Weekend Discussion
Let's try something productive actually. Let's have an "Advocate your favorite game thread". There really are a lot of games out there, and sometimes it's easier to appreciate something if there's a paragraph or two where highlights are shown, the weaknesses explained and general tips provided. Maybe screen shots would help? Or perhaps a DOSBox config? Now here's the catch, once a game is advocated, you can't pick that one as we want diversity. But I will pick a thread contributor to get a Enemy Territory: Quake Wars shirt courtesy of Activision.
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geedeck
replyAdvocate your favorite game thread.
There really are a lot of games out there, and sometimes it's easier to appreciate something if there's a paragraph or two where highlights are shown, the weaknesses explained and general tips provided. Maybe screen shots would help? Or perhaps a DOSBox config? Now here's the catch, once a game is advocated, you can't pick that one as we want diversity. But I will pick a thread contributor to get a Enemy Territory: Quake Wars shirt courtesy of Activision.-
Ok, how does this work?
If I spend 20-30 minutes typing up a nice detailed post advocating TF2, and by the time I post it, someone else's beaten me to the punch, that's it?-
Make a short post, then later "remember" more that you want to say in reply. :-)
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No One Lives Forever 2
Easily one of the funniest games ever made, almost every part of the game will make you laugh heartily. Even some of the weapon choices are hilarious: the Angry Kitty Proximity Mine and the Banana are my favorites. Grandiose end-of-the-world plots and fighting ninjas in a trailer park being overrun by tornadoes (no gay stuff!) help make this one of the best games ever.-
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its smart fun, not poo poo fun. never gets old.
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Most Satisfying game I ever completed, before Portal.
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hear hear
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I thought Mafia was great. I remember the "race" mission where you have to race on a race track, and it was really fucking hard. But, after multiple tries, I beat it. Then, a few days later they released the first patch for the game, and in the notes was "made race mission easier" or something along those lines. I was proud of myself that I beat it before they dumbed it down.
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Civilization 4. Easily one of the best games ever made. Not only does it look good, but it is so complex that you can essentially discover new ways to play and to win every time you play. This is one of those games that has a tremendous amount of replayability and never gets tedious and boring.
I've also found that the skills I've gained from playing Civilization games actually carry over into the real world, as odd as that sounds. Micromanagement is useful!-
Civ 4 is the only game that frightens me. I loved playing it but I actually didn't play it that much at all... after the first few games, any time I got the urge to play I would have to ask myself "Do I have anything else that I need to do today? And am I planning on sleeping tonight?" and then I would have to put the game back down. :-(
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Damn thats my experience exactly. Its like some sort of life sucking device or something...and it always wants more. Its the ultimate "just one more turn" game...I think the turn based elements make it that much more addictive...because things are in these bite sized increments that you can just say "oh one more one more and then I'm done" and you look at the clock and its five fucking thirty in the morning and you have to get up in fifteen minutes and "OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE!!!!". Civilization was the same way...hell I'd be tempted to make an argument for that except Civ4 does everything Civ1 does and then some...amazing games...digital fucking crack all of them and I really need to play them some more but I know I don't have the time for it...not because I need to play them all day, but because I will (I think this is probably the reason I've avoided WoW...I now it would devour my life entirely and it isn't even the sort of game I tend to like...Civ4 can destroy me completely because it is the sort of thing I'm drawn to...and it always demands "just one more turn").
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Sid Meier's games are pretty damn educational, lessons in history and resource management
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Not so much about detailed historical events but more about general eras and technologies and broad stuff like that. Like I never understood how dangerous sea travel was until I lost a bunch of caravel transports. Or the devastating effect of guns
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I love everything about Civilization 4. It's the perfect step up from the earlier games. Not only is there more stuff to do with the gameplay itself, but the graphics and music both complement it perfectly (especially the music, dear lord, it's excellent).
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Final Fantasy X - PS2
Merits:
- Great graphics (for the time)
- Smooth gameplay with traditional J-RPG turn based battles with a twist
- FANTASTIC music
- Great storyline; Intertwined stories (Sin, Ject, Auron, etc.)
- Special Features: the first FF to use voice overs, sphere grid, CGI cut scenes
Add to this the endless unlockables (ultimate weapons, summons, monster captures, besaid language, etc) and you have my favorite game. -
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I always thought Mass Effect was KoToR meets Star Control 2. If they add ship combat the game will be near perfect.
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Bionic Commando (NES). That game really stood out for me back then, with remarkably different gameplay for a side scroller. Your character can't jump, and his only way across ravines & climbing and such was a awesome bionic arm. The graphics were pretty sharp, and the music very memorable. Here's a fairly in depth website devoted to the game: http://www.elitecoder.com/bionic/bionic-commando.html
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Jagged Alliance 2
This game was so well put together and has incredible gameplay and characters. Its blend of turn based strategy and RPG elements (where your mercs gain skill from activities the do like Marksmanship from just aiming and shooting) makes the game unique and very fun.. The system set up where you can manage your team is really cool. You receive emails on your in game computer and you can use that same computer to browse the internet to hire your mercenaries in what can be compared to now as a kind of Myspace but for mercenaries. And to get weapons (ranging from Glocks to even a mortar!), ammo, explosives, and medical supplies you can browse on to another site and buy them all. But be sure to ship them to the right place and not places like Baghdad or Hong Kong, they won't do you any good to overthrow that evil Queen Deidriana who has taken over Arulco. The strategic maps allows you to move your team across various sectors of the country and you must liberate cities to build up your support and cash (by securing mines) and to protect them you can train militias. But every dictator has an army you must out maneuver or engage successfully.
The characters you can hire are all caricatures of action stars and some original. My favorites were "Steriod" who's like Arnold and "Dr. Q" for his wise Asian words. Combat is excellent where you can spend action points to move or shoot. And obviously it takes more points to aim for the head than it is for the torso. But there's nothing more satisfying when you hit someone in the head with your decked out FN-FAL with scope, bipod, laser sight, and "rod & spring" (makes it shoot faster) and watch the dude's head explode. Combat becomes way more interesting when you can create a squad who can deliever indirect artillery support with mortars using a squad of camoflagued snipers who can act as forward observers. It's incredible how much flexibility you can to approach a battle. If you don't like using the front door, take some TNT and mix it with RDX to create a more power explosive (make sure they guy doing it has good enough Explosive skill) and blast a hole in a wall. Don't want to risk it even then? Toss in some mustard gas to clear the room.
Jagged Alliance 2 is an excellent strategy game, the story is great and SirTech (RIP) really put together an outstanding game. I highly recommend this game to anyone and everyone and to play it once as SirTech designed it and there are plenty of mods out there that adds a ton of weapons and scenarios.-
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I think I saw it on Steam
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The Steam version doesn't work with the fan-made 1.13 patch, which is absolutely fantastic... :(
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What is this patch you speak of? I have the game around here somewhere (I'm looking at the original manual right now actually).
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You can extract the files from the GCF with GCFscape and then use 1.13/stracciatella. Sadly I couldn't get the latter to run in OSX, but at least I can run it in Parallels..
http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/board/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/57712/page/1
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Bummer. Keep an eye on this thread I guess: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=620444
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Thirded.
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The Typing of the Dead. Hands down, the greatest zombie typing game ever created. They took Sega's lightgun game House of the Dead 2 and added typing gameplay.
Each zombie has a phrase. When you type them, it shoots and kills them:
http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/01/00/262200.jpeg
Everything has a sense of humor about it:
http://www.mobygames.com/images/i/01/00/262200.jpeg
Even the phrases you type start becoming funny:
http://www.pcsvet.cz/art/cldata/4500/tod1.jpg
The hilarious voice acting of original game carries over nicely:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPpayQFqoAE
As well as all the gore that a zombie game deserves:
http://i.neoseeker.com/screenshots/R2FtZXMvRHJlYW1jYXN0L0FyY2FkZQ==/housedead2_profilelarge.jpg
It's on PC, PS2, Dreamcast, and Gametap. I think they're making a sequel which looks fun but unfortunately, loses the campy humor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA7CKlpdIh0-
Whoops, that second link is supposed to be this:
http://curmudgeongamer.com/uploaded_images/typingftdead_screen022-750860.jpg -
HotD2 has one of my favorite videogame quotes in it.
That little flying monster who says "Suffer like G did"-
I love how he says it like a question. Suffer like G did?
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I'll stump for Myth, i.e. "that stuff that Bungie did before Halo". Especially Myth:TFL, although I had good fun with Myth 2 also. I can't really say that any game is my favorite game, but the Myth series sucked up my time like no other game has except Quake (and maybe eventually TF2).
I've never really been a big fan of RTS games, although I always want to enjoy them. Instead it ends up being too frantic for me to really like, and I get to a point where I have to start either missing some opportunities to micromanage troops while I fix up my base, or letting my economy/production slide while I manage my troops, and that really bugs me.
With Myth though it was all about the combat. You got to spend points at the beginning of a round (in MP) to set your mix of troops, and that was (usually) all you got. Formations, terrain, combined-arms, scouting, all sorts of stuff actually mattered. The ability to laser-focus on two or three separate combat teams and be aware of everything around them was often indispensible. And while you had to have micromanagement skills, you could play and play well with moderately high pings. I was actually kinda good at it!
And as sort of a Bungie hallmark, Myth came with several game-modes out of the box. Territories (with flags or with mobile balls), CTF (ditto), Last Man on the Hill, and good old Body Count (i.e. deathmatch). And people actually played the non-Body Count variants! Lots of people! There was definitely a large, odd subculture of Body-Count-only players, but if you wanted a good game of Territories you always had a fine selection of games to pick from. And while there were lots of fine folks in the ranked games and lots of asshats in unranked, if you wanted to lower the Internet Fuckwad quotient in your games then going into unranked-land usually worked really well.
I also loved the "feel" of the game. The little bits of humor, the troop vocalizations that each had a distinct character, the super-bloody combat in beautiful lush settings, the frustrating physics of the Dwarf molotov cocktail. The moment of panic when you see a Wight head poke out of the water next to your Archer platoon and hear the start of his suicide RARRRR. The pace of the game that had a brief "quiet before the storm" at the beginning; troops that moved just fast enough to keep things fairly snappy, and just slow enough so that you had to make good decisions and guesses when moving them, because you couldn't just snap out of a bad deployment. Each game lasting around 10-15 minutes usually, so that you could burn through all sorts of thrill-of-victory and agony-of-defeat moments in a matter of hours.
The single-player storyline was solid, "grunt's-eye POV" fantasy more like Glen Cook than Tolkien. Unabashedly wordy "cutscenes" between maps, basically scrolling text with a great narrator voice next to sepia-toned stills and maps. A memorable and evocative soundtrack (which I have on CD). And a nicely apocalyptic ending.
Lots more that I could talk about. Bungie.net's matchmaking lobby/service and the odd, sort of exasperating culture and fan-websites that grew around it. Tournaments. My gaming group, Clan Plaid. The wonderful teamplay setup (dividing available units between any number of players) that let you have teamplay "for free" in any SP or MP mode. The Quake-like flood of user-created maps and mods for MP and SP. Yada yada yada. I still have many recorded Myth:TFL games laying around on my hard drive and I occasionally break them out and re-live carefully selected scenes of me adminstering tactical beatdowns. It helps nostalgia along if you don't revisit your horribly embarrassing defeats. :-)
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I'll post some screenshots later if the current "community patch" for Myth ( http://projectmagma.net/downloads/tfl/ ) works on Vista.
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Not a lot. It's more active than (for example) QuakeWorld, I believe. There's certainly enough people to get games with, but it helps if you hook up with a particular group that organizes certain times to play. If you're looking to get in a game with random folks, Myth 2 is a much better bet than Myth:TFL.
I haven't played in a while myself, so I'm going on my most recent knowledge and a peek around the net.
The Bungie metaservers for the Myth games shut down a long time ago of course, but you can still use the metaserver at http://www.mariusnet.com/ for matchmaking ... and for the latest Myth-related patches, maps, etc. see http://getmyth.com/ (which is primarily about Myth 2 these days, but there's Myth:TFL stuff on that site as well if you poke around).
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I guess I should clarify my first lines above by saying "more active than QuakeWorld in North America". I think overseas QW is still going pretty strong and I don't want to incur anyone's wrath. :-)
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BTW, in my previous post I left out a few gametypes. Last Man on the Hill has a "mobile ball" form too, as Steal the Bacon. There's also the Flag Rally game type (first player to claim all flags wins, don't have to maintain control) and a ball form of that too.
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OK, here's a bunch of shots in 800x600, which is not quite the original as-God-intended resolution of 640x480 but close enough for flavor. My guys will have red somewhere on their uniforms. In teamplay Myth games, the team captain's color was dominant on a unit's uniform, and the individual player's color was used as a secondary color.
