A handful more games that didn't make the list for one reason or another.
Chip's Challenge
A classic tile-based puzzle game among old-school Windows gamers, being distributed with several of the Windows Entertainment Packs back in the early 90s and having 149 stages to solve (as well as several fan-made level packs to add even more). However, it's technically ineligible by my rules, since the original release of the game was actually for the Atari Lynx three years earlier. Sorry!
(I could have put the two-decades-delayed Chip's Challenge 2 or its "spiritual successor" Chuck's Challenge 3D in their place I suppose, but... nah.)
CyberJudas: the Sequel to Shadow President
A very in-depth presidential simulator with some cyberpunk overtones (you're plugged into a rotating VR-chair a la the Lawnmower Man that lets you monitor all global communications and manage everything from a convenient UI), it's basically just a sandbox game - you can try to improve relations with neighbors, crush them through military force (even nuclear war), fund insurrections, develop third world nations or do whatever else you please. Of course, you also have to manage your approval ratings and, in the case of the titular CyberJudas game mode, a cabinet that will try to manipulate you for their own ends or even outright betray the country and make you try to take the fall for it, so you have to discredit and/or eliminate them before irreparable damage is done (or they kill you first). Grim stuff, and for better or worse, I've never seen another game quite like it.
Dong Dong Never Die
With the advent of the internet came too many fan games and parodies to count, some of which are actually surprisingly well-made. Dong Dong Never Die (东东不死传说, more accurately translated as "Dong Dong the Immortal Legend") was one that caught the attention of the fighting game community, and for good reason - it's utterly ridiculous and totally awesome. Lifting its plot from Terminator and several of its music cues, character traits and special moves straight from Street Fighter and King of Fighters while using digitized stills of actors a la Mortal Kombat makes it a game with a lot of schoolyard charm. The end result is a completely unbalanced game with no regard for copyright laws, but it's an absolute blast to play, especially with friends.
Garry's Mod
A sandbox toy that showed off how powerful and flexible the Source engine really is. Not only could you spawn and play around with models, enemies, and basically every prop, character and level from all the major Source engine games, but people have crafted machinima animations, entirely new games and roleplaying servers and basically anything else you can think of utilizing complex rigs and Lua scripting. Really fun to mess with, but not a game per se, which is why I left it off.
Gamebryo RPGs (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas)
Though every major game Bethesda has released since the early 2000s has been on consoles as well, the PC remains my preferred way to play them. The reason why is pretty simple - modding support. Not just to fix the numerous scripting errors and bugs left in by the programmers (though some of those can be fun), but to add new quest lines, weapons, perks, vehicles, recruitable allies, and whatever else you may want. With thousands available to experiment with, all of these games become a fresh experience each time you revisit and replay value is basically infinite.
Goat Simulator
A game that recognizes that buggy design and janky physics can be incredibly amusing, Goat Simulator puts you in the role of a goat with a sticky tongue and sets you loose on a city to cause mayhem. You get a ton of achievements for doing various things - finding objects, blowing up gas stations, knocking stuff over or just driving people crazy, but you're by no means bound to any goals. The devs ensured you're not bound to any rigid playstyle either, as it was their policy to only fix game-crashing bugs and leave the rest intact. They even added more modules parodying MMORPGs and the Payday games (having you prank people as a team of animals with various ridiculous talents), so if you just want a bit of good, absurd fun, Goat Simulator is the place to find it.
Minecraft (Markus Persson/Mojang, 2011+)
I don't think any "top games" list, PC or otherwise, can go without at least mentioning Minecraft; after all, it is far and away the best-selling video game of all time as of this writing and has spawned too many imitators, alternate versions and spinoffs to even count. Essentially a procedurally-generated sandbox game where you battle monsters, collect resources, find food and water to survive, and build... well, whatever you want to build. Towns, skyscrapers, castles, giant pieces of art,
Beetlejuice-themed rollercoasters, you name it, it's probably been done (and if not, soon will be). Those with a more goal-oriented mindset can also opt to collect enough resources to enter "The End" and slay the Ender Dragon, winning the game in a more traditional way, and there are no shortage of mods that change up the setting or make huge alterations to the core gameplay. It's a game that has a little something for everybody, which probably accounts for its ridiculous popularity.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy
A multiplatform release from the tail end of Mortal Kombat's 2D era, its selling point was including
everybody from the first three games (even the bosses) as playable characters. It did just that, but no real playtesting was implemented either, so it was a ridiculously unbalanced mishmash of nonsense; that's also what made it a lot of hilarious fun, though. The console ports all had some flaws - the N64 version lacked load times but had poor sound quality and several fighters missing owing to ROM space restrictions, while the PSX and Saturn versions had everyone and higher-quality sound but rather atrocious load times (particularly in Shang Tsung matches, where the game would pause for several seconds and load mid-match every time you morphed). The PC version, however, was arguably the definitive release, having all the characters, high sound quality and, since it installed everything to disk, no load times either. So if you want some campy and incredibly busted entertainment, track this one down and give it a play!
