Is it too early to call something next Portal? Well Shift is as close as I’ve seen to that puzzle magic. This side scrolling puzzler requires your running and jumping silhouette reach a door, but to get there, you have to shift from one background into the other, turning the world upside down. This allows you to reach new platforms and down others. There’s no cake, but it’s still a great game for that Portal-esque craving.

Geek-Out Game: Shift

There’s lots of debate about what defines art and video games are caught in the crossfire.  These often violent bastions of 21st century manhood are shuffled off as immature, shallow, and silly, which many are, but then of course, so are many books, movies, plays, and paintings.  As technology improves, so do the games, but that alone does not make an artistic video game.  Look at games for their stories, character development, visual design, and innovations in the medium, these are the games that are the proof of the medium’s potential for greatness.

7. Final Fantasy VI

Final Fantasy has been the standard-bearing for storytelling and character development as well as unmatched for its creative designs and attention to detail.  Of all the best of the bests, Final Fantasy VI stands out for its phenomenal use of sprites and 16-bit technology to create the franchise’s most massive epic.  With a cast of 14 main playable characters, and several optional additions, the game had so much back story to fill all on a Super NES cartridge.  With limited pixels and colors, Final Fantasy VI matched if not surpassed the story telling epics of the half dozen Final Fantasies that followed.

6. Bioshock

Amid the hype and rave reviews, Bioshock was an amazing step forward in video game artistry.  The story posed ethical questions drawn from philosophical literature, provided creativity through emergent gameplay, and showed off some of the best artistic design in a video game - you feel like you were in a gorgeous art deco city.  Most impressively, Bioshock altered the video game narrative (SPOILER WARNING) by revealing that for the first half of the video game, all the decisions you thought you were making were actually mind control through Pavlovian trigger words.  Really raises the question of who’s controlling who?

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