(Excuse me for these last 4 entries being a bit brief, I'm tired from work and have a huge RPG backlog. It makes it hard to concentrate!)

#4: Baldur's Gate 2 (PC)

I've been criticized in the past by other RPG'ers for being a combat addict who, according to them, doesn't like to read or is functionally illiterate. All this because I want a strong combat system. I never said I want the story to be gutted and forgotten about. I simply want an equal balance of BOTH, but I demand a much higher quality of combat than I do a story. It's why I could never get into story-lite RPGs like Grandia Extreme, Enchanted Arms or (god help me for even mentioning it) Dungeon Lords.

On the flip side, I also can't get into Story Heavy games that replace challenging, frequent combat with hour long dialog such as Planescape.

Instead, I prefer a sweet and harmonious combination of the two, and rarely have I ever found such a wonderful balance of these two things than in Baldur's Gate 2.

No review or even drive by critique of the game should never go two sentences without mentioning the party interaction, since it was Bioware that basically invented this system of interacting with your comrades. Oh sure, Garriott did it with Ultima 7 to some degree, but BG 2 completely reset the bar when they added the much loved relationship quests and "Banter" to their games.

All of a sudden, party members mattered. They could like you, love you, hate you, turn on you or even sleep with you. How you treated them both inside and outside of combat ultimately determined what would happen to your friends. Just pick any possible recruit-able NPC in the game and there are dozens of different side quests and non-plot interactions that can and will take place over the course of your journey. Take whimsical little Aerie for instance...

Keep Aerie in your party with Minsc long enough and he adopts her as his new witch. Let her die and Minsc becomes withdrawn and even more vengeful than before. Keep Aerie in with Ha'er Dalis and then romance her and you'll find yourself fighting the bard for her affections. Put her in with Korgan and laugh as he taunts and ridicules her.

As much as I love the combat in the Infinity Engine games, I love these inter-party reactions even more. In what has since become a Bioware trademark, BG2 injected life into your party members and made them something more than just mere numbers and letters on a GUI bar. Bioware made them real. So real that I will admit that I can't go through an evil game in BG2 because I am unable to go even a few minutes without hearing Minsc's witty comments and *insightful* musings. He was always my favorite RPG character and after a couple dozen trips through the game I still find myself laughing at the same lines for the 500th time.

That was the magic behind BG2. Yeah yeah...the combat was typical 2nd edition goodness (I'd have preferred Turn based though) but it was the interactions with your party memebrs and their constant chiming in during plot scenes that made it feel like it was "alive". You cared for your party and you honestly felt like they cared for you. BG2 was the pinnacle of NPC interaction and even Bioware themselves have yet to surpass it. Even though ME2 came remarkably close.

Also, I'd normally put a video of the game here but eveyr single one is done by a nerdy-voiced man-baby who sounds like their testicles never descended. Really folks...let's cool it with the voice overs and just show gameplay, alright? Christ.

Though I initially hated Bioware for "dumbing down" my precious D&D, Christmas Eve of 1998 changed that when I finally got to play BG1 and realized how fun a little "mainstreaming" could be. It only got better with the sequel and I soon found myself enjoying their games just like the rest of you. Though they've had some slip-ups (Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1) they still manage to get me to cry/scream/cheer over imaginary characters on my monitor screen...and that really isn't easy to do anymore.

BG2 is one of those games that I simply can't go a full year without going through. It's always there, sitting on my hard drives, waiting for me to come back to it like a dependable old friend, always there to rekindle old memories with or even create some new ones. BG2 never gets old and thanks to the modding community, never gets boring either.

A truly legendary game from one of the best designers in the business.


#3: Fallout 1 (and to some extent, 2) (PC)

Here's a shocking bit of Taxonomic history: I didn't buy Fallout when it first came out. It wasn't until later in the spring of 1998 that I finally grabbed a copy. A friend of mine, Matt, was a huge Fallout fanboy and kept telling me that I HAD to try it. I was skeptical, and also very caught up in my 7,823rd play through of Diablo, so I never paid him much attention. It wasn't until boredom overtook me that I decided to take the plunge and buy it.

