Top 20 PC Games of All Time

Synopsis: It may be old as hell and you may have to actually disable DirectDraw to get it to run these days but there's still no PC game that can compete with the mighty X-COM. Conceptually it's one of the finest strategy games to ever appear on any system. Putting the player in charge of a worldwide defense against an alien invasion, the original X-COM combined elements of sophisticated base management, high-tech research, engaging roleplaying, thrilling tactical combat and a tense, terrifying story to create an experience that has yet to be duplicated by any other game. Leading your squads on missions to reclaim crashed UFOs or fighting house to house in an effort to repel alien terror attacks on major cities throughout the world were the highlights of the game but X-COM has plenty of other pleasures in store, from juggling personnel and equipment to keeping the nations of the world happy enough to sustain your budget. Simply put, there's no excuse for strategy fans not to break this one out and play through it again. 

Synopsis: One of the Civilization games was absolutely going to be in the top 5 in this list, it was just a matter of which one we chose to occupy the spot. For years, it was largely understood that Civilization II was the best in the series offering up complex strategy in a palatable and even graceful format. Some out there would probably still argue that it's the best of the bunch, but we decided the latest went above and beyond that great title with more improvements than can be counted. From the revamped damage system to the diplomatic improvements and inclusion of religion, Civilization IV provides the most addictive 4X experience on the market. Even worse for those of us incapable of quitting to desktop is the inclusion of a very workable multiplayer solution. Turn-based strategy has never been easy this way, but Firaxis managed to make it easy, make saves work, and make it easily as much fun as the single player if not more so. Civilization IV is a brilliant game. 

Synopsis: Fans of space combat games will always have a soft spot to games like Wing Commander or Elite, but no game before or since has captured the drama and action of the genre as well as TIE Fighter. Benefiting from the lessons learned from the X-Wing game that launched the franchise, TIE Fighter boasted some of the best flight mechanics and mission design ever seen in a space combat game. Long before Knights of the Old Republic gave us a chance to see what it's like to serve the Empire, TIE Fighter presented the opportunity for the player to become the villain. The Collector's Edition went one better by adding improved polygonal graphics and brilliant sound design. There have been a few imitators since this classic game was released, but none have come close to delivering the excitement and joy that we still find running secret missions for the Emperor. 

Synopsis: Creative Assembly's third entry in the Total War series represents some of the deepest, most polished, and addictive strategic gameplay out there. Fusing a 4X style overworld map with riveting real-time battles, there was a near overwhelming amount of expertly designed content to chew through. The A.I. always put up a challenging fight, making aggressive overworld map moves and employing effective tactics on the battlefield. Rome offered even more complex siege battles, cities whose appearance reflected the structures placed therein, a wide range of highly detailed units, and unprecedented sound design. This is one of those games that when you start playing, it's near impossible to stop, and is certainly worthy of being considered one of the top PC games of all time. 

5) Fallout
Developer: Interplay
Publisher: Interplay
Year Released: 1997

Synopsis: Fallout really had it all: dynamic, believable characters; a quality of narrative and storytelling too rarely seen in games; and the opportunity for players to drastically affect how events proceeded. It was a game that above all else recognized and rewarded the player's free will. Fallout's fiction and game world were vivid, it's character development system deep, and it possessed an often hilarious tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. Peering past the post-apocalyptic science fiction surface, deeper cultural themes become apparent, echoing notions of humanity's absurd fallacies hit on in novels like Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Though games like Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Planescape: Torment and plenty of others are all worthy of the PC RPG crown, this 1997 release from Interplay is our choice for the top of the heap.

