No particular order intended.

1) Civilization II. God, how I love this game. I wasted hours on the first game and bought the third, but Civ2 (and its cousin Alpha Centauri) will own my heart for turn-based strategy games forever.

2) Fallout II. The most impressive example of an open-ended RPG I can recall.

3) Final Fantasy IX. Excellent game system (even if the active turn battle system was a bit weirded out in this installment) and a moving story. Echo Technogoth for the gameplay pluses. This may be skewed, though, as I beat the game for the first time only two hours ago. Amazing, amazing ending; I've beaten FF6-10 and played all except FF3j, and I have to say FF8 and FF9 are running neck-and-neck for my favorite.

4) Thief. The first 3D "action" game where I ever had to think instead of twitch. We must all pour one for Looking Glass.

5) Space Empires IV. Y'know, a lot of folks would say MOO2, but here I can't agree (mostly because I didn't play MOO until I played Space Empires, which admittedly owes a lot to MOO). The gameplay of Space Empires has always felt more fluid and interesting to me. Plus, the designing of your own ships was handled in a far better and more interesting way, as was inter-species diplomacy and colonization.

6) Uncharted Waters: New Horizons. A shining example of how you can take something that just isn't given the love it deserves (the Age of Exploration) and make gaming gold out of it. Excellent pseudo-RPG.

7) Pirates! Gold. I'm younger than a lot of hardcore gamers and I don't really remember the original Pirates!. I didn't play it except on an NES emulator, maybe two years ago. Pirates! Gold enhances on the original in too many ways to mention. Graphics, sound, tactics, and playability are all improved immensely. Hunt down the Sega Genesis version; it's better than the PC version.

8) Dragon Warrior IV. My first RPG ever. I played it when I was 6, and didn't beat it for another six years. As I said above, I'm younger than a lot of hardcore gamers. However, this game cured me of all things not-hardcore with my games. It made dungeon crawling fun, what with Taloon the merchant doing a little dance to distract the enemies or tripping and causing a 3x critical blow entirely by accident. To date I've beaten every DW/DQ game except for DQ6, and that's because the IPS patch isn't finished.

9) Phantasy Star IV. Forget Phantasy Star Online; that sucked. PSIV is sweet-baby-Jesus awesome. This was my second "real" RPG, and the first to immerse me in the story. Dragon Warrior IV was a dungeon crawl for a dungeon crawl's sake. It was fun, but the story was an extra. I didn't really even pay attention to the story until my most recent playthrough, about a year ago. PSIV's story grabs you from the start with the anime Visual Events. The sidequests aren't as plentiful as in Final Fantasy, but with a battle system as engrossing and fun as PSIV's to help move along what may be one of the greatest three stories ever to grace a console RPG (with Suikoden II, FF8, and FF9 fighting for the other two slots--take that, FF7 fanboys!), I could never put it down. Been thinking about using a similar cutscene system in my project. Oh, yes--and it ties up just about all the loose ends except for the big one at the end of PS2.

10) Suikoden II. I wish I could describe in words how truly great this game is. The story is brilliant, if marred by translation errors, and the gimmick of the game--recruit 108 characters to change the course of history in the game and rescue someone important to you--is made fun despite the enormity of the task. And just one minigame, the cooking one, is fun enough that it could be its own game.

My Favorite Top Ten Games:

1. Sims 2
2. Uplink
3. Neverwinter Nights
4. Black & White
5. Fallout Tacticts
6. Civilisation 3
7. Frontier or First Enconunters (can't wait to see Elite IV)
8. Warcraft 3
9. Worms :)
10. Diablo 2

Quote:

Original post by streamer My Favorite Top Ten Games: 7. Frontier or First Enconunters (can't wait to see Elite IV)

O.O Elite IV?

My top 10:

1. Unreal Tournament

Play it merely for the feel of the game. The weapons were amazing (not balanced maybe, but not everyone likes a balanced experience) with lots of different ideas. A lot of in-game tricks came because of the diversity found in the weapons.

