game setting?

Back in my days on the Commodore 64, I played through many Ultima games. I first got Ultima III and was amazed at its workings. Ultima IV was even better. But I never finished either of those games. I later went back and got the first two Ultima titles as well. Yet somehow, the one that really struck a chord with me was Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny.

Ultima V was far more than a series of dungeon dives and fetch quests. To my fifteen-year-old mind, Britannia was a coherent world full of realistic people and places, and a storyline that has stayed with me to this day. Ultima IV had been all about understanding the eight virtues: Honor, Valor, Compassion, Honesty, Humility, Justice, Sacrifice, and Spirituality. In Ultima V you learn that Lord British has been lost on an expedition to the underworld and that his throne has been usurped by the evil Lord Blackthorne. Blackthorne enforces tyrranical parodies of the eight virtues, and you later learn that he is in fact merely a puppet controlled by the three Shadowlords who’ve imprisoned Lord British in the Underworld. So you’ve got to travel the world, slowly gaining companions, learning the magic words that open the eight dungeons, each of which you’ll need to visit for different reasons, then follow the path of Lord British’s expedition to find where in the underworld he fell and thus retrieve his amulet. Through similarly convoluted quests, you’ll need to locate his sceptre and crown in different places, and learn the correct song to play on his harpsicord to open a secret panel and retrieve a certain sandalwood box from his personal chambers. The complexity and coherence of the game is astounding when you realize that it was made in the mid-eighties.

As I play through Final Fantasy XII, visiting and re-visiting towns until they become familiar, I begin to sense something that I haven’t since playing Ultima V two decades ago. Rabanastre feels like home in the same way that Britain did in Ultima V. Visiting the Sandsea tavern is like staying at the Wayfarer’s Inn. I like the way that certain items just aren’t available at certain shops. In order to buy everything you want, you might have to visit two or three very far-flung towns. The teleport crystals in Final Fantasy XII provide quick transport similar to Ultima’s Moongates. And while in Ultima V you could travel via ship, horse, hot air balloon, magic carpet, or grappling hook, Final Fantasy XII allows you a private airship.

Final Fantasy XII uses much the same magic system as its predecessors: base spell names like cure, fire, and haste with different suffixes (-ara, -aga, -aja) indicating the spell’s power and area of effect. Ultima V had a far more complex magic system: you had to learn which magic words to use and then combine them in different ways. And then, they wouldn’t work unless you’d puchased or gathered the correct magical reagents. Two of these: Mandrake Root and Nightshade, could not be purchased – you had to travel to a certain spot and dig them up.

Each of these games also has many optional side missions. Ultima V allowed you to travel to find the plans for the legendary HMS cape, which would rig your ship to travel like the wind. It let you find magical glass swords which would kill any creature with a single hit, but then shatter. You could join the underground resistance, or infiltrate “The Suppression” and sneak into Blackthorne’s castle. There was even a companion who’d join your party and then betray you. No – Yoshimo wasn’t the first betrayer in a video game.

Final Fantasy XII has an elaborate series of hunts in which you’re commissioned to locate and kill creatures. Similarly to Shadow of the Colossus, sometimes finding the creatures is more difficult than killing them. You’re then rewarded not only by the one who hired you, but also by the guild itself. Similarly, you can find and defeat “espers”, whom you are then able to summon to help you in combat.

Both games have enormous worlds that you could spend many hours exploring. There are entire dungeons and large areas in the games that I’ll never even visit. If I now had the time that I used to when I was 15, it’s possible that I might spend as much time with Final Fantasy XII as I did with Ultima V. But my life is very different now, and so I’m rushing to complete Final Fantasy XII before Borderlands comes out on October 26th.

My first game console was the Atari 2600 my father brought home when I was eight. I spent countless hours playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Demons to Diamonds, and Warlords. I even loved that crappy Raiders of the Lost Ark game. But the one I probably spent the most time with was Video Pinball. Never before and never since have I obsessed so much about a numeric score in a video game. I developed a pattern whereby I could repeatedly nudge the ball – gently, so as to not tilt – and bounce it back and forth, watching the score go up and up.

A few years later, and after a brief stint with a Timex-Sinclair PC and an Atari 800XL PC, my parents bought me a Commodore 64. I do not jest when I say that the Commodore 64 changed my life. It got me interested in programming, which many years later led to a career. But 90% of the time, if I was on the Commodore, I was playing games. Defender of the Crown. Pool of Radiance. Autoduel. Maniac Mansion. The Racing Destruction Set. Wishbringer. Wasteland. Mail Order Monsters. Super Giana Sisters. Forbidden Forest. I could easily write about all of them. I had dozens of 5.25 floppies, and they all saw a lot of use.

I still remember vividly the day I got my copy of Bards’ Tale 2 via UPS. Cash on Delivery. Words cannot express the excitement I had as I broke open the packaging, slid that floppy into my 1541 disk drive, and typed LOAD”*”,8,1 – to this day, when I type that, my fingers try to hit shift-2 to get the quote.

I never did complete Bards’ Tale 2, although I likely spent hundreds of hours in its dungeons. That distinction goes to Ultima V, which was the most epic game I ever played on the Commodore. The NPCs had daily routines – the shopkeepers would close shop for lunch and walk to the bar to eat. I could have conversations with just about anyone in the game and ask them their names and their jobs. I could pilot ships and balloons, learn area effect spells, relocate moongates, and track the movements of the Shadowlords. I had to travel the world to learn the magical entrance words to open various dungeons so that I could travel to the underworld, battling mongbats, sand traps, and gazers along the way. When I finally made my way to the dungeon Doom in the center of the underworld and rescued Lord British, it was such a momentous event in my young life that I wrote it on the calendar and celebrated for a number of years afterwards.

While Ultima V is undoubtedly my most fondly-remembered Commodore 64 game, Wasteland isn’t far behind. It took the top-down style from Ultima, and mixed it with Bards Tale’s battle system to create an awesome mesh of the two. You could split your party during battle to have the melee fighters run up while the gunslingers stayed back. The game’s atmosphere was what later inspired the first Fallout game, but Wasteland was far edgier. The battle descriptions had you exploding foes like a blood sausage and spinning them into a dance of death, and a later mission in the game had you battling nuns with machine guns. You could even hire a hooker and contract Wasteland Herpes. And my favorite part of the game was the over-the-top robots you’d battle at Base Cochise. The robots you’d fight had names like Sonar-targetted Proton Carbine, Life-seeking Flamethrower, and VTOL Auto-fire Robot.

Fast forward to 1996. I’d just broken off an engagement, and I was depressed. I hadn’t played games much in the past few years, and my friend Rich talked me into buying myself a Playstation. One of the first games I played was Resident Evil 2, and it blew me away. To this day, no other game defines survival horror like Resident Evil 2 does. There are moments in Dead Space that come close, but the storyline in Resident Evil 2, while very complex, is the best of any game in the franchise. Also, the T-103 zombie is by far the best Resident Evil villain ever.

After that, I became primarily a PC Gamer, moving on to games like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Mechwarrior. But I’ll always have fond memories of that Commodore 64.