101. Night vision versus heat vision One lets you see through walls, the other lets you spy on spies.
102.Moss arrows Need to cross a clanking grate? Moss arrows can help! Next time, just wear slippers.
103.Planescape Torment This RPG shows that fantasy doesn't have to mean faux medieval towns and stupid beards. It looks great with the widescreen mod: snipurl.com/e03sl
104.Purple drops We're all about the professor plums.
105.Socketing items Gems = more hurt.
106.LAN Parties We might take a month to organise transport and a venue, but once there it's rare we'll actually get to play much. We'll just spend most of the day patching our favourite games. PC gaming: we wouldn't have it any other way.
107.Zombie patches Want to add shamblers to your favourite game? We've included a couple of patches on our DVD.
108.A fresh Windows install... And the promise of a hard-drive to fill.
109.The cow level Once you've killed Bael, the real point of Diablo II arrives: the secret cow level. It's you versus many, many angry bovines.
110.The railgun The ultimate test of your twitch skills.
111.The Longest Yard Oh, my railgun-shot knocked you off the ledge. Again. Sorry about that. Bad luck.
112.John Carmack For Quake, rockets, and the discovery of deathmatch.
113.Enemy Territory Still the fastest team shooter around, and still entirely free. The same developers went on to make the equally extreme-paced Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Get your WWII fix from our DVD, and do it now.
114.Trackmania It's the fastest and silliest racing game we know of. The free version, TrackMania Nations, is on our DVD, but we'd recommend paying for the complete version: TrackMania United. It's only £20 and available on Steam.
115.Indie Prototypes Indie developers are constantly trying new game mechanics well in advance of their arrival into the mainstream. Before GTA's hysterical drunken ragdoll physics arrived, we'd experienced similar with Sumotori Dreams, an abstracted Sumo game in which your characters worked constantly to remain upright (try it at snipurl.com/cxqk7). Before World of Goo, as students the developers responsible tested their mechanics with Tower of Goo (try it at snipurl.com/cxqlj).
116.The Marian Reforms When the Romans in Rome: Total War suddenly become hard cases. And turtles become tough nuts to crack.
117.Hitman Blood Money Woefully under-appreciated, Blood Money is the assassin sim we've dreamed about: 14 levels of ludicrous violence, where dozens of tortuous plans to get to your target can be set in motion. It rewards clear thought, sadism and experimentation, and we commend it to you.
118.The Pope In Medieval II, you can throw money at his excellency, and encourage him to wage crusades against your enemies. If he won't play ball, you can assassinate him, and help elect a sympathetic cardinal to the seat of the papacy. Either way, it's evil. And we love it.
119.Tanks that fire bears Good work, Red Alert 3.
120.The Redeemer Because we all want to ride a nuke, Doctor Strangelove-style.
121.The nuclear option We fear the horrors of nuclear war, but we love visiting it on the luckless inhabitants of our favourite games. Thank you, Fallout 3, Supreme Commander, Defcon, Crysis, World in Conflict, Red Alert and Total Annihilation.
122.Bioware For pushing story and choice harder than any other dev team in the world. They've built an empire on character development and accessible writing, and that success is deserved.
123.Introversion Indie kids who survive on passion, smart ideas and a brilliant visual style. Their commitment to innovation means they're always ten pence away from bankruptcy. And that's kind of funny.
124.Valve The smartest developers in the world, producing classic after classic. Even better, they listen to what PC gamers want and need. Their Steam digital distribution service is as important to PC gaming as Windows.
125.High-definition texture packs Making great old games look as good as the games of today. We've picked the best for our DVD. Try a superb re-render of System Shock 2.
126.Boomer Vomit If you arc it just right, you don't even have to see your target to puke into their face.
127.Playing as the infected Unleash your inner zombie in Left 4 Dead's versus mode. Who realised that playing alongside the shambling hordes could be such fun?
128.Taxi rides So incredible is GTA IV's world-building, we're happy just to sit and watch Liberty City whizz past in the back of a cab.
129.Andrew Ryan A slave obeys.
130.Super mutants We wish we could carry a bag of internal organs around with us, too.
131.Sniper rifles The best, in our estimation? The insane range on Far Cry's AW50 - dropping men and mutants from a mile. But the most fun? Nothing beats estimating distance and drop-off with the ultra-realistic Dragunov in Armed Assault.
132.Adventure games If the genre really is dead, why have we been reviewing two or three an issue for the past ten years? Well done to Telltale and Hothead Games for keeping the point-and-click spirit alive.
133.Company of Heroes' strafing run Line up the approach vector, then zoom-in real close and watch the infantry get cut to ribbons.
134.Our archives We have entire careers, empires and armies saved to floppy discs, CDs and USB sticks. We tell ourselves that we'll return. Now, the future is keeping savegames online - where we can return to our games at any point, and in any place.
