Top 10 Video Games of the Decade!

I really didn't want to make a decade retrospective list. The inexorable march of time fucks me up something serious. Not the idea that something bad will happen in the future, but knowing that something, anything will invariably happen as anything and everything already has. Time stalks me like a flame, nipping at my spine. Why are we cosigned to become the dust we came from?

But then I remembered that there were some pretty neat things this decade! So I'm making some Top 10 lists, starting with video games, and then moving onto movies, albums and NFL moments.

To disclaim, this is going to be a subjective list of stuff based on its personal impact. So I'm not measuring on any basis of "greatness" or "influence" (although I'd like to think some of these entries have those qualities!). I've placed entries on here because I think back on them and they make say "Yooooooooooooooooooo, that was crazy." I also recognize the recency bias in these lists because I have a lot more in common with who I was in 2018/19 that at age thirteen.

nyways, heres my list.. hope u liek it :)

10. Assassin's Creed II (2009) - Ubisoft Montreal

"Sacre bleu!" you exclaim because my entire readership is French. "La video game from le 2009? That goes against the rules! J'accuse!" Listen here Frenchy, I just rambled on about how time is wonky and arbitrary in the intro so I'm not about to get bent up over a game released in the twilight of 2009. There are some people who say that the new decade doesn't begin until 2021, and do you want those wretched bastards to have a say? Time is fluid like a...grape.

The Assassin's Creed franchise is the perfect "stealth action" series because these games are "stealthily just normal action games". Yeah it has the veneer of stealth with the whole "oooooh you're sneaky robe guys and your organization is freaky and sneaky and aaaaaah conspiracies they gonna getcha". Sometimes you disguise as a haystack for a few seconds or hold down a button to go Sneako Mode but you're mostly running around Italy like a parkour asshole. The silent assassin veneer is just for aesthetic purposes; if there's one archetype that gungy teenage boys fantasize about than tough-military-shoot-people-man, it's secret-broody-shadowy-secret-guy. 

It's kinda sad how this franchise is on its 37th installment and the second one turned out to be the apotheosis. Ezio is the least mopey mope-boi in the series, instead bringing much needed Italiano himbo energy. He flirts, he lies, he burglarizes the vaults of the Catholic Church looking for apple slice snacks. He gets a bunch of swords and is all like *schwing* *schwing* *schwing*. Go do backflips all over your ancestral home.

Even within the constraints of the gameplay (cuz if you do a collateral damage the time-space continuum implodes) there's enough flexibility and leeway that magic happens. My favorite memory of this game is this mission where you have to assassinate a rich merchant dude at his yacht party. Problem is, he's surrounded by hired muscle and party guests. Around the periphery of the yacht the game offers a lot of options: do you pay a group of courtesans to seduce the guards and lure them away? Get a band of mercenaries to cause a scene and distract everyone?

So I run up to the target and pull out the .45 and blast his corporeal form to the Heaviside Layer. Then I jump in the water and swim my ass down the gondola until I'm in the open. That's good gaming.

Plus, you can meet Leonardo da Binci and kiss him right on the lips.

9. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) - Infinity Ward

Modern Warfare 2 is a paradox. I think it might have an anti-war message, or it's like critical of the military-industrial complex? "Aaah, an eye for an eye makes the whole world bad" the game says quoting Ghandi whenever you accidentally blow yourself up launching an explosive eggshell into a cluster of ad hoc gasoline canisters. As per the series, the whole game reeks of AH YEAH U.S. ARMY U.S. NAVY SEALS SEARGANT MASTER SEARGANT HOO-RAH OH LETS DO A MISSION I LOVE  EMINEM. Then you watch as your super-strong special force buddies get massacred by a neighborhood of Brazilian soccer fans. Yes, sometimes you have to wage trench warfare against the entire Russian army. The hardest missions by far are running through the Favelas getting chased by some motherfucker who looks like me IRL with a mustache, hiding from him before he plays Beethoven's 6th Movement on your buttcheeks like bongos.

