The other day, Rocket announced on his blog that he picked up a new Macbook that runs Windows. He kicked out an open call for video game suggestions; as he says, he’s got himself a whole decade of entertainment to catch up with. Rocket and his wife are good friends of mine - at this point, I think I know them well enough to know that he wouldn’t be amused with any old crap.

I gave him a few recommendations, but it got me to thinking. I’m a thirty-five-year-old man with my own business and assorted financial and social responsibilities, but I’m not too proud to admit that I dig on good video gaming. The really good titles pack an incredible amount of entertainment value into a cheap price - but these aren’t just any games; the industry is full of junk titles and time wasters (and not in the good way) as well. If I’m going to plunk down fifty at Best Buy, I don’t want a toy designed to distract a 12-year-old through Christmas season. I want a mature game that’ll steal a year from my adult life.

Looking for some great grown-up video game experiences? Dig on these titles.

(Even though I prefer PS2 for gaming these days, I’m doing my best to stick to PC titles here. Some of these have great - or even better - console versions, simply because they were originally written for console. Others, like Half Life, had dynamite ports from PC to console. You should be safe either way.)

The list:

8. Silent Hill 2 and 3. Along with Resident Evil, Silent Hill essentially created the modern horror survival genre. I was a real latecomer to this party - I didn’t find myself hanging around the Hill until the summer of 2006, and at first wondered what the big deal was. Gameplay was awkward, every cinematic sounded like it came from a bad high school play, and more than once I wanted to hurl the controller in frustration.

But after a half hour or so of play, I got completely sucked in: Silent Hill’s twisted plots, bizarre visuals, some highly intense moments, super-creepy atmosphere. One of the very few video games I’ve ever played that actually snuck into my dreams and had me imagining things in night shadows. For all their flaws, the Silent Hill games still define the horror game standard.

(I’ve never played the original and wasn’t impressed with SH4. I’m hoping that Silent Hill 5 makes the same kind of quantum leap that Resident Evil 4 did - if it does, it’ll be a real horror groundbreaker.)

7. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Along with games like Zork and Hard Hat Mack, I remember playing the original PoP in middle school on the school library’s Apple II. Ah, for the days when video gaming was considered an important part of a child’s education.

Sands of Time takes the entire concept of the Broderbund original and updates it with an amazingly smooth Tomb Raider-like 3D engine. The controls take a bit of getting used to, but once you do, it’s a blast to go running along walls, going crazy with swordplay. What makes Sands really work, however - and better than any of its sequels - is the writing; the whole script is written as a very elegant, graceful fairy tale with a satisfying ending. The sequels were fun, but their stories just didn’t have that same magic for me.

6. American McGee’s Alice. One of the most imaginative PC video games ever written, “Alice” updates Lewis Carroll’s classic story. This story takes place ten years after Alice, daydreaming about Wonderland one afternoon, ends up the only survivor of a housefire that kills her family and fatally damages her psyche. She spends the next decade catatonic in a Victorian insane asylum, clutching her battered and torn childhood stuffed rabbit. Finally one day she begins to wake up, her rational mind struggling to emerge from her trauma - an inner journey Alice experiences as a return to a Wonderland now dark and twisted, ruined under a nightmare of evil. With the help of Cheshire Cat and Rabbit, only Alice (now older, bitter, angry and violent) can save Wonderland.. and ultimately, her own sanity.

I don’t have anything bad to say about Alice, especially given when it came out (2000) - the story was wonderful, the gameplay was great, the graphics were good, the writing in general was sharp, replay value was solid. If more video games like Alice were made, the world would be a better place.

5. Resident Evil 4. RE4 was my introduction to Resident Evil, the classic zombie horror/shooter series. The only other I’ve played was Code Veronica, which was just enough of a mess to send me running back to RE4.

In Resident Evil 4, you play Leon Kennedy, a Secret Service agent (and survivor of a zombie “incident” in an earlier RE game) assigned to protect Ashley, the President’s college student daughter. When Ashley is kidnapped, Leon is sent to find and rescue her - a mission that leads him to a small village somewhere in rural Spain, and into the hands of a cult intent on using Ashley to blackmail the United States. Leon soon discovers that it’s not so simple as that: this cult has managed to free an ancient evil from its subterranean crypt, a force that has turned all the local inhabitants into strange and very dangerous zombielike creatures. Your job is to shoot your way through, somehow survive, find Ashley and get her out before she - and you - become the cult’s latest “converts”.

I don’t know how else to say it: Resident Evil 4 kicks ass. An intense third person shooter that plays like an FPS, RE4 is rich and detailed and smooth and well-written. It throws you right into the lions pit from the beginning, forcing you to fight for your life against an entire village of zombielike creatures, armed with only a 9mm pistol for protection. It’s a long game that just gets tougher and tougher. Best of all, it has a ton of replay value - it doesn’t get much easier on replay, and the game comes with a full basket of unlockable games and weapons and other extras to keep things entertaining for a long time. After the fantastic gaming experience that was RE4, Resident Evil 5 might just get me to buy a PS3. (Well.. that, and Grand Theft Auto 4.)

