Quake 2

Opinions! We have a lot of 'em, but in this edition of PC Gamer's Playlist, we've somehow managed to distill our complex views on the big subject of classic shooters into a list of just five of our favorites. Note that our choices aren't based on some all-encompassing algorithm which weighs historical context, impact on the industry, and public consensus—these are the much-debated personal opinions of each editor, and we've focused on choosing titles which we still want to (and do) play today...

One of the challenges of an action game is creating a villain that you, the player, will want to destroy. Some games, like Killzone 3, end up crafting bad guys so cool and awesome, you're rooting for them instead of the so-called heroes. Then there are games that just get it right, making an entire army of bastards you just want to punch in the face.

Thanks to a mixture of visual design, atmosphere and writing, some games go beyond even that, and are able to craft an entire race of enemies that are simply despicable to behold. They're ugly, they're disgusting, and they garner absolutely zero sympathy. Those are the truly successful baddies in videogames, and now we rightly pay tribute...

Now that the veneer of freshness is drying off of our copies of Modern Warfare 2, we can fully devote ourselves to complaining about the lack of dedicated servers, and just how much the maps suck because our piss poor ranking certainly isn’t due to a lack of practice and the statistical disadvantage of playing against millions of people, no! Which got us thinking: What multiplayer maps reign over all others?

Seeing as it took almost 40 years for movies to learn how to talk, gaming hasn’t exactly shuffled its feet. It hasn’t even been 40 years since Computer Space became the first commercial game, and what began as little more than dandruff on a black screen is already threatening photo-, audio- and physical realism.