6) StarCraft
Developer: Blizzard
Publisher: Blizzard
Year Released: 1998

Synopsis: When you say the three letters RTS, there are a few games that immediately pop to mind. For millions of gamers, it's StarCraft. It remains as one of the most popular real-time strategy games played on the Internet around the world. For those of us that only revisit on occasion, there's still an immense amount to love. StarCraft managed to create three wildly different factions in nearly all forms. Motivation, technology, and biology provided an amazing platform for a brilliant story and universe. Even more amazing was the ability to create checks and balances when none of the races shared units or even particular functions. Even the builder units acted much differently to fit the background of each race. The superb balance translated into enticing and addictive gameplay. The galactic war between the Terrans, Protoss, and Zerg proved to be one of the most entertaining pieces of software ever created and the unannounced sequel (we have hope) is still one of the most asked about games of the future.

7) Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Interplay/Black Isle Studios
Year Released: 2000

Synopsis: Plenty of Dungeons and Dragons based PC RPGs have come out over the years, but Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn had the biggest impact. Riding the surge of praise after the release of Baldur's Gate in 1998, the sequel delivered an even more fully featured pseudo-turn-based combat system, expansive environments, a seemingly endless number of side quests, and a compelling narrative. If there's a single element that makes BGII stand out, it's character. The game had a truly sinister, multi-faceted villain, as well as some hilarious NPC companions. Take Minsc, for example, a brash fighter who frequently consulted with Boo, his trusty hamster companion. If you never bothered with this when it first came out in 2000, you should pick up a copy this instant. It may not look so good anymore, but it's still one of the best RPGs ever made.

 8) SimCity 2000
Developer: 
Publisher: 
Year Released: 1993

Synopsis: Fitter, happier, more productive. The citizens of your city are free to live long and happy lives presuming you have any clue what goes into city planning. If not, SimCity 2000 will give you a crash course to help create your own utopia and then allow you to smash it with an alien or monster attack when your citizens have grown too fat and lazy (they don't, but imagination opens up all kinds of possibility). SimCity gave players an open sandbox in which to create their own perfect (or disastrous) city using a clever paint tool style interface. The more services a city had, the more attractive it would become to people hoping to move there. In addition to being sickeningly addictive, the title helped provide a base for players to educate themselves on the workings of a city and the dangers of crime and pollution.. SimCity 2000 is a sleeker model of the original and still one of the most ingenious and creative titles ever shipped for the PC. 

9) Half-Life 2
Developer: Valve Software
Publisher: Vivendi Games
Year Released: 2004

Synopsis: For many, the fist-person shooter genre really bloomed with the original Half-Life. While the game introduced grand new storytelling techniques and used atmosphere and tension to draw gameplay along, we decided for today's purposes that Half-Life 2 is simply the better game. Amazingly enough, the sequel did manage to best the original through the wide variety of gameplay provided. Whether it was straight up run and gun, vehicle combat, or physics based puzzles, there were no dull moments to be found in Gordon Freeman's assault on City 17. The same story-telling techniques that made Half-Life so popular were back and improved thanks to character models with emotion (in voice and animation) and the brilliant dystopian City-17 of the future. The game immediately managed to draw us in and create the best single-player first-person shooter entertainment experience ever made on the PC. That long six year wait ended heroically.

10) Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings
Developer: Ensemble Studios
Publisher: Microsoft
Year Released: 1999

Synopsis: When it comes to old-school RTS games, no one did it bigger or better than Ensemble's Age of Kings. Though it lacked the sophisticated tactical action of Starcraft, Age of Kings' rock-paper-scissors combat model and its subtle balancing of a wide range of civilizations makes it one of the most enjoyable RTS games ever. Sure, the historical setting required a bit of similarity among the unit types but the advantages and disadvantages of each civilization were so intriguing that no one side played like any other. Possessing one of the most engaging resource models in any RTS before or since, Age of Kings was just as much about your infrastructure as it was about your armies. The RTS has definitely evolved a lot over the last eight years but Age of Kings still represents the peak of what historical RTS games used to be.

