9 Video Games That Will Leave You A Changed Person

3. Half-Life 2

Another of Valve's instant classics, Half-Life 2 was released in 2004 (yes, it's 10 years old!) to waves of well deserved hoopla and joy, as one of the best loved shooters of the '90s came crashing into the new millennium with a new setting, new characters, new mechanics and one of the best physics engines ever created in the Havok Engine.

At the time, HL2 was an advertisement of the disparity between console gaming and the PC master race. Bear in mind that in 2004, the best looking console game released was Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and while that was a handsome game for the PS2, HL2 took things into an entirely different realm with the first character models that displayed graphical fidelity so intricate you could see the pores in their skin (just see the opening close up of the G-Man in the intro sequence).

But it wasn't just the leaps in technology that stood HL2 above its peers. The storyline was more cohesive, the environments traversed were more varied and the game was still bloody long, clocking in at around 20 hours to finish the single player campaign. Such is the expert level of development Valve hold, the final level in the game was a tour de force in tension vs action. Your ascent to the top of City 17's Citadel was a fraught battle between Combine soldiers and the venerable Gordon Freeman, holding no weapon other than the upgraded Gravity Gun, allowing him to pick up enemies and hurl them around like ragdolls.

You reach the top, you destroy Dr Breen's interdimensional portal and just as the explosion threatens to kill you and your companion Alyx, time freezes and the G-Man takes you away again. Never has an ending resulted in so many jaws being picked up off the ground and never before has an ending to a major game asked more questions than the rest of the game has answered.