Myth:TFL came out in 1997, and it's a game that looks better in motion than in pictures. I do still like its look though, and I had fun taking these shots. :-) Hopefully some of the Myth-ness shows through.
There's a song and a movie at the end!
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http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_1_1.jpg : Choosing my army during setup time, for a game of Last Man on the Hill on the map "For Carnage Apply Within".
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_1_2.jpg : I let the green player walk his Thrall (heavy infantry) into the middle to take the flag; meanwhile my Dwarfs on the top hill (heavy ranged) and my Soulless on the right (all-terrain light ranged) chew him up. Starting to make a mess there.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_1_3.jpg : Now getting really messy in the center. With my Thrall hanging out nearby and my Soulless able to shoot over the top, nobody wants to pay the price to charge up and take out my Dwarfs. So I'll just hang out here, kill everyone, then claim the flag.
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http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_2_1.jpg : A game of Steal the Bacon on the map "I'll Dance on your Spiderweb". My Fetch (heavy long-ranged) is atop the hill zapping bad guys below, while the rest of my army is coming up behind out-of-frame.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_2_2.jpg : The bacon has been pushed into the river where it is now floating in mid-screen... hard to see since it is currently colored black. I just used an underwater Wight (suicide bomber) to nuke the enemy troops around it.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_2_3.jpg : My remaining infantry hold off the last bad guys while my floating Soulless hover out onto the river to claim the bacon.
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http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/FG_pimp_slap.gif : My Forest Giant on the map "Rest in Pieces", applying the map name to an enemy soldier unit.
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http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_3_1.jpg : Charging my Warriors (medium infantry) into a fixed defense during a game of Territories on the map "Creep on the Borderlands", trying to contest the flag and extend Sudden Death.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_3_2.jpg : Got one guy through! Contested long enough for us to grab the NW flag and win.
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http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_4_1.jpg : Territories on the map "The Desert Between your Ears". Blue team didn't have enough infantry defending the NW flag, so we swarm them with Warriors and Ghols (light infantry). Their Archers (light ranged) are about to be gutted here.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_4_2.jpg : Setting up the bridge defense on Desert.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_4_3.jpg : After pushing across the bridge... good attack, but a few Thralls were too slow and got hit by a Wight coming out of the river.
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http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_5_1.jpg : A game of Captures (Territories with balls) on the map "Mudpit Massacre". Here we've pushed a couple of balls into the river and set up a submarine defense force of Thralls.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_5_2.jpg : Same Captures game. We've acquired another ball among the center ridges of the map, and are defending it with infantry below and Archers on the ridge.
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http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_6_1.jpg : A classic push across the river in Territories on Creep.
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http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_7_1.jpg : Attacking the flag in a game of LMOTH on the map "I'll Dance on your Grave". My Ghols are throwing Wight-bits to paralyze the opponents. Ghols can pick up and throw objects found on the battlefield, which for most objects is just mildly amusing, but Wight-bits are quite useful.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_7_2.jpg : See, using red as my color is actually good for camoflauge. After rampaging through the units around the flag, my last three guys head off to block the other players and make sure that Sudden Death terminates with me holding the flag.
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/series_7_3.jpg : An example of the postgame stats screen.
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Some multimedia for you, a peppy tune with lots of Myth sound effects ("Casualty" ©1998 by Benjamin Grant DePauw): http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/CASUALTY.MP3
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Finally... there aren't many fan-made Myth films, but some Shacker made this one, "Why Myth Owns You", a while ago. Only 14 MB, for you cautious downloaders. It shows Myth 2 (also a great game!), not Myth:TFL. Anyone want to step forward and claim authorship? I forget who did this. :-(
http://www.neogeographica.com/myth/wmoy.avi
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^^^^ Screenshots and stuff in here (which the post-preview doesn't make clear).
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Ah, here's where I got that movie from: http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=12019533
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Man, I loved Myth and Myth 2. I remember Clan Plaid, how weird is that? When Myth 2 hit I ran with a bunch of guys that specialized in the WW2 Maps. It was a nice mod that completely changed the feel of the game it was widely played. Not to say that the regular MP wasn't fantastic.
It's funny that you compared the single player story to Glen Cook because I'm reading Chronicles of the Black Company right now and I keep making comparisons to Myth.-
It's not weird at all! :-)
Cf. the story thing: I don't have any relevant interview handy, but I'm pretty sure that the Bungie guys have explicitly said that they were drawing a lot of inspiration from the Black Company. Aside from the general idea of having everything chronicled by one of the footsoldiers, the influence is most obvious I think in the names they pick for the enemy "hero units".
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Tie Fighter (and it's expansion) is still my favorite game. The storyline kept me on the edge of my seat, and gave purpose to every mission. The graphics at the time were excellent, and each imperial fighter was fun as hell to play, even the clunky tie bomber.
I would commit horrible, unspeakable acts if it meant getting a quality Tie Fighter sequel in my hands.-
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Doesn't this look nice? USB baby.
http://www.amazon.com/CH-Products-Flightstick-4-Button-Hatswitch/dp/B00006B84V/ref=sr_1_24?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1199043155&sr=8-24
Too bad there's no way I'd pay $70 for it.-
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I am still shocked that Lucas Arts hasn't made this series for the new consoles. They would translate pretty well without the need for a joystick (although it would be cool to have a "mastery" level of control with an add-on...I always liked micro-ing shields / weapons / throttle in dogfights), they are accessible, and games like Crimson Skies prove that flying games on consoles are just fun. And using X-box live for competitive multiplayer, co-op missions, and add-ons (new maps, scenarios) would keep them alive.
It seems more appealing than the BattleFront series, at least to me. I don't want to run on the ground and shoot stationary turrets- I want to dog fight and take on Imperial Destroyers.
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I'd love to see that along with a PC release (I already have a nice flight sim setup (throttle, joystick, rudder pedals, etc)...so I hate having to buy things again when space is limited).
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They should seriously remake it. i want a new one :(
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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time -- IN REPLY
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Oh yes it is! s{now, anyway}s
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I have heard the argument that 3D Zeldas are nothing when compared to 2D Zeldas such as The Link to the Past and the venerable original. I have heard this argument, and summarily dismissed it. Make no mistake, I'm all for 2D gaming. Classics such as Mega Man and Castlevania have crashed and burned after making the leap (more like tumbling end over end) into the allegedly deeper, richer world of 3D. But some games, despite being masterpieces in their flat, two-dimensional skins, were simply meant to be experienced in a 3D world.
The first time I climbed to the highest point of Hyrule Field for no other purpose than to watch a sunrise, I knew that Zelda: Ocarina of Time was one of those games.
There aren't many games which I played for no other purpose than simply existing in a virtual world. I would click my Zelda cartridge into place, boot up my save file, and live in Hyrule for hours--fishing, traipsing across Hyrule Field with Epona, wading through the Gerudo obstacle course to obtain the largely useless ice arrows, spreading out the Goron's Sword quest for no other purpose than the fact that I enjoyed running each and every segment of it, collecting stray chickens for a breeder who was, astoundingly, allergic to them, searching out each and every heart piece, item capacity upgrade, and truth stone.
Ocarina of Time gave me a skeleton of a story line and thankfully let me fill in the blanks. Yes, the goal was ultimately to save Hyrule from Ganondorf's tyranny, but I could do so at my leisure. Yes, the sages were desperate for my Hero of Time to free their brethren from captivity, but understood that I had a horse to ride in the meantime. And yes, Princess Zelda was probably pissed that I chose to let her literally hang out in a giant shard of pink crystal for days and days, but I like to think that she understood that having 50 arrows instead of 40 would make her rescue that much more efficient, and a great deal less lethal to the both of us.
Every area of Ocarina of Time had a perfect soundtrack accompaniment. The Water Temple's score was slow and lethargic, yet mysterious, much like the task of completing said temple. Low drums and chants provided the perfect backdrop for the Fire Temple, and a jungle beat hastened my steps to rescue my childhood friend, Saria, from the Forest Temple.
Zelda64's airtight control scheme raised the bar single-handedly locked into place by Mario64. Why have a jump button when it's so much easier to simply rush to the precipice and have the game leap for you? Why spend time swinging your bow to and fro when the option to lock on and concentrate on the ballet of the battle is available? Why swing your blade haphazardly when it is far more fun to circle your opponent, deflect their killing strike, and leap forward in retaliation, slashing through his defenses and watching his broken body burn into nothingness?
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the perfect blend of adventure, traditional and non-authorial storytelling, music, graphics, and gameplay. It is by far the best entry in the Zelda franchise, and the pinnacle of gaming.-
3D Zeldas are nothing when compared to 2D Zeldas such as The Link to the Past
Exactly.-
Congratulations, you've taken my quote completely out of context.
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You've been Colbert'd...I love truthiness!
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I just wanted to put it in the right context!
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I've finished every classic style 2D zelda game I've played (Zelda 2 doesn't count), but I always grow bored with the 3D Zeldas. I play Zelda games for the puzzles and the item finding portions. I've never been big on the combat sections and the 3D Zeldas seemed to ahve made the combat even more important. They feel like a completely different game, really. Even Metroid games feel different once put into 3D, but since that's a shooter rather than a hack and slash game it was a clean transition. I know many people love the 3D Zeldas, and that's cool, but I sort of wish that they were able to create those games with a different name.
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While I prefer LttP to OoT, its more a matter of the games themselves rather than 3d vs 2d...I actually prefered TTP to OoT because it reminded me more of LttP which is easily my favorite game in the series and holds a special place in my heart. Not knocking OoT...it was a great game...even though I hated the whole damned Peter Pan thing in the beginning.
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Okami
The best 3D Zelda style game out there. Yes, that's right. Better than Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess. Has a long and good, albeit highly Japanese story. Fun and varied gameplay throughout. Controls are tight and the celestial brush mechanics are surprisingly a lot of fun. The graphics and art style are both outstanding, even in its low res SD form in a sea of high tech HD games.
It's not without its flaws though, opens with a series long unskippable cutscenes (I don't personally mind these too much, since the game is better when you pay attention to the story, rather than ignore it, but many were initially put off by it). Long and painful character dialogue / text scrawls. There is no way to speed them up really, and since there's a lot of conversing in the game, that means a lot of sitting and waiting. Some people also find the character's generic speech mumblings that accompany the text highly annoying, at least Issuns' anyway. Even I was annoyed with him at first, I won't spoil why I ended up liking him though, you'll have to play to see! The game is also looong, like 40 hours long even without doing much side stuff. Some people hate epic games but I thought the length was perfect since the game was so fantastic, and I really did not want it to end.
If you have a PS2, you should own this game. Capcom's Clover Studio did an incredible job on this and other titles before being dissolved.
If you have a Wii but no PS2, watch out for the port which is currently being worked on by Ready at Dawn. I've always felt this game would have been better suited to for the Wii because of the paint brush gameplay, but it really depends on if they nail the controls or not. I hear a lot of Wii games & ports have substandard controls, but Ready at Dawn are supposed fans of the game and should do a good job in the end.
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screenshots!
http://www.shacknews.com/gallery.x?game_id=3204
and here is a video showing comparing the original somewhat realistic art style and the final one which looks more like a painting come to life:
http://www.stage6.com/Game-Comparisons/video/1193975/Okami-old/new-comparison
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"Incubation: Time is Running Out" (US) / "Battle Isle: Incubation" (EU)
It's nearly impossible to find now, but I loved it. It's a turn-based strategy game by Blue Byte Software that captured the feel of the movie "Aliens" to a tee.
Game installs fine, although on newer operating systems you may need to put the installer in Windows 98 compatibility mode. You will have to use the software renderer because none of the 3dfx wrappers work. Also, the disc has to be in the drive as the cutscene audio is on the CD as Redbook-encoded tracks.
A few tips:
Unless you are running, have an overheated barrel or are out of ammo, always finish your turn with enough action points left to put yourself in defense mode. A person in defense mode will open fire on any enemies that move into a 45-degree cone in front of them until their barrel overheats, and a single person can decimate many enemies.
Try to get weapons with bayonets on them. Most of the rank and file aliens can only damage you up close and personal, and defense mode is intelligent enough to use the bayonet at that range.
Track morale. When someone is wounded or sees a teammate fall, there is a chance that they will get scared and lose most of their action points until they rest.
Rotate out your personnel. There is permadeath for your units, so if you just stick with your starting few and buff them up with promotions and experience, you WILL suffer when they start dying at the 2/3rds point...and they WILL die.-
I played that game !!! alot. dont remember how I got it though maybe a friend gave it to me... awesome game, and i just realized that is why i play Fire Emblem games and the like, now....
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I've been trying to remember the name of this game for a few weeks now. I loved the demo but never got the game. Thanks!
