11 Games That Made Us Think

Few games make us stare at the ceiling reconsidering our role in the universe. These are those few.

11. Missile Command

Not the last nuclear war-related game on this list, Missile Command deserves serious respect for being the most fun interactive political cartoon ever. As with many arcade games of its day, Missile Command is impossible to beat; you just keep playing until you die. But unlike other arcade games with abstract subjects or cartoon characters, Missile Command dealt with the inevitable destruction of the world in a nuclear war. No matter how many quarters you pour into your defenses, when the missiles fly, you will die.

10. Final Fantasy 7

Stop rolling your eyes. While it's easy to see Final Fantasy 7 as a cornball melodrama in retrospect, it was one of the first game to get its players so involved with the story that they were angry when a character was taken from them. Aeris's death hurt gamers so bad they demanded a way to bring her back. Interactive media had reached a point at which it could make us mourn.

9. The Sims

Long ago, the term "God Game" was a little obtuse. It essentially meant you controlled a world. Great. But with The Sims, you finally felt like you actually had an affect on human lives. You saw them laugh, you saw them cry, and you caused it. Some players tortured children. Some players recreated lost family members. Some just watched, letting their Sims live their lives. And almost everyone had the same shocking realization: this is what I'd do if I had ultimate power.

8. SpyParty

Hundreds of video games try to make their A.I. bots play like a human. But only one game asks their human players to pretend to be an A.I. bot. What makes a human player human? Is it our mistakes? Our inability to be truly random? Or our pursuit of set goals? And how do we identify that humanity in others? A lot of questions from a simple game that often ends with the Spy asking, "How did you know it was me?"

7. BioShock

Three words that changed how gamers saw their medium: "Would you kindly?" What sounds like polite prodding from an NPC turns out to be the driving force behind every interactive moment in the game. But how is that any different from the way all video game designers trick players into doing what they want? Mind blown.

6. Ultima 4

Ultima 4 suffers from the common video game ailment of influencing everything that came after it and looking stale as a result. But in 1985, video game heroes were heroes. They were good people who did good deeds. Not in Ultima 4. At the start of the game, you were asked hard questions with harder answers. Maybe you were brave, but you weren't very humble. Or you were willing to lie to help someone in need. Ultima 4 was the first game to have a serious morality system and therefore forced players to ask: what makes someone a good person?

5. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Like Bioshock, Majora's Mask forced players to question the act of gaming. Is Link a hero if he's just helping these people to return himself to normal? Because all those good deeds? They disappear when the clock goes to Day 1. The lost couple isn't reunited. The condemned monkey isn't saved. The man in the photo booth doesn't find his strange, lost son. Nothing. How much good are good deeds worth if they only succeed in helping us reach our own selfish goals? And are we really heroes if we're only saving the kingdom for our own entertainment?

4. DEFCON: Everybody Dies

Title aside, you can win in DEFCON - after being told how many people you've killed. Every one of your bombs that score a hit is matched with a number of people dead. 2 million. 3 million. 15 million. People. Not aliens or Nazis or zombies - people. DEFCON is the other side of the Missile Command coin ? even if you could win a nuclear war, why would you want to?

3. Braid

Braid isn't as hard to understand as people think ? it's just so incomprehensibly sad that players wish they could make it go away. Like many games on this list, it forces the player to consider their role in a bad situation that can only be prevented by not playing. But Braid takes it a step further by directly integrating the time-reversal game play into the tragedy of the metanarrative itself.

Put another way, your character can reverse time to solve his problems, but he can't reverse time to solve his problem.

2. Planescape: Torment

When you're talking to someone, trying to pick a lock, or attempting to repair your weapon, make sure you have the right set of clothes equipped. Some clothing might have a low armor trait, but could have a +5 Barter stat, allowing you to receive a lower price when talking to vendors at supply locations. Others could have a +5 to Repair, helping you maintain your armor and weapons. Just make sure these clothes are equipped before you carry out these actions, as these special garments can help you out a lot in the early in the game.

1. Shadow of the Colossus

Of course this is number 1.

Shadow of the Colossus isn't only beautiful, it's a treatise on the tragedy of the video game. Everything that makes games interesting ? enemies, stage design, narrative ? is only there to be ?beat.? You have to kill an enemy to appreciate his challenge. You have to make the traps in a stage useless to appreciate their design. You must remove the mystery of a world to appreciate its mystery. Otherwise you're "stuck."

Shadow of the Colossus isn't just sad because you're ultimately the villain. It's sad because it showed us that, even when you're the brightest of heroes, your main goal in a game will always be to make the world less special.

Whoa.

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