4. Tomb Raider. I’ve already professed my undying love for the captivating Ms. Croft, so this one should come as no surprise. Tomb Raider rewrote all the rules when Core released it in 1996: a female Indiana Jones protagonist? One who didn’t exist merely to be saved by the male hero? A smart heroine with guns and attitude? And what’s this third-person 3D open level stuff? And a T-REX!

In Tomb Raider, adventurer Lara Croft - in her younger, more reckless days - gets an offer: locate and retrieve three parts of an ancient artifact scattered around the globe, and return them to her employer (the mysterious Jacqueline Natla). As Lara ventures into Greece, Peru and Egypt in search of the items, she gradually learns that the device - and Natla - aren’t nearly what they appear to be.

While the series itself has been hit and miss, the original Tomb Raider still rocks (if you can find it). The sequel was great, the fourth wasn’t bad, and Legend got back to rocking; the rest of the TR titles were painful. But now that Crystal Dynamics has control over the franchise, I have high hopes again - they did an awesome job with Legend, fixing virtually all of the problems that have plagued Raider since TR3.

If you can’t find the original, fret not: the next title, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, is scheduled for release in May. It’s a complete remake of the first game, done up around the Legend engine and fully modernized. I can’t wait.

3. Half Life. Oh Gordon, Gordon, Gordon. You’re late - whatever shall we do with you, Gordon? I have an idea! Let’s volunteer you for an incredibly dangerous, high energy experiment involving a dimensional rift and see what happens! We’re scientists, Gordon - we’re pretty sure that nothing will go wrong. So be a good sport, will you, and step into the test chamber?

Basically the film “Office Space” with aliens, assault rifles and a crowbar, Half Life tells the story of Gordon Freeman, an entry-level materials handler working in Black Mesa, a top secret underground government facility somewhere in the desert. He gets volunteered to help with an experiment that goes horribly wrong, finding himself suddenly surrounded by lots of dead scientists and buried in a giant sprawling underground complex full of angry, dangerous aliens. Even worse, the government has written off the Black Mesa facility, sending Marines in to clean up the mess.. by killing everything and everyone left behind after the accident. If Gordon wants to live, his only hope is to fight his way past all of that to the surface.. and just maybe, figure out how to undo the experiment before it’s too late.

Half Life didn’t exactly rewrite the rulebook, but it did take the party up a major notch. Before HL, first person shooters were typically Quake clones: deathmatch blasters with free-floating pickups and little-to-no plot. When Gordon Freeman came to town, he brought all the joys of modern FPS gaming with him, starting with a good story. Half Life had puzzles, intelligent enemies, hapless security guards, general humor and a fun ending. And then to make it even better, Valve went and released two expansion packs - Blue Shift and Opposing Force - telling the same story from the perspectives of a security guard and a Marine, respectively.

Half Life also still remains one of the best ports to PS2 ever done.

I bought Half Life 2, but despite my best efforts have not yet played it. Valve and I had a parting of ways over HL2 - I could never get the thing to work, the game had some very serious and widespread fundamental problems, and Valve’s support in fixing the problem outright sucked. Not only did HL2 drive me away from Valve, it drove me away from PC gaming altogether; these days, I prefer to stick to PS2.

When I finally buy a PS3 or 360, I may give it another shot. But I’ll never do another Valve PC game again.

2. Deus Ex. I tripped over this game while searching for something to give me my new Half Life fix. I wanted a solid shooter with a good plot; I’d already been through Red Faction, which despite REALLY wanting to be Half Life only got the first half of that formula right, and I had begun to resort to titles like “Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force”. Deus Ex not only fixed me up, it did what I thought couldn’t be done: it kicked Half Life’s ass.

Deus Ex takes place sometime in the 2050’s, in a dystopian cyberpunk future where worldwide terrorism is out of control. After terrorists blow up the Statue of Liberty, a worldwide police force called UNATCO (United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition) is formed to bring order to the world. China is the last truly functional government on Earth, a strange plague called the Grey Death is decimating the global population, and the whole world is on a suicide watch.

(Incidentally, this game was released over a year before the 9/11 terror attacks; many, many of this game’s plot points actually have happened in recent years. It’s intensely creepy, how prophetic Deus Ex was - the parallels between this story’s fictitious Statue bombing and the actual WTC bombing were freaky.)

In Deus Ex, you’re a UNATCO agent named J. C. Denton, the first of a new breed of soldier - a cybernetic agent fully integrated with advanced nanotechnology, augmenting your natural powers with abilities ranging from invisibility to super strength. On your first mission for UNATCO, you begin to see that nothing is quite as it seems: not UNATCO, not your mission, not yourself. There’s another agenda at work, one that doesn’t have your best interests at heart.. and one that could plunge a dying world finally into a terrible night. As the only one of your kind, you’re also the only hope for unraveling and stopping the conspiracy.

