what one game stands head and shoulders above the rest

You know, I may just have to add civilization to my list.

 

Ah yes, the original Civilization with the great big foldout technology map in the back of the manual that you had to reference as an ancient excuse for DRM (until you memorized it after a couple weeks). My parents had just split up and my mom was finally going to college when one of her gen-ed history professors assigned 15 hours of Civilization as homework for the semester. I don't think she played it at all, but my siblings and I took turns constantly for the next 6 months and off and on for the next few years. I've only played 1, 3, and 4, but I feel like the original is the best, with 3 outclassing 4 by far as well.

 

Nostalgia could have played a role in why you like the game so much now.

I'm just sayin...

 

All just kids. I remember the original Sim City, I was in high school then. Hell, Sim City 4 says released January 2003, I was 30 years old then...

 

Afraid it won't happen. I too was a fan of th dino crisis series and the first few RE games. Too bad all "survival horror" games are now Action horror games. Just like RPGs are now Action RPGs... classic gaming where thinking>twitch is a thing of the past.

Ironically it seems like the only style of gameplay that i believe should be more twitch based, MMORPGs, keep the same linear, slow-paced, tab targeting scheme.

 

Splinter Cell series
WoW
Half life 2

are the stand out games for me with real playability

 

I'm about halfway in between - Sim City 2000 was a staple of my late elementary school years, though it was a year or two old when we got it. I belong to that awkward generation that never really felt any mystification with the real classics, the Pongs and Donkey Kongs and Space Invaders', but has still seen revolutionary changes in the way video games look and play and gets nostalgic about our "good old days". Anyone who grew up in the Nintendo 64 era or later has certainly seen big steps taken, but post-3D gaming is largely variations and improvements on a theme, whereas 2D to 3D is a major paradigm shift (I still remember the first time I saw the first 3D Zelda teaser, it was like Link had stepped off the screen and into real life).

Earlier generations (like yours) saw the shift from black and white or Hercules Green to CGA and EGA and VGA, text to graphics, subtitles to sound. My generation saw the shift from 2D to 3D. Post N64 kids have seen the shift from polygon count to lifelike 3D modeling and things like tessellation. What will my own kids see when I have some, I wonder? Their nostalgic old games will be more lifelike than anything that's even out today, and their major paradigm shift will be something like lifelike 3D to immersive virtual reality or some bizarro-future game system that projects the games into some alternate dimension in which the characters are all real people sprung to life just for the sake of the game. I should probably patent the movie rights for that one, actually, only I think Philip K. or Kilgore Trout has already written the novel...

 

I just this second needed a picture of a grizzly bear and googled it and used the very same picture as your profile pic, at the same time I was viewing this exact topic and this exact page.

I fear the world will end because of this.

P.s I stand by the greatest game of all time being : Roland on the Ropes.

 

Oh my, so many games are exceptional when compared to the mass garbage that comes out... let's see:

Civilization series. The first was obviously very original, but IMO all of them until Civ 4 were great games. Civ 5 is a joke.
Fallout 1 and 2, absolutely tremendous RPGs, IMO the only ones that can compete with Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. Fallout 3 is OK, but the first two were awesome.
Elite series, the spiritual predecessor of the X-series, which is also pretty good.
GTA series, especially Vice City which had a really good mood, and . I didn't like San Andreas as much.
Diablo 2, which I am still playing today. Diablo 1 was also great, with its dark mood and all, but D2 wins because of replayability.
Raven Shield
...

I could easily put here 100 more entries, all of them of great quality and which bring good memories. If I have to choose ONE of them... it's Fallout 2. I mean, the humor in that game is just priceless, I still remember showering my old CRT monitor multiple times because I was drinking something when the game made me laugh hysterically.

 

Mainstream developers have shifted this way, but all you have to do is look at indie PC developers. Penumbra series and Amnesia blow your statement out of the water

 

You bring up some very good points. Absolutely right. It's strange to think that we all have a different perspective based on when we first were exposed to games. Going from the monochrome monitors with 80x24 resolutions to 1080p (and larger) flat screens with near to life-like character models and animation is a significant step in the last 30 years. I mean imagine if you were cryogenically preserved in 1980 and woken up today. The changes would be so significant.

