#9 Demon’s Souls

What a monster of a game. There is no other way of saying this. Demon’s Souls was a game that single handedly took the RPG genre and stood it on its head for years to come. A game changer. A hard game. A very hard game. People loathe it, people love it, but the groundbreaking influence of From Software’s now legendary title cannot be ignored. Others have tried aping the effort after this enormous success, but none ever got close to this. 

Demon’s Souls treats death differently than other video games. Death resets the game world, respawns all monsters, and puts the player back to the beginning of the level. What sounds like barbaric insanity though, is a clever system of teaching the player to play right, to respect the game, and to listen to what other plays say in the numerous little messages sprayed all over the game, in what is the recent generation’s most interesting multiplayer feature. A true classic.

#8 Eternal Sonata

Eternal Sonata is a standout title in that one of the playable characters was an actual person. As composer and pianist Frederic Chopin is lying on his deathbed, he dreams of a fairy-tale world where anyone near death has the ability to harness supernatural abilities. 

Released as Trusty Bell: Chopin's Dream — Reprise in Japan, Eternal Sonata is notable for its use of classical piano pieces, educational cutscenes featuring real paintings and photographs, and a fictional world envisioned by the game's developers of Chopin during his final hours, influenced by his life and music. 

#7 The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion

Oh, Oblivion. You are kind of the runt of the Elder Scrolls litter so far. Originally conceived as a game depicting a very different Cyrodill Province, Bethesda changed that eventually from a steamy jungle like land filled with ancient Roman style legionaires to a much more traditional medieval European fantasy landscape, and took much bigger hints from the Lord of the Rings movies’ visual aesthetics than Morrowind had before. 

But that doesn’t mean that Obsidian was a bad game. Far from it. There were tons and tons of things to see, to do, to kill and to explore. Bethesda are great at designing worlds, and while this Cyrodill is their most vanilla effort yet, it still was an enchantingly beautiful world at the time, filled with mystery and wonder as it should be in a fantasy game. Even the questlines given were high above your standard fantasy computer RPG given, and even today the game still holds up quite well as one huge time eating monstrosity that will not let you go easily. 

#6 Fallout New Vegas

Fallout: New Vegas is set in the Nevada desert, north of California and years after the events of Fallout 3 and its predecessors. Players take on the role of the Courier, a man who’s lost his memory and whose only lead is to pursue a man with a platinum poker chip—a man responsible for his memory loss. Along the way, the player becomes embroiled in a war between the New California Republic and a group of raiders and slavers self-styled after the Roman Legion

#5 Deus ex: Human Revolution

Human Revolution is primarily a first person shooter with strong RPG elements that, if it's anything like the first two games, will allow you to approach combat situations based on your own personal preference. You can take out enemy combatants through stealth, brute force, or even use your hacking abilities to get sentry guns and armed robots to do your bidding for you. 

Taking a cue from Ghost in the Shell, Deus Ex carries a strong cyberpunk motif. If things continue to head in the direction they're heading in the real world, there's little doubt that we'll be living in a world just like the one depicted by these games.

#4 Mass Effect 3

Shepard has returned, and so have the Reapers. Mass Effect 3 shows an Earth besieged by an armada of Reapers, and the only hope of humankind's survival depends on Commander Shepard.

Mass Effect 3 brings back the role-playing and action elements of the first two games with a number of improvements, and it takes all the events of the first two games into account, provided you have a save file to import and carry over to Mass Effect 3. All the actions you commit in Mass Effect 2 are therefore etched in stone, and you'll have to deal with the consequences. 

Save for the game's ending, we can't think of anything bad to say about the game. 

#3 Skyrim

The reason Skyrim isn't higher up on this list is simply because Bethesda took forever to support the game on the PS3.

The latest addition to the Elder Scrolls setting elevates the series to new heights. Featuring a brand new engine, Skyrim is shedding the poorly aged GameBryo. 

