In no particular order:

Breath of Fire III
Breath of Fire IV
Torneko: The Last Hope
Tales of Destiny
Tales of Destiny 2
Strider 2
Mega Man 8
Mega Man X4
Mega Man X5
C: The Contra Adventure...just kidding!
Actually, Mega Man Legends.

In alphabetical order:

- Crackdown
- Dragon Quest VIII
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
- Gears of War
- Mega Man Zero Collection
- Pikmin 2
- Shinobi 2K2
- Sonic Adventure 2
- Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
- Wild Arms 3

And because ten is never enough, here's runners-up:

- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
- Mass Effect
- Metal Gear: Ghost Babel
- Metroid: Zero Mission
- Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
- Tales of Vesperia
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas
- Torneko: The Last Hope
- Ys: The Oath in Felghana

(NOTE: I'm ruling out remakes of games from prior decades, except for "Zero Mission" and "Felghana," which are pretty much fundamentally different from the originals anyway.)

What's your top ten for the decade?

Someone got into my Twitter and Facebook, although they weren't able to do much of anything. If you have a commenting account on Kotaku or any other Gawker site, even if you don't use it much or got banned or something, you might want to doublecheck your shit to make sure it's okay. Hopefully you're not dumb like me and use the same password just about everywhere.

Someone posted a little guide here that helps:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ekpr3/gawkergizmodo_does_not_salt_th.../

"Mindfuck of the decade: Prototype and Bebe's Kids were developed by the same company."

There are dragons.

Don't make games that involve the Holocaust or Columbine or 9/11 or any other hot button social topic. But if you must (and I can't see why you'd must) at least make a game that doesn't suck. The video game entertainment medium doesn't need more crapfests like "Super Columbine RPG" or "Controversial Wolfenstein Holocaust Mod #22," especially when they spurn the outrage of Moral Guardians.

And you know what would suck? If these Moral Guardians succeeded in petitioning the government to crack down on games, because of a small number of indie stinkers no one even plays. So please, if you're going to put the medium in harm's way, make sure your controversial game will be worth bootlegging in the face of a purely theoretical ban. It's the least you could do.

If you take the time to think about it, Solidus Snake was the worse of three Snake siblings. Despite holding office for a few years and donning a super-powered muscle suit, he didn't accomplish much of anything in life. The only boast he ever made that had any truth to it was when he claimed he was "a whole different game from Liquid." He was certainly nothing like Liquid Snake, but what about when he claimed that he was "the boss to surpass Big Boss himself"? He did nothing of the sort. To review, here's a list of things Big Boss lived through:

- Falling from a bridge.

- Being within close vicinity to a nuclear explosion.

- Being beaten and humiliated by The Boss countless times.

- Having a horse crush his hand.

- Being stung by a swarm of bees.

- Being shot with bullet bees.

- Being shot with poison arrows.

- Being burnt with a flame thrower that spews a special kind of flame that's designed to burn for a long time.

- A torture session in which he endures electric shock and asphyxiation at the same time, followed by a muzzle flash taking out one of his eyes.

- A near death experience spurned by taking a long drop, "The Fugitive"-style.

- A frantic ten minute sparring session with ubersoldier The Boss, the outcome of which earns him the codename he'll use for the rest of his life. (And which Solidus would feebly try to surpass.)

(Keep in mind BB went through all of the above within a week's time period, acting as his own medic.)

- The Cold War, and the numerous missions he participated in throughout it.

- Having rockets shot at him by Solid Snake at the end of Metal Gear 1, not to mention the explosion of Outer Heaven.

- Being burnt to a crisp by Solid Snake with a makeshift flamethrower at the end of Metal Gear 2. (Yes, he actually survived that!)

In the end, the one thing that was finally able to kill Big Boss was a narrowly focused super virus. Now, what did Solidus Snake live through? Lessee:

- An election campaign.

- A harrier jet crash.

- An encounter with Metal Gear Ray.

Surviving an encounter with Metal Gear Ray was no push-over… but according to the expanded MGS mythology, Big Boss took down like a dozen Metal Gears. (I'm including the Shagohod in that figure as well as the AI machines in Peace Walker.) And he did all that *without* a powered muscle suit. Fuck sake, Solidus.

The boss to "surpass" Big Boss himself was ended in front of federal hall by his effeminate surrogate son. Prior to that moment, Solidus threatend to drown Raiden and friends for interferring. Not too long afterward, Raiden made a codec call to The Colonel in which he bragged about avoiding drowning.

Perhaps the most laughable thing of all was Solidus' attempt to pose as Solid Snake. He made no effort to behave or sound like Snake. He was able to keep up the "illusion" for all of a few seconds in front of Raiden before the real Snake arrived on the scene to helpfully exclaim: "That is NOT Solid Snake!!" Raiden, dumb as he was, was already suspecting otherwise long before the face-to-face encounter.

Despite his muscle suit and his ability to generate streaks of DeLorean Fire and his dual-wielding blades named after the two American political parties, Solidus failed in his ultimate mission to extract (misleading) data about The Patriots from his son's brain. His corpse was preserved and later mined for parts to rebuild Big Boss' body. Afterward, it was unceremoniously destroyed in a boat fire to fool everyone into thinking the corpse of Big Boss was lost for good.

That was the boss to surpass Big Boss.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why so many people choose to surf the web with Google Chrome. After a week of trying it, I've come to the conclusion that it's the poorest web browser ever invented. Here are the pros to using Chrome:

* It's fast.

* It's pretty.

Here are the cons to using Chrome:

* You can only have one search provider at a time. (Google wants you to only use Google, see.)

* A lot of useless useful features you can trigger by accident. (Dragging text to start a search, dragging tabs to create a seperate window, 'x' button for all tabs, etc.)

* No title bar. (The application title bar is one of the small niceties in life we take for granted. It orients us in a very subtle way that minimalist designer douchebags overlook.)

* Text looks jagged and ugly.

* For all the hype, it can't render some pages correctly.

* For all the hype, it crashed more frequently than IE ever did for me.

* Assorted little nuisances. ('Close tab' not being the first option when you right click a tab, no 'properties' option when you right-click an object, clearing 'recent downloads' list is a hassle, etc.)

So, I've decided to switch back to IE8. The interface is lightyears ahead of Chrome, and it doesn't stumble over itself to be "helpful" like Chrome does. (No, I *don't* want you auto-completing text for me in the URL bar, you piece of shit.) The only downside to using IE is having to endure the snickers of smug nerds when they find out you're an IE user. What can I say? It's nice to have more than one search provider.

What a rip-off!

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