RESULTS: UKFF Top 25 Greatest videogames

[HarmonicGenerator]

Thanks Rooster - great write ups from everyone and I can’t argue with that number 1!

[Arch Stanton]

Sadly I didn't find the time to post my list in time for this, but if I had done, Red Dead Redemption 2 was going to be my number 1. Top work guys!

[FLips]

Excellent job Rooster, and everyone that did a write up. A really enjoyable list that brought back so many memories!

There are some games on there that if we could pick more games definitely would have made my list. Here Comes The Pain and Vice City for sure. If push came to shove those two and Timesplitters would make up some of my favourites on the PS2. I'm sure I learned the Vice City map off by heart!

Champ Man 01/02 as well. I didn't have a PC at that point but I would go round my mate's house and hammer that, Age of Empires 2 and some absolute shovelware game he had called Inca II: Wiracocha. We'd have pizza from Milano's and cans of pop from the corner shop, we'd stick wrestling tapes on and just have a blast on them.

I remember Pro Evo 4 being the year where our group of mates all collectively decided Pro Evo was better than FIFA. The gameplay was just an absolute blast.

I still haven't played Red Dead 2 so that might finally need to happen. Everyone I know who's played it adore it but I'm still mad about the ending to the first one!

[RedRooster]

1 hour ago, FLips said:

I still haven't played Red Dead 2 so that might finally need to happen. Everyone I know who's played it adore it but I'm still mad about the ending to the first one!

Oh you absolutely should. Judging by your taste in games, I’d be surprised if it didn’t end up being an all-timer for you. The ending to the previous game actually enhances RDR2; which probably sounds odd given that it’s a prequel, but that sense of dread really adds to the game. I enjoyed the shoulder content and side missions - but I found myself doing them simply to postpone what I assumed was inevitable. I was so invested in the characters and game world that I actively wanted them to break canon, or to find an ‘out’. The storytelling is tremendous, and sets the standard for Rockstar games going forward. 

[Donald J Trump]

Genuinely amazing work. When you look at professionally written lists like this, they don't come close to the standards, insight and soul on display here, not to mention the work that clearly went into compiling what is a tremendous list. Thanks to everyone responsible for bringing this together. You won't find a piece on videogames like this anywhere else. 

[Keith Houchen]

8 minutes ago, Donald J Trump said:

Genuinely amazing work. When you look at professionally written lists like this, they don't come close to the standards, insight and soul on display here, not to mention the work that clearly went into compiling what is a tremendous list. Thanks to everyone responsible for bringing this together. You won't find a piece on videogames like this anywhere else. 

Missed a trick by not naming the thread “Here are the best video games - YOULL NEVER GUESS WHATS AT NUMBER ONE!!” for that professional, modern feel. 

[Fog Dude]

42 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Missed a trick by not naming the thread “Here are the best video games - YOULL NEVER GUESS WHATS AT NUMBER ONE!!” for that professional, modern feel. 

Or even "Why is *this* video game popular among British wrestling fans?" 

But seriously, outstanding stuff, the lot of you.

Some games on the list I also adored even if they didn't make my top 10 but the few which aren't among my faves still do what they set out to do tremendously well, and deserve to have been advocated for so brilliantly by other 'Keffers so that we can at least understand their appeal. Top work all round!

[Sphinx]

Really enjoyed that, thanks for the effort and bringing back good memories. Still barely played Red Dead 2 and am currently on the third disc of FFVII having never got that far as a kid so looking forward to those. Already feel I could play FFVII again to make sure I get certain materia and limit breaks.

[RedRooster]

For those who are interested, here are the games that were awarded 10 points - some of these were awarded 10 points more than once, of course:

• Championship Manager 01/02
• Disco Elysium
• Elden Ring
• Elite II Frontier
• Fallout 3
• Final Fantasy VII
• Final Fantasy IX
• Freespace 2
• Gears of War
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
• Metal Gear Solid
• Red Dead Redemption 2 
• Second Sight
• Starcraft 2
• Street Fighter 2
• Super Mario World
• Time Crisis (Arcade)
• WWE Smackdown: Shut Your Mouth

[FLips]

Interesting how so many 10s never made the list at all. Some really big hitters on there.

[Merzbow]

Echoing the love for the amazing write-ups there, now watch some journo at the Guardian steal them.

Back when I bought Dark Souls of the back of a Teletext review I never thought anything with that DNA would be high up on lists like these with so much love for it.

[RedRooster]

13 minutes ago, FLips said:

Interesting how so many 10s never made the list at all. Some really big hitters on there.

What surprised me most were the big hitters that didn't get any votes at all - or received very few.

For example, the following games received no votes at all:

• Tears of the Kingdom (BOTW received just 2 points)
• Half-Life 2 (the original Half-Life received 2 points)
• Portal/Portal 2 
• The Metroid series
• World of Warcraft
• The Mass Effect series and the Dragon Age series
• The Xenoblade series
• The Super Smash Bros Series
• Knights of the Old Republic
• Super Mario Galaxy (Super Mario Galaxy 2 received 4 points)
• Minecraft (perhaps an indication of the generation we're all from) 
• EWR and TEW (I reckon they'd chart highly if this was a vote purely on wrestling games)

[BomberPat]

great write-ups, great work, and a phenomenal final five.

