Silent Hill 2 -
This is one of those rare games where absolutely everything about it, most especially the parts that shouldn't work but somehow do anyways, come together to form an amazing whole. Take any one of it's parts except the atmosphere on it's own and it doesn't really stand up. But put them all together in this package and everything fits into the greatest game of all time.
Portal -
What makes Portal amazing isn't just the the ingenious puzzle design, or the brilliant writing. It's the extraordinarily subtle narrative it weaves. Gamers on a whole are very willing to accept the reality that any given game presents, Portal presented us with a series of random test chambers and a funny narrator and we never looked past that. It wasn't until the final third that the walls came off and we realized, this wasn't some abstract esoteric puzzle. This was a place in a world (Half Life's world to be exact). Imagine if Tetris had pulled a stunt like that, or Bejeweled?
Mass Effect 2 -
There's not a lot I would change about this game given the chance. Yes, occasionally the writing could use a bit of polish, and the Paragon/Renegade system desperately needs to be thrown out an airlock, but compare those to everything the game get's right and ME2 still blazes ahead of the pack. Having never been a fan of heavily number based RPGs, I thought the simplification of the leveling allowed the game to focus on it's original strengths of character interaction and storytelling. And the revamped combat makes it a surprisingly effective tactical-shooter in it's own right. Add on the top-notch voice acting and beautiful art style, and you're left with the definitive space epic.
Splinter Cell: Conviction -
Chaos Theory remains the fan-favorite of the series, and for good reason. To this day it stands probably as the king of the stealth-action genre with it's tight design and wide array of options. So why does Conviction make the list instead? Simple: the story. Though the actual conspiracy driving the game's events is cliche and contrived, it's a mistake to think that it's the actual story the game is trying to tell. The real heart is Sam Fisher's struggle to find his daughter, and this simple tale is told with more emotional deftness then most games ever get the chance to exhibit. Sam is angry, and with the solid writing and Michael Ironside's always excellent performance, you feel it more clearly then perhaps any other emotion a game has ever tried to portray. This anger comes to a head in one of the most astounding moments of telling story purely through gameplay I've ever encountered. Combine that with the flawless presentation, and you get one of the most stylish and emotional experiences you can play.
Assassin's Creed -
There were a lot of things that nearly made this spot, but in the end this was the only choice. It was even harder to give the title to only one game in the series; between the near flawless gameplay of 2, the small but important refinements and sheer beauty of Brotherhood, to the unparallelled originality of 1. In the end, 1 won out. You see, beyond the art direction, gameplay, writing and dense conspiracy, AC still ranks as one of my favorite games ever for one reason: high concept sci-fi. Described by MovieBob as "Dreaming up some fantastical technology, showing us how it works, and then showing us how it all goes horribly wrong." This kind of old-school sci-fi is hardly ever seen in gaming, except here. Not only is the Animus a fascinating idea, but it forces us to confront the fact that, even though finding bizarre tangled web of lies and secrets stretching back across the whole of human history is highly unlikely, if we could peer into the past like that it would probably look very different then we've been told. And with the it's complicated morality and left field reversal right at the end, AC1 stands in a unique place among the storytelling circle. It's not the best, but there really is nothing else like it.
