The popular game award events don't let the audience rank the very thing that is most interesting to me each year: how the new year's top games compare to all the classics. Can they even make it onto the list?

Here is a list of 50 of my favorites. I'd like to see yours.

I don't like to group games by genre anymore. There's genres in which I haven't even tried a total of 10 games, and there's many games that are impossible to neatly fit into a single genre category. Instead, I'm going with top 10 games by each of the 5 criteria groups below.

Some games would make my top 10 in multiple, or even all 5 of these lists. In such cases I just left them in the one list in which I thought they were highest.


Single player gameplay:

1 Selaco
2 F Zero AG / GX
3 Psyvariar 2
4 The Messenger
5 Thief 2: The Metal Age
6 Ion Fury Aftershock
7 Jagged Alliance 2
8 Oni
9 System Shock 2
10 Ashes 2063


Multiplayer gameplay:

1 Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R (specifically the Steam version)
2 Quake Champions: Doom Edition
3 WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne
4 Ikaruga
5 Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
6 Final Fantasy XI (old 75 cap version before they ruined it in 2010)
7 Dragon Ball FighterZ
8 StarCraft: Brood War
9 Quake Champions
10 Path of Exile


Storytelling:

1 Planescape: Torment
2 Xenogears
3 Terranigma
4 Lost Odyssey
5 Final Fantasy Tactics
6 Xenosaga Episode III
7 Tactics Ogre
8 Final Fantasy VII
9 Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
10 Drakengard


Music, atmosphere or sound design:

1 Koudelka
2 Chrono Cross
3 Diablo II
4 Unreal
5 Final Fantasy IX
6 Silent Hill 2
7 StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
8 Touhou 8: Imperishable Night
9 Earth Defense Force ('91 SNES version)
10 Seiken Densetsu 3


Visual charm, beauty or style:

1 Hedon Bloodrite
2 Valkyrie Profile
3 Final Fantasy X
4 Hyper Light Drifter
5 Metroid Fusion
6 Dark Souls
7 Vagrant Story
8 Sea of Stars
9 Final Fantasy VI
10 Chrono Trigger


It feels like atmosphere shouldn't be lumped together with music and sound (and maybe these two shouldn't be together either), since there's way more to it than just what you hear. It also feels like I'm missing another category for cinematography. And yet, there's not a single game that does any of those things really well that I'd want in my top 50 list that isn't already listed here for other reasons, so for the sake of simplicity I'll just keep the categories as they are. Video game music is a huge topic and in itself deserves its own top 100 list, but these here do include my all time favorites.


Cutting it all down to a simple overall top 10 games ever would be something like this for me:

1 Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R
2 Quake Champions: Doom Edition
3 Selaco
4 Hedon Bloordrite
5 Planescape: Torment
6 Xenogears
7 Koudelka
8 Terranigma
9 Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne
10 F Zero AX / GX