So.

Two weeks ago I was bored, having just finished the last entry in a three-month long holiday glut of excellent recent videogame releases - some of which are among, in my opinion, the best ever made, new exemplars of the form. A bit of postpartum sadness was setting in as I wondered how I'd fill the idle hours next - what do I want to play, what do I want to play, give me a sign - and it occurred to me, as it often does, to organize my thoughts by drawing up a list.

As those who indulge in it recreationally can tell you, listmaking can be a profoundly fun exercise. Sometimes it's fun to work within pre-ordained constraints - I can recall a hundred passionate late-night Denny's arguments spurred by impromptu calls to list one's "all-time, top five" actresses or X-Men or rock bands - but alone in a room, with unlimited time at one's hands, one naturally gravitates towards comprehensiveness. You don't want to omit anything, you don't want to seem forgetful, and most importantly, you don't want even inadvertently to do injustice to something you love.

So my list - what was originally going to be my Five, or later Ten, then Twenty Favorite Games - grew. It grew more as I paged through old Case Logic wallets full of fifteen-year-old CD-ROMs and dug out from storage cardboard banker's boxes distended out of true by the weight of dozens of old NES cartridges. It grew even more as I talked about it with friends and internet people. In the end, when I had written down everything I could possibly think of that I might consider a favorite, when I had sat on the list for a week and let it marinate, I had 145 separate items on it.

That number isn't round, or prime, and it has no inbuilt totemic significance whatsoever - but to me, that makes it feel like an honest number. A real number. A sum arrived at fair and square across twenty-odd years of living and engaging with this ridiculous, beautiful, juvenile, transcendent artform.

What I propose to do here is to write about each of these 145 games in turn, in no set order and as the fancy takes me. Something that has always distressed me about games criticism and games journalism is the way many (not all, but many) games critics meekly bow to the popular perception that their job is essentially a gussied-up form of consumer report, a bloodless recommendation to "buy" or "rent" or "avoid." I hate that tendency. I want to see more context - more tracing of creative lineages, more personal anecdotes, more human feeling.

In other disciplines, critics are the lorekeepers of their medium, the shamans, the ones who put things in context and remind us where we have been so that we may better see where we are and where we are going. Gadflies, kibbutzers, mentors, or Jedi masters - the rare voices whose passion is so pure and so contagious that it can incite and ignite a reciprocal heat in a few others and so change the course of a life or of an artform. I want to see more of that with games, and so I add my small voice to the choir (or the garage band, as the case may be).

One of my favorite writers in any medium, Roger Ebert, is fond of quoting an aphorism coined by the critic Robert Warshow: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." When something moves us - or fails to - we should admit why, even if it seems unworthy or embarrassing or counterrrevolutionary. In my case, my first admission is that while I strove to make my list complete by my own standards, it is massively unlikely to be so for anyone else. You'll see certain genres and platforms underrepresented, misrepresented, or not mentioned at all. You'll probably cock a skeptical eyebrow at some of the stuff I like or my reasons for doing so. And that's all to the good; all I ask is that if you disagree, let me know! A good list should be the start of a conversation, not the end of one.