I spent most of my time on the single player portion of this game, because I like narrative (especially incoherent geopolitical narrative that is bad) and computer guys are easier to kill than actual players. I did dip into multiplayer occasionally to see what all the hype was, to immerse myself in the verisimilitude of being an actual soldier. Turns out, that entails chucking grenades at each other across a mall food court, and running around with a shield chucking butter knives at each other's toes. If you're a really good Call-of-Dutyer, the game rewards you by allowing you to call in a nuclear strike that obliterates you, your enemies, your teammates and an entire city, sending the world into immediate political crisis. You did ittttttttttttttt.

8. Red Faction: Guerrilla (2009) - Volition

The gameplay is repetitive and oddly difficult at times. The scenery's color palette is hella ugly, a mixture of junkyard brown and garbagetown amber. The main character looks like Vin Diesel's nephew who listens to Wheezer and volunteers for the Rand Paul campaign. The story is like the moon: desolate, full of holes and ultimately forgettable in the long run. So what makes this game any good?

It's one gimmick: destruction. Guerilla's selling point is that if you see a structure, you can make it not a structure. In other games you can plant bombs on an objective and watch a pre-rendered animation, but this game has a robust physics system so that the destruction feels tangible. There's nothing like luring the Martian D.E.A. into a Rube Goldbergian trap that ends with a water cooler falling on them. There aren't many spectacles in video games like watching a silo or suspension bridge collapse organically.

The game gives you a handy toolbox needed to fill your deconstructive gluttony: your default and signature weapon is a sledgehammer which break anything. Then you get bombs that stick to any flat surface and remotely detonated at command. There's a rocket launcher that does rocket launcher stuff. That's it until mid-game where you unlock a sniper rifle that also melts matter. There are some other weapons that are used to kill people but whatever. There's a couple fun weapons like a saw-blade spewer and a halberd thing that are impractical but dope enough to make up for it. Regardless, there's a lot of stuff to break.

The missions are repetitive but I do have a soft spot for repetitive structures with good gameplay loops. One mission its, "Blow up the enemy base" and then it's "Blow up the enemy laboratory" and the difference in setting makes up for the rigid objectives. And I'm too impatient to do stealth missions which is good because instead of sneaking around the guard tower, you can just drive through it.

If you like watching big things fall in fun ways and don't mind the game being fairly mediocre otherwise, check this out. It's a technical feat that hasn't been matched 11 years later.

8. Fallout: New Vegas (2010) - Obsidian Entertainment

I've never really been into these Bethesda's style of games. I was just trying to get into the Elder Scrolls series for the fifth time but trundling all over the world to complete inane quests where I gotta' talk to people like "Veldarr Bruxmouth IV, the Unmunchable" is just not my scene. I played Fallout 3 and had a decent time overall, even if a lot of that game was janky and tedious. I thought to myself, "What if someone made this game except good?" So they went and hired another studio to make that.

New Vegas takes the core elements of Fallout 3 and then heaps on a ton of quality-of-life improvements. You can aim your guns, which is something that happens in, oh I don't know, every single shooter game since Ronald Regaen invented Pong. NPCs breathe more life, the political factions have depth to them, and Vegas is more vibrant than D.C. in this universe. D.C. was a lot of grey ruins stitched to each other, but Vegas has this nice desert-golden sheen over everything. I vividly remember looking out into the rolling sands only for some Godzilla motherfucker to come try and run my pockets and it's like YOOO WHO THE FUCK IS THAT  while trying to flee. Or getting into streetfights with my knuckle dusters in the slums outside The Strip. And fighting hordes of Greco-Roman cosplayers and extras from Eyes Wide Shut. 

There's a big world out there, one that is usually too big to hold my interest for long but this time it's filled with enough interesting people, places and happenings to keep it consistently entertaining. There are less Histories of Magic and ballads about crypt-keeping; here people want to win big in gambling or reunite with their father or steal heirlooms from their ex-lover. That's the type of business I can have a stake in. 

Sometimes, there are dogs :3

7. Red Dead Redemption (2010) - Rockstar San Diego

Man I love Westerns. Dusty roads and beautiful vistas teeming with wildlife and shit. A space at the intersection between civilization and nature. A setting which is the most "American" of them all but might as well not even be America. Somewhere where anything goes, where your morality is is just an extension of your cobra-skin boots. So when I heard they were making this big ole' cowboy game I had to get it. And damn, does it work.

