This Mass Effect game was the crown of the bunch, and it effectively altered the course of my gaming life. None of them were enough to convince me of the superior technology the Xbox 360 provided. Gears of War, Dead Rising, Tom Clancy, yet another Halo game. It took a single trailer for a new game called Mass Effect, from the creators of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, to leave me in awe of what I was missing out on. In 2007, I was naively convinced that the Wii was the future of video games and that Nintendo has successfully won back its audience all over the world by keeping everything simple and inventive. Mass Effect was the series that pulled me into HD gaming. From morality to cover based shooting to in-depth storytelling and believable worlds and characters, Mass Effect took gaming to the heights that other developers promised but only dreamed of delivering. One brought all of our modern trends in gaming to a peak, moreso than any of its rivals. Together, these two represent everything that was amazing about the previous generation. With that in mind, it is time to look back and pick out a few of our favorite games, but before we get to that, I'd like to call to attention to the two original franchises from the last eight years that have stood out as the best and for totally different reasons: Mass Effect and Dark Souls. True, the final years of a console might churn up an experimental classic that succeeds on the pure game front rather than lean on new technology, but by and large, the best games have been either launched a long time ago or are already announced.

The previous generation of consoles have had their time in the spotlight, and it's safe to assume that the best is behind us.

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