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Gaming: My Top Ten
I'd like to state for the record that, in general, I don't have a favourite anything. Not a favourite book, or film, or piece of music, or anything else. Aside from the minor issue of cutting down a few hundred things I like to just one, any answer will change with time, mood etc. Even putting together a top ten is usually fraught with difficulty: a few a easy, but then you have a huge lump of ones that you like enough to think deserve a place, but it's too hard to pick between them. Later on I will list things that I like in other art forms (and I'm one of those who are happy to call video games an art form), but I certainly don't plan to do them to a strict number.
But when listing my Top Ten games I have a more objective tool that I can use: I'm going to place the list in roughly the order of decreasing time spent playing that game. It will be veryroughly in time order though: I really haven't counted up. Steam keeps a track of how long I have played games linked through them, and a couple of games put total times on things like saved games, but where I've played through many times I'm not going to add them up. It turns out that nine out of ten were easy, and then it just became a fight for the last place. There was one cheat though: in general I treat sequels as a different game, but in case I've lumped them together. But anyway, below are ten games I've played the most, with some thoughts on why I play them.
Update 07 August 2021: since I originally wrote this, Fallout 4 came out, and moved to the number two spot. And Skyrim has moved from number six to number three.
Nethack
Fallout 4
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Diablo 2
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Sacred 2
Fallout 3
Dungeon Keeper
Unreal Tournament
I'll talk about the also-rans elsewhere.