135.Preloading Complete Valve's Steam delivery system has created mini-launch festivals, as we wait for our next favourite game to unlock. We might download the files a fortnight beforehand, but they'll be sitting on our hard-drive, inert, waiting to decrypted. PC Gamer staff members have been known to gather early, waiting for the keys to the latest Half-Life episode. We even make party hats.
136.Windowed mode Nothing says hardcore like playing two games at once. Whether it's keeping an eye on your auctions in one window during a sneaky Counter-Strike match, or a quick bout of Peggle while you fly from one base to another in WoW. All hail the Alt+Tab (or second monitor).
137.Shodan We love to be dominated. Particularly by a malevolent lady AI with a god complex.
138.Armadillo Run Inside every PC gamer is a closet engineer, waiting to get out. Don't just ignore that itch: nurture it with Armadillo Run, a superb construction puzzle game. You place plates of metal, springs, rockets and fabric bags to move a yellow bowling ball to its ultimate destination. It's a slice of DIY genius, and you deserve to play it. Try the demo at www.armadillorun.com.
139.The Cradle Scared yet? The Cradle might be PC gaming's greatest level: a twisted story of child abuse, murder and depravity in an orphanage, told through architecture and ghostly flashbacks. You'll find it midway through the excellent Thief: Deadly Shadows.
140.The Sporepedia Not as full of cocks as we'd expect. PC Gamer hosts the world's largest Sporecast, containing the very best of the user-created creatures, ships and buildings from Spore. To subscribe, visit snipurl.com/cxral.
141.Fort Frolic The maddest man in BioShock's underwater city of Rapture is Sander Cohen, a crazed theatre director who has taken up residence in Fort Frolic. There, he manipulates you into murdering his friends - all to produce a gruesome sculpture.
142.Admiral Harkov's betrayal Something isn't right. You've been ordered to clean a minefield surrounding rebel containers in a rickety and unshielded TIE Interceptor. Your Secret Order contact suggests calling for reinforcements. Oh, yes, trouble is en route. As you clear the mines, it's revealed that an entire Star Destroyer is ready to defect to the rebel alliance, and you've been ordered into a trap. But the Emperor knows of the betrayal, and has arranged his own trap within a trap. The plot of TIE Fighter pivoted on that single mission; we laud the ambition, paranoia and sheer attention to detail on display. Sequel please.
143.The Opera House Hitman Blood Money's best level gave you two targets, but a dozen ways of doing them both in. Try slipping a bullet into the fake gun for that climactic moment in Tosca. Or dropping a chandelier on their heads. Or...
144.The internet in World of Goo Just when you think you've got the measure of the Goos, the whole game changes. You're in a zero-gravity retro-digital world, pinging virtual goos and viruses into orbit. World of Goo never keeps its formula the same for long, but its most daring adventure is the one that sticks in the mind.
145.Pro gamers If you want to see the best gamers taking each other on, you need to play on PC, where players are free to practise independent of manufacturer-controlled networks, and where communities can mod their games to better suit tournament play. Get good, and you might even earn a living from it. Isn't that right, Fatalonety?
146.Skill movies Want to prove your skills as a PC gamer? Then install Fraps, and start recording. All you need after that is a YouTube account, a copy of Windows Movie Maker, and a copy of the Memento soundtrack.
147.Ravenholm If only because we can drop cars on zombies all day.
148.The final mission in just Cause In which you strap C4 to the President. While skydiving. YES.
149.Shotguns The enjoyment from which is dependent on three factors. The length between reloads, their power, and the noise they make. Our favourite: Doom II's double-barrelled boomstick.
150.The Zerg A fearsome threat that still feels alien, some ten years since Starcraft's original release.
151.Sid Meier For Civilization. For Railroads. For Gettysburg. For distilling complex metaphysical ideas such as religion, progress and power into game mechanics. For being one of the founding fathers of PC gaming. For the polo-shirts.
152.Looking Glass Studios Their pioneering work in pushing the boundaries of what games can simulate still influences the games that are made today. They closed their doors in 2000 after releasing Thief II, but their legacy lives on in games such as BioShock, Stalker and Dead Space.
153.UFO: Enemy Unknown Before Total War, the UFO/X-Com series offered a similar cross between grand strategy and down and dirty skirmishing. In Enemy Unknown, we led the world's defences against a new alien threat, funding, training and maintaining X-Com's military might on one side, while directing the men and women under our command in tense turn-based shootouts on another. No game has come close to reproducing UFO's anxious energy, and it still stands up to repeated play today. You can buy it and its rock-hard sequel, X-Com: Terror from the Deep on Steam for just a few quid each.
