Abe's Top 30 Video Games of All Time [Archive] - Front Office Football Central

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 12:10 AM

I do have one honorable mention game. So this would technically be number 31 on a list of thirty, but I wanted to put in an entry for it:

Honorable Mention: Sea Battle
Intellivision
Mattel Electronics
1980
GameSpot Review - 8.9 (There is no official review, this is the cumulative review score of all players)
Action - Strategy

http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/games/credits/box_art/sea_box.gif

Of all of the video games from the early 80s, the only one that stands the test of time well is Sea Battle. Designed fo rthe IntelliVision, and one of its first games, Sea Battle is a unique strategy game that must be played between two players.

The game is divided up into two phases. An overland phase sees you deploying various ships and trying to outmaneuver your opponent. Each player has a certain number of ships of various types. One lays invisible mines, while another canl sweep mines. If you get either your Troop Transport or your Aircraft Carrier into your opponent's base, you win.

http://www.hotcom.com/intellivision/seabattleplay.jpg

When one of your fleets meets up with an opponent's fleet, you enter a battle screen, where you duel with your opponent. A couple of ships have torpedos, while the rest have gun batteries. Different ships have different speeds, weapons, range, damage capability and armor. A big Battleship, for example, can do so much damage it can kill smaller ships with one hit and destroy the biggest with two or three. It has a long range, but it can occasionally be outmaneuvered by a faster vessel, like the fastest ship in the game, the PT Boat.

http://www.hotcom.com/intellivision/seabattleplay2.jpg

Like all IntelliVision games, Sea Battle came with an overlay for the controller, which you can see here:

http://www.hotcom.com/intellivision/seabattleovly.jpg

This will show how many ships you have at the beginning and what types they are.

In deploying fleet, your opponent only knows the size, not the content. He also will not know where you drop mines. Therefore, there is a lot of cat and mouse in the overland game.

This game's dual nature with one side beign strategy and the other side with a battle map and each being equally challenging was a unique creation that went on to inspire numerous games (To be fair, IntelliVision's Space Battle, which was one of the system's launch game was the first video game with two interweaving maps and challenegs, but the strategy map is too, light to really count to most poeple. It's just sending ships to computer controlled bad guys before they reach your base, and then you fight). Sea Battle is still a load of fun because the game's challenge comes from the opponent.

Chess is still a good game despite its age because it provides an amazing foundation for you but the challenge lies in the other's skill. The same is true of Sea Battle. I still have an IntelliVision and play this occasionally with friends, who just love it.

This is one of the greatest classic video games, and it stands the test of time, unlike others. The IntelliVision was a very avant-garde system with many brillant and inovative games, like Utopia (often called Civilization 0.5) Football (with actual plays called), Baeball (with an actual voice) and Treasure of Tarmin (the original first-person 3D game. Still, those games have become quaint, while Sea Battle remains a good game to this day.

This was the honorable mention. Stay tuned when we hit the first game on my list!

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 12:39 AM

I hope you guys can see the pics from the previous game. Now it's time to hit the actual list. Here comes:

30. Baldur's Gate
PC
BioWare
1998
GameSpot Review - 9.2
RPG

http://www.bioware.com/_global/images/content/rightsidebar/bg_box.jpg

This RPG shocked the PC World away from the previous RPG King of the Hill (which will chart higher on our list) and showed what technology and a new engine could do. It single-handedly put BioWare on the map and spawned numerous quality RPGs like Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale 2 and Fallout 2, and even can be seen in KOTOR, KOTOR II and Neverwinter Nights.

http://www.bioware.com/_global/images/gallery/bg_screens_2/bgscreens_1_9_small.jpg

Baldur's Gate was an engrossing isometric game that re-established D&D rules as pertinent to PC role-playing when most people were laughing at the old SSI AD&D games, which had continued to be released long past their due date.

Baldur's Gate was so intricate for an RPG of its time, and that's what made it special. No RPG got as much mileage out of as little level progression as BG.

The continuing quest of your main chracter and the ultimate revelation in the game were both very well done, and even a surprise to me who, at the time, had read every single Forgotten Realms novel published.

Who can forget the great way this game handled theft? When many RPGs allowed the players to rob from virtually any chest and any closet in anybody's home, it was BG that made that stealing and had guards attack you. It did a lot of little things that made the world more and more beleivable.

From graphic superiority over contemporary RPGs to an intricate and believable world, Baldur's Gate was both a satisfying play and an innovative game. It did have some issues, like pathfinding and dungeon crawling, which were never that good. However, at its heart, BG was an amazing game hich you can still play and enjoy today.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 01:12 AM

This will be the last one tonight. Again, I hope you can see the pics.

29. Monster Rancher 3
PlayStation 2
Techmo
2001
GameSpot Review - 8.4
Strategy/Fight Monster Breeder

http://ps2media.ign.com/ps2/image/monsterrancher3_ps2box_usa_org_01boxart_160w.jpg

FYI - I purchased my copy of Monster Rancher from my winnings at a Blackjack table at Greektown Casino, my first trip ever to a casino.

Monster Rancher is a franchise that, frankly, a lot of people don't take seriously. Where it's more popular cousin, Pokemon, is an RPG-Monster Breeder game, Monster Rancher is more of a Strategy-Monster Breeder game (although MR 4 and MR Evo are more RPG like than not).

MR3 was the game that finally got it. It crosses a simple fighting game element with a Breeding game and, much like Sea Battle, creates two seperate games.

The first game is the strategy game. Here you raise a monster using various training methods. You feed it various foods. You react to it using various commands. You give it various items. You equip it with various accessories. All of these methods are more or less effective on various monsters, each of which has its own personality. The metallic Henger, for example, likes a completley different type of food than the snakelike Naga, who likes a different types of food than the large Hare. The Henger likes oil and metal, the Naga like meat, and the Hare like veggies. The Henger will not respond much to either positive or negative comments, the Hare adores attention and the Naga wants to be pushed to excellence. Each has a different personality, training method and so forth.

The best pic I could find of a monster being trained is from the Japanese version, sorry. Here a nasty death-like monster called a Joker is being raised in the desert:

http://ps2media.ign.com/media/previews/image/mr32/mr3_4.jpg

There are five different regions and every monster has evolved to live in these different regions. Monsters will train best in the region that they relate too. You can take a monster from one regions and evolve it to become a monster of a different region, if you are so inclined. The regions are desert, underwater, forest, artic, and jungle.

You begin the game just in the forest, and have to unlock the other areas by doing well in tournaments held there.

The game is very complex, with heaps of items, skills, moves, and stats that determine how well your monster fights. When you enter a tournament, you can control your monster and fight it out:

http://ps2media.ign.com/media/previews/image/mr34/mr3_12.jpg

A Gitan that has been named 19 is duking it out with a Raiden named Mon. This isn't as complex as Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, but it is a very nice element to the game. Strategy is one part of the game is mixed with strategy in the other, which really helps the game, in my opinion. I actually won the game with a Gitan, by the way.

Like many Japanese games, it does suffer from a lack of documentation at times. Occasionally you'll come across a nifty accessory for your creature and have no idea what it does. Most of them have a clue for you, but a few do not.

There are cute little monsters in here, but don't let that fool you. A lot of monsters are just downright mean looking, like the Naga, Joker, Durahan, Dragon, Zoom, Zan and more. Don't let the cute Mocchi, Suzarin, Lesione and Suezo make you think that everything is all Pokemon here, because that definately is not the case. It's more of a mix.

I really like these games that combine multiple elements into an intriguing game. MR3 is great at representing the different personalities of monsters and does a much better job at the details of the game than its predecessors.

A lot of people love the innovative way that the MR series generates monsters for you. There are dozens of monsters and sub-breads in the game. You don;t initially have access to any, and you have to generate some from "saucer stones." You open up the PS2 and pull out the game, putting in a CD, DVD or PS2 game. Then the game reads the new disc and creates a monster. Some DVDs, CDs, or PS2 games have been hardcoded to generate a special rare monster that can only be unlocked with those discs. For example, the widescreen version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon creates a unique Dragon called a Tigon which is a cross between a Dragon and a Tiger.

Ultimately, this game is amazing for its depth and detail. I played this game through a ton of monsters, and you can't beat it on the first monster. I didn't beat the game until my sixth monster.

Well, that's all for tonight. See you later.

-Anxiety

Poli

07-24-2006, 09:36 AM

Mustang

07-24-2006, 09:44 AM

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 10:51 AM

Never beat MR...wish I could find something for the Nintendo DS or something.

Heck, for that matter, I never knew you could "BEAT" MR. I loved to play the game just to play it.

Makes me wish I had my PS2 and MR out here. :(

MR3 has a promotional system where you rise in level after level as you win tournaments. Once you advance to level S, there are five tournaments where, if you make it to the finals, you will fight the top champion in the region - one torunament for each region. Once you've beaten the Top 5, you can then challenge a nasty dragon named Ragnarok. Beating Ragnarok wins the game. Of course, the game continues, and you can raise more monsters, keep fighting Ragnarok, Top 5 tourneys, and such, but the storyline ends when you defeat Ragnarok.

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 10:52 AM

At least Sea Battle got some love. We still break out the intellivision to play. Nothing better than getting a lucky shot off with a transport and destroying a sub. :D Of course, you had to find tricks to try to disguise the fact you were laying mines. Pretty obvious when you just start mashing buttons when you have a ship in the middle of nowhere...

Exactly, which is why it is so strategic. No video game taught me as much strategy in my early days as Sea Battle did.

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 11:37 AM

Here, we are, in my lunch break, and the thing on my mind? Game number 28 on our countdown. Incidentally, I've edited the previous posts to add in the game developer, which I'm going to include from now on. At number 28, here's a game from a company many of you love and remember fondly:

28. Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares
PC
MicroProse
1996
GameSpot Review - 8.7
4X

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/master_of_orion_1_2

http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/games/coverg/69/649569.jpg

At its height, MicroProse was a legend of strategy games, and this will not be the only game from them to make this list. Ten years old, and Master of Orion II still stands out as the best strategy space game ever developed. It outscales all competitors from Galatic Civilizations and GalCiv II to Space Empires IV, Master of Orion III, Fragile Allegiance, and more.

Master of Orion II was legendary for being one of the best games around when it came to giving players options. From building your own race from scratch to outifitting ships with the weapons and equipment that you want, MOO2 really gave a player a lot of cloth to weave with.

Like several previous games, Master of Orion II was a weaving of two seperate games. The basic game was a strategy game where you colonized planets, issued build orders, developed new technologies, dispatched fleets, signed up leaders, accumulated taxes and tariffs, and more.

http://images.starpulse.com/AMGPhotos/gscreens/screen250/drs200/s293/s29339egtjx.jpg

This created a lovely Civ-like space game that was tons of fun. It was balanced with some interesting tidbits. Namely, Orion itself, a star system in every galaxy with an amazing plant, just waiting for your ship to arrive, but guarded by the aptly named Guardian of Orion. And then there were those Antareans, nasty enemies of the people of Orion who are hopping from their dimension to yours, and you can build a Dimensional Transportal and hop over to their world and kick their ass. Other flavorful thigns included space monsters, especailly a space worm that would blockade a star system until you killed it, and if left alone long enough, would spawn other space worms that headed off to other systems. There were also Space Crystal monsters and Space Dragons. Pirate Caches in some systems rewarded the first one to find them with treasure. It was a wonderfully done game.

Can anyone else remember the sheer frustration that a Hyperspace Flux caused? That random event stopped all interstellar movement from occuring. It was nasty.

The other half of the game was when two fleets met up and began combat, you swiched to a combat screen where you moved your ships like chess pieces across the starry plane and fired weapons, missles, interceptors and various rays, including one ray that would actually spin an opposing ship.

http://images.starpulse.com/AMGPhotos/gscreens/screen250/drs200/s293/s293422dqf6.jpg

Master of Orion II is really the grandchild of Sea Battle, and I hope you can see that. Both have an overview strategy map, where you duke it out strategically, and then both move to a battle front where you fight it out with ships, either in space or sea.

Master of Orion II is an amazing game that is still great to play today. I found my old disc, installed the game on my XP, downloaded the most recent patch, and then played the game again. No slow programs, no cheats, and no problems.

I know that MOO2 has a few problems. Once you understood the game, you could buld a broken race (Creative, Democracy, +1 research). Although, I personally swear by Subterranean and Large Home World as absolute requirements (which gives you twice the starting size HW as other races).

Still, the game has stood as one of the greatest strategy games of all time, and the space game all others are measured by.

-Anxiety

Poli

07-24-2006, 12:26 PM

MR3 has a promotional system where you rise in level after level as you win tournaments. Once you advance to level S, there are five tournaments where, if you make it to the finals, you will fight the top champion in the region - one torunament for each region. Once you've beaten the Top 5, you can then challenge a nasty dragon named Ragnarok. Beating Ragnarok wins the game. Of course, the game continues, and you can raise more monsters, keep fighting Ragnarok, Top 5 tourneys, and such, but the storyline ends when you defeat Ragnarok.

I can't remember all the subquests, but I assume you could continue those as well.

PackerFanatic

07-24-2006, 12:47 PM

Last two pics didn't show up for me...

Izulde

07-24-2006, 12:57 PM

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 01:04 PM

How does MR3 compare to the original MR? The one thing I liked about the original MR that I don't recall later versions using is the raising one monster at a time thing.

If I remember right, later versions had you raising multiple monsters at a time, which I didn't care as much for.

MR3 is the last one monster at a time game. MR4 you raise multipel monsters and I agree, it just doesn't work.

On another note, let's see if I can find new pics, eh?

-Anxiety

EDIT: I've added new pics to MOO2 after the first one, hopefully they work!

spleen1015

07-24-2006, 01:35 PM

I am doing a top 101 poll over at OOTP. I've been slacking off much lately, but MOO2 is on my list. I have it much higher than you do. I wonder what the top 27 games are. :D

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 03:46 PM

spleen - Since you asked, and I have a few spare moments here at the end of my work day, why don't we take a look at my #27 game? This is sure to get comments and comparisons to Kodos, but I don't care, because is really is good enough to chart.

27. Madden '99
N64
EA Sports
1998
GameSpot Review - 8.8
Sports - Football

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/boxshots/1/197831_n64.jpg

This little game got me hooked in video football games. I played it non stop in franchise mode for several months straight. Later versions would also be played by me for several months.

I played Madden 98 a bit after getting into Madden 99, and it felt much worse. Madden 99 was a huge step forward in playability, realism, AI, and strategy. To my mind, Madden 99 is the definitive Madden.

Maybe on a website like this, I won;t need to expound upon Madden, but I will, never the less.

Madden was beautiful because of the great amount of detail. The large playbook was easy to maneuver and thus easy to find the right play. The controls gave you tons of options while never requiring you to become an elite joystick jockey in order to defeat an opponent (like more modern versions of Madden have required). You could win simply by calling the right plays and executing them.

The sheer realism of the game when you actually played the game brought me back to sports games. I hadn't played sports games for a long time because they were broken (Techmo Bowl) and could be defeated by the same play or same player every time. In fact, up until Madden 99, if you had asked me what the best football game ever was, I would have said IntelliVision's NFL Football from 1978.

http://n64media.ign.com/media/previews/image/maddn9914.jpg

Not so with Madden 99. There weren't the problems of broken players or broken plays. In fact, the game was so realistic and engrossing, that I remember playing on a big screen TV in the main lounge at our residence hall and having people walk by thinking there was an actual football game on. I found that to be quite impressive.

What really sold me on the game, however, was the detailed franchise mode. Contracts, salary cap, and roster oversight was all done with a great deal of detail, to my mind, at least.

For me, Madden would ultimately be a gateway drug, getting me into the sports sim world. I loved Madden and its franchise mode so much that I posted some ideas for expanding it at MaddenMania and someone said it sounded like Front Office Football. The rest is, as they say, history.

In fact, I enjoyed Madden 99 so much that I bought an N64 so I could play it. It was system seller to me.

From the franchise mode to a detailed and highly entertaining game against humans or the computer, the game was great. To this day, I'd put Madden 99 up against the best sports games ever made in any genre, sim or otherwise.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 07:46 PM

I thought it would be interesting to go back in time and add the Gamespot Final score for those games here that were reviewed, in order to see what comtemporaries thought of the game. I'm about to do so now.

Havok

07-24-2006, 08:11 PM

BG II better be in the top 5 at least ;)

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 09:09 PM

BG II better be in the top 5 at least ;)

Nope. When looking at a franchise, I select what is, for me, the definitive version, the one I played the most, the most compelling one. I don;t want the list clogged up with a bunch of, for example, Madden 99, Madden 2000, Madden 2001, etc. If you see an entry, that will be the only one in that franchise. That does not, however, prevent similar games from charting. BG prevents BG II and Throne of Bhaal from charting, but Fallout 2, Icewind Dale, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights and Planescape: Torment are all still eligible.

This list is very eclectic, because I love video games so much. A variety of different games on different systems will chart, although PC will be the most dominant system, I believe. Which only makes sense. PC game have been around for decades, but how long were Atari games made or Sega Master System games made, etc?

________________

Hoenstly folks, I expected more comment on the Madden pick. I know a lot of people here at FOFC don't particularly care for Madden. Anyways, I'll put up number 26 before I head to bed tonight.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 10:03 PM

Ah, here we are at the next entry in the countdown. This is the first game referred to by a previoous entry, in this case, entry number 30. Let's take a look at a game largely forgotten by time:

26. Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven
3DO/New World Computing
PC
1998
GameSpot review - 9.1
RPG

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/might_and_magic_6_limited_edition

http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/games/coverg/72/612472.jpg

Bad Timing. That's what has kept Might and Magic VI from being known as one of the best RPGs of all time. Mere bad timing.

M&M6 came out after a dead period in classic RPGs. For several years previously, you couldn't find a classic RPG in print with a compass and a flashlight. The genre was dead, game developers had moved to other games, and the classic, expansive fantasy RPG was declared dead.

Then New World Computing thumbed its nose at the world and released Might and Magic VI. Everything changed.

Suddenly, reviewers are lauding the game. Might and Magic VI is credited with revitalizing the genre. Classic RPGs are back and wow, are they ever big news. Rejuvenation has begun.

You knew from the Larry Elmore box art that this was a classic RPG. The world was the most expansive world ever in a video game. The matrix style of adventruing with loads of side quests and tons of things to do and places to go gave the game tremendous value.

The game was important because it brought a sense of reality to the game. Gone was haphazard dungeon design, now everything made sense. If you needed in invade the Temple of the Snake on an island later in the game, it had in it Snakes and Medusas. Snakes were one of the first monsters you fought in the game and were amazingly easy by the time you got to the Temple of the Snake, yet here they are, all over the place. About a third of the way through the game you are trouncing around a sewer. Sure, the rats that are all over the place are really easy kills, but they make sense there. You don't have to worry about there being mega-hard monsters down there "just because." Dungeon design made sense.

The game also included a signifcant upgrade in graphics. It was the best graphics people had seen in an RPG.

http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/games/coverg/30/634130.jpg

The inventory management system was genius. You had a limited amount of space, and different items took up different amounts of space. You had to physically arrange your items in your backpack to maximize space. It was pure genius.

Another great innovation was flying. You could cast a flying spell outdoors, then head up into the air, flying over monsters and land quickly. However, the game managers understood the powerful ability it was, and on a few overland maps, many of the monsters flew, which made flying less powerful.

http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/games/coverg/28/634128.jpg

Here we see our heroes flying over a town. However, some of the monsters are Winged Devils, that fly (this is one of the hardest overland maps in the game). As you can see, the first and third members of the party have been put to sleep while the middle member has been turned to stone. The last member better do something quickly!

The game was largely realtime, but you could pasue it at any time and go into a turn based mode (Baldur's Gate would use the same idea). Therefore, you could play either game, and many players played both, pausing when they got to monsters so they could plan strategies.

The game wasn't perfect and fell prey to the vicious 3DO curse. Every world they created ended by revealeing that it was really a sci-fi world and not a fantasy world at all. In most you end up exploring spaceships and what not. By the end of this gane you are using "Ancient Weapons" called Blaster Pistols and Blaster Rifles and have discovered that the Devils are a space race bent on destroying the planet.

The graphics, although great for an RPG, were not that hot compared to other games.

All of the praise and lauding for M&M6 ended when Baldur's Gate was released seven months later. Up until then, people were talking about a Might and Magic revolution in RPGs and how the classic RPG was back. Then Baldur's gate made them forget about Might and Magic.

In fact, the review of Baldur's Gate gives it higher scores that M&M6 in graphics and sound, as it should. BG kicked Might and Magic to the curb in terms of graphics, and remember, M&M was considered to be top notch for an RPG. However, M&M was evaluated higher in terms of gameplay, because Might and Magic was such a smooth game from start to finish.

The Mandate of Heaven scores higher on my list than BG for that very reason. It was, simply put, a better game. It took longer to play, the game was more open-ended, the world was bigger, the scope was better and even the skill system outclassed the AD&D one.

Bad timing.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 10:10 PM

I might, maybe, get to the next game tonight. However, as a bit of a teaser, I beleive it is a game that very few people, if any, would expect. However, after seeing it, I believe most people familiar with it will absolutely agree.

-Anxiety

cubboyroy1826

07-24-2006, 10:25 PM

You tease. I like the list so far but we will see what you have ranked higher up the list as the Baldurs Gate series is very high on my list.

Lonnie

07-24-2006, 11:22 PM

I loved M&M 6! In fact I still have a screenshot of my characters after I had beaten the game.

I'm really enjoying your dynasty as I find myself agreeing to most of your choices.

http://lonnie352.home.comcast.net/MM57.jpg

Abe Sargent

07-24-2006, 11:36 PM

I like M&M because it was the game where I created my Pimp N Hoes strategy. i take bad ass looking guy and then all females for the other characters. The guy is usually a burly fighter and what. Later, I would regularly roleplay as a female just to change things up. Let me tell you, some games just broke when you played a female character (like KOTOR and KOTOR II which regularly refer to you as male even if you select female. In fact, in some statements made by people you'd be referered to as both male and female in the same statement - made for messy problems)

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-25-2006, 03:06 AM

Okay folks, here we are at the next game. Again, I suspect that this game will evoke a "I never thought about but you know, you're right" response from you good folks. It's definitely outside the box.

25. TradeWars 2002
BBS Door Game
Gary Martin
1985
No GameSpot Review
Simulation - Trade

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/07/Twimage.jpg

This was a game designed for operation on Bulletin Board Systems across the country for any computer that could connect (could be PC could be a Mac, could even be an Aquarius). Loads of people would log on to local BBSs and play door games, download software, and talk on forums, just like this one...

