BEST PC GAMES

100. Grand Theft Auto IV

Release Date: 2008
Last year: 15

Graham: I can’t stand Grand Theft Auto’s cruel, dull missions, so I used to be reliant on its buggy multiplayer if I wanted to have fun messing around in Liberty City. Thanks to a persistent modding community turning the game into a giant toybox, that’s no longer true. Now, when I visit the city, it’s packed with cars that can travel at infinite speed, and I’m a superman who carries a gravity gun. That the best way to enjoy this game has changed so much two years after its release is the perfect example of why PC gaming is great.

99. Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45

Release Date: 2006
Last year: New entry

Tim S: Quake 3 re-imagined by Remarque or Solzhenitsyn. An ecstasy of brutal fumbling, wild SMG fire, and cold, calculating elimination. What’s not to like?

98. Ultima Underworld II

Release Date: 1992
Last year: 90

Tony: It wasn’t just the graphics. You could pick stuff up. You could throw it. You could cast spells, repair your armour and fly. You could talk to the monsters. Wonderfully, richly, impossibly interactive, UUII was a game from the future. It took history a long time to catch up.

97. Max Payne

Release Date: 2001
Last year: New entry

Chris: Right when you start, you discover Max’s murdered wife and child in his own home at the hands of drug addicts. Has there ever been a beginning of a game more powerful or emotional? Exceptional noir writing and a gritty NYC underbelly setting made Max Payne one of the greats.
Rich: Nothing like trying to gracefully launch Max into a room, guns blazing, only to have him dive headfirst into a doorjamb and very slowly rub his hair down the wood as he floated to the ground. Get up, try again, get it right, and you feel like king of the underworld.

96. Football Manager 2011

Release Date: 2010
Last year: New entry

Craig: Training? Pah! My tactics? Wild and confusing. I’m more of a hands-on kind of manager, giving people calming talks, asking for their advice, before taking my team on a long, unbeaten run in Europe. I’ve no idea about football anymore, but there are enough switches to flick so that doesn’t matter.
Rich: After years of playing it safe and managing with a steady hand, I decided to go full-on mental in FM2011. I started insulting and praising players in the same breath, I changed my assistant manager’s registered name to ‘Wiggles’, and I brought in half of the Slovakian national team. All turned out to be good decisions, and all explain why I love managing footballs.

95. Audiosurf

Release Date: 2008
Last year: 92

Craig: Man up, everyone. Favourite song to surf? I’ll start: Girls Aloud’s ‘Biology’. It makes a super bouncy, fun track to dodge blocks to.
Graham: That was mine as well.
Rich: I like the songs that no one else is cool enough to like.
Craig: Ah, ‘Sound of the Underground’.
Tom: I like Feist’s version of Sea-Lion Woman – gentle opening, then bumpy with hand-claps, then batshit with a twisting guitar solo.
Cooper: Listening to music is fun and all, but if only there was a way to… play my music. Oh, there is? And it’s psychedelic euphoria? Awesome, sign me up. Audiosurf makes a game out of your MP3 library, creating interesting, unique experiences for each song. The ability to “surf” every single song (and compare stats on an online leaderboard) makes it one of the most replayable games of all time, and adds incentive to getting into new bands. Actually, I wonder what sort of level Willow Smith’s ‘Whip My Hair’ would make…
Josh: The faster, the better. I’ll toss in any punk rock I can find.

94. The Last Express

Release Date: 1997
Last year: New entry

Richard: It’s the eve of World War I, and Robert Cath is up to his ears in murder and intrigue on the Orient Express. Arguably Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner’s magnum opus, it’s one of the most atmospheric games ever made, notable for its use of real-time action and incredible attention to detail.

93. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Release Date: 2005
Last year: 96

Craig: Splinter Cell: Convicton came pretty close to digitally heisting my heart in the action-spy genre I love, but while the action is sharper, more brutal, it misses Chaos Theory’s wonderful characterisation of Sam: he threatens a man with death if he says “monkey” and has funny little chats with his boss. And the wonderful, tactile co-op is still the best of its kind.

92. Red Faction: Guerrilla

Release Date: 2009
Last year: New entry

Tom: The hostage rescue side quests made it for me. You’re charged with breaking into an EDF base, untying the three captured rebels inside, and driving off with them alive. But these hostages can die. It’s not game over, it just sucks. That makes me genuinely care about their survival, and I’ll rip buildings apart to make sure they get out alive.

91. Mount & Blade

Release Date: 2008
Last year: New entry

Evan: The progression of a campaign in M&B feels like one of those scenes from a movie where someone enters a street and starts walking toward the camera, inviting along butchers, housewives and other sidewalk-people to join their happy jaunt. The difference is: you’re a conquering swordsman or Robin Hooder, and you take that entourage of archers, pikemen and cavalry from castle to castle, liberating food from innocent farmers or slaying bandits along the way. Not to be overlooked for its graphics; it’s the joy of archery, the best sieging you’ll do in an action game, you can get married, and all while being a proper, open-ended RPG that makes you care about the troops you recruit in the same way that X-COM or Jagged Alliance might.

Click here to continue reading PC Gamer’s 100 best PC games of all time.

