millarworld.tv Comics Creators

Your top 5 video games of the PS3/XBox 360 gen

#1

Well, it’s just about over now. Looking back, what were the top five games of it?

Feel free to discuss why they were your favorite, or just put a list. They don’t have to be what you think were the most important or groundbreaking (I think we all know that general list), just what YOU had the most fun playing.

Also, try to stick to five. Narrowing it down is part of the fun. If you want to go nuts with “honorable mentions” or “toughest omissions” or whatever, feel free, but put your desert island five up top. (Selfishly I’m looking to see if I’ve missed anything vital, which is hard when people list a ton of games).

I need to think of mine, ha. I can come up with four pretty easily but that fifth will take some thought.

#2

1 - Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas

2 - Mass Effect 2

3 - Arkham City

4 - Mass Effect

5 - Demon’s Souls (although I never finished it yet!)

Disclaimer - I still have not played The Last Of Us and I’m only about 1/5th into GTA V. I suspect both would be on my list.

#3

  1. The Last of Us

  2. Tomb Raider

  3. Brutal Legend

  4. Uncharted 2

  5. Bioshock

I probably logged the most time with Nino Kuni and Red Dead Redemption, but mostly wandering the worlds aimlessly and doing random stuff—as games they were not my favorite.

#4

Great idea for a thread. I’m sure I’ll kick myself when I think of ones that I’ve forgotten, but here are my five:

(5) Sleeping Dogs: I feel like this was a little bit overlooked on release: a great little Hong Kong action game that took the GTA concept to a slightly more exotic locale and tethered it to the tropes of Asian cop movies rather than Hollywood action flicks. They came close to beating Rockstar at their own game with this one.

(4) Portal 2: This was amazingly good fun. Not only the brilliantly-designed physics-bending gameplay, but also the intriguing story that was subtly teased out over the course of the game rather than thrown in your face explicitly. Nothing matches the joy of cracking a Portal puzzle, especially one that’s had you stumped for a while. And it’s also a rare occasion of humour in a game working really well. I laughed a lot while playing this.

(3) Arkham City: Arkham Asylum was good; this was better. Never has a game captured the spirit of a superhero quite like this. Endlessly enjoyable, with a great aesthetic somewhere between Nolan and Burton, perfectly-tuned fight mechanics, and a terrific story too. I sunk many hours into this and had a great time doing it.

(2) GTA V: You know when you play a game and wonder how the developers are managing to get so much out of your machine? That’s what GTA V felt like, pretty much all of the time. And not only did it push the PS3/360 technology to the limit (taking full advantage of coming out towards the end of that generation), but it also corrected a lot of problems I had with GTA IV, and injected a key ingredient back into the franchise: fun. The multiple-character mechanic was inspired too, giving the game a lot more variety (and almost making it feel like three games in one).

(1) The Last Of Us: I only played this recently (and only then on the PS4 remastered version) but I thought it was a stunning achievement and a landmark in videogames. It married involving gameplay to a gripping story with shades of characterisation that I’ve never seen in a game before, and plot twists that floored me. And crucially for this thread, it utilised mechanics that I don’t think would have been possible in the previous (PS2) generation.

(A final honorable mention goes to the Scott Pilgrim vs the World game, which was a beautiful homage to 1980s side-scrolling action/beat-em-ups, and translated the world of Scott Pilgrim to the screen even better than the movie did, but didn’t quite cut it as a fantastic game in its own right. )

#5

Mass Effect 2 is #1

By far the most entertainment I got from a game in a long time.
Honourable mentions to the Transformer Eybertron games. Loads of fun outta them.
The Farcry series.
And Just cause 2 was a whole lotta fun.

#6

Mass Effect 2 is far and away my number 1

The rest would be (in no order):

Portal 2
Arkham City
The Last of Us
Saints Row IV

#7

This is tough! But fun. My five:

Mass Effect 2 – I got more involved in this than any game of the generation. Such a terrific universe, great writing and characterization and so much cool stuff to do. And not too big!
The Last of Us – Perfected the third person action game.
Portal 2 – One of the few AAA titles of that generation that made you use your brain as much as your reflexes. More, please.
BioShock – My favorite first-person game – creepy, witty and with just absolutely gorgeous design sensibilities. I completely lost what the hell was going on by the end, but you can’t have everything.
Red Dead Redemption – Who doesn’t want to be a cowboy? So much fun, a big old world discover and grow into. It was a little too easy (I’m not sure I ever died) but it was an amazing experience. And that ending was very emotional.

Honorably mentions to Assassins Creed 2 and Far Cry 3, both of which I clocked more than 30 hours to complete every last bit. The Uncharted games were all terrific eye candy but a little too on the rails, and they all blurred into one another.

As for Arkham, I absolutely loved being Batman and they are brilliant…but something about the two games (we pretend the third doesn’t exist, right?) left me a little cold.

#8

I should probably give Mass Effect 2 another shot. I had no idea it (or any one game) would be the runaway winner.

Randomly, because I play a lot with my toddler around, here are the top-5 all ages games:

  1. Nino Kuni
  2. The Puppeteer (really underrated gem)
  3. Kameo: Elements of Power (one of the first 360 games and last real Rare games)
  4. Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction
  5. LittleBigPlanet (the novelty wore off by the sequels)
#9

While I own both consoles, I haven’t played video games in many years now. And yet I play Mario Kart Wii every single day. My guess is that all the games mentioned don’t have the pick up and put down aspect that Kart does, and I wonder if that art is being lost in future consoles.