What happened afterward was me getting written up at work because I was late coming in...due to me having stayed up to 3am playing Fallout when I had to get up at 7.

Fallout was one of those magical "Everything you want, nothing you don't" games that hit me like a freight train and changed my RPG playing life forever. Turn based combat, great NPC interaction, an original story, a moderate challenge and even a pretty decent (if repetitive) soundtrack. More than that though, it was the very last of the true turn based games and the game that sort of signaled the end of an era.

Fallout was "our" game. It was a game made by two hardcore RPG nerds (Fargo and Cain) and was more of a love letter to the genre than the cash grab most games would soon become. It was their gift to the community and their way of saying thanks. It was "Wasteland: Re-imagined" and it was a game that to this day has no real equal.

So what made Fallout so great? So revolutionary?

Moral ambiguity and a very deep reputation system, the two crucial fallout trademarks that Fallout 3 lacked.

Fallout didn't measure your actions by a lame good/evil bar, it instead measured them on a person-by-person basis and computed your overall reputation in each area. It also rarely gave you clearly good or evil choices and required you to make hard decisions that had no real "nice" solution. Hell, the whole Mordino feud in New Reno (Fallout 2) is a perfect example of that. Do you want drug runners or gun runners to rule the city? Either way you're screwing someone up for years to come.

turn based combat, crotch shots, strategic battles, true non-linearity, an original world (That has been since copied dozens of times over) and a captivating story made Fallout 1/2 the best game of the 90s BY FAR.

It's a shame I can't say that about Fallout 3 and the previous decade. Though I've had enough angry arguments with FO3 fans in my lifetime to not want to stir up the bee's nest again.



#2: Gothic 2 (PC)

Gothic 3 wounded me greatly. I expected the third game in my fgavorite RPG series to be at the very least a playable experience, but what did I get? I got a broken, easily beaten game that played like a fanmade sequel that had been coded by 15 year old hackers.

Why so passionate about a little known series that most of you have probably never played?

Well, Gothic was the Ultima of the 2000's. A game that took the highly interactive and responsive world of Ultima 7 and put it into a 3D engine. An RPG that recreated a living, breathing world in digital form and never cut any corners. Characters hunted for food, conversed with each other, eat, drank, worked and even went to the bathroom whether you were there to see them or not. Life went on without your character and it created a feeling that I haven't felt in any other RPG since. The game world felt alive, and to this very day no other company has been able to come close to what Piranha Bytes did way back in 2001 when the first Gothic was released.

While others worshipped Morrowind, I worshipped Gothic 1.

...and why did I like it so much?

Besides the extraordinarily interactive world, the game had a very punishing difficulty level that forced you to approach each enemy with a great deal of fear and apprehension. It forced gamers out of their comfort zone and made them worry more about positioning, speed and enemy behavior then stats or equipment. Though this combined with the "odd" interface to scare off most of the average gamers, it attracted weird ones like me who enjoyed the added realism. You couldn't kill things by mashing the left button, you had to actually plan each strike and time your movements to match those of your enemies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgSPWakEjdQ

Gothic was one of those games that came and went with very little fanfare. The first one came out right at the start of the "European RPG renaissance" and the second one was already written off by the gaming media as a forgettable "B-level" game that wasn't worth anyone's time due to the awkward controls and high difficulty. In an era where simplistic, easy-to-grasp "Sandbox" games like the Elder Scrolls series is considered revolutionary, Gothic stood tall as one of the few games that refused to fit into that formula and instead kept faithful to its Ultima-inspired roots. Like that series, Gothic 1 and 2 were all about having a huge and highly interactive world that was filled with NPCs that weren't dependant on the player to give them worth. Even the excellent faction play didn't remove this feeling, since no matter what you were never made "Boss" of your faction and still felt like an outsider amongst your own kind.

Unlike The Elder Scrolls, gothic's game world didn't need you. It could easily go on existing without you.

This is a game that was about as "Ultima" as you can get without pulling Garriott out of his facebook game phase and forcing him to code another RPG at gunpoint. Gothic really was the spiritual successor to Ultima and even though the 4th one coming out this September may knock my opinion of it back even further...

