My "Top ten" games of this ten years!!

Well, I had nothing to do and was reading an watching some stuff, so I decided I was going to make this list; the top ten games that have really touched my soul in this ten years. I really don't play that much on consoles, not that I don't like them, I don't have any (sobs), so mostly this are PC games, except for three of them, and games that I have played, I know someone will say "hey, where's this game or that game", that's why I want to make clear "The games that I HAVE PLAYED", yes, my computer's hardware has refrained me from playing some awesome kickass new gen games that most people consider awesome, but for the games I've played, this is my top ten favourite.

10 - Audiosurf.

Many people don't know this game's existence or don't like it. Audiosurf is a music based puzzle/race game hibrid or something, released in 2008 on Steam. The gameplay is really simple, you upload a song from your PC and the game generates a race course based on the song's tempo, you race a pod -very similar to FZero- and try to hit color blocks that in a way match the song, while avoiding grey blocks. the idea is to collect groups of at least three blocks to gain points, and that's pretty much it. There are other play modes, but this is the basic. The ambients are really pretty, everything is like a moving fractal image -fractals are pretty right?- not depending on high tech graphics or advanced hardware, I guess it could run on pretty much anything with enough RAM.

The reason I like it, is because it can be played once and again and it's not esy to get bored of it, worst for me that I'm listening to music all the time, has massive replay value and is really addictive. It works on the same idea of Guitar hero and alikes: you simply like music, and few things are better than playing while listening to your music -perhaps killing zombies while listening to your music... but someday we'll find out-.

9 . Castlevania: Harmony of dissonance / Kingdom hearts: Chain of memories.

I couldn't decide wich one of this two, so this one is a tie. Perhaps the only games I've played on Gameboy advance that aren't a pokemon.

The first exception on my PC games is: Castlevania: Harmony of dissonance, released by Konami in 2002 for the Gameboy advance; following the steps set by Symphony of the night with a Metroid like 2D castle map, sets Juste Belmont and his friend Maxime Kischine back on Dracula's castle, looking for their childhood friend Lydie Erlanger, who is being held captive inside.

Most people like better Symphony of the night or Aria of sorrow but I have not played those really well, so, for me, this is the one I liked the most, I liked Circle of the moon, but this one has a little something. The gameplay is awesome, the plot is well rendered and it draws you into playing more, the graphics and music are pretty and it's really fun to play; I managed to get two different endings and both are equally satisfactory. Definitively a game to be remembered, just like all the Castlevanias (yes, I like Castlevania 2 for the NES and the N64 ones too...)

The second one is Kingdom Hearts: Chain of memories. I have never really played the ones on bigger consoles, but this one was really satisfactory. Released by Square Enix in 2004 and remade for the PS2 in 2007 (2008), Sets Sora and his friends -Donald, Goofy and Jiminy Cricket- in Castle Oblivion, where Soras' memories are to fade as new appear while he travels across the castle, which is build up from Sora's memories (now we know why it's named Chain of memories), trying to recall his friend Naminé, who is being held captive in the castle (yeah... pretty much like Castlevania right?)

The gameplay is a mixture of RPG and figting card game, where you can attack your enemies if the number of the card you play is higher than the card your enemy played. It's very pretty to play, the graphics are GBA good and the plot is great. At first, I thought this would be a dumb game because of the Disney characters, but this is one of the many times I've been dead wrong. The ending is really good and there's a second story after you end the game the first time. Awesome game, play it if you can.

8 - Max Payne.

Everybody knows Max Payne, and if you don't, you've lived under a rock (and if you only know the 2008 film, you're dumb and don't know what you've missed). An amazing third person shooter game developed by Remedy entertainment and 3D realms in 2001 and ported to the PS2, XBox and GBA by Rockstar (yeah, the GBA version is really good). You're Max Payne, a NY police agent that lost his family, killed by a trio of drug addicts on the new design drug called Valkyr; later Max becomes an undercover agent, investigating on some mafia bosses; no one knows his existence but his friend Alex Balder, who gets shot by an unknown person, thus, Max loses his identity as a policeman, comes to be the main suspect of the murder and specially, becomes a non existing person who has nothing to lose; this way, Max begins a one man war against the whole mafia.