MUGEN
If you've been on Youtube watching gaming videos for any period of time you've probably seen at least one of MUGEN, a fighting game engine that lets you import your own graphics, build your own characters and tweak nearly all of its mechanics to your liking. Because of this, people have made dozens of fangames and literally thousands of characters to play around with - some attempting to be legit recreations of existing fighters, others original, and still others just
meme-laden broken nonsense. People have even included stages from other games like Super Mario Bros as "fighters", so it's surprisingly flexible. But you really do have to put in quite a lot of work and hand-tweaking to set it up and it's not really much of a game in itself, so I opted against including it on my list.
Portal, Portal 2
I do love me some Portal. A action-puzzle game set in the Half-Life universe where you utilize the eponymous portal gun to sneak past obstacles, hop over long gaps, bridge two areas that otherwise wouldn't reach and do all sorts of other clever things to make your way to the end. All presided over by the twisted AI GlaDOS, who is both menacing and consistently hilarious. Unfortunately both games were also simultaneous releases on consoles and therefore disallowed by the rules I set.
Sid Meier's Pirates!
The first game to bear Sid Meier's name right on the cover, and it was also a pretty unique and innovative game for its time. Taking place in the age of piracy, you pick a nationality, a time to begin your career and a skill for your character, and from there you're pretty much left to your own devices. You can become a pirate, a privateer, a bounty hunter, a treasure seeker, or any combination thereof. You can also seek prestige and favor from any of the major powers, and once your career has ended, you get a score and a rank based on how much land, prestige and wealth you accrued, how many of your lost family members you rescued and whether you successfully wed a governor's daughter. A pretty clever early take on sandbox gaming that's still fun today. That said, this is a rare case where the console ports are superior; they're more polished than the computer versions in many respects and have the benefit of much nicer graphics and sound design. My personal favorite is Pirates Gold for the Sega Genesis - it looks great, plays fluidly and has a surprisingly good soundtrack to boot.
SimAnt
After SimCity found enormous success as a "software toy", Maxis and Will Wright branched out the Sim brand into many other venues, big and small. The smallest in scale but certainly not in depth, SimAnt basically serves as a virtual ant farm crossed with a real-time strategy title. You choose a single ant to serve as your personal avatar (who is always reborn shortly after being killed as long as the queen survives) and set out to help your colony thrive, collecting food and laying down scent trails to automate the behavior of other ants while avoiding hazards like getting stepped on, sucked into the lawnmower or eaten by antlions or spiders. You "won" by overcoming and defeating the red ant colony in the same patch of yard or, in the full game, completely eliminating the red ants from both the yard and house one square patch at a time. While SimAnt is a not terribly deep experience, it is fun to mess with for a bit, and once you get good at it you can beat the whole game in about ten minutes. In true Maxis form it also comes with an enormous 170-page manual, though only about a third of it talks about the gameplay and mechanics, with the rest being a lot of very well-researched ant facts.
SimCopter/Streets of Simcity
I mention these two not because they're good; quite the opposite in fact. They're ridiculously buggy at the best of times, have weird controls and even weirder physics, esoteric coding that makes them almost impossible to run on anything but very specific hardware from the early 90s (or PCEm), and even then they crash constantly, sometimes bringing the entire operating system down with them. But you know what? That can be pretty fun sometimes. As long as you're not set on taking them seriously, playing around with their insane physics models and uniquely janky mechanics, topped with Maxis's strange sense of humor, some unironically
good soundtracks and a rather notorious
Easter egg in Simcopter inserted by the programmer as a prank, makes these games surprisingly entertaining even with their many flaws. The guiltiest of pleasures, these.
A talented coder named Alexander Krimsky has also released
fan patches for these games in order to improve their stability and make them install and run on modern platforms with minimal fuss, even supporting higher resolutions!