Players enter the role of the Dragonborn, an individual prophesied to take on the Sons of Skyrim, an army not unlike the Vikings of old. 

If you're wondering where Skyrim happens to be, it lies somewhere to the north of Cyrodiil in TES4: Oblivion, where it's always cold, snowy, and full of Draugr—the land's version of the undead who roam the crypts deep beneath the earth.

#2 Dark Souls

Have you ever heard of dying a lot as a video game mechanic? Dark Souls puts it to full use as it forces you to master your ability at the game, which is something you’ll have to do if you expect to make any progress whatsoever. Prepare to die a lot. 

Set in the strange land of Lordran, players must venture through this bleak and foreboding land of the dead in an attempt to ring two magical bells and reclaim their humanity.

#1 Ni no Kuni

Developed by Studio Ghibli and Level-5, the makers of Princess Mononoke and My Neighbor Totoro, Ni No Kuni is one of the most charming experiences to ever grace the console. As a Japanese RPG, it’s top notch and offers everything you could expect from two high-caliber studios. 

Players take on the role of a young boy named Oliver who sets off on a quest to bring his mother back from the dead after she dies saving him from drowning. He must venture to another dimension, where he learns to unlock his inner potential and become the hero of that land. 

(courtesy of CivcraftDefenseFund)

I wasn’t happy with how things were turning out, but how could I change the course of the raging river of the HCF? Every day I dreaded logging in, but couldn’t stop myself anyway — one day I’d see the town’s center portal covered in a huge cube of cobblestone (produced by HCF agents dropping water and lava buckets repeatedly), and the next day the cobblestone would be gone, cleared by the ever-industrious citizens of Augusta.

Events continued in that general manner until one morning, I logged in out of sight of my home — I’d logged out the previous night after retrieving a large amount of items for a player who had accidentally fallen off their roof and died (thereby scattering an inventory load of wood across the lawn in front of their house). Whether that was good luck or bad, I don’t know, but when I walked towards my home (now a striking, well-designed tower), I saw nothing in its place but lava and cobblestone. Those bastards had targeted my home now, and I had lost everything (or so I thought).

Luckily, a few days before, I had placed a snitch (another serverside modification; a block which logs any actions which occur nearby) hidden inside a wall, and the lava had flowed in the wrong direction - it was safe. Still in shock, I climbed a tower of dirt to the snitch, and read the logs. To my horror, there were pages full of entries such as “Username: Placed - Lava Bucket”, and even then, I knew that I wouldn’t be rebuilding.

As I read the logs from the snitch, a player in a full set of enchanted diamond armor decided to stroll by, and quickly noticed me standing in the ruins of my own home. Without any warning, the diamond-armoured player quickly pearled me, and before I knew it, I was in the End for the very first time. Needless to say, I was pissed — and, as I later learned, I had been pearled by the very leader of the HCF himself, a nasty character known as Gordge, who just happened to be patrolling my part of town when I logged in.

Going to the End for the first time was an… interesting experience. At first bearings, it didn’t look good to me - a dark dimension filled with roaming criminals and innocents alike, milling about with nothing much to do. There were trees, though, brought in via the two End Portals on the overworld, and there appeared to be a fairly inexhaustible source of lava, going from the rampant lava griefing.

I walked around for a bit, then, to my surprise, a player (who I didn’t know) contacted me through the private messaging system. He offered a safe haven for me and anyone who might have been pearled with me, at a place called Fort Marienberg. I followed his instructions, and soon found myself on a very long bridge leading away from the floating mainland, and, after a short walk, I was confronted with the towering fortifications of Fort Marienberg, the home of the End’s resistance forces.

There, I met with the player who had contacted me: apparently I’d been vouched for by another resident of Mount Augusta, and I’d been deemed trustworthy enough to enter the base. He showed me around, and I noted that they had set up something that almost felt like… home. The Fort was fully self-sustaining, with a large farm and cobblestone generator, and some of its citizens were bedecked from head to toe in shining iron armor. We all, at the very least, had rudimentary weapons to protect ourselves from the plebeian masses huddled only a couple of thousand of blocks away on the mainland, accessible via a dark bridge.