The most popular thing to do was, of course, to play games. One game stood above the rest in terms of quality and capability. Although I remember many games from this genre fondly (American President, Arena, Solar Realms Elite, etc), the one that really stood out was TradeWars 2002.

The game focused around a galaxy that players explored and traded from one port to another. Players tried to move about from system to system until they found an ideal trading area and then traded until they made money.

There were a variety of shiptypes and players could buy new ships and outfit ships with shields, fighters, holds, and a variety of gagets like scanners, photon torpedoes, genesis torps, mines, beacons, and so forth.

You began the game with a solid ship, a merchant cruiser:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/28/MerchantCruiser.gif

Every alien and player had an alignment, and you could attack aliens and players to gain or lose alignment. You could also have your ship destroyed by running into the dangerous Ferrengi. A Ferrengi ship could really own your day.

http://www.tradewars.info/images/aproach.gif

Each galaxy had a main starport where you could go to do business, like collect bounties on evil players, check out ASCII videos at the cineplex, buy items, sell a ship you are towing, gamble, bank your money so it is safe, grafitti up a wall, and if you are evil, head to the underground to do things like change your name. Evil players can also try to rob from ports.

http://www.tradewars.info/images/cineplex.gif

Once you have some cash, you can find a nice away sector somewhere and launch a Genesis Torpedo. You can then land on your newly created planet and harvest free minerals from it to sell after you ship in colonists from Terra. To protect your goods, you can build a citadel on the planet. Over time and an investment in the citadel, you can level it up several levels, including among other things, a Quasar Cannon that blasts intruders, a battle computer to control defensive fighters, and a shield generator. Deploy mines to protect the area and leave a beacon to taunt people. You can stuff up to five planets in your sector, and you can even build a commercial port.

The galaxy also has Ferrengal, the Ferrengi homeworld, which has a lot of credits stored on it. Conquer Ferrengal and you'll get a planet with a citadel already leveled up a bit and a nice influx of cash.

Galaxies are customizable to the Nth degree, so each iteration of TW2002 is different that previous ones.

There are loads of other interesting bits as well. A few sectors are FedSpace, and you can attack or be attacked there. There are three Federal starships controlled by the computer that roam around and attack evil players on sight. There's tons more things jammed together as well.

Unlike other door games, this one is still active. In the late nineties, programmers edited the game to make it accessible via the net, and people still actively play the game, although usually with updated graphics. Imagine a game so addictive, so detailed that it transcended its original technology and is still being played today.

The game is very moddable, and tons of files have been added so you can add the Borg, the Crystalline Entity, random black holes, and more,

In short, this was a very inventive game that is still getting played today in a later version. It ruled the roost in BBS games and should rightfully go down as one of the best video games of all time.

This game was murder to find pics for, BTW. I hope the ones I found really work.

-Anxiety

Philliesfan980

07-25-2006, 01:07 PM

As a former SysOp, I shed a tear. I long for the simpler times of BBS's, FidoNet, and doorgames.

Abe Sargent

07-25-2006, 01:12 PM

I was a CO-SYSOP of a BBS my Dad and I ran together.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-25-2006, 02:52 PM

The next game on our countdown continues a three game sci-fi streak that TW2002 started. Say hello to a game that I've pushed here on the forums:

24. Star Chamber
Nayantara Studios
PC
2003
GameSpot Review - 8.8
Strategy - Card Game

http://starchamber.station.sony.com/

http://www.starchamber.net/images/newsletter/2005_11_30/newsletter_starchamberbox.jpg

A couple of years ago I stumbled across this independant game created by a few guys at Nayantara Studios. The game is simple in concept. You play against a real life opponent online, in a space strategy game that is like a simpler version of Master of Orion. You conquer planets, build resources and so forth. You can win either through conquering your opponent's homeworld, winning three power plays at the Star Chamber or getting thirty more culture than your opponent.

The Star Chamber is a neutral planet where political machinations take place every six turns. Typically, each player gets a vote for every citizen of theirs at the Star Chamber when the vote takes place. You can vote for a Power Play, or to get ships or culture for your empire. Three Power Plays equals a victory for a player.

Here is a Star Chamber Vote:

http://70.86.3.237/screenshots/00003330.jpg

Artifact planets produce culture every turn, and control of these planets can also be a key to victory.

Therefore, you can try to grab and hold aritifact planets, try to overwhelm your opponent at the Star Chamber or try to take their homeworld. All three paths to victory create a game that really has three fronts. Mere board play alone will win or lose you many games.

http://70.86.3.237/screenshots/00003328.jpg

However, there is another side to Star Chamber. In addition to being this strategy chess game with three fronts and numerous options, it also is an online collectible card game. There are collectible cards that come in booster packs you purchase and you build a deck.

There are five techs in the game (similar to the five colors in Magic) that can be made, and over time, you'll make more and more techs. There are ten races in the game, and each race is a combination of two techs. My favorite race, the Silica, are a combination of the Life and Cyber techs. Another race, the Ixa, are a combiantion of Order and Entropy techs. And so on it goes through the ten races.

The beauty of this game is in the interweaving of a CCG overtop of a board game that is already detailed. The cards can make specialized ships, give you leaders, and affect the game in a variety of ways. Every so often, a new expansion set is released and the game evolves.

I can't tell you how amazing this synergy of games becomes. The total game created by the intertwining genres in more than the sum of its parts, and it is truly an amazing game.

You can also play a larger game with more players, or just watch the game getting played.

It was recently bought out by Matrix Games, which repackaged the game. Although the Matrix Edition of the game did add some vital things to the game, including a small single player campaign, they also did some things that I disagree with.

Like any CCG, you have to buy packs of the cards. The older, original Nayantara version of the game understood that the cards were electronic and priced them accordingly. You could buy a booster box, 36 packs of 15 cards each, for 30 dollars or so. For a 30 dollar investment, you could play this game tons and still end up paying less than you would for many video games.

However, Matrix has upped the pricing structure, and as a result, the game is now more expensive to play. It's still a great game, it just has ceased to be a cheap game as well.

The second decision made after Matrix took over was to reduce prize support for tournaments. There are tournaments held weekly and the prizes for them used to be amazing, but quickly became less sterling. The number of prize diminished, and so has tournament play.

One disadvantage the game has always had is that there are never more than 20 people playing at a time, and that's during peak hours. I decided to log on as I write this, just to see how many players are on. There were nine, including Merakon, the guy who was behind creating the game.

That's one of the great things about this game. Imagine playing a casual game against the creator. I played him twice in my first week as a player! You are always rubbing noses with the community manager, the game developers, and more. It's one of the most mature internet communities out there, and very warm and friendly. Just like this place used to be in its earlier days :)

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-25-2006, 02:53 PM

Hmm. Those pics are too big. Let me see if I can find any a bit smaller.

-Anxiety

EDIT: Okay, I found some smaller screenies

Abe Sargent

07-25-2006, 10:58 PM

Rounding out our little mini trio of scifi games all in a row is the only simulator to make the countdown. It was truly one of the great games of its day, and its impact on games since has been astounding. I'm sure you need no introduction to number 23 on my list:

23. Wing Commander
Origin
PC
1990
GameSpot Review - 9.2 (Note this is also before GameSpot gave out reviews and is the average user review)
Simulation - Flight

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d1/WingCommanderBox-front.jpg/200px-WingCommanderBox-front.jpg

Wing Commander is one of the great, all time PC games in any genre, period. I don't normally go for simulators, but Wing Commander was amazing at it. The game was truly revolutionary in many ways.

First of all, Wing Commander had a matrix path through the game. At the end of each series of missions that made up an element in the war against the Kilrathi, if you won, you would advance to one new campaign and if you lost, you would go to another. If you won all of your campaigns, you could make it through the game with relative ease and speed. If you lost, then you had to go through more campaigns that get harder and harder until you finally get to either the Humans Won campaign or the Humans Lost campaign. This sort of reactionary game not only increased its playabilty as you moved through new campaigns but also added an organic factor to the simulator.

The flight and combat simulator were top notch for the time. The graphics were great, the play style was great, and the concepts were great too.

As you took damage, systems on board the ship would start to get damaged, and the game realistically simulated that. The game also was constructed in such a way that the best combat strategy was to wait, aim and fire instead of spraying the sky with bullets and hoping for luck.

The AI for the Kilrathi and your wingmate were both really good, with various wingmates having different personalties with different styles of combat. Who can forget Maniac flying in front of your guns to attack a Kilrath? That was really annoying.

http://www.wcnews.com/background/images/wc1screenshot06.gif

You had different ships, different missiles, different guns, and different wingmates throughout the game. The enemy also had different ships, different missiles, different guns, etc. They also had a few unique and nasty pilots in the game that you had a chance to shoot down.

Even the graphics looked good. I mean, take a look at this screenshot of the station lounge. Doesn't this look great for the time?

http://www.wcnews.com/background/images/wc1screenshot03.gif

Not only would Wing Commander spawn a whole mess of sequels, but it also featured one of the first expansion packs for a video game (some believe it is, actually, the first expansion pack. Much like figuring out who invented the remix when numerous artists came up with the idea simultaneously, figuring out the first game to have an expansion pack is difficult at best. However, Wing Commander is in the conversation.)

I can still remember fighting against Kilrathi. I can remember how hard an escort mission was with these dumb transport vessels that were slow and easy to hit. I can remember a mission I simpy couldn't succeed despite ten or twelve tries where I had to go out and save one of our capital ships from being blown up by Kilrathi that were already attacking it. I remember Paladin as a crusty old rules lawyering bastard.

I also remember that in some missions there would be Kilrathi off the trail you are supposed to follow and if you journey outwards, you could get some major kills. You could be promoted or awarded medals based on your perforamnce on missions. It was great.

Wing Commander would get away from some of this open endedness in later sequals, instead using voice acting and cut scenes to tell the story instead of letting you choose the story (in fact, WCII was one at the forefront of using voice acting and WCIII was at the forefront of full motion video).

Still, the game was near perfect in every way, and the only thing keeping me from giving it a higher evaluation is the fact that the game was a bit too joystick jockey for my own perference. It came down a bit too much to reflexes and such. Nevertheless, the game is good enough to warrant a spot here with the greatest games of all time, to my mind.

-Anxiety

AgustusM

07-26-2006, 12:27 AM

Just wanted to chime in on how much I am enjoying this. I haven't even played half of these games, but your level of detail is fantastic and I too greatly remember the BBS days.

Abe Sargent

07-26-2006, 12:30 AM

Well, I don't expect that Wing Commander would surprise anybody, but this next entry probably will. Next up is the highest charting game purely for flavor. This is, quite frankly, one of the most flavorful games I've ever played. Give it up for:

22. Tropico
PopTop Software
PC
2002
GameSpot Review - 8.6
Simulation - City Builder

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/tropico_reloaded

http://www.poptop.com/InfoPanel/TropicoPoster_small.jpg

Flavor. To me, a game is flavorful if it oozes flavor out of everything it does. Tropico is one of the most flavorful games ever designed, period, and that experience allows it to slide into my countdown.

Tropico will never win any awards for being just a simulation game, but it is a pretty good one. Tropico is the game that has been installed on my PC the longest. You can play a game in just a few hours, making for one evening's adventure.

Of course, there are a lot of options in Tropico. You can build a tourist trap, complete with hotels, beaches and such. You could pander to wealthy tourists with rich hotels, casinos, and spas. Or, you could build your economy around industry and factories.

Over time, different factions of people on the island will like or dislike you according to what you have done, and the difficulty of the game lies with appeasing enough of your citizens that you keep in power. Communists, democrats, militarists, religious, environmentals and more all needed to be balanced.

http://images.starpulse.com/AMGPhotos/gscreens/screen250/drs200/s233/s23341cg32q.jpg

In order to keep people happy, you will need to balance shelter, jobs, payment, health clinics, electricity, army, churches, newspapers, radio, various offices, banks, police, beauty, and many differnt courses of entertainment all while keeping your people happy. Just balancing the island, before adding in tourists, can be difficult.

By the way, all islanders have an outfit that they wear that symbolizes their job. I love the Cabaret girls oufit. Every island of mine has to feature a Cabaret.

You can have a variety of people working the island in different ways in order to gain money and resources. Farmers can plant bananas, pineapples, papayas, corn, tobacco or sugar. Each product has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Ranchers can raise goats or cattle. Miners can mine bauxite, iron or gold. Loggers can timber trees. Fishers can harvest the oceans. And on top of all of this, you can build various industries in order to work your raw material and then sell for a much higher profit.

Here a plane from an airport is flying over some cheap housing, the teamster's union and farms:

http://pcmedia.ign.com/media/previews/image/paradiseisland_dec18_02.jpg

Instead of the game being about ruling the world or defeating the Ancient and Evil Enemy of the Empire, its just about taking control in a small caribbean island and keeping it for as long as possible.

The game has a ton of options available called Edicts. These are various Edicts that you can issue to curry favor, change policies, and so forth. You can have Social Security. You can try to host the Pan-Carribbean Games if you have a soccer stadium. If you have a Cathedral, you can host a visit from the Pope. You can bring in a famous lounge singer to headline at one of your clubs. You can declare a festival. You can encourage safe sex. You can send out trade envoys to the USA or the USSR and try to curry favor and maybe support. You can sponser a National Geographic special on the wonders of Tropico (brings in more Eco Tourists,, for example). You can also jail a dissenter, kill them, torture them, and so forth. It's a great way of changing the game.

The game oozes flavor. The people speak either in Spanish or English with a Spanish accent except for tourists, who speak the language or accent of their home country. Russians, for example, speak with a Russian accent. My favorite is a cheap American tourist male who will sometimes say "GRA-SEE-YUS" in a southern accent. It's quite funny.

There are four different types of tourists you can attract. Rich tourists, cheap (called slob) tourists, eco tourists and spring break tourists. Different tourists will have different amounts of money and want to see different things. Eco tourists would love an archeological dig while rich tourists and wealthy spring break tourists will go to a spa and slob tourists hit pools really hard (despite there being beaches, they seem to really like pools).

Here is a rich hotel, which obviously caters to the wealthier tourists:

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/tropicoPI_021402_015.jpg

This creates an interesting tourist situation. Should you try and accomodate one type of tourist and try to bnring in that one type? Should you instead try to make them all happy?

There's flavor in other ways. The narrator speaks to you with a Spanish accent. The music is amazing with very authentic sounding carribbean music. The colors, the faded stucco on the chapel, the pictures of people, the trees, the rocks - it all looks so authentic.

The game is enchanced by its flavor. In the beginning, you have to choose various background options and skills and disadvnatages. Even those are flavorful. I personally like to play as a corporate shill who has been set up by a corporation to run the island for as long as I can keep control (you get a free hotel if you do this). Other options include revolutionary, hereditary, and more. You can be Che Guevara and try to set up a new state. Or you can be a famous lounge singer trying to restablish your credibility. An intellectual, a man of the people, a man of the Soveits - it's all your choice at the beginning of the game.

There is not a sour note in the entire game, and what it set out to do, it did fantasticly. Other games are more influential, more innovative, and as you can see, I generally respect that. However, this game made it here simply by exploring a small corner of the gaming world and polishing it until there wasn't a blemish left.

-Anxiety

Havok

07-26-2006, 01:10 AM

Nope. When looking at a franchise, I select what is, for me, the definitive version, the one I played the most, the most compelling one. I don;t want the list clogged up with a bunch of, for example, Madden 99, Madden 2000, Madden 2001, etc. If you see an entry, that will be the only one in that franchise. That does not, however, prevent similar games from charting. BG prevents BG II and Throne of Bhaal from charting, but Fallout 2, Icewind Dale, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights and Planescape: Torment are all still eligible.

This list is very eclectic, because I love video games so much. A variety of different games on different systems will chart, although PC will be the most dominant system, I believe. Which only makes sense. PC game have been around for decades, but how long were Atari games made or Sega Master System games made, etc?

________________

Hoenstly folks, I expected more comment on the Madden pick. I know a lot of people here at FOFC don't particularly care for Madden. Anyways, I'll put up number 26 before I head to bed tonight.

-Anxiety

that breaks my heart :(

BG 1 might have been the orginal, but BG II is the best RPG every made IMO and my favorite game ever.

Izulde

07-26-2006, 03:53 AM

Abe Sargent

07-26-2006, 09:03 AM

Did you try Tropico's expansion pack?

Also I heard that in vanilla Tropico, if you didn't go US in the relations war, it was damned difficult to be successful.

Or maybe that's Hidden Agenda I'm thinking of.

Yes, I did run the expansion pack.

Nah, you don't need to curry favor with either one if you don't want too. Neither the US nor the USSR gives you major things, some some money and occasioanlly immigrants or cheaper ways to build something - that sort of thing.

-Anxiety

Honolulu_Blue

07-26-2006, 02:20 PM

At least Sea Battle got some love. We still break out the intellivision to play. Nothing better than getting a lucky shot off with a transport and destroying a sub. :D Of course, you had to find tricks to try to disguise the fact you were laying mines. Pretty obvious when you just start mashing buttons when you have a ship in the middle of nowhere...

I had an Intellivsion growing up as a kid. A few of them, I think as me and my brother wore them out. In all honesty, I believe that a 8-10 year old H_B would destroy anybody in a game of Sea Battle.

I was just. that. good.

Ajaxab

07-26-2006, 03:11 PM

Just wanted to chime in on how much I am enjoying this. I haven't even played half of these games, but your level of detail is fantastic and I too greatly remember the BBS days.

Agreed. This is really interesting Anxiety. I'm enjoying the writeups and screenshots as well.

Abe Sargent

07-26-2006, 03:15 PM

Thanks all!

Philliesfan980

07-26-2006, 03:52 PM

Reading as well, and very much enjoying it. Now I gotta see if I can get my hands on some of these classics.

Question for you though: Do you have this list already made up? Or are you putting this together as you go?

Abe Sargent

07-26-2006, 03:55 PM

I made up the list ahead of time.

Abe Sargent

07-26-2006, 06:51 PM

Without further ado, let's head to the first game on our countdown from the same creators as a previous game:

21. Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars
3DO/New World Computing
PC
1996
GameSpot Review - 8.2
Strategy

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/heroes_of_might_and_magic_2_gold_edition

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/boxshots/0/197550_pc.jpg

The GameSpot evaluation is a travesty, in my opinion. They gave HOMM3 a 9.1 and even the woefully problematic MOMM4 an 8.6, but HOMM2, which is absolutely the definitive version of the game just got a 8.2.

When you read the review of the third game, it's almost like they admit their mistake in evaluating the second game so badly. Here's a quote:

Best known for its long running Might and Magic role-playing series, New World has since created the offshoot Heroes of Might and Magic turn-based strategy series, which has nearly eclipsed its role-playing progenitor with the sheer amount of critical and popular acclaim it's earned. It's no coincidence - the Heroes formula is one of the most brilliant strategy game designs ever conceived, with its careful blend of micro- and macromanagement within a distinctive fantasy setting.

This shows that HOMM2 was an amazing game and recognized as such, despite the poor GameSpot rating. You don't say, "(O)ne of the most brillant strategy game designs ever conceived" unless you mean it or you're full of it. I think the former is true in this case.

What is HOMM2 all about then? Heroes of Might and Magic is a strategy game with several levels. You begin by selecting a "caste" but its not really like that. You can be a Warlock with a town that makes Hydras, Gargoyles, Centaurs and more. Or, you can be a Necromancer with a town that makes Zombies, Skeletons, and more undead. There are several choices.

Then you can select a Might or a Magic hero, unless you chose Barbarians, because they don't get Magic heroes. The Might heroes specialize in helping their armies win through arms while Magic heroes specialize in learning and casting spells.

As you adventure, your hero learns and gains experience. They will have an opportunity to learn new skills and advance in those they already know. Magic Power, Magic Knowledge, Tracking and Pathfinding, Morale, and more are all skills your hero can learn.

Your heroes also will likely accumulate various artifacts with a variety of effects. These gadgets and trinkets can sometimes wrest victory from the jaws of defeat. While adventuring, you can also come across a variety of fountains, huts, towers, ruins, and more, and all of them are different, with effects, items, information, and such.

So, on one level, you have one or more heroes traipsing through the wilderness and gaining expereince, skills, and items in an RPG sort of way. That's one level.

Here is a pic of the overland map with the hero adventuring through it:

http://cdn.channel.aol.com/videogames/gallery/1996/11/26/313342.jpg

One the next level you have resource management. There are a lot of resources in the game (gold, wood, iron, crystal, mercury, crystal and sulfur). There are mines and raw materials in the world and you need to harvest them so you can get certain monsters in your army and certain buildings in your town. On a second level, the game is about resource managment.

On a third level, the game is about town management. You have a town with a variety of buildings you can build, and you will slowly figure out what to build. Some buildings allow you to recruit monsters. If you are a Wizard town, and you build a Golem Foundry, then you can begin recruiting golems. Later, you can upgrade the Golem Foundry and recruit more powerful golems. Likewise, you can build a Mage's tower and being recruiting Magi. Later, you can upgrade the tower and begin recruiting Archmagi.

Some buildings may help with resource gathering. The Sorceress town has a crystal fountain that makes a bit of crystal each game week. You can build a a statue that brings in a bit more gold each week.

Yet other buildings help your hero. All towns can build a Mage's Guild levels one through five. Each level allows your heroes to get a spellbook if they need one and learn spells up to the level of their magic proficiency. High level spells can alter the course of battle with one go.

Here is a fully built up Barbarian town:

http://cdn.channel.aol.com/videogames/gallery/1996/11/26/313344.jpg

Therefore, the game is also a city management game.

Lastly, there is the army management and battle level. You are recruting monsters in an army that your hero leads, but does not fight in. Your hero will add to the battle prowess of your army, and some skills come into play during battle. Once per round, your hero can cast a spell or take another action, like firing a bow into the fray.

Your units are in stacks and are move as a unit, fastest unit first, in a turn based setting similar to chess. Units can move, and attack. Some units are archer units and can fire a weapon. Some can fly anywhere on the map and attack. Tons of units have special abilities. For example, the Crusader attacks twice and the Unicorn, in addition to attacking, has a chance to Blind the defending unit afterwards.

After attacking a unit, it then has a chance to counterattack. Therefore, you have to be careful who you attack. After a unit has counter attacked once, it will not be able to counter again until it next takes a turn. This gives you an opportunity to get in a few free hits.