You've got all your tumbleweeds and saloon shootouts and train hopping. Beyond the atmosphere and attention to genre, what elevates this beyond any of the other GTA-style is...well, getting rid of all the GTA stuff. By replacing cars with horses and machine guns with six-shooters, you've got a crunchier, and tighter experience than just waving an uzi around until the bad guys are dead so that you can jump into your faux-Jaguar and ram straight into a utility pole. Everything in this game has so much more weight than "Modern Crime Simulator, Moral Panic Instigator: 16, Heist Edition". The protagonist, John Marston, looks like your typical rough-and-tumble white man main character guy but voice actor Rob Wiethoff kills it with a movie-level performance. 

The story is well written too, which is a saving grace when you have to pick 200 Desert Sages for a recipe before doing your ninth bitch-ass horse-and-cart race. Everyone's pulling out the stops to make the most of these characters, and the writing has serious teeth. There is something that might influence your take on the game: this shit is morose. Not tear-jerking like some other entries coming up, but the RDR universe has a real grudge for all its inhabitants. There aren't happy moments or sad moments, there's just a spectrum from gallows humor to depressing. 

And not to be an incel or anything, but this game does for ragdolls what Guerrilla did for destruction physics. There are no death animations; banditos stumble over and fall, they spin around, crashing into windows and hurdling off rooftops. It's some cinematic business.

5. P.T. (2014) - 7780s Studio

&

Five Nights at Freddy's (2014) - Scott Cawthorn

Get drunk beneath the bleachers / harangue your favorite teacher / discover exotic creatures / it's time for a double feature!

P.T. is gorgeous. I know that's not the selling point but just look at it. Has there been a game since that has been more photo-realistic and polished than this one hallway? I mean when your game (actually, a demo of game) is only one hallway, of course you can make it look good. But still. There's not much your unnamed character does besides walking around and looking at things, but the plot is so freaky and weird that it doesn't matter. Freaky things keep happening: sometimes it's a jump-scare, sometimes everything goes bizzaro-world and sometimes it's just a regular creepy hallway. The gameplay is fucking cryptic and the win condition is so nonsensical it took like two weeks for the Internet hivemind to figure it out. It's a compact experience but it's so grotesque and beautiful at the same time. It sits with you, bouncing around in your Corpus Collosum like a ping-pong ball.

One thing it isn't, is scary. I mean, a lot of people think it's the scariest game they've ever played. It made me jump a few times but no worse than a decent horror movie. I'm not brave, it's just that ghosts and spectres don't make me tremble. They're creepy and rude yes, but it's not something that I actively fear.

I actively fear animatronics.

I spent a lot of my early childhood running away from mascots at theme parks, not wanting to be left alone with the Chuck-E-Cheese Jamboree Gang and feeling my stomach drop every Halloween when we would pass by the motion-detecting ghouls at the malls. Animatronics fucked up my young schema: are they people or animal? Living or dead or in some sort of horrible purgatory? These quasi-animal-people-cyborgs were the worst. But I aged and grew past these childish fears; I stopped crying at the idea of animatronics and started crying at the inevitability of human mortality. 

In high school I was an avid fan of the comedy gaming group The Game Grumps. One night, I saw they had uploaded a video of this weird game about a robot bear. I watched it and didn't sleep for the rest of the month. I don't think any media, game or not, has given me that amount of real trauma. You know when you're trying to sleep and you think of that scary thing and your eyes slam open? That's still FNaF for me, baby.

For all their vasts differences, these two games have their common ground: scary PoV games where the player character has little control over their general environment and no combat mechanics whatsoever. These weren't the first games to do this, like what's up Amnesia: The Dark Descent? But they both embodied their specific styles and were two horror games aware of the fact that they were being released in an age of Youtube Let's Plays. Thus begot the Youtube Horror Game Reaction and the games that fuel them, a phenomenon which I actually enjoy a lot. Yes, jump-scare reaction videos are the lowest of low culture, but let everyone enjoy their Reality Dating Shows and superheros and leave me with my 20-somethings couple overreacting to a scary monster. Ahh!

4. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor 

(2014) - Monolith Productions

As Sigur Ros Freud once said, "Sometimes a video game is a video game." I'm not going to talk about the plot here because you already know Dumbledore and Artemis Fowl or go into themes or whatever. You play a ranger and you disrupt Orc civilization from the inside out. And man does it feel good. Swinging your sword, shooting your bow, running around, all of it just feels tight and rewarding. Hell, even the stealth is good, because the game has the good sense to include the mechanic "Hold down the right trigger to stealth" and that's it. You can still run and jump and stuff but in a stealthy way. Enemies are pretty generous with their stealth detection, and stealth is usually optional. It makes your life easier, but generally you have the option to just go H.A.M. when you want to.

The gameplay reminds me a lot of Assassin's Creed but with more fluidity and flourish. You don't take falling damage, you can climb up anything, you run real fast and unlock an ability to run real fast. You learn all this ways to kill Orcs, each of which is fly as fuck. The map isn't that big, which is actually good because you can traverse it efficiently and it's full of landmarks and stuff: ruins turned into fortresses, wide open valleys, ramshackle war camps. 

The real selling point of this game is the "Nemesis System". And oh my God, Jesus Christ. This is like the dopest thing ever. Essentially, the Nemesis System procedurally creates Orc Captains, the "Bosses" of this game. Each Captain has his own personality, along with various strengths and weaknesses. This is where this game transcends from being a fun stealth-action-hack-and-slash to one of the best and most engaging action experiences of all time. Some Captains become enraged at swarms of flies but are afraid of fire, some of them sing to you, some of them will wait until your fighting another Captain to ambush you, some have hobbies like poetry or brewing. Some are friends, some are enemies, some are that guy you thought you killed but nope he's back baby! 

The map is littered with non-story missions that center around the activities of Captains. They introduce a little slice-of-life action that makes the world seem that much more real as you watch Captains hunt wild animals, throw booze parties and recruit to their ranks. Then you infiltrate these social events and ruin the Orc's birthday bash. The story missions are fine, and necessary, to get cool abilities, but I spend the vast majority of these games pursuing these organically generated stories, chopping down Captains and watching them gradually be replaced by fresh faces. Even dying is lit, because a Captain that kills you increases in power level, and if a random mook finishes you off, he gets promoted to Captain with his own title and abilities. Aw baby!

Once you eventually get through wiping out several Orc regimes, you can advance the story and gain new abilities which keeping increasing the scope of the game. Halfway through, you get a major ability which throws a wrench in everything, adding a level of political intrigue and tactics to an already vibrant Nemesis system. It's the reason why I poured more hours into this game than any last decade, and why it's maybe the best "game" out of any video game I've seen in ten years.

3. Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) - Team Salvato

Dan Salvato, creator of DDLC, once said that one of his chief inspirations for the game was his "love-hate" relationship with anime, how it's aesthetic and style can be both an "asset and detriment". I empathize with that a lot, as I feel like anime has produced at one end produced magnificent art and narrative while simultaneously being trite and painfully unwatchable. Salvato cited anime's trope of "cute girls doing cute things" being a decisive wedge in both drawing people into the medium while keeping others away. Anime is a complicated medium.

So what do you do? You take everything that rules and sucks about anime, blend it with dating simulators and existential horror: bam! Doki Doki Literature Club! A lot of questions come up through this game: Which of these lovely girls will your formless protagonist date? How can you write beautiful poetry to woo them? What is the difference between feeling alive and being alive?

It's no secret that this is a horror game, it says so on the official Steam page; Salvato is courteous enough to let any unaware pursuer know what kind of deal they're getting into. A good chunk of this game plays out like a traditional dating sim: end up in a wacky situation, meet all your potential partners with their idiosyncrasies, and figure out which one you're gonna' hold hands with. Then things get a little weird.