2. Frontier (Elite II)

There was something about this game that hooked me from day 1. I dread to think how many hours I spent playing it.

3. Syndicate

Man oh man did I love this! The weapons were cool, the way you could upgrade your agents was cool and taking over the world was cool as well. I was only sorry the game wasn't longer and didn't have more variation in the missions. Still really worth playing.

4. Duke Nukem 3D

This game had such a personality. Awesome weapons, a great comic book style and a really enjoyable game to play. Multiplayer was brilliant even with only 3-4 players!

5. Half-Life (1 and 2)

Half-Life proves that even in today's climate of fiercely competitive multiplayer games, there's still room for a hearty singleplayer experience. Really engrossing, great story and I can't help but wonder how many times I went back to complete them over and over again.

6. Theme Hospital

More isometric fun in this colourful hospital resource sim. The sort of game that would appeal to most. Great fun to play, the resource management was really cool and tbh, it's worth playing just to see the vomit waves. [wink]

7. Crusader: No Remorse

For an isometric shooter, this game was pretty damn cool. Was really fun to play. Had a nice story with it, the controls were really easy to get to grips with and the gameplay was fantastic.

8. Command & Conquer

Dune II was great, but I think Command & Conquer really solidified a huge RTS following. There have been a lot of RTS games since, but IMO, there hasn't really been anything as enthralling as this. The graphics in recent games are a lot better, but the gameplay has stagnated a bit.

9. Tomb Raider II

IMO, easily the best in the TR series. The puzzles were good, the player was rewarded for being clever (unlike future TR games where you die in situations you just have no chance of escaping whatsoever the first time). The controls were easy to use as well.

10. Hidden and Dangerous

I'm not usually into war-type games as I find them a bit difficult to get into. However, H&D was so addictive. Used to play it on a LAN with some mates and the combination between stealth and action was pretty inspiring.

Honourable mentions:

Crash Bandicoot
Sonic 3
Doom (obviously)
Quake
Sensible World of Soccer
Serious Sam
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

Now just for something different, here's my top 5 games to play, purely to see something wrong with them.

1. Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness

Beautiful looking game, but a shame the controls are so crap that it's hideously annoying at times. Also, some of the puzzles and other bits were just tedious.

2. Tomber Raider Revelations

Another annoying game. Really stupid puzzles in this one and the controls weren't hugely impressive either. The items are also impossible to see in places and detracts from the whole experience. There was one section where you had to look for a tiny coin in this expanse of ice cold water. You had very limited time in the water before you couldn't take the cold anymore and would die very quickly. Probably one of the most stupid parts of a game I've ever seen.

3. Unreal Tournament 2004

You might be surprised to see this in here, but let me explain. Unreal Tournament 2004 (and 2003) were supposed to continue the Unreal Tournament series. Unreal Tournament 2004 does have a lot to offer, but it's completely divided the Unreal Tournament community because the gameplay differs quite a lot from the original. If it would've been a standalone title it would've been a much larger success I think.

4. Final Fantasy VII

Incredibly annoying crappy music that you couldn't seem to turn off. Think it was VII anyway but it might've been another one. Was definitely the FF series, though.

5. Kingpin

This was actually a good game, apart from the fact that without a patch, you couldn't complete it. I'd imagine if you bought it now it wouldn't be a problem, but still, that's hard to beat.

Has anyone mentioned Daikatana?

You can't simply list the best games. You'll also have to list those that aren't considered good. After all, sometimes what not to do is more important.


EDIT: After reading through the thread, nevermind. Someone did. But I wish there was more concentration on examples of "bad games".