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As a broke ass high school student at the time, I put probably 50+ hours into the demo of this game. Sadly, now that I'm less broke and feeling reminiscent, this game is pretty much impossible to find. I have some very fond memories, though.
Someone needs to revisit this idea, though. There were some very awesome things about this game that I've never seen anywhere else.
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Planescape: Torment (PC. 1999) For me, Planescape is hands-down one of the most creative and diverse universes ever made. Your character awakens on a dissection slab in a gigantic mortuary, without memories, having nothing but a floating, wise-cracking skull to tell him what's going on. The story only gets better from there. If you love games like KOTOR, where you get to change peoples' lives with the things that you say and do, you'll love Torment even more. This game utilizes Bioware/Black Isle's Infinity engine (as made famous by Baldur's Gate PC) and the AD&D 2nd ed ruleset, so it's no surprise that the combat and movement play similarly to Baldur's Gate. Expect a lot of surprises though, as there are no true rules in the Planescape universe!
What to expect:
- An incredible story with some of the best twists found in games
- Strategic real-time combat, allowing you to give orders while paused
- Puzzles galore, both logical and diplomatic, often with multiple solutions
- An experience that you'll never forget (you'll play it again every few years to make sure)-
Come on people, this has to be one of the greatest games of all time.
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This is about what I was going to type out, but actually worded better.
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I've played it in XP before. What was the problem?
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Did you apply the 1.11 patch first, and the community "fix pack" ( http://planescape.outshine.com/ ) ?
Although I don't think either of them have to do with XP compatibility. :-(
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Here's an interesting article (not a review or preview) that was put up on Gamespot a good while back. It does contain spoilers, but no more than you'll find in the typical review. Read it if you need more convincing: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6135401/index.html
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Torment's the best RPG I've played. That includes both Fallouts.
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I only played it this summer, but yeah, it's a stunningly amazing game. I'm already planning on playing through it a second time.
The ending floored me...I was just speechless.-
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This is a fantastic post. Listen to this man!!!
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Totally agree. Planescape: Torment makes every other RPG out there look like it was written by a 4-year old in comparison. To add to Aasyranth's list, it also has some of the best voice-acting and line-up of voice actors ever created including: Mitch Pileggi (Director Skinner from the X-files), Sheena Easton (80's Pop psuedo-star), Dan Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer Simpson), and John DeLancie (the character of "Q" from Star Trek: Next Generation). While you may not think of Mitch Pileggi or Sheena Easton as "great voice-actors", I can assure you that they hold their own next to John DeLancie and Dan Dan Castellaneta.
It's not hyperbole to say that this game has (easily) the best-written scripting and story/plot of any game, ever. -
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Uprising: Join or Die Motherfucker
Apparently this game came out in 97 and I remember playing it to death. It's essentially a first-person action game with a tiny bit of strategy and resource management mixed in. I'm sure there was a story though I remember nothing about it.
Essentially you're in a tank which has guns, cannons, all that shit. You would play on a map with a number of enemy bases. The basic gist is that you destroy the base, build yours on top of their old base, and you then have access to build tanks, infantry, air support etc. So when you move on to attack the next base, you can spawn all of your buddies to help you attack the new one.
There were some more wrinkles, like being able to man giant cannons that were built on your base to take out attackers. I'm pretty sure there was a rock-paper-scissors type thing to balance the units.
I can't find too much info on it but here's what I was able to dig up:
This is the back of the box and is probably the best collection of screenshots I could find
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/uprising-join-or-die/cover-art/gameCoverId,30266/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/uprising-join-or-die
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/uprising/review.html?tag=tabs;reviews
I would love to play this game again. I wonder if it's aged well.-
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Still runs in xp no problem in software mode. Uses glide for 3d, and there are no glide wrappers that work with it. It is like one of about a half dozen or so glide games that cannot be wrapped due to a funky method of something-or-other that cant be emulated.
There was a sequel, but I have never played it.
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Deus Ex still stands as one of the best games ever, and my favorite, because it does an astonishing amount with very simple technology. It accomplishes this through effectively balancing a cinematic impulse with a still-astonishing amount of player freedom. It's really hard to establish multiple, viable avenues of action in all your circumstances; making them self-evident on an inspection of the level and well-balanced with a complex, branching tree of possible skill-paths the player can go down is mindbogglingly-difficult.
They were never anything special at the time, but the AI and Graphics have obviously aged. But the great (and amazingly voluminous) writing and good-enough voice acting keeps it feeling appropriately immerse it and fleshes out the world in a way that the blocky architecture and sparsely-placed items never could, and haven't in many subsequent games. It knows just the appropriate amount of detail to throw at the reader, and that balance still rings true years later.-
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i like the story and environment better in system shock 2, but i think deus ex is a better game overall, ss2 is a little too short, i like the augs and stats in dx but i think ss2 has the advantage as far as character creation content and difficulty, the importance of sneaking in dx edges out ss2 imo..
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Mario Kart 64. What was so amazing about this game was that anyone could not only pick it up and have a good time, but also become competitive very quickly. The fact that it supported four players made my N64 a fixture in the back of my volvo station wagon as I would tote it around to all my friends droms. Having four people in the same room playing together offered a kind of fun that today's online games just can't seem to muster. Mario Kart 64 is a party game that is fun even without a party, and for that I salute it.
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I'm still jealous of how well thought-out the game premise is, or at least appears. You are in deep space, so they want you to feel "alone". You have to protect your "base" (it is an RTS game, after all), so they make it a mothership of which there is only one and it is the last hope of your dying race. Your people must seek out the planet from which they originate, so your quest is a long journey to your homeworld, in which you must protect this mothership, and have enemies that can come at you from any side. Add in some awesome Brian Eno style music, and it was just magical. Conjured emotion which no RTS game had done for me before.
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I was way down in the pits when Kharak was destroyed, the first time I really felt sadness , doom and gloom in a game. The story line is awesome and the books that come with HW 1 were awesome to read and get into the atmosphere of the game.
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My vote goes here. My initiation into HW happened at 3am on a Sun morning, Pal told me to load it up ..... after many drinks and many joints, I hit the Sensors view and my mind was fucking blown.
Pro's,
Looks and runs great on older systems.
Clean interface with great graphics.
With the tech tree you can really customize and build a fleet suited to your style of play.
Unrestricted movement within the cube of space (map/level) Up, down, side to side) This is what blew me the fuck away,
Con's
Learning curve is what you make of it.
Slow to get going into the battles, but once you are there... whoah..
Many Usermade maps run like total ass, for they are too large or have too much resources on sceen and the game is super choppy
Only 2 races to choose from.
Tips.
You can easily spend to much on researching tech, and spend yourself to death.
Upgrade only what you currently have, or what you are planning to build next.
Protect your resourcing, and keep fucking moving around the map.
I personally move my whole fleet around all the time. If the mood is right, I will split up my fleet for a flank.-
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actually it's more vital in HW2
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Oh man, I wanted to mention this game but JA2 was more obscure. This game had the greatest hype from me ever and it went far beyond it. Great music, graphics, controls, story, every aspect of the game was excellent.
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Did HW allow you to pause and issue commands? That really saved my bacon in HW2.
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I know it's the original, but I vote for Super Metroid. ;)
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Team Fortress Classic!
Highest skill cap potential in any game that I've seen. There is almost no limit to how capable a player you can become in this game with so many things to try. Unfortunatly for other players, this was also the biggest weakness as it discouraged most new players from making the effort of learning the game. Despite this problem, once you get past this initial stage the enormous possibilities open up and absurd situations occur quite often and become another weapon in the players arsenal. Double concussion jump at 4,000 MPH, rocket skimming through the map, pipe deathmatching, concussion aiming to negate the effects all at a ridiculous rate of speed makes it a very fast paced game.-
I'm not even average skilled in tfc, but damn I still SO love that game, but nobody is playing it anymore. :(
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I still have my disc right here :)
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Not as good as Master of Magic, bitch!
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How is it, with all time and money and processing power in the gaming industry now, that developers have failed to match MoO2? It's ridiculous that this game contained design features which so obviously enhanced play, such as the racial bonus system, which never seem to have been done justice since.
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fan-fucking-tastic game. It's too bad MoO3 was such a pile of shit. :(
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Silent hill 2 introduced a more fluid branching narrative mechanic that this wherein the behavior of the player, rather than discreet win/loss conditions, or artificially clear cut good / bad decisions, determined which ending was shown. The game would track how often a player checked in on the status of a NPC, the amount of time a player was low on health, and other behaviors which were added together to generate a profile of the player's manifest personality to determine the appropriate ending to show.
The story itself followed akira yamaoka's strategy of not revealing everything to the gamer and keeping them guessing in order to brilliantly pull them into the tension of the game design by keeping the player always slightly off balance and ill at ease since the very universe you're wandering around in is somehow disjointed or 'off' and you never are able to quite make enough sense of what's going on to feel comfortable.
This coupled with his absolutely phenomenal atmospheric sound design lead to a perpetual sense of dread for the player. There were never enough health pickups or plentiful ammunition to where you could stop fearing the enemies.
Unlike the recently lauded Resident Evil revival the Silent Hill series had under stood that giving the player too much power in combat runs contrary to the ethos of building tension in a horror game. If you can run around constantly headshooting any threat you may face, what is there to fear from them?
Where as SH2 introduced the enemey of pyramid head who is so iconic, i feel, not simply due to his brilliantly singular design, but also because up until the end of the game he was beyond your ability to defeat. You knew that around any corner the game might make you face him, or some other equally powerful creature that left you with no option but to flee.
Furthermore the sound design of the game, and indeed the whole series to this point, is simply brilliant, sound is in general, is critical to developing emotion in the player and in a genre that is wholly defined by that (horror) the enire experience and hinge on what is often overlooked for the graphics. Other horror games on consoles such as Doom 3 on xbox, clearly put sound second to the visuals which becomes clear in extremely low fidelity vocal clips, while silent hill put the audio front and center where it should be. Yet for all that the graphics for the time on the ps2 were phenomenal, using a, at the time, novel grain filter to give the game a additional visual layer and enhance the dirty, abandoned feel of the project.-
Excellent choice. Another point in favor of SH2 is the well-executed adult story... and I'm not talking about Pyramid Head getting it on with undead nurses, but rather James' confused search for his dead wife & his reaction to Maria.
Also, I hadn't played SH before playing SH2, so the whole thing about the radio static and the alternate dimensions was new to me. Truly a scary, creepy game.
Tried SH4 later and didn't really like it. :-(
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It's Breakdown shillin' time again. Before F.E.A.R., before Half Life 2, before Chronicles of Riddick, there was Breakdown. The creators of Soul Calibur and Tekken sucked up the entire history of gritty sci-fi FPS, boiled the juices down and served up a game that still stands as one of the best and most innovative 1st person experiences ever. This was the first released game with a full body player model and what that gives, in terms of slide tackles, backwards handsprings and just simply getting into a vehicle and taking cover is phenomenal. The first person hand to hand combat has never been improved on, the guns are as solid as Quake 2 and the pacing and challenge/reward/challenge rhythm has not been topped, even by the refined standards we see 4 years later. Add a crazy, psychological funhouse of a storyline and you've got a brutally difficult, but incredibly rewarding monument to interactive entertainment. It's finally BC on the 360, so you really don't have any excuses left not to discover this unsung classic. At well over 25 hours of gameplay, you're going to come away with a gaming memory you'll never forget.
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Some early gameplay, just to whet your whistle: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/547.html
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Breakdown really is an amazing game. It was put together well, the story is deep, and you slowly gain in power to the point where you almost feel like you can do anything. The hand-to-hand combat system it deep, too. There are SO many moves based on sequences and combinations of the movement stick plus the left trigger / right trigger / both triggers. I played through it on the XBOX, and I fully intend on going through it a second time on the 360.
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Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Not the be confused with Quake Wars, ET was released as a totally free MP game in 2003. It was originally planned as being an expansion pack of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but due to problems with the single player development, Splash Damage decided to release it free as just a multi-player game!
This was the first game (that I know of) to use a ranking system in the way they did. You went up through the ranks depending on how many kills/points you accrued during your time on that server. As soon as you left the server, though, the next time you join you're back to private. This was somewhat of an equalizer, however, the upgrades you received through ranking up were certainly not enough to make it impossible for someone who is a lower rank to kill you.
My favorite aspect of this game was the Covert Op. Anyone who has played TF2 knows the deadly art of disguises and Wolf:ET was the first game to implement this. The catch was you had to find a dead enemy in order to steal his uniform! You also steal his name and whatever class he was wearning, so the enemy will see the victims name when they point their cursor at you.