The story of the game takes you deeper and deeper as you play it, as you discover more of the character himself and as you fight his inner demons. The comic book-like story board with the cheesy characters make a pretty sight and the gameplay is well made and entertaining. Max Payne is one of the first games that used the "Bullet time", in my own words, the capability of slowing the whole game so you can see where the bullets are coming from or where your enemies are so you can get a better shot or dodge a couple of bullets, pretty much like the bullet scenes from Matrix. Great replay value also. It was followed by Max Payne 2: The fall of Max Payne, which is a great game too and theres a Max Payne 3 scheduled for 2010... but we can only hope for it to be true.

7 - Unreal Tournament 2004.

Unreal is an awesome game, that's it. I first played a demo of Unreal Tournament out from a Internet connection installer CD that also had a Quake II demo and some other game named SIN that i've never heard of again; it was absolutely awesome. Then I played it again on the awesome holy and missunderstood (makes a bow and the cross sign) Sega DreamCast; that was as close as nirvana as you could get back in the days.

Then it's Unreal Tournament 2004, released on that date by Epic games, Digital extreme and Atari, used the Unreal engine 2.5; featured all the things that made it's predecessors awesome, but including greater graphics, new weapons, new gameplays, team building and fighting, smarter AI and the most awesome thing a FPS battle game could ever have: tanks, gun torrets, aircrafts and spacecrafts!; This addition made it possible for awesome great scale epic action battles to take place! Shredding aliens and people to pieces had never been this awesome. There is no way words can explain how awesome this game is, you must play it.

On 2007, Unreal Tournament III came out, but I have not played that one that much, needless to say, it's awesome.

6 - First Encounter Assault Recon (F.E.A.R)

A great way way to mix first person shooter games and horror. Developed by Monolith productions and released by Vivendi and Sierra in 2005, takes you into the character of "The point man". You are like a S.W.A.T. team, sent to eliminate a man named Paxton Fettel, who used a batallion of mind controlled soldiers to take control of some military base or something; but as you chase the man, some odd things begin to happen, hallucinations and paranormal activity that involve a little long haired girl in red.

F.E.A.R. managed to mix two of my favourite things: First person shooters and japanese-like horror; of course, this game is not the only one nor the first one, but manages to make it in a very pretty way. A very pretty thing is that, when you look down, you can actually see the characters feet and body, unlike most FPS's that you can't see them.

I can't say a lot of things of this one because I haven't actually finished it, but one thing is for sure: It's an awesome game. Play at night in the dark, but don't forget a spare of underwear... you'll need it.

5 - Jet Grind Radio.

Out from the awesome (makes a bow and a cross sign) Sega DreamCast, developed by Smilebit and published by SEGA in 2000, Jet Grind (or Set) Radio placed you at the battle of three on-line skaters gangs for the territory of Tokio-to. You are Beat, a guy who ran from home trying to join a gang of on-line skaters: Later, Beat decides to start his own gang, "the GG's" and begins a graffity spray tagging war with the other rival gangs.

The game is really fun to play, you have to spray paint your tag all over the place before the cops get you, and replace the other gang's sprayed tags with your own, sounds really simple but the game can become really challenging ahead. The music was awesome in my opinion, J-Popish electro music that really fits the ambients, there's even a soundtrack CD. This game, like (makes bow) the DreamCast console, where way ahead of time, being one of the first (if not the first, at least it's the first I saw) games that used the Cell-shaded graphics, making the game look like a cartoon, and which is used now by other games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind waker and Prince of Persia. This kind of graphics, added to the bright colors and the J-popish music made a really beautiful game to watch and play -and probably a real torture for epileptic kids-.