It's hard to get into the meat of this game without major spoilers, but I can broadly say that the game asks questions on the nature of beings, the role of technology and the ethical dilemmas innate in humans empathizing with digital constructs (yeah baby, let's construct Dating Simulation). It uses anime tropes while challenging them and is also really really really freaky and will getcha' sometimes. It's like if Black Mirror made a "desu-desu kawaii" game.

This game is probably 5-6 hours total, but I've been thinking about it for years. It's also free, so you're in for some freaky animu exsistentialism, go for it Senpai. 

2. Undertale (2015) - Toby Fox

This one is just so charming. It's funny, it's riveting, it's emotionally moving. Undertale feels like the adaptation of a beloved Saturday morning cartoon, and I'm positive it has some roots in fare like Pokemon and Adventure Tale. Toby Fox has captured that childlike wonder and put it into this delight of a game that carries a surprising amount of depth. Undertale exudes nostalgia like Zambia exudes copper exports and does so without ever feeling tacky or indulgent. All your favorite character archetypes and tropes are there, but in new shapes and sizes that fit right into the digital age. Like all great nostalgia-fountains, the main cast is excellent and loveable but all the side acts and one-liners are so good that they've each developed their own loyal followings, as it should be. 

The combat is...woo. The combat is heavy, at first looking like you're classic RPG fare until it flips that formula on its head so that the actions you take during battle have implications not just for points or the story but also morality. Undertale has a better take on ethics than most of those big budget "Say nice thing OR say mean thing" games. The "Pacifist" and "Genocide" runs (which are not the only possible gameplay routes!) are so vastly different that it requires a second playthrough. On top of that, each (literally, each) enemy has its own fighting style and gimmicks, with the bosses really funking up the expectations you've built on to that point. Even the attacks come with their own jokes!

I don't know how you could forget this game, it begs, nah, it befriends you. I've known a few people who didn't jive with it, fair enough, but if you've ever enjoyed cartoons or anime or Disney in your youth and want a game that resonates with that magic, badabing. 

TeMmieE!

1. The Walking Dead: Season One (2012) - Telltale Games

I think that great art elevates itself, but the best art elevates the medium. Games have been fun, they've been engrossing, they've been beautiful. When I played The Walking Dead, I had to say "Oh snap, video games are doing narrative now? We're doing character development?" 2012 was not the start of games having stories by any means, but this game was the one to really click with me. TWD's narrative isn't just great by game standards, it bats among the finest television shows, books and movies out there in the milieu. "Video games aren't art," you well look what happened Mr. Roger Ebert (R.I.P. Ebert. I miss him). I had no idea it was going to be a point-and-click adventure game with chunky comic-book lookin' people that would convince me of this artistic possibility, but masterpieces often come from surprising places. 

Lee Everett isn't just a fantastic video game protagonists, he's one of my favorite main character's ever. Because of the choices the game presents you, you can pilot him in different directions but any of his personas carry real weight to him. A witty history teacher with a tortured past, the apocalypse offers Lee a final shot at redemption. Instead of being the burgeoning plucky hero who grows throughout the adventure, Lee is the mentor and protector of Clementine. Clementine goes beyond being not-annoying but incredibly loveable, and you feel as much responsible for her guardianship as Lee. You'll meet people you love and hate along the way (which of these categories they each fall into is still hotly contested) but the main cast offers some really compelling performances. This might remind you (rightfully so) of Last of Us, another masterpiece that would have not only made this list but fought for the #1 spot if only I had actually played it (if you want to read my review of Last of Us, just read this entry again and swap out the appropriate names). 

As per the extended universe this game takes place in, there will be twists and horrible zombieness and the palpability of loss. You will probably cry. I did, multiple times, including the heaviest emotional response I've ever had to a piece of art. I don't even reflect on this game, I actively miss people from it. 

It's a shame that the follow up seasons to this game aren't nearly as moving, but this single season is more of an gaming achievement than I could ask from the ex-workers of Telltale. There's probably a lot more I could say about this game but I don't wanna' cry right now.

And that's it for vidya' games! Next time we'll turn towards the cinema for the Top 10 Movie Bangers of the 2010s. Peace out.