Final Fantasy IX
My second favourite in the series and, if VII didn't have a mountain of nostalgia associated with it, I could probably make the argument for IX actually being the best one. I didn't like VIII very much, but by the time IX came out I had gone back and played the older games on emulators, as well as some other JRPGs, and been playing around on RPG Maker, so this game was right up my street. It felt very self-consciously a throwback, full of references to the previous games in the series, but also had fun new ideas and new twists on old classics; I still love how it gives you the option to see little side-stories going on now and then, and how it does a better job than most FF games of dividing your party and splitting the story across different groups - it means people level up more evenly, but also means you don't have to spend all your time with sex pest-y Zidane. As much as he's the main playable character, Vivi is the real protagonist and the heart of the whole story. I replayed it last year, and it had been long enough that there were big chunks I didn't remember, and the themes of identity and sense of self resonated far more with me than they had as a kid. I never cried at FF7, but I cry at the Black Mage Village every time.
When X came out, with its no world map and its voice acting, I realised that IX had always been intended as not just a love letter to the series so far but also a bit of a farewell, and the amount the franchise has changed since then only makes that clearer today, and I think IX is even more enjoyable now for that. The only downside is, because of how hard it was pushing the PS1 hardware, the battles feel incredibly slow now - thank God the remaster has a fast-forward button.

Metal Gear Solid
Adored it. One of the first games that comes to mind when I recall the PS1. I knew nothing of the series to date, so just delving into all the lore and backstory was as exciting as figuring out the gameplay, which was unlike anything I had played. The Psycho Mantis stuff was mindblowing at the time - not just the "mind-reading" of the memory card, and plugging into the second control port, but if you had a DualShock controller, he would tell you to place it flat on the ground and that he would move it with his mind; so you do that and the controller vibrates enough to move! Wonderful stuff, and I'd never known a game before or since (outside of MGS2's "Fission Mailed") break the fourth wall so effectively - see also, Revolver Ocelot's "don't even think about using autofire, because I'll know". I think, despite the whiny new protagonist, MGS2 has aged better, and the themes of that game are far more relevant today, but MGS was an incredible game and a phenomenal achievement.
I've told the story on here before, speaking of the fourth wall, of how I bought my copy of MGS in a shop in Rotterdam. When you're told that Meryl's Codec number is on the back of the box, I spent God knows how long hiding in the cardboard box, trying to rotate the camera to see if there was a number on it. At some point I looked it up online, and it said it was on the back of the CD case - there's an in-game data disc, so I was trying to look at the icon for that too, before eventually finding out somehow that it means the back of the actual box the game came in, where the number appears in a screenshot. A brilliant bit of lateral thinking and innovative design! Except that my Dutch copy of the game had completely different box art, and that screenshot wasn't there, so I wound up just dialing every number in sequence until I landed on Meryl's, which thankfully is relatively early.

Championship Manager 01/02
I'm not really a football fan, but all of my family are, so we always had football games, and this was the last football manager game we had. It was one of the only games my Dad played, and myself and my brother played it too. I don't have a lot of memories of it now, but it's a testament to how good it is that I sank hours into it despite having no real interest in the sport.

Final Fantasy VII
A life-changer and a multi-year obsession. I started a new school, and one of my first friends there asked if I'd played it, I had not. He must have lent it to me or something, because I can't imagine I rushed out and bought it so quickly on his recommendation alone, but it blew my mind and became a complete fixation. I'd never played a JRPG - RPGs to me before that was stuff like A Bard's Tale and Ultima - and never played a game with such a rich story and world-building. I've played it over and over again, but that barely scratched the surface. The first time I used the internet it was to look up cheats for Theme Hospital, and to subscribe to the Discworld Monthly newsletter, which got sent as a .txt file to my Dad's email address, and he would print it out at work and bring it home for me to read. But when I started secondary school, we suddenly had internet access available to us in IT classes, and you could book out computers during the lunch break - there was a sign-up sheet, where you could book any computer for a half-hour slot by just signing your name next to it. My friends and I would sign up for the first slot, then make up a signature to sign up for the second as well - lunch break was just over an hour, so it gave us about ten minutes after the IT room closed to go and buy whatever they had left in the canteen for lunch; one time they were out of anything vegetarian, so I spent my £1 lunch money on ten packets of Space Raiders.

In that time on those school computers, most of my mates hung out in the Sky Sports chat rooms, because somehow people found out they were the only chat site we knew that was unblocked; we'd be chatting to people sat in the same room as us, sometimes right next to us, so I guess the appeal was the novelty more than anything else. But me and one mate spent our time on Shinra No. 26 and Rocket Canyon, a pair of FF7 fan-sites. We posted on their guestbooks as a rudimentary message board, we read up on all the mad made-up rumours (how to play as Zack; I know a woman in her mid-40s who still insists she did this, and her 30-something year old brother dumb enough to still believe her), all the theories about the game, and talked about it endlessly. We read and wrote (very bad) fanfiction. When the PC version came out, we got software that let you muck about with the game's code, never really knew what to do with it, but it was there. It consumed my life, and there has never been anything else like it since. 

 

Red Dead Redemption 2

There's a few games that it took lockdown to make finally commit to playing, and this was one. Everyone told me that the story was incredible and would make me cry, but for the first few hours I was thinking, "the gameplay is great, the world is really in-depth, but I don't get the fuss about the story". And then there's a couple of moments that bring everything into focus, and really hit home what's going on in this game. The story was incredible, and it did make me cry, but it's also probably the best open world game ever made; I spent half my time playing dominos, hunting, and watching vaudeville shows. Best game ever, I reckon.

[Max Power]

A thoroughly enjoyable thread, thank you for the hard work.

As I write this I'm currently playing CM01/02 on an old laptop with an original disc.

Probably time to grow up tbf.