The best of the best. The 100 games you must play. Our favourites. The greatest. We love lists. We love arranging things in order of excellence. Some might say our entire reason for existing is to attach a declarative number of quality to the hard work of thousands of game developers. On with the show!

100 - IL-2 (2001)
We got really excited when we played IL-2 Sturmovik for the first time purely because we could use our Track-IR head-tracking thingy to glance at the map sewn into our virtual pilot’s knees. And then work out where we were by comparing it to the scenery outside the cockpit.

99 - Mirror’s Edge (2009)
It lets you be an urban ninja, which is reason enough to love it, but it’s the city’s polished dystopia that keeps it so firmly in our minds.

98 - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)
Big, brash, and questionable in its ethics, it should be an easy game to hate. But it’s just so slick, so planned, it demands everlasting, if grudging, respect. Bumping it up to Veteran difficulty and plowing ahead is one of gaming’s great trials of strength.

97 – Anchorhead (1998)
Atmospheric and absorbing, but nevertheless a game with puzzles to solve, this is everything that’s great about interactive fiction.

96 - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005)
Is it the exquisitely designed single-player game, or the hilarious co-op? Screw it: both are great. Outside of Thief, this is the best stealth game ever made.

95 - Jagged Alliance 2 (1999)
Managing your own A-Team of international mercenaries, each with his own specialities and unique personality, makes for some of the best tactical strategy combat this side of the X-COM series.

94 - Dawn of War II (2009)

Space Marines are the finest action figures PC gaming has ever had. DoW2’s cover mechanics and loot/leveling create a fine environment for paper doll play, picking out what jump pack or power sword to put in their hands. The star, though, is the free Last Stand mode, in which you and two friends face increasingly dangerous waves of malevolent beasties. Avoid falling over to get the high-score. It’s that mode, despite being so simple, despite being so cut down, that has hooked us. It is the Dawn of War equivalent of tower defense, and it proves, as ever, that the real-time-strategy game still has places to go, and new mechanics to explore. You should try it.

93 - Far Cry 2 (2008)
Take its idiosyncrasies as a given, relegate the respawning enemies to the back of your mind – you’ll find there’s not much to match the thrill of the best laid plans of mercs and men going awry. Explosively awry!

92 - Audiosurf (2008)
Screensaver, MP3 player, game, giant willy-waving scoreboard. Audiosurf is all of these things mashed together to create something that’s totally its own, and something that really infuriates people who only enjoy music superficially.

91 – Uplink (2001)
All geeks know that hacking doesn’t happen like it does in the movies. Uplink made us believe that it does.
 
90 - Ultima Underworld II (1992)
One of the most important games ever, and as inventive with the Ultima universe as BioWare were with the Star Wars tales. But so antiquated that it’s now very hard to play. It was first-person! You could pick stuff up and throw it! Your armour wore out and then you repaired it! With your repair skill! The sheer verisimilitude of UWII’s little world was like nothing we’d ever seen before, and still impresses.

89 - Rainbow Islands (1987)
Bub and Bob are perennial modern heroes. Rainbow Island is a magical platform game, based around the simplest of urges. Upwards, ever upwards... It’s videogames’ manifest destiny incarnate. You shoot rainbows to destroy bugs and collect fruit. You walk on top of those rainbows to ascend platforms. It’s an incredibly simple game, but the colourful graphics and insanely catchy music just imprinted themselves on our DNA.

88 – Outcast (1999)
It’s the closest the PC has ever came to having a Zelda of its own – grown organically from the first principles of the PC.

87 - King’s Bounty: The Legend (2008)
The best PC-only game of 2008, and yet no one played it. We will hunt down and kill those who didn’t, with our snake-and-bear-and-zombie-and-fairy-and-mad-dwarf-scientist army.

86 - Grand Theft Auto (1997)
It’s incredible how innocent something that was once so controversial now feels. GTA 3 and its sequels are obviously important, but there’s something about GTA 1’s mechanics-above-all approach that makes it the freer, more replayable pedestrian murder simulator.

85 – ZangbandTK (1989)
Rogue-derived games are at the root of so much that’s brilliant in PC gaming. If you’ve had enough of the watered-down cocktails you sip in the mainstream, you should head towards the hard liquor brewed in a bathtub for a real hit. Start with ZangbandTK, because it’s got all the strength and won’t sear your throat as much as the nastier brews.

84 - Tomb Raider II (1997)
The first Tomb Raider dazzled us with its massive escarpments, Jurassic era cameo, and a beautiful, acrobatic and fearless heroine, but it wasn’t until Tomb Raider II that the series hit its stride. That’s when an even more improbably-dimensioned Croft went Indiana Jones on us, jumping a motorboat through the windows of a Venetian bridge and blasting immortal warriors back into pottery shards.

83 - Supreme Commander (2007)
Feels like the most PC strategy game ever – because we’re not just about nerdy stats and squinting at intricate interfaces, we’re about ridiculous ambition, impractical scale and rampant hubris. SupCom exemplifies all five of these things, and does it with amphibian robot death-spiders wielding backmounted gigalasers of hypergenocide.

82 – Solitaire (2001)
A true “retro” classic.

81 - SimCity 2000 (1993)
Cities are staggering, beautiful, things. They’re also bastards. SimCity games always captured the latter, but 2000 is the best at balancing endless frustration with the compulsion to create a more perfect city. It’s also the only one in the series to capture a little bit of that futurism, letting you build arcologies and then prompt a mass exodus into space. More games should end on a mass exodus to space.
   
80 - Gothic 2 (2002)
A spiritual successor of sorts to the Ultima series, Gothic II features a beautifully detailed nonlinear 3D world. NPCs live their own lives, complete with uniquely independent daily schedules, personalities, and… urination?