40. System Shock (Looking Glass Studios, 1994)
System Shock was another early Looking Glass title that was highly acclaimed for being innovative and surprisingly deep (big shock there). It utilized the same engine as Ultima Underworld; however, it took things into the future instead, putting the player on a space station overrun by mutants and cyborgs and having them fight to survive and thwart the machinations of the mad AI SHODAN. In contrast to many other shooters of the time period, though, System Shock is comparatively slow paced and methodical - not quite stealth-based, but you'll do a lot of crouching and peering around corners to take potshots at enemies rather than facing them head-on, and you'll also collect a number of upgrades for your cyborg gear - from a camera that sees behind you to speed-boosting leg enhancements to a shield that absorbs some damage you take. There is also a heavy focus on storytelling, puzzles and mission objectives - hunting down crew logs, keycards and passwords, finding ways to skirt around traps, and solving wiring puzzles are commonplace. You'll also have to hop into cyberspace which, as in many 90s depictions, is a surreal world full of 3D shapes and vague space shooter elements. Very much a product of its time with its slow-paced gameplay and somewhat clumsy controls and physics, but a very rewarding experience once you adapt to its quirks.
39. Max Payne (Remedy Entertainment, 2001)
38. The Oregon Trail (MECC, 1985)
If you're of a certain age you probably remember playing this one in your school days, mostly because it's one of those rare educational games that was actually fun. In fact, it was actually rather like a roguelike in many respects - you picked one of three career paths (determining your starting money and score multiplier at the end), dealt with a lot of randomized hazards and splitting paths, and tried to reach Oregon with as many resources intact and people still alive as you could. There were legions of updates, remakes and rereleases over the years (still continuing to this day) and several spinoffs including Amazon Trail, Africa Trail, Yukon Trail and the controversial
Freedom!, but the fact that this game still remains popular despite having iterations going all the way back to
1971 speaks to its timeless charm.
37. Dwarf Fortress (Bay 12 Games, 2006+)
Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress (yes, that's its full title) has always been a legendary title among PC gamers despite being in a constantly unfinished state for over fifteen years, and even after getting a paid Steam release in December of 2022, it's still very far from done. But it is at least considerably more accessible now, with a window and icon based user interface, tile graphics instead of just ASCII characters, Steam Workshop modding support and some quite excellent, moody music and ambient sound on top of everything. Gameplay-wise it's a bit hard to describe, but I think an apt description is "Simcity plus the Sims, only much more complex". Basically, you generate a world and its complete history, then start out with a small caravan of dwarves and try to set up a colony, building and maintaining every imaginable thing you'll need to that end - workshops, meeting places, stills to brew liquor, bedrooms, blacksmiths, fields to farm, traps to deter invaders, a trading post and so forth, and you give your dwarves jobs to carry out each of these tasks as needed. You're also constantly beset by all manner of hazards from both within and without, from goblin raids to illness to subterranean horrors to fits of murderous madness, and you just try to survive as long as you can before things get into a downward spiral and your fort collapses in spectacular fashion. There's no concrete win condition and all manner of things can and will go cataclysmically wrong, but as the game's motto goes - Losing is Fun!
36. StarCraft (Blizzard, 1998)
The game that tore the real time strategy genre down and rebuilt it from scratch, Starcraft was quite a sight to behold at the time of its release. Not content to have just two armies with mostly identical units, Starcraft has three to control, and despite having very different playstyles, all are relatively balanced and require quite a bit of differing strategy. The Zerg mostly rely on weaker but cheaper units that excel in swarming tactics and harassment, the Protoss have powerful but slower and costlier units that require careful micromanagement to use effectively, and the Terrans fall somewhere in the middle, using their versatility and resilience to their advantage. Starcraft also sported an incredible map editor that allowed for scripting, enabling complex new gameplay dynamics and even entirely new games at times. An incredible experience in 1998 and still the best of the genre today.
