Control, the horizon games and stardew valley.

• Diablo II
• Chrono Trigger
• Halo 3

I don't get to play games much nowadays but I was a rank 50 lone wolf back in the day. Good times.

Factorio, Anno 1602, Civ 3

Easy choices for me, but I don’t know how to order them.

Anno 1800 gets an honourable mention for feeling like a great spiritual successor to 1602, but I have a ton of nostalgia for the first game.

• Left 4 Dead 2 - for the awesome vs teamplay
• The Last of Us (remake) 1+2 - stunningly gorgeous, emotional heavy hitter
• Disco Elysium - art, literature, as a game

edit: I forgot Guitar Hero / Clone Hero was a game not a 'standard hobby', I play e-drums on that daily still..

1. Jagged Alliance 2
2. Unreal Tournament
3. Fistful of Frags

Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Kingdom Hearts 2, Jak 3

Riven, Shadow of the Colossus, and Guilty Gear Strive.

(in no particular order)

Really hard to have any real favorite. But the games I've played the most in my life:

Super Mario Bros (NES)

Diablo Franchise

Destiny 2

• STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl
• EuroTruck Simulator 2
• Battlefield 2

Honorable mentions: EvE Online, Mount and Blade Warband, XCOM Enemy Unknown, Helldivers 2, Disco Elysium, Mini Metro, Tactical Breach Wizards

1. rock band 3, spent multiple summers playing this all day long

2. skyrim, still play it every year for like 3 months straight. its insane

3. borderlands the pre sequel. i honestly prefer this one over any other borderlands game

Master of Orion 2
Lords of the Realm 2
Caesar 3

1. Mafia 1 from 2002, that game really shaped my taste in games when I was a kid
2. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Essentially a perfect video game from start to finish IMO.
3. Alan Wake 1 or 2, genuinely hard to pick one.

Metal Gear Solid 3, Subnautica, Papers Please.

I love the Metal Gear series but the Cold War setting of 3 works so well with the theme of the game. It also features crab battles and the ladder boss.

Subnautica really captures the feeling of being lost in some alien world and slowly making it your new home. The electronic voice assistant manages to send chills up your spine with lines like "oxygen."

Papers, Please explores complex moral decisions in such a simple way. I wish to live my life more like Jorji.

3 is really tough, but I'll say:

1. Hollow Knight
2. Noita
3. Super Metroid

Other GOATs of mine are already mentioned by others. Y'all have impeccable taste

1. Cyberpunk 2077, just by hours played and number of replays.

2. The Horizon games. I just adore the world and Aloy.

3. Great Gianna Sisters for hours played and the music.

I also loved the Portal games, they might be a contender for third place.

It's hard to tell because I have played a lot of games but that comes to mind immediately right now. I would say:

1. Red Dead Redemption 2.
2. Garry's Mod.
3. Titanfall 2.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that I absolutely fell in love with and it's one that I regularly go back to just lose myself in and still find new things in it. Arthur Morgan might just be my favorite protagonist of anything ever. It's still one of the best looking games ever made. The game looks like a painting. And you know they did something truly special when they managed to make my ADHD ass enjoy just walking in a game without running.

Gary's Mod is an odd pick for me because I almost thought about leaving it out because I cannot like don't see it as a game. I have thousands of hours on it and most of my time has been spent exploring empty maps. It's more of a tool of relaxation for me than anything else but it's deeply meaningful to me. If I had to summarize it, I would say that the Source engine is my home.

Titanfall 2 is simply the best FPS I've ever played. Both multiplayer and solo. It's amazing. I have spent weekends just playing the main campaign on max difficulty on loop without ever getting bored and the multiplayer was fucking fantastic.

Street Fighter II for getting me into fighting games. While I don't play that version anymore it is a favorite because of how much I did play it and later fighting games.

Valheim - hundreds of hours of enjoyment from the first moment I was dropped into the world by a giant crow. So much fun time with friends, building stuff, and just exploring. Such a well done game with fantastic lighting, sound, and things to do. Only long tine gripe is fighting on slopes!

