Top 10 videogames of the decade

Everyone seems to be compiling lists of the best games of the decade,¹ so here, with minimal special pleading or argumentation,² is mine. A link is given if I have previously written about the game in question. Nota bene: this is not just some personal list of games that I happen to have liked during the noughties; this is The One True Objective Trigger Happy™-Endorsed List of the Ten Best Games of the Decade, and any different list is simply wrong, mmkay?³

1  Shadow of the Colossus  Fumito Ueda/SCEI International Production Studio 1, 2006⁴ — Don’t look in their eyes.

2  Advance Wars  Tohru Narihiro/Intelligent Systems, 2001 — Medium tank.

3  Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots  Hideo Kojima/Kojima Productions, 2008 — “Ah, overhead view. Just like old times.”

4  Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater  Hideo Kojima/Konami, 2004 — The End.⁵

5  Halo: Combat Evolved  Jason Jones/Hamilton Chu/Bungie, 2001 — Wargaming.⁶

6  Animal Crossing: Wild World  Katsuya Eguchi/Hisashi Nogami/Nintendo EAD, 2005 — Special coffee.

7  Rez  Tetsuya Mizuguchi/United Game Artists, 2001 — But is it art?⁷

8  Warioware, Inc.  Hirofumi Matsuoka/Nintendo R&D1, 2003 — Chop!⁸

9  Far Cry 2  Clint Hocking/Ubisoft Montreal, 2009 — Welcome to the jungle.⁹

10  Crazy Taxi  Takashi Nishimura/Hitmaker, 2000 — “That hurt! Pay more attention!”¹⁰

1. Apart from Action Button, who are doing the 33 best games of all time. Their list is wrong, of course, but interestingly wrong. ↩
2. Except in footnotes. ↩
3. Especially if it has Bioshock on it. Jesus. ↩
4. Videogames are the only works in any art or entertainment medium that are routinely referred to by the name of the publishers and/or the hardware format, but not (at least one of) the creators. I suggest we change that — though, since it’s not usually done, credits information available on various sites seems rather sketchy, and I had to guess for a few of the above based on what I thought the job titles meant. Corrections to these attributions welcomed in comments. ↩
5. Yes, two MGS games, one after the other. If you prefer, you can read 3 as taking its place above 4; it was too close for me to call. If you don’t agree with either: suck it, hater. ↩
6. Half-Life 2 is on a lot of these lists, but not mine. Perhaps because Halo is just better; or perhaps because HL2 made me sick. ↩
7. Answer: yes, but not as you know it. Developers are still chasing the shadow of this game, which burst in unannounced from some techno-hippie far future and blew everyone’s minds. (Hello Flower!) ↩
8. Close call for me between this and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. It was surprising to me how many of this list turned out to be handheld games: this probably has something to do with the increasingly vast budgets necessary for standard console games in the period, and the concomitant creative freedom afforded developers on much more restricted hardware. ↩
9. This game continues to get better and better in my recollection: it’s the supreme achievement thus far seen in videogames of “sense of place”. Nearly, but not quite, beaten to the “sandbox mayhem” slot by the best GTA game to date, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Considered as part of the shooting-pretend-men-in-the-face-from-a-firstperson-perspective genre, meanwhile, Far Cry 2 makes Modern Warfare 2 look like a cardboard-cutout fairground peashooter. (Splendidly entertaining as a cardboard-cutout fairground peashooter can be.) ↩
10. The last interesting driving game anyone has produced. ↩