 

Better get your aarp card out...But yeah I remember games like Doom, quake 1, warcraft 2, startcraft being in my high school.

 

yes they would be extremely different, mind blowing some might say, im also in my late 30's and although i agree with the above comments regarding Nostalgia and age, i don't think that takes away from what for us at the time a great experience, just because age and time where factors doesn't mean in our own eyes it wasn't a awesome game.

its great to read these posts and reflect and recall our own experience with the games, how we felt when playing them, what it really means for me is that it wasn't a waste of time, it was something that even today many years later brings a smile to my face and that in my opinion is priceless.

 

As long as we've shifted to nostalgia a little bit, I remember playing "Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego" in black and white on my Mac Classic. Anyone else remember that?

I also remember Civilization (the first one) on the Mac Color Classic, Sim City (the first one) on the SNES, Final Fantasy (the first one) and Legend of Zelda (the first one) on the NES...it's interesting how many of the games I enjoyed in my youth have turned into major franchises.

 

Just like everyone else here, I feel like this question is hard to answer. If I had to pick one single game, it would probably be WoW. No other game has managed to take as much time and money from me as WoW did. I haven't played for 3 years though, and I occasionally think about going back, but I have no regrets.

Other than that, I'd also have to say pretty much every single blizzard game since Diablo 1. I remember playing Diablo on an old 686 my dad scrounged from work and loving it. Right now I'm spending a ridiculous amount of time on SC2 custom maps. Galaxy Vampirism, yeeaaahh!!

Other honorable mentions: Civilization series(especially 2 and 4), Half-life series(and it's mods), Final Fantasy 7, Shining Force 1, and Chrono Cross. Nothing matches the sheer amount of hours and enjoyment found in these games.

 

For me, the first game I can remember where I sat down and said "Yes. This is what its all about" would have to be Halo. Its the first fps where everything just clicked. Not the best game by a long shot, but still.

Also, SimCity 3000 Unlimited FTW.

 

Super Meat Boy, it took the classic 2-D side-scrolling platform game I've been playing my entire life and turned everything to 11. Music, controls, artwork, level design, and difficulty are all perfect IMHO.

 

Meh. WoW was a miserable experience for me, played a month or so and just quit, didn't see the appeal.

Starcraft 2 I SOOO much wanted to like since I really enjoyed SC1, but SC2 was a huge disappointment for me. I am so bitter about it that I loathe the game so much that I don't care to even touch it any more. Turned into a game for elitist players. Noobs or people just wanting to have fun can't, really. I think SC2 was a failure in the sense that it doesn't continue to have the appeal like SC1 did. I mean there's less than 10% the players that were on the first few months after launch. Last couple times I was on it said "600 games in your region". 600. It was more like 8,000 six months ago. This means chances of actually getting play someone of a crappy caliber like me is pretty slim to none.

 

I agree with your comment on WoW. I wanted to like it because of it's huge success and apparent fun/addiction factor. But from what I played, it bored the crap out of me... I would much rather be playing minecraft or battlefield...

 

What region are you in?

I'm a bronze league player in Oregon, I play maybe a dozen games per week (average length of game is 15 minutes), and I have no problem finding other people of my caliber when I do 1v1 ladder matches.

I've been away from SC2 for a month or so while my MBP started to struggle, but I'll be back into it next week now that my Vaio is getting here. My name is Mitlov on battle.net as well--go ahead and friend me and we can play sometime.

 

I live in Michigan., but I'll add you to my friends list. I'm "RigorMortis" lol.

 

X-Com

I don't play it much anymore because completing the game takes a while, but I thought it was a near perfect blend of economy, research, squad based tactical combat and a bit of random RPG (that differentiated your soldiers between psi warriors, scouts/snipers and grunts).

I'm not a huge fan of squad based tactical games in an FPS environment...I prefer the isometric style of X-Com. I could usually take a game like Rogue Spear or Ghost Recon and beat it lone wolf style after a couple of attempts which I found easier to do than spend the time pre-planning the mission and the equipment loadouts. Some people really enjoy the pre-planning. I don't. Choose your equipment in X-Com and implement your strategy as you go. Door breaches aren't quite as elegant as Rainbow Six, but they still required planning and were tense. Beating an X-Com battle with a single player was extremely difficult. (I was never able to do it at the mid- to late game battles...I typically did it at the beginning, after a few save games, to maximize trait improvement with that soldier who became one of my squad leaders for the rest of the game.)