SimEarth
After SimCity proved to be a massive hit, Will Wright and Fred Haslam figured the next step was to go even bigger. Thus we got SimEarth, a game where you oversee a virtual planet's entire ten billion year life cycle and help it grow by tweaking environmental factors in the earth's crust and atmosphere and occasionally summoning up natural phenomena like volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts and earthquakes. There isn't really set goal, being more of an experimental toy to see how effectively you can cultivate a planet's ecosystem, help species become sentient and eventually modernize and (hopefully) find balance with nature, although if you're so inclined you can also take on various Scenarios to undertake tasks like terraforming Mars or even a fairly accurate representation of modern Earth to play with. A much more complex game than Simcity and quite a bit more abstract in presentation, but the sheer scale and ambition of it is pretty amazing stuff for 1990.
Another one that just barely missed the list owing to its release window, but that doesn't mean it's not fantastic. The gimmick of Superhot is a clever one, being a shooter where time only moves when
you move, and adding VR to put you right in the thick of it makes it downright exhilarating. This results in a lot of slick, stylish slo-mo flair - weaving between bullets, shattering enemies with punches or improvised weapons (from bottles to ashtrays to thrown knives and shuriken), parrying bullets with your own guns or slicing them apart with knives, snatching a dead enemy's gun out of midair and returning fire at his distant buddies, emptying the clip and tossing the gun to take out another bad, and so forth. It's a brilliant blend of trial-and-error puzzle solving and surprisingly intense action despite the slow pace. The whole experience only lasts 2-3 hours, but it never stops being a constant adrenaline rush until the credits roll.
Super Mario Bros. X/Zelda Classic
Classic Nintendo titles recreated by fans that also include some scenario creation tools? You know I'm a huge fan of old-school Nintendo, so I'm definitely onboard for that. But, I opted not to include them for that reason, too - the classics are still around, they're still great, and while these are fun, they're not really original enough to be considered a "PC game" per se. I guess you could argue AM2R isn't either, but I was blown away with that one on so many levels; not least of which because it has more polish than most professionally-released games these days and stands as proof that fans are more passionate for that series than Nintendo's been in ages. (Not to mention it's way better than Mercurysteam's 3DS remake.)
Team Fortress 2
This was another simultaneous multi-platform release, but I considered including it anyway because it got so many updates and so much more content than the console versions that it was basically a totally different game before long - weapons, stages, voice clips, game modes, and of course player-made levels all took it leaps and bounds beyond the console versions. But then it went free to play and everyone quit playing it in lieu of creating idle servers full of bots to farm billions of items to trade for real money instead and I quickly lost interest. Then Overwatch and Fortnite and Counterstrike: Global Offensive came along and everyone with any serious interest in team shooters moved on to those, which pretty much put the final nail in the coffin. A fantastic game in its heyday, but once Valve's priorities shifted and it just became an empty cash-grab for them and a money-laundering tool for various flavors of scammers, it was all over. RIP TF2.
Ultima IX: Ascension
A game that's heavily derided these days, mostly for its incredibly buggy, crash-prone engine and a laughably trite script that feels like a amusement-park-esque bastardization of Ultima and its lore, complete with mountains of plot holes and inconsistencies, cheesy voiceover and juvenile moralizing every step of the way. I can't really argue against any of that, but even with all of its flaws I still can't hate Ultima IX - even a muchkinized Britannia is still quite a bit of fun to explore, with plenty of hidden secrets and creative dungeon puzzles (when they work as intended). Plus, it's at least buggy in a
very entertaining way, from building bridges of bread and scrolls to cross oceans to breaking scripts to skipping over puzzles and even entire dungeons with strange exploits. If you go in expecting the epic conclusion to Ultima that was originally hyped, well, you won't really get that. But if you make a point of not taking UIX seriously and just enjoy the sheer lunacy of it all, you can still get quite a bit of mileage from it.
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness/Beyond the Dark Portal
The
first RTS game I played, and it's still a surprisingly fun one today,
establishing many staples of the genre despite its relative simplicity
to modern examples of the genre. Choosing one of two factions (Humans
or Orcs), you wage war across land, sea and air with a combination of
melee units, ranged units and casters, with some clever tactics and
well-placed spells able to turn the tide of battle. It's a bit
unbalanced (particularly the Orcs' Bloodlust spell) and the AI is horrifically cheap, but still great fun
to play with friends; I have still good memories of playing it over dialup.
Nowadays the version to play is either the remaster or (for older
machines) the Battle.net edition, which adds in quick keys for rapidly
selecting units and greatly improves the AI when engaging in battle (all
units will attack instead of just pairing off with any extra units
standing there...).
