This was tough.

2016 had so, so many stellar games that almost any list would essentially leave out a few favorites. However, we combed through our personal gaming archives, had several heated discussions over email and in person, swapped a lot of skeptical hippo memes and finally managed to narrow it down to a select few candidates.

Aside from my first console and first computer, falling a console generation behind in the mid-nineties was the best thing that ever happened to me as a gamer.  In the early nineties, I missed the fourth generation of consoles (SNES, Sega Genesis, etc.) completely while getting into PC gaming (I played on my friends’ systems but never owned one).

Video games are primarily a visual medium—it’s right there in the word itself. But of course they’re more than that, too. There’s the interactivity, of course, and the sound design can really improve or drag down a game…and then there’s reading.