As a game, Deus Ex was ambitious as all hell. Created by Warren Spector’s Ion Storm group, it was designed to be something completely new: a game that combined cutting edge FPS gaming technology with an innovative role playing system and an intricately thought-out plot. You’ll find literary references within the game to G. K. Chesterton, Sun Tzu, Neil Gaiman, Shakespeare, Robert Anton Wilson, Olaf Stapledon and a long list of other writers and philosophers. Being a game specifically about conspiracies, Deus Ex incorporated into the plot as many real-world conspiracy theories as humanly possible: the Illuminati, the Templars, Area 51, black helicopters, the Grays, Echelon, Men In Black, all of it. And bizarrely enough, it managed to do so convincingly, nearly seamlessly. It really was the thinking man’s first person shooter.

On top of all that, the game was very long, adapting to your playing strategies as the story developed - no two run-throughs were quite the same. Deus Ex forced you to make choices, itself a core theme of the story; those choices then had consequences that you couldn’t avoid. In Half Life, all you really had to do was shoot, run and survive. In Deus Ex, you had to think things out and make sacrifices in order to survive and get ahead. That was amazing - it hadn’t been done before, not on this kind of level anyway, and hasn’t really been done as well since.

Deus Ex 2 wasn’t bad, but it was ungodly bloated. Thing sucked up memory and disk space like no tomorrow, and stripped away much of what made the original great. Much more a standard FPS, DE2 was an enjoyable enough play but I never saw a reason to do a second playthrough. By that point, I was just happy to have the disk space back.

When DE2 tanked in the stores, DE3 - a multiplayer whasawhozits called “Clan Wars” - got put on hold and finally rebranded into a non-DE game called “Operation Snowblind”. Fun game, a more standard FPS, an 80% Deus Ex game under a different name. It’s a shame that Spector bailed after completing the original; I would have loved to have seen what his group could have done with the sequels.

And finally, the big award goes to..

1. Grand Theft Auto. Just as The Matrix was the reason I bought my first DVD player, Grand Theft Auto 3 was the reason I bought my first Playstation 2.

Often imitated, never bested. So far now there have been five chapters in the modern GTA era - GTA3, Vice City, San Andreas, Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories. As I write this, the GTA4 trailer has just come out and there’s a PS3/360 release date aiming for October 2007.

They all follow the same basic formula. You’re a guy who for some reason is down on his luck (an ex-con, or a street thief, or a ghetto kid being harassed by cops, etc.), pushed every which way by the cops and the local crime syndicates, and the only way out is to start taking jobs from the local bad guys. Over time they begin to trust you, and you get better and higher paying jobs, and get introduced to thugs higher up the food chain. Ultimately, you take over the show and begin building your own criminal empire.

You just can’t go wrong with GTA games. They simply have everything for everyone. Fun missions. Well-written stories with solid characters. Dark, warped humor. Hilarious radio stations. An incredible degree of flexibility - a GTA game is essentially a fully operational city (or in the case of Andreas, a state), complete with traffic, autonomous gang wars, cop car chases, plane crashes, and business operations. Even if you choose never to play a single mission, there’s still a million ways to stay entertained.

Granted, most of the best alternatives are violent. One of my early GTA3 favorites was to get a bunch of cars together in a busy intersection, let the traffic back up for a few minutes, and then lob a hand grenade in the dead center. BOOM - thirty cars explode in a chain reaction! (In Vice and Andreas, you can have a blast just shooting out tires. For some cheap thrills, shoot out two tires on a moving passenger car with a sniper rifle - the driver panics, hits the gas, but can’t straighten the car out. Follow along in your own vehicle until he finally careens into a lake or something. Great fun!) For slightly less violent fun, there’s always the everpopular sport of ambulance surfing.. shoot someone, attract an ambulance, and then climb on the roof before the paras finish their thing and take off. Then see how long you can stay on. (For added difficulty, fire a weapon and try to stay on while the paras panic.)

You gotta admit it: there just aren’t too many games that allow - nay, encourage! - you to lob a hooker’s head off with a katana, strafe Miami Beach with Hellfire missiles served from an Apache gunship, piss off both the cops *and* the Army, and then jump a motorcycle over a building - all to a 1980’s pop soundtrack. And all in one busy afternoon.

That game, my friends, is Grand Theft Auto. Definitely not a game you want to buy for your kids, but a great game for a grownup. Entertaining, great gameplay, tons of replay value, fun plots, kickass soundtracks.. a hundred games in one, worth so much more than Rockstar’s asking price. If you haven’t played Grand Theft Auto, you really can’t properly say that you’ve played modern video games.

So go grab the list. You’ll enjoy them.

Posted by Rob on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 10:43 pm.