The game was followed later by Jet Set Radio Future on Xbox, I haven't seen that one.

4 - Uplink.

Uplink is the proof that only a nice plot and a well made and addictive gameplay are needed to make an incredible game. With not great graphics -actually, this game has no graphics at all- Uplink is a great game with a great fanbase community and a great amount of MOD's -actually, I have one where the photos of people have been changed by the FBI's most wanted-. Released in 2001 by Introversion software on Steam, this game is a movie-like hacker emulator, pretty much like the hacking done in the 2001 movie Swordfish. As a friend said, "It's a nerd's game" and in a way, it is.

In Uplink you become an agent of a corporation named "Uplink" which helps hackers from all over the world to do their hacking stuff. Set in the year 2010 XD, basically, you access the Uplink computer located in one point of the world -I guess that's the only graphic, a map of the world where you can see the I.P. of the computers you have access- and from the database, you can accept contracts from different companies, asking you to hack into someone's system and erase something or steal data or create false identities, among others. You can buy your hacking softwares and tools out from Uplink, you can also upgrade your gateway and secure it so you can run before the feds find you; things gets better when by April on the game's date, you receive a mail from a dead agent saying that a corporation is working on some virus that is surely to cause computer apocalypse, later that company contacts you to work for them, and to help them attack another company with the new virus that is being developed, just the moment this other company contacts you, saying that they know everything and they want you to joint them against the other and into building a program against the virus... geee, what a tied up plot!.

Uplink has no graphics at all, runs as if it was another program on a computer, achieving more points to the feeling of real hacking -I even played a couple of friends into thinking that I was really hacking-. Something I find really cool, is that you can follow the games plot, choosing one of the ways, or ignore it at all and continue freelancing, taking jobs from the Uplink database. The game achieved a goal on the emulation, you have to be really clean on the jobs you do, buy hacking tools and know what to buy, erase every log on any computer, avoid trace, you have to break passwords, disable security systems and even record peoples' voices to be able to crack voice protected systems. It's a good game, sometimes it can be a little repetitive and really hard, because if you do only one miserable thing wrong or leave or erase one wrong log and the guys on the computer you hacked trace you, your gateway and PC gets detroyed and you get kicked out of Uplink, meaning this a game over and you have to start back from scratch.

3 - Clive Barker's Undying.

Coming back to the FPS's, Clive Barker's Undying is a Horror FPS game released in 2001 by Electronic Arts, based on the Unreal engine :D.

Undying, places you in the role of Patrick Galloway, an adventurer who visits his friend Jeremiah Covenant in his creepy dark mansion, set in 1923. Patrick has an odd stone that helps him see ghosts or things that are not there, he is also capable of hearing voices that call his attention to things that cannot be seen. His friend Jeremiah asks him for help on paranormal matters dealing with his health and that have destroyed the Covenant family.

Jeremiah and his siblings, while they where children, found a circle of standing stones -pretty much like Stonehenge- and an occult book and started playing with it, summoning a curse onto all five of them, and when they became adults, one by one became mad and died, being Jeremiah the only one left, the dead siblings return to take vengueance upon the one that is left and the one they blame.

It's pretty much like a Lovecraft history turned into a game, the plot is absorbing and the graphics are very pretty; the game sucks you in as you discover more about the Covenants' curse. No words can describe it, saying more is revealing more of the plot and ruining the game. It's a must play.

2 - Doom 3 and Resurrection of Evil.

We all know Doom, The grandfather of FPS's sided by Wolfenstein 3D; Doom is the concept of everything a first person shooter is. This is the only game saga I can say I have played complete or almost complete -Doom 95, Final Doom (Doom plutonia, Doom TNT), Ultimate Doom, Doom 64, Doom RPG I and II for the cell phone, Doom 3 and Doom RoE, even the Simpsons' Doom MOD; I haven't played the boardgame, the Rougelike thing, and the iPhone one-. Developed by id Software and published by Activision for Windows in 2004, and ported to the Xbox in 2005, Doom 3 has become the most successful game produced by the id company and has received favorable reception from the gaming community.