35. Lemmings (DMA Design, 1991)
A popular puzzle game that spawned a horde of rereleases, updates, sequels, expansions, clones and parodies, Lemmings is a simple concept - get a quota of the little rodents safely to the goal. To this end, one picks a few out of the crowd and assigns them jobs meant to help the others avoid danger or bypass obstacles - whether simply stopping and forcing them to go the other way, digging through dirt, climbing up walls, parachuting down long drops, or blowing themselves up to clear an obstacle from the others' path. Once enough are safely through the exit door, the next stage begins. Simple enough in concept, but many of the later stages get deviously difficult, requiring some very fast thinking to succeed. Given just how prolific and popular the series was, if you owned basically any game platform out in the early '90s, you probably played or at least saw Lemmings or one of its sequels/spinoffs/expansions at some point. And thankfully, most of them were pretty damn fun. Key word being "most"; skip Lemmings Paintball and All New World of Lemmings aka Lemmings Chronicles, they're really lame.
34. AM2R (Some awesome fans, 2016)
Nintendo's Metroid series is one that has been oft-copied, but puzzlingly sat idle in Nintendo's own hands for nearly a decade. AM2R is a stellar fan-created remake of Metroid II for the PC, combining excellent visuals and audio design, spot-on controls and polished gameplay on par with the top games in the franchise. Naturally, Nintendo quickly became green with envy for said fans doing something better with Metroid than they had in years and had it pulled from the internet, once again reaffirming their philosophy that "If people can't play high-quality fan games or even our old games that were good, they'll just have to buy our new games that aren't so good instead". Which just seems like terrible business practice to me, but oh well. If you can get your hands on this piece of forbidden treasure, you should, because AM2R is a game with more polish than most professionally released games, and perfectly captures that feeling of isolation in an eerie alien world that the classic Metroid games provided.
33. Day of the Tentacle (Lucasarts, 1993)
The sequel to Maniac Mansion and Tim Schafer's first game as project lead, Day of the Tentacle was another hilarious and well-made point and click adventure from LucasArts. Starring Bernard and two of his college roommates as they attempt to foil the Purple Tentacle's scheme for world conquest, the setup is quite a clever one - each of the three characters is trapped in a different time period, able to pass objects between one another but otherwise unable to directly interact, and changing things in the past will affect things in the future, opening paths for puzzles to be solved. This, plus the sharp writing, acting and animation, make for a truly fun and creative adventure. Though it sadly lacks the multiple paths and endings of the original game, Day of the Tentacle is nonetheless a worthy sequel to a classic.
32. Ultima VI: The False Prophet (Origin Systems, 1990)
It seemed that every Ultima title did its best to up the ante over the previous one, and Ultima VI was no different in that regard. While the previous games had a recognizable world to venture through with a lot of surprising nods to realism, Ultima VI set out to create an immersive, realistic world that you'd live an alternate life in. You could hunt animals for food, milk cows, load and fire cannons, move furniture around and so forth, and creative solutions to get around problems often work. The story was another great one too, starting with what appears to be a hostile invasion but having you looking at things from a very different perspective by the end. The somewhat clunky UI and limited viewpoint don't make it my favorite Ultima to play, but even with the annoyances of constantly running into dead-ends and getting lost in towns, it's another fantastic RPG from Origin and a very worthwhile entry to a legendary franchise.
31. Ultima Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams (Origin Systems, 1991)
Ultima 6 is a game as known for its intriguing story as its inventive gameplay, putting the player into a world more intricately designed and realistic than any other seen to that point - cows could be milked, doors could be lockpicked, blown up or smashed down, and virtually every object one saw could be moved around, stacked atop one another or used in surprisingly intuitive and realistic ways. Naturally, this engine cost Origin a ton of money to develop, so they decided to try and recoup costs with some spinoff games. The end results, while lauded by critics, were not financial successes, leading to the Worlds of Ultima franchise being cancelled after only two entries. Shame, that, as Martian Dreams isone of the best games in the entire franchise. Set in a fictionalized Victorian era on Mars, it has the player and a number of real-life historical figures unearthing the remains of a long-lost civilization on the red planet, and having to endure a lot of surprisingly realistic obstacles - low oxygen, radiation and an ever-constant struggle against limited supplies. While it is frustrating to navigate at times, the tale told here is a creative and memorable one, and proof that Ultima remains an important milestone for both design and storytelling in video games.