(Courtesy of CivcraftDefenseFund)

Despite its obvious power advantage, the base was still vulnerable to griefing, and many times I’d log on to find our crops destroyed and random chunks taken out of the walls. We persevered, however, and one day we began to hear whispers of a huge raid being undertaken on one of the HCF vaults by a coalition of the most powerful factions on Civcraft — including the Ancaps, the most wealthy players on the server. I, personally, doubted them — there had been rumours of similar happenings before, and they had never come to fruition. Who was to say that they would succeed this time when every other attempt had failed?

To my happy surprise, I was completely wrong. The day after hearing about the vault raid, I logged on and, instead of being greeted with Fort Marienburg, I burned alive in lava. A good start, to be sure. When I respawned, I was inside the chest room of my destroyed house, which miraculously hadn’t been touched at all (being made of cobblestone instead of wood). My biggest challenge was getting out of the room, and, eventually, I was able to block off the lava and make my way out.

When I stepped out, it was to the largest sack of Mount Augusta yet. The farms had been wiped out, and there were huge mountains of cobblestone covering the center of the city, effectively prohibiting access to the Nether portal and the player-run shops dotted around it. It was almost heartbreaking to behold the devastation which covered the city, the countless man-hours which had been nullified in one fell swoop, and from that moment forth, I knew that I wouldn’t rest until I’d made a concrete contribution to the underground resistance.

(courtesy of LouisIndustries)

As I stumbled around, not quite knowing what to do, I was hailed by one of my neighbours, a member of the Communist Party of Mount Augusta (the CPMA). He urged me to follow him, to build a base far, far away… and I agreed, because there was nothing left for me in Mount Augusta except ashes and memories. After a few hours’ scouting and sailing, we discovered a small island a great distance from civilization, hidden deep in the map’s northeast quadrant. We dug downwards, made a small home base, and returned to Mount Augusta to transport his (and my) valuables to the island, which we dubbed New Pyongyang for the communist principles which we’d operate our civilization on. Soon after, we were joined by some other members of the CPMA, and our little family was created, out in the middle of nowhere.

Fast forward a week, and my comrades and I had developed the grandest of plans: instead of living in a hovel in the dirt, we would dig out a mighty cavern beneath the island, to serve as a glorious enclave for the resistance. The idea was ambitious, and the execution took longer than we expected, but after digging out nearly 300,000 blocks’ worth of space underground, and drafting a constitution, we adopted a juche policy (following in the footsteps of our city’s namesake) and attempted to seclude ourselves from the outside world, with its ongoing conflicts and messy requirements of human/HCF interaction. In New Pyongyang, we were utterly safe — we followed a strong policy of security through obscurity, and it worked extremely well, until it didn’t.

Here’s the point where I say “it wasn’t much, but it was home” — but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t much. New Pyongyang was a grand and almost entirely self-sufficient city. The saddest thing is that our exclusionist policies precluded our grand constructions from being seen by the masses, especially those who would appreciate the beautiful architecture that was exhibited in both its towering buildings and displays of public art (including a statue of Geckolubber, our Dear Leader).

Note that I’m using “was” instead of “is”. We worked diligently towards finishing construction for over a month, and even accrued quite a bit of wealth — hell, we could have even hired a hitman to take care of anyone who stumbled across us. Our paranoia had almost no limits at that stage, and I suppose it’s ironic, after all our hard work, the weeks of planning and running and hiding and deception, that our secret society was taken down from the inside by one of the very people who founded it. In fact, it was the same player with whom I originally undertook the scouting mission which resulted in the founding of New Pyongyang. We didn’t know that at the time, though — he attacked the city with an alt account, and managed to access our vault. With this in mind, we spent the next week or so running around like headless chickens, endlessly repeating the same theories to ourselves, wondering who the attacker was.