154.The Pit of Despair N is the hardest game we know. And the Pit of Despair is the first time you realise just how sadistic its designers can be. To get out, you must tempt electrified blocks to try and kill you, by standing in front of them, before standing on their top edges. Escaping feels nearly impossible. And then you do it. And your fists pump.
155.Tazers When a perp won't behave in SWAT 4, fill them full of electricity. It's even funnier in co-op multiplayer, when just as your friend is about to blow a door in, you taze him in the back.
156.Outcast Why is Outcast so important? It pioneered open worlds - in this case a bizarre alien landscape crafted from imagination and voxels. For its astounding orchestral soundtrack. And because. Just because.
157.Alyx Would.
158.Mass Effect's press conference A simple "I don't have time for your questions," won't do. No. You have to assault the reporter.
159.Custom soundtracks Route to epic gaming: turn music down. Play Beethoven. Win.
160.Ding! Gratz.
161.Mice We all have our favourite shape, be it the Sidewinder, Logitech or genero-brand. They are our weapons, and we prize them.
162.Expansion packs Like that game? Want more? Good. The best expansions (see: Starcraft: Brood War, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms) offer even better experiences than their base game. Forget the hype around downloadable content: the PC has had game-changing expansions for years.
163.Nailing men to the wall By their faces Respect to FEAR's nailgun.
164.Bullet Time Because there's nothing cooler than slow-motion sliding.
165.Max Payne's face Is he upset because his wife was murdered by junkies? Or just constipated?
166.Neverwinter Nights modules Neverwinter Nights's modding community is extraordinary. Even now, players are developing new RPG campaigns; far surpassing the main game's slightly squiffy story. You'll find BioWare's community site (nwn.bioware.com/forums) is the best place to start. We recommend Elegia Eternum, Sex & the Single Adventuress (saucy!), Twilight and Midnight, and Witch's Wake for the original Neverwinter Nights.
167.Jetpacks Particularly those belonging to the Brummie spacemen from Giants: Citizen Kabuto, and the oft-forgotten Outwars.
168.Clown face Agent 47's best ever disguise. Don't laugh. He'll cut your face off.
169.Unlimited, fixed-cost broadband Most PC gamers have a £100+ phone bill story from the 56K modem dark ages. Now we can play all day, and never worry about the cost.
170.Aimbots Cheats are bad. But at least they give us an excuse for being rubbish. OMG Hax.
171.Ever decreasing costs We live in a world where today's £500 graphics card will be less than £100 a year later. Buy slightly below the high-end and you can save a fortune.
172.SCUMM VM This adventure game emulation engine works with all the great adventure games of the past, and the ROMS for a great many of these are available to download. They're the perfect games to install on a netbook. Get the SCUMM emulator from www.scummvm.org.
173.Being the bad guy A thousand teenage perverts were created when we discovered we could hire bondage queens in Dungeon Keeper. Brrrr.
174.Floyd Your robot sidekick with the brain of a five-year-old, from Infocom's great text adventure, Planetfall. Don't ask what happens to him.
175.Dog Don't let him hump your leg.
176.Nazi zombies Because Nazis just aren't evil enough. Add robo-Hitler, and you've got the greatest villains on earth. Good work, Wolfenstein.
177.World War II Every time there's another WWII series on TV, we can happily sit and say, "I did that. And that. Yeah, I was there."
178.Gal Civ II's ship editor And the parade of Borg cubes it produced.
179.Eve Online's relentless war Never has one game acquired a more vicious playerbase: gamers ready to betray, defraud and destroy each other at a moment's notice. It's perfect: we can laugh at their incredible exploits (read about an amazing assassination at snipurl.com/cxrfx) without ever having to meet these ghastly people in other games.
180.Race Driver: GRID True story: the first time Tim played GRID, he entered a 16-player Formula One race. At the first corner, he passed two cars that had clipped each other, spun off and embedded themselves in a tire wall. Six feet above the track. GRID's weird arcade handling won't suit the sim fiends, but it's approachable, demanding and on the right side of silly.
181.Far Cry 2's gazelles And their unusually brutal ends. Dozens of times we've seen them dash in front of a mercenary's truck, only to be flattened. Sadface.
182.Four leaf clover In which Grand Theft Auto turns into Heat, a mission depicting a brutal bank job with the least subtle escape ever: directly through Liberty City. On foot. With M16s.
183.Homeworld The most morose strategy game ever created, Homeworld set a new standard for storytelling in RTS games. In its opening moments, your entire civilisation is nuked by a rival alien species, and the remaining survivors packed into cryotrays and loaded into your mothership. The whole sequence, soundtracked by downbeat electronica and Adagio for Strings is deeply affecting, and deserves to be remembered. Homeworld still looks beautiful on today's PCs: we urge you to try it.
