Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) | Phalanx
The melancholy beauty of Shadow of the Colossus makes all 16 'levels' a compelling experience, but its the 13th beast - the Phalanx - that leaves the biggest impression. The Phalanx erupts from the desert and soars gracefully overhead, but never once makes a hostile move toward your character. So you fill its poor belly with arrows and give it the old stabby-stabby. Nice.
Mounting the colossus is great fun in itself. Once you've peppered the airbags beneath this lazy mammoth and brought it closer to the ground, you spur your horse Agro into a high-speed sprint beside the monster's wings, before standing up on Agro's back and leaping onto the colossus in one fluid movement. We even purposefully jumped off again, we loved getting back on to the beast so much.
And, once you've struggled up to the monster's furry spine and stuck it in the hurty place a few times, the Phalanx takes you on a aerial rollercoaster ride, spinning and corkscrewing in mid-air as you cling on for dear life. The views are amazing and the sensation is so dizzying we feel a little green just remembering it all. If only we didn't have to murder the ruddy thing!
Silent Hill 2 (PS2, Xbox, PC) | The Silent Hill Historical Society
SH's most disturbing moments come when you're not fighting nameless horrors in the dark. James Sunderland's descent into the town's subterranean depths through the Silent Hill Historical Society is an overwhelmingly ominous example, and while there's plenty of action it's the quiet moments that really hold atmospheric power.
First, a series of shudder-worthy paintings plant mental seeds of nightmares. Then, a startlingly long staircase leads down, down into the gloom, leaving you with no company but your own imagination, by now peppered with distressing memories and thoughts, for over a minute. James climbs ever deeper beneath Silent Hill during this section and every leap into pitch blackness, every step downwards is accompanied by the sensation that there's now absolutely no way of getting back to the surface.
In this section Silent Hill's fondness for psychological metaphors is at its most glaring. Your continuing descent is a plunge into James' monstrously dark past, exposing and battling the literal demons that he hides beneath the surface of his conscious mind. Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way is that being underground for so long, and being forced to go always deeper, really screws with our heads in the best possible way.
SSX3 (PS2) | The Back Country
You coast effortlessly over the shimmering, pristine snow. You gently ebb and bob with every playful undulation of the mountain. Your ears are awash with gently pulsing electronica or simply the soft rush of air and the distant call of birds. In every way you are at one with your surroundings.
Then the whole world drops away, and in a breathtakingly serene moment you are suspended, looking down at the universe’s finest-crafted snowglobe as infinite beauty and potential adventure rolls out silently as far as your eyes can see. Simultaneously flying, floating and falling, you return to Earth to soak it all up, and the meditatory adrenalin rush begins once again.
StarCraft (PC) | New Gettysburg
The second-to-last mission in the original StarCraft's Terran campaign gives you a strange directive: while you're supposed to wipe out every trace of the hyper-advanced Protoss aliens, you're specifically ordered not to bother the swarming, bestial Zerg situated right near your base. What happens once you carry out those orders affected us in a way we never knew a real-time strategy game could. Once the last Protoss is dead, a massive wave of Zerg sweeps across the screen, obliterating everything you've built in a matter of seconds. Making matters worse, one of the main characters - Sarah Kerrigan, a psychic Ghost operative you've gotten to know over the last nine missions - gets caught in the destruction and is apparently devoured by the Zerg horde. And it only happened because your boss wanted to weed out anyone who might be a threat to his power.
Of course, StarCraft fans know what really happened to Kerrigan, and why it's integral to the rest of the game's plot - but that's perhaps a story for another article (or, you know, Wikipedia). In the meantime, though, you can see the crushing horde being stopped in its tracks by one determined player who probably cheated like hell to put all that hardware at his disposal.
Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (PC) | The Falling Ship
This was the first Star Wars shooter to hand you a lightsaber and enable dueling in the first person perspective. And yet, amazingly, that was wasn't even the coolest thing about Jedi Knight.
What could possibly be better? Racing through a ginormous, exploding, collapsing space ship as it plummets through the atmosphere and crashes toward the surface below. Dodging through tunnels, fighting past droids and evading terrorized crew as the entire environment spins around you, the walls becoming ceilings and the ceilings transforming into floors.
Lightsabers were expected. The Falling Ship was an ingenious surprise.
Stretch Panic/Freak Out (PS2) | First level
Most games on this list are here because they’re good, if not great – not so with this surreal actioner, which really kinda sucks. But you’ve got to try it simply because there’s no other game that looks or plays anything like it. And there probably never will be.
You play Linda, a little girl with a whole herd of obnoxious, vain sisters. One day, your sisters are all turned into bizarro cartoon caricatures of the thing they were most interested in. So, one who loved her own face now looks like a Mr Potato Head, and the ones who were into big boobs now have yabos like weather balloons. You got off easy and just bonded with a demonic scarf that grabs things. See a door you want to open? Use the right stick of your controller to guide your scarf’s “hand” and open it. Wanna damage a boss? Grab it, pull back (everything is stretchy, like a rubber band) and let go, and the resulting snap back will mess her up. This combination of one-of-a-kind gameplay and psychotic art design creates an experience you’ll enjoy just for its uniqueness, if not for its great gameplay.
Super R-Type (SNES, Virtual Console) | Giant ship level
Old-school shooters were all about odds - one against a million, usually. But R-Type turned the tables every so often, pitting your one ship against one enemy. The catch? That one enemy was actually the entire level, a capital ship that filled multiple screens and required several passes to destroy. Any given R-Type will deliver, even the arcade original, but we chose the SNES version for its less-annoying sound effects. It's one thing to stop wave after wave of flimsy fighters; it's quite another to successfully obliterate a shadow-casting hunk of space metal.
Tenchu: Stealth Assassins (PS1) | Mission 1: Punish the Evil Merchant
While the original Tenchu was a pretty cool game for its time - being the first to introduce us to realistic ninja stealth action - we never had quite as much fun with it as we did in its first level. The objective was simple: quietly infiltrate the rich merchant Echigoya's castle-like compound, track the fat bastard down and stab him in the throat. But the compound was big, pretty, open to exploration and filled with dark spots to hide in, and we were free to tackle it however we liked. Granted, that almost always involved sprinting across its rooftops and zipping around on a grapple line, but we were also free to creep through its buildings and alleyways, dodging or stealth-killing Echigoya's idiot guards - or just fighting them head-on, if we were feeling suicidal.
Pre-Metal Gear Solid, this was unlike anything we'd ever done before in a game, and it was incredible. Compound that with Tenchu's uniquely moody music and the satisfaction of killing Echigoya himself - a fat, vile, gun-toting slob who's chasing a terrified woman around when you confront him - and not even the game's prototypical pirate vs ninja level could keep us from coming back to this one over and over again.
