When I took the above screenshot in Cyberpunk 2077’s Photo Mode, I didn’t realise that I had unintentionally captured the essence of the player experience. A beautiful vista, irrepressible style; but closer inspection reveals a certain lack of fidelity, and the word “broken” in graffiti. Cyberpunk 2077 is fundamentally a great game, with a lot of redeeming qualities. But it is also a deeply flawed game that has a long way to come.

What is Cyberpunk 2077?

Cyberpunk 2077 is an Action-RPG set in the world of Mike Pondsmith’s 1980s tabletop RPG, Cyberpunk 2020 (the most recent edition is called Cyberpunk Red). As the name suggests, the genre is “cyberpunk”, a sub-genre of science-fiction most readily associated with movies like Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Akira and to some degree movies like The Matrix, Robocop and Judge Dredd. William Gibson’s 1984 book Neuromancer is generally recognised as the birth of the genre, but it was Phillip K. Dick whose work laid the foundations, with his numerous novels and short stories such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? …

Three weeks in, and the effort to conquer my Pile of Shame progresses slowly, but surely. As I mentioned last week, one of the major hurdles in working through a Pile of Shame is other games — in this case, Stardew Valley.

If you haven’t played it, Stardew Valley is the spiritual successor to the 1996 cult classic farm simulator, Harvest Moon by Amcuss on the Super Nintendo. Games like Stardew Valley are the mortal enemies of gamers trying to beat a Pile of Shame. The game is completely open-ended; there is no way to “beat” the game, you simply keep playing until you get sick of it. …

Geckos, Gargoyles and a Gelatinous Cube

For the past week, I’ve kept plodding on with Ultima I, Fallout 2 and Heretic, and I’ve managed to successfully complete one of them! However in tackling my Pile of Shame, I’ve also encountered another obstacle — the distraction of other games.

The gameplay, design, mechanics and themes of many of these old games reminds me of other games that I’ve played and loved. …

The Pile of Shame.

We all have one. That ever-increasing list of games that is left abandoned, unfinished, unplayed or even uninstalled. Maybe you picked it up for a sale price that was too good to pass up, or maybe you got the game for free. Maybe you purchased it full price, but weren’t in the right headspace to enjoy it. Maybe you played it for a bit and just didn’t like it.

Over the past few months, I’ve spent some time highlighting my top 100 games, as well as a few that just missed out. Obviously, everyone’s top 100 will be different, and list like this are likely to say a lot about a person as a gamer; these sorts of lists will also tell us a lot about the state of the industry over the years.

In this article, I’m going to look back at my top 100, and see what my choice of games says about me — as a gamer and as a person. I’m also going to look at what my list says about the industry over the years. In looking at these stats, I’ve decided to include the “honorable mentions” from my previous article — these games have had enough influence over me that they are worth considering. …

Over the past couple of months, I’ve attempted to capture my top 100 PC games of all time. As I mentioned at the beginning of this journey, I made no attempt to rank these games — I simply don’t believe it is possible and is ultimately a meaningless affair. Even for myself, what I consider to be “number 1” can change from week to week depending on what sort of mood I’m in.

One thing I’ve learnt, from a writer’s perspective, is to plan ahead when doing these sorts of articles, and this is something I did not do. I had a rough outline of the games I wanted to include, but as I wrote these articles over several months, I started to remember a few games I’d forgotten to include. This had the effect of bumping a few of my previous picks off the list — something that is very hard to do when you are emotionally invested in these games due to the impact they’ve had on your life. …

See the previous parts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

10. Unreal Tournament (Epic Games, Digital Extremes, 1999)

Unreal Tournament remains, to this day, the undefeated gold standard for multiplayer arena shooters. There is simply no game since that has nailed the polished design, diversity of levels, weapons and gameplay, well executed graphics and overall balance like Cliff Bleszinki’s Unreal Tournament. UT was the big challenger for FPS supremacy against the veterans at id Software with their multiplayer shooter Quake III Arena, and they nailed it.

I received UT as a Christmas present in 1999, and I could not put this game down. The modding scene kept the game alive for many years, and the ability to play against highly-configurable and intelligent bots meant that limited access to the internet was not an obstacle to enjoying this game. To this day I still play UT, and prefer it over all of its sequels — even the highly regarded Unreal Tournament 2004. UT is, for me, a perfect game in every sense of the word. …

I know I said that this list isn’t ranked, but I’ve definitely saved some of my favourites for the top 20. Enjoy!

See the previous parts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.

20. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004)

The biggest online game of all time hardly needs any introduction. Blizzard’s first foray into the increasingly popular MMO genre was a huge success, and that largely boiled down to having a thorough understanding of what gamers wanted. World of Warcraft was the ideal blend of complexity and approachability. …