Games

Portal (1&2)

Dwarf Fortress.

They're even making sequels to "the carp stands up" now. They added exercise to the game, and now carps get fucking ripped as fuck just swimming upstream, so when they start walking on land they're there to just destroy you and everything you hold dear.

Baldur's Gate 3. Hands down. Red Dead Redemption 2 is probably number 2. That said, I have more hours in World of Warcraft than every other game combined. It was an entire lifestyle for a few years back in the day. But WoW was good because of the people, not because of the gameplay.

Joust

Minecraft. Even with all the shitty updates there is so much to be done in Minecraft that it’s honestly mind boggling. Almost anything is possible especially with mods. Only downside is Microsoft’s greedy ass owns it

Boulderdash II on C64.

Star Control 2

The Ur-Quan Masters

Free Stars

Team Fortress 2

Minecraft, circa 2015. It was a religion.

Barbie horse adventures

Deus Ex

My favorite game, the game I can always come back to, is The Elder Scrolls III - Morrowind

Detroit: Become Human

It was the only story ever that has pulled me in completely. I wasn't just playing it, I was living it. It took me 2 more days to come down to earth after finishing it.

Grim Fandango. Despite the weird tank controls, it created such an amazing world - and all in a point-and-click adventure. My home PC is named Manny, our NAS is Eva, the router/firewall is Glottis, and so on.

Also, Psychonauts. Just a perfect 3D platformer.

Breath of the wild.

Played it on a friends new Switch and bought a Switch and that game three days later. I was so immersed in this weird and wonderful world...

Cyberpunk 2077 for me, it has everything, an amazing story with great characters, fantastic gameplay, a banger soundtrack, and an interesting world that's fun to explore and feels like a real place.

The Mass Effect Trilogy. By the time I was fighting in London I wondered where this game had been all my life.

Metal Gear Solid 3

Vagrant Story.

BioShock Infinite and Spec Ops: The Line are the only two games I've played that I would consider "art" in the truest sense of the word. Video games in general are creative works, and they all have debatable levels of "greatness", but those who have played these two know what I mean.

I'll probably always think that Tetris is the greatest video game ever. The inherent dramatic arc that comes with watching the blocks stack up is tension directly within you the player, not you watching tension unfold for characters on the screen. It's different every time, even if the shape of the arc is similar, because you improve as a player. It's the kind of emergent involvement the most designers could only aspire to create.

That said of course Shadow of the Colossus is also a favorite. That one probably feels a little more obvious, but I'm okay with that.

Tie between Final Fantasy X and Morrowind.

Slay The Spire. Really excited for the sequel.

There are a lot of ways to measure that.

I guess one reasonable metric is how long I probably played it. Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far and an old computer pinball game, Loony Labyrinth probably rank pretty highly.

Another might be how long after its development it's still considered reasonably playable. I'd guess that maybe something like Tetris or Pac-Man might rate well there.

Another might be how influential the game is. I think that "genre-defining" games like Wolfenstein 3D would probably win there.

Another might be how impressed I was with a game at the time of release. Games that made major technical or gameplay leaps would rank well there. Maybe Wolfenstein 3D or Myst.

Another might be what the games I play today are -- at least once having played them sufficiently to become familiar with them -- since presumably I could play pretty much any game out there, and so my choice, if made rationally, should identify the best options for me that I'm aware of. That won't work for every sort of genre, as it requires replayability -- an adventure game where experiencing the story one time through is kind of the point would fall down here -- but I think that it's a decent test of the library of games out there. Recently I've played Steel Division II singleplayer, Carrier Command 2 singleplayer, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and Shattered Pixel Dungeon. RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included tend to be in the recurring cycle.

Portal

Breath of the Wild

Alan Wake 2

The Last of Us series

Mel Gibson's Safari 3

Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary

Shame about nearly everything else Sega has done to the franchise since.

Baldurs Gate 1. D&D Lv. 1-7 campaigns are the best

Space station 13

What a lazy ass question

I’d say Baldur’s Gate 3.

With Demons’ Souls a close second. For those of us who got to play that game before Dark Souls became a thing, when we knew next to nothing about what to expect, it was an almost revelatory experience.