As for the question I can only really name 3:

  1. Rock Band. Other than kart, my most played game ever. I could see me still playing this a decade from now.
  2. Portal 2. It’s nice to see genius - not only in the concept but also in the execution. Makes you feel quite proud for some reason.
  3. Uncharted 2. Spectacular story and really fun gameplay.
#10

I’m going to have to give Uncharted another shot (maybe with the PS4 re-release?). I tried the first game and found it too on-rails and cutscene-heavy for my liking, but everyone seems to think Uncharted 2 is excellent, so maybe I should play through the first one to get to that.

#11

There’s something to be said for this, I think. With the increasing sophistication of games there has come an added complexity, and there aren’t so many games that you can just pop in and have a quick half-hour blast with. The only titles that spring to mind for me are a couple of arcade racers and the Resistance series, which were ultra-simple FPSs in the Doom mould. (And none of them probably touch the quality of Mario Kart.)

Otherwise, if I sit down to play then I know I’m going to have to commit at least an hour or two if the session is going to be worth it.

#12

Hasn’t that always been a significant difference in the Wii target audience and the others? That they are more casual and family gaming and X-Box on the other extreme is really the hardcore guys with 5 hour sessions to spend.

#13

The Wii has always been a bit more geared to family gaming, but there’s no reason why adult games for other consoles all have to be deep and involved.

My games collection usually has several one-on-one beat-em-ups and sports/driving games in it, because they’re games that you can pick up and have a quick half-hour blast on.

Whereas half an hour into a session on a lot of big games, I’m lucky if I’ve managed to remind myself of what all the controls are. :slight_smile:

#14

I guess so but there needs to be some difference between the offerings to justify their existence. Jim is a very wealthy man who lives in a mock tudor mansion and bought them all but most make a choice of one and they do that for a reason. They want casual games or first person shooters or RPGs or whatever, they each have their strengths.

#15

The first Uncharted is marred by spotty combat and a so-so story, and the third one is marred by too many on-rails events that are not exactly Quicktime but not NOT Quicktime. The second game is the sweet spot.

I suppose the series is on rails, but not any moreso than the Last of Us, God of War, Dead Space, stuff like that. Personally I like this kind of thing better than all the customization in stuff like Mass Effect, Fallout, and Skyrim and what have you, but everyone is different.

As for the pick up and play angle, there really isn’t much of it. But racing and sports games will always have it across systems. I tend to only play games in 20-minutes bursts and I’ve finished a fair amount over the last few years, but sure, games are much more of a commitment than in the Nintendo/Sega heyday.

#16

I think you’re right about on-rails games in that sense, and I phrased my post badly: I also prefer games that give you a single, focused experience to ones that suffocate you with choice and don’t provide that tightness.

By ‘on rails’ I meant more the amount of the story that was told through cutscenes rather than gameplay: I remember playing Uncharted 1 and climbing across a waterfall only to trigger a cutscene that then took me to a submarine that my character climbed inside. Once I was in control again, I walked to the end of a corridor in the sub, which triggered another cutscene to tell the next part of the story… it was at that point that I gave up as I just didn’t feel very involved in proceedings.

But I’ll give it another shot, as I want to get to the second game - and the new footage of the fourth makes it look amazing.

#17

I’m not sure about that really - I think the Wii is more of a special case. With the Playstation/Xbox/PC crowd you can largely get the same games and same types of games across all systems. It’s only the exclusives that I could see making a difference in terms of choosing a console based on its games.

Either way, I feel like variety is good and as a consumer you want all that choice on one system. Even just on PS4, I have games for my kids (Lego and Minecraft) as well as the more adult stuff for me. I am considering getting a Wii though as they’re cheap second-hand and I think the kids would like the motion-control aspect. Plus, they play Gamecube games and I can pick up Rogue Leader. :slight_smile:

#18

  1. Transformers: Fall of Cybertron - Not only a fun third-person, cover based shooter, but an excellent Transformers game, with a good aesthetic that went close enough to the movies to be commercial, but still looked authentic to proper Transformers and a good handle on the characters. Nice multiplayer as well.

  2. Red Dead Redemption - Amazing single player campaign. It helps that the Western is so under-explored in games, but I was hooked on the story of John Marston. Only game from the previous generation that I’ve played start to finish twice over.

  3. Batman - Arkham City - I know some people preferred the more claustrophobic feel of Asylum, but I loved the environment of City. Took everything from Asylum and improved on it, in my opinion.

  4. Sleeping Dogs - dismissed as GTA: Hong Kong by a lot of people, it was actually more than yet another wannabe. It had excellent melee combat (better than GTA has ever managed), the city feels so vibrant and interesting, while being an undercover cop made for a more likeable main character than GTA usually manages. I absolutely loved using the hacked security feeds to find a group of drug dealers, speeding over in a hatchback, swinging it into them and taking them out with a wrench from the boot.

  5. Ghostbusters - The Video Game - certainly not perfect, but it was the real Ghostbusters 3. An absolute blast to play, for the most part, I think it was crippled by the delay in official release in the UK on XBox and the serious glitches on multiplayer killed momentum on what was an interesting mode (by the time the flaws were sorted out, everyone had moved on). A good swansong for Egon.

#19

I respectfully disagree. Yes, sure, those other games being what they are, you go from A to B to C – to that extent they’re on rails. And in broadest concept they’re the same as Uncharted, but it’s about degrees.

Throughout the Uncharted series there are stretches of the game where you’re barely in control, not to mention there are a lot of cutscenes, and they’re pretty long. At times it felt like watching an animated film where you hit a button now and again.

I agree that Uncharted 2 is the best of the series – and, Dave, you really need to play at least that one, because they’re great games. But Last of Us – same studio, same basic architecture – does a lot more to keep the player involved, for instance. Not to mention the acting and script are much more engaging, and the game is longer and harder than any of the Uncharteds.

#20

I’m replaying Red Dead Redemption again and it would make my top five for sure. A gorgeous game and a much richer experience than this generation’s GTA games in my opinion.