You take the role of the nameless Marine who is sent to UAC's mars base, where you get the order of finding a scientist that has gone missing, when you find him, he warns you something about the teletransportation experiments held by doctor Betruger, when a teletransportation occurs and some horrible hellspawns appear and start destroying everything; the teletransportation experiments ended up opening a portal to Hell itself, and bringing an invasion of blood thirsty demons into the base. As you fight your way across the base and across zombie scientist and zombie security guards with guns, Sargeant Kelly gives you orders to acquire a distress signal to call for back up, and so, the game is on.

Doom 3 gave a great step on the graphics out from Doom I and II -not meaning that they were bad games-, using the id tech 4 engine which allowed more realistic lights and shadows that scare the hell out of you and make you feel like you are really inside a demon and zombie infested futuristic base on mars. Some people don't like it, because it stays with the same theme of the first one's of fighting your way through a buch of hard to kill monsters, but, that's the essence of Doom and what made the first Dooms awesome, and also does the same on this one.

Resurrection of Evil, is an expansion of Doom 3 developed by Nerve Software and id Software, released on 2005, eight months after the release of Doom 3; taking place two years after Doom 3, a crew is sent to mars after finding an anomaly coming from one of it's satellites; the crew finds the Hell stone, being a human heart shaped thing, and are attacked by a horde of demons that try to retrieve it. The marine gets the thing back to Doctor Elizabeth McNeil as she tells the marine that the only way to destroy it is to return it to where it came from: Hell... easy task right? This way, the marine returns to the base where Doom 3 took place. There are no big differences between Doom 3 and RoE, just the addition of a couple of new guns and new hard to kill enemies; but is a great twelve chapters addition after having played Doom 3. I just love this games :D

AND FINALLY MY NUMBER ONE:

1 - American McGee's Alice.

Alice is a child's tale... gone completely insane. Published by Electronic Arts in 2000, American McGee's Alice is -I think I can call it- a third person shooter, based of the Lewis Carrol books "Alice's adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the looking glass, and what Alice found there".

Set years after them, Alice is found sleeping, taking tea with her friends, while in the house, a cat drops a candlestick, starting a gigantic fire that burns up the house and leaves poor little Alice as the only survivor. From the guilt of being the only survivor and the memoirs of her parents screams, Alice loses her mind and is interned in Rutledge Asylum where she remains lying on her bed with her rabbit doll. Ten years later, the rabbit talks to her and takes her again down into the rabbits hole and back into Wondrland, but this time, Wonderland has become a twisted, horrible death place under the rule of the Red Queen -This is seen as a really beautiful intro at the game, you really should see it- Saying anything more is ruining the great plot of the game, so play it for yourself.

The World of Alice is all twisted an gloomy, the ambients are so gothic, dark and scary, but someway they are pretty at the same time, helping with the gone-insane idea of the game. Your task is to go through Wonderland and destroy the Red Queen, you have available a Vorpal sword that you use to shred into bloody pieces the cards that want you dead, among other weapons like dices that summon demons, jacks that pierce enemies, etc. The game is greatly done, it's really fun to play and has a lot of replay value, the music is so beautiful but yet so twisted that fits exactly the mood of the game; the graphics are excellent, they are pretty to see, the game uses the id tech III engine used on great games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake III -though I don't like Quake III that much...-

If you have not played Alice, do it, it's a great game and an awesome experience, the game is really satisfactory and leaves a nice print. The plot is great and the ending is awesome; Surely is a game that you have to play before you die.

Well, this were my top ten games, if I were to add a bonus or an 11, that would be 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that game is awesome, though some find the mixture of nazies and horrible monsters way odd, i find it blissful. Thanks for reading my list.