Hopefully, you have more quarters.I know you can hear them too – the plucky strings accompanied by pleasant woodwinds that greeted us every time we opened Buy Mode. Coupled with the roguish wit and charm of Kyle Katarn and his quest for revenge made Jedi Outcast one of the best stories in the Star Wars universe.Spelunky is a game about patience. Everything from the UI to scene transitions to the animated cutscenes is absolutely dripping with style, and the battle system combines series staples with mechanics that haven’t been in the franchise in over a decade for perfectly balanced fights. Not only were players treated to an excellent RTS experience, but their reward for completing sections of the campaign were evocative visuals that further immersed you in a world where humans are losing a war against brutal space aliens.Taking it a step further, those cutscenes were paired with some truly talented voice acting and narrative design. For the longest time, Suikoden II was locked behind a near-impenetrable wall of scarcity that kept it out of the hands of most American gamers.

I definitely did not order all these bombs.Hey folks, beloved mascot Coconut Monkey here representing the collective PC Gamer editorial team, who worked together to write this article!Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors.Thank you for signing up to PC Gamer. Pokémon Go Thief II took everything right about stealth games, and then added a dash of steampunk-infused magic. You might even complete the entire story without harming a soul.Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn was very much a leader of the pack during the RPG renaissance of the early 2000s and is still an excellent example of that genre’s strengths. This machine clearly doesn’t hold a Star Wars-inspired space battle – but what’s in it? Even at the twilight of the SNES’ lifespan, Chrono Trigger’s branching narrative, colorful characters and unforgettable soundtrack were are more than enough to earn it a place on our list in this timeline or any other.There's a reason first-person puzzle games far and wide are constantly compared to Portal — though a brief adventure, its gameplay, tone, writing, and structure so cohesively work together to create one of the most memorable, challenging, and fascinating puzzle games around. Silently sprinting along rooftops, ducking through secret mansion passages – the game didn't just make you feel like a thief, it made you feel like a master of the craft.SimCity 2000 may not be the most complex or original of the city-building series, but it’s definitely the most iconic. It also mixed its “thinking with portals” puzzles up even further by weaving in gel mechanics that felt entirely fresh and completely natural at the same time - while simultaneously and subtly using them to tie gameplay mechanics into the story, patiently waiting until its incredible finale to pay off those setups with one of the weirdest and most spectacular video game endings around. While a truly skilled player can clear Contra on a single credit, the power of the thirty lives code gave all of us a fair chance to power our way through the gauntlet of alien invaders, or more likely die trying.Contra was one of the few cooperative video games of the 8-bit era where player two didn’t feel like a burden dragging you down with every step. Learning to use the seemingly simple Portal gun in increasingly more complex, all culminating in perhaps one of the most memorable end-credits songs of all time.But for as great as its puzzles are, and the way they take the simplicity of two portals you can shoot almost anywhere into such fascinating territory, it's also Portal's world-building that equally makes the game such a memorable touchstone. As a hardened horror fan who’s tough to frighten, I appreciate Silent Hill 2’s ability to stick with me even a decade later.I may be immune to Silent Hill 2’s scares now, having spent countless hours wandering its foggy streets and haunted otherworlds, but I still remember its power that first time I walked into town.2001’s Grand Theft Auto III was a real watershed in the history of open-world gaming. League of Legends