It's worse than even McShea made it out to be. If people liked the game, that's fine, but the number of official reviews that basically claim it to be perfect is pretty confounding.

1. The Witcher 2

2. Dark Souls

3. The World Ends With You

4. Persona 4

5. Skyrim

This is like music to my ears. Uncharted 2 was a very cool game at the time, but not even it (much less the thoroughly mediocre original or the shambling UC3) really holds up all that well today. In fact, the UC games encapsulate a lot of bad design tendencies that emerged this gen: there's a huge insistence on using tons of cutscenes to tell a story that isn't very good, everything is hyperlinear to a fault (there are sections in UC3 where you can't even turn around) and the minute-to-minute gameplay is lazily designed - just a bunch of standard cover-shooting that ND places their bets on being offset by crazy setpieces.

A lot of them, honestly. MGS4 and PD0 are particularly egregious examples of initial praise seeming absolutely confounding a few years later. BioShock, as well.

Anyone saying it's best in series is in serious denial. Or hasn't played Killzone 2. Or Killzone 3. Or Killzone: Liberation. Or Killzone: Mercenary. Or Killzone.

Max Payne 3 - 9/10

GTA IV (and Episodes) - 9/10

LA Noire - 8/10

Red Dead - 6/10

GTA V - 6/10

Deep down, you know it to be true.

Call of Duty 4: Basically every multiplayer action game is an extension of the ideas Modern Warfare brought to the table. Almost every first-person shooter nowadays uses all its core mechanics.

Gears of War: Cover-shooting didn't really exist before this game. Suffice it to say, it's pretty popular now.

Gears of War 2: Introduced Horde mode. The rest is history.

Braid/Castle Crashers: Directed a lot of people's attentions towards indie games for consoles, each in their own way; Braid is more on the "art-game" side of the spectrum, while Castle Crashers is more old-school and arcade-y.

Dark Souls: Take a look at any Kickstarter gaming project. 9 times out of 10 you'll read some reference to Dark Souls as an inspiration for the proposed game's design philosophy.

Mass Effect: The integration of shooter and RPG elements hadn't been done a whole lot before, whereas now it's pretty frequent. The simplistic dialogue choices it "pioneered" are also popping up in quite a number of games.

Final Fantasy XIII: Set the bar for how JRPGs shouldn't be made, making following games like Xenoblade, The Last Story, and Ni No Kuni look like works of genius by comparison.

Left 4 Dead: Along with games like Gears 2, really shifted the focus of multiplayer gaming towards co-op.

The Walking Dead: Raised the bar for what's to be expected of games that serve purely as a conduit for traditional storytelling. Makes David Cage's stuff look laughable by comparison.

Wii Sports: Affirmed that some fun (if not fully functional) game mechanics can be crafted with motion controls.

BioShock: Deluded a lot of people into thinking that thoroughly mediocre games could be considered "great" because they possess a self-important, faux-intellectual story.

I get that there's a Notifications tab now, but it's not all that accessible, nor does it display enough information about new user contributions (new blogs, for example, are just listed as "new blog," rather than their actual post title). Regardless, I don't think I've read a single blog post from the formerly frequent bloggers I used to follow since the new site was implemented (either because they haven't posted, or because I haven't been able to track down their posts), and that's pretty sad. The feed really should be fixed; GameSpot has by far the best user blogosphere of any of the major games media sites, and it's beyond a shame that this new redesign is so detrimental to such a great community of writers. What's the point of making a big push to support the GameSpot community with this updated site if it disregards the outlet for some of the most in-depth and thoughtful community contributions that users have access to?

No indies? And Tomb Raider has a spot? What the ****? Ditch that garbage and give something good like Gone Home or Brothers a nod.

I'd put Dark Souls up there with the Metroidvania-esque greats. Also, La-Mulana is a great Metroidvania style game. Be warned though, it's brutally difficult.