Here combat is being waged in the desert. This is at the beginning of combat, and the player on the right has three units of Titans and two units of Archmagi - all ranged combatants. You can see the chess-like grid that covers the area. Monsters have a range they can move.

http://cdn.channel.aol.com/videogames/gallery/1996/11/26/313343.jpg

There are two factors helping or hurting your army - morale and luck. You could get positive or negative luck through spells cast, items and hero abilities. When luck struck, you would either deal double or half damage (based on whether you were lucky or unlucky.

Like luck, you could either have positive or negative morale. Some monsters never benefited from or suffered from morale. A negative morale would cause a unit to lose its turn and a positive morale gave it a seocnd turn after it completed its first. There were more factors that affected morale than luck. If your army was all from one faction or caste type, it got a morale bonus. The more troops from different factions were added to the army, the more morale would drop. Living creatures fighting alongside undead would suffer a massive morale drop.

As you can hopefully see, the game was a complex combination of a variety of elements that came together to give it a tapestry that really felt like it fully involved you. There are tons of things I haven't mentioned, little details. For example, you could sail at sea with a boat. You could capture other cities through sieges that were much different than normal combat. There were dungeon places onteh map where you had to defeat a certain number of monsters in order to raid the spot. There was a necromancy skill that allowed the hero to raise a certain percentage, based on skill level, of killed monsters as skeletons. This is just the prophetic tip of the iceberg.

Multiplayer is great with the game, and I loved playing it hotseat.

I hope you can see the detail that this game provided. In fact, the most recent iteration, HOMM5 was released a few months ago. They've added a lot since HOMM2, like underground travel, new cities, new monsters, and a 3D overland view. Still, the HOMM2 game was the absolute essential version of the game. It was the one that got the formula down.

-Anxiety

EDIT: I forgot one thing. The music. The music is amazing, and sometimes I'll just play the disc as a music disc. The music writer wrote these classical piece for the game, and many of them are OPERA. If you think I'm kidding, I'm not. The operatic parts of the soundtrack makes the HOMM2 soundtrack one of the most distinctive in all video games.

sterlingice

07-26-2006, 07:10 PM

Fun thread- just wanted to get in a post so I see when it's bumped :)

SI

Abe Sargent

07-26-2006, 07:11 PM

One little interesting tidbit about the list. The events in the HOMM2 campaigns happen about twenty years before M&M6. You are playing in the same world, on the same continent, with a handful of the same characters involved in both.

Izulde

07-26-2006, 07:19 PM

HoMM2 was definitely the best in the series. The others seemed puzzle-heavy from what I remember, though again, I could be wrong.

Necromancy is my favourite skill, no question about it. Nothing like turning your own enemies' troops against them.

A more interesting debate would be whether HoMM series or AoW series is better.

Abe Sargent

07-26-2006, 10:25 PM

I know that some may choose other entries in this series, like VII or IV, but for my money, no game in the series was more impactful, no console game as complex as:

20. Final Fantasy
SquareSoft
Nintendo
1990
GameSpot Review - 8.8 (Again, this is the player aggregate reviews because there was never an official review of FF)
RPG

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2001/nes/finalfantasy/finalfantasy_boxshot.jpg

As I mentioned above, I think the original adventure in the series is still the top notch one. It allows you to play your own characters, instead of forcing them on you. And it doesn't have that damn talking red dog from VII that joins your party.

Final Fantasy is the best game ever produced for the NES, bar none. No game was as pretty, no game as deep, and no game as complex as Final Fantasy. Simply put, it was the top dog of the system.

Final Fantasy was one of the great classic RPGs of the early days of video games. An expansive world, for its time, met a solid plot and a large variety of dungeons, landscapes and more.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/Final_Fantasy_Origins_Outside_Corneria.png

I remember going up against the first dungeon, that castle with Garland. I had spent some time levelling up, exploring, talking to people, and finally marching to the dungeon and taking out Garland. Then the bridge was built to the rest of the continent and I walked onto that bridge and the scene cut away and I found out that the few few hours were designed as a preview. That was amazing, and that moment of wonder stuck with me.

I loved that you could play whatever game you wanted at whatever pace you wanted. You could go anywhere so long as that area had been "opened up" in the game. Wander around, fight monsters, level up - it was great! And then you delved into dungeons with the intent of exploring every nook and cranny. There were a ton of unique items in these dungeons, and you wanted every one.

I still remember the difficulty of the Marsh Cave. I had to have gone into there 15-20 times before I finally emerged with the itme that Astos, the dark elf in disguise needed.

When you gained a ship, didn't you just sail everywhere, trying to see where you could land?

When you gained the airship, didn't you do likewise, learning every island in the map?

This was a masterpiece of gaming design. The beauty was that it was very replayable because you could take a party each time. I beat the game with a fighting intensive party and then with an all spell casting party, and even a one player game, recently. (In the one player game, you let everyone get killed except for one player and then you never res them. You play that one player for the entire game. It's a very interesting challenge.)

The monsters had a diverse range of characteristics.

http://www.thefinalfantasy.com/picturepost/images/screenshots/final_fantasy_i/1.gif

You had to balance money for items against money for spells, which seemed really pricey in the mid game.

The Liche:

http://www.ffgurus.net/ff1/enemies/57.gif

Final Fantasy was so successful that it kept a dying computer game copany afloat and launched arguably the single most important franchise in video game history. It certainly is the third biggest selling franchise. That's a pretty impressive resume for an NES game that was released in America near the end of the system's life.

It remains a beautiful, enchanting game to this day (I have the GBA version still.) Final Fantasy was truly landmark for console systems in its depth. It acheived a complexity and was really the only challenge to contemporary PC games because of it (as opposed to today, when there are tons of console games as deep). Final Fantasy was truly a remarkable game for that reason alone.

-Anxiety

Izulde

07-26-2006, 10:54 PM

The original Final Fantasy was also the single most difficult game in the series.

You had to plan out your attacks perfectly, or you'd end up wasting a turn killing an enemy that wasn't there.

And oh man, that last end battle was a pain that involved a lot of luck. The day I beat that game was one of the most exciting in my childhood.

The end battles in the other FF games have been, by and large, a considerable disappointment in terms of difficulty.

sterlingice

07-26-2006, 11:11 PM

First time I've had to, but I have to strongly disagree on a couple of accounts with this one:

1) I just don't rate the production values that highly. The game balance was positively awful (hours of creeps and ogres, anyone?). The gameplay was good, but there were other RPGs that were also quite good (Dragon Warrior series, in particular). The translation was nothing to write home about either, but we're splitting hairs at that point- nothing had good translations back in the day. If I were talking production values, especially attention to detail, SMB3 takes the NES cake and it's not even close.

2) If you're going to pick a Final Fantasy, this would be about 4th on my list. IV (II) and VI (III) would top it for production values, particularly III as a total package. Tho, if Chrono Trigger is higher on the list, I suppose I could see a reason for wanting an earlier game. I'd even rate VII higher for purely influential reasons, much as I can't stand playing the game. In the grand scheme of things, FF didn't break a lot of ground and very few things followed it- it was a good singular showing but the mould was never really used for much after it.

SI

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 12:01 AM

Dragon Warrior? Dragon Warrior was one of the most monotonous RPGs I've ever played. (Looking at comtemporaries)

Final Fantasy was good. Ogres and Creeps were only in one section of the fiorest, and that was a good place to level up, so you went there, but you didn't have to. Nothing stopped you from going somewhere else - they were just the most powerful guys around.

Most players now know (I discovered it without reading a tip list, btw) that there is a peninsula way to the east and north of Drakovia or whatever the name of that city is where at the tip you can fight monsters WAY ahead of where you are supposed to be and get levels and gold like mad. So on replay, there isn't even a need to level in the Ogre/Creep forest around Elfheim or whatever that city is named.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 12:02 AM

Oh, and remember II and III were SNES games, and its not really fair to compare the production values of an NES game against an SNES game. Plus, I hate an RPG that forces what character you have, what skills they have, when to use them, and so forth. I find it very annoying. There was none of that in the first volume and that was a serious problem to my mind, in later FF games. I hate being dragged around by the nose, I just want a world with a plot line and a "good luck."

-Anxiety

Havok

07-27-2006, 01:19 AM

I hate being dragged around by the nose, I just want a world with a plot line and a "good luck."

-Anxiety

then i bet an Elder Scrolls game is coming up on this list somewhere :)

thealmighty

07-27-2006, 01:44 AM

then i bet an Elder Scrolls game is coming up on this list somewhere :)

Ah, but which one will it be? That's the fun with this list. That plus waiting to see if my old favorites make the list, of course.

Keep it up, Anxiety. Lovin' this.

Havok

07-27-2006, 07:35 AM

well i've yet to play Oblivion(i will soon im sure), but from what i hear its quite simply one of the best games ever made. So thats my pick :) :)

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 10:59 AM

It's time for the next game on our countdown and the second game by the company with the most games to chart:

19. Colonization
MicroProse
PC
1995
GameSpot Review - 9.0 (Once again, average player rating, not staff rating)
4x - City Management

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/2003/all/boxshots2/562685_45327.jpg

I suspect that time and memory have sort of blended together Colonization with Civilization and ended up neuturing Colonization. However, the game is an amazing game in its own right, and really is the not so much the child of Civ as the cousin.

Colonization does not have tech research which is one of the foundations of the Civ gaming system. There aren't wonders of the world, nor are there tons of military units over time. Instead, there are just a small number of units (five ships, and three ground military units).

To call Colonization a Civ-clone is to ignore these major differences. Sure, both are turn-based strategy games with an emphasis on city/colony management, and there is an obvious similarity, but this game has its own road to walk.

Colonization deals with a smaller time period than Civ. Among the concerns here are friendly Indian relations, unless you play the Spanish, friendly European relations, and friendly home country relations, until you are ready to revolt.

Unlike other Civ-clones, the best strategy for winning Colonization is not to spread out and gobble up land as fast as possible, but instead to have a small amount of land with a smaller amount of built up colonies. Seven or eight colonies close together and built up is way better than 15 or 20 colonies spread out everywhere.

The reason for this is simple. In order to win the game, you'll have to declare independance and then your home country is going to send massive and powerful armed forces. They will blast your republic to pieces if you are spread out and thin, but if you are tightly bound together, even if they do crack your nut (and that will be much more difficult to do), your concentrated forces can oust them.

The game does have an impressive city management system:

http://www.ibiblio.org/GameBytes/issue21/greviews/colon3.gif

Indeed, despite the fact that city management is at the core of Civilization, no Civ sequel has ever been as complex and diverse as Colonization in this area. There are all sorts of specialties your colonists can have. A farmer is really great at raising food, a lumberjack amazing at harvesting lumber, a silver miner good at extracting silver, a cotton planter good at growing cotton, etc.

Many colonists work the production side of things. A tobbaconist is great at making cigars. A tobacco planter is great at growing tobacco. Get them together, and you'll be making tons of Cigars. The problem is that the game has a realistic economc model. The more Cigars you and other European colonies sell to the homeland, the cheaper they become, and vice versa.

Some colonists have other specialities as well. Firebrand Preachers and Elder Statesmen are great in bigger colonies to increase unrest in Europe and liberty in your colonies. Veteran soldiers and scouts are also specialities.

http://www.ibiblio.org/GameBytes/issue21/greviews/colon4.gif

In between balancing relations with Indians and other Europeans, and building an economy, you'll have to deal with your home country raising taxes constantly. The higher taxes go, the less money you'll get when you carry goods back home. Refuse a tax, and instead, a good is embargoed and you can't buy or sell it.

You begin the game with a lot of colonists and indentured servents and criminals. You can send these out to Indian tribes, and if they are friendly, the tribe will teach their speciality - which is the only way to get Cotton and Tobacco planter specialists. Scouts can spend time with a tribe and get news of a small gift of gold. They can also explore sites and find a variety of things.

Three events from an explored site are major, game shifting events. You can find a Fountain of Youth, which results in you getting EIGHT free colonists, many with specialties. You can find a Lost City of Gold which gives you serious points and a ton of gold. Or, you can find an Ancient Burial Mound that you have to explore and will sometimes give you a ton of gold as well. If you are carting this gold back, Indians will often attack the gold wagon. Then you'll need a special ship (a galleon) to send it back to Europe or else lease a Royal Vessel for 50% of the cut.

You can work to establish founding fathers for your Constitution Congress. Each founding father has some ability you gain, and some are very useful, like Pocahontas, which halves your problems with Indians. You can get non-USA founding fathers too, like Simon Bolivar.

You can play as the Spanish, Dutch, English and French, and all have advantages. I prefer the Dutch. You start with a better ship and the Dutch economy doesn't drop as fast as other economies do. The French aren;t bad either, with the Pocahontas effect (and get Poca too, for a quartered problem).

See, the Indians have problems with you developing the land too much. As you build walls, equip soliders, fortify cannon, and so forth, the Indians get testier and testier, until they eventually start attacking. The French halve their concern.

You can also send missionaries to the Indians, and you'll occasionally get Indian Converts to join your colonies.

This game is signifcantly unlike Civ in many ways (there's just one way to win, no techs, no wonders, no large number of units, no sweeping era, no victory by expansion, a real economy, many products, more complex city management, founding fathers, etc). As a result, I have no qualms about making it my ninteenth game on my All Time list.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 04:25 PM

No Colonization comments, eh? Well, now we are strating to move through franchses famous and important. Final Fantasy was two spots ago. Now its time for another major franchise, one that has had numerous entries. Unlike the Final Fantasy franchise, when I felt the first was ultimately the best, with this franchise, I feel that the most recent is the best:

18. SimCity 4
Maxis
PC
2003
GameSpot Review - 8.1 (8.3 after addition of expansion)
Simulation - City Management

SimCity™ 4 Deluxe Edition on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/)

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2002/news/00boxshots/561176.jpg

The city building genre owes its lifeblood to the SimCity franchise. Someone once said that Civilization and SimCity are the two great strategy games of all time, two giant pillars that stand astride the PC world, tall above everything else.

I almost put the SNES version of SimCity here, because I think that version reached more players that wouldn't normally play SimCity on the PC than anyone else. However, I ultimately decided that, for me, this is the greatest iteration because I have played it more than all other versions combined.

As I am sure most of you already know, SimCity is a game without end. You just build a city using various tools. You zone areas of the city, and people start opening businesses and moving in.

You build the infrastructure like water pumps, pipes, purfying stations, windmills, nuclear plants, coal plants, hydro plants, oil plants, trash to power plants, landfills, power lines, roads, rail, subways, bus stations, ferries, naval ports, airports, interstate networks, hospitals and clinics, libraries, schools, museums, operas, police stations, fire stations, jails, recycling centers, and probably another 50 things I can't remember.

Here is a Water Puriciation Plant beside some landfill:

http://www.firingsquad.com/games/simcity_4_review/images/01.jpg

The point is simple. The sheer scale of things to build and do in Sim City is staggering, yet it all works together. Your advisors wil tell you when the city needs something - like a Water Purification Plant. You can also look at a map of the city and see it by water pollution - telling you if you need a plant or not.

Therefore, you can tell when you need to build something, merely by these maps or your own advisors.

The transporation networks are complex on their own. Roads, streets, one way streets, avenues, elevated highways, highways, and intersections plus bridges make for an interesting road network.

Here are some bridges across a river. You can also see power lines and industry on the left bank.

http://www.firingsquad.com/games/simcity_4_review/images/13.jpg

The beauty SimCity 4 is that there were several additions to the franchise. You could load up your characters from The Sims and place them in your city. Then, you could follow them around and hear what they thought about your city. If you didn't have or didn't want to have The Sims added, you could just make some Sims. This was valuable to do because it gave you information from the ground, often providing an early warning indicator to see if there are problems in a neighborhood. For example, the Sim would complain about travel time to and from work before people starting moving out, so you could address the problem early.

Another thing that was added were quests. You could do quests like fly a helicopter to little Suzy's house and pick her up and return to the hospital in a hort period of time. Succeed with these, and your mayor rating would rise, you'd get a little cash, and you could unlock various bonuses. This was really useful because some bonus buildings could be unlocked way earlier than normal, and they were worth it too.

This was especially good for the Casino. The Casino was one of seveal "bonuses" that provided your city directly with cash but were negative for your Sims. Others included a Nuclear Waste Dump and a Missile Silo. You only unlocked these when you went into debt. However, if you never went into debt, then you never unlocked these "bonuses." However, the Casino was actually a debt building with a plus and a minus, besides the cash you got from it. Commerical buildings were upped by a nearby Casino, and it increased crime. You just build a Police Station beside it (which the profit more than covers and you are set. You can unlock a Casino with a quest, instead of going deep into debt.

You could also build famous landmarks for serious cash. You could build the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Bank of China, the Space Needle, the Sphinx, the Hollywood Sign, The Hadj Sophia, and much much more. This added a great amount of top level significance to the city.

The game also added region economics. Your city was part of a region, and you could buld two cities side by side. One city could buy power from the other instead of building its own plant. Water, trash, and more could also be bought and sold.

The interaction of citizens with the economy, housing, commercial ares, transportation, each other and industry was all complex. People would even cross through the region to other cities to work or shop. One farm city would feed several other cities nearby. One garbage city could take the trash from several adjacent cities, build several Trash to Power Stations, and then sell the power back to those cities and make a killing (You get paid to take trash and you get paid to provide power). That killing would need to be spent on some parks and whatnot, because Trash to Power is a very nasty pollution high power supply, but you get the idea. Local cities could do without trash removal or power of their own, just buying it from a local city. And your sims would be happy to cross over and work in their dirty industries and then come home to a nice clean city. A regional economy was a great idea.

The game was great at telling you when something was amiss. Just in case you didn't get the message from your advisors or maps, here is a section of the city that has been abandoned:

http://www.firingsquad.com/games/simcity_4_review/images/12.jpg

Can you tell by looking at this map which buidling have been abandoned?

If the demand for cheap housing outstripped your ability to provide it, lower level citizens would take over a more expensive place. You'd sometimes see mansions get overwhelmed by lower level cits, and more of them can fit into a mansio that high level cits could, so it would sometimes put a lot of pressure on your transportation network.

The whole game was an amazing simulation of city life, living, and politics. You could issue edicts like youth basketball programs or free clincs. These cost money, except for legalized gambling which brought in money and was necessary to build a Casino.

Other bonuses included a Convention Center, Disease Research Clinic, University, Major League Baseball Stadium, TV Station, County Fair, City Zoo and tons more. This gave your city a real nice, organic look to it.

SimCity is one of the classic franchises in all strategy games. SimCity 4 was a great version, and I still play it from time to time. Long live the City!

-Anxiety

rjolley

07-27-2006, 04:42 PM

Great list, Anxiety. I think I'll have to find a copy of Colonization tonight and pick up SimCIty4 and the expansion pack. Never found time for SC4, but maybe I'll make time...

timmynausea

07-27-2006, 04:56 PM

Really impressive list. I'm anxious to see what else makes the cut.

WVUFAN

07-27-2006, 05:14 PM

I'm hoping X-Com is somewhere in this list.

GoldenEagle

07-27-2006, 06:21 PM

I have the urge to go out and buy Sim City 4 now.

Vince

07-27-2006, 06:23 PM

Big thumbs up for Final Fantasy -- one of the greatest games ever made, period. It was so far ahead of its time, it was absurd.

I haven't played much of SimCity 4, but even so I'm surprised that SimCity 2000 doesn't get the nod from that franchise. It was such a huge improvement over the original, and I got hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of play out of it.

sterlingice

07-27-2006, 06:57 PM

I haven't played much of SimCity 4, but even so I'm surprised that SimCity 2000 doesn't get the nod from that franchise. It was such a huge improvement over the original, and I got hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of play out of it.

Identical comments here. SC2K was just so amazing- I probably got thousands of hours of play time from it. Haven't played SC4 yet but I need to.

SI

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 07:11 PM

Vince - Like I said, I seriously considered the original version on SNES before deciding on 4. In this case, I fel that 4 was sufficently advanced from the previous version that it warranted consideration

Eaglesfan27

07-27-2006, 07:13 PM

I'm really enjoying reading this as well. I would have put Baldur's Gate 2 as the definitive game, and I would have put it significantly higher, but I haven't had too many other quibbles. Great writeups.

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 08:01 PM

Lots of interest after SimCity 4. Maybe the next game will get your juices flowing too.

17. Pokemon: Ruby & Sapphire
Nintendo
Game Boy Advance
2003
GameSpot Review - 8.1
RPG - Monster Breeding

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots2/471243.jpg

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots2/563596.jpg

Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire have around the level of technology of an SNES game. I know that a lot of adult players look down on Pokemon because they think its cute and meant for kids. Pokemon is such a great game, and I want you to listen to this statement. Pay attention.

If Pokemon had been released as an SNES game fourteen years ago, people would remember it as one of the greatest console games of all time.

Pokemon is not the second best selling franchise in video game history simply because it was a fad seven years ago. It keeps selling. These games are good. There's a lot in Ruby/Sapphire, so let's get started.

Like Monster Rancher 3, you are raising monsters (Pokemon) and fighting with them against other trainers. Unlike MR3, this is a more of an RPG game, where MR3 is more of a pure strategy/fighting game.

In MR3, you chose training regimens, here your Pokemon gain by fighting. In MR3 you actually fight, mashing buttons and what. Here, you just choose an attack and it happens behind the scene. No button mashing, no maneuvering.

Let's go over the basic Pokemon game, just to refresh those who are unaware or to inform those who do not know.

At the beginning of the game, you get a Pokemon. You then walk around town, getting acquainted:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/gba/pokemonsapphire/p_screen021.jpg

After you get familar with your surroundings, you head into the wilderness and fight wild pokemon. This will help level up your guy. You'll also get money. Once you get some money, you'll go buy some PokeBalls for catching pokemon. (Pokemon has the tendancy to be the McDonald's of video games. There are PokeSnacks, PokeBerries, etc.)

You snag some Pokemon and you can add the ones you like to your party to train just like your original Pokemon. You can have up to six Pokemon at one time, although almost all fights are 'Mon-to-'Mon. (One of the things Ruby/Sapphire adds is the ability to have tag matches where two of yours go against two of theirs. This seriously changes the dynamic, as can later be seen in the GameCube Pokemon games Gale of Darkness and Colloseum, which are exclusive tag team.)

As you level up your Pokemon, their stats will get better, and they'll learn new moves. It's very RPG. Your Pokemon can also evolve to a different, and usually better, monster.

