MagicWithEarvin
Member
Games of the Generation by Eurogamer
Portal
Red Dead: Redemption
Journey
Fallout 3
The Last of Us
Street Fighter IV
Spelunky
World of Warcraft
Dark Souls
Super Mario Galaxy
Over the next two weeks, we'll be bringing you some of the reasons we picked the games we did, and telling you how each of them, in their own way, defined their generation. We start with Portal today. Thanks to a neat quirk in the voting results, numbers five to ten were tied - we'll be bringing you each of them in no particular order this week, with a rundown of the final five starting next Monday. If everyone plays nice, I might even share the full top 50 with you in a couple of weeks, once we've revealed our final pick.
It's not a definitive rundown of course, and no doubt you'll take issue with some inclusions as much as you puzzle over some omissions - but hopefully you'll appreciate our own take on some of the most enjoyable games of the era.
Portal
Released in 2007, Portal was met with unanimous, sustained praise and yet its influence has been almost non-existent. There have been no imitators, no cover versions, no respectful nods from other studios hoping to build upon its lessons and approach. That is, arguably, because it is a complete game, in which story and mechanics elegantly entwine and unfurl towards their natural conclusion. Like a short story that is too rounded to expand into a novel, and too idiosyncratic to birth a genre, Portal sits alone, majestic. It's a game that offered an exit from a cliché, but one through which only it seemed to fit.
Even the sequel, for all its cleverness and expansion, was unable to match its perfectly told story. In video games we are led to believe that a debut is a first swing: sequels, being technological evolutions as much as creative ones, will always curve towards improvement. Portal refuses to adhere to this rule, just as it rebukes the rest of them. It's proof that once you've delivered perfection where else is left to go but imperfection?
Red Dead: Redemption
If asked to boil down what makes Red Dead Redemption my favourite game of the generation, it'd would be this: it knew the value of emptiness, of silence, of space. It had confidence enough in its players ability to engage with the fiction that it could create a beautiful landscape and not clutter it up with crap. It saved its bullet points for the bodies of bad men lying in the dust, not for a press release, and in doing so offered the most singularly absorbing opportunity to live a different life that these consoles offered.
To walk in the bootprints of Ford and Leone, not to read, or to watch, but to feel history shift beneath our feet as an old world was ground away by the new, if only for a short time. Hopefully the next console generation will offer similarly powerful experiences, or we'll be destined to make more barrels than memories.
Journey
Journey's a game defined as much by what it isn't as what it is. In an era where the appetites of hungry audiences are satiated by companies tossing out swill buckets overflowing with content, there's a certain defiant charm in the 90 minutes it takes to see Journey through to its end. At a time when so many players define themselves by their conquests and achievements, there's something too in its obstinate refusal to raise a challenge.
Written in that arc, and in that playful moment of escape from gravity, lies Journey's theme of transcendence. It's a literal touch rather than a literary one, as thatgamecompany's reliance on the framework of the hero's journey provides a fittingly slight narrative thread - but here it's told through little beyond mechanics and systems. Journey proves in its epic minimalism that a tale told through the struggles and reliefs of a player with a controller can be just as powerful as that relayed through the spoken or written word.
Fallout 3
Fallout 3 was, in my exploding and increasingly dislocated eyes, a triumph. A perfect meld of the old and the new. The SPECIAL skills system was adopted and updated brilliantly, while the action points and live action freeze-frames of VATS gave a welcome taste of turn-based decision-making.
A constant theme of this generation has been old ideas and formats being recycled and repackaged. Every publisher has visited dusty back rooms to inspect what licenses had been accrued over the years - what brands they could reinvigorate, which older gamers to reel back in, how many HD remakes could be hastily chopped together and what consistency of freemium bullshit could be feasibly be forced down a single throat.
Fallout 3 however (alongside the likes of X-Com) came from the right place - a design team energised and invigorated by the approval of their teenage selves. It used the past as an intelligent stepping stone towards modern mass-appeal roleplay and, arguably, eased the passage of kickstarted re-apocalypses like Wasteland 2.
The Last of Us
In Hollywood such happy endings are assured, but in real life attaining them is rarely so straightforward. On paper, The Last of Us is standard, big-budget blockbuster fare laced with Hollywood cliché. Its setting, subject matter, characters and relationships have all been seen in one form or another across a host of films and video games alike. The UK launch event of The Last of Us offered tacit acknowledgement of this, hosted in an old London cinema during a night that included screenings of I Am Legend and The Road.
Nonetheless, expectations for The Last of Us were high, tempered only by the mild concerns associated with launching a new IP near the end of one generation as a restless audience casts glances toward the next. Amongst its many achievements, then, is that The Last of Us both exceeds and subverts those expectations by delivering the mature and meaningful blockbuster experience that this seventh generation of consoles has promised since its inception.
The Last of Us is every inch the epic blockbuster. It's pacing and set pieces are well judged, its story of loss, hope and betrayal leaves us conflicted and the savage beauty of its world offers melancholic lows and dizzy highs. It is an experience whose individual parts can and will be replicated but that, as a whole, sits atop the pile of narrative driven experiences as a high profile, mainstream example of what the medium is capable of. Hollywood can keep its happy endings, I prefer mine bittersweet.
Street Fighter IV
Street Fighter 4 single-handedly revitalised the fighting genre for an entire industry and, for those who were there during the glory years of the 16-bit era, for those who toiled over 10-hit combos in Tekken and for those who mastered the parry and thrust of Soulcalibur, breathed new life into rusty quarter circle forward motions. Even the most die-hard Street Fighter fan will admit - whispered in back alleys only - that Mortal Kombat 9 turned out okay in the end. Street Fighter 4's greatest achievement is it delights expert and casual Street Fighter players with equal aplomb. It's the Toy Story of fighting games.
