Man, we're getting old. It seems like only yesterday broadband was available in just a select few homes and we were all cutting up bits of cardboard to use as makeshift screen-dividers, but lo and behold the gaming industry of 2014 is a completely different beast. These days wars are won and lost on the difference between 30 and 60fps (and if you're unaware of what that even means, please take it from us - if you get involved in The Great Frame Rate Debate you'll never come back the same), but back in 2004 it was a simpler time. Open world games were still fairly fresh and were yet to be inundated with minuscule improvements over a core formula, and shooters on console were yet to be dominated by the annual Call of Duty machine. With all of these titles though, they mostly hold up very well today - albeit in a far more polygonal form - but hey when you watch an old film you don't complain about the footage being all grainy or black and white, right? Most of the time it's part of the charm. Plus there's a certain title on here that in the run-up to it being released, it was a huge deal that you could actually see the main character chewing gum. Not flying up into the sun and reigning down a handful of nuclear strikes like some horrific Michael Bay nightmare - just moving his mouth to chew some gum. And if that doesn't make you realise how far we've come, nothing will.
10. Halo 2
The sequel to the game that single-handedly proved first-person shooters could work on consoles, and in a spectacular way. Even if the end credits seemed to come out of nowhere and Master Chief's final line of "Sir, finishing this fight" brings about more cringes than a Jersey Shore marathon, the vast majority of us played this for its spectacular multiplayer. It's clearly such a perfected set of mechanics that later this year Halo-adopters 343 Industries are capitalising on it again, releasing the 'greatest hits'-style Master Chief Collection in November, an Xbox One exclusive that aims to emulate everything about Halo 2 in terms of gameplay whilst adding a lick of paint to the graphics. But, being that the mechanics of the game are still going to remain exactly the same, it proves just how timeless the likes of the overblown Warthog collision physics and general 'feel' the game has become known for. It may be a decade old, but an old fashioned game of Halo will never lose its appeal.