The nerd in me loved all the available graphs. I was always emotionally devastated when Brasil withdrew their support because I only had one intercepter and one squad and they were busy in the Pacific.

I loved the storyline and the ending. I loved the sound effect of a dying alien. I hated the sound of a grenade going off (I never used explosive grenades...you can't capture live aliens using them...and live aliens are needed for probing). The research tree was cool. And after the first time one of your bases was attacked, base building strategy became very necessary.

The only weak part of the game was shooting down UFOs. It was an almost cheesy part of the game which was only a small step above simply stating "You crashed the UFO", "You destroyed the UFO", or "The UFO just cost you another $60 million investment."

Awesome game that was not matched by its sequels (although Terror from the Deep is essentially the same with water tiles). And I'm not sure another game has been made (maybe Civilization/Alpha Centauri) that combined so many different elements so well for me.

 

halflife 2 and crysis.

 

How could I forget X-Com!! It was a beautiful game. And X-Com: Apocalypse was a really good game, even though they had to cut some of the content out. Great graphics for its time, awesome base building, great mission generator, great weapon variety, challenging AI... all in all it's awesome.

 

Interesting...I grew up in Michigan. Hate that place.

 

Welcome to the club...

Worse though, I'm stuck here.

 

If you never played this, I don't know how to describe what you missed. Most innovative FPS ever created, by leagues.

 

D3 will be awesome. Really looking forward to that game if it ever comes out...

 

I really enjoyed Max Payne.

That's the only one really I haven't seen that I have been thinking of. I might not compare it with FF7 or WoW or CS1.6 etc but it sure was a pretty awesome way to play a game. Slow motion third person shooter hehe.

 

I actually have to agree with you. I remember playing the original Max Payne on PS2 and thinking that it was one of the better shooters I'd played in awhile. The game itself was kind of cheesy, but the whole thing was a lot of fun (except the crying baby levels which sort of bothered me).

 

And the whole "noir" thing was very well done. At least the Max Payne games weren't just ripoffs from other games (i.e. COD and Battlefield, etc).

 

Batman Arkham Asylum so far is my favorite stealth action game. The controls, action, and stealth are fluid.

 

Everyone raves about Batman. I thought it was ok, although still playing through it. It reminds me more of Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay really. Same kind of adventure/action game. I think Riddick was better though. But the top stealth games imho are the original Splinter Cell games.

 

While the original Splinter cell games are good, best stealth games imho are the Thief Trilogy.

 

VERY OLD SCHOOL: Project Halley: fly a space ship throughout the solar system collecting clues to solve puzzles. Education hidden in a fun little space game. Ran on the Amiga back in the 1980s or so.

Elite and Elite Frontier: The first 3D universe game with free flight and make your own adventure layout. An incredible HUGE universe laid out to work on a machine with < 64k of RAM. If you haven't played it, look up oolite, the modern reimplementation.

OLD SCHOOL:
Battlezone 1 and 2 set the standard in real time strategy mixed with first person shooter / craft piloting. At its height you could find hundreds of servers and thousands of players online, from sniping training schools to crazy mods / hacks etc.

MechWarrior2, specifically Mercenaries, was the best battlemech game I've ever played, with swiveling torsoes and awesome weapons. Nothing like outfitting an Atlas with 12 machine guns and one large pulse laser. Draw them in during city fighting, switch to machine guns, and literally watch the other mech fly apart at close range. Or put an arrow in a Naga and take out a formation of medium mechs before they can even get off their first shots. Dual LRM 20s on a DC Catapult, and so on.

Carmageddon 1 and 2. One of the funnest driving games ever. Twisted Metal never even came close to Carmageddon for all out bloody destruction and crazy stunt driving. surprisingly good physics modelling for an older game.

Descent 2: Great 3D space / in the mines game. HAD to have a swivelling joystick to play.