Helldivers 2 - yeah, another more recent game but it is also just the exact thing I am looking for in a mutiplayer game with friends. Nearly everything is viable in most difficulties, the game has mechanics for accidental team kills, the setting evolves, but in a way that encourages participation in scheduled events without forcing it, and the devs have listened when the player base pushes back on changes that don't mesh with the tone of the game.

Enjoyed a lot of other games too, but those are ones that hit specific things that I love and enjoyable to replay over and over and over and over...

• Halo 2
• TLoZ:OoT
• Half Life

I can't deny that nostalgia has to do with the first two fossils in the list, though I still maintain that I like them more than their latest counterparts in their franchises.
Not Half Life though: it was ~15 years old when I first played it, no nostalgia there.

Still, between the many games I would gladly build a monument to, those are games that I can play beginning to end without getting bored, annoyed or burnt out (as long as you allow me to use the Ship Of Harkinian randomizer for Z:OoT, otherwise replace that game with Perfect Dark ig).

1. Jump Ultimate Stars, this is the dream game for any Otaku, the fact that we can still play it in 2025 thanks to custom servers is a blessing.

2. God Of War 2018, I was having a bad streak gaming related due to personal and work life, but when this game was released I got it immediately, something that I rarely do (patient gamer gang), anyway, this game kept me awake late nights, I know this is not something that one should brag about, but I was enjoying it completely thus the nights felt that happened too quickly.

3. Toy Story 2, this game will never age for me, I honestly don't know if it should deserve this spot, but if there is a game that I have replayed the most in my life, this would be it, the platform mechanics and graphics are top notch for me (and hey, PS1 graphics are making a comeback, so no shame at all with that style).

Maybe another game deserves that last spot, but those 3 games were the 1st ones that came to my mind.

Honorable mentions:

Mario Kart DS

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Trilogy

Hotel Dusk & The Last Window (can you guess my favorite console by this point?)

Pokémon Soul Silver

TWEWY

Time Hollow

All the other God of War games (even Ascension)

Batman Arkham saga (even Origins)

The Witcher 3

Xenoblade

And a bunch others that would make this list absurdly big, which is not the main point of this post.

• Starcraft II
• Mount & Blade: Warband
• Heroes of Might & Magic III

Honorable mentions

• Anno 1404
• Far Cry 2
• Witcher 3
• Tropico 4
• Factorio

1. Skullgirls - Simply the best fighting game ever made. There's so much depth in a comparatively small roster that I could basically never get bored or see every viable strategy in it.
2. Baldur's Gate 3 - Tried and true RPG mechanics combined with the best version yet of Larian's engine that encourages free form problem solving. And on top of that, they managed best in class presentation in NPC dialogue and had some of the best writing in the genre. This will be a tough act to follow, especially since I don't think their last two Original Sin RPG systems were anywhere near as good as D&D 5e.
3. Elden Ring - It's been a great couple of years for two of my favorite games of all time to come out within a year and a half of each other, but this is another one of those games where there's just so much to see and so many ways to solve the problem in front of you. Pattern recognition for where to find your next reward is up to you; your next goal is up to you; how you conquer the bad guy in front of you is up to you.

All three of these games just respect your intelligence and are composed of systems deep enough to give you countless ways to solve their challenges.

Morrowind - the first game that let me leave the path. It completely changed RPGs for me, and I loved it.

Solasta - this game captured the D&D feeling like no other game has. My wife and I have spent hundreds of hours playing this together.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard - this game touched me emotionally, more than any game before it. The whole 3rd act is an emotional rollercoaster. Plus it has one of my favorite action sequences ever, in The Siege of Weisshaupt.

1. Skyrim
2. Minecraft
3. Destiny 2

Doom Crosscode Cave Story

• Link to the Past
• Super Mario Bros 3
• GTA 4

I took into account the impact at the time of release as well as the timelessness of the games.