alexriviello

Guiding another poor sucker through the foggy world of Silent Hill seems a bit familiar, but the second installment is smarter and much better looking, and delves deeper into the backstory of this cursed town. Pyramid Head was introduced here, just one of the many horrors you'll face in this genuinely scary game...

An ode to hip-hop culture in a way only the Japanese could pull off, Jet Grind Radio was one of the best reasons to own a Dreamcast. Riding around on in-line skates (do kids still use those?), tagging graffiti on the walls while avoiding rival gangs and cops and blasting hip-hop and J-Pop...

Ken "Bioshock" Levine's first step into horror was incredibly successful. A first-person shooter mashed together with role playing elements, the game follows a storyline heavily influenced by classic horror and sci-fi flicks. You play a soldier who awakens in a spaceship cryotube with no knowlege of what's happening, only to find out that aliens have infested the ship and all the crewmat

It's not often that a game can be incredibly difficult yet still attract people's attention but that was one of the selling points of both Demon's Souls and its superior follow-up, Dark Souls. In an age when gamers are now handed infinite lives and checkpoints to save their progress, the idea that a would wipe away all your progress with one enemy kill seemed downright cruel...

Maybe the best proof that the iOS needs to be taken seriously as a gaming platform, Chair entertainment and Epic Games' stunning Infinity Blade II holds its own among any other action/adventure games. Cleverly utilizing the touch screen for fights makes for the most cinematic combat around...

Fez is everything a modern platformer should be. At first appearing to be a simple, straightfoward and cutesy little game, you soon find a magic hat that lets you rotate the entire world 90 degrees on its axis, allowing for new kinds of movement and ways to explore the world...

All hail the Sega Saturn! Treasure's sidescroller is one of the best beat 'em ups ever made. You're given a cast of characters to choose from, each of which can level up and learn new moves. The best feature is that you can fight along three planes of battle...

Jump button? Who needs a jump button? A near-perfect remake of the classic game, it does absolutely everything right in adapting the game for current generations to play. Much like the original, players use their expandable bionic arm to swing around like Tarzan...

Perhaps the true evolution of point and click adventures, Heavy Rain might be the most cinematic game yet made. It effortlessly weaves together a story with four playable characters, each of which are tied to a serial killer in some way and are trying to stop him...

One of the first successful beat 'em ups ever made, the Arcade version of Double Dragon still holds up as one of the best. Twin brothers Billy Lee and Jimmy influenced competitors for years and years before beating the hell out of them with their combined might, the quest to find their true love Marian stronger than anything or anyone...

Naaa na-na na na na na-na na na na na-na... Katamari Damacy shouldn't exist here. It's too weird, too cutesy, too Japanese for American audiences to get. But get it we did, and we ate up so much of it that Namco had no qualms publishing the many sequels over here too...

While it's not Capcom's most famous fighting franchise, the "Versus" series always felt more fun. Much more ridiculous and combo-heavy than Street Fighter, the series emphasized over-powered superheroes and villains in match-ups that you could previously only dream of...

Ghosts'n Goblins is notoriously difficult. You can only take two hits of damage -- the first leaving you in heart-patterned underwear -- before dying and restarting the level. Actually beat the game and you get to replay the whole thing again...

To war! Dragon Force offers massive, 200-troop battles in the vein of every great fantasy war movie. Each general has different troops under his or her command and you can choose everything from monks and samurai to zombies and harpies...

The Advance Wars series is one of the finest turn-based strategy games of recent years. This version would be considered better than the previous games if only for the touch controls, which make selecting units that much easier. But add in a lengthy campaign, the ability to use two commanding officers at once, new units and smart usage of the DS's second screen (that's used to display valuable uni

Team-based multiplayer doesn't get any better than Team Fortress 2, Valve's incredible series. The cartoon-y look helped with the game's great sense of humor and to distinguish it from all the other shooters out there. Just trying out each of the nine unique classes will suck up hours of your time, but getting good at one of them will take days...

The Contra series has several great installments- from the Arcade to the Genesis and even the DS had worthy titles- but we chose Contra III for the SNES. This time around, the aliens have arrived, and Earth is at stake. The graphics are great, the weapons system are improved over other versions and there are even stages where players ride motorcycles and even missiles...

It's difficult to think of another series that's so crushingly stupid yet imminently playable than Gears of War. Skip the laughable and melodramatic cutscenes and you'll find a fantastic third person shooter, one that's only made better when you're playing with three friends...

The sequel to Maniac Mansion is hilarious but  and how could it not be? Day of the Tentacle features a sentient purple tentacle (named -- surprise, surprise -- Purple Tentacle) who drinks toxic waste from a river behind the lab he was created, accidentally gaining arms and increased intelligence...

Sorry, Fallout 3 fans. As good as Bethesda's installment is, the second still wears the (rusty, half-broken, studded with bottle caps) crown. The finest post-apocalyptic game ever, it's technically not that far removed from the original classic...