Welcome back to the Top 10 Favorite Video Games of All-Tim Countdown.
With this countdown, Jon Johnston and I will count down our top 10 favorite video games of all time. The background of the countdown can be found in the 10th place link, but as you can probably tell, Jon and I grew up playing different video games as I grew up in the greatest era of all time and Jon grew up in a different one.
If you want to catch up on the countdown, then here you go:
10th place.
9th place.
8th place.
7th place.
6th place.
5th place.
Now for our 4th place games!
Nate’s 4th Place Game – Tomb Raider 2
To be honest, when this game was released I was 12 years old and probably in the middle of going through puberty.
So when there’s a game that has the female version of Indiana Jones then I was definitely all in on it.
But there was more to it than just the attractiveness of a fictional character to a 12 year old.
In the beginning you run into a T-Rex under the Great Wall of China and then the next scene is in Venice.
I mean who wouldn’t want to travel the world as well!
I still remember the first time playing the game in Venice where you start diving into the water and you end up finding a boat. It blew my mind at the time. It was the best boating in video games until Jet Moto on PS1.
Anybody remember that game?
Watching some of the video of Tomb Raider 2 is making me question Tomb Raider 2 being on this list. I mean, maybe it was all about Lara Croft and my 12 year old brain/hormones?
To give her credit, it appears that she might have an 80 inch vertical jump and she also never runs out of ammunition.
I need to be better. Maybe some of you have other memories of this game than I do.
Jon’s 4th Place Game – The Fallout Series
I don’t remember the exact moment I first saw a Super Mutant attacking the Lone Wanderer, but I remember my reaction to it. It was from Fallout 3, the game set it Washington, D.C. I was like, “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?” and at my first opportunity bought the game on the Xbox.
I’ve mentioned I’m a Sci Fi guy. I grew up loving the cheese of Sci Fi, movies like “The Blob”, or “Green Slime”, or “Colossus: The Forbin Project”.
I mean, LOOK AT THIS:
Combine that shit with the Gemini and Apollo projects, man landing on the moon when you’re seven years old and your world is built around outer space. Then add the Cold War, and BOOM, you’ve got a world in which nuclear holocaust has to happen at some point.
Fallout 3 introduced me to the Lone Wanderer. Here was an open world into which I could escape. The story is plausible. The setting beautiful; the combination of 50s architecture and cultural references, but with an advanced civilization with atomic cars!
The wonder of today’s video games is how well you can become immersed. I bought into the story of the Lone Wanderer, but it was the music that brought it all together. Three Dog and his radio station playing real music from the 1930s, 40s, 50s.
My kids came to love that music, a fact I found even more fascinating. Had I tried to get them to listen to it by itself, they would have shrugged it off as old timey music – in others words, as shit they wanted nothing to do with.
“War Never Changes”
Fallout 3: New Vegas added another great story and another part of the country. The combination of story and game are the best of the series. Who knew wandering the Mohave desert listening to old timey music could provide such joy and terror as you discover the Legion.
By Fallout 4, the story had gotten just a little worn, but there were still amazing characters. Piper, the Nick Valentine story, finding Billy stuck in a fridge for 200 years and bringing him home to his parents. Then there’s my favorite, Cait.
The DLCs in Fallout 4 were the best of the series. I recently re-played Fallout 4 just so I could get back to the Far Harbor DLC. There’s something wonderfully fascinating about the story of a young woman struggling with whether she’s a real person or a “synth”, a manufactured being who’s completely replaced her.
You deal with factions; the xenophobic islanders, the Synths, and the “Children of Atom”, who worship the atomic bomb as if its God.
This is what I love about video games. They present to me a world into which I can escape and leave behind my day-to-day struggles. It’s as if the Fallout Series were made just to fit my personal tastes of cheese and adventure.
I haven’t tried Fallout 76 and have no interest. I don’t want to go online and deal with other people. I just want my own world into which I can escape.
I’m not sure they can do more with the story to keep me interested. I saw this with the Far Cry series. I loved Pagan Min. I loved the music, the setting, the story line, and the game play. Then came Far Cry 5. The setting was great, the story was fine, but it was really more of the same. I’ve played it twice and I’ve never finished each time.
So, what do you think is up next? HAHAHAHAHAH