We uncovered the truth eventually, though, and by that time, New Pyongyang had been evacuated and then abandoned, with only a few signs left in front of Dear Leader’s palace to explain the history of our first home for any who might wander upon it.

After that, my time on the server was effectively over. I didn’t log on much to talk to my comrades, since I’d just flown to a time zone sixteen hours away, and I was discouraged by the fact that a couple of months’ work had gone down the drain due to the actions of a filthy traitor.

Civcraft pulls you back, though, and I was about to log in again when I read a post on the subreddit that, quite literally, made my jaw drop. Something awful had happened to the server — a HCF-affiliated user had volunteered server space for backups (something ttk2 needed) and had breached his trust by leaking the entire backup of the server, including the Civcraft map and source code of the custom in-house plugins. It was a catastrophe of the highest order, and every other HCF player (indeed, even the management of the Hardcore Factions network) immediately denounced his actions — but it was too late. The damage had been done, and over a year’s worth of work by hundreds of users had been undone in the space of minutes.

In spite of the huge damage that this breach wreaked on the server, some players are looking on the bright side — the breach has made a server map reset mandatory, which is something that many have called for in the past, and the map reset will necessitate the beginning of a whole new world of Civcraft: new players, new factions, new cities, new drama. The new map is scheduled to start on Sunday, May 19th, and I plan to be there to watch more stories unfold.

It’s going to be awesome.

(Courtesy of JakacBatko)

10: Matmos Sound Mod

Big and old and still updated, this mod takes care of Minecraft being quiet. Too quiet. It adds environmental sounds in relation to the players’ current environment, and gets rid of the perpetual silence that has haunted Minecraft forever, for whatever reason, and creates a much, much more immersive experience. 

Usually I am not a fan of these polishing or high def mods, but when it comes to sound alone, Minecraft is a bit lacking. Sure, the zombies and creepers are iconic, but there is just very little else going on. This environmental sound simulation changes that, and oh boy does it ever make a difference. Give your ears something to mine on right here!

9: Minecraft Comes Alive

What was the point of those villages, except that you could go and protect them from mobs at night, or that they made the world seem less empty? Anyway, here’s a mod to change those villages into something useful. Need some AI to talk to? Talk to your villagers. Need a digital wife? Marry a villager. Have kids. Have the kids help around the house. Watch them grow old. Neat huh? 

That’s what this mob is about. It adds male and female skins to the various villagers, and gets them to be more talkative and interactive and allows the player to almost form a kind of relationship to and with them. Peter Molyneux would be so proud of the creators of this mod. Oh and the villagers can follow you, can be assigned houses and whatnot. It adds a bit of Fable to Minecraft. And life. A lot of life actually. Makes the game somewhat more meaningful if you want that. Download here. Diapers NOT included. 

8: Creepypastacraft

Everyone knows that the Endermen are kinda sorta based on Slenderman, the Something Awful forums spawned monster that kinda became it’s own urban legend. Now there is a way to encounter Slenderman inside Minecraft itself. And good news! He brought friends! 

Creepypastacraft is a mod that adds a number of mobs and items to Minecraft. Some of the mobs are hostile, some are friendly, and most of them are kinda creepy, and based on the internet based horror stories called “creepypastas”, in which users of reddit or something awful or what have you write up some neat little scare stories. The more successful ones make it to inspire others to write about the same thing with a different take. The REALLY successful ones end up as YouTube videoseries or get their own games, like Slenderman. This adds more creep to Minecraft, and a number of pretty tough monsters. Download here. Comes with in-game diaper.

7: Dimensional Door Mod

Sometimes things happen that shouldn’t. Sometimes a door is not just a door. In this mod, you can create doors that lead you to a sort of warp dimension, a pocket dimension, a black lodge. Whatever you call it, this dimension is a doorway to yet more dimensions. Insanity awaits. 