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/news/03/05/pokemon/pokemon_screen030.jpg

One of the beautiful ideas behind Pokemon is the type system. Every Pokemon is one, or at the most, two types, just like elements. Every attack is one type. The seventeen types are Psychic, Fighting, Flying, Electricity, Fire, Ice, Water, Rock, Ground, Steel, Ghost, Poison, Dark, Grass, Normal, Bug, and Dragon. Some types are vulnerable to certain attacks. Grass Pokemon are especially vulnerable to Fire attacks, for example. Fire Pokemon are especially vulnerable to Water attacks. Water Pokemon are especially vulnerable to Electricity.

Some types are less effective against each other. Poison is less effective against Rock. Electricity is less effective against Grass. And so on. Some types are completely immune to certain attacks, although immunity is rare. Normal Pokemon are immune to Ghost attacks and vice versa. Flying Pokemon are immune to Ground attacks while Ground are immune themselves to Electricity.

Different Pokemon get different attacks, and having a well balance selection of Pokemon types and attcks is important to winning. Having the right Pokemon can help you tons. Going up agains a tough group of Water Pokemon is fine if you have a Grass Pokemon with a powerful Grass attack like Absorb. Beware though, because some Water Pokemon, like a Spheal, have other attacks besides Water, in this case, Ice. Water is less effective against Grass, but not Ice.

This system encourages a great deal of diversity. In fact, you'll raise an awful lot more than just six Pokemon. You'll have a battery of Pokemon designed to go into different dungeons and whatnot.

Like any RPG, there are quests and items, and such. You'll eventaully go against the various Gym Leaders in order to level up. As you defeat Gym Leaders, they'll give you a machine that can teach your Pokemon special moves. These moves allow you to go places you wouldn't normally be able to go. For example, Surf allows you to move across water while Flare lights up a
dungeon and Cut slices through certain trees.

So, in addition to having all of these elemnts to worry about, your party also has to have all of these moves as well. Each Pokemon only has room for four moves at a time, so it can be a precarious balance at times.

Here the character's Torchic (so you can see it pre-evolution) is really taking it to a Poochyena:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/news/03/05/pokemon/pokemon_screen015.jpg

In every Pokemon, there are also two games, and some monsters can only be found in one version or another. You can trade monsters with each other, and only through doing so can you "Catch 'Em All."

Now, let's talk about some of the things Ruby/Sapphire added.

As mentioned above, the game added tag battles, which creates a new dynamic. Some attacks will affect both opponents, and many just one. Many attacks aren't "attacks" but buffs for you or debuffs for your opponent. In tags, a few buffs work on both your Pokemon, while a fwe debuffs work on both your enemies. As I said, it's a nice extra dynamic.

The game also added farming. There are patches of special dirt around the map and PokeBerries. If you plant one of these many berries and water it, it will grow into a berry tree, and you can pick the berries. You have to plant, and regularly water these spots. This creates a very interesting gardening sub-game. Of course, you never have to participate, if you don't want to.

There are also beauty contests for Pokemon. You can use various moves and some will hurt other competitors and some will help you with the judges. These moves are not always good combat moves, so, again, you have to balance a lot with your monsters.

You can blend PokeBerries into PokeSnacks, brick like food. The blending itself is a minigame all on its own. What berries you choose to use will determine what the Snacks look like and their properties. Feed these to a Pokemon and a variety of things occur, usually potential for growth in several statistical areas when it levels up. You'll need a lot of berries for this, and I wonder where you can get them....

The world is a smoother design than Red/Blue or Silver/Gold. It's the first time I've really respected a world. In Red/Blue, your game was often dominated by a few legendary Pokemon (meaning there's just one) like Zapdos, Articuno and Moltres. This dominated the game too much, and diminshed replay because they were the hands down best critters for you to snag and fight with. Not so in Ruby Sapphire, where you don't get access to legendaries until after you win the game.

The result is a game that adds a lot, has a better designed world, and keeps everything good about the prior versions of the game. The game is complex enough for adults. It's even complex enough for me, and I pretty much demand complexity in my games.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 08:06 PM

I just wanted to let you guys know that after the next game, number 16, when we are half way finished, a few things change. The next game is a console game. After that, there is just one console game in the top half (at number five no less) (Although I occasionally change around my top games slightly as I learn more about myself and what I like as I write these up).

As I said before, PC games were top dog for so long that any historical list like this one is going to naturally be PC heavy.

-Anxiety

sterlingice

07-27-2006, 08:13 PM

Ew, strongly disagree. Glad Pokemon is on the list, but, again, dispute the one that was chosen.

Ru/Sa are easily my least favorite of the outings (tho I still have over 100 hours in it, just like the others). It seemed like a big step back from G/S/C, which would have been my choice. Stripping out elements like the real time clock and the full Pokedex were huge minuses in my book and th new elements were decent but not great.

The interface was better, but with each game it's taken a big step forward. RBY -> GSC was a bigger step than GSC -> RuSa and next to FR/LG, Ru/Sa's looks old (but, again, they all do- it's hard to go backwards in the series- big gameplay improvements each time).

I can't wait for Pearl and Diamond for the DS. :D

SI

Izulde

07-27-2006, 08:29 PM

I have the urge to go out and buy Sim City 4 now.

"

I also really dig the Pokemon series. Got Ruby in my GBA SP right now as a matter of fact, though I keep restarting. :D

Daimyo

07-27-2006, 08:30 PM

I like the pick of FF1 (although i would have had it higher). IMO FF4 is the best of the series, but its by a very, very narrow margin over FF1 and FF6 (I'm assuming FF Tactics is considered a different franchise - otherwise it would be the clear #1 IMO).

I'm very surprised to see Sim City 4. I loved Sim City 2000 and was disapointed by 3000 enough that I didn't even bother with 4. I might have to pick it up now if I can find it on a bargain rack.

Daimyo

07-27-2006, 08:30 PM

DOLA, and how does Pokemon chart higher than FF? :)

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 08:34 PM

Sterlingice - I'll probably buy the DS just so I can play Pearl or Diamond so I agree. However, the new Pokemon in G/S are just UGLY and STUPID. For proof, I submit: Hoppip.

http://pokedex.pokedream.com/images/187.png

Or, Sudowoodo

http://pokedex.pokedream.com/images/185.png

Or, Sunkern

http://pokedex.pokedream.com/images/191.png

Or, as my final piece of evidence, the PINECONE POKEMON, Pineco:

http://pokedex.pokedream.com/images/204.png

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 08:40 PM

DOLA, and how does Pokemon chart higher than FF? :)

By being a better game :)

Daimyo

07-27-2006, 08:45 PM

I tried the original Pokemon for a several days back when it was first hot and it just bored me to death. Not nearly as good as the first Final Fantasy Legends (comparing GB RPGs) IMO.

I liked the CCG okay though.

Abe Sargent

07-27-2006, 08:49 PM

This is the edited post. I am putting the next game here, which bumps Zelda up one. What game almost edged out Zelda and did for some time?

16. Star Control II
Accolade
PC
1992
GameSpot Rating - 9.3* (From now on, I'm just going to put a star beside the games that users rate but have no official rating)
Strategy/Simulation

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots1/564589.jpg

If you think I'm kidding with rating StarCon2 so highly, just look at the users. The average user rating for StarCon2 is 9.3 versus 9.1 for Zelda I. This is not mere nostalgia or a pet game, this is one of the true classics from the middle era of PC Gaming.

Star Control 2 takes up where the original left off. The nasty Ur-Quan and their Heirarchy of Battle Thralls have destroyed the Alliance of Free Stars and imprisoned all of the races on their homeworlds unless they chose to be Battle Thralls as well.

You begin the game as the child of a deep space research team that was never found by the Ur-Quan. The research team discovered an old Precursor factory that built the framework of a spaceship, but there were not enough materials on the planet to build the whole vessel. You strike out for Earth with your only Earth Cruiser they had in tow.

You arrive to find Earth under a slave shield and the entire human race under it, except fora few hundred that man an Ur-Quan space station around the planet that the Ur-Quan and their Battle Thralls use as a refulling and resupply station.

Earth under an inpenetrable Slave Shield:

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/screenshots/slaveshield.png

After you convince the commander to join your quest to restablish the Alliance. You have to seek out your own allies and find what happened. You'll discover new allies. You'll find that some of your own enemies can be friends, some of yoru own friends can be enemies, and some races will switch from, one to the other.

In the meantime, you will also discover that an Ur-Quan splinter group called the Kohr-Ah are fighting with the main group, the Kzer-Za, and the winner will control the Ur-Quan destiny. The Kohr-Ah want to destroy all non-Ur-Quan life making them worse than your old enemies, the Kzer-Za Ur-Quand, who at least want you as fallow slaves or battle thralls.

If the game is allowed to go on too long, the Kohr-Ah will win the Doctrinal War and then begin annililating every race in existance. Therefore, you have a clock, but you don't know when the clock ends. There are few things you can do to extend the clock, but you will have a limited amount of time.

Meanwhile, you'll need to be collecting minerals. You'll be ssearching star systems for various mineral deposits and taking them back to the space station where you can swap them for fuel, crew, escort ships and modules. Your ship, as a framework, is modular and can be configured for different missions.

Here is the shipyard with a lot of escort vessels already for the ship:

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/screenshots/shipyard.png

If you lose your precursor vessel, you lose the game. If the Kohr-Ah exterminate life, you lose the game.

You can also shoot down monsters on some planets for biological data. There are a race of interstellar traders, the Melnorme, that will trade for your biological data and in return will give you fuel, tips, and upgrades for your precursor vessel.

StarCon2 is an amazing synergy of various games, all rolled into one. In addition to the resource gathering, and in addition to the political simulation, when ships get into combat you have to fight it out in a real time arcade style shooter.

Many people thought that this was a real attraction to the StarCon series. The developers took serious pride in balancing all of the ships. Every ship has two attacks, and each is different. All of the ships are balanced and useful in some situations.

Here, a Chenjesu ship and a Mycon ship are locked in combat. Sometimes there is a planet which acts realistically. You can whip around it for a speed increase or fall into its gravity well and hit the planet for serious damage.

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/screenshots/melee3.png

The game has mutiple paths to victory and multiple ways to screw up. Based on how and when you do things, various ending can occur. For example, a friendly people called the Pkunk will start heading towards their warlike and battle thrall distant cousins. Two times you can arrive and deadly their journey, but by the third time they head off to join their cousins, if you haven't started a civil war in their cousin's society, the Pkunk will be slaughtered and eradicated. Of course, you can win the game with or without the Pkunk, but that;s the beauty of the game.

The game has a serious sense of humor to it. The Spathi, who are a cowardly race, have created one of the fast ships in the galaxy. It fires B.ackwards U.tilizing T.racking T.orpedoes behind it. Yes, that's right, it fires BUTT missiles at enemies as it runs away.

There are several other reasons why I love StarCon2 so much. Let me list some of them:

StarCon has the most beleivable, realistic, fully fleshed out space faring races I have ever enountered in any game, period. Every race is fully fleshed out, from the evil and loving it Ilwrath to my favorite, the Spathi, to the f'ed up Orz and the tri-race, the ZotFoqPik.

The VUX are these disgusting slimey tentacled race-things, but talk to them about why they hate humans and listen to them go on and on about how humans are so ugly. It's amazing. The way they describe our physical appearance actually makes me understand why they would find us so repulsive.

The simple fact is that each race is balanced in its ships and its personalities (or not balanced , in the case of the Orz).

StarCon2 blends humor, politics, amazingly fleshed out races, resource gathering and real time combat and combines all of that on a "do-it-yourself" go out there and figure it all out game. It's truly a marvelous game, and there's one more reason to really like it:

Several years ago, the two developers of the game, Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III, released the game source code. Fans of the game worked to develop a freeware StarControl II, but they had to reanme it The Ur-Quan Masters.

Would you like to download and play, FOR FREE, one of my top games of all time and one of the true classics of the middle age of the PC?

Just click your mouse here and enjoy

The Ur-Quan Masters - News (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/)

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-28-2006, 01:51 AM

With this game, we begin the second half of the countdown. This is a favorite that virtually everybody knows and loves. This entry should be like an old friend, and I expect everybody's face to crack into a smile, because at number...

15. The Legend of Zelda
Nintendo
1987
Nintendo Entertainment System
GameSpot Review - 9.1 (Once again, the average of all voters, not an official number)
RPG - Action

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots1/563433.jpg

Rewind with me to 1987. A new gaming system has recently been released that is, in many ways technologically superior to the system that came before (Although not in all ways. The IntelliVision, for example, was a 16 bit machine.)

This new system made a lot of promises. Maybe one of your friends had one, but your parents weren't convinced that it would stick after the Great Gaming Crash of '83. Maybe you saw it on TV commercials and in comic books. You wanted it.

And then The Legend of Zelda came out. Zelda showed us what was possible with console games. A save game feature? A long, exhaustive quest through numerous dungeons across what we thought was a huge map?

Zelda promised hours and hours of play value, and then a Second Quest afterwards that was harder with everything changed around. The game was replayable, at least once, for the Seocnd Quest.

Think how clever the Second Quest was. Beat the game once, and everything moves around. Can you do it again? Games still don't do that today and that feature is still ahead of its time.

"Where do I go?" you might ask.

http://cubemedia.ign.com/cube/image/zeldacollected_111703_x10.jpg

The quest for items and heart containers seemed neverending. There was always a better Candle or the Blue Ring or getting another Magic Shield after one had been eaten. They had to stuff two items in the final dungeon because there wasn't enough space for them.

And we knew. We knew that the game we were playing had changed the rules. After playing Zelda, other games seemed quaint. Later there would be better games for the NES, like Final Fantasy, but no game was as important. Without Zelda, would the NES have reached its level of sales in the home? Zelda was for the NES what Pac-Man was for Atari and Grand Theft Auto III was for the PlayStation 2 and Halo was for the XBox. Without Zelda, with just Mario and Duck Hunt and Ice Warriors and such - would the Nintendo System have ever dominated? Would there have been a revolution, or would it all have washed away like consoles had once before in 1983?

I loved the thematic dungeons.

http://cubemedia.ign.com/cube/image/zeldacollected_111703_x14.jpg

Zelda was a more than just an amazing console game for its time. Zelda was a wake up call for consoles. It was a new way of looking at gaming. The Legend of Zelda was a window into a world that soon was to be, so we didn;t mind waiting a few years.

It's hard to describe Zelda because we've all played it. You had to get the Triforce to save the Princess Zelda and the Triforce is split up into peices each of which is at the end of a dungeon. You adventured through graveyards and The Lost Woods to try to get to dungeons, claim items, and kill creatures for Rupees (gold).

Even my dad loved Zelda. He wanted more games like Zelda. It was like a drug, but there was no fix except to play more Zelda becaus eno other console game could touch it.

And we all knew it was genius. My friends and I never debated what the best NES game was - only what was second best.

And that's why Zelda is the highest charting NES game on my list. Even if other games would later be better games for the system, no game had Zelda's heart. In fact, I don't think any console game, ever has been as impactful to us as a gaming society than The Legend of Zelda. No cartridge was as seditious as Zelda, with its seductive gold plastic packaging.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

07-28-2006, 01:59 AM

In fact, after looking at my list, I'm considering switchign Zelda and it, making Zelda fifteen and making this other game 16. If I decide to do that, I'll make a post and edit my posts to reflect that. I learn more about my gaming that way.

However, no way is Zelda making it past the game after that (making it to fourteen). I consider Game Number Fourteen to be the beginning of a new tier of games. Games that are either virtually flawless or so great at what they did you ignored the quirks. Zelda is not in that category, but it is near the top of this category - the great games that are flawed (MR3) or never reached their potential (HOMM2) or were outdone (M&M6) or ruled only a small perch (MOO2) or were great in one area (Tropico) sort of games.

Starting at Game Fourteen all of that changes.

AgustusM

07-28-2006, 02:08 AM

I LOVED Colonization! One of those games I would stay up till 3am playing, WAY too many nights. a great, great game and one I was sad they never made a sequel for.

condors

07-28-2006, 04:57 AM

Well i hope fallout, plansecape:tourment, football manager, front office football, are on here, if it was my list saap and diamond mind would also be in the top ten, i am wondering if earl weaver baseball makes the list. Also since you seem to like the genre wondering if Dominons 2 is going to make an apperance. Masters of Magic would be on my list also. For rpgs i would have to have Wizardry and the orginal Bard's Tale. I am curious how many of my favorites will show up. I also loved autoduel.

Great stuff.

sterlingice

07-28-2006, 07:19 AM

Zelda's a really tough series to rank There are 3 games in it that could go on a best of list (zelda, lttp, and oot). I tend to favor lttp then oot then the original but you can't really go wrong with any of them.

As for the character designs in G/S, yeah, there are some weak ones, to be sure, but there are also some pretty good ones. But, again, just one facet of the game (yes, the pics show up).

I'll be curious to see what the top 15 hold. There are definitely some console games that I'd rank up there with PC games, but I could see putting 15 PC/arcade games at the top, especially if you go with a lot of stuff pre-1990.

SI

Abe Sargent

07-28-2006, 03:27 PM

Alright folks. I am officially moving Zelda up to fifteen and I am editign the post above it with number sixteen, previously number 15. It should be up in a little while.

EDIT: Okay, the new game is up!

Warhammer

07-28-2006, 04:19 PM

Abe Sargent

07-28-2006, 04:22 PM

Zelda beats out SC2! You're insane!

Who can forget the greatness that is the Ultron! Who can forget after you get the damn thing together they break it again!

One of my favorite parts of the game was defeating the Thraddash enough times for you to determine their new culture.

I gotta download the game and play it again!

Don;t get me wrong, I think SC2 is a better game, but for its time, I think Zelda was more ahead of its time than SC2 was.

Besides, the Utwig messing up with the Ultron, again, only happens in the credits, which are not canonical.

timmynausea

07-28-2006, 06:13 PM

I might favor a Link to the Past slightly over the original. The original blew my mind as far as how epic a video game could feel, and then lttp re-blew it.

I also think I'd have something from the zelda series ranked higher, but I can't really complain about that until I see the rest of the list.

Abe Sargent

07-28-2006, 09:20 PM

As I mentioned before, I believe there is a big jump in game quality from #15 on my list to here. Let's take a look at a more recent classic, and the best game in a very popular genre:

14. Half-Life
Valve/Sierra
1998
PC
GameSpot Review - 9.4
First-Person Shooter

Half-Life on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/70/)

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots2/43362_52700.jpg

In fact, I'd say that the modern age of PC Computing began in 1998 with games like Baldur's Gate and Half-Life.

For those of you who may be living in a very deep closest, allow me to explain. Half-Life is a PC game that revolutionized the first person genre by taking it one giant Lambda step forward in technology.

For one thing, Half-Life was completly about immersion into the game. From the beginning sequence where you spend five minutes in a rail car moving through the Black Mesa Complex to the platform where you work, you get the idea that this is a different game.

There are no cutscenes, no written dialogue, level transitions, or anything. Nothing breaks the mold of a living, breathing Gordon Freeman trying to fight like hell to get his way out of Black Mesa and survive.

This was innovative. In previous first person shooters, there was a cutscene at the end of the level giving you your kill count and percentage hit ratio, or mission briefings or cutscenes. Half-Life was simply about being there, with a crowbar, and maybe a gun.

The first time I saw that giant tentacled thing pouring up through a central corrider up several stories and I had to walk softly past it, or else one of those huge clawed tentacles would kill me. The first time I saw that, I held my breath as if to say, "My God."

Here is the big giant tentacled thing viewed from several floors up:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/2/43362/halflif_screen003.jpg

There are no spinning and glowing icons to represent health, weapons, ammo, or anything. Instead, placement is very logical. For you, its on a shelf, in a crate that you have to destroy, on a corpse of a dead person, and so forth.

There are no levels, the game is just one never ending romp.

Some bad guys are spawning in front of Gordon:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/2/43362/halflif_screen006.jpg

One major thing Half-Life had is a very believable squad AI for the human opponents. See, as the reasearch facility explodes, special forces head out the kill anyone in there, alien or human, and shut the place down. You'll be fighting these guys who have a very realistic AI. Shoot down one of a group from around a corner and all of the remaining characters will dive for cover, peek their heads out, and start laying cover fire while one or two others will creep to your position.

If you run into a room, they aren't stupid. They'll just toss in agrenade or two to kill you or flush you out. All of this is amazingly realistic.

The result is a very nice single player mode.

However, Half-Life does not end with a single player mode. Any review of Half-Life would be missing half of the review if it ended there.

Multi-player is a major aspect of the game. I know players who bought the game just for multiplayer. Valve intentionally created a very moddable game and we'll talk about a certain mod in a bit, but for now, let's just talk about Deathmatch multiplayer.

I loved playing against real people in this environment, with interesting maps and believable characters. This is my second favorite multiplayer gaming experience of all time.

Living in a residence hall, as an RA, with almost all of my residents and myself playing on the same server with our doors open and taunting each other.

Nothing compares to that. You got a chance to slap some people silly all while taunting them, or running around saying, "Where are you hiding, bitch?" and whatnot. The game was awesome.

I loved learning new maps. I started with some maps that everybody else liked, but I began to host because I had a fast machine, and I got to choose new maps that everybody began to like, ie The Mansion and X-Bow2.

Of course, everything changed when the Counter-Strike mod was made. Counter-Strike was a multi-player mod created just for Half-Life and was truly significant in the evolution of multi-player FPS. It was an amazing game using Half-Life textures and whatnot but with a more realistic, military feel to it.

Counter-Strike:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/news/001117/frontline_screen006.jpg

Another CS screenie which I think looks very cool:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/news/001117/frontline_screen005.jpg

It became hugely popular, so much so that Sierra began selling this player made mod in retail stores for a cheap price.

From mods to multiplayer to an amazing reality, Half-Life is truly one of the greats.

-Anxiety

Vince

07-29-2006, 05:13 AM

Half-Life was one of my favorite games ever, but I think that since I missed the actual release, and didn't get in on the game until a year later, that I'd give the nod to Half-Life 2, which I pre-ordered almost as soon as humanly possible, and was STILL able to completely blow away my expectations. I think that Half-Life 2 might be the best game I have ever played.

And I would have to give the nod to A Link to the Past as my Zelda franchise winner -- one of the best games ever made, and in my opinion second only to one Nintendo game on any platform.

Vince

07-29-2006, 05:14 AM

The more you go over this list, the more I realize how hard this would be to do definitively on my own. It would be interesting to see how much my heavy console-based youth affected my rankings -- I didn't really get into computer games until College, near the end of 1999.

Philliesfan980

07-29-2006, 02:59 PM

Will there be an update today?

Abe Sargent

07-29-2006, 03:16 PM

Sure

Izulde

07-29-2006, 03:28 PM

Anxiety, would you mind if I did a Top Games thing after you're done with yours?