184.Fallout 3's robots Clearly not designed for a wasteland. And who keeps recharging their batteries, anyway?
185.Darwinians Best for filling rockets full of delicious space fuel (Multiwinia), dying magnificently when ambushed by spiders (Darwinia), or producing elaborate dioramas (PCG Showdown).
186.The Battle for the Undercity The moment when World of Warcraft finally realised its ambition of creating a platform for episodic storytelling. No spoilers. Just OMG.
187.Spelunky A brilliantly simple platform game in which you raid tombs. Its genius: the levels are randomly generated, and you can buy equipment upgrades with the treasure you find.
188.Microprose Long dead, but not forgotten, Microprose defined PC gaming, producing adult strategy and simulation games that were consumed by masses. They launched a dozen enduring franchises, including Railroad Tycoon, Civilization, Formula One, X-Com/UFO, Pirates! and the Falcon line of simulations. Their legacy should never be forgotten.
189.The end of Half-Life 2: Episode two Inevitable? Possibly. Shocking. A bit. Upsetting? Definitely.
190.Enormous heatsinks Because the size of your cooling stack is directly proportional... to the speed of your processor.
191.Fahrenheit's mad ending Lurching from serious detective drama to sex with zombies and a fight with the internet. Win.
192.Trials 2's untimely deaths No matter how many times we die, and how brutal the end, we'll also continue to play Trials 2, a superb motocross game. The demo is on Steam.
193.Creative griefers We're all evil on the inside.
194.Episodic gaming Not the Valve 'five hours every two years' model, but Telltale's three hours a month adventure game series that let you dip in and out of ongoing stories. They're about to hit the big time with Wallace & Gromit.
195.The steady march of innovation Improvement in design and technology will not stop. It will not slow down. It will accelerate. And the PC will be the place where those innovations and ideas are first glimpsed. We'll be the first to try true 3D gaming (it already exists, with driver hacks and special specs), touchscreens and pervasive, location-aware games. Just add it to the list of game innovations pioneered on the PC: 3D acceleration, online gaming, massively multiplayer gaming, digital delivery, simulations, stealth gaming, teledildonics, etc, etc, etc.
196.Lucasarts' superb characters Fifteen years ago, LucasArts were untouchable, because they understood the importance of characters. It's telling than when reminiscing we end up talking about the stars of their games: Guybrush Threepwood, the world's worst pirate. Sam and Max: psychotic animal detectives. Even Ben, the grizzled biker who rode at Full Throttle. These are people and bizarre rabbit things we didn't merely enjoy playing with: we wanted to be around them. There are multiple ways of replaying old LucasArts games: we've placed the SCUMM VM emulator on the DVD. You'll have to find the games yourself.
197.Ultima's amazing worlds We owe the scale and ambition of games such as Fallout to the Ultima series. They showed that RPGs could do morality, epic scale, and freedom of action. For those interested in gaming's past, Ultima is still worth revisiting: you can track the early games down via your favourite abandonware site. Ultima VII is the best place to start.
198.Unleashing a monster When you've filled SimCity's landscapes with high rises, arcologies and baseball stadiums, there's only one route left to you: knock it all down - by unleashing a UFO, tidal wave, hurricane or riot. Ignore the overly fussy SimCity 4. 3000 is where the real fun is at.
199.Taking off Flight sims on PC have a deserved reputation for being tough nuts: they can be complicated and unforgiving. But when you crack them, the rewards are extraordinary. Landing a bruised and battered Hellcat on the deck of a pitching aircraft carrier in Pacific Fighters might be one of gaming's toughest challenges. But it's also an experience you'll remember for life.
200.PC Gamers Funny, creative, clever and dedicated, PC gamers are the reason we can continue to make this magazine. Every day we're surprised and delighted at what you do in your games, and the time you dedicate to them. It's not just about the games: PC gaming is about the communities our hobby fosters. We salute you.
170! I swear everyone on Counter-Strike is either a hacker or a child/student with nothing to do but spend 10 hours every day perfecting his god damn AWP whoring.
Completely agree with 139 although I would have said that one of the best moments from the Thief series is a game which you can spend 15 minutes sitting still working out patrol routes and timings.
I think also although the TIE Fighter moment is good I dont think there is an X-Wing moment that tops completing the ROTJ Death Star destruction in X-Wing Alliance; flying full speed with no shields, lasers and no idea where you are going from a speeding fireball through tunnels only one Falcon wide. Anyone who tells you they didnt do a Lando whoop when they completed that evil session is a liar.. Thats a true moment of PC gaming.
And why exactly would that render them "invalid" considering that many of those games were released on the PC first? Furthermore, consoles owe just about everything to PC hardware. Consoles do what they do well, but they've got nothing on the PC in terms of raw power and capabilities. Hell, even console games are first designed and created on PCs.
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