Games of the decade: Resident Evil 4

The last of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Resident Evil 4

(2005, Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2; 2007, Wii)

In the five-plus years I've been reviewing games, I've given a score of 10/10 on four separate occasions. Two of those were for Resident Evil 4. No, it's not perfect, in the sense that no game ever could be, but in all the ways that matter, it is my idea of a perfect game.

I had been a fan of the Resident Evil games going way back, but by the time I played Zero I felt that the franchise was more than out of gas. I put about three hours into that game and couldn't summon the will to go on. It was impossible to ignore the positive buzz building around the fourth installment, but even so, I went to Best Buy and picked it up because we needed something to review, not because I was expecting anything earth-shaking.

My blase attitude lasted about five minutes, by which time the game's opening sequence fairly well blew it away. There's a little bit of ominous lead-up to the real opening sequence. First Leon is abandoned by the unfriendly local cops, then he encounters a crazy man in a farmhouse, then he sees one of the cops being burned at the stake in the town square. It is all creepy and very well done. But it still doesn't prepare you for the onslaught that comes next.

Years later, my head still spins when I remember that opening shootout. The designers played me like a fiddle. They showed me Leon pushing a bookcase in front of a window, and so I understood that I could use the other furniture to barricade myself in. I felt very pleased with myself, listening to the plagas struggling on the other side of what I presumed to be sturdy, artisanal furniture, and I don't know why I didn't realize that they could break through it until they did.

So I ran upstairs, where I was again surprised by the sight of plagas clambering in through the windows. Here's where the interface came into play: any time Leon was near an interactive object or location, a button popped up letting me know. So I leaped out the window, darted across the courtyard, and climbed a ladder onto a rooftop. The big button appeared, informing me that I could knock the ladder down. "This is too easy!" I thought. I ran to the other side of the roof and kicked down another ladder. "I'll just stand up here and pop them all in the head."

As I turned back around, ready for the turkey shoot, up came the ladder I had just knocked down. That's when I knew this game had me completely. And that's before the chainsaw guy showed up!

The crazy thing, though, is that RE4 never slowed down from there. It raised the stakes at every turn. More impressively, it finagled endless variety out of a streamlined interface and a limited moveset. Leon couldn't do very much: he could run, aim, and shoot, or he could performed those predetermined contextual actions. From this Resident Evil 4 presented one inventive setpiece after another, never repeating itself, and often exploiting the player's own laziness. You beat the first El Gigante, and later the game sics two of them on you. One is easy to dispatch by dropping into a pool of lava, and if you're like me, you're feeling relieved at this point that you know how to kill the second one. Except, oops, now the lava pool is sealed shut.

In the end, that might be what makes Resident Evil 4 so great.* At every stage, Capcom carefully sets your expectations, and then swiftly knocks them down. Playing this game is like going up against a great poker player: he knows exactly what you're holding, and how to fool you into thinking he's holding something else. Except in this case, you're the one winning the jackpot.

*N.B. I've been trying to explain for almost five years what makes Resident Evil 4 so great, and I don't think I've gotten it right yet.

More on Resident Evil 4:

• Teh best game EVAR
• Why Resident Evil 5 isn't scary

Games of the decade: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

(2003, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC)

I can't be sure, but I think Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was the last game I played without the aim of writing about it. There may have been others, but it was right near the end. It was definitely the last game I fell in love with and played repeatedly, content not to rush on to the next big thing (or not so big thing).

A common theme on this list, among the games predating 2004, are games I got for Christmas, because that was the way I got them for the first part of the decade. This was no different. In 2003, I remember seeing TV commercials for two games: this, and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. When either ad came on, I'd comment about wanting to play them, but when Christmastime arrived and my girlfriend handed me a suspiciously game-shaped box, I found myself desperately hoping it would be Prince of Persia and not Castlevania. I'm not sure why. I don't think I'd read any reviews. I'd been a Castlevania fan in the past, especially Super Castlevania IV and Symphony of the Night, but held no particular affinity for anything PoP. Still, when I unwrapped that gift and saw a sword-wielding Prince leaping out at me, I felt relief more than anything.

As I delved into the game, my relief turned quickly to excitement. Sands of Time is nominally similar to Tomb Raider, a franchise I have never liked because of its unforgiving and slow-paced platforming, but it solves every problem that Tomb Raider had, including some I didn't realize existed. The acrobatic Prince performs one impossible stunt after another, and the beauty of the game is that you don't often have to stop and line up your next move exactly right. Using only two buttons, you can wall-run over a gap, then spring onto a bar, flip around it once before leaping to a pole, then shimmy up it and disembark for a perfect landing, all in one smooth and unbroken sequence. Navigating the game's physical space is thrilling. I had never felt such freedom of movement in a game before.

Smarter still is that magical sand. I can't believe it took until 2003 for somebody to come up with the idea to let you rewind upon making a mistake. There's no such thing as a cheap death in this game. Instead, you learn what you've done wrong and can immediately correct it. That doesn't make the game too easy or simplistic. It makes it fun.

The sand is the linchpin of a surprisingly powerful story. From the beginning, the game is cast as a flashback, with the Prince narrating his incredible story to someone whose identity we don't learn until the end. The writing is fantastic, and so is the acting. Yuri Lowenthal, as the Prince, strikes exactly the right note of raffish charm. His sarcastic asides to himself as he progresses through the game are funny, and his gradual acceptance of responsibility for having unleashed the Sands of Time is both believable and affecting.

