LO500 High Scores: Director Guillermo del Toro's Top 5 Favorite Games

In an interview at the Brattle Theatre, acclaimed director and maestro of the mystical Guillermo del Toro discussed The Fall, the second installment of his The Strain trilogy. He also payed homage to the video games he's come to know and love (and even make), and put the smack-down on America's favorite movie critic Robert Ebert for claiming that "video games can never be art."

Shout it from the rooftops, del Toro:
"I'm a gamer, I'm very proud to say that I'm old enough to have been a gamer since the Tele-Pong... I've been playing games since then until now; I think that they are a narrative art form and that many contain haunting, powerful immersive passages of narrative."

Here are his top 5 video game picks. How will they fare in the Laser Orgy 500?

1. Shadow of the Colossus
"And I believe that, soon, there will be a masterpiece in the genre, if not already with Shadow of the Colossus. I love that, and you know, I think that people talk about adapting it into a movie and I say, "Play the game." It's really perfect. You cannot replicate the wandering. And 90% of the beauty of it is just to get lost in the landscape and the atmosphere."

2. Call of Duty: World at War
"There are moments in Call Of Duty: World at War, when you are in the subway of Berlin and the Nazis flood that subway with water is as good a scene as any movie."

3. Bioshock
"[It's] full of moments of haunting, Lynchian, Cohen brothers beauty. It's like Barton Fink meets David Lynch on a crowded corner in an Art Deco building, meets Ayn Rand and Orwell, it's a really great meeting."

4. Gadget
"In the pre-history of CD-ROMs, there was a great game called Gadget, that was ... intoxicating."

5. Ico
"Incredibly haunting."

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PODCAST + VIDEO: Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan at the Brattle Theatre