I started compiling a list last night after I couldn't sleep. I thought about starting the dynasty soon, but I didn't want to steal your thunder. :)

Abe Sargent

07-29-2006, 05:07 PM

Abe Sargent

07-29-2006, 05:22 PM

This next game certainly isn't controversial to choose around here, but the version I choose may raise a few eyebrows:

13. Front Office Football 2001
Solecismic/EA Sports
2001
PC
GameSpot Review - 7.5
Sports/Simulation - Football

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/sports/fofootball2001/fofootball2001_boxshot.jpg

How do you review a game that everybody on this board has played? Even if a handful haven't played it, surely they've heard about it a lot.

It's difficult.

Here is why I'm choosing 2k1. There only other option, for me, is to choose the original, but I've never played the original nor the second game, so it would be highly unfair for me to pick agame that I haven't even played.

Secondly, the game series doesn't change that much from iteration to iteration. Madden changes more from game to game than FOF does. Tiny little tweaks here and there don't make me want to chose to the most recent version.

However, one deletion does make me want to choose 2k1. It is the last title with expansion.

Expansion was amazing. I had the Chiefs to three Super Bowls in a row and won the first and third. Then the expansion teams were named, and one of the game chosen expansion teams was in Huntington, WV. Well, I had to jump at that, so I named then the Huntington Highlanders and did the expansion draft and built them into a perennial playoff team.

Then I jump to the to the expansion team in Charlottesville, VA. They still had an awful roster and as awful cap. I can't remember their name, but it was something dogs, and I hated it, so I changed their name to the Wolves and failed to build them into a playoff team after three years, just getting them to 8-8 when I jumped to a new expansion team in Burlington, VT. I chose the name them the Cyclones, and once again, went through the draft, and so forth.

I loved expansion, and no other FOF has given me that experience. In fact, I've soured a bit on the more recent versions because they haven't jumped that much in new features and haven't brought back expansion.

I still remember my first draftee in 2k1 with the Chiefs. He was a safety named Sean Stewart that I drafted with the 28th pick the first round, and he started for me every year, got All Pro twice, and was put in the Hall of Fame with over 70 interceptions and tons of tackles.

I was hoping to find a Charlie Batch screenshot, because he was a 2k1 player of great ability, but instead, we'll just have to look at the Titans:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/news/010118/front_screen001.jpg

It wasn't the best game ever, and it did have issues, like backup soften demanding starter pay to resign, but the game was really good and it had expansion. That's why I chose it.

-Anxiety

sterlingice

07-29-2006, 06:14 PM

I'll probably get rocks thrown at me for saying this, but I figured FOF would make it on the list somewhere and I'm not sure I can disagree more. It's not that FOF isn't a good series or doesn't have good games but in the pantheon of games, text-based sims are such a small segment and to put it up there next to Half Life and Zelda and SimCity and, yes, Pokemon... it's just not right.

SI

Abe Sargent

07-29-2006, 06:16 PM

I understand your concern si. If it makes you feel better, I just wrote up number 12, and you can see it. Remember though, this is my list.

Abe Sargent

07-29-2006, 06:16 PM

At number twelve we have one of the true classics of the early PC era.

12. Wasteland
Interplay
1986
PC
GameSpot Review - 8.9 * (remember, an Asterisk means no official review, just a user review)
RPG

http://home.comcast.net/~darkguardian15/images/WLBOX.JPG

The developers on this game read like a who's who of RPG greatness. Michael Stackpole (writer of many books, developer of RPGs), David "Zeb" Cook (Writer of a few books, creator and writer of AD&D 2nd Edition), Liz Danforth (famous painter and RPG writer), Brain Fargo (creator of many famous RPG PC games and founder of Interplay), and Bruce Balfour (writer of many books).

Some of the game designers dressed up in Wasteland apparel and had their pic on the inside cover of the box. Unfortunately, the only pic I could find is not working :(

Instead, here is the Scorpitron - one of the toughest monsters in the game.

http://home.comcast.net/~darkguardian15/images/WL1.JPG

If you asked me what the best RPG ever designed was three years ago, i still would have said Wasteland. I don't think any RPG hit as many notes as perfectly as Wasteland. Even my Dad liked it.

What was good about Wasteland, you might ask? Everything.

Wasteland was an RPG that took place after a nuclear war cleaned the slate. You are a part of the Desert Rangers, and survived because you were underground. Your party emerges and heads out into the desert to investigate some odd occurances. You'll head to Needles, Quartz and Las Vegas to find out what is going on, and eventually you'll learn that a militaristic group of people who survived the Nukes have been building death robots and are building an army of them.

The game has a very Mad Max or Road Warrior feel to it, and its great!

It takes a long time to investigate the world and figure out what's going on. In the meantime, you'll have some of the most descriptive text in any game, ever. Here is a sample from a mere abandoned building. You got a short message of text with every step in the building. For the record, there are dozens of abandoned buildings in the game.

The wind has been blowing dust and leaves into this room so long that it is now almost 3 feet deep.
There used to be a door here a long time ago.
The old brick walls are slowly crumbling and falling apart.
Though rusty with age the hinge springs will close this door after you walk away.
The squeaks of rats bounce off the walls all around you.
You are walking on the door to this room.
The walls and ceilings all around you are covered with graffiti and bullet holes.
Don't wiggle! This chair is trying to fall apart.
This wall is covered with gang names and warnings to other gangs.
THE WHITE BOY IS #1 has been painted over the hundreds of bullet holes in this wall.
Crude pictures of nude girls and gang symbols are all over this wall.
Don't put anything on this table. I don't think it could take the weight of a feather.
Either that trash is moving or something is moving under it.
Lucky you! That snake could have been very nasty if it hung around to fight.
These old dusty shelves have stood here unused for more years than you have been alive.

With so many people who became published authors on the staff, you can understand why the text is so good.

The world is vibrant. Radiation has mutated a few, and there are realistic missions that take you all over the map. From a three legged prostitute to the Church of the Mushroom Cloud, you'll range all over. You'll either install a new mayor of Quartz, the leader of a group of thugs, or free the good Mayor Pedros.

During the game, your party can add three NPCs which are almost always (for me at least), Ace, Covenant, and one of the two dying people in Darwin Village, and usually Christina until then. I never liked Redhawk because he is too unstable.

http://www.svatopluk.com/images/wl-t.png

Here are some of the inventive things that Wasteland did:

There are no healing items and no healing skills. There actually is a First Aid and a Doctor skill but those stop bleeding and so forth, they do not cure diseases and heal. Too many RPGs rely on healing items, but there are none here. You can go a Doctor but it costs a lot of dough.

Random encounters never drop money or items. Only set encouters do. Therefore, you will never get money and items unless you are advancing the plot.

Stores have a limited supply of items, and keep things you sell to them so you can rebuy them later. Many stores at this time had unlimited items or never kept what you sold to them.

If you kill an emeny with a gun, you get a certain amount of experience. If you pull out an axe or a spear and charge them, killing them in melee, you get double experience. This was a nice incentive to fight up close and personal.

NPCs in your will refuse to give the team items in their inventory, especially if they are vital, like body armor. Some NPCs (Redhawk) do this more frequently than others. I love this and it makes perfect sense that someone who joins your quest may not feel comfortable giving you back the armor you gave him.

A radiated monster:

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/01/gray/wasteland/waste-pic/pc-pic/desert-dweller.gif

Wasteland was such a great game, full of flavor, excitement, an advanced gaming system, and more. It's impact reached through the genre and inpired the Fallout series which in several locations has had references to Wasteland.

Unfortunately, Interplay was never able to really do a sequal. Interplay was a developer, but EA was the publisher. EA got the right to the name Wastealnd when they published it, and only recently (2003 in fact) has Bryan Fargo repurchased the name.

This guy's not happy to see you:

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/01/gray/wasteland/waste-pic/pc-pic/deserter.gif

The game was the first high quality RPG. It influenced tons of games that came after. It was truly remarkable and great and more than worthy to be number 12 on my list of the top games ever.

-Anixety

Abe Sargent

07-29-2006, 06:19 PM

I've got a problem with a WL pic, let me see if I can figure it out

Abe Sargent

07-30-2006, 04:41 PM

Let's get this next one out of the way so that all we'll have left is the top ten.

11. Europa Universalis II
Paradox
2001
PC
GameSpot Review - 8.5
Strategy

GamersGate - Buy and download games now! (http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-PDXEU2/europa-universalis-2)

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots2/529304.jpg

EU2 ruined it for me. Up until 2001, my favorite strategy games were turn-based Civ and Civ clones. Then I played EU2 after someone here posted a dynasty.

Nothing was ever the same again. EU2 and FOF2k1 completely changed my gaming, but EU2 more than any other game really did. Europa Universalis II was so epic and so detailed that it erased from my mind my previous love. I plum forgot anything else.

Europa Universalis II is a real time strategy game but the real time is so slow that is has the effect of a turn based game. I hate real time strategies because they always seemed like button clickers, but EU2 is different.

Here's a look at Spain:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2005/132/529304_20050513_screen006.jpg

I played an entire dynasty written here on just this peninsula. Some people remark that the map looks a bit like a gameboard, and I think they're right.

One of the things that I always appreciated was the simple fact that the game, despite tons of detail, has three military units - infantry, calvary and artillery. The emphasis of the game is elsewhere, and I love that.

Let's begin with the world. You play on the most detailed and exact version of the World Map that I have ever seen in a video game. It is amazing in its detail. Even with its European focus the game still has plenty of time for a highly detailed Nippon (Japan), SE Asia, Russia and Siberia, China, India, Middle East, North Africa and South America. Many felt that Southern Africa, North America and Indonesia needed some work.

The map creator decided that areas of the world that were completely inhabitable with 18th century technology (the highest in the game), would be written in as Terra Incognita - places you could not go (like, for example, the Sahara Desert)

Here you can see that Inland Greenland is completely Terra Incognita.

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/news/010828/eu2_screen004.jpg

The game is built around an event engine. This is a highly detailed event engine that helps to simulate some of the real world issues involving various states.

For example, suppose you are playing China. At some point in time, you are going to have to deal with the White Lotus Rebellion. In fact, you'll get an event with several choices, and the one you choose will show how your country is guided by your leadership. When you script an event, you can make one choice the likely choice for the AI, so the AI will usually follow the historical path, but will deviate occasionally so that each game is different.

China, to continue the example, will have an event early in the game where they choose whether or not to fund their Treasure Fleet under the guidance of Zheng He. Fund it, and you get Zheng He, one of the earliest explorers in the game but it costs you money. Choose not to, and you don't get Zheng He.

Areas of the map you don't know can be explored by an explorer at sea or a conquistador if by land. Zheng He, in the above example, would open up sea lanes for later trading, exploration or war. (Explorers have a small chance of discovering coastal land as they sail by)

The game's technology was very simple. There are a variety of techs and each are from level 1-5. Some are military, some economic and some social. You can have your people working on a tech, but it is very uncertain when you'll get it. As neighbors get techs, you'll get them slowly. You have techs by provinces. If you discover, for example, cathedrals, you can only use that tech in your base province and as it moves throughout your country you can use it in your provinces. Likewise, a tech a neighbor has will start at the edges of your empire adjacent to that neighbor and move in. It's very realistic.

The economic system is based around trade. Each province has a good it specializes in. Let me see if I can remember them all (Naval Goods, Spice, Copper, Iron, Gold, Coffee, Tea, Slaves, Ivory, Fur, Chinaware, Fish, Sheep, Salt, Wheat, Cloth - but gold is not a traded good). Goods have a production value and a trade value. Production is how much you make from them and trade is how much in made in the local Center of Trade. Production is also affected by factors like population, but trade isn't that much.

The local Center of Trade is the place that all nearby goods go to be traded. An example of a Center of Trade is Tago, the capital province of Portugal. Nearby goods are shipped to Tago and, as a result, a ton of money is made in Tago by Portugal.

You can send off merchants to a CoT to set up shop and siphon off some of the profits. The more merchants you set up, the bigger a slice of the pie you have. Big CoTs, like Byzantium, have a lot of competition for spots so your merchants get squeezed out a lot.

New CoTs will occasionally spring up, some from random events and some from set events (Flanders, for example, will pop up as a CoT if the Netherlands form as a country).

In order to expand, one option is colonization. You send out colonists to unclaimed land and there's a chance based on climate, previous colonizing attempts, conquistador presence, number of natives, and hostility of native as to whether or not the colonizing attempt will take. Once you get six successful attempts, any local natives will join your colony. In the meantime, natives could burn down your colony with a higher chance of it occuring the more aggressive and numerous the natives are.

The Carribean:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2001/pc/str/europauniversalis2/europauniversalis2_screen017.jpg

You can also expand by war. In this game, you have to have a Casus Belli o go to war with someone. You have a permanent Casus Belli on a country if they have land that you have a claim to. For example, at the start of the game, Wallachia has a Callus Belli on Moldova because of an ancient claim Wallachia has on the province. Anytime Wallachia wants, they can go to war with whoever has the Moldovan province. If they claim that province in war, there is much of a problem with the international community.

However, if you start gobbling up neighbors and land that you do not have a claim to, others will get antsy and start attacking you. This concept is called your badboy rating. Over time, your BB rating will get better, so you can expand occasionally but not significantly. If you take land in a defensive war, as opposed to an offensive war, your BB isn't hurt as badly. Annexing land politically as opposed to war is also not as bad. There are other examples, but those illustrate how the principle works.

As a result, although you will get into wars, wars will not drive the game. There will be periods of prolonged peace, for example, interspersed with a lot of blood. It's very historical in that respect.

In your provinces, you can build a ton of improvements over time as your techs increase. You can even specialize your provinces with various improvements.

You'll learn to love/hate the random events. Some are great, while others include such events as plague and civil unrest.

There are a handful of game events that change the nature of the game and effect everyone. They are; Treaty of Tordesillas which divides up the New World, the Protestant Reformation which creates Protestantism as a new religion, Jean Calvin which creates Reform as a new religion, and Counter-Reform which created Counter-Reform Catholicism as a new religion - all offshots of Christianity, and then later, Religious Tolerance which reduces the disagreements between religions.

As you control your empire, there are a variety of sliders that affect how you organize and treat your people. Do you want to be more centralized or decentralized? Do you want your military to be more offensive or defensive? Do you prefer free trade or mercantilism? And so forth. These sliders will adjust happiness of the four castes in your society (peasants, nobles, clergy and burghers) as well as increase merchant, colonist and missionary production, change tax effectiveness, and so froth. (Missionaries can be sent, at some cost, to try and convert the masses of a province to your state religion.)

You'll also have to worry about tax rate, keeping people in a province happy, revolts, and more.

As you can see, the game is quite complex, but many of its complexities make sense, like the badboy rating simulating the need to not appear too much a tyrant or else neighbors will come down on you.

The game is highly moddable, and in fact, I scripted many of my own events for a fantasy Granada in my dynasty. Players have added hundreds of events, tons of countries and more in a player made mod called the AGC-EEP which is a combination of two previous mods.

The company patched the game long after it has passed its shelflife, much like Jim does, only these patches were much more grandiose. They are still tinkering with it, trying to fix little things and make the game work much more smoothly.

As a result of all of this, EU2 is my eleventh game and came very close to cracking the top ten.

-Anxiety

timmynausea

07-30-2006, 09:35 PM

Man, FOF2k4 is so much better than the other versions for multi-player purposes alone. I never thought I'd care about multi-player and didn't even look into it until over a year after the game came out, but it is amazing.

Abe Sargent

07-30-2006, 09:56 PM

Time to begin the top ten countdown with that classic of classics, that marvel of marvels:

10. Civilization
Microprose
1991
PC
GameSpot Review - 9.0 *
4x

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/06/03/564621.jpg

What is there to tell about a gem we've all played or heard of? If it didn't begin the "Just one more turn" phoenomenon, it certainly brought it tinto our public conscience. Civ was responsible for more than its share of cold dinners and sleepless nights.

It was magic because it has never been done before. So many aspects of Civ have been taken and added to other games, from tech development to strategic development. Making armies and fighting, sending a spaceship to Alpha Centauri and nuking those damn Indians led by that pretentious Ghandi.

In terms of ingenuity, Civ would rank near the top of all games.

Therefore, I'm not convinced why I should need to defend the choice for Top Ten spot to Civ. I may have to, however, defend why its near the bottom of that list.

Civ, the original game, does not stand up well. Let's take a look at the graphical Civ from DOS:

http://apolyton.net/civ1/images/screenshots/civilization.jpg

That's just painful. There have been numerous games that were either contemporaries or earlier that looked much better. Wing Commander came out a year prior to Civ and it looks much better to our eyes. At the time, poor graphics wasn't a big deal, because we weren't so use to good graphics. However, now, Wing Commander is tolerable and Civ isn't. In fact, for the rest of the review, I'm going to post pics from later versions of Civ and not the original DOS version.

For comparision, here is the later Windows version:

http://apolyton.net/civ1/images/screenshots/civscreen(winversion).jpg

That's a much cleaner interface and the graphics are sharper as well. It's still ugly, but not as bad.

The graphical problems not withstanding, Civ still deserves a place in my list as opposed to Civ II because the original was the best. The other version may have tweaked the game a bit, added more techs, more wonders, more units, more playable nations, and more buildings, but Civ was the original.

So many decisions in Civ were really great. Different terrain types led to different cities and different things being built on them. Even railroads (which could look downright clunky after a while):

http://apolyton.net/civ1/images/screenshots/civnet3.jpg

This alone was an amazing idea. Various terrain types that you improe over time with irrigation, mines, roads and more.

Even something minor, like the Civilopedia was a great idea. Put everything in one, easy to access area and then questions are reduced significantly.

From units to cities, so many of the things in Civ are clever, unusual, unique, or just plain amazing (or any number of the above). So many games owe their heart to Civ.

For a decade I was obsessed with Civ and the next Civ games. Then EU2 changed all of that. Nevertheless, it is Civ, and not EU2 that makes the cut into my personal top ten.

-Anxiety

sabotai

07-30-2006, 10:02 PM

Count me as someone who had Civ ruined for him because of EU2. I just can't seem to get into Civ at all anymore. All I think about is how much I want it to be more like EU2.

Izulde

07-30-2006, 10:09 PM

I'll have some personal disagreement here.

I hated EU2 and I still don't like it. For some reason, I just can't dig it, though I've tried it multiple times. Same thing with HoI2 and Victoria (which I wanted to love, btw, but couldn't).

I also would have put Civilization II ahead of Civ. While I can understand the rationale behind Civ in terms of historical significance, Civ II was just so much better it's unreal.

But I'll get into why later on. :D

Eaglesfan27

07-30-2006, 10:55 PM

I would have picked Civ 4 to be the Civ representative. It is such an improved game from the earlier versions. However, I understand that historical significance is a factor.

ISiddiqui

07-30-2006, 10:58 PM

Like Izulde, I would have put CivII on the list ahead of Civ, and probably would have it either 1 or 2 (probably #1). CivI was the first, the innovative one, but CivII was everything a sequal should be and far more.

I think Izulde and I have been seperated at birth because I share his views on EU2. If I was doing this list, I don't think I would have had EU2 in my Top 25, frankly. Ambitious idea, but doesn't pull it off, IMO.

Grammaticus

07-30-2006, 11:15 PM

Just started reading this, great stuff. I love the pics, man that brings back some memories. Me and my buddies used to play the heck out of sea battle on the Intelivision! Nothing as intense as trying to hit the juice and move your battleship out of a torpedo line.

Grammaticus

07-30-2006, 11:16 PM

dola,

I'm curious to see if my all time favorite makes your list.

Abe Sargent

07-30-2006, 11:21 PM

I guess we'll find out :)

Peregrine

07-31-2006, 02:34 AM

Great list so far Anxiety, glad to see EU2 represented, I'd have to put that one in my top 5 alltime list, I just go back and play it again and again, and the experience is so different each time depending on country and culture, etc. The dynasty listings on the Paradox boards are beyond incredible, also, dozens of novel-quality dynasties and hundreds of others.

Peregrine

07-31-2006, 02:36 AM

I would have picked Civ 4 to be the Civ representative. It is such an improved game from the earlier versions. However, I understand that historical significance is a factor.

Which Civ to pick is definitely tough. As the best game, I'd have to go with Civ 4 also, since it is so much improved over the other versions. Personally I'd also have Alpha Centauri high up on my list since it has a lot of unique ideas and is one of my favorite games ever, but I know not everyone feels that way.

sterlingice

07-31-2006, 05:48 AM

Which Civ to pick is definitely tough. As the best game, I'd have to go with Civ 4 also, since it is so much improved over the other versions. Personally I'd also have Alpha Centauri high up on my list since it has a lot of unique ideas and is one of my favorite games ever, but I know not everyone feels that way.

Just nerve staple the populace until they agree ;)

SI

Peregrine

07-31-2006, 06:11 AM

Just nerve staple the populace until they agree ;)

SI

Yang loves the people and the people love him. A few dissidents may need to be re-educated, but it's all for the greater good of the people!

MIJB#19

07-31-2006, 07:17 AM

dola,

I'm curious to see if my all time favorite makes your list.
I'd be shocked if mine would. :D

ISiddiqui

07-31-2006, 08:02 AM

I'd be shocked if mine would. :D

Likewise my #2 (Civ being unquestionably my #1) would make it, since it is a console game (though ported to the PC).

AgustusM

07-31-2006, 01:16 PM

first off another tip of the cap, great idea, great list.

in fact so good you have inspired me to purchase Europa Universalis 2 and Tropico. ordered them both just now.

also my 2 cents, I think I would have chosen Civ4 as well, I have played the hell out of every version including the "ugly" DOS one (it didn't seem ugly at the time) and I think 4 has removed a lot of the little minor annoyances of previous versions - now I obviously don't know what 1-9 are yet, but at least for me I think Civ would have to be top 3.

Abe Sargent

07-31-2006, 04:16 PM

This next title should need little justification for the people on this board.

9. X-Com: UFO Defense
Microprose
1993
PC
GameSpot Review - 9.0
Strategy/Simulation

X-COM: UFO Defense on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/7760/)

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/boxshots/2/199362_pc.jpg

One of the things you may notice is that I really like games that have several different parts, several different games. Monster Rancher 3 has a fighting and a raising game, Sea Battle has an overland map and a fighting map, Heroes of Might and Magic II has the strategy game and then the chess-like game, Master of Orion II has a Civ like game and then a chess like game. Even StarCon2 has a strategy map and a melee with ships fighting.

X-Com is arguably the best dual-game ever designed. Although one more dual-game will chart higher (two spots higher at number 7), that's because of an affectation (you'll see when I list it).

