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My dream team would create a game where you control a clan of ninjas building up your territory on a turn-based overworld like Total War or Civilization, but instead of leading armies into combat you would control a solo-infiltrator into stealth levels with flexibility in how you accomplish objectives. To do this game I would have:

- Sid Meier creating the gameplay for the overworld and making sure the turn-based strategy is addicting on the macro scale of controlling your ninja clan, establishing trade, working natural resources, and strengthening your culture and religion.

- Hideo Kojima would create the realtime stealth gameplay where you could assassinate enemies, spread propaganda, rescue prisoners, steal technology and wealth, or sabotage the infrastructure of other clans, and otherwise have a variety of options to weaken another clan from within, subvert them to your cause, or unleash unethical weapons to outright destroy a village. I'd also want him to cleverly insert situations that make you think more critically about the human costs of the imperialism that you're engaging in.

- John Carmack would be our lead programmer and he could build the engine.

- Satoru Iwata would be a programmer/producer in charge of everybody, and I'd use him to make sure all the input and inevitable messes resulting from these big personalities stay on schedule and get cut until we have a shippable game of high quality. I don't think anybody said our developer had to be alive still, so I think Iwata would be very beneficial to a team.

Chrono Crossing 1995

 My pick is MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. As a kid I was a big fan of the movie Robot Jox and seeing people get into huge robots to fight each other, so I thought MechWarrior was an awesome idea. It was too complicated for me at that age so I never finished any of the clan's campaigns and I had trouble understanding all the customization for the mechs, but I still thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.

Exrian's list is perfect. Shadow of the Collossus is one of my favorite games, and Last Guardian was my game of 2016. From Software is amazing. I've only tried Armored Core in demos and I thought it was cool, but really complicated. I'm not sure where to start in the Armored Core franchise but it seems worth checking out. Duke Nukem 3D ruled. I could never finish the campaign but I had a lot of fun trying. My fond memories of Duke Nukem 3D are probably the main reason why I was looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever for so long and waiting for it. Even once it became clear that DNF was a huge mess and was likely to be a tire fire there was always a part of me hoping against hope, thinking, "But...Duke 3D was really cool, there has to be some hope for Duke Nukem Forever."

Stage Select (My 3 favorite video game developers, at the moment)

NOTE: I skewed off in the dumb direction of "at the moment" because my list of historically favorite developers ended up with Bioware, Valve, and Bungie; none of which I feel passionate about in 2017. Valve doesn't make games, I'm skipping Andromeda, I didn't like Inquisition much, I stopped playing Halo after 4, and I never got sucked into Destiny like Patrick did. I should've just sucked it up and went with that list but it would be unenthusiastic. Plus, I assume some of those three companies will get mentioned by people in our community anyway so I decided to weasel my way into a slightly different list.

TLDR; I'm trying to justify to myself why Bioware, Valve, or Bungie aren't on my list and I'm upset with myself about letting this happen.....but also kind of not.

3. From Software - I love the Souls trilogy. A lot of fans argue that Dark Souls 2 is the worst of them, and they're not wrong, but even Dark Souls 2 is awesome. It goes to show, when From Software and this franchise were at their worst, they were still way cooler than most other video games.

2. Bethesda Studios ft. Obsidian - This includes a weird cheat, but I hope Julian allows it. I'm a big fan of all five of the 3D Elder Scrolls and Fallout games made by Todd Howard's team, but my favorite Bethesda game is Fallout New Vegas, which was developed by Obsidian. So my #2 is Todd Howard's Bethesda team but I want Obsidian to get their due credit for New Vegas.

1. Crystal Dynamics - After I finished the 4th Tomb Raider on Playstation 1 by Core Design I was burnt out for years, but I eventually came back to see what Crystal Dynamics had done with the series once they got their hands on it, and it turns out they were actually making the best Tomb Raider games of them all. Tomb Raider Anniversary, Underworld, Tomb Raider 2013, and Rise of the Tomb Raider all knocked it out of the park. Lara Croft is still awesome and there aren't many other developers that have hit so many home runs in a row, making me a bigger fan with each new game.

