Lucy O'Brien's Favourite Games of All Time

By Lucy O'Brien

To be honest with you guys, this was a really hard list to write. I’ve never been inclined to share properly personal stuff with the internet; yet I couldn’t see how this list could be anything but personal. Writing this kind of felt like giving birth to a chest of drawers, if you’ll excuse the gristly mental image.

I'm telling you this because I want to remind you that I am just some person and therefore I am not presenting this as some definitive ‘ranking’ of the Best Games Ever. These are definitely not the Best Games Ever, but games that have impacted my thirty years on this earth in one way or the other, games that have shaped who I am and games I’ll still remember when I’m in my 80s, provided I live that long.

So here they are, presented somewhat tentatively but with a heart full of love. My 9 favourite games of all time.

On my fifteenth birthday, my friends pooled in their money and bought this for me. Because we were too young to legally drink and too soul-old to consider ourselves 'young', it kicked off a weekend ritual of trying to savour crappy beer pilfered from various parents' fridges and playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with the soundtrack turned up as loud as it could go on a 1997 model Panasonic 32 inch TV.

I loved ‘Tony Hawk’ - as we called it -  because it was total fantasy. There was nothing realistic about the dizzying heights you could reach, about kickflipping in the rafters or chaining an impossible number of tricks.  It was made for teenagers like us, drinking stolen beer and pretending to be adults while still getting childishly moody when we lost. With our united love of American pop punk (Blink 182’s Enema of the State was in every CD player) and attraction to entertainment that felt “cool”, Pro Skater couldn’t have come at a better time in our awkward lives.

Six Golden Coins was the first game I owned on my brand new Game Boy, and my first proper introduction to video games as something I could get into. I’d played Doom and Wolfenstein with my friends on their PCs before, but having an actual world I could explore privately was an entirely new prospect. I sunk hours and hours and hours into it, and while it’s not particularly relevant, it was an important distraction when my sister was sick a lot during the early ‘90s. Last week I watched a Six Golden Coins Let’s Play and realised I still associate it with the smell of hospital disinfectant. The human brain is weird.

And of course, it was my first introduction to Nintendo, and that publisher's particular brand of quirky genius. I had never played a game set in the jelly-like innards of a tree before, or the inside of a mechanical version of the game's protagonist. The truth is, once you have Nintendo’s boundless creativity in your hot little hands, you never really look back, do you?

In 2006, I’d all but stopped playing the JRPGs. I had resigned myself to the fact that they were relics of my past, a past where I was more invested in goth-lite, angst-ridden romance.

And then I was given this. It was for a review, actually; my first. It was terribly written. And I loved the game.

Dragon Quest VIII is old-school, but refined, polished within an inch of its life. It’s everything that I loved about Final Fantasy VII in particular - the humour, the enemy design,  the stakes, the anglophilia - unburdened by the convoluted narratives and mythology of the later games in that series. It was simple, and honest, and bright, and most importantly, tonnes of fun. In my terribly written but sincere  review, I gave it a 9/10. My dad was big into horror. The house I lived in growing up had wall to wall horror novels and  VHS tapes of old Hammer movies he brought home from the second-hand record store that was (and still is) our family business. Having grown out of R.L. Stine, pilfering this treasure trove seemed like a natural step for me. I quickly grew attracted to authors like Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, who lent towards psychological horror, things that went bump in the mind.

I thrived on this stuff during the reclusive and weird phase of my teengehood - the ‘too-big leather trenchcoat phase’ -  and so it’s no surprise that I loved Konami’s Silent Hill when it was released in 1999. It’s not the best game in the series - that honor goes to number 2 - but it’s the one I have the fondest memories of.  I loved the foreignness of it. There were the bizzaro creatures, sure, but also that jarring voice acting and stilted dialogue; it was like watching a David Lynch movie through Google Translate. Silent Hill’s frights stayed with me years after I’d grown accustomed to more advanced fare.

Full disclosure here: I only played Half-Life 2 a handful of times, and I haven’t touched it for years. Yet the game was crafted so expertly  that it left me with powerful nostalgic attachment nonetheless; a series of mental screenshots that are stuck in here forever. Whenever I find myself asking “what was the game with that awesome part when…” I’ll inevitably remember it was Half-Life 2. From its subterranean confines to the dizzy heights of that bridge traversal to Raven “We Don’t Go There” holm, the game strings together layer after layer of spectacle and mood.