X-Com is simply the best game at merging two worlds. The strategy element segues seemlessly with the tactical element. Although it was not the first game to do so (see Sea Battle and later Archon), it probably remains, to the day, the best game to do so.

In fact, X-Com has proved so good, so important that many other games have really copied it directly (Jagged Alliance) or indirectly (Heroes of M&M).

X-Com has sevearl things going for it. To begin, you have to build a base, train soldiers, worry about finances, order equipment and fuel ships. The strategic element takes place over a globe map of the world.

As aliens go about their business, your bases will track their movements, and you dispatch craft to take them down.

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/screenshots/2/199362/xcomufo_screen002.jpg

Once you intercept them, you can attack, retreat, etc. If you manage to shoot down the craft and do so over land, you can dispatch a team of X-Com agents to investigate the crash site.

Once there, the games shifts to the ubiquitous chess-like tactical combat that everybody knows and loves. You move your men, then the alien moves as well. Several unique ideas, like Time Units, attacks of opportunity and such were added to give this turn based system the illusion of reality.

Our X-Com Agent sees two bad guys!

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/screenshots/2/199362/xcomufo_screen001.jpg

You have to explore the map, protect any civilians, and secure any alien equipment you find. Afterwards, your ship lifts off and you have some goodies for your tech guys.

Downed alien craft are not the only reason you may find yourself in tactical mode. You could launch an attack on a hidden alien base. The aliens could be attacking your own base, and you defending it. You could be responding to a Terror-Site, a city where aleins are trying their best to terrorize the locals. Lastly, you could be launching a game winning attack on the alien homebase.

Different alien ships have different purposes and capabilities. You'll begin with the small ships and upgrade your way to bigger and better ships as time progresses.

Since it was designed after Civ, it took into account several Civ-ideas. The first is tech development. Your tech boys can research live alien specimens, do autopsies, and try to figure out gadgets that you bring back from missions.

One of the things you can do research on is parts of spacecraft. Looks like the aliens were up to some research of their own:

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/screenshots/2/199362/xcomufo_screen004.jpg

The game progresses as your guys get better tech. Armor, guns, ships, ammo, and psi abilities will all get better as stolen or integrated tech comes online. Of course, you'll need a workshop of engineers to build all of this stuff. And all of these things: engineers, scientists, lab space, alien containment and workshop space do not come cheaply...

Which leads us back to the seemless combinations I meantioned earlier. As you do better on missions, you'll get more material for the brain boys, more items to sell, so you can pay the brain-boys, more esperience for your soliders so they get better. Then your brain boys find a new piece of equipment and your engineers build it, and then you equip your soldiers so that the tactical missions are more likely to be successful.

Do you see how it all fits together, smoothly?

In fact, I think that there were less X-Com clones than Civ clones (which were all over game stores for several years) because X-Com did what it set out to do so much better than Civ.

And therefore X-Com is number 9 on my list.

-Anxiety

Vince

07-31-2006, 04:20 PM

Number 9...not sure if it would be that 'low' on my list, but it is definitely one of the best games ever made.

Eaglesfan27

07-31-2006, 06:35 PM

Yeah, I think X-Com would have been closer to #1 on my list. However, I can't wait to see what is next on the list :)

Abe Sargent

07-31-2006, 10:31 PM

Let's create some controversy with the next pick. Maybe.

8. Angband
Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand, 1990 - 1991, 1991 - 1993: Sean Marsh and Geoff Hill, 1993 - 1994: Charles Swinger, 1994 - 2000: Ben Harrison, 2000 - Now: Robert Ruhlman
1990
Unix (Later, Mac, PC, OS/2, Unix, and Pretty Much Every System Ever)
GameSpot Review - 9.4 *
RPG

Okay, before I begin this review, I want to point out a couple of things. I like a game with a lot of detail, tons of complexity, and strategies I can learn for months.

Angband is not a good looking game. It's clean, but it's not pretty. However, take a look at the user reviews of this game. 9.4 is higher than almost any other user reviewed game that I have looking at.

Okay, with that caveat, I present Angband. We'll start with a graphical version:

http://www.thangorodrim.net/graphics/dumps/dump1_small.gif

Okay, before you get all up ons, let's take a bit about Angband. Angband is freeware. You can download it for free and play it at no cost. It's free.

In fact, if you are interested in Angband or variants, you had head over to:

http://www.thangorodrim.net/

Okay, let's talk about the history of Angband, because it is very important.

In the late seventies, a game developer created a cute little freeware game called Rogue. In Rogue, you are delving through a dungeon and picking up potions, scrolls, wands and more while killing various monsters. The tech at the time was poor, so you were represented with an "@" symbol, and everything else were ASCII characters as well.

In 1985, Robert Koeneke fondly remembered that Rogue game he played years ago, but could not find it. He set out to create a similar game, with a bit of a Tolkien theme, named "Moria." He built the game around Tolkein, with the player decending to level 50 before killing the Balrog.

He remembered Rogue being very difficult, so he handed out early version of his game to friends, and each time they beat the game, he closed off the avenue they used to do it. He intentionally set out to make Moria the hardeset game ever developed (and succeeded).

Moria was significantly more advanced than Rogue, with tons of monsters, items, spells, classes, and more added to the game. There was also a village level at the top of the dungeon that had a few shops.

Other writers also wrote Rogue variants, and this genre of game is called a "Roguelike" game (go figure :) ). Most of them share a common element with Rogue - once you die, you are dead. No save game. If you die, you die.

This creates a ton of suspense. It's tough to go through a game that is designed to be amazingly hard and THEN is unable to load a save game.

As a result, Angband is the hardest game I've ever played. Ever harder than Fragile Allegiance.

Anyways, back to history. In 1990, a couple of guys decided that Moria was not Tolkien enough so they wrote Angband. Angband has come to be viewed as THE roguelike variant to play.

Angband added so many unique ideas to the equation. They added unique items, many from Tolkien, like Angdrast, Sting, Ringil, the Phial of Galadriel, and more.

This added a new element to the top end of the game and added tons of flavor as well.

Next they added unique monsters. Many of these are Tolkienian, like Smaug, Thuringwethil, Saruman, each of the Nazgul, and more. This also added a new element of challenge to the game as you progressively moved into harder and harder terrain.

Then they added tons of things to the dungeons, like a monster pit, which is a room full of a monster type, or vaults, which are large areas chock full of treasure and nasty out of depth monsters (As you delve deeper, more powerful monsters exist, and an out of depth monster is one that is up too high of his average level.)

On this floor, an orc pit is to the left (like I said, a lot of monsters) anda vault is to the right. Both of these are special rooms and to get them both that hgih up in the dungeon is unusual.

http://home.att.net/~bamitchell/angband/grabs/zangband03.gif

The randomizers added out of depth items and monsters upon occasion. There were new elements to add more creativity to your armor (in addition to basics like fire and cold there was now nether and chaos and such).

The game also stretched 100 levels instead of the previous 50.

Angband took everything that was great about Moria and exploded it into many more pieces while also adding tons of new elements to the game.

I prefer playing with the text version, instead of that crappy graphic version. Here's a pic (remember, you are the @)

http://home.att.net/~bamitchell/angband/grabs/angband01.gif

Angband became so popular and definitive that over SIXTY-THREE variants were written by other people as freeware. That's how influential and important Angband became.

Now, as a matter of fact, I prefer one of those variants, ZAngband, to Angband. Z is a game as advanced from Angband as Angband was from Moria (and Z is the most popular variant as well.). Z is based on Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles. It also includes quests, outdoors, tons of classes, a better overhauled magic system, tons of races, mutations, and lots more great stuff. I love it.

However, this is not a review of Z but of Angband, the vanilla version. It may not look like much, I know, but packed in here is one of the best computer games ever made. I spent an entire summer once playing Angband. And the best part?

It's free!

-Anxiety

Groundhog

07-31-2006, 11:33 PM

Interesting selection with Angband. That's really the only Roguelike game I ever played much, though it may have infact been ZAngband that I was playing, because I recall being outdoors a fair bit. It's been years since I played it.

Daimyo

08-01-2006, 12:07 AM

I would have picked Civ2. I played all four games in order and loved them all (although civ3 took many patches and an expansion to become lovable), but civ2 was the one that really captured me and I probably played it well over 10 times as much as the other three combined.

I don't know what is up with me on EU... I absolutely loved EU (my wife still knows it as "the amazing game" from how I used to refer to it). However, I was disapointed with EU2... I don't know what it was, they added a while bunch of stuff that was great on paper, but I just didn't like it much.

If I had to rank my top five games of all time, limiting to one pick per franchise, it would very likely be EU1, Civ2, FOF2k1, FM2006, and FF Tactics. I'm glad to see four of the franchises represented this far. :)

Abe Sargent

08-01-2006, 12:30 AM

One thing I forgot to mention about Angband was how Diablo was an Angband clone, with fewer unqiue weapons and graphics.

bob

08-01-2006, 09:13 AM

In case anyone wants a free remake of XCOM: UFO Defense, check out the following link for the game UFO: Alien Invasion.

hxxp://pc.gamespy.com/articles/718/718272p2.html

Abe Sargent

08-01-2006, 09:49 AM

Thanks bob

Vince

08-01-2006, 01:15 PM

The Civilization series would probably be the hardest one for me to choose from, between the original and Civ II. Both were absolutely fantastic games.

As for rogue-likes...I think I'd have to go with JAMoria for the Macintosh. That's the one that got me hooked back in the early '90s, and from there I went on to Zangband and ADOM. I think ADOM would have to be the most quality of the games I've played, but JAMoria meant much more to me growing up.

I'm loving the list, Anxiety!

Abe Sargent

08-01-2006, 03:15 PM

Time for the next game on my list. As a mentioned before, this is the last dual game, with two different games in one. Sure, X-Com was probably the best at this synergy, but this game was the most fun at doing it.

7. Magic: The Gathering
MicroProse
1997
PC
GameSpot Review - 7.2
Strategy/Simulation - Card Game

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/boxshots/8/197838_pc.jpg

Incidentally, the GameSpot review is a particularly low review, if you look at other websites, the average review is much higher, and the GameSpot review is one of the lowest scores.

The campaign game is called Shandalar, so that is what most people call the game.

Okay, let's talk about Shandalar. Shandalar was an attempt to bring Magic to a single player PC game. How could you translate this game?

What the developers decided to do is to keep the Magic game. You will duel opponents in Magic, with real Magic cards and the real Magic rules. Then you also have a campaign game as well.

You resolve combats by dueling, and then you adventure around the map, collecting gold, items, cards for your deck, mana links, and more.

Okay, let's talk about the game in detail:

You begin the game with a very poor deck of cards that you can modify. All games you play are for ante, so there is a chance you'll lose a card from your deck as well as a chance you'll gain a card from your opponent's deck.

Here is an adventure screenshot:

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/screenshots/8/197838/magicgat_screen002.jpg

You can stop in towns and cities and sell off extra cards for gold. Each place also has a small number of cards for sale, and you can try and get some new cards for your deck here. You'll also need food, which yu eat as you move about the map.

On the map, there are five different terrain types which correspond with the five different terrain types in Magic: mountains, swamps, islands, plains and forests. Enemies can only go into terrain areas if they have that color in their deck.

Enemies are all around and you'll have to do a lot of dueling in order to move across the map.

As your deck gets better, you win more often, but better players with btter decks will emerge from the wilderness to challenge you.

You begin the game with just 10 life (your starting life total in each game. 20 is the normal starting life in a game of Magic). You can complete quests at cities and gain a mana link with that city. Your life permanently increases by one. You can gain a lot of life this way.

However, there is a evil wizard in the land, one in charge of each color of magic. They are trying to conquer the land magically. Occasionally, one will send an enemy to assault a city, and a short time later, if you do not intervene, the city will be lost and you'll lose your Mana Link. Once a city is tapped, you'll have to assault it yourself, which is very difficult. When a wizard gets three mana taps, he wins, and you lose.

Random events are on the map in each land type. Sometimes you'll come across a free random card, sometimes you'll find a monster guarding a horde of spells, and sometimes you'll come across a bazaar exchanging your gold or gems for any card you want.

There are little gems that you can collect during the game. These can be used to fuel WorldMagics or to exchange at bazaars. There is one WorldMagic for each color of gem (again, one of each color of Magic). As you advance through the game, you have the option to buy WorldMagics, and five of these use gems. For example, the most useful is the Sword of Resistance. Once you have it, you have use a white gem to teleport ourself to a city that is being sieged by a wizard's servant before it is captured. You want this one as fast as possible.

Other WorldMagics are more or less useful. The Amulet of Swampwalk allows you to walk through swamps much more quickly, Sleight of Hand allows you to switch your ante with a random new ante at the beginning of a match, and so forth.

You can eventually delve into dungeons. The dungeons will have a permanent enchantment in play. In these dungeons are very rare and unique cards, like a Mox or a Black Lotus. These cards will amp up the power of your deck significantly.

Expansions to the game added new cards from the earlist Magic sets, so you'd have new strategies.

One of the interesting things the designers did was to design twelve new Magic cards called the Astral Set that used some form of randomizing agent. For example, Rainbow Knights had protection from a random color (out of the five possibilities).

Eventually you would be ready to tackle a wizard overlord in his own castle. Once you defeated him, all creatures of that color disappeared from the overland map. Defeat all five of the evil wizards, and you have to tackle the mega, super, ultra bad guy, who begisn the game with 500 life.

I loved the game, but it suffered from one major flaw. Here is a duel:

http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/screenshots/1998_2/98_0210_manalink/screenshot_screen001.jpg

The flaw was in duels. The AI sometimes made boneheaded decisions, and couldn't handle some cards (Mishra's Factory and Strip Mine are examples) correctly. As a result, you could cheese wins that shouldn't have been so easy.

If this flaw was not in the game, and the AI was good, I'd give the game my top spot. As it is, the game is still challenging because of low life, an abhorrent starting deck, losing cards in ante, and so forth. However, the AI is so poor that you will really begin to notice.

If you doubt this game's worthiness to be here, let me share a recent story with you. I have a friend who loved Morrowind and was dying to play Oblivion. He got Oblivion and was playing it. He loved it. Then, when he was over at my place, I showed him Shandalar. He went home, downloaded it, and got so addicted that he stopped playing Oblivion completely until he finished Shandalar. That's how good Shandalar is.

Just so you know.

-Anxiety

Izulde

08-01-2006, 04:01 PM

Shandalar *was* a good game, but the ungodly low amount of life made duels a real pain in the rear for me.

Grammaticus

08-01-2006, 04:26 PM

Blah, I'm not a magic fan at all.

ISiddiqui

08-01-2006, 04:35 PM

Also, interestingly, the "Magic: The Gathering" computer game was designed by none other than Sid Meier:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/sidlegacy/gather.html

Groundhog

08-01-2006, 06:01 PM

Yeah, I have zilch interest in Magic or any other game involving cards. Just not my cup of tea.

Buccaneer

08-01-2006, 07:04 PM

This is a cool idea, I really like the screenshots and writeups. Of course I have to disagree with some of them. As much as I was a huge fan of Microprose, I could not understand why Colonization proved to be a hit - esp. when the far superior Interplay's Conquest of the New World hit about the same time. CotNW had much better graphics (Colonization looked like something from the mid-80s while CotNW had very similar improvement graphics that you see in Civ4 - and that was 10 years ago!). CotNW had one of the best SP, turn-based combat ever - even better than Civ4's combat (although a little different in scope). But Colonization had Sid's name on it.

As usual, I agree with Imran about Civ and EU. As much as I tried to like that and get up some interest here for that game when it came out, it didn't take long to realize that there were some elements that were poorly implemented (trade, combat, naval and the whole system of improvements/research). It did implement some things very well (diplomacy, religion if I recall) but there always have been the debate of whether you accepted their way of implementing these things and whether you thought the good outweighed the bad.

I also understand paying homage to the original in picking Civ1. Civ2 was a better game in every single way and Civ4 (once they get going on true scenarios) will likely surpass even that. Having said that, I would have been consistent in picking SimCity over SimCity4.

Abe Sargent

08-02-2006, 12:29 AM

Time for number six. After this, we have only the top five to go. Incidentally, this is the last MicroProse game to chart.

6. Master of Magic
MicroProse
1994
PC
GameSpot Review - 9.4 *
4x

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/master_of_magic

http://www.abandonia.com/images/games/Master%20of%20Magic_thumb.jpg

Master of Magic was, to me, the pinnacle of Civ-clones. To my mind, no Civ game has ever been as good for its time as Master of Magic was. Why am I so smitten by MoM?

First of all, Master of Magic is a Civ clone in a traditional sense, but you choose a magical race instead of a nationality. Each race has their own units, buildings, bonuses and penalties. Things that typically change from race to race include what building a race can build in a city, growth rate, soldier types, and more.

Like I said, a Civ clone in some sense:

http://www.abandonia.com/games/en/189/images/games/Master%20of%20Magic3.png

You see, each race had their own, individual units. Only orcs had wyvern riders, for example.

You would build a city, grow it, send out new settlers, make army units, build a nice army, and have a lot of fun with the Civ aspect of the game.

Of course, the units here were much more detailed than Civ. They had the old veteran, rookie, type ratings for their combat, sure, but they also had abilities. Some units flew, others were faster or slower, some had a ranged attacks or immunities, and a few cast spells.

However, an adjunct to all of this strategy was the magic side of the game. You researched new spells, and could cast them. You needed mana, which you could get from cities or from magical nodes of energy located throughout the world. Tapping into a node yielded a sizable bump in mana each turn.

You then channeled your mana and cast various spells. The most common spell was a summoning spell, which would create a unit you could add to your armies. The Civ strategy gave you normal units, like the aforementioned Wyvern Riders, and they were paid with gold and upkept with food, like all units. Summoned creatures instead relied on a regular amount of mana, and cost you mana per turn.

Yet another type of unit was the hero. This represented one individual who gained signifcantly in skills and abilities with experience, and in fact, leveled sort of like an RPG.

The best army often combined good regular units with good heroes and good summoned units.

Nothing better than casting a spell.

http://www.abandonia.com/games/en/189/images/games/Master%20of%20Magic5.png

In magic, you could also enchance current units, create artifacts for your heros to carry and enhance their powers, cast enchantments on your land, and of course, cast spells in battle.

You could cast a spell in battle. Sometimes, you want to heal one of your guys, and you can. Or, you may want to protect or enhance your guys, and you can. You can even attack opposing figures.

There is one world, with ruins, lairs, temples, towers and more to explore. In these places your find gold and artifacts. There is also another world, another plane of existance, where other players are playing and building armies.

This adds an entire dimension to the game (Figuratively as well as literally.) You have a new front to explore and use. Some units can cross the boundaries between planes and make amazing flanking units. You can also study spells that do the same. There are places on the map that are also crossing spaces.

You can win by defeating all of your wizard foes or casting the ultimate spell of winningness (it's called something but I forget the title).

Of course, there's diplomacy with other wizards, combat with both random units and other foes, and more.

Like Master of Orion, there are various options that you can choose at the beginning of the game to select your own wizard. Or, you can choose one of the pregenerated wizards.

Wizards can have abilities, just like Master of Orion. However, as a neat little spin, wizards also have to purchase access to schools of magic. There are five different schools of magic, from nature to chaos to death and life and sorcery. Chaos will give you a alot of attack spells and death will give you some, but no healing. Nature and life have healing spells but no attack spells (actually, I think Nature may have one), sorcery has phantasmal monsters that can be summoned in combat and counter magic, and so forth.

Not only do you purchase access to a school of magic, but you also spend points to determine how strong your access is. The stronger your access the more and better spells you will have available to research.

This adds an amazing replayable element to the game. You have races with different abilities, you can start on one of two planes, and you can choose which magic(s) you want along with various abilities. Then, when you start playing, you can focus on developing magical strength or traditional strength.

It is, frankly, the best product MicroProse distributed (made by SimTex) and one of the best games I've ever played.

-Anxiety

Peregrine

08-02-2006, 12:57 AM

Excellent choice, I still break out MoM a couple times a year to mess around with it, just a great game.

Daimyo

08-02-2006, 01:30 AM

Wow, I never knew the M:tG game had all that other stuff in it... Ill have to look for it now (underdogs?). I was a huge fan of the CCG back then and I remember playing the demo (I think you could use the white deck to play against five other preset decks) and the computer AI was so terrible in the duels that I never even bothered to look at the game after that. Guess I missed out!

Izulde

08-02-2006, 01:48 AM

Excellent choice, I still break out MoM a couple times a year to mess around with it, just a great game.

"

Marc Vaughan

08-02-2006, 02:30 AM

Definitely agree with Master of Magic - loved that game :D

Havok

08-02-2006, 07:12 AM

MoM rocks hard

Eaglesfan27

08-02-2006, 08:40 AM

MoM is a great choice. :)

Abe Sargent

08-02-2006, 04:06 PM

It time for the first game in the top five games ever made, and it finishes a three game mini-theme in games 7, 6, and 5. This is also the highest charting console game, and you would never have guessed the console.

5. Culdcept
Omiya Software
1997
Saturn
GameSpot Review - None for DC version, 7.9 for later PS2 port.
Strategy - Card Game

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots2/918917.jpg

The PS2 port was rated lower than it might otherwise had been because it was several years old and desiged for a system with worse graphics. However, you have to be surprised to see a Saturn game make my list (a later verion was on Dreamcast), and even more suprised to see it hit this highly.

The pics will be from the PS2 port, which combined the original Culdcept game with an expansion disc into one game.

Culdcept is the perfect blending of two distinct genres in one game: Monopoly and Magic.

In Culdcept, you move around a board with a variety of spaces. Some spaces have rules attached, and some are of four different elements - Air, Fire, Water and Earth. You can "capture" a vacant spece by summoning a creature to guard it. Then, if you land on someone's space, you either have to pay a toll, or summon your own cretaure to fight their guardian. Defeat their guardian, and you take the space. Lose, and you still have to pay the toll.

Here's a look at one of the maps:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/reviews/918917_20031215_screen013.jpg

Later maps, including this one, have new spaces. This map has vacant spaces that are elementless. Some have spaces that are all four colors.

Cards are divided into three types. Creatures, items, and spells. At the beginning of your turn, you can cast any spell you want. Some make mana, some affect the dice roll, some affect creatures, some affect the board, some affect players, and a few affect other things, like symbol value and such.

After playing a spell or not, you then roll the dice and move. After moving you can take one territory command or summon a creature to either capture or attack the space you are on, if it is capturable.

