Moving on! Not long to go now!
7. Psychonauts (2005)The insanity that is The Milkman Conspiracy, probably the best designed level in the game.If there is one person in the gaming world that has not been involved with a weak game yet (some are better than others, sure, but none are bad), it's Tim Schafer, co-creator of the Monkey Island series and known for other awesome games like
Grim Fandango or
Day of the Tentacle. This game further proves that rule - it's amazing. It's a platformer, but oh man the design is frickin' glorious. You play as Raz, as young boy aspiring to become a Psychonaut, someone who can enter people's minds and psyches to obtain information, manipulate them or free them from their personal demons. Throughout the game, you explore a series of real world settings and mental settings, and while the real world doesn't really offer that much variety, that's more than made up for by the mental worlds, which are about as different as they could possibly be. Some of these worlds include the explosion-happy armed-to-the-teeth mind of a former soldier, the Spanish alleyways of a painter possessed by bullfights or the M. C. Escher-esque landscapes of The Milkman Conspiracy, set in the head of a paranoid asylum guard. Along the way, you gain various psychic abilities, ranging from Invisibility to Telekinesis to Psi-Blast, which you can use to attack pretty much everything. Add to that a fairly interesting plot with some nice twists and turns, great characters and some awesome humour, and you have a winning combination that just might be my favourite of all Tim Schafer games.
6. TRON 2.0 (2003)TRON was a fairly awesome movie from 1982, about a guy that gets digitalised into the inside of a computer and fights viruses and stuff there. In 2003, we got an awesome sequel in form of a video game, creatively titled
TRON 2.0, which the most recent TRON Legacy promptly discounts as canon.
Anyway, that game sucked and this one doesn't, so I don't care much. Back on topic, this game is cool. It's a fairly straight-forward first person shooter with some platforming elements thrown in, but again, the environment is crafted so expertly that I just don't give a fuck about that. It all takes place within the digital world, and there are so many cool things that represent digital processes in a creative way (viruses corrupt you, security programs try to kill you if you don't have the correct identification, you need proper authorisation for pretty much anything) - basically, what makes this game so entertaining is that everything that you come across is explained by a counterpart in the digital world, and most of it actually makes a lot of sense. The graphics are a little outdated, but due to the way that they are presented, much like in XIII, that doesn't really matter at all. Plus, you have the light racers here that were made famous in the movie and that returned in TRON Legacy, and they're one of the few obligatory mini-games within a game that I don't despise, which is another plus.