Chrono Crossing 1996

My favorite game from 1996 was the original Tomb Raider. Not only was this one of the first 3D games I ever played, but around the time this game came out my dad had made me a fan of Indiana Jones. So I loved the idea of taking these exotic journeys to temples to solve puzzles and get mixed up in ancient mythology.

Stage Select (top 3 town or village musical themes)

3. Dark Souls 2 "Majula Theme" - My first playthrough of Dark Souls 2 was pretty special to me, and hearing this understated theme in Majula village makes me picture my character standing at the scenic coastal village itself and looking inland to see the giant Roman aqueduct traversing the mountains, as well as the King's castle in the far distance.

Majula Theme on youtube

2. STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl "Dirge For The Planet" - This plays on loop via a radio in the first village of the game. It's a melancholic dirge with acoustic guitar, violin, and vocal harmonies lamenting the state of the world and sets the tone for the sad and harsh world you will find as you wander out into the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Dirge For The Planet on youtube

1. Mass Effect 1 "Normandy Theme" - Mass Effect has my favorite soundtrack in gaming and the Normandy is like a small village in and of itself. This theme fills me with nostalgia for wandering that ship and talking to my crew members.

Normandy Theme on youtube

Chrono Crossing 1997

My 1997 was mostly on the N64 and the two games I loved the most were also the first FPS games I had ever played: Goldeneye and Turok Dinosaur Hunter. Turok had the cooler premise, more enemy diversity, and had the gratuitous gore that made it the after-hours game I had to play when my parents weren't around to see what was really in this "dinosaur game" that I convinced them to buy for me. Meanwhile, Goldeneye was a total package that delivered a big single player campaign and a multiplayer mode that my friends and I became addicted to. For years afterwards, Goldeneye set the bar for what I expected console shooters to deliver. I pick Goldeneye because that's still the better overall package and is plenty fun in its own ways, but my heart is always with Turok in a close second place.

Chrono Crossing 1998

5. Tomb Raider 3 - The stories didn't make sense and it was difficult to navigate levels, but Lara Croft was an awesome female Indiana Jones with a British accent so I played the first four games religiously. Between '96 and '99 they released one Tomb Raider game per year and Tomb Raider 3 was in the heyday of my fandom before The Last Revelation burnt me out on the franchise the next year.

4. Body Harvest - I had never seen gameplay like Body Harvest before. It was open world and you could run around killing aliens or grab a variety of vehicles to drive, even fly a plane. It was a little confusing and I never made it to the end of the game, but I kept renting Body Harvest for weeks in a row because I wanted to see more of the world.

3. Tom Clancy's Rainbow 64 - This was the first game I ever had a co-op experience in, and was the first game I played that was tactical. Everything died in one to two bullets, and each mission would only take a few minutes if things went well, but you would spend most of your time planning the mission, deciding loadouts, and failing often. It was a totally new experience in gaming for me and I loved it.

2. Turok 2 Seeds of Evil - As a kid I loved dinosaurs, native american history, and science fiction. Turok 2 was a game about a native american warrior killing weaponized dinosaurs and their alien overlords, so the premise alone made it a winner. The weapons were awesome too. You had a bow, machine guns, a nuke gun that blinded you and filled the screen with white hot death, and the cerebral bore that latched onto the enemy's head and drilled their brains out until they died. A wildly disgusting game for its time, and I loved it.

1. Ocarina of Time - Up until this point I saw games as a toy to cure boredom. Ocarina made me see video games as an artistic outlet. Hyrule was filled with music, mythology, colorful characters who were suffering, and the story of the unremarkable child expected to fight for them all. Despite the fact that every boss he comes across is far larger and stronger than he could ever be, Link never quits fighting. In human cultures for thousands of years the themes of courage and tenacity have been important for any kid to be exposed to, but in Zelda you became an active participant thanks to video games. When Ganon fell in battle and the people of the world comforted each other during the credits I was so happy for them I became teary-eyed. My enjoyment of video games goes back further than Zelda, but my love of games started with Ocarina of Time. Historically this is the most important game I ever played in my life.