Actually this offers some interesting neat little travel tricks. Doors within doors, dimensions within dimensions. There even is an extra dimension deep down the well, the limbo, which the player might have to traverse when taking a wrong turn, to return to the “real” world. This mod is really neat, not just because it makes Minecraft even more like Inception. Download it over here!

6: Better World Generation Mod

Similar to Biospheres but a little less specific, Better World Generation gives you a bunch of options as to how Minecraft generates the game world. These options include a switch back to the generation rules of the Alpha and Beta versions, an improved Superflat World, improved default and very large biomes, and something special.

One of the options to create a world is called “survivor island”, which strands the player on an island in the middle of the ocean with a little chest filled with some random stuff. Another is called “survivor sky island”, which puts the player on a significantly bigger, floating island. And the third one is called “sky dimension”, which puts the player into a game world made up of floating islands. You can get the mod at Minecraft DL. 

5: Risugami’s Biosphere Mod

This is one of the really big ones, it’s a mod that fundamentally changes the way Minecraft’s worlds are built. Instead of separating the world into neat little divisions of “naturally” occurring landscapes, the Biosphere Mod has Minecraft create a world, that entirely consists of glass encased bubbles, that float in thin air, each of which containing a separate biome. 

Those “biospheres” are interconnected by little bridges, and generate “naturally”, so completely at random. It’s a pretty radical alteration, and to top things off, this world generation can be combined as it seems with regular world generation, by turning this mode of generation on and off in the options menu. It certainly gives you a completely different game if you’re sick of your regular Minecraft world. Get it here! 

4: Instant Massive Structures Mod

This one is a bit of a cheat. With a few blocks this mod allows you to craft gigantic structures, and plop them into the world. The mod give you 24 crafting recipies that eventually give you much, much more than the sum of their parts. Technically this is cheating but, you know, sometimes you just want to go and build a whole city on a single day. 

What makes this mod interesting is that there’s quite the selection of structures, subterranean ones too, that it gives you easy access to. Those structures might be rather simple but they can be used to liven up whatever you’ve got cooking in the game, especially if you want to quickly build something like a village or a town, a settlement or the like. Get it here!

3: Better Breeding Mod

Some people want to watch the world burn, but some want the exact opposite. No, not to watch the world drown, silly, but be more productive. Build, farm, mine, do some animal husbandry. For them this mod is ideal, as it allows them tinker with the stats of animals, adjust drop rates and more. 

The most interesting feature is that through this mod you can create more nutritious animals, so that they give meat that replenishes more hearts more quickly. Also it gives breeding and animal herding a bit more of a reason to be in the game. All in all a neat little addition to the game, especially when you play survival. Get the mod here. 

2: Zan’s Minimap Mod

Personally I hate minimaps, but what the hell, in Minecraft, getting a proper map to work can be a pain, so why not just take the easy way in, and add a minimap through a mod? This one is handy, kept up to date, and shows you everything, from mobs to blocks in one handy corner of the screen. 

Be it in survival where it’s a really useful addition, or in creative where you might need to get your bearings more easily, this mod will have your back. Never lose track of where you are again, and never lose track of what’s nearby again. Ever overlooked a diamond block? And found it only hour later? Yeah I know I have. Not with this baby. Get it here!

1. Pheenixm's Explosives Plus Mod

Ahh Explosives. With a fully explodable, err I mean explorable world like Minecraft, you’re bound to have some need for explosives. Even in regular creative mode. Want to do some serious landscaping? Get some explosives. Lay down a ton of TNT and boom! Just that regular Minecaft TNT doesn’t do much. That’s where this mod comes in handy. 

Want to do some major, big ass landscaping? Erase a biome? Really play God? Have a look at this. It adds a bunch of ridiculously powerful explosives and weapons to the game, that will allow you to really go to town - and blow it all up if you want to. Just be careful, it seems to be a bit on the laggy-crashy side of things, especially with the really big ones, depending on the Minecraft version. Get it here.