SEMI-MODERN and MODERN:
Crysis 1 and 2: Still some of the best FPS ever made. My son was hating Crysis the first time he played it. He quit at the point where you're infiltrating the village to rescue the scientist who's held hostage. I berated him for being a wussy, and took over, and promptly got killed. And got killed again, and again, and again. then I noticed his flashlight was on. Oh, so he got that far with his flashlight on the whole time? The rest of the game was a breeze for him after that!

Race On, Race 07. STCC etc: One of THE best reasons to own a steering wheel today. Incredible physics and realism, online racing, and so on. Lots of mods, including one for 2011 BTCC! If you like to drive it is the best sim out there.

 

+1 for Elite (you forgot Newtonian physics, something that even the X series doesn't have!), Mechwarrior, and Carmageddon. This last one especially is absolutely awesome. A racing game where the goal (one of them) is to kill all the pedestrians in as gory a way as possible. It HAD to be a good game

 

Oh ELITE! It pretty much spawned the space based 4x games today. +1 for sparking that neuron (last one) in my brain. MechWarrior 2 was awesome. I LOVED that game. Except I reloaded it some time ago and the graphics and experience seemed sooo dated compared to what I remember, lol.

 

I never had mechwarrior 2, but I did have MW3 and played mw4 the most when it came out. I wish they would make another MW game, but it seems like the "mechwarrior reboot" isn't going to happen because there has been no new news since 2009.

 

Speaking of Mechs, both of the MechCommander games rank highly on my all-time favorites list. I wish more sci-fi games were made in that genre.

 

Judging by your comments about minecraft and battlefield, I assume you never played vanilla WoW? To me, nothing can match the wonder that WoW had from launch till WotlK. It really was an entirely different game back then. Since WotlK it's been dumbed down and made more repetitive. I mean honestly, they just recycle the same bosses, hoping that it will match the pull that those encounters had in the beginning. So yeah, considering how watered down the experience has become, and that the game has been out for 7 years, it IS pretty boring. When it came out in 2004, though, nothing could match it.

 

Putting 12 of them together was pretty much the only way you could get any damage out of them, lol.

Developing a personal favorite is the best part of Mechwarrior games. My personal Mech is a Timberwolf/Madcat. Always. If not available, I'll take a Mad Dog/Vulture or a Summoner/Thor. When I used to play LAN Netmech matches with my brothers, I would use an Elemental, let them beat eachother up, and then waltz in with my crappy small laser and Mgun and finish off the other one.

I heard that they were ramping up development on the new one last month, and that they would be announcing a release date soon. I need a new Mechwarrior game, 4 is a bit long in the tooth now (although it's legally free, which is great).

 

some great games being listed here love it, i have thought of another one, i think it was called ' Vagrant story' it was a ps1 game, a somewhat action rpg, i played it a few years back on my psp, and i have to say it was epic, really really groundbreaking at its time.......hmmm i think it was vagrant story, or was it vagrant hearts, you could chain abilities, use a break effect and even forge new weapons and armor......

 

Somehow, Alan Wake came to mind for xbox 360. I just really really really enjoyed it when I played through it.

PC game - Half Life 2 Series

 

Well their main limitation is their terrible range of like 100M. If they're not right in front of you the bullets just bounce off the enemy mech.
But conversely, at ranges < 50M their power goes up exponentially. Spending some money on rockets for a 80 or 85 ton mech with 8 or 10 machine guns lets you charge right, firing as you get within 100M and watching even 100T full armored mechs come apart.Thing is none of the AIs knew how to fly those, but online a lot of guys did. As long as you had cover the machine guns ruled.

Conversely, the other end of the spectrum was putting three erPPGs on a bigger machine with maximum cooling and a single small or medium pulse laser and ALWAYS try to stay out of range of things like Atlases covered in machine guns. Lots of sideways running to make that work.

 

metal gear solid

 

Half Life 2, GTA San Andreas, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Crysis

 

That would be a lot of games imho.
I mean every year or two there was such a game.

Judging by time played i must say World of Warcraft.

 

It would be wonderful if they are actually going to go through with the new game; the website of the developer still seems very active so hopefully they are working on it but just keeping it quiet.
I have been playing the Mechwarrior: living legends mod for crysis wars; it is a LOT of fun (32 player multiplayer mech battles), but doesn't run too well at all on my laptop so I can only play it on my desktop.