Now, nearly five years after release, Street Fighter 4 is still the most-played fighting game on the planet. It enjoys top billing at EVO, the biggest fighting game tournament. Its nostalgia-fuelled accessibility ensured critical and commercial success upon release, but its enduring popularity makes it deserving of a place in the pantheon of this generation's best multiplayer games.
Spelunky
Ultimately, Spelunky, like Ico before it, was something of a pioneer. Without a strong gimmick to its name it would be easy for newcomers to write Spelunky off as a heartless void of a platformer where the player is at the mercy of a clockwork algorithm, but that would be a mistake. Spelunky is the gift that keeps on giving. Even when all of its secrets have been discovered, enemies vanquished, and items found, it still beckons me back for another go, as I know I've only gotten stronger, faster, and all around better at conquering its unpredictable challenges. Every shot is an adventure: a chance to prove I can overcome the odds, take bigger risks, and maybe, just maybe, come out the other end with a new high score. But more likely I'll get knocked onto some spikes. No matter. I know the very next day I'll be back.
World of Warcraft
It's a defining characteristic of this generation that most of the games in our list play differently now than they did at launch. Bugs have been fixed, classes rebalanced, level caps raised, new content and modes added. The internet has even reached into solo experiences like Bethesda's RPGs and synced them with the remorseless march of time. If such a thing as final cut ever existed in video games, it's gone now. You can still experience most of the original versions if you try, but you'll have to try: wipe that install, delete that save data, unplug the router.
For World of Warcraft, though, that's all but impossible. Blizzard's mighty online world is now almost unrecognisable as the game that, just before the new consoles launched, heralded the dawn of a new age - the age, in the term coined by Valve's Gabe Newell and parroted by an army of publishing executives, of "games as a service". Not only has WOW undergone constant evolution in mechanics, design and philosophy over the last nine years, but its original content is gone. Wiped from the servers, never to return.
If you really want to turn back the clock, there are communities out there running "classic" WOW servers that attempt to preserve the game in its original state. Good on them. They're archivists, performing the same illicit but essential function that the emulation community used to in the days before Virtual Consoles and Xbox Live Arcade remakes - preserving gaming's past for posterity. I'm sorely tempted to visit one. But my rose-tinted memories of 2005 - of my personal game of the generation - are too precious to me to risk.
Dark Souls
I haven't played Dark Souls for over a year, and anyone who has played it extensively is going to find it infuriating to discover where I am: I'm at the end of Sen's Fortress, just before the fight with the Iron Golem. I know! I haven't even made it to Anor Londo yet and it's right there! I'm not stuck. I just haven't done it yet.
Perhaps that's because I'm slightly intimidated by Dark Souls, even after the 25 hours it took me to reach that last bonfire before the rooftop. When I arrived at Sen's Fortress, I felt strong and confident. I had survived Darkroot Garden and Midnight Butterfly, Blighttown and the Depths, Gaping Dragon and the Capra Demon. I had spent an entire day grinding for XP in the Undead Burg, listening to NPR Planet Money podcasts on my laptop. (I have no idea if the former was wise or not, but the latter is always recommended.)
As I walked up the Fortress steps, past the spot where I had once encountered an onion knight (not to be confused with that impostor in Game of Thrones), I thought I would be overmatched for whatever lay within. I didn't kid myself that I had out-levelled the rest of the game - I knew better than that, at least - but I was hoping for a bit of respite. Maybe a couple of hours where I could let my concentration slip and coast a little.
I can't remember if it was the first Serpent Soldier I encountered who pasted me all over the floor, but if it wasn't him then it was the arrow trap I didn't notice I was triggering as I panicked at the sight of him. Next time, I made it past this room onto a narrow walkway punctuated by swinging blades. I was sent flying into the gloom below either because a hidden Serpent Soldier came running at me and I lost my footing, or possibly because I was knocked back by the Mage casting lightning spells from a distant platform. I can't remember which of these fates befell me first, I should say - they both did for me at some point.
Super Mario Galaxy
It's the apocalypse, and you're wearing a bumblebee costume.
Well, it's an apocalypse anyway. Out here, in the bright depths of space, Mario Galaxy wants to show you the end of a universe. And - sorry to break this - it's a universe you probably know so well. 11 years after Nintendo's designers revealed the true potential of the 3D platformer with Mario 64, Tokyo EAD would essentially draw the genre to a close, taking the simple business of running and jumping to places that running and jumping had never been - and at times moving beyond them both entirely. Your expectations would never be quite the same again.
Sure, people would still release 3D platformers after this (and Nintendo would definitely release more Mario games, too), but somewhere within Galaxy and its sequel I think there's the unmistakable sense of a great idea reaching its fullest, and perhaps final, expression. Mastery is often a dead end, isn't it? Still. What a way to go.
Galaxy begins with a gentle statement of its astonishing scope. The opening sequence presents the Nintendo equivalent of a powers-of-ten shot, snatching you away from the familiar surface of the Mushroom Kingdom before dropping you high overhead on a beautiful lumpy planetoid covered with felty grass and shimmering puddles, where three bunny rabbits are waiting to lead you on a treasure hunt.
There's time to register how different this all feels - stuck to the surface of a sphere while a camera roves unmolested above you - but before long, Nintendo is moving outwards once more. Now it's unveiling the first of a million plasticky launch stars and blasting you far beyond the rabbits and the grass and the puddles and into a glittering archipelago of floating space rock, home to a handful of scattered moons. Each of these moons is as pretty, as mysterious, and as playful as the place you've already spent 10 minutes exploring. Each is yours to claim, and beyond this archipelago, dozens more await your arrival.
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