The 10 best PC games of all time

10. Ultima VII: The Black Gate

Release Date: 1992
Last year: 24

             

 For the creatively sadistic roleplayer, look no further. Most people will think of the global Apocalypse spell or the many ways to kill Lord British, but I prefer the start of Ultima VII, where you find a man butchered, his blood everywhere. It’s possible to gather the blood and put it in a bucket safe keeping it for later, when you recruit this deceased man’s 14 year old son and can then have him haul his father’s blood around. Oh, it’s not over yet. The game also features baking for which you need a bucket of water and flour to make bread, but, the game doesn’t differentiate between liquids in buckets. So it’s then possible to bake bread with the bucket of blood and then feed it to the 14 year old. It’s the little evils that get you by, really.

9. StarCraft 2

Release Date: 2010
Last year: New entry

           

 It’s one of the few games here that you can be a fan of without playing much of. My Starcraft II time isn’t usually spent playing the game, it’s watching the commented Korean tournament matches that reach us via GomTV. When I play, I dabble. When I watch, I am consumed.

8. Portal

Release Date: 2007
Last year: 17

Gaming’s best vignette. The laser focus of an indie game with the production quality and cleverness that you’d expect from Valve.
 It’s cleverness that I didn’t expect. Valve’s pre-Orange Box games had all been more or less played straight, with a few gags here and there. But Portal was mind-bending puzzles punctuated by increasingly disturbing and hilarious chatter from GLADOS.

7. Diablo 2

Release Date: 2000
Last year: 43

              

 Turns out if you make an RPG with only the briefest glimpses of plot, zero dialogue options
and no character creation, it's ridiculously good fun. Click click click, smash smash smash, loot, level-up.

The reason Diablo 2 sticks with me, rather than the moodier first game, is the sheer scale and diversity of the thing. After a pretty standard first chapter in what looks like Wales, suddenly you're in the desert. Cat people frisking in the sand, maggots erupting from the dunes, pseudo-Egyptian relics unlocking tombs. And then: rainforest. Whoa.

One of my favourite gaming experiences of all time was four of us lugging our PCs to the same house, stocking up on snacks, and questing through all this together the week it came out. By the end of it I was a corpse-exploding Necromancer with a pet made out of blood and a curved dagger that made even demon's flee. And we all had poor personal hygiene.

6. Rome: Total War

Release Date: 2004
Last year: 5

 Rome was the magic point where Total War assumed epic scale, but had yet to sag under the weight of its own ambition. The cinematic wars of the Romans, familiar to us from a hundred Technicolor matinee movies, were perfect for its cast-of-thousands battle technology in a way no subsequent outing has been able to match. No other strategy game at all has kept me so gripped, so caught up in its drama.

5. Half-Life 2

Release Date: 2004
Last year: 2

 It was the first videogame launch that felt like it mattered. Worldwide, at 8am in the UK, the game clicked on for everyone who’d bought it through Steam. I was there, alone in my bedroom, but it still felt like a party. And when it loaded, it felt like a homecoming. Barney! The crowbar! Kleiner! You have a name now - congrats. I don’t know who this Alyx is but she seems nice. Manhacks? Combine? D0g? Despite all the new additions, still it felt like home.

4. Team Fortress 2

Release Date: 2007
Last year: 3

Remember this time last year, when I suggested I should probably stop after 253 hours of game time? That took two years of TF2 to accumulate. I just checked, and I’m at 595 hours. Why? Valve keep adding new content to bring me back in. Good content, on top of all the hats and paint, there are fun maps and new weapons to play with nearly every other month. I actually want to stop now, as it’s taking up far too much of my time, but they keep bringing me back.

3. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Release Date: 2006
Last year: 6

 Bruma keeps springing into my head, the snowy rooftops and cobbled streets and the web of lies about the vampire slayer. Leyawiin, planning Adamus Phillida's death. The southern forests, and a hitman by a lake I hunted down on a vendetta. A little waterfall tumbling into a mountain pool I stopped to splash in. A cold peak miles from anywhere.

2.World of Warcraft

Release Date: 2005
Last year: 14

 WoW leaves me in awe. I look at it’s landscapes, recently pockmarked by it’s latest Cataclysm, and smile. They spread and undulate for miles, always changing, always gorgeous. I look at it’s mechanics, newly revamped, and gasp at their depth. Classes that interlock so perfectly, tricks of each character counter-balanced by traits of another. I play it’s dungeons, and smile - think of the times I’ve shared with raidmates as we took on, and eventually bettered, some of the strangest, and silliest boss fights I could imagine. I tinker with it’s battlegrounds and arenas, fiercely competitive and grimace a little: they’re as stressful as any FPS deathmatch.

1. Deus Ex

Release Date: 2000
Last year: 1

        

 Just when I thought it was starting to get stale, the doors opened and I was in Hong Kong. Hong fucking /Kong/. Chinese lanterns. Night markets. Signs in neon kanji. Games didn’t do things like Hong Kong. This was a real place. And it wasn’t just a map, a level - it contained levels. The whole unforgettable VersaLife complex was just one of many areas embedded within its mini-world, along with canals, luxury skyscraper apartment blocks, nightclubs and restaurants. And you could just walk around it, and explore at your own pace. The Hong Kong section redefined what games were capable of, and it’s everything that’s great about Deus Ex.

The PCG Top 10 panel of judges were:

Andy Mahood (Freelancer, PCG US)
Craig Pearson (News editor, PCG UK)
Dan Stapleton (Reviews editor, PCG US)
Ed Fenning (Freelancer, PCG UK)
Evan Lahti (Senior editor, PCG US)
Graham Smith (Deputy editor, PCG UK)
Jaz McDougall (Freelancer, PCG UK)
John Walker (Freelancer, PCG UK)
Jonathan Cooper (Freelancer, PCG US)
Josh Augustine (Associate editor, PCG US)
Logan Decker (Editor-in-chief, PCG US)
Owen Hill (Web editor, PCG UK)
Richard Cobbett (Freelancer, PCG UK)
Rich McCormick (Staff writer, PCG UK)
Robert Hathorne (Freelancer, PCG US)
Stefan ‘Desslock’ Janicki (Freelancer, PCG US)
Tim Edwards (Editor, PCG UK)
Tim Stone (Freelancer, PCG UK)
Tom Francis (Section editor, PCG UK)
Tom Senior (Freelancer, PCG UK)
Tony Ellis (Production editor, PCG UK)
Tyler Wilde (Freelancer, PCG US).