And what’s more, there was Alyx, who was the first NPC I could remember that felt reactive and observant and real, and so much more than a woman in a refrigerator or a sex-bot. As a girl who grew up with video games, I thought I was getting a glimpse of some brilliant, tactile future.

We’re...getting there.

I find solitary exploration in video games really meditative, even when there’s combat involved. It’s one of the reasons I enjoyed the original Tomb Raider so much, and Shadow of the Colossus even more so.

I fell in love with Shadow of the Colossus because it made me feel alone. There’s no insistent GUI,  no markers, no Game Stuff to distract as you make your way through its open world. The game told me nothing and I knew nothing, and the lack of distraction drew me closer to its weird, beautiful world.

And then there were the encounters with the colossi themselves.  The slow thud of the giant’s fist, the scramble up a grassy leg, only to fall, then scramble up again, the thrill of the upper hand - and the devastating final blow. There is something so bittersweet about the victories in Shadow of the Colossus. You are, after all, destroying something beautiful.

I don’t think I’ve been so personally invested in the outcome of any game before Mass Effect 2 or since. I remember telling my partner at the time to leave the room during a love scene, because I suddenly realised I was super invested and didn’t want anybody else in the room as it felt too personal. Afterwards I felt weird, like I had done something a little perverted.

I hadn’t, of course. I was simply at the mercy of the massive Mass Effect universe, the  wonderfully-written characters that populate it and its beating heart of choice and consequence. It was a game that was entirely mine, and yours, and the guy down the street’s. And while I am against petitioning for creators to adjust their creative choices, it was for this reason that I found the upset over Mass Effect 3’s ending unsurprising.

Metal Gear Solid changed my thoughts on what a video game ‘could be’ irreparably. It was lauded at the time for its cinematic cut-scenes and emphasis on stealth, but I loved it for its villains. They weren’t ‘video game characters’ as I knew them, but Bond baddies, full of theatrical venom, plucked from the movies I had grown up with. They were exciting and unusual and invariably tragic. Kojima, too, loved his villains. I could feel that so strongly.

And geez, was I a sucker for all that meta stuff. The bit where Psycho Mantis made the controller rumble, or the bit where you have to read the codec number off the back of the CD box itself, was revelatory to me at the time. Here was a video game creator playing with the conventions of game design, considering all the aspects of the video game experience, even the player himself and the living room he occupies. If anything,  Metal Gear Solid’s dismantling of the fourth wall led me to think of games as tangible, created by artists driven by a creative vision. Pandora’s box was opened, and here I am working at IGN today.

Resident Evil 4 was, and still is, the most thrilling game I’ve ever played. While I could praise its many virtues for days - including its (then) revolutionary over-the-shoulder perspective, frenetic pace and great combat - I want to talk mostly about its scares.

Most of Resident Evil 4's creeping horror is drawn from very obvious cinematic influences. Do you remember the first zombie you see George Romero's Night of the Living Dead? How it just looks like some guy, lost in a graveyard in broad daylight?  There was nothing particularly threatening about him, yet its this normality that sticks in the mind, more than the ghoulishness that came later.

He is just like Resident Evil 4's Los Ganados, who look like regular people until you get close enough to see the insanity behind the eyes. The game is shot through with this kind of irrationality; like the nightmares I would have as a kid where my parents were replaced by monsters who looked like my parents.

The horror gets more ostentatious, of course. The Chainsaw Man's first - and indeed, subsequent - appearances evokes the first time Leatherface rushes through the door brandishing his chainsaw in pure, raging insanity. The regenerators are like Terminators, slowly making their way towards you in their relentless pursuit to sink needle-like teeth into vulnerable flesh.

These are encounters I will never forget. Creator Shinji Mikami borrowed from the masters to create something new, elegant, and terrifying. While I wish I had a more personal story to share with you considering this is my number one game of all time; I don't. It simply is. Resident Evil 4 is a masterpiece.

Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN AU. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.

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