This is a really strong list from
@Padrino. I haven't looked at the voting yet but I assume based on the rankings that I'm going to lose this matchup. As has been the pattern so far, some of the highest profile games here are the least compatible with my gaming taste but I can certainly appreciate that you have a style of game you enjoy and you stuffed your desert island list full of them.
OWN, WANT TO PLAY
1.
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (PC) "A game so awesome that I played it for an hour and knew I was going to love it. And then haven't played it since! Had I stumbled across this one sooner and/or wasn't trying to write a book, design a board game, record an album, and make a movie at various points over the last 6 years it might have been my favorite game. I'm sure I'll get around to playing the rest of this eventually."
2. Mass Effect (PC) "My parents took me and my brother to see all three of the original Star Wars movies in the theater when I was barely a year old. I must have slept through most of them but I quite vividly remember the Emperor attacking Luke Skywalker by shooting lightning out of his fingers and that's my earliest memory. Anything remotely Star Wars adjacent already has my attention and it also has the branching storyline and interactive movie elements I tend to gravitate toward."
WOULD BUY, WANT TO TRY
3.
No Man's Sky (PC) "This has also been on my radar for awhile but I haven't found the time to try it yet. I do quite like the look of it -- boldly pastel hued space exploration is distinctive and interesting -- and there's the promise of some of that Deus Ex style open-endedness. The big question is, will it be the good kind of Open-World game where I never run out of things to do or the bad kind of Open-World game where there's a lot of
stuff but most of it isn't fun?"
4. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition (Nintendo Switch) "Unfortunately this will have to be ported to PC or PS4 / PS5 before I'll try it but I'm certainly intrigued. I haven't played a Xeno game in quite awhile but I get all frothy (y'know, like I've been spun round in a blender with ice for 30 seconds) just thinking about more mech combat filled JRPG globe-trotting adventures."
5. Control (PC) "This looks like a lot of games that I have enjoyed. I dismissed
Infamous rather quickly in the last round which in retrospect seems a little unfair. Is a third-person action game with telekinetic powers really that much different from a third-person action game with electrical superpowers? But I guess this is an example of how the presentation of an idea can be more significant than the idea itself. I wouldn't have thought I would like this when I read about it, but seeing it in action I get the references -- the X-Files, the Matrix, Christopher Nolan's warped dream-reality from
Inception -- and I love the aesthetic, which is usually enough to rope me in."
INTERESTED, WOULD HAVE TO LEARN MORE
6.
Citizen Sleeper (PC) "This one scores big points with me for the art direction -- I looked up the artist responsible, French cartoonist Guillaume Singelin is someone I'll pay attention to now. There's a recent trend of using tabletop gaming mechanics in video games ("Slay the Spire" being the most high-profile example) which I'm a little uncomfortable with. I'd love to see someone make this into a co-op board game so I could play it with friends sat around a table. As a video game though, from the playthrough I watched I'd say that it feels more static than I was hoping for."
7.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES) "This game actually looks really cool. I have not even seen this game before and was a little surprised that the roots of what I think of as the modern Action RPG actually pre-date Diablo by quite a few years. I would probably play this."
8.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PC) "As much as I keep hearing that this is an all-time classic (most recently in
@Löwenherz' comments) and the photo-realistic landscapes really appeal to me, it really would take a lot for me to look past the theme. Big, silly fantasy settings are really hard for me to get into. I won't even watch Game of Thrones."
9.
Elden Ring (PC) "This was the hardest game on this list for me to rank. Perhaps the ultimate example of a (by all accounts) great game that is most likely not for me. From what I've seen the theme does not appeal to me, the difficulty level seems deliberately designed to push me away, and the size of the game world guarantees I will never come close to experiencing even 5% of what the designers put into this. I worry that game designers seem more and more focused on making virtual worlds with nearly limitless potential to tell stories and less and less focused on making sure that the stories they do tell are interesting and original. That's not really a criticism of this game though, I don't know if that comment applies. But when I see a game promising a massive game world and hundreds of hours of gameplay my first thought is that it can't all be great."
OLDER GAMES I HAVE PLAYED
10.
GoldenEye 007 (Nintendo 64) "I never played the single-player story mode but four player split-screen was a lot of fun. Also I still have a soft spot for the movie
GoldenEye and this game had my favorite side character in that movie -- Alan Cumming's russian hacker Boris -- as a playable character so my friends got to hear me shout
"I am invincible!" every time I sniped them from behind and then ran off to hide."
11. Mortal Kombat II (SNES) "One of my favorite bits of mid-90s ephemera was a TV show called
WMAC Masters, which was a lot like professional wrestling but for martial arts. The original martial artist that portrayed Liu Kang (used for the motion capture of the first 2 Mortal Kombat games) is named Ho-Sung Pak and he played "Superstar" on that show. He was also wearing the Raphael suit for all the martial arts scenes in TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze and TMNT 3 -- though I only found that out just now when I looked him up so I knew how to spell his name."
PROBABLY WON'T PLAY
12.
Illusion of Gaia (SNES) "At this point I'm getting the idea that you
really like action RPGs! This game looks like enough of a time investment and similar enough to games that I have already played that it falls just on this side of the "probably won't play this one" line. I can see why someone who grew up with this would really love it though."
13.
Castlevania (NES) "I hadn't even heard of the Castlevania games until Symphony of the Night was released on PS1. Similar to the Final Fantasy series, these were revered games that were locked away from me behind a Nintendo pay wall. As NES era platformers go, this one looks better than most. I like the gothic art and somewhat more realistic, less cartoony presentation. But if I'm going to play a Castlevania game, I'll probably play Symphony of the Night since it's the one I have some history with."
14.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim [Special Edition] (PC) "I briefly played Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. I wandered into my first town and realized the game would let me steal anything on the store shelves -- so naturally I availed myself and before long the entire village guard had shown up to enact old testament vengeance on me. I fled off into the woods with my meager loot, managing just barely to evade them long enough to escape with my life, but now forever doomed to live the life of an outlaw and beggar. Such was my one and only experience of playing Elder Scrolls. See above (The Witcher 3) about fantasy settings. I only like Diablo because it's more medieval horror than fantasy."
15.
Dark Souls: Remastered (Nintendo Switch) "There's an ideological conflict I have with the Souls games and I think it goes all the way back to Super Mario Bros. These games expect you to try and fail over and over again until you get good enough at the game mechanics to overcome the difficulty curve. And then it gets even harder. I skipped over most of the early arcade and NES / SNES days so I never had an in-road to participate in the formative years where this was the dominant game design methodology. Instead I played PC adventure games, RPGs, and strategy games where skill was rarely a factor and figuring out
what to do next was the challenge, not
how to do it. If gaming choices were represented by a skill tree, I now find myself in a place where the games coming out in some genres are five or six levels beyond what I'm even capable of participating in."