Some awesome stuff with the Covert Op:
Shooting will NOT remove your disguise unless an enemy sees you shooting. So you can get up into a tower and snipe the enemy as long as they aren't looking in your direction and you won't lose your disguise.
Your melee knife also has a backstab ability: simply get behind an enemy and stab! An icon shows on your screen if your next jab will be a backstab.
The other classes were equally enjoyable and had their own original aspects. The Field Op could call in artillery strikes with his binoculars and air strikes with a smoke grenade. The medic could revive fallen teammates with his syringe and the engineer could build machine gun nests, guard towers at pre-designated locations.
All in all, this has to have been the most fun I've had with a multiplayer FPS. Only Team Fortress 2 comes close to the awesomeness. The fact this game was released for free says a lot as well.
I leave you with this video my friend and I made back in 2004, at the peak of our Wolf:ET playing. We decided to emulate the various aspects of the game in real life as only people who have played the game a lot would know it. Love live ET!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7brakrJjvO0-
Wow, I played this game for months and I didn't know the bit about losing disguise. Awesome!
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One of the games where even if you weren't very good, you could take great delight in getting the ranks or doing different things - ducking around reviving people or just sitting back with the mortar (lol, how many other games have a weapon that lets you kill with virtually zero exposure?), maybe even being that pesky engineer who repairs stuff or defuses the dynamite when you're not looking. It wasn't just team deathmatch with classes. Almost everything was useful and kinda balanced too.
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Valkyrie Profile (and 2)
One of the only JRPG series I enjoy. It isn't about a bunch of silly little twink heroes fighting a guy in a cape. You play Lenneth, the Valkyrie, who collects the fallen to fight in Aasgard. The world map is overhead and you can visit side-scrolling platformer type dungeons. It may sound easy to navigate since they are platformers, but there are plenty of puzzles to solve in order to progress.
Also, the combat is fun as hell. It's more timing/combo oriented than other RPGs I've played. And in VP2, they add a whole nother tactical component to combat.
The voice acting is pretty bad though, and the first one is sort of time-limited so you can't just farm a dungeon for items and XP. You have to keep moving or you fall behind and get a shitty ending. -
no doubt it my mind, QUAKE 1/QUAKEworld
the pinicle of online gaming and the first time a lot of gamers played on the internet. i spent countless hours playing threewave ctf, regular deathmatch, some TF and counter strike. Sure it was a pain to get and stay connected to servers because of our 28.8 modems or in some cases 14.4 but it was still a blast.
oh and not to mention when you'd get on a T1 or go to a university and just completely dominate a server filled with HPB(high ping bastards) and everyone screaming at you because you were a LPB(low ping bastard) was completely hilarious. the fast paced action combined with (what i think is the best weapon in any game of all time) the rocket launcher with quad damage.
the DM levels were almost perfectly balanced and some of the single player levels played nicely also (e1m2 i think and e4m3). quite simply the perfect game for the time and the electro-shock online mulitplayer needed at the time-
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LPB 4ever! Awww yeeeeeeeeahhh.
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I'd probably have to go with this too, just based on the sheer amount I played it. That, and Q2/UT.
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A little Quake story from my distant past: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=973838#post973838
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SUPER METROID - One of the best 2-D adventure to ever grace our televisions. This sci-fi game has some of the best boss battles and gameplay mechanics even up till this day. The weapon system is simple yet intricate enough to keep you interested. The puzzles are wonderfully crafted and the areas you explore are all unique and diverse. The art is spectacular and the music very fitting for our bounty hunter Samus. The atmosphere in this game is what makes it stand out in my opinion. The sense of solitude and exploration are perfect.
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The story/ending really add to make this my fav game of all time too.
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The Ultima Underworld games were really good. I played them back in 97 or something but the first DOS one came out in 1992. Ultima Underworld was really a forefather of all modern 3D games, with an amazing level of technology for the time (read up on it, it's interesting). But it also happened to be an amazingly good action-RPG as well, with great puzzles and combat, good interface, and even a good story eventually.
It starts off slow though. I also have no idea how well it plays in DOS emulators etc. today. But it's a monumental game that deserves more respect. If you like it the sequel is just as good... and the later Looking Glass games like the System Shock ones.
Honestly though I don't have one favorite game. -
Pong... it started it all.
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Starflight- I was in love with that game as a kid. It felt like it had so much depth - alien races, tons of worlds to explore. Plus, I never finished it. :(
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Lands of Lore : The Throne of Chaos
The real-time FPSRPG to end all FPSRPGs. This game packed it all, smooth scrolling faked 3d navigation, a killer soundtrack and plot, and best of all, kickass gameplay.
Plays perfectly under DOSBox, and if you can get your hands on the CD version of the game, features Patrick f'n Stewart as the voice of King Richard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lands_of_Lore:_The_Throne_of_Chaos-
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Jedi Knight - The game that I'd always wanted to play, and it was awesome. Force powers, some cool weapons, really cool levels and locations, and cheesy cinematics all in one place. I played this game for two years (including the expansions). Multiplayer was really fun, albeit flawed, as well. One on one duels...so many memories I'll never forget.
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BF1942 - Released in 2002 and it brought a lot to the table back then. Awesome infantry combat, amazing vehicle combat, and diversity out the ass. Amazing class team play and maps ... omfg the maps.
However, it was just the general arcade feel of this shooter that put it over the top. Watching bodies go flying from tank shells, destroying a whole team with one bombing run from a b17 ... I'm getting wet just thinking about it.
yes, there were downsides like going up against umax in a tiger tank
The mod scene was pretty active as desert combat became BF2.
This is the game that brought me back to gaming.-
I have to jump on the BF 1942 band wagon as well. As Rosewood said almost every type of combat was fun as hell and each person seemed to have a specialty be it flying, sniping, or blowing the crap out of everything umax style. This game is what really got me into PC online gaming.
We need a commemorative shackbattle...
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Darkseed - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Seed_(game)
Originally published in the early 90's by Cyberdreams, it raised the bar for style & artwork in video games. Every scene resembles a mixture of a creepy photograph, and a morbid oil brushed painting. The art direction was done by H.R. Geiger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._R._Giger), and to this day holds it's own for the title of 'most amazingly evil & disturbing art in a video game'. The game itself was difficult & bug ridden, and had a lot of game-breaking failure points, if certain goals weren't achieved within a specific time frame. Despite these flaws, it was an enjoyable not only to watch, but to experience it's twisted story.
Art reference (courtesy of delteradventures.com):
http://www.delteradventures.com/images/screens/Darkseed3.JPG
The story revolves around the protagonist Mike Dawson, who buys a macabre house in the hills of a mysterious town. He falls asleep in the first night of the new house, and dreams about an Alien abduction which results in a 'dark seed' being imanted in his head. The rest of the story is spent discovering the truth behind the seed, and the mystery behind the town he resides in. The game is primarly based around point & searching (a'la Escape Room games) and time based puzzles.
It was difficult to play & disturbingly beautiful to me. Much like the original Alone in the Dark for PC. It is definitely one game I will never forget. -
Tribes 2 though I wanted to say Battletoads
After sampling some FPS on my friends' computers (Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Pathways to Darkness) and playing some on my first decent machine (Half Life, TFC, CS), I was introduced to Tribes 2. More specifically I was introduced to playing as a team. Some friends and I would take over a computer lab at college on Fridays and play Tribes 2. Because of the class based aspect, we'd all split into several different roles and work on taking out the competition. I was the engineer character most times. Whether I was setting up forward bases behind their lines complete with teleporters, sentries, and radar dampeners or I was riding in the back of a bomber with my friends (repairing our ship, throwing off chaff grenades to stop missiles, or launching my own missiles at attacking planes) I was having a large amount of fun. The bombing runs were really great as we'd fly over their base, drop off a spy who'd blow up their power generators, and proceed to bomb the crap out of them.
When the college ended, Tribes more or less did too. A lot of the enjoyment came from the fact that we were all playing in the same room, but the size and depth of the game is still something that I miss in later class based games such as TF2.-
I also forgot to mention that the maps were huge, which I liked.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d7/Tribes2Screenshot.jpg -
I liked the aesthetic of the Tribes games a lot too, not to mention all the little goofy touches like the mocapped dance taunts and "Shazbot!"
Makes me all tingly inside to see what GG is going to come up with for their Tribes-a-like game.
As for what you said about being in the same room together, there's a lot to that, especially for a game like Tribes 2 that had a high ceiling for teamwork. For example this promo video for Tribes 2:
http://www.neogeographica.com/temp/tribes2us140.exe
You would never see that happen on a pub unless one of the teams had a group of people who were used to playing with each other, and on voice comm or in the same room. However if you did have a group of folks like that, that really could happen and it was very cool.
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Duke 3D - This was not only a fantastic single player, one of my greatest gaming memories was staying after school and playing Duke 3d DM with my friends.
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Far from it. Now Fallout 1...
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Agreed. Finally, amoral game dynamics (you can win being a damn bastard or a saint), realistic world (guess what, you shoot a kid, people hate you - and their friends in other towns hate you), a game where Intelligence plays into conversation and conversation *matters*, and still one of the best intro movies to date. Hilarious easter eggs and sub-plots. Just a fun, fun, fun game.
Rough stuff - Unlike Fallout 1 you can't win the entire game by just being a smooth bastard. =( -
Yep. My favorite. Pimping your in game wife for cash, enough said.
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Ultima VII
Easily the most interactive in depth world ever created for an RPG. Honestly. The world is also a big one and fun to explore, as even the most useless caves have goodies and things to discover. Every character is unique and has their own personality / portrait....so you don't get any of that Oblivion grade "I saw a mudcrab the other day" nonsense.
Combat may be lacking, but thats hardly the focus of this game. It's more akin to an adventure game, solving puzzles, hunting down the item you need to complete a task or avoiding danger.
DOSBox is the best way to go for playing it, as you get the authentic experience. I play with 9000 cycles and normal for the cpu. Disable EMS as U7 refuses to start otherwise. Everything else can be default (your choice of screen resolution/scalers). For Serpent Isle (the second part of U7) you can raise the cycles and core to "auto" since the game will not go too fast.
Exult is the second choice, and the easier one. However you also miss out on AI since they had to use guesswork for the code, since the source is not free. If you are a first timer you might not care or notice, but I believe a lot of U7's charm comes from the scripts and NPC interaction, and breaking those really takes a lot away from the game.-
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Yup, I was checking this post, just to make sure someone already did this. :D
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Final Fantasy Tactics (War of the Lions) for PS1/PSP
The world of Ivalice is probably the most complicated creation in Square's cannon, with it's stories wrapped in massive political conflicts and battle systems that favor open-ended combat over rigid character builds.
As far as I'm concerned, RPG, tactical combat has never been better than this before or since. The lessons learned from games like Vandal Hearts and Tactics Ogre are applied beautifully here, creating a game that will almost literally customize itself to your playstyle within 4 or 5 fights. There are 20 or so classes to choose from, each of them useful if you can figure out how to use them (Calculator class is woefully misunderstood, but once you've watched someone end a fight in 5 turns with a full party of them... wow!). Not to mention a ton of special character classes often with their own moves and abilities. The biggest downside here are some absolutely heinous difficulty spikes, one in particular being so bad (The Velius Fight) that if you're not alternating saves you might have to start the whole damn thing over again. There aren't many, and only one is potentially game-breaking, but they're there.
The graphics are a bit dated and blocky for their time, but the absolutely crazy amount of sprite animations each character (and each version of each character) posses manage to fill the game with personality. Almost every story sequence has at least one this-is-the-only-time-you'll-ever-see-it animation. The environments are presented in a simple, clearly PS1-era method, that actually works to its advantage in planning strategies and movement routes. The spells are a mix of colored lens flare effects and hand drawn art that just brings the whole design that much further.
The audio presentation is a bit stark by comparison to the rest of the game, however. While the soundtrack is exceptional, for the most part it is clear that you're listening to midi compositions. The sound effects are, for the most part, variations on static, giving a decidedly 8-bit mood to the proceedings. It's effective, sure, and they did include some good bass for some of the bigger spells, but the audio design could've used a bit more love.
Finally there's the story. And dear GOD it's a good one. I won't get into specific details, but over the course of its 40-or-so hour playtime you'll see class conflict, racism, regicide, fratricide, suicide, homocide, genocide, dangerous religious allegory, and chocobos. I've often referred to this story as the Hamlet of videogames, and in all the years since I stand by that comment. There just isn't a better story in gaming. Certainly there are easier-to-follow tales out there, and even easier-to-like tales, but for the sprawling epic it tries to push there isn't anything to compare it to. Unfortunately some of the translation work on the original PS1 version needs some work. I still giggle whenever I think of how many times I read "I got a good feeling!", and don't even get me started on how horribly translated the Tutorial is....
