“he Walking Dead features such a potent landscape, filled with rich characters and unrelenting danger, that every decision you make feels important and weighs heavily on your soul, even if the stories actually all end more or less in the same place.” —Warren Zhang
It’s difficult and terrifying to comprehend that the Xbox 360 came out when I was in middle school. A full eight years later, the longest, least cohesive console generation ever has finally ended. Fortunes were made and then promptly squandered; disappointments and surprises abounded. The world that the new Playstation 4, Wii U and Xbox One face is far different from the one its predecessors helped shape.
But through it all, good games have survived and flourished. These are the greatest gaming experiences of the past console generation.
5. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
It’s easy to forget, given the depths to which the Call of Duty franchise has sunk of late, how revelatory the series’s genuinely magnificent first modern-day installment was. Call of Duty 4 unquestionably raised the bar for shooter controls, offering an insanely responsive system then-unheard of on consoles.
And unlike every other modern shoot ’em up since, Call of Duty 4 had a truly fantastic single-player experience to go along with its multiplayer mayhem. Despite the bombast and incoherence, Call of Duty 4’s campaign was tightly paced and designed with rigor, culminating in a startling and awe-inspiring post-nuclear detonation set piece that its makers have been trying to top ever since.
4. Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto IV provided some of the most indelible moments of this last console generation. Cruising down the streets of Rockstar’s recreation of Manhattan at night with the radio on full blast was one of gaming’s most transportive, utterly immersive experiences ever.
To be fair, many of the game’s more experimental features — i.e. the cellphone — were divisive and did ruin the game for some. I, on the other hand, appreciated Rockstar’s intent, partly because I never got tired of hearing Roman belt out “It’s your cousin! Want to go bowling?” Still, even if you’re a firm hater, it’s impossible to deny the grandeur of Rockstar’s technical achievement. No virtual city has ever felt so real.
3. Bastion
Imagine if a velvet-smooth and disarmingly sexy voice narrated everything you did. It would be pretty awesome, wouldn’t it?
In Bastion, this weird fantasy becomes a reality. A narrator — quite possibly the greatest ever — talks over most of the game, organically cluing us into the storied past of both the main character and the postapocalyptic world. Combined with the gorgeous artwork and engaging, tightly designed isometric combat, Bastion offers a lean, mean treat for anyone tired of the constant yelling and macho posturing of the Gears of Battlefield 9: Bad Warfare 3: Revelations of the world.
2. Portal
Sometimes I wonder if, when making the zany little physics puzzler, the people at Valve had an inkling of just how viral Portal would go. If you’ve been on the Internet at all since 2007, chances are you’ve heard “The cake is a lie” repeated ad nauseam somewhere.
Portal’s seeming immortality on the Internet speaks well of Valve’s expert comedic timing and not so well about the Internet’s habit of running memes into the ground. Yet for all the cake and sentient artificial intelligence jokes, it’s easy to forget how fun and compelling the game really is. The series of puzzles escalates perfectly and suits the sterile laboratory setting immensely well.
Everything you need to know about Aperture Science and its predilection for murderous AI is revealed by the increasingly deranged scribbling on the walls and the deadpan public address announcements as you solve puzzles . Portal remains one of the greatest examples of seamless storytelling in gaming, the plot unfurling without cut scenes or downtime. It’s a near-perfect sprint through the worst place to work in America.
1. The Walking Dead
Player choice is one of the foundations of modern video gaming — and it is extremely overrated. While many games of the past generation have dabbled in giving players agency — Mass Effect and Heavy Rain come to mind — these choices have almost always resulted in little more than a handful of different endings.
The Walking Dead, on the other hand, managed to transcend limitations in technology and storytelling to create the most compelling narrative game experience of the last generation, if not of all time. The Walking Dead features such a potent landscape, filled with rich characters and unrelenting danger, that every decision you make feels important and weighs heavily on your soul, even if the stories actually all end more or less in the same place.
In The Walking Dead, it’s your journey, not your destination, that counts.
Honorable mentions: Crackdown, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Frog Fractions, Just Cause 2, The Stanley Parable and Super Mario Galaxy.