Here is a player about to summon a Spitting Cobra:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/reviews/918917_20031215_screen005.jpg

The currency of the game is mana. You gain mana when you make a circuit of the board, like passing Go in Monopoly. There are also various magical effects you can have that gain you mana, and you get mana from tolls. You need mana to summon monsters and to play the other cards in your hand. You also need mana to activate most of the various terrain commands (explained later).

The game is also a collectible card game, like Magic. There game comes with cards that are common, uncommon and rare. You will get cards after playing a game, no matter whether you win or lose, but you'll get more and rare cards the better you do. This is a permanent benefit to playing the game.

Before the game, you build a deck and then as the game progresses, you draw cards from your deck. Each campaign is different as your deck evolves in different ways.

Each creature has one of the four elements, or is neutral. A Centaur Archer, for example, is a desert creature. If a creature is summoned to guard a land of its own element, it will get a HP bonus equal to ten times the level of the land.

You have mana, but you also have a net worth. This is the value of all of your holdings, plus your available mana. When your net worth goes above a certain amount, you win the game.

One way to increase net worth is to take a space. Taking a space allows you to own land. That incrases your net worth. If you gain a second spalce of the same element, then you have a chain. Each space is now worth a little more than they would be worth individually. If you get another space of that element, your chain will get bigger, and the individual value increases even more. Therefore, one of the keys of the game is to get chains, much like getting all of the properties of the same color increase the value in Monopoly, only more conplex.

Any time you pass a space you own, you can take a territory action with that space as your action for the turn. Most of these cost mana. You can change the element of the terrain to another element. You can switch monsters with one from your hand, you can move a creature one space adjacent, you can use any territory ability the creature has, or you can level up the land.

Levelling up land is like buying hotels and houses in Monopoly. The charge in mana for landing on one of these gets increasingly higher. It also protects a creature of the same element more. However, it is a risky move, because if the space is taken from you, it can be a major swing in net worth.

Changing elements is useful to force chains. Switching monsters can give you a more defensive creature to guard the space. Moving, which is free, can move the creature to a better space or begin a conflict with whoever is already in teh space you moved to.

Lastly, some creatures have a territory command, like Fate. Whenever you pass Fate, for your action, you can spend 40 mana to draw a card. The Spitting Cobra pic above shows a creature with a territory ability.

Another way to increse net worth is with symbols, which are like stock. You can buy symbols in one of the four colors, and as land is leveled and chains are made, the value of that symbol increases. When that happens, your net worth increases. However, if a land is easily divded between players, lacks development and sees creatures die, value will barely rise, or hold steady, or possibly even plummet. Therefore, a concerted effort is often placed in ruining an opponent's symbols.

Okay, let's take a look at a creature. This is a Shell Creeper:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/reviews/918917_20031215_screen017.jpg

You can tell it is a water creature from the blue border and the blue symbol to the right of its name. The N in the upper right corner means that it is a common creature (N stands for normal).

The creature has hit points and attack. In this case, a 20 attack and 30 hp.
As a creature takes damage, their HP drops but their MaxHP is still displayed. The G is the mana used (there's another word for it, but I can't remember).

The item limit tell you what items this creature cannot use. Here, you can see that our turtle friend is unable to use scrolls.

He also has a special ability. All attacks on him from air or fire monsters are neutralized. This makes him a good attacker into one of those guys with first attack (explained below) or a good defender against those two element types.

Lots of creatures have abilities. Normally, the attacker attacks first then if the defender survived, it attacks back. However, creatures with first attack get the first hit on defense, unless the attacks also has first attack, in which normal battle progression occurs. There are other abilites. Support allows you to use a creature as an item, for example.

You can then use one item. Some pump defense, some pump offense, some give various abilities, some prevent damage, and quite a few do odd, eccentric things. For example, a lucky coin will give you some mana after combat if your creature survives.

Once two creatures attack, a little animation shows each card, and various animations based on the attack type will attack the cards. Here's a battle animation:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/ps2/culdcept/1006/c_screen008.jpg

The hobgoblin on the left is in the process of clubbing the Cyclops on the right. The Cyclops will kill the hobgoblin on the return attack, but he will have lost HP. HP are restored slowly over time or through spells.

If neither creatures kills the other in one attack, the battle is over. The summoned or moved creatures returns, all items are used, no territory changes hands, and any tolls still need to be paid.

Some powerful monsters require that you already have land of the appropriate type to summon them, in addition to any mana. This means they aren't getting summoned in the early game. Some powerful creatures, spells, and items require you to discard a card in addition to paying any costs. Super powerful creatures combine these things. You have to balance power with cost. You often want cheap creatures and cheap cards justas much as you want uber-powerful cretures and cards.

As a multiplayer game, Culdcept is the best non-GameCube party games I know. Women and men love Culdcept, and we played a lot for months. Everybody starts with a solid deck, and can build it from there as they gain new cards. You can also trade cards to people in a multiplayer trading room, so a player with a ton of cards can give a few to a newb to round out the newbs decks.

Culdcept has a campaign with tons of maps to fight on. Afterwards, you can do a variety of challenges to unlock maps and extra rare cards for your character.

There are two negatives to Culdcept. First of all, although it doesn't happen regularly, occasionally you'll run into a smattering of Engrish on a card and wonder what it does. (Like Nymph or Lilith).

Secondly, the graphics are a bit dated, although I excuse that knowing its age and the system it was meant for. However, the art on the cards is very beautiful, and makes up for the poor graphics.

Many players don't like collectible card games because they don't want to drop all of that money on packs of cards. Every card in Culdcept is in the game, and you always get cards by playing, but you can also get them through trading and even get a few extra rare (Unique for each player) cards in the campaign and later in the challenges.

I hope you can see why I love Culdcept. The meshing of two distinct genres in one game is simply, magical, and it combines together very well. Gamespy even had it in its top ten games of the year.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

08-02-2006, 06:21 PM

I believe that the the top four games on my list are a tier above ebery other game, but that they are all in the argument for my number one game, and I consider it a close race. At different points in in, 1, 2, and 4 have all been in my number one spot and 3 could have been. These games are immense, detailed, intricate, complex, open-ended, and tons of fun.

I wonder what they are?

:p

-Anxiety

Izulde

08-02-2006, 06:22 PM

:eek:

Wow, that was unexpected.

I tried Culdcept back in the day and really wanted to like it, but just couldn't. Maybe I'll give it another crack.

Peregrine

08-02-2006, 10:14 PM

Wow, definitely not what I was expecting for the top 5, I remember one friend said it was decent but that was about it.

Peregrine

08-02-2006, 10:19 PM

Toddzilla

08-03-2006, 07:35 AM

What? No Cross-Country USA?

Eaglesfan27

08-03-2006, 08:17 AM

Count me among those who tried Culdcept, and never really liked it. It was ok, but not one of my top 25 or 30.

Then again, I'm not a fan of Magic: The Gathering either.

Warhammer

08-03-2006, 08:22 AM

I agree with most of these picks, but I do have a few comments to make. First, instead of singling out Angbad, I would have specified Rogue-likes. There are a significant number of them out there, and it is hard to single out any single one as the definitive one.

Second, MoM should have been in the top 5. The only problem that game had was the AI.

Third, my wife is pissed at me since I had to go back and replay Starcon 2. My son has loved me because we have played SuperMelee head to head every night since I downloaded UQM.

Godzilla Blitz

08-03-2006, 09:06 AM

Great job with this. I'm enjoying it.

This will make a nice resource when I'm looking for something new to play. I love retro gaming, and our tastes seem to run along similar lines. I'm looking forward to trying out some of these games that I've never gotten around to.

It's really hard to read this and not want to make a list of your own.

Some thoughts on the games you've mentioned...

Colonization
I had the Mac version and have never been so disappointed or pissed at a game in my life. The port from the PC was so horribly done that the game was essentially unplayable on the Mac. I downloaded the game for the PC a few years ago but never got around to playing it much. I'll have to go back and give it a shot.

Monster Rancher
I really enjoy this series, but haven't played much since playing Monster Rancher 2 on the GBA. I picked up Monster Rancher 5 (import version) for the PS2 recently when I was in Japan, but it was in a discount bin for about $8, so I have a feeling the latest version is not the series' best effort. I wish I grabbed MR3 or MR4 while I was there.

Magic the Gathering
I really liked this game but played it on a computer that could barely handle it. Like about a hundred other games, it's on my list of "games to get back to" now that I've got a better computer that can run it. Reading this makes me want to give it a try.

In any case, great stuff! Looking forward to reading about your last four favorites.

cubboyroy1826

08-03-2006, 10:43 AM

Anyone have a link to download the Magic:Shandalar other than the demo?

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 10:43 AM

Thanks guys!

Eaglesfan27

08-03-2006, 12:05 PM

I've been putting out a few slightly negative comments in so far that I haven't agreed with some of the picks, but I just wanted to add to the many compliments about the write-ups. While I have some disagreements with the actual ranking of games, the style and substance of the write-ups is top notch. Good job, and I look forward to seeing more of the top 5. :)

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 02:46 PM

I had intended to write this up last night but board slowdown resulted in me spenind 30-40 minutes more running my Werewolf game than I would have done otherwise. I have a break right now, though, so I am ready for the first game of the final four. The top echelon, in my opinion, of all video games, ever.

4. Crusader Kings
Paradox
2004
PC
GameSpot review - 8.2
Strategy

GamersGate - Buy and download games now! (http://www.gamersgate.com/DDB-CKDV/crusader-kings-complete-bundle)

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots2/560986.jpg

Three gaming companies have multiple games on the list. 3DO and New World Computing had two games in their franchises chart. At times, it might have seemed like half the list was MicroProse. (Master of Orion II, Master of Magic, Shandalar, Civ, X-Com and Colonization for a total of 6 games), and now Paradox scores with EU2 and CK.

If EU2 ruined my experience with traditional turn based strategies, CK buried it deep underground where is may never be found save by archeologists years in the future.

When I first wrote this list, CK was in the top spot. After some consideration, I dropped it to four, because I do think that this game is the most flawed of the highest tiered games. However, there are some things about CK that no other game on this list can touch.

First of all, I have played some complex games. Space Empires IV, Monster Rancher 3, text based sims, and more. Tons of complex games over the years have been in my console systems and in my PC.

What I am about to say may shock you at first, but I want you to consider it:

Crusader Kings is the most complex video game I have ever played.

It seems to me that the gaming paradigm has switched. Now console games are intricate while PC games are built around The Sims and 50,000 tycoons, little java games, and other games designed to fill time at work or on a plane. Where once PC games were complex and detailed, now console systems are, but PC games seem to be getting simpler.

Breaking through all of that is Crusader Kings. Crusader Kings seems to the be evolution of what computer gaming is all about. It is the pinnacle of a classic strategy game. In fact, CK is the highest charting strategy game in my countdown. No game has ever been as good.

Crusader Kings is similar to EU2 in many respects. It was designed by the same company, it has many of the same principles. Crusader Kings is to Europa Universalis 2 as Master of Magic is to Civilization. Both games came afterwards and added a ton of new features and ideas to the formula.

Here are some things CK has:

A living, breathing dynasty. It's a little small, though.

http://www.armchairempire.com/images/Reviews/pc/crusader-kings/crusader-kings-1.jpg

You have uncles, aunts, brothers, parents, children, distant cousins, and a spouse or three. You choose who to marry in England, assuming the monarch of that country agrees. You can look at dynasties and try to find one that is vulnerable. Then you marry into it, assassinate an heir or two, and now your grandson is the heir.

If you die without a direct descendant as your heir, its game over.

You can also bring in new blood for your line, including better stats for your rulers and advisors. The basic states are martial, stewarship, intrigue and diplomacy. You rule can have an advisor in each of these field which will add the advisors stat to his own.

Controlling your dynasty is a very important part of CK, just as it was in those times. This adds a new element to the classic strategic forumula. Conquering, not by diplomacy nor by war, but dynastically.

Of course, war and diplomacy are also available to you, similary to EU2. CK kept the best stuff from EU2, like the badboy rating that prevents you from attacking and annexing land haphazardly. Other things they kept was the tech development system and the four classes that you have to balance.

Another addition is the use of policies. For example, there are several different heritage policies, and the one you use will determine your heir. Another set of policies, for example, is how you treat the church. Are you sovreign, is the church sovreign, do you try to equal it out. This will determine things like who chooses bishops - the pope or you?

The concept of desmesne is taken very seriously here. Based on factors such as your intrigue rating, you can only directly rule a small number of lands. After that, you have to give them away to dukes or counts. If you are a Duke, you can have counts who rule provinces nad report directly to you. If you are a King, you can have both dukes and counts report directly to you.

There are no standing armies. Instead, you have to raise an army from one of your provinces. These armies have a set number of units based on the relative power of the four economic classes, based in large part on various policies you set.

You can build up your provinces as you gain technology. However, you can only do this with the provinces in your direct desmesne. Your vassals will have to choose when and what to build on their own. The games suimulates this very well. Give a vassal a gift of 100 ducats and you might immediately see that vassal start a project in his province. On the other hand, some vassals just hoard their money and won't start anything at all.

Vassals have loyalty to their monarch, and that changes over time either positively or negatively based on several factors. Prestige of the monarch, similarly of the monarch and the vassal when it comes to personalties, intrigue or diplomacy ability of the monarch (I forget which), and more.

Everybody has various personalty traits. All traits have some game effects. People have educational traits, like Martial Scholar or Poor Diplomat. These reflect how well the person learned their trade. Then they have various personalities like ruthless, generous, cruel, chaste, and more. Many have both positive and negative benefits, and many will add or subtract to a character's score.

Using these personalties, you can see which vassals are more likely to get along than others. A generous king will get along more with his generous duke. A duke who is not generous won't have such an attachment, while a greedy Duke will have problems with the king (many personality traits have opposites).

The problem is that if you do thigs like strip someone of their title just because they don't like you and their loyalty is dropping over time, your other vassals are not going to be pleased, and their loyality will suffer an immediate hit. Plus, if the vassal refuses to give up their title, you may have to go to war with your own vassal in order to get your land in the hands of someone more loyal. Then, when you die, and your son takes over with a different set of personality traits, the loyalty of your vassals change. This creates serious tension in your family.

This is a much more open ended game than EU2. As you raise your children, you get options that might give them various traits. All events in CK are random, whereas EU2 had random events and set events to show the historical struggles of a country.

If you are a count, you can claim a Duke title once you've gobbled up enough lands in a historically accurate duchy. Once your are a Duke, you can claim a historical Kingdom with enough provinces.

You can also begin as a vassal of a Duke or King. There are literally hundreds of counties, duchies and kingdoms for you to start with.

Your ruler has a piety and prestige rating. Some diplomatic actions take prestige, like "discovering" an ancient claim to a land, so you can capture land. Piety will increase or decrease based on traits, how much the ruler is donating every month to the local church, and various policies.

The map is very detailed, and I love it:

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/550/550902/crusader-kings-20040924013920019-000.jpg

Compare, for example, to other games. In Medieval: TW, Ireland is one prevince. In the Viking expansion that focuses on just the British Isles, Ireland is only five provinces.

In CK, which is focused on all of Europe, there are 13. Combine the sheer size of the map with the difficulty of taking land, and you have an amazingly tough time.

One of the only complaints I have against the game is that is does not have enough documentation. You have to figure out some things on your own, or consult people on forums. However, despite that, the difficulty, complexity, and sheer size of the game make this not only my fourth overall game of all time, but my top strategy game of all time as well.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 02:47 PM

The screenshots for CK are too big, let me see if I can find anything a little smaller.

-Anxiety

EDIT: Okay, new pics are up.

ISiddiqui

08-03-2006, 03:30 PM

Meh, that should have been considered in the EU series :p.

I believe that the the top four games on my list are a tier above ebery other game, but that they are all in the argument for my number one game, and I consider it a close race. At different points in in, 1, 2, and 4 have all been in my number one spot and 3 could have been. These games are immense, detailed, intricate, complex, open-ended, and tons of fun.

I wonder what they are?

Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and San Andreas?! ;)

Though, actually my second favorite game of all time was the GTA3 series.

King of New York

08-03-2006, 03:41 PM

Cool thread.

Now, a good-natured rant: CK over EU II? EU II covers the whole globe, and CK is hampered by court management issues: after a couple of generations, your court has about sixty people in it, and there is no search filter! In fact, I would put HOI II above both CK and EU II, although maybe that will be in your top four.

I am guessing that CM/FM will be in the top four, and perhaps number one.

What about Eastside Hockey Manager? Dominions II? I would put them in the top thirty, and Dominions II might even merit a top-five finish.

rjolley

08-03-2006, 03:51 PM

Couldn't find the old post about the-underdogs.info, so I'll post here. Has anyone been able to download from that site?

Eaglesfan27

08-03-2006, 04:07 PM

I love CK. Great choice :)

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 04:19 PM

Cool thread.

Now, a good-natured rant: CK over EU II? EU II covers the whole globe, and CK is hampered by court management issues: after a couple of generations, your court has about sixty people in it, and there is no search filter!

Maybe you need the most recent patch that really ckeeps courtesans down. I also libreally use the cheat/kill command to off useless courtesans.

-Anxiety

Izulde

08-03-2006, 04:40 PM

A couple of small corrections to make in your CK review:

The number of provinces you can control as of the latest patch (1.05) is determined by your character's Intrigue rating, not Stewardship.

Also, the types of troops you get is largely dependant not so much on the power of the classes, but on what governing system you have. Hence, if you want a lot of knights, you use Feudal Contract as your law of rule. :)

Peregrine

08-03-2006, 05:34 PM

Now, a good-natured rant: CK over EU II? EU II covers the whole globe, and CK is hampered by court management issues: after a couple of generations, your court has about sixty people in it, and there is no search filter! In fact, I would put HOI II above both CK and EU II, although maybe that will be in your top four.

I certainly agree about the EU 2 part, I would have switched them in the list, and maybe dropped CK a few spots down from there, but this isn't my list, it's Anxiety's. I enjoy CK and think it has some very good ideas, particularly after the 1.05 patch. However, while it's a good game to document what one count or duke or kingdom could do in a historical vaccuum, I feel the weaknesses in the diplomacy and war systems make it very unhistorical. You routinely see countries completely collapse because of rebellious vassals, and of couse while there were many of those in history, seeing things like the entire Byzantine empire collapse in the first 50 years of a game really gives me pause. I also miss the events of EU2, I guess overall I want more of a connection to history than the game provides.

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 05:59 PM

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 06:50 PM

I have a few minutes so let's do the number three game, and the one game from its genre on my list.

3. Ultima Online
Origin later EA
PC
1997
GameSpot Review - 4.9
MMORPG

Newsletter and Exciting News – Ultima Online (http://www.uoherald.com/news/index.php)

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/boxshots/6/199146_pc.jpg

I think it's funny that my number three game had such a low review for UO. To be fair, UO shipped with bugs and they also didn't know what to expect from a mega-multiplayer game.

Ultima Online stands to me as one of the best mmorpgs of all time, plus arguably the first (some would claim LOTR is the first).

Let's look at some of the things UO did:

1. There were no classes, and no levels. Instead of a traditional RPG approach to the game, you simply have skills and a certain number of skill points you can put into them if you so desire. You raise a skill by using it, and skills are capped at 100 points (this has since changed a bit). This was amazingly inventive, and later competitors could not touch UO in this area.

2. UO was happy to support non-combatitive skills. Sure, you can RPG as warrior, or an archer, or a tamer or a bard if you want, but there were other skills as well. There were skills that really appeared in RPGs for the first time: Carpentry and fishing and tinkering. You raised these like you did combat skills - with practice. You made lots of weapons and armor to raise blacksmithing, and made lots of maps for cartography. This was also super realistic, and no competitor added this to this game for years.

3. UO allowed you to buy a house deed, and set it down. You could store stuff in your house and decorate it however you wanted. Lots of items were designed to be used in houses, like almost everything a carpenter could make.

In a traditional RPG, if it included carpentry, you probably made wooden weapons and armor. Here, you could make tables, chairs, bookshelves, stools, and more.

A later expansion set allowed houses to be customizable, so you could really build whatever you wanted with your house.

To this day, no other RPG has duplicated the UO housing system.

The game also had traditional RPG elements in it. Here people are fighting lizardmen.

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/6/199146/ultimao_screen003.jpg

You have traditional skills that help you to fight, cast spells, enchance your fighting, your spellcasting, and so forth. For example, my first character had:

Sword-fighting, which allowed him to use a sword,
Parrying which allowed him to effectively fight with a shield,
Healing to use bandages to heal himself
Anatomy which increased melee damage and amount healed with bandages
Tactics which increased damage dealt
And a smattering of magery and hiding.

The world was immense. It was the largest gameworld ever seen when it was released, chock full of ruins, caves, dungeons, cities, islands, temples, shrines, graveyards, and a lot more. There's a lot of history in Britannia.

Here a couple of guys are dominating a small sandstone ruin in the jungle.

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/8/145428/uosecond_screen005.jpg

Some of the things the game allowed people complained about, and resulted partly in the lower score by GameSpot. Origins thought it would be a selling point, but instead, these things sent people away. They were looking for a traditional RPG in an mmorpg, and it hurt the game. What are these things?

A. People could steal stuff from you. There were ways to protect yourself, but was a chance someone would snoop your backpack and then steal an item. A lot of players like to keep a hold of the things they acquired.

B. People could attack you out in the wild away from towns. They might even kill you. Sure, there were penalties for this, but a developed character may not have cared as much. Again, people liked knowing that they weren't going to be attacked.

C. People could loot your corpse. When you died you has to get ressed and then get back to your corpse before it decayed. In the meantime, people could loot your corpse and take what they found. Once again, people don;t like losing their stuff.

In a normal RPG, you'd just reload a save if you died, and there'd be no players to attack you and the stealing AI wouldn't be as good as another player so you'd be able to handle it.

What game developers learned from UO was that people don't like losing their things or being attacked unless they want to. Even UO would ultimately patch to no PVP servers and permissive PVP servers where you had to belong to a faction.

It was the right idea, but it was too revolutionary. Another great idea was the concept of a living economy. But some regs from a mage in town and the next time someone wants to buy regs, the price goes up. If there is a long time before anybody buys regs, then the price drops, with an absolute floor.

It was great for controlling the economy, but again, players didn't like this. UO got rid of it, and over time, the economy went bust, in part because of this.

Power creep was introduced to the game with expansions as well. More powerful monsters, more powerful items, higher skills allowed, more powerful monsters, no individual stat cap, artifacts introduced, even more powerful monsters - etc.