For these reasons and many more, Final Fantasy Tactics is my favorite game. It's good enough that sooner or later I am willing to buy a PSP just to have a good excuse to play it again.-
Well said. FFT is the best game on Playstation 1.
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Starcraft. It had great a single player that had a good length, introduced you to all the races, a nice story and awesome cinematics. Multiplayer was endless amounts of fun. Awesome race balance, continued updates, free content from Bilzzard, easy matchmaking, and even the ability to spawn copies of the game.
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"Final Fantasy IV", or "Final Fantasy II" when it was originally released for the Super Nintendo in the United States.
While it may seem fairly derivative now, it is the mold that many modern JRPG's were formed from: a main character with a mysterious past, hidden alliances and betrayals, a revolving cast in the main party, and a story focused on moral choices.
This was the first game in the Final Fantasy series to have the Active Battle System, the second to have front and back ranks, the first to have sections of the game dependent on the equipment your characters had on, the first to have multiple vehicles, and among the best music ever to grace the Super Nintendo.
If you have the opportunity, pick up "Final Fantasy IV" for the GBA, as it has a redone translation that expands the story, additional dungeons, and the ability to create your own party for the end battle...or you can wait for the 3D remake that is coming to the DS. -
Screw it. Diablo II, since I did a quick CTRL + F and saw nothing.
The amount of depth for the skill-trees is phenomenal. I still cannot get it right myself, since I like to dabble hither and thither with it, trying stuff out. This was the first game that actually killed a mouse for me. Learning to gun for the Shamans first to stop the flow of fodder, and the way the zombies said 'braaaaaaains...' sealed the deal.
And the soundtrack. The music in D2 was nothing short of brilliant.
Now, gimme my shirt. :D -
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Should be able to find it in Lucasarts Collections and whatnot out there. One of the finest adventure games ever. Offered three slightly diffrent approaches to the quest, using a partner, using solely your brain or choosing to duke it out with people every chance you got. Lots of adventuring for the buck, and it has some replay value due to the diffrent routes you can take. Also has a fun intro sequence where you guide a clumsy Indy through the stuff in a museum. -
Master of Orion 2: Battle at Antares
A well written and throught out game originally written for Dos/Win95 that is still fun today.
The basic premise is that two ancient races had battled ages ago, and the Antarians were defeated and banished to a pocket dimension. The Orions then gathered their technology and departed for parts unknown. Now, several different younger races are taking to the stars just as the Antarians are beginning to escape their prison.
It is a both a simple game and a complex one, depending on how much you prefer to micromanage.
First off, you have the option to adjust your race. There are 13 precreated races, all of which are useable. Some are easier then others to use. Klackons have bonuses to Farming and Production, which makes them the easist to play. Darlocks are natural spies, allowing you steal all the technology you need from your enemies. Gnolams are traders, and can buy all that they need. Don't like them? Fine, build your own. Choose from 10 categories, 53 different abilities in all.
Each colony you build can be managed by the computer for you. Or you can micromanage them at will. You can adjust your population on each colony to produce more Food, Research, or Production, or even pick them up and move to newly started colony to help it grow quicker.
You also have a large technology tree that that you can research, with each level obtained making the lower level cheaper to build and maintain.
You can win by 1) diplomatic victory, 2) by conquering the known universe, or 3) by defeating the Antarians. You can team with other races, making treaties and trades, or you can steal their technology, damage their cities, or even bribe other races to attack your enemies.
You can design your ships. Lots of energy weapons? Missiles? How about an carrier for your fighters? Your ships do not need cutting edge weapons. With each level of technology you have, your older but still powerful weapons become cheaper to buy.
It is a multi player game, up to 8 players (human or computer) at one time. With 5 difficulty levels and 4 galaxy sizes (for quick games or short games), you can create the game you want it.
Bonus points because it runs in XP and Vista.
The game does have issues. Races can go from love to hate in a just a few turns. Nothing worse then having an Alliance with a race go to hate and then they surrender to another empire.
Random Events can freeze your worlds for dozens of turns, allowing your enemies free time to grow or forcing you to invest heavily in research to prevent a supernova.
For best results you need to micro manage your colonies. There is an Auto Build mode but it can do the weirdest things sometimes.
And to top it all off, the AI cheats. It never runs out of money or food, but it typically does so badly in developing its colonies that it needs it.
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Carmageddon!
This game was my "gold standard" for video games.
You could easily pick it up and play for a few minutes at a time, or, spend entire afternoons running over pedestrians, destroying enemy cars, or just plain racing. You could play it any way you wanted. There were no "boss battles" to have to complete a certain way, or a defined way to run the races. There were no challenges that had to be completed.
I would be completely happy if someone would release a version that would run on a "modern" PC (maybe with upgraded graphics and possibly downloadable via Steam????).-
AWTOO???
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Alpha Centauri Best turn based strategy game ever. Started several things that are now standard in Civ games, like borders, and some things that haven't been replicated yet, like designing your own units. Only downside was that the AI was pretty retarded, and only got difficult by cheating.
I've been able to play the planetary pack (SMAC + expansion) in XP without any trouble.-
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hear hear. they really need to put it on steam pronto
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You can design your own units in Galactic Civilizations.
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No one seems to have mentioned HL2 or EP1 and 2 yet, by far the best fps games out there imo due to their all round combination of atmosphere, story and combat. Some games have done combat better than HL2 but nothing has quite beat the experience yet (especially Episode 2).
Also mention for the Baldur's Gate series. -
Marathon 2 (and the rest of the trilogy). Myth was mentioned up above, but Bungie's Marathon trilogy was their true great work before they made Halo. The first game came out in 1994 and it was basically the Mac's answer to Doom. It had a more impressive 2.5D engine (kinda like the Duke3D Build Engine), and an amazing highly intelligent scifi story that hadn't really been seen before in FPS's. It also came with an incredibly fun deathmatch multiplayer mode (unfortunately it only worked over LAN at the time). Starting with Marathon 2, there was also a coop multiplayer mode where you could play through the entire singleplayer campaign with a friend.
As a scifi FPS with an intelligent story about colony ships, aliens, cyborgs, insane ship A.I.'s, and more cool stuff, Marathon 2 is one of my favorite games ever.
A while ago Bungie released all three games for free, and there's a source port for the marathon 2 engine. Go to source.bungie.org and you can get the games for free and running in windows. Yay! -
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No Thief mentioned yet? Shame on you, shack. I think I like the second game in the series the best, but the first one of course blazed the trail for the now somewhat-maligned stealth gameplay. The world and atmosphere was great, it featured some truly funny dialogue (taffer!) and was one of the first games I remember playing where the sound design really caught my attention. Definitely a pivotal PC game and one of the best ever.
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Yeah, Thief - The Dark Project had an amazing world, gameplay, story and for the time totally unique gameplay mechanics and is my number 1 game, The Metal Age had superior level design and removed the zombie elements that many disliked but it lacked in the storytelling department but still provided oodles of atmosphere. I probably love the series jointly as my favourite game ever.
The medieval steampunk theme of TDP was amazing. The plot was executed brilliantly through ingame conversation: stories and rumours being exhanged by peasants and guards alike; passage and prophecies in dusty old tomes and beautifully artistic cutscenes. The gameplay was a mix of hack-n-slash (if you wanted) but most of the time it was stealth, patience, a well aimed water arrow to douse a torch to provide a path, a well timed noisemaker to distract a guard from an entrance, and an efficient clock on the back of the head with a blackjack. They revolutionised sound ingame, occlusion and the sounds you made dependent upon the environment and the varying responses to that sound pretty much cemented a sound design that's never been beaten and rarely matched.
Simply brilliant.-
I've mentioned before that I played the Thief games in "nonlethal" mode (well, as far as human opponents were concerned) and it was a unique and exciting process... lurking about and timing guard routes, creeping from shadow to shadow... My go-to gaming genre is kill-everything-that-moves FPS, but the Thief games were a great break from that.
Oddly now that I'm all grown up, I might not have enough patience these days for a game like Thief. Comes from having less spare time I suppose.
I'll second your praise for the cutscenes while I'm here. Great example of art direction triumphing over limited tech, and fitting for the mood of the game. The only games that come to mind as doing something sort of similar to that are the Homeworld games, although I'm sure there have been others.
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I don't see DOOM so I'll throw it out there. Easily the game that had the most impact on my life...I'd say that its likely I wouldn't be a computer programmer if it weren't for DOOM. DOOM was like a religious experience for me I had to fucking tell everyone about that game...everyone I met my first year in high school after having played it over and over again that summer...everyone I met I asked "have you played DOOM" in that sort of scary "have you found Jesus, are you saved" sort of way that uber-religious people do. I was obsessed with the thing...had dreams about it, came to know some of the levels in the same way that I know real places I'm intimate with in real life. Learning enough about computers and DOS to get it to run on my PC after I got the shareware version...learning simple things like bare booting and making boot disks so I could get the sound working were my first steps into really messing with computers...before that I was kind of afraid of them because I was sort of told "be careful you don't want to break this and make it an expensive paper-weight"...but after sitting reading DOS manuals and learning everything I could to get it and my other games running right I really think I got started down the road that led me to my current profession. If I hadn't found that demon infested base on Phobos and made it my own stomping grounds for a better part of my misspent youth...my future would have been somewhat different I imagine.
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Oh and for recommended source ports, I'd say that Legacy is one of the best...but unless you compile the current beta from sourceforge or where-ever...the older versions are growing long in the tooth.
http://legacy.newdoom.com/index.php
http://sourceforge.net/projects/doomlegacy
Chocolate DOOM is a great way to play DOOM in XP (not sure about Vista?) just as it was in DOS!
http://www.chocolate-doom.org/
I really like GZDoom (its ZDoom with OpenGL stuff) as it looks nice...though the mouse input is a little odd for some reason.
http://grafzahl.drdteam.org/
jDOOM/DOOMsday is good stuff...its not necessarily my favorite...but I do like it with some of the graphical features turned off so that it still feels like DOOM (not a fan of all the .md2 stuff in it...I think its better with sprites personally...but I'm a bit odd...and with really good models I could change my mind). I haven't messed with jDOOM in forever so I should probably see the newest version sometime to make up my mind on it.
http://www.doomsdayhq.com/
For online play ZDaemon and Skulltag are your two best bets in my experience. Skulltag is fun if you don't mind the changes they've made to things (3 or so new weapons and new multiplayer game modes). And ZDaemon is basically ZDOOM online...I think it has server/client stuff now but I'm not sure...but its generally pretty damned good from what I remember. Odamex is supposed to be good stuff too, but I've not messed with it.
http://www.skulltag.com/
http://www.zdaemon.org/
http://odamex.net/
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I can't believe this game isn't getting more love. It's DooM, people! This was also a big part of my life. I still go through an episode or two of Ultimate DooM, or even all of DooM II, every now and then these days. The widely-varying levels with zillions of enemies and fast-paced action is as good today as it was a decade and a half ago. I've also purchased multiple versions of the game over the years just to support id Software!
If playing these days on the PC, I fully recommend DOOMsday with the 3D model stuff disabled.
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Daggerfall! Buggy as all hell. Lots of fun. Absolutely huge world. The main city, Daggerfall, took 20 minutes to get from one end to the other. You're supposed to go on a quest after a year of game-time, but I never played until that point. Well, I did once, and when I went on the quest, I got killed in the first dungeon. It's more fun to kill peasants and run from the guards until you get stuck in a wall.
Trailer: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aqntYb3IDUk
Intro movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vuj3uARuPWU
Example of a Fighter's Quest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIO0Ym_3wco&NR=1 . Shows some dungeon fighting. Dungeons were my least favorite part of the game. They were generated, so they didn't have stories attached to them like many of them do in Morrowind and Oblivion. Plus, a lot of the times you would find yourself falling through the floor.
There was so much do, and great music to boot! You can sample the music here: http://www.tesguides.com/tes2/music/music.htm . I suggest dag_4 (snow theme)
Here was my character, Mariel, early on: http://www.nflight.com/files/shack/mydaggerfallchar.jpg . After I robbed stores, I was decked out in elven armor. And here's a shot of part of the box: http://www.nflight.com/files/shack/daggerbox.jpg . Shiny!-
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It stills plays well! I muck around with it a couple times a year.
The game was banned from my parent's house. My brother was playing on the family's computer when it first came out, and my dad didn't like the *shing* sound that the sword made when it was drawn. When he mentioned this, my brother hit the sheath/resheath button a whole bunch of times (*shing**shing**shing**shing*). And then the game was banned.-
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It was more that my dad told my brother not to do something and then he did a bunch of times. My dad wasn't a huge fan of gaming violence though; our games for our new computer consisted of Myst and some Bible game. I don't believe the latter was ever played, but the former was pretty awesome.