90. Mirror’s Edge

Release Date: 2009
Last year: 99

Tom: I only have to be mildly drunk before I start swearing this is the best game ever. It’s not, but between the fights there’s something absolutely unparalleled about the rough and tumble of scrambling around these rooftops and offices. You see yourself roll with every fall, feel every clamber, hear every breath and footfall, and at the same time you have a sense of how quiet and small it all is. Next to this vast, stingingly bright, bleach-clean city, you’re completely insignificant. Apparently that’s something I want to feel.
Rich: I ended up playing Mirror’s Edge on its hardest setting for no real reason. There, Faith feels as fragile as she looks: her tiny frame falling to two bullets. My awareness of her mortality bled into jumping sessions, and I’d find myself wincing as she smacked her ribs into white concrete. It also made running away into an artform: my feet and heart racing as I dodged sniper fire.
Graham: It has its problems, but what strikes me is that none of them feel like they’re the result of negligence. DICE didn’t make a single lazy assumption in designing their free-running shooter; they considered everything, from how interior design can help guide the player, to what Faith’s shoes should look like. Although not everything worked, that’s smart design. And hey, a lot of it did work. There’s no place in gaming I’d rather be than the gleaming city of Mirror’s Edge.
Tom S: Even Mirror’s Edge’s sewer level was a playground of primary colours interesting level design. There’s a huge underground room full of huge green and white pillars and a tiny door at the very top. After ten minutes of breathless scrambling and death defying leaps the guards appear. Cue the frantic escape in a hail of gun fire. In it’s best moments Mirror’s Edge truly captures the thrill of the chase. Running away like a coward has never been so exciting.

89. Gothic 2

Release Date: 2002
Last year: New entry

Desslock: A spiritual successor to the Ultima series, Gothic II was the first open-world RPG in the 3D age to feature NPCs that weren’t static, quest-doling kiosks. These inhabitants had their own chores and agendas, such as luring gullible do-gooders into a mugging and smoking from bongs. No cute pet dog in this one.

88. Dungeon Siege

Release Date: 2002
Last year: New entry

Josh: My friends and I spent an entire weekend at one house bashing our way through Dungeon Siege’s zombies, spiders and other ickies. Party combat systems, the ability to pause combat, and 3D graphics were welcome additions to the frantic clicking and character progression of Diablo. Man, that pack mule could kick some serious skeleton ass when it needed to.

87. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Release Date: 2006
Last year: New entry

Tony: That frantic, fumbling escape from your hotel room is reason enough to include this. There are other great, scary set-pieces, and behind the bugs and clunkiness, a genuine and admirable attempt to make a horror-adventure that’s both fun to play and true to the spirit of Call of Cthulhu.

86. StarCraft

Release Date: 1998
Last year: New entry

Rich: I only know of StarCraft in retrospect. My utter obsession with GomTV’s Global StarCraft II League means I spend hours listening to SC1 ex-players Tasteless and Artosis. For my own selfish needs, their eleven-year experience with the game makes my viewing experience immeasurably better; on another level, I realise that for a game to captivate a swathe of humanity like StarCraft did for a decade and a bit, it has to be special.
Dan: The quintessential edge-of-your-seat, fast-paced RTS. Mastering command of each of StarCraft’s three wildly diverse, yet intricately balanced races is a challenge that few will ever achieve, but it’s sure fun to try.

85. Sins of A Solar Empire

Release Date: 2008
Last year: New entry

Dan: Bombarding a planet from orbit, killing all its inhabitants and recolonizing it with your own people is a pretty good sin, I’d say.
Rich: Sometimes, when I was colonising space and sending vast capital ships to do ponderous combat against an agonisingly beautiful backdrop, I’d read the title of the game as “Bins of a Solar Empire” and laugh for ages.
Tom: Good one Rich.

84. Silent Hunter 3

Release Date: 2005
Last year: New entry

Andy: The sub sim genre really needed this one. After the disappointment of SH2, Ubisoft brought in an entirely new Romanian team to redefine the WWII submariner experience and boy did they nail it. I experienced real fear the first time I crash-dove my U-boat to escape the depth charges of a relentless British destroyer and that terror didn’t diminish one iota in the ensuing 40-minute cat-and-mouse struggle. Even Das Boot The Director’s Cut didn’t move me like this.
Tim S: The secret of SH3′s sublimity is right there in the title. Unlike 98% of combat games, this one doesn’t serve-up prey on silver platters. You must *hunt* for those rusty toilers of the sea, and the long hours of zigzagging and hopeful horizon-scanning ensure engagements, when they come, are sweatier than a stoker’s y-fronts. Thank God Ubisoft postponed the release in order to implement freelance-friendly campaigns.

83. The Curse of Monkey Island

Release Date: 1997
Last year: New entry

Josh: Technology finally caught up to the genius emerging from the Monkey Island franchise, allowing the devs and artists to craft a perfectly-fitting cartoon world brought to life by voice actors and fueled with the same off-the-wall humor and irreverent plot lines. And who can forget Murray, the demonic talking skull?

82. MechCommander

Release Date: 1998
Last year: 66

Evan: Match all this stuff together: the personal attachment you feel for your soldiers in X-COM; MechWarrior’s intense robot customization; Diablo’s easy loot; an RTS’ pace. MechCommander isn’t simply a tactical take on MechWarrior–it’s an incredible single-player process of salvaging robot parts and amassing a team of deathbots and skilled pilots, and it plays truer to the board game roots of the franchise than FASA’s first-person version.

81. Kings Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow

Release Date: 1992
Last year: New entry

Josh: Shipwrecked on a beach; a nightingale singing in a tree; battling a minotaur in the labyrinth. If none of those spark a deeply-rooted memory in your game upbringing, you’ve got grounds for suing your parents for neglect. KQVI was a pillar in early adventure games.