(Why Lowenthal was replaced in Warrior Within by some generic gravelly voiced dude, I have no idea. Nolan North did all right in last year's Prince of Persia by playing, as he always does, Nolan North, but Lowenthal is the definitive Prince.)

It's the game's finale that pulls the rug out from under you. Throughout the game, the Prince has been slowly developing a relationship with the Princess Farah, at the end of which they are well and truly in love. Standard stuff. Then, after the Prince topples the evil Vizier and rewinds time, back to before the Sands destroyed everything, it's as though they've never met. When we realize that the Prince has been talking to Farah all along, and not to us, it is a perfect storytelling moment: funny, surprising, achingly romantic. I don't remember if Farah falls in love with the Prince after that, but I did.

Games of the decade: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3

(2001, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, GameCube; 2002, Xbox, PC)

I got the PS2 for Christmas of 2001, and with it I received two games I would have given my eyeteeth to play. One was Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the sequel to what, at the time, I would have called a top-five game of all time. The other was a game you may have heard of, Grand Theft Auto III, which at the time seemed like it might topple breathing as the most important thing you'd do all day. Yes, I was excited to play these games. I was ready to spend my semester break obsessing over them.

I had also gotten a Best Buy gift certificate, and picked up this Tony Hawk thing I'd heard was good, because I thought it would be nice to have a casual game I could use to cool down between intense MGS and GTA sessions. You can guess where this is going.

Neither Metal Gear Solid 2 nor Grand Theft Auto III is on this list. The former, because it was a big sloppy mess -- and, yes, I will be the fanboy who's still upset that you spend 90% of the game not playing as Snake. Beyond that, the storyline seemed to invalidate everything I had done in the original game, which I took as a personal insult, and which had the unfortunate consequence of making me like that game a little less, too. GTA was great, fantastic, and I admire it for many reasons, but ultimately it's not a game I connected with on a gut level, as with the rest of the games on this list.

So how did it go with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3? Well, within days of having bought it, I was playing all-night sessions that passed in the blink of an eye. I remember well that I had to leave to go to Maine for New Year's around 10 in the morning. Close to 2 AM, I started thinking about turning the system off, after I got one more high score. At about 9:30, I finally turned it off, not by choice, but because my ride was en route.

Games just don't get more addictive than this. It's rare that something which succeeds as pure gameplay breaks through to me -- usually I need some underlying reason to be doing what I'm doing -- but when it does, it's all-consuming. Improving at this game was secondary to the fun of simply playing it. Grinding rails, getting air, even just a simple invert to manual -- it all feels just right. It's sad to see what the franchise has become, grasping at lame gimmicks while the more sim-like Skate series blows right past it. We're missing something this arcade-like, this silly, and this expertly produced. It's ironic that today I think of Neversoft as the company that ruined Guitar Hero, because in its way THPS3 is every bit as compelling.

It was also the scene of one of my greatest triumphs in gaming, better than the 89-second Expert clearance in Minesweeper, and almost as good as beating Contra without dying. In the airport level, I eventually was able to start a combo right at the start of the board, with an ollie onto a ticket counter, and keep it going with a variety of grinds and manuals down the escalators, through the metal detectors, and into the baggage claim, where I did a special grind on the carousel over 24 times, for a total score well in the millions. I'm sure in the scheme of things this is not so impressive, but at the time I felt like the kid in The Wizard.

Games of the decade: Metroid Prime

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Metroid Prime

(2002, Nintendo GameCube)

Depending on how you want to look at it, I've either played through Metroid Prime twice, or I haven't played through it at all. See, twice I played a borrowed copy all the way through to the climactic battle against the Metroid Prime itself. Both times, circumstances intervened to prevent me from beating it. Yet I can't imagine having been more satisfied with the game, even if I had polished off that boss.

The first time I played it was due to pure charity. A kid in my dorm had hooked up his GameCube in the common room, and decided to leave it there so others could enjoy. I took full advantage of this. Frankly, it probably bugged him that every time he came in to play, I was in there, usually on the ass end of a several-hour play session, and well deeper into the game than he was. But he was nice about it, probably because he was a freshman and I was a senior and that was the natural order of things, dammit.

Besides, it was hard not to play Metroid Prime at every available opportunity. Super Metroid is one of my top two games of all time, and when I played Prime I thought that I'd never played such a skillful 3D translation of a sidescroller. Everything that made Super Metroid great, Prime did, too. The powerups, the exploration, the sense of delving deeper and deeper into an actual, physical location -- they were all there. You get a real sense of adventure playing Metroid Prime, not just the thrill of action. Samus is a swashbuckler.

And it was more than that. The difficulty was exactly as I remembered it, with most enemies merely giving you something to do on your travels, while bosses were huge, imposing, and tough without seeming cheap. The developers at Retro Studios made the morph ball even more fun than it had been in the slower, 16-bit era. Lock-on targeting did away with some of the more frustrating aspects of console first-person shooters, and did so in a way that made complete sense within the story, and within series tradition. Graphically, the game was stunning, even at a time when the GameCube was earning a reputation for being less powerful than the PS2 and Xbox (this would be a recurring, and unfair, accusation).

So why didn't I finish it? Because some douchebag stole the GameCube out of the common room. This was probably the most important lesson the freshman victim would learn at college: never do anything nice for anybody, ever.

The second, less interesting time I failed to get through Metroid Prime, I needed to give it back to the person who loaned it to me because semester break was over. I know, that's not exciting at all. But the game was just as good the second time! And surely I didn't miss anything by not technically beating it, right?

...right?