Number One, singleplayer

SimCity

SimCity? The Best Singleplayer Game of All Time on FiringSquad? Just what is Jakub smoking, you might ask. Well, nothing really. But you have to admit, deep down inside, that even you get tired of the killing. Sometimes, you just want to sit back, relax, play an easy game where you build a city for people and take care of them. You use rail instead of roads because rail never suffers from traffic problems. You put residential areas near the water front and power plants off in a lonesome corner of the map. And then, when your city is nicely grown, with beautiful bridges, skyscrapers and content citizens, you unleash Godzilla on the unsuspecting Sims.

SimCity made non-violent, non-competitive games cool. Will Wright began development in 1985, but somewhere along the way was told that games needed to have goals and objectives. So, in 1989, when SimCity was released, it had scenarios with pre-built cities that had objectives to fix - scenarios no one played, because as Will Wright rightly guessed, people liked creating from scratch. That we later ruined our creations with floods, hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, earthquakes and monsters is besides the point.

The immense popularity of the non-violent Sim franchise flies in the face of the nanny-state activists who'd have you believe that games are nothing but violence, mindless or otherwise. The Sims became the best-selling PC game last year, and it, like SimGolf, SimAnt, SimEarth, SimLife, SimCity 2000, SimIsle, SimCopter, owes its existence to SimCity. Imagine how much emptier, sadder and, in a way, more cynical gaming would be if not for these light-hearted, constructive and sometimes even educational games.

We've all felt the surge of adrenaline when playing Quake or StarCraft, when competing in seemingly mortal combat against our foul opponent or dread rival. We often get angry when we die or lose battles, we curse, and call each other mexican jew lizards. SimCity and its successors taught us to relax and enjoy, to engage in calm mental exercises that challenged us in non-obvious ways. Just why is this part of town run-down? What can I do to improve it? Do I have to add a new police station or can I simply move one I have? Increase taxes or cut expenses to balance the budget?

No other great designer has contributed as much to the enlightened aspects of gaming as Will. In these times when games are so often under assault for being needlessly violent, and often with good cause (Manhunt, Postal 2), we can always look at the Sim games and feel good about at least part of our hobby. This will be taken as an exaggeration, but SimCity has ensured that PC games will never lose their human side. This is why it passes so many other fabled titles and X-Com, the Perfect Game, for the title of Best Singleplayer PC Game of All Time.

Note: I shamelessly ganked screenshots for some games from sites like MobyGames, but I can't recall which screens go where. My apologies.