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Quest for Glory - In Reply
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Quest for Glory was one of the first true rpgs I can remember playing. Definitely one of the best games of all time.
-Customizable Character Classes
-Lots of Combat and Puzzle Solving
-Multiple solutions to puzzles, for example: To get the Healers Ring stuck in a tree, you can either climb the tree and walk across the branches (Thief), throw rocks at it until it falls down (Fighter), or cast the "Fetch" spell (Magic User).
-Lots of Humour in game (especially when you die)
-Time of Day system (need to sleep when tired, or break into peoples houses at night as a thief)
-Steal things as a thief and fence it at the Thieves Guild.
-Lots of optional quests that affect the ending of the game.
But my favourite part of this game is the ability to save your character at the end of the game and import it into the next game in the series. You can take your character all the way from QFG1 all the way to the end of QFG5 with all the spells and abilities you learned along the way.
There's a whole lot more, too. I'll add more later as I think of it.-
I am going to man marry you - now.
I have said the same of QFG1 for many years now.
I managed to finish QFG1 with 100 on all skills - which meant when I went to QFG2 - I imported the character and got +100 on top of that to all of my skills.
Those two games were just so damned good. I loved them.
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Baldur's gate 1&2 + expansions. Even tho it's two games. To me it was just 'one' really amazing experiance to take your character through the entire saga. It had an epic story, memorable characters(Minsc and boo!), multiple paths/choices for replayability, and a satisfying conclusion to wrap it all up.
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Dragon Force (SEGA Saturn) -- an amazing real-time strategy game which really, REALLY worked on the good ol' Saturn.
The game lays out a huge map covered with castles connected by paths by which troops can travel from one location to another. You start out as one of eight factions on the map, all of which are fighting each other. You only start with a few castles of your own, and you are given generals you can order to travel forth to attack other locations (or stay behind to defend the ones you already have -- you have to distribute your forces accordingly). One of your generals is also the main ruler of your kingdom, so you will want to make sure he/she doesn't "bite the dust." There are usually a number of poorly-defended neutral castles between you and your nearest enemy faction, so you pick up a few extra castles and some much-needed fighting experience before you encounter troops from the other main seven kingdoms. You need to branch out and take over the other kingdoms (in addition to some other twists which are thrown your way throughout the game), and things can get quite hairy and interesting.
Battles are managed individually by the player in real-time. Basically, when your forces encounter an enemy in some way, the action stops on the main overworld and you are taken to the conflict to guide the battle process. Your squad of generals are going up against another squad of generals. These confrontations occur with a series of general-VS-general battles until all of the generals on one side or the other are either defeated or surrender.
In a battle, each general commands a bunch of troops of some sort. There are ten troop types (soldier, cavalry, mage, samurai, archer, monk, harpy, beast, dragon, zombie), and a general can command a maximum of 10-100 of one type of troop in a battle. When a battle begins, your general and their general are on opposite sides of the battlefield (the generals themselves don't move in the battlefield), and you choose an initial formation for your troops. You can then order your troops to do such things as press forward, retreat backward, scatter randomly, scatter toward the edges of the field, stand their ground, etc. Your choice of initial formation can affect how many of your little minions obey these simple orders (basically, your initial formation can determine how many of your troops stay near your general for defensive reasons and ignore most commands). You can also just order your troops to go nuts in a full-on melee charge, at which point two things happen: whatever troops were sticking with your general due to the initial formation choice will also move out toward the enemy general, and you lose all ability to give your troops commands for the rest of the battle.
Opposing troops will try to take each other out when they get near each other on the field of battle (with the exception of mages and archers, which can fire at the enemy without being next to one). Which troop type wins depends on a variety of factors:
1. Luck has a say in who wins. When one guy attacks another, it is always a chance: your guy could miss the enemy, or your attack will connect. If your attack connects, there is even a chance that the enemy will block the blow and survive.
2. Troop stance can greatly affect the outcome. A guy standing still will actually swipe at an enemy moving toward him before the enemy can stop to swipe back, so standing your ground can give you that initial attack which can really help turn the battle in your favor.
3. Terrain type directly affects things like your chances to hit or dodge enemy attacks. There are multiple terrain types (depending upon where you meet in battle), and they can affect the troop types very differently. Most commonly, you will battle at a castle, so the defending side will usually have an advantage (based on the level of the castle (castle levels range from 1-50 (more on that later))).
4. The biggest factor affecting your troops' ability to overcome the enemy is their troop type. Troop types can be very good, good, average, poor, or very poor against a different troop type, and this can have a very drastic effect on the battle's outcome (being good against an opposing troop type means your chance to block their attack and connect with your own is increased).
5. You can overcome the enemy with numbers, of course! You could have a general with 50 troops going against one with 20, for example. Remember -- each general commands up to 100 troops (between you and the enemy, that's up to 200 on the field at any time).
Your main goal is to hurt the general on the other side of the battlefield until he/she either loses all HP or surrenders due to low HP. You should try to get a good amount of your troops to reach the enemy general, because the general can usually take out many of your guys (even while being attacked on two sides) before taking enough damage to go down.
Battles are not just about commanding your troops -- your generals can interfere directly. They each have MP which they can spend on techniques while in battle. These techniques vary greatly. It could be a powerful direct-damage attack on the enemy general, or a less-powerful attack on the enemy general which passes across the battlefield killing enemy troops on its way over, or a technique to resurrect a portion of your fallen troops, or something else (depending on that general's unlocked techniques).
If all troops from both sides die in battle, a duel is declared. If you agree to the duel (you could simply surrender if you fear for your life or know it's hopeless), the two generals simply take turns swiping at each other until one falls. Which one wins depends on a general's remaining HP, stats (attack power/defense/etc.), level, type (even generals have types similar to troops), etc. You could also get lucky and keep blocking the enemy swipes or landing critical hits with your own.
Managing your generals throughout the game has a real impact on how well you can do. As your kingdom grows, you are going to need more and more generals to throw around. When you completely conquer an enemy kingdom, you convince the opposing kingdom's main ruler to join you against the rest of the world, and you gain a few generals for your army when that happens. This, however, is not the only way to fatten your arsenal of generals. When you defeat enemy generals in battle, there is a small chance that they will be completely slain, slip away and escape, or live and be captured by your forces. The game gives you a way to convince captive generals to join you in your cause (explained in the next section).
The main gameplay in the overworld is broken up into turns (each turn is played out in real-time and lasts only a few minutes, aside from any time spent in battles). Between turns, you can do a number of things to help strengthen your generals:
-You can speak to captives to try to convince them to ally with you (you will pick up a lot of generals this way).
-You can view the stats of generals and equip them with items to improve their abilities. You can also use one-time items on generals to do things like increase HP, increase MP, increase certain stats, or even unlock a new troop type for that general to command.
-You can assign victory awards to generals to help strengthen their troop command. Your big-bag-o'-awards-to-give grows by one for each battle you won during the previous turn. Each time you give an award to a general, you pick a troop type available to that general, and the maximum number of that troop type availble for that general to command will increase by 10 (eventually up to a maximum of 100 for a given type).
Also included in the list of things you can do between turns are:
-You can save the game! I'll bet you'll want to do this!
-You can make your generals search or fortify castles. Searching a castle has a chance to turn up items to equip or use (what type of item you can find depends on the castle being searched), or you might encounter a new general and maybe convince him/her to join you! Fortifying a castle has a chance to increase its castle level by 1-2 points with a maximum castle level of 50 (higher-level castles give bigger bonuses to the defending team in battle). Only certain generals can perform these actions, and they can only do one such action until the next turn is over. Telling them to do an action like this is "free" in the sense that it does not occupy their time during the real-time turns. Additionally, a general capable of such actions can only do such things to the castle he/she is currently in (if the general was not in a castle when the previous real-time turn ended, he/she will not be able to perform any of these actions).
Generals you use will improve over the course of the game. Generals who win battles gain experience and level up. Leveling up increases HP, MP, and other stats. Leveling up can also unlock more techniques your general can use in battle. After a battle, you can park your generals in a friendly castle so they can regenerate their health. You can refill their fallen troops at a castle as well, although you may need the assistance of several friendly castles to refill large piles of fallen troops. Over time, all of your castles generate new troops you can use to fill up the troop capacity of a resident general in need of more minions. A castle's level directly affects the maximum capacity of new assignable troops generated at that castle, so you might find yourself sucking-dry several friendly locations of their available troops after a nasty battle.
As you can imagine, there can be A LOT of things "going on" at any given time in Dragon Force. This game is pretty non-linear, as you can imagine. You might have an easier or tougher time depending upon which of the eight kingdoms as which you choose to start, and you are not required to go after the other factions in any particular order. As you run around fighting your neighbors, they are all fighting each other in the mean-time and gaining strength. If you are a fan of strategy games, you really owe it to yourself to play this game. With a game like this, it is hard to say exactly how long it would to to finish; however, I would expect to put in at least 20-40 hours by the end of this gem. I've gone through it three or four times (two or three on my Saturn hardware, and once in SSF (FULLY emulated in this fantastic SEGA Saturn emulator)).-
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I agree. A translation of the PS2 title would have reached a much larger userbase than the Saturn commanded, and the title would be more well-known because of it. Additionally, it is difficult to get a hold of the translated version of this game without paying AT LEAST $100.00 on eBay for a used copy. If the PS2's SEGA Ages Vol. 18 release was translated, it would be much easier to obtain in general. As it stands, it's uncommon to find someone in the USA who knows this game, and those who know it and want it might not be willing to pay the price to get it.
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The game was simple. Build your own international army via NATO style funding. You started out with a tiny base and a mere 6 million in NATO style international funding. Pandering to various rich nations you could double or triple this easily. Build your elite team from pools of recurits, supply them with the best the earth has to offer then go shoot down some UFOs. Using day or night assault plans in realistic world wide terrians raid the crash or landing site of the UFOs killing or capturing all the aliens. Then use their technology against them via a small army of engineers and scientists you also had full control of.
It was an excellent and unmatched blend of strategic database and tactical planning combined with a Jagged Alliancesque tactical mode where you got to use all those fun things you bought and researched. Plus you could rename your troops to whatever you wanted. When Colonel Fury died on his 3rd or 4th mission my first time though and everyone stated panicing and shooting civilians it was some classic gaming goodness.
Its own sequels ranged from lack luster to suck and it has yet to see anything resembling a worthy successor. Don't even bring up the horrible UFO: Afterlight/math/shock series. -
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Really? I mean it did some pretty cool things and the character generator was extremely impressive, but the game was otherwise pretty empty. Maybe I was spoiled by WoW having been my first MMO experience but CoH wound up being much to grindy and repetitive for me since there was really nothing to do other than fight stuff.
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The theme goes along way, if you like superhero stuff and dislike generofantasy. Also I didn't find it to be grindy when playing in large teams (which was really the only way to fly, both for fun and for XP).
I won't argue with the people who think it doesn't have enough chewiness for them, but for me it was a good time. Played it a lot for around a year and half.
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I sometimes have nostalgia for those old times. Such fun to be had in the modding community.
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Man, so do I. Those were good days. I worked on AHL, awesome times.
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Maybe Ninja Gaiden Black...but I don't know, it also ranks as one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. It seems no matter what, I keep playing it . Can't wait for Ninja Gaiden 2.
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Wave Race : Blue Storm I've gotta advocate this game because it's great fun in short bursts or hours at a rip, plus it's easy enough for beginers while providing alot of depth for seasoned pros. Here is my shackreview under my old account. http://www.shacknews.com/reviews/review.x/317
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My pick is minesweeper. Sure the graphics are dated but when you just want to play a quick game or something its perfect. Here is a little writeup that shows you the basics of the game:
First off we have the different levels. There are 3 levels. Beginner, Intermediate and Expert. There is also a custom option where you create your own level by picking the amount of bombs you have to uncover. Here is a screen shot showing the different levels you can pick from (excluding custom)
http://www.easyscreens.info/?v=1997
Now lets cover what everything stands for. The top left you have the amount of mines you have to find. Top right is the time frame. Here is a screenshot showing you where to find these;
http://www.easyscreens.info/?v=1998
The gray squares are the playing field. This is where you start to work your magic. You can click anywhere within the gray squares to start without fear of hitting a mine. I myself go for the 4 corners first. I click one corner, and if a area of the game is opened up I go to work. When you click a gray square it will uncover either a blank spot or a box with a number. The blank spot means there are no mines around your uncovered square. A square with a number inside means there is a mine in close range to your square. The numbers range from 1-8. That number represent the amount of mines close to that particular square. For instance if you have a 1 inside the box, then that means there is 1 mine near that square. Here is a screen shot showing you this is action;
http://www.easyscreens.info/?v=1998
By right clicking on the uncovered square you will put a flag on that particular square to signal there is a mine. This will make the square unclickable. You can then click both the right and left mouse button and then uncover all the squares without mines under them in the immediate area. This saves you from having to click each square individually. Here is a screen of the flags in action;
http://www.easyscreens.info/?v=2000
From there it is just a matter of marking mines and clearing out areas. There are patterns that you can recognize throughout the game. It just takes time. There are also times where it is just a guessing game. If you look at this screen shot (http://www.easyscreens.info/?v=2001)and take what I told you above, you can see how some mines I have marked, and others I hadn't gotten to yet. It also shows how the numbers really work. How there are 4 mines near a square with 4 inside, and so forth. It really is a fun game, and quite addictive. I have been playing this game since 1997, and still play it every day.