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3. Rainbow Six Patriots - Patriots looked like it was going to be a tactical single player FPS with an intense story, but we got the multiplayer-only Rainbow Six Siege instead.

2. Prey 2 - I just wanted another weird sci-fi shooter that connected with the first Prey, and now we're getting a shiny reboot that I doubt will have any of the 70's hard rock blue jeans wearing native american personality of the original.

1. Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 3 - they started work on this but Black Isle Studios ran out of money and couldn't retain the Dungeons & Dragons license. This is one of the franchises that got me into RPGs, and I wish I could've had more.

Chrono Crossing 1999

It was between Syphon Filter and SimCity 3000. SimCity was completely addicting, but at the same time Syphon Filter let you wield an absurdly long-range taser that could electrocute dudes until they burst into flames! I have to choose SimCity 3000. Syphon Filter was a cool shooter with some novelty mechanics that I thought were hilarious, but SimCity was the game I kept coming back to after school got out.

That's a great one. Most of the TH games I played had good soundtracks. Jerry Was a Racecar Driver was good, but I liked playing Superman the most

Tony Hawk 2 was really fun, and I loved that soundtrack. Bad Religion, Rage Against the Machine, Millencolin, Lagwagon, Anthrax, Naughty By Nature, Public Enemy, and Swinging Utters were all really great

Stage Select (3 favorite consoles)

3. Xbox 360 - A lot of the franchises I love to this day were ones I played on my Xbox. Mass Effect, Portal, Fallout, Red Dead Redemption, and many others. The 360 & PS3 generation was almost a decade of really great gaming; I just happened to have the Xbox.

2. N64 - Nintendo 64 is where I first played Zelda and started to look at games as art. I loved Mario Kart 64, Body Harvest, Turok, and all the great wrestling games that came to N64.

1. PS2 - Playstation 2 had an incredible controller, a massive library, and it was my first DVD player! The PS2 also introduced me to new genres, the biggest one being RPGs. Shoutout to Champions of Norrath and Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance. I also played way more Kessen than a person probably should.

Chrono Crossing 2000

Majora's Mask - I was 11, slowly losing my innocence, and Majora's Mask was the game that uncomfortably welcomed me to the new millennium. It was apocalyptic, bizarre, and forced you to acknowledge everyone's mortality. You get to be the hero trying to save a world full of sympathetic characters & interesting cultures, but the designers require you to fail everyone repeatedly along your macabre journey before you can eventually piece it all together.

Look at how dark the TV ads were:

I have skills in shooter games as well as stealth games that mostly translates to other games in those genres. I started young with Goldeneye, Halo, and then the first Splinter Cell, so I've had a lot of time to build the coordination or expectations for how games in those genres get designed or how they feel.

I've been into action-RPGs since the Baldur's Gate and Champions of Norrath days on PS2, and I've played tons of games in the general roleplaying space since, like Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and others, but if we're being honest I don't feel like there are too many RPG skills that get passed on. Of course if there are common terminology (attribute names, HP, mana) or systems (economies, upgrade paths) it will make it easier since I've seen parallels in other games, but not much else. When I start a new RPG I usually feel a little overwhelmed and there are long periods of time trying to get comfortable in the game's universe or combat. I never hop into RPGs on a whim, I really have to be in the right head-space and do my research to know a bit about it. I tend to know which RPGs I'm going to buy months or years in advance, and I sink a lot of time into them once they get here. Whereas, I could buy and spontaneously pop in any random shooter game or stealth game and dive in feet first without hesitation. I tend to play shooters on higher difficulties than anything, like I start new Halos and Call of Dutys on heroic or veteran settings, which is like the 3/4 setting. I've never played Mass Effect or most other RPGs on anything other than normal or casual.