Canada Day 2009 – Top Ten Canadian Games of All Time

3. Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn – Interplay, BioWare, September 24, 2000

Baldur’s Gate was a tough act to follow. Having the misfortune of being released in the same year as one of the highest rated games of all time, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate still managed to take the PC gaming world by storm. It heralded a return of good Dungeons & Dragons video games. Remember all the fun you had with the original Gold Box games? Baldur’s Gate reminded you of why you like D&D.

So how does a sequel improve upon that? To start, it let you import your character from Baldur’s Gate, which is a feature of the Gold Box games. It added even more choices to the Bioware’s Infinity engine. It had unique and memorable NPCs. It continued to make your choices between good and evil impactful and fun. It provided an incredible sense of freedom as you could try to demolish an entire town. It even generated relationships between you and the NPCs in your party. We still remember the sense of wonder as one of the characters would fall in love with us, and not in a scripted manner! They actually fell in love with you or hated you based on your actions and dialogue choices, which is honestly one of the coolest things ever put in a videogame.

The game also let you create three other fully customizable characters to put in your party right from the start, allowing for tactical squad-based combat without sacrificing the personal focus of the story and relationships.

Succeeding where its predecessor could not, Baldur’s Gate II collected some prestigious Role-Playing Game of the Year awards as well as Gamespot’s Reader’s Choice Game of the Year Award in 2000. To further decorate this beloved title, it is still the 6th highest ranked PC game on Metacritic.

2. Mass Effect – BioWare, Microsoft Game Studios, November 20, 2007

We are and always will be suckers for epic space battles. Wait, we’ve used that one already, haven’t we? Ahem! We are and always will be suckers for epic space operas. Distant planets, alien species, massive spaceships, and impending threats to the known galaxy – it makes us all giggle with delight. Now take those concepts and put them in the hands of the talented gamesmiths of BioWare and you have a masterpiece in the making. That masterpiece is called Mass Effect.

A third-person action role-playing game set in the distant future and filled to the brim with fascinating aliens and mysterious worlds, Mass Effect is a dream come true for science fiction and space opera fans alike. The story is thoroughly engaging from beginning to end, and the universe in which it takes place is fully-realized and remarkably extensive. Each race, weapon, spaceship, planet, skill, and historical event are fully documented within the in-game glossary and encyclopedia, and given such rich histories that they could almost be real. Mass Effect is more than a game, it’s an entire universe to discover.

And discovering it was amongst the most fun we’ve ever had. The character creation and development was very deep, enabling players to create Commander Shepard, the game’s protagonist, in their own style and image. Furthermore, Mass Effect’s revolutionary conversation mechanics gave players the opportunity to truly role-play their character. Players could be polite and considerate one minute and be rude and choose to interrupt non-player characters the next. It was the first game we ever played in which our in-game character truly mimicked our real world mood swings.

The combat was also fun and could be approached in a multitude of ways, all depending on how each player chose to develop their particular character. Relationships were affected by the players whims as well, causing some characters – even ones of the same gender – to fall in love with you.

In the end, Mass Effect was a game about choices and the consequences that came with making them. For the first time in our videogame-playing lives, Mass Effect presented us with moral choices that weren’t merely black and white, cut and dry. The game asked us to make some tough decisions, decisions that some of us still regret to this day, and that made us realize something: if a game can take you on an adventure in which you remember both the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, in a positive light, than every moment of that adventure is worth taking.

And our winner is…

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