The only downside to this game is the lack of multiplayer. I think this could add a lot of fun to the game. Trying to beat each others scores would be classic. However its not crucial since if you have a lot of people over you could just crowd around and try beat everyones score. Makes for a great party.
If you would like more info about minesweeper feel free to ask away. I am not an expert on the subject, but I could help shed some light on this great and overlooked game. Thank for reading and have a great day. -
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Battlezone, the 1998 windows version ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_%28computer_game%29. Great action/strategy game.
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I LOVED that game!
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OK, pretty sure Team Fortress hasn't been mentioned. I saw classic up, but seriously this game is what got me hooked on PC gaming. This is the reason my brother and I tried to get a 56k modem running on our crappy phone line. This is the reason I got my first 3d graphics card. This is the reason I did all my homework at and between classes my last 2 years of high school. This is one of the reasons I wanted to build my own PC and learn the entire craft.
The game just had incredible balance and games were HUGE back then. A full server on 2fort4 was some of the best gaming I've ever had to date. Sniping people continuously and being able to reliably adjust for ping was simply incredible. Having actual squad tactics with people doing different roles and succeeding brilliantly was extremely rewarding. I just can't count the hours of really satisfying gaming that I got from Team Fortress. No game yet has held my attention for so many years. I played TF like people today play warcraft. I liked the game so much that I hated TFC when it came out, because I thought people should just go back to the original.
TF2 brings some of that back, but I'll never be able to go back to trotting down our long gravel lane, relishing the thought of sitting down for about 3 hours worth of TF until it was dinner time.-
So, each class had some incredible tactics by the time the game was mature.
The class I played the most was sniper. Sniping came down to being able to stay out of a pattern. As long as you had a minimal amount of speed (which there was a significant learning curve too) you could always out snipe the other time, hold the battlements, and slow down their offense. Patterned snipers were easy to spot, you could see the sniper dot draw across the room as they crawled out of their cover. You knew exactly where they would be. I would regularly fire a split second before they would appear (to account for ping), and they would die without me ever having seen their body, just their gibs flying about. Once you held the battlements and started attacking their offense, you could begin analyzing patterns of movement for other classes. HW guys were easy to take out then too. Scouts were more difficult, especially for a High Pinger. But almost all the classes made the mistake of dropping straight off the battlements. This movement was very predictable, as air control in TF was minimal. This was a huge vulnerability that snipers would take advantage of. Later as strategies like woozie bombs starting being the norm for jumping long distances, all you had to do was look for the setup and there would always be a second of vulnerability.
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FreeSpace 2, motherbitches, where the fuck are you people?!
My personal pick as the pinnacle of space combat, by far. Had the right amount of complexity while delivering jaw dropping environments and combat scenarios. Subwoofers had their work cut out for them when mile-long superdestroyers were ripping your little itty bitty ship up with flak fire and gigantic laser beams were cutting a swathe through the dark air.
Shit blows up a lot. How the hell can a gamer not like?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6VhyMzu12c-
I so fucking want to reinstall this but my joystick is the broken :(
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"DIVE DIVE DIVE". Oh man i had a blast playing this game, absolutely amazing for it's time.
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Sam & Max episodes. Available through Steam or GameTap. Real adventure games, people!
Pros:
* Great story
* GREAT characters, some of the best I've seen.
* Great voice acting, good dialog most of the time. Look! Behind you! A three-headed Internet!
* Fun games
Cons (SMALL)
* 3d (duh)
* Not as difficult as most "classic" adventures, simpler interface
Really. Try this shit out. I can't recommend them enough. -
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MM3 was pretty damn good man! protoman
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Mega Man 3 was much more enjoyable to me than Mega Man 2. The controls were tighter (less sliding around), it introduced sliding, and it just felt like a more polished game in general. Mega Man X is amazing too, but subsequent games in that series just get less and less fun for some reason (except X4, which is mostly awesome).
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Agreed. Still my favorte Megaman. Amazing music, as well.
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Indisputably the best, a true classic. I've played it through so many times I can nearly do it blindfolded.
can you:
- kill each boss with the basic weapon?
- kill Crashman without taking any damage?
- finish the game without dying?
- complete Heatman's stage without Item 2?
- complete Quickman's stage without Time Stopper?
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I actually have a couple:
Rise of the Triad - A first person shooter that never really had a true moment of popularity. It was overshadowed by Doom 2 at the time. It was pretty revolutionary, however. The game that really did gibs properly. Turning people to skeletons, unlimited bullet ammunition, powerups Dog and God modes (your bark was a BFG equivalent).
Dual pistols was awesome, as well as killing enemies which were begging for mercy was a real plus in the era of videogames. Also, multiplayer was an absolute blast to play with ridiculous explosions, totally overpowered weapons and springboards. Also the spinblade columns were pretty hilarious.
Overall it had a real arcade feel and the included random level maker produced some funny results.
I'm pretty sure there's a windows port for it since the source code was released a while ago.
Duke Nukem Manhatten Project - Pure fun side-scrolling (but full 3D) platformer which I found to be supremely enjoyable. Very straightforward game which means you can spend small bits of time on it and sll enjoy it.
Rune - You can hack off people's limbs and beat them with it. eating meat, killing monsters in all sorts of interesting ways and really fun interesting arcade action to boot. Based on norse mythology with lots of vikings. however for those who might not like it: there are lots of jumping puzzles. -
Day of Defeat. Pre-"Realism". When it first came out it was fast and fun. Then they completely overhauled the game, slowing it down and I haven't been able to get into it since.
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I am in the exact same boat as you. I keep trying to play the game but I ended up quitting after a few rounds and just sigh. I miss the old silly day of defeat. It was just so much fun and the community was so much fun. We had some great tournaments and custom maps being churned out.
Oh and who could forget the turtle and the bug where a grenade would not explode until you let go of the mouse. Ah good times.
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Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis
i love it. its one of my favorite games. i love hacking, upgrading my board and programs and selling information all to avenge my brother!
FTW-
And upgrading a Street Sammy with a Smartlink and Aries Warhawk and going all-out on pistol.
Yeah, this was by far my favorite Genesis game. -
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Even though Shadowrun for the SNES was super linear, I had a blast with it. :D Assault Cannon FTW! (I used the assault cannon's gun sound effect for the turret and sniper gun noise in Team Fortress for Quake).
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Colony Wars 2: Vengeance. I'm not saying it's the greatest game in the world or anything, especially compared to the greatness of Tie Fighter or X-Wing, but it was definitely very pretty for its time.
TF and XW had very simple graphics and lighting and CW2:V had a 'floating' cockpit that would sway from one side to the next depending on which way you turned, giving the illusion that you were a person inside, and not bolted to the frame of the fighter with a fixed angle.
The lasers lit up the cockpit when fired and the dual analog controls made steering smooth and interesting, albeit difficult.
The FMV in the beginning was pretty awesome. I can't remember too much of it but there's a futuristic looking guy with war-paint on his face overlooking a futuristic cityscape.
The gameplay was pretty flat and not nearly as in-depth as TF or XW. But that's probably due to the general lack of keyboard support for the Playstation. In TF and XW nearly every key on the keyboard controlled something, and was more akin to a simulator whereas CW2:V was more like an arcade shooter.
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All time favorite: Tetris. I've spent more time playing it on more platforms than any other game by a factor of ten.
Favorite turn-based strategy game (tie): HOMM2/Civilization IV
Favorite RTS: WarCraft II
Favorite FPS (tie): Half-Life/Halo
Favorite RPG (tie): Morrowind/Planescape (runners up: Fallout, KOTOR)
Favorite adventure game (tie): Broken Sword/Sam & Max Hit the Road
Favorite balls-out, pure action game: Painkiller. I love just randomly firing the game up when I want to kill some random dudes.
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Crusader: No Remorse/No Regret.
If GI Joe's Snake Eyes had a futuristic badass silent asskicking cousin, this would be the guy. I especially loved the destructible environments and the death animations (you can electrify, roast, freeze, liquify.. fuck.. you name it you can do it!)... It was ahead of its time. Plus the graphics, sounds, and music (loved that trance-rock) were top notch for this isometric shooter.
Just watch this clip and remember the good days:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZM4t7fc4U-8&feature=related
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small writeup with screenshots here of 2 favs:
i could spend hours writing about doom, quake, (hexen/heretic/rott/duke/wolf/marathon/etc) as i have dumped so much time years ago - playing, tracking, anticipating, etc but these 2 take the cake:
everquest - up to velious, a polished 3d MASSIVE multiplayer game. a pioneer of sorts. before that we had primarily smaller multiplayer games and not so much on a scale like this. at the time - living, breathings worlds, other people.. day/night cycles which at the time (i dont' even notice in games now) blew me away before... dumped 6 years in it, early early years of it being more memorable.
http://www.winwood.net/eqz.jpg
i could go on and on
my equally favorite game - asherons call
same as above, one of the pioneers (not so much the realm or meridian, not the same) but even better was no real 'zoning'. these are shots from alpha beta when there was no such thing as a MMO.
http://www.winwood.net/AC2.jpg
http://www.winwood.net/AC3.jpg
http://www.winwood.net/AC1.jpg
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Thief II - The actual gameplay is amazingly open and free, with a great plot, excellent art direction, and some of the best use of sound ever. And after you get done with the game, there are literally hundreds of fan created mission.
Several dozen of these fan missions are of a quality that at least matches and often exceeds the quality of missions from the original game.
Not many other games have thriving fan communities creating new content a decade after their release. -
Beatmania IIDX
Before Activision and Harmonix fought over a concept Konami invented years ago, Beatmania broke ground with it's "dj Simulator" series.
With the IIDX series into its 15th Style in Arcades and 13th for JP PS2, the game still has a dedicated following and continued success. Each iteration of the game became progressively harder and harder, which kind of created a barrier of entry for newbies, but, each arcade style had nearly all the songs from all past IIDX styles prior to its style number.
It's a damn shame Konami didn't really take the US market seriously when the hardcore Bemani audience was crying for them to bring beatmania, Guitar Freaks, and Drum Mania to the US with a proper marketing campaign.-
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That's true, but it would have at least set some precedent as to who brought the idea to fruition first. IMHO, GF sucks :o and I still don't get the appeal of the guitar games since it seems so passive.
The funniest thing though is RedOctane, known for selling knock-off Bemani hardware, like DDR pads amd GF controllers, probably went to Harmonix with their fuckton of unsold guitars and said LETS MAKE A GAME :D.
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The Secret of Monkey Island™ - Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer and the rest of the LucasArts crew managed to create such a beautiful, wondrous, and hilarious game that introduced me as a young child to the beauty of interactive storytelling and PC gaming in general.
My father bought an AMIGA when we lived in England, I must have been around 7 or 8 years old. With it, we played through almost all of the great early SCUMM games together, from LOOM to Sam&Max, but my favorite will always be the Monkey Island series.
We spent hours puzzling over yellow flowers in the lost woods, carnivorous poodles, gopher repellent and breath mints, and just how much stuff we could fit in Guybrush's pants.
And to this day, that head of the navigator still creeps me out (I was 8, jesus that thing was creeeepy).-
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Suikoden 2 is the single best JRPG ever made. Anyone who is a fan of the genre should play it. It might not win over people who don't like JRPGs, even though it does have the least annoying random battles of any game in the genre I've ever played. There's no real grinding involved, since the leveling system only requires you to fight six or so battles in every new area for you to be at the right levels for anything. And if you're already high enough, you can just escape with no penalty whatsoever. The only real need for grinding in this case is money, but even then, Suikoden 2's trading system makes it almost completely unnecessary to grind for money.
But that's just scratching the surface. Most people dig JRPGs for their stories. If your not a fan of melodramatic heroic fantasy, just skip it and go play something else. This game has so many awesome moments in its plot, from the early tragedies The hero and Joey's separation, the towns burning, fleeing from Muse to one of my favorite gaming moments ever The ambush on Luca Blight. I would've been satisfied if that was the final boss battle, really. The Suikoden games are always these great dramatic little war stories, rather than the usual "save the world"-type games.