11) Sid Meier's Pirates!
Developer: Microprose
Publisher: Microprose
Year Released: 1987

Synopsis: It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since we first played through Sid Meier's Pirates!. Standing as one of the singularly most innovative and all-encompassing game experiences, the original Pirates! maintained it's position as one of the most beloved games of all time. Fortunately, an exciting remake a few years ago introduced a whole new generation to the joys of virtual swashbuckling. Players choose whether to serve a European nation or whether to engage in a life of piracy and have to build their fortunes amid the turbulent waters of the Caribbean during the 17th and 18th centuries. Engaging in ship-to-ship combat and boarding actions, dueling with a whole cast of villains, trading goods and recruiting sailors at exotic ports, seeking out lost treasures and rescuing your kidnapped family members, romancing governors' daughters, this game really has it all. 

12) Battlefield 1942
Developer: Digital Illusions CE
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Year Released: 2002

Synopsis: If true addiction has ever had a name in the offices of IGN, it's name was Battlefield 1942. No other game has inspired so many editors to give up their Friday nights in search of the perfect match in Stalingrad, Wake Island, or at the Battle of the Bulge. When you leave the office on Saturday morning and the sun is starting to come up, you know you have a good game on your hands. BF 1942 was that game. It was the perfect blend of action and strategy across large maps filled to the brim with different types of vehicles and weapons. There's huge amounts of fun to be had whether you're playing a serious match or just screwing around having jeep races between capture points. No, the game was not perfect, but it ushered in a new era of large team-based first-person shooters and showed how much fun the chaoticly comic nature of a video game battlefield could be.

13) System Shock 2
Developer: Looking Glass/Irrational Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Year Released: 1999

Synopsis: Looking Glass and Irrational Games' System Shock 2 excelled in many ways, but perhaps the strongest was the genuinely frightening atmosphere and that pervaded throughout every polygon. Pitted against a seemingly ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence with a singularly haunting speaking voice, your character had to escape the clutches of monstrosities and altered crewmates aboard the space vessels Rickenbacker and Von Braun. The game, like many others on our list, emphasized player choice over strict, predetermined progress. A widely varied and upgradeable skill set, as well as a large range of weapons and tools were at the players' disposal. It was a game that demanded precision as well, where player decisions had noticeable and lasting repercussions, since items degraded quickly with use, ammunition was difficult to come across, and there were multiple ways of tackling nearly every obstacle. System Shock 2 wove together compelling storytelling, oppressive atmosphere, a wide range of abilities, and addictive first-person RPG gameplay to create an experience impossible to forget, and still remains one of the most cohesive, affective games out there.

14) Company of Heroes
Developer: Relic Studios
Publisher: THQ
Year Released: 2006

Synopsis: If there's a modern game that shows the potential for tactic heavy strategy titles, Relic's Company of Heroes is it. This is about as complete an RTS game as we've seen in history and will probably be the benchmark to which other new RTS titles are compared. There's very little wrong with the game at all. It provided a stunningly exciting and interesting campaign nearly the entire way through, offered a wealth of skirmish and multiplayer fun, and did so with two very unique sides where none of the units ever become obsolete on the battlefield. Add masterful production values, sound composition, and brilliant visual effects and you've got one hell of an entertainment piece. While a lot of the ideas in Company of Heroes have been taken from other games, they've all been polished so bright and shiny that most strategy gamers will keep wanting more.

15) Grim Fandango
Developer: LucasArts
Publisher: LucasArts
Year Released: 1998

Synopsis: It may be hard for the younger crowd to believe but there was a time when LucasArts was known as the industry's best adventure game developer. With a roster of superlative titles, the company had already cemented it's reputation in the annals of gaming. Then they went one step further with a game that many consider the greatest adventure game of all time. Grim Fandango succeeds on a number of levels. On the surface, there's a tremendous concept for the world that involves a Dia de los Muertos aesthetic and a bureaucratic take on the afterlife. These are merely backdrops however for a compelling story full of memorable characters and a series of challenging puzzles that are so well integrated into the plot that you almost forget that you're playing a game. Great music and genuinely funny humor round out the package nicely. Even if you don't normally like adventure games, you'll love this one.

16) Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Publisher: 2K Games
Year Released: 2006

Synopsis: The Elder Scrolls series has always delivered something unique to players: choice. The games aren't MMOs, but basically the single player equivalent; open worlds where you can follow a main story, or get lost in a titanic amount of side quests and hidden content. Deciding which game in the prodigious series to squeeze onto our top 25 list was a heated subject, literally. Scalding coffee was being flung around for fifteen minutes straight during the meeting. "Arena forever!," "Morrowind is way more interesting than Cyrodiil!" they shouted. While they're all great games, the most recent entry, Oblivion, wound up taking the Elder Scrolls crown, since it brought along one feature the series had always lacked: accessibility. Though such a statement will likely cause the hardcore to shatter their teeth in frustration, such design and interface changes as Oblivion employed sliced up the unwieldy Elder Scrolls of the past into much more digestible chunks of RPG goodness. Hate on the auto-leveling all you want, Oblivion ranks in as the most important of the series, and among the titles most worthy of recognition in PC gaming.

17) World of Warcraft
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Year Released: 2004

Synopsis: You'd have to have been living in a cave on Mars for the last five years not to know about Blizzard's World of Warcraft. The company, widely known as the creators of one of the industry's leading RTS franchises proved that it could crush the competition just as easily in the world of online RPGs. The subscription numbers (and server queues) alone are more than enough evidence of the title's success but if you need further proof, you only have to consider the inviting design, stylish graphics and richly storied, quest filled game world to see why it's inclusion on our list of the best games ever is a foregone conclusion. While it doesn't eliminate the grinding and downtime that are part and parcel of the MMO experience, World of Warcraft hides them better than most games and also offers up enough rewards to keep us questing long after we should have gone to bed. 

18) Call of Duty
Developer: Infinity Ward
Publisher: Activision
Year Released: 2003

Synopsis: World War 2 shooters had been done to death when Infinity Ward honed the genre to razor sharp perfection with Call of Duty. From the initial paratrooper drops in the hours before D-Day to the final struggle for Berlin, gamers were instantly transported to a world that was at once both thrillingly cinematic and eerily real. The game's realistic AI and squad based combat makes you feel more like part of an actual unit rather than a one-man killing machine. Add in some of the best sound design we've seen and Call of Duty is one of the most convincing and exciting simulations of FPS warfare we've ever seen. Better still, the game offers up a wide range of multiplayer battles that are still our first choice when it comes to online action.

19) Warcraft 2: The Tides of Darkness
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Year Released: 1995

Synopsis: There are a few iconic genre games that are hard to pass over when it comes to a top 25 list. We had to pass some of them over this time around in the hopes of adding newer, sleeker models, but we had too much trouble passing some of them up. One we couldn't overlook was Warcraft II. Not only did it really begin the move to multiplayer over the Internet, but really helped drive the RTS genre home as not only viable, but hugely successful. Besides that, playing Warcraft II today is still pretty enjoyable thanks to stylized cartoon graphics and wonderful, if simple by today's standards, sound. While a bit goofier than your average RTS, the world is still vibrant and units well realized. Who knew that a war between Orcs and Humans, a war that had raged through countless pieces of fiction, would spawn into a gazillion dollar franchise in a completely different genre series. There are so many good memories with this game that all three of us PC editors insisted it be somewhere on the list.

20) Deus Ex
Developer: Ion Storm
Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Year Released: 2000

Synopsis: Ion Storm's first-person RPG gave the player power. Not just in the form of deadly weaponry, which was certainly present, but also over the game itself. In each expansive level multiple routes to the end were available. With hacking skills you could take control of security bots to wipe out enemy patrols, or if concentrated more on raw firepower, you could blast your way to the end instead. With an intriguing science fiction storyline, vivid characters, plenty of ways to augment your character skills and armaments, and some really great level design, this game was as entertaining as it was thought-provoking. Ultimately, Deus Ex stands out for accommodating player desires for complex ways to control their gameplay experiences, instead of being forced along a linear path. An unforgettable experience.