At least we have "Risen".

...god I hope Gothic 4 doesn't suck. I really really do.



#1: Deus Ex (PC)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKp0DP1O4bs

God did I hate this game. I played a demo of it around the time it came out and was really turned off by it. The weapon sight sway caused by low rifle skill levels, the reliance on stealth, the inability of my character to instantly one-shot enemies...it pissed me off so much that it wouldn't be until I bought the game of the year edition at a Best Buy the next year that I finally got into it and realized what the game was.

Deus Ex corrupted me. It tainted me. It altered forever the way that I would see games. If you wonder why I'm such an elitist prick this game right here is the reason why.

That first day I installed it after buying it was like the day when you finally realize you like girls, or the day you finally realize you have to start shaving. It was one of those unmeasurable moments that live forever in your mind and shape what you become. Hell, I even started going to conspiracy websites soon after and checked on the names and organizations that appeared in the game. Spooky stuff, let me tell you.

So what was so great about DX?

In the categories of story, atmosphere and player interaction, there is NO game on ANY system in ANY genre that comes even within a light year of this. It was this magical one time in a lifetime strike of lightning that will probably never be copied and, sadly, always be exploited by companies trying to make a quick buck.

First of all, Deus Ex is all about telling a story. Yeah yeah....all games are, right? Sure. The thing with Deus Ex is that unlike most other games you are free to f*ck the story up as much as you want without getting a lame a** "Game Over" screen. Go ahead, kill Anna Navarre on the airplane, see the game adapt to your harsh decision and actually alter the part of the plot where you normally would fight her. Do the same to Gunther by figuring out his killswitch. Feel like avoiding combat entirely? You can do that!!

Deus ex was a remarkably non-linear game. I say remarkably because we ARE essentially talking about an FPS here. stats be damned, this game is still, at its core, a shooter. Though through some of the best story writing and scripting you'll ever see in a shooter, most of the interaction is done outside of cut scenes and the direction of the story is guided completely and totally by the player character. Everything you do matters, and every line of dialogue you speak affects something. No two playthroughs are ever quite the same, even though there are really only three distinct endings.

Deus Ex also had some very large areas, making it easy for Warren and his team to give players several different ways to enter into buildings. Sneak, hack, shoot or bribe your way in, you could find a new way to get through each mission every time you played and all would be valid. It was like Fallout, only in first person and taking place in a cyberpunk dystopia.

Which brings me to my favorite part of the game: The Atmosphere.

Deus Ex has one of the best and most underrated soundtracks in all of gaming. Combine that with all of the memorable NPCs its known for (Tracer Tong, Paul Denton, Bob "Bill Gates" Page) and you have a game that does a good job of sticking with you long after the credits roll. It creates a believable world that feels, sounds, and looks real, even though the graphics have aged considerably since its release. The intrigue, the drama, the tin-foil hate conspiracy nut talk...it all feels so real and lends so much credibility to the game that this is the only piece of software you "games are art" people can call ART and I wouldn't laugh my head off at you.

Because Deus Ex really IS art.

The non linear gameplay, the music, the atmosphere, the well defined characters, THE DRAMA...it's like playing a big budget summer blockbuster and you're both the starring role and the director. That's the only way I can describe it.

Sometimes I wonder if Spector didn't just accidentally create this game. Like it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that just HAPPENS and no one knows why or can recreate it.

I think the game is best explained by a youtube video, which for some damn reason I can't find right now, where a user pieced together a video of clips showing how the simple act of spying on a female employee in the UNATCO restroom snowballed into a series of in-game events. It was incredibly hilarious and shows you how f'ing DEEP this game goes, when even story NPCs remark on things as mundane and unimportant as you walking into the restrooms and looking up a woman's skirt with the camera.

If you don't like Deus Ex, you simply do not like video games. I am being completely honest when I say that. It is truly perfect in every single way and to get bored with it (or even dislike it entirely) isn't even POSSIBLE for a gamer who claims to love playing games. Deus Ex is the kind of game that gamers wish we'd get more of, and get enraged when we don't. It is the game to which all others are judged.

At least by me, anyway.