And there's all kinds of entertaining mini-games and things to do alongside the main quest. Collecting all 108 of the game's unique and charming characters is enough fun in itself, but there's also cooking, fishing, trading, some weird wall-climbing minigame that I just discovered last month, building up your home fortress with all kinds of fun little things, etc. To put it simply, it never gets boring. Yeah, a JRPG that never gets boring. Really. No, I'm serious.
The only real complaint I have against it is the poor translation, with way more exclamation points and ellipsis than should really be allowed in anything past ninth-grade writing. But it's overshadowed by so much awesome that it's easy to ignore.
The game's hard to find right now, but if you're a fan of the genre you need to find it. Like, right now. I'm serious. And play #1 while you're at it.-
Left out a couple of technical things: the graphics weren't the best 2D graphics that Playstation RPGs had (look to Legend of Mana or Saga Frontier 2 for that), but they were unique and detailed. The music was an awesome blend of Japanese music with some orchestral tracks. No load times whatsoever, battles loaded and unloaded in the blink of an eye, further reducing the frustration of random battles.
Oh, also, in the second paragraph replace "your" with "you're".
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Mutant League Football.
I'm not much a sports fan but this game had enough comedic violence to nudge me over the edge. I didn't bother with league play, I just always did exhibition matches and picked the fields with the most land mines, fire pits and were floating in space. Bribing the ref, the nasty audible calls and the awesome wins when you have reserves turned off was huge for me back then. I actually learned more about football from that game than I ever would have watching it on TV -
Undying, not only was it the scariest game I've played, but the story and presentation was very engrossing and ahead of its time. It wasn't just another shooter. Plus, Clive Barker is awesome.
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hell yeah! awesome atmosphere and amazing graphics for the time. I remember playing it and feeling an immense sense of accomplishment going from a guy with a gun to a semi-god.
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Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Not RTCW:ET, and certainly not ET:QW. The singleplayer was a disaster - unless you like playing every single uninspired FPS that comes along with a good engine and tolerable AI. This game was worth the price of admission for the multiplayer.
Why this game, and not others in the series, rocks:
-Class balance is perfect. Four classes is all you need, and any class can be a playmaker. Every class had awesome abilities - the Soldier could handle any weapon from a rocket launcher to a sniper rifle, the Medic could very easily keep his troops alive and kicking (thanks to the amazingly awesome down-but-not-dead system), the Engineer was great as a support role or a frontlines guy, and the Lieutenant could dole out ammo and call in airstrikes. A one-man army. Because any class could subsist by himself, there was rarely a 'wrong' class to choose.
-Movement and firing were a brilliant mix of Quake3 and CS. You could bunny-hop your way into a fight as quickly as possible, or crouch and lean to get the clutch headshot.
-MAP DESIGN. People, this is how you make multiplayer maps. Objectives were supreme and timed respawns provided the opportunity to grab momentum without the forced momentum of TF2. Everyone knows the Beach map very well by now, but the rest of the game's maps were designed just as beautifully. ET's maps got overly complicated, to where a well-coordinated group of 6 guys still couldn't accomplish anything. Here there were usually no more than two routes to a map, which made team tactics very easy to pull off, even on pubs. No matter what game or map, though, one very clever and decently skilled Rambo could single-handedly capture the documents or plant the bomb.
-The post-release content was awesome. New maps provided the base for a competition community that should have lasted longer than it did.
Why it got overlooked:
A game with 90% similarities but without the perfected design of the original - or the well-thought map design - was released for free and the whole community went 'OMG ITS FREE! OMG OMG FREE FREE FREE OMGOMA WEOIFNAWEOIFN' and abandoned RTCW so all their cheapskate friends could load up the FREE FREE OMG FREE game. The result was a game with a tweaked class balance and not-quite-as-good map design - so you became a die-and-respawn machine a la Battlefield.
ET:QW was more of the same, but taken to 11.
It's worth noting that a small start-up named Nerve designed and produced just the multiplayer portion of RTCW. Since then, they haven't touched the RTCW/ET/QW series, and nobody else has been able to match their mastery of multiplayer game design. Their last gig, iirc, was the 360 port of ETQW, which may have been a lost cause to begin with. Either way, it looks to me like they got thrown on the backburner by some bitch of a publisher and gamers have suffered for it ever since.-
RTCW multiplayer was fun back in the day. I was always chucking airstrikes on the poor german players on the airfield level. :P
Too bad barely any of my friends had it. :( -
The multiplayer in this was fun, I forgot how good the maps were. However, as soon as ET came out, it's MP easily trumped RTCW's with the ranking and such; plus it always seemed like people were at least trying to use teamwork. Since you got points for giving med packs and ammo, people were more inclined to throw them around. Their motivation may have been greed (getting themselves more points) but the end result still ended up with players helping their teammates.
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C & C Red Alert. I remember driving 45 miles one way in a blizzard the day it came out. Took me 4 hours round trip. Loaded it up when I got home. Played through the night. Completely in a trance by that game. Will never forget that time. I've played it at least a half dozen times.
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Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time - it was the first time in a 3rd person game where I felt not only completely in control but like a real bad ass too... the combination of wall running, puzzling, fighting and a fantastic story have made me replay this game 4 or 5 times now. I think the only weaknesses were the fighting became repetetive (not enough moves and the enemies didn't have much AI to counter) and the first boss was a showstopper for a lot of people, I know at least 3 or 4 people that never got past it and therefore missed out on the rest of a fantastic game; at the time of release nothing compared to it.
I put POP:SOT up there with Mario64 as the only 2D game to be successfully translated into a 3rd person puzzler.
A shame that Warrior Within didn't simply "improve" on the fighting mechanic of the first one and that Two Princes felt so hollow. I still loved both of those too tho.-
My love of Sands of Time made my dislike of Assassins Creed pretty heartbreaking. I can't believe how RIGHT they got the controls in PoP. They made you feel like a bad ass. Always jumping and swinging just right. They took that away in Assassins Creed. Holding Up + A + Trigger to get somewhere is no where near as cool.
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No way, man. PoP was great, but Assassin's Creed is the true PoP heir. PoP had shitty combat that was way too easy and simple. Also everywhere you went was one specific route and you couldn't go over it again. And there was no mix of climbing & combat, unlike AC. You also don't have to hold down A and trigger to climb on stuff in AC. The thumbstick + A was enough... adding the trigger just let you do the free-running thing, another awesome feature evolved from PoP's system.
It's sad that AC is looked down upon so much when that game did so many things right, but everyone sees the few flaws it has.
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Rez - it's hard to explain why what is essentially a simplistic rail shooter connects with me so deeply, but it does. I consider shooters the purest form of game anyway, but Rez goes beyond that and completely connects you to the game experience. Almost like Portal, the "real" game isn't even apparent during the first 4 levels, which could be considered training for the final story-based level.
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Legacy of Kain (Blood Omen, Soul Reaver, Defiance)
By far the most engrossing and well-acted story I've ever experienced in a game. It's worth suffering through the dated gameplay and awful performance of Blood Omen to hear Kain tell the story of Nosgoth's damnation, and worth solving a kajillion block-moving puzzles in Soul Reaver to watch Raziel unravel Kain's empire a millenium later. And after those, SR2 and Defiance actually have fun-to-play combat. Blood Omen 2, while rather fun, was done by different developers and does not fit into the main story, and can be skipped.-
agree. by the way, the cutscenes are all on youtube. I have all the games but the gameplay for SR1+ is a little painful, and Defiance is the only game allowing you to watch all cutscenes.
anyhow, here they are, starting with the first game. Make sure you watch them in order (if you follow it backwards from the end, it's correct for the most part)
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?p=r&user=Joudas&page=7
It's too bad more games don't have story and dialogue this good, it's like a very good small play.
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You must not have played Torment. To even put NWN in the same class as BG2 is a horrible disservice to it.
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BG2 is great but the last act is weak in my opinion. They don't do anything interesting with the main villian. The scene after exiting the first dungeon and the dream sequences were awesome though.
The other thing that's annoying is the side quests are completely superfluous and they're all available after some point, so you play the 1/3 of the game in sidequests all at once, seemed kind of stupid
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yah so true.. i think out of all the game I've owned I've replayed this the most. Well maybe Super Metroid. But Chrono Trigger is just pure bliss!!
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Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive It's the only game I've played through twice, and playing as an asshole made a HUGE difference in the game. The first section was an awesome murder mystery, and you have to stop the killer before he strikes again. As an asshole, you could let one of the main characters die! Such an incredible experience.
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Zelda: A Link to the Past How has this not come up yet, yet Ocarina has? ALttP is by far the best of the entire series. It completely hits the huge sprawling world that you can discover. The move to 3D was awesome for Ocarina, but the scale had to be slightly toned down because 3D art takes more time then 2D art. The combat of LttP was still the simple yet elegant system of dodging and hitting, and the huge arsenal you acquire of gadgets has yet to be surpassed.
Mostly though, it was the puzzles/dungeons. In my mind, they have yet to be beat in terms of depth and ingenuity. Plus the two worlds, light and dark, was genius at the time, and added a whole knew depth to the game. The story was much less of the anime type as well, and more of a fantasy adventure. -
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Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
Max Payne 2 is my favorite game ever. I've probably played it 8 or 9 times. I love every minute of it, every level of it, and I always crave more after I finish.
Max Payne 2 is good for a number of reasons.
First- The Bullet time is literally perfect, in my opinion no improvements could be made on it. That, and its INCREDIBLY fun to use, the pure enjoyment of it is absolutely amazing.
Second- The Level Design, its almost perfect. The fun house levels are just so absolutely ridiculous, awesome and most of all fun. The construction site is one so well designed its not even funny, and the protect-as-sniper scenes don't feel forced. The end of the game rocks, protecting a dude in a Chicken Suit- fuck yeah, fun, going through the slums with the Russian Mobsters- a pure treat . Not to mention the final levels as you move into Woden's Manor.
Third- The Story, which I adore, the story is fantastic through and through, with excellent writing, dialog and overall plot. It doesn't feel like a video game plot, it really is Noir. Plus, to get the real ending you have to beat it on the hardest difficulty.
Fourth- The presentation, the game is presented so well as one coherent narrative through the Comic Books style as well as the games. The voice acting, sound effects and music are all wonderful, as are the ideas presented. Everything just feels so dead on, nothing forced, like a real world. I feel as though you are literally dropped into the world.
If you haven't played it you should, if you have play it again. -
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I hope they release this for Virtual Console.
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Since a lot of awesome games have already been mentioned...
The Specialists
Like Action Half-Life, only better. The most viscerally satisfying modern-contemporary style deathmatch I have ever played. Fast, frantic, great weapons, and stunts, stunts, stunts. :D
I still fire it up from time to time. -
Counter-Strike. Not CS:S, good old fashioned pre-CZ counter-strike. I started playing CS in beta 2, and I was completely hooked from then on. I probably spent more time playing that game, and being active in the competitive community, then any other game ive ever played. my best gaming memories ever come from CAL matches and scrims with the few clans i played with.
The game was perfect IMO, great weapons, awesome maps, you could do really well playing lone wolf, but really needed a team to excel. Its a shame they never got a real handle on the cheating situation, and i never really liked it much after 1.3. -
Outcast
The game that made voxels infamous is still one of the best action/adventure games out there. It is one of the early pioneers for completely open worlds with the ability to travel to any place in Adelpha from the get go.
Story - The story is outstanding, with excellent writing and some truly memorable characters. The dialogue with the inhabitants of Adelpha are always entertaining.
Art - While voxels haven't really aged well the art in the game is still outstanding. The first time you set eyes upon the sky with its multiple moons and the outstanding water effects you'll know much care has been put into the game. The game was also one of the first to use depth of field blur as well as translucent and reflective water.
Gameplay - The game plays a lot like Zelda with different areas that require new tools to advance and the same sense of discovery. The game has so many gameplay types from first person shooting, to puzzles, to third person exploration.
Sound - This game has one of the best soundtracks to a game ever with it being orchestrated by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The voice acting is great as well.
The game is difficult to find now, but its worth it to find and play. Its one of the first games to create a 3D world with NPCs that have their own schedule as they farm, sleep, eat, etc. The wonder and adventure when exploring the huge world is amazing and has yet to be beat. -
MechWarrior 2 is the only answer
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Serious Sam - The First Encounter This game made me laugh, scream and re-load like no other.
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Ultima Online. In the early days it was the wild west of MMRPG's. A game isn't fun unless there is a threat of gank+dry loot. Play it on a free server with the rule set you perfer. You need to download a UO client and razor (a UOA type of program). Some links:
http://www.game-master.net/
http://www.runuo.com/razor/ -
Freedom Force 1 and 2. Awesome games.
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