[Edited by - GBGames on June 27, 2005 5:27:10 PM]

Ah yes, Daikatana, cursed be the name of John Romero for creating this foul piece of gaming trash. It's not so much that it was bad, but more that it didn't really add anything to the genre, while pumping all the funds of the company, which led the producer to disband the Looking Glass team. Clicky references 1 and 2.
If there is a gaming Hell, the people who pushed Daikatana over keeping Looking Glass are going to it... [grin]

Any other major examples of bad games from anyone?

well, my personal opinion is that if you play any older game, you will learn a double lesson:

1) Games in the past REALLY did have something better about them. More care was given to gameplay and originality. This isn't some nostalgic bullshit, but rather an objective comment if you consider the gameplay of said games given the period.
If you compare an old game and think "wow, this was 10 years ago, imagine if those guys had had today's resources at their disposal!", chance is, you are thinking that gameplay, surely, must increase in a manner similar to graphics and technology. i.e. if Elite could fit on 1.2 Megabytes (that's right, a game that I played for months on a single floppy disk), imagine how good it would be if it was 1.2 Gigabytes !!! [grin]
Which is a wrong way to look at it. Just like a painting on a bigger scale doesn't mean the painting is going to be better...

2) A lot of games from the past suffer from poor GUI and limitations that were created by the technology of the time. And I don't mean the graphics, I mean the interface. When all you have is 320x200 and you have to fit a HUD in there... well, it's a tough challenge.

I still remember when Ultima Underworld II came out and they had a proud line on the box saying something like "a bigger area for the 3D view, now taking almost 80% of the screen!" (as a side note, UU had 3D environments, light levels, slopes, even bloody swimming, before Wolfenstein was even released. Doom was NOT the first 3D game [razz])


My point is, there are TONS of old games which I would be extremely curious to see "remade" with nowadays technology.
Again, not so much for improved graphics (which seem to be the accepted way to remake an old game ... foolish people), but rather to have a proper GUI to play the game. Transparent HUDs, better mouse support, much more "real estate" to work with, etc. Imagine a game with the addictive gameplay of Rogue, but with the interface of a Neverwinter Nights !
A masterpiece like Darklands (which Technogoth mentions in the original post, BTW) remade with an engine like GTA3 (because even the interface was perfect, at the time, 14 years ago!)...

aaah, I can but dream, I guess [rolleyes]

Bad games (a very good idea, by the way. It's a bit easier to agree on games that suck [grin]) :

I got Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness as part of an offer with my mobile phone a few years ago. Now, I am not generally dismissive of getting games for free in magasines or otherwise, because I have had delightful surprises in the past, but in the case of TR:AoD, it was just one of those "please play our game, we'll PAY you to play it! Please!" cases.
Honestly, when I started it, I was really eager to play, as I hadn't tried a 3D platformer in quite some times, and with the reputation of the TR series, I was at least expecting something decent. Yeah, right. The game looks beautiful from the start, and from the start it is utterly frustrating. It's all about potential. Potentially, this would have been a great game.
Potentially, this could have been a Splinter Cell, but with a different kind of hero and storyline. But honestly, I just gave up after the first level... I liked some of the ideas, but the controls were SO annoyingly unresponsive that I couldn't be bothered...

The lesson :
-Get the priorities straight : it doesn't matter how good your game potentially is if nobody can even play it because of sucky controls.

A example of how it should be done:
-GTA San Andreas : it starts off as great as the other GTA3 titles, but as you get more skills, the control only get better and better (no more crashing as soon as your bike hits a sidewalk, once you practice enough). This game is one of those were I just drive/walk/ride/swim/fly around just for the pleasure of the experience, the sheer joy of seeing my vehicle respond to my will. I take my Harley (well, steal it from some dude), turn on the radio, and just cruise on the coast road... it's like a simulator (think Flight Simulator), but fun. Now I just wish they would do some European locations soon [rolleyes]

Atari's ET was widely considered a horrible game and signified the video game crash in the early 80s.

But I remember playing it and liking it. Am I the only one who enjoyed playing it? I was under the age of 10 at the time, so maybe I just didn't know better.