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Top 20 Videogames of the Past Decade #18

18. The Madden NFL series. (Just about every platform, period)

Love it or hate it, there is no sports videogame that rivals it. Arguing against it is like arguing against using floor tiles in a kitchen: pointless. Hands down, it is the biggest money-making sports videogame in the world.

The biggest bump in the road came a few years ago, when EA announced it had secured exclusive rights to the NFL, NFLPA and NFLCA licensing. This, in effect, drove alternate NFL games like Sega/2K Games’ football game pretty much out of the running.

The big argument has been that without competitors, EA would slack on game innovation. That has not been the case, and in fact Madden NFL ’10 has seen a changing of the guard on the development team, including a re-emphasis on producing a serious, realistic simulation of football, rather than a pinball scoring-machine style of play where the game has typically fallen down, due to the inclusion of so-called “magic plays” that almost always work.

With plenty of innovation each year, the Madden franchise has proven that their biggest competition is… every other videogame out there vying for gamers’ hard-earned dollars in a down economy. People are buying fewer videogames now than they were at the start of the decade; but most are still keeping Madden at the top of their list every August.

Top 20 Videogames of the Past Decade: #19

19. The Neverwinter Nights series (PC)

Offer me an RPG, and I’m happy. Give it a D&D license, and I smile. But make it one of the most revolutionary PC experiences in the past decade, and I won’t stop smiling for a long, long time.

Introduced in 2002, Neverwinter Nights was built off an improved Baldur’s Gate game engine, but was one of the first RPGs to offer a developers kit so that the mod community could build their own adventures using the same tools as the pros who developed the game. These “user-generated adventures” became about as handy as motorhome insurance following an accident… in other words, essential!

For a long time, Neverwinter Nights just never wore out its welcome because of all the wonderful mod adventures that BioWare fostered and encouraged. It was a game that set the tone for many of the RPGs that would follow it, such as the Elder Scrolls series and some of BioWare’s own later masterpieces.

It wasn’t until 2007 that a sequel was even released; by that time, BioWare had moved on to many other wonderful projects, and were replaced by the capable Obsidian Entertainment, who have served the franchise well, even if they are a bit less inspired.

One could even stretch the point that without Neverwinter Nights, the whole idea of downloadable content now sweeping across Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network might not even exist. Extending the appeal of a title by adding content beyond that included in the game’s initial release – rather than saving it for a sequel – is a popular idea these days, but it was tested, popularized and proven to work by this ground-breaking title.

Long live Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2! Here’s hoping the new decade eventually brings forth a Neverwinter Nights 3…

Top 20 Videogames of the Past Decade: #20

OK, as promised, Yahoo Games so outraged me with their crappy, Nintendo-centric list of the Top 10 games of the last 10 years, I’ve vowed to to my own countdown, and this is where it all starts! If you want a job done right, do it yourself, correct?

Here we go with the 20th-best videogame of the past decade:

20. The Gran Turismo Series (PSone, PS2, PS3, PSP)

Prior to the first Gran Turismo racing title on the original PlayStation, racing games were generally rather generic; you might get to select from maybe a dozen cars and race on a half-dozen tracks, on average. And most were home to comic-book physics engines.

That all changed when one of Sony’s in-house studios decided to really do a racing game “right.” The first Gran Turismo title may look dated by PS3 standards, but it was a revolution in racing game design. There were hundreds of cars, not dozens, all of the licensed and designed to perform like their real-life counterparts.

Sure, there are flaws to the realism; licensing issues prevents real damage modeling being integrated into the game, and the game is sometimes a bit too hard to master – though hardcore gamers love that aspect – but the extent to which this game improves its graphics, physics engine, realistic feel, and hardcore customization and detail with each new chapter is something special in the world of videogames.

Yes, many have come along since and tried to one-up Gran Turismo; and games like Forza Motorsport, which includes damage modeling as an option, offer something Gran Turismo has yet to bring to the table. However, there’s no denying that without the Gran Turismo series, which sold like wildfire over the last decade, there would likely never have been a game like Forza Motorsports because the template for racing games would never have been changed to begin with.