6 Video Game Stories as Good as any Movie
Definitive proof Roger Ebert was wrong
Back in 2010, the late Roger Ebert predicted video games could never be considered works of art. Obviously, he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Here are a just a few reasons why.
6) The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Even among the frequently repetitive Zelda games, Majora’s Mask stands alone. It’s a depressing fairy tale about a boy’s search for identity and friendship in the face of crushing losses both recent and impending.
Majora’s Mask is played and replayed in 3-day cycles. The perpetual protagonist Link begins the game on the back of his beloved horse, searching the woods for a missing friend. Soon Link’s horse, instrument, and literal humanity are taken from him by the masked Skull Kid. He wakes up in a land called Termina, where a grimacing moon looms low over the horizon. On the third day, it crashes into the city, presumably killing everyone on the planet.
Link’s goal is first to find his ocarina, which gives him the power to travel back in time. Next he must regain his identity. Then he has to free the four giants who can save the world. All the while, he collects masks by helping the townspeople using information collected while exploring the doomed land and reversing time to fix their problems.
There’s a reason it’s been re-released three times since it came to America in October of 2000. Majora’s Mask is permeated by a sadness most games — especially Nintendo games — lacked back then. No one’s really made anything like it again.
5) Alien: Isolation
No movie is as frightening as playing Alien: Isolation with headphones on. You play as the daughter of superfemme Ellen Ripley, gone to the faraway Sevastapol space station to retrieve the flight recorder from the famed Nostromo. An interstellar mishap sends Ripley and her tiny crew onto the trading post’s loading dock without any way to get back or contact their escape ship.
Then it gets worse.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know what else was on the Nostromo, and you can bet something like it found its way onto the Sevastapol spaceport. Too bad it already decimated the crew and made the automated maintenance bots turn on everyone.
Isolation is not fun. At all. You have no way to hurt the alien that’s hunting you, and it never, never stops. You can’t run. You can’t even hide for very long. All you can do it try to keep track of the creature, and keep moving.
You have a motion tracker to help, but if you’re looking at it, distant objects get blurry, so you have to focus. The best way to monitor the monster is by listening to it. That’s where the headphones come in handy. If you have your back to a wall and you hear it 2 feet behind you, breathe easy. At least you know where it is.
4) The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Booting up Skyrim for the first time is like stepping off a boat onto a whole new continent. Pick you character’s species and gender, then strike out for a lush fantasy world in the midst of civil war and mythical dragon resurgence.
Skyrim is on this list because it lets you as a player do just about anything you want to do. If you want to work your way up in the Thieves Guild or Mage College, that’s fine. You can choose to become a werewolf warrior-for-hire, or an assassin of the Dark Brotherhood. Fight against the vampires threatening to blot out the sun — unless you’d rather help them in their mission. Train with the silent mountain monks to harness your dragon speech abilities. Your choices turn the tide of a brutal civil war.
You can do all or none of these things. I’ve played as an all-powerful summoner who commands dragons. I’ve also booted up a file and totally ignored the dragon questline, so they never showed up. There I can explore in relative peace as a brave and muscular orc, never quite at home in the human cities and villages peppering the land.
In Skyrim, exploration is everything. Trudging through its dense forests or across its icy shores, you’ll come across caves full of goblins or other creepy critters. Skeletal remains inside tell the stories of the unlucky men and women who attempted to plunder the region before you.
There are hundreds of books to read, quests to complete, and distinct locations to explore. You could play for 300 hours and still find something new to do. No movie compares.
3) Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Conker’s Bad Fur Day may be the only laugh out loud funny game I’ve ever played. From buxom sunflowers to operatic poo, it has just about everything.
The basics are simple: Conker drinks way too much one night, wakes up in a strange place, and needs to find his way home to his girlfriend Berri. Along the way, he has to “rescue” as much anthropomorphic cash as possible.
The cartoon squirrel swears and smokes and battles through Alien and The Matrix parodies to get back to Berri, but he’s too late. The game ends with Conker seated at the bar where it all started, drowning his sorrows in cartoon booze.
Conker’s BFD came out in 2001 for Nintendo 64. I was 13 years old, and it was just like South Park in that I didn’t want to have it on when my parents were around to see. It was also like South Park in that it tempered raunchy comedy and hamfisted parody with an ultimate lesson about life and love, delivered in monologue form, directly to the camera. “It’s true what they say,” Conker grumbles from his new position of power. “The grass is always greener, and you don’t really know what you have until it’s gone, gone, gone.”
It’s heavy stuff for a game in which, hours earlier, the biggest threat was a panther king’s plot to use you as a table leg. This comedy is a tragedy.
2) Mass Effect
The Mass Effect trilogy is science-fiction at its best. Here, Bioware tells a 60-hour tale about danger, perseverance, love, and survival as humanity struggles to find its place within the galaxy. The best part is, you have a great deal of control over the outcome.
Here are the basics: The Universe is threatened by an all-powerful ancient alien ship called a Reaper. In the first game, the player (as a male or female Commander Shepard) has to find proof that the Reaper exists, then bring it to a sort of galactic council of alien races. In the second game, Shepard has to help fight back a horde of creatures that are inexplicably eradicating entire colonies of humans. In the finale, Shepard must unite the galaxy in an all-out war against a biblical-scale invasion.
In each game, you command a ship called the Normandy and gather a crew to unravel the mysteries and battle back the antagonistic forces, whoever they may be at the time. All the while you’re juggling weighty issues like genocide, eugenics, artificial intelligence, machine life, and diplomacy among races that, for the most part, see humanity as inferior.
You’re also forming personal relationships with crew members, falling in love one minute, choosing who stays behind to activate a nuclear weapon and secure a crucial escape the next. Those choices follow you through all three games, culminating in a single ultimate choice that, no matter what you decide, elevates the tale to the status of a legend or a myth. I used the word biblical before for good reason. Playing through Mass Effect is as valuable as a religious experience for a science fiction fan.
1) The Last of Us
A man loses his young daughter in a sort of zombie outbreak. Twenty post-apocalyptic years later, he finds himself responsible for a girl her age on a cross-country trip through a zombified hellscape. This is America now, and you’ll have to get over your hangups if you want to get through it alive.
Storytelling doesn’t get any better than The Last of Us. I’ve wept at the prologue every time I’ve played through it, and every time I’ve watched it on YouTube. This game hits hard, over and over again, up through its very last frame. The story of Joel and Ellie is the story of what it means for men and women to be strong. It’s a story about what it costs to come through the other side against terrible and overwhelming odds. A story about a smear of humanity in a world that’s almost lost it entirely in ways both figurative and horrifyingly literal.
I love The Last of Us. I love it too much to spoil it for you by detailing even the most basic post-prologue plot points. I can tell you that the ending sticks like a rock in a lake — hard and sunken and permanent. You carry it with you when it’s done, the way a catchy song or traumatic experience gets stuck in your head.
The graphics are incredible. The voice work is unsurpassed. The script holds up against any that’s ever been committed to film. There are few video games and movies that are as good as The Last of Us, but none are better.
The Last of Us is a work of art, and everyone with a PlayStation is lucky it exists.
I haven’t played every video game in the whole dang world. How about sharing your own favorites in the comments?