However, the game has several constants still. It has a very dedicated group of players that still play UO to this day. Although it was first, UO has seen many Mega-Multiplayer games come and go, but it is still around.

In addition to amazing ideas and advancing RPGs years and founding a new genre with its release, UO is also a damn fun game, and one that is even easier to play today than it was almost 10 years ago.

-Anxiety

MizzouRah

08-03-2006, 07:27 PM

At number twelve we have one of the true classics of the early PC era.

12. Wasteland
Interplay
1986
PC
GameSpot Review - 8.9 * (remember, an Asterisk means no official review, just a user review)

http://home.comcast.net/~darkguardian15/images/WLBOX.JPG

Probably a top 5 in my book. That was the best game on the C64 next to Hardball, 4th and Inches, and Stealth Fighter.

Not a mention of any FPS game yet or Tecmo Bowl?

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 07:39 PM

Half Life is an FPS

Peregrine

08-03-2006, 07:41 PM

Good choice with UO, definitly an underrated game. I got on the MMORPG train a bit too late to play it more than a little, but my DAOC clan had moved over from there and was always talking about how good it was. Ah, the good old days.

Swaggs

08-03-2006, 07:43 PM

Just caught up on this one.

Good stuff.

Makes me long for the high school and college days, when I had time to play an RPG for like 15 hours a day. :)

Ironhead

08-03-2006, 07:51 PM

Half Life is an FPS

I think he might mean Front Page Sports.

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 07:54 PM

Ah, I see.

Groundhog

08-03-2006, 08:31 PM

Makes me long for the high school and college days, when I had time to play an RPG for like 15 hours a day. :)

Tell me about it. I miss the days where I'd get up at 7, go to school, get home at 4, play Baldurs Gate until 1am, sleep, and then repeat the cycle once again...

MizzouRah

08-03-2006, 08:34 PM

I think he might mean Front Page Sports.

Yes, sorry. :) .. I'm more of a sports junkie.. but there are some golden games in this thread for sure.

Havok

08-03-2006, 08:41 PM

GREAT choice with UO.

Before it got taken over by carebears, UO was the best PvP game ever. People are to dam lazy in MMORPG'S. They want nice shiny loot and they wanna kill big mean computer controlled dragons.

Old school UO there was actual FEAR when you left town. Fear that at any second some PvP'er could come along and nail you. I do admit that there were quite a few griefers and they sucked. But nothing felt better when you finally got a nice sized crew together, then went and took out those griefers. Nothing you do in modern day MMORPG's comes close to that feeling.

What a game! after it turned into blue'be land, i went and played on quite a few player run shards. In fact there is a dam big one still out there that is awsome. I forget the dam name though, last i checked they had an average of like 400 people on line at a time. Its very PvP based but mostly in factions. Good fun :)

great pick bro, UO is a top 5 for me aswell.

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 10:01 PM

I'm feeling industrious since I'm nearing the end of my list. Next up is number two, and being my Second Favorite Game of All Time is Something. One caveat, I have no played the sequel yet, because I don't have a DVD-ROM. As soon as I get one, I intend to play the sequal for years on end until I have squeezed every last drop of flavor out of the game. Until then, my second favorite game is...

2. The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
Bethesda
PC
2002
GameSpot Review - 8.7
RPG

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/22320/)

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2002/pc/featurepreviews/morrowind/morrow_box.jpg

Flavorful.
Sprawling.
Labyrinthine.
Realistic.
Haunting.
Breathtaking.

Beautiful:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2002/pcnews/011402/morrow/morrow_screen009.jpg

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/feature_previews/morrowind/morrowind_screen017.jpg

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/news/010501/morrow_screen001.jpg

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/feature_previews/morrowind/morrowind_screen012.jpg

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/e3_2001/pc/morrowind/morrowind_screen004.jpg

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/news/010129/morrowind_screen001.jpg

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/screenshots/gs/news/010720/morrowind_screen001.jpg

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/morrowind_031502_013.jpg

http://pcmedia.ign.com/media/previews/image/mwind014.jpg

http://www.pick.ucam.org/~apc27/pics/pub-37.jpg

http://www.pick.ucam.org/~apc27/pics/pub-16.jpg

Words are simply not sufficient to express the beauty, awe, and grandeur of Morrowind. Can a review be told with just pictures?

-Anxiety

Peregrine

08-03-2006, 10:05 PM

Yep, this is top 3 material for me as well. Oblivion is also good, though in different ways. I feel that the mods are just starting to bring it up to a good level though, so it's probably a good thing you didn't play from the start.

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 10:11 PM

Im trying to find smaller pics for the Morrowind pic sequence

Swaggs

08-03-2006, 10:15 PM

Anyone have guesses as to #1?

I'm thinking it has to be a Wizardry or Warcraft.

thealmighty

08-03-2006, 10:21 PM

Morrowind > Oblivion, imho.

saldana

08-03-2006, 10:21 PM

Anyone have guesses as to #1?

I'm thinking it has to be a Wizardry or Warcraft.

wizardry 8 is one of my all time favorites, so i could easily see that, but while reading this thread i of course started working on my own list in my head, and i keep coming back to StarCraft.

saldana

08-03-2006, 10:22 PM

dola, if it werent for the fact that we know its a pc game, i could also have voted for Metroid.

Abe Sargent

08-03-2006, 10:24 PM

I hope you guys don't mind the different style of review. I could talk at lentgth about how Morrowind in the spiritual successor to Might and Magic with a huge world, tons of things to do, scads of temples, ruins, burial mounds, caves, and mines that you never are asked to go to, but you can wander in if you'd like, and more.

However, I think Morrowind is the computer game closest to being a piece of modern art. Therefore, I felt a different style of review was in line.

Grammaticus

08-03-2006, 10:38 PM

I had been wondering if Fallout would be in there. Doubt it is number one, though. No idea, a few of the top 5 have come out of nowhere.

ISiddiqui

08-03-2006, 10:54 PM

I had been wondering if Fallout would be in there. Doubt it is number one, though. No idea, a few of the top 5 have come out of nowhere.
No kidding (sorry, Anxiety, I won't bring the GD discussion here... promise!) ;).

If we are limiting to PC games, I think something like Fallout or Planescape: Torment or System Shock 2 or Doom or Grand Theft Auto 3 could fit in here.

Peregrine

08-03-2006, 11:23 PM

Well some of my top 10 that haven't been named are Fallout, Planescape: Torment, and System Shock 2. Will be interesting to see what is #1.

edit - Heh, just read the post above, at least we're on the same track!

Raven Hawk

08-03-2006, 11:55 PM

One word:

PONG!

Groundhog

08-04-2006, 01:31 AM

Commander Keen.

condors

08-04-2006, 05:06 AM

#1 i am guessing is football manager 2005 or championship manager 3 but i also don't see how wizardry, fallout, bards tale and dominions 2 are not on the list. If rts is factor than starcraft could be #1.

Its been a great read though

Peregrine

08-04-2006, 05:57 AM

This has really made me think, it would be an interesting project to try to identify the top 30 games among FOFC in general. I guess you'd have to do something like compile a giant list of games, then have people pick their favorite 30 of them and compile the results. Might be interesting though.

Havok

08-04-2006, 06:21 AM

another great pick at number 2..... but i just bought Oblivion last week and i gotta say it's better then Morrowind in my mind. I enjoyed MW alot and i thought it was 1 hell of a game. But Oblivion is blowing me away. The graphics are jaw dropping, the shear size of the game is amazing, the combat is actually challenging(unlike MW), you don't spend hours just running from place to place and EVERYONE actually talks!!

great game!

spleen1015

08-04-2006, 06:30 AM

I think the top spot goes to one of the GTA3 triology games.

Mustang

08-04-2006, 07:00 AM

Lot's of games I can think of. These - Fallout, Command & Conquer, Diablo, Neverwinter Nights, Pirates, Elite.. probably would have made my list.

Buccaneer

08-04-2006, 08:55 AM

Oh no, Morrowind is #2. Well, it is your list for I hated that game. I thought it was a very ugly, barren world. Cool lighting and water effects though.

vtbub

08-04-2006, 10:39 AM

I'm surprised that none of the cm/fm series made your top 30.

Wow did that get stuck in a loop? It posted that 15 times.

Abe Sargent

08-04-2006, 10:41 AM

Time to write up the pinnacle of games, the tip of the top, cream of the crop, Mary Poppins and there we stop game. The top game is one that will be familiar to many of you. Wondering what it is? Well wonder no more.

1. Football Manager 2006
Sports Interactive
PC
2005
GameSpot Review - None (2k5 received 8.6)

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2003/all/boxshots2/928129_67520.jpg

Why do I like this game, and I did I choose it as my top game?

To me, FM is pretty much the ideal game in many ways. Although it is tremendously intricate, like the other top games, it does not suffer from a lack of documentation. Instead, the manual and guides you can download from SI's site are very good at telling you what the game is about.

The game's difficulty is modular. If you don't want to do training, you don't have to. If you don't want to worry about your lower squads, you don't have to. Your Assistant Manager will take up a lot of slack for you.

On the other hand, if you want to get yoru hands dirty, no game will let you do as much under the hood as FM. The sheer number of leagues, teams, coaches, players, scouts and unemployed will stagger a mule.

The tactics are just incredibly deep. Note that the pic is from the XBox version of the game because those pics are smaller.

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2005/222/929429_20050811_screen003.jpg

I know that some people prefer the quick sim of FOF to the slower speed of FM. However, that does not deny the greatness that is FM.

I didn't even like soccer when I started playing FM. When I played the game, I was not only learning a new video game, I was learning a sport as well. This past World Cup, I watched almost every game. I went from soccer scrub to soccer fan because of this game.

The depth of game really brings to life soccer management. When other sports sims often feel like accounting, FM feels like enmeshment. You feel like you are really involved in the game. Players have personalities, coaches have personalties, the media has a personality, your coaches have personalities, and you, of course, have a personality.

Are you going to tear into your third string keeper who just blabbed ot the press about not getting enough playing time? Are you going to encourage him? Or are you going to say enough is enough, time to cut him loose? SOme players react better to hardball, and some want to be encouraged, while others want praise in the press.

When you compliment another manager, some players like the professionalism while others dislike their manager praising other managers. Attack another manager and some players love it, becuase they think you're just like them, while others aren;t sure you should be lowering yourself.

You work hard to bring in a bright young star and watch after a couple of seasons as he dominates on the pitch, then demands to be transferred to a bigger club. When you decide to transfer him, other players get upset that you traded away this young star.

The game is frustrating and rewarding all at the same time. I won the Ukraine High League twice in a row and got third in the 2010 World Cup with Ukraine, but no team in a top European League would even sniff my jock as a manager.

On the other hand, I took Carlisle to the Championship, (which is the second highest league in England), and did poorly with the USA national side and a German club from their top league offered me a job.

Someone is working on a training schedule:

http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2005/222/929429_20050811_screen005.jpg

The beauty of the game is that you can play on so many levels. Once, I just laoded up a game and grabbed the Kenya National Side and worked hard and ultimately qualifed them for the World Cup where they proceeded to lose all three matches, but we were there.

The financial engine is realistic, with sponsorships and gate receipts against maintanence costs and payroll.

Different owners and board of directors also have different personalities, and you will learn to feel them oot and figure out what they want. Some want financial success while others want on the pitch success. Some want an aggressive acquisition of players.

There are so many things to determine when playing the game. When I pick a team, I look at stadium size, finances, expectations for the team, and other types of information. I really don'tcare about the players or staff, though.

Imagine all of the choices you have in FOF but multiplied by a factor of five, and you begin to see the detail in FM. In fact, I suspect that many of you will not even need to be convinced about the quality of FM, and that more than one person will read this post and think, "Yep, FM sure is a great game alright."

In the space created by the overlap of tremendous detail and sheer staggering size and the living, breathing organic life lies a game that some call FM. I call it the closest thing to perfection a video game has ever been.

-Anxiety

vtbub

08-04-2006, 10:42 AM

D'oh

Abe Sargent

08-04-2006, 10:44 AM

I love how you posted that AS I was writing up my top game :)

Eaglesfan27

08-04-2006, 10:47 AM

Great pick for #1. I've gotten more time (and enjoyment) out of FM/CM than any other series of computer games, and most likely more than my next top two put together. I've literally put thousands (just over 2,000 hours - sheesh that is a year's worth of work almost) of gaming time into the FM series over the past several years.

condors

08-04-2006, 11:02 AM

spleen1015

08-04-2006, 11:46 AM

I'm surprised by the lack of GTA, although I don't see many games like it on your list. Have you played any of the GTA3 games?

Lonnie

08-04-2006, 11:52 AM

Did you play Daggerfall at all? I think it actually came out before M&M VI and I believe it was the leader in the resurgence of RPGs. Like M&M VI the graphics were not great, but the game was very deep and wide open. Which you can see with Morrowind, the next step.

Abe Sargent

08-04-2006, 11:54 AM

I'm surprised by the lack of GTA, although I don't see many games like it on your list. Have you played any of the GTA3 games?

I've played tons of games, hundreds and hundreds over the years. including them. I like them.

Abe Sargent

08-04-2006, 12:01 PM

Just wondering if you have any thoughts on how games like fallout (thought it improved over wasteland),wizardry, earl weaver baseball, and dominons 2 didn't make the list? were they considered? I just wanted to hear your side of the story, overall i think you did a great job and i really enjoyed your thoughts even if i disagree with some of the choices (which is to be expected).

Fallout 2 is solid, but all of those games are in the Baldur's Gate engine of games, and therefore I consider the BG pick representative of the group. If I were to pick another game from that group, it'd be Fallout 2.

Wizardry? I can't select too many RPGs, there have to be other games :) M&MVI, UO, Morrowind, BG, Wasteland - there were a lot of RPGs selected.

Bee

08-04-2006, 12:21 PM

Can't disagree with #1, but I also was expecting Wizardry and possibly Bard's Tale. And there's no such thing as too many RPGs. ;)

Abe Sargent

08-04-2006, 12:53 PM

Folks, if you have read up through all of my games, I want to give you great thanks. I wrote my reviews in a Word document first and there are sixty some odd pages of Word in my reviews, so I appreciate your dedication in reading.

Thanks all!!!

-Anxiety

saldana

08-04-2006, 12:56 PM

Izulde

08-04-2006, 12:57 PM

Thank you for the list, Anxiety. :)

Abe Sargent

08-04-2006, 01:01 PM

what about starcraft or warcraft...without going back over the list, were there any RTS games...rise of nations, command and conquer...any and all of these would have some representation on my list....and i cant believe i forgot about diablo

Diablo was represented by Angband. Diablo is just a dumbed down Angband with graphics.

If I chose a RTS, I'd have chosen Warcraft. I find the genre a bit to click happy for my tastes. I loved Warcraft III, thought Rise of Nations was very overrated, still enjoy the original C&C and Starcraft is probably the best of the group.

-Anxiety

tanglewood

08-04-2006, 02:13 PM

My Top 10 of all time:

1. Half-Life

One of the few games that I just absolutely loved every minute of, even the alien world levels. I still remember the shock of training when you use pistols and the SMG thinking "Wow, I'm using real guns!", since every other FPS of the time had corny portable rocket launchers and nailguns and sci-fi laser blasters and whatnot. I have replayed this so many times it's crazy. Even today it's still for my money the best FPS ever, the only one even coming close being it's own sequel.

2. Championship Manager 96/97

This is the one that started it all for me. I remember I became hooked when I had led my Man Utd side (hey, gotta start easy) to the League Cup final on the day of the actual League Cup final, thinking "Wow, what a neat coincidence", then continuing to play on in the game and ignore the actual match that afternoon! Even though there wasn't a 2d match screen and players didn't really have a personallity and you didn't talk to the media and so on it didn't matter then. Plus it ran like a rocket even on my old P90.

3. Civ 2

The actual game itself was fantastic, but it was the ingenious mod community that really made Civ 2 stand out for me. The number of absolutely fantastic scenarios created by some really talented guys using the most creative workarounds on a rapidly ageing engine just amazed me. I think that since Civ 3 and Civ 4 became so complicated they've lost a bit of the simplicity that made Civ 2 so easy to edit, and thus the scenarios now need huge teams of modelers and coders and so on. Back in the day, one guy took about 2 months to create a masterpiece and I miss that.

4. Deus Ex

Since you don't really 'complete' Civ or CM/FM, this game vies with HaldLife for my most completed game, and it's damn close between them. The whole RPG/FPS hybrid had been done before a few times (System Shock) but never so superbly and with such a brilliant storyline. The illusion of freedom and choice (yes it was an illusion, but you don't care at the time) in this is quite brilliant and was far ahead of its time. If I had the funds to make one game into a film, I would chose Deus Ex hands down, the only worry being that Hollywood would simply mash the nuances and subtleties of the game into some technobabble Schwartznegger disaster. So infact I wouldn't suggest Deus Ex at all and instead point them in the way of Jazz Jackrabbit or something.

5. Tie Fighter

Even though Deus Ex is the most cinematic game expereince I have ever played, I think that Tie Fighter has the best atmosphere ever in a game. I mean come on, when we all watched the Star Wars trilogy we all secretly wanted to be the bad guys. But Tie Fighter doesn't make you a bad guy, you are the good guys! The way it paints an image of an Empire striving for order and peace and elimation of corruption is simply magnificent. But it wouldn't hold up if the space action wasn't excellent, and it was bloody fantastic.

6. Command & Conquer: Red Alert

The original C&C was pretty damn good but Red Alert was the first RTS that ever got me to go back and complete it multiple times. Again, the ability to be the really cool bad guys was a part of it (nothing like shouting "Die for the motherland!!" as you lead hundreds of Soviet infantryman to certain death), but I think on a basic game mechanics level it was so balanced and well thought out. I think the fact it was one of the first big budget RTS games to back in time instead of forward (albiet in a alternate reality past) gave it added authenticity that I felt the genre was lacking before.

7. Monkey Island II

Simply hillarious. I really enjoy all of the Lucas Arts 90s adventure games but I think this was the best one they ever did. It's just non-stop laughs all te way through, yet concurrently challenging, intelligent and a damn good puzzle game. I never forget trying to record all the different affects the different types of hurling made at the spitting competition. And if you haven't played the game before and that sentence seems very, very odd to you, well, that's kinda the point. :D

8. Mario Kart 64

The next two games on the list are heavily based on the fact that my best friend had an N64 and I would always play multiplayer games with him and our brothers and sisters. Basically, when it comes to one game to play at a party I don't think Mario Kart, any incarnation, can be beat. Ridiculously simple to pick up and learn and so, so much fun. Even if you take out the Marioness and the zany Nintendo setting, as a pure racing game it's still damn good.

9. Goldeneye 64

Ahh, Goldeneye. My friend practiced this endlessly and stomped me all the time, but I still loved it. Goldeneye was cool because Bond was cool for the first time in about 20 years, and that's all that mattered to us kids back then. Even taking that into account it's still a solid FPS with good variety of levels and weapons and a well thought out single player game too. But ultimatley, it's all down to who gets to be Bond, who gets to be Valentin and making sure nobody picks Oddjob when no-one else is looking.

10. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

As a big Star Wars fan I think this was the first title that really captured the feel of the original movies (Tie Fighter is different, capturing the exact opposite feel). It may seem a bit strange considering it's not even set anywhere near the movies, but it's just a perfect representation of everything George Lucas' dream has come to be. A distant galaxy bustling with incredible alien life, sleazy crime lords, an evil empire and gallant heroes, all set to an epic storyline of truth and justice where the galaxy hangs in the balance until the very last. The sequel was also great until about 3/4 of the way through, heres hoping the third in the series is back on form.

Honorable Mentions: Quake, Syndicate, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, Theme Park, System Shock 2, Pharoah, Sim City, Privateer 2: The Darkening, Close Combat III

Greyroofoo

08-04-2006, 03:58 PM

Any top 30 list w/o Tie Fighter makes me sad.

ISiddiqui

08-04-2006, 04:57 PM

Fallout 2 is solid, but all of those games are in the Baldur's Gate engine of games, and therefore I consider the BG pick representative of the group. If I were to pick another game from that group, it'd be Fallout 2.

:confused:

Wait a sec... if Fallout is in the same 'engine of games' as Baldur's Gate then how in the world did Crusader Kings and EUII both make it on the list? That's far more of the same 'engine of games'.

Eaglesfan27

08-04-2006, 05:27 PM

:confused:

Wait a sec... if Fallout is in the same 'engine of games' as Baldur's Gate then how in the world did Crusader Kings and EUII both make it on the list? That's far more of the same 'engine of games'.

Yep. Seems like there is some inconsistency in that regard.

Abe Sargent

08-04-2006, 06:42 PM

:confused:

Wait a sec... if Fallout is in the same 'engine of games' as Baldur's Gate then how in the world did Crusader Kings and EUII both make it on the list? That's far more of the same 'engine of games'.

I never said it was banned for that reason, I simply said that I feel BG was the best of the group, and if the best of the group barely charts, nothing else is.

Peregrine

08-04-2006, 07:03 PM

I think we should keep in mind that any list of this kind will be subjective, one person's favorite game might be a game another person has never played, or really disliked. I think Anxiety did a great job with this list! (Though leaving Planescape:Torment out makes baby Jesus cry.) ;)

Buccaneer

08-04-2006, 07:13 PM

Even though I don't play CM/FM, I can understand why it would be #1. Very nice work (even if I didn't like the #2 pick).

Peregrine

08-04-2006, 07:21 PM

Even though I don't play CM/FM, I can understand why it would be #1. Very nice work (even if I didn't like the #2 pick).

Yeah CM/FM is one of those games that even though I can never get into it and it wouldn't be in my top 30 at all, I can see its merits and how it would be a #1 game for its fans.

Daimyo

08-04-2006, 11:53 PM

While I disagree with several of the picks, my top five all time all made the list at some point so I guess its pretty solid. :)

sterlingice

08-05-2006, 10:37 AM

I liked a couple of the top 5. UO, for sure- basically have to choose either UO or EQ as they were the big games that got MMORPG's started. Frankly, I fall in with the UO camp so I agree with its choice. Morrowind- possibly but it's too soon right now to tell. It could very well be up there in 10 years when history revisits this list.

The Starcraft/Warcraft omission is just way too glaring- easily top 5. No Quest games from back in the day, be it King's or Space? Also, not nearly enough console games. I figured from the comments about how PC games make up a majority of games in history, we'd be getting a list of some older stuff. Speaking of which, no idsoftware FPS's? Wolfenstein pretty much invented modern FPSs and Quake revolutionized online gaming.

I guess the discussion on the above points is whether this is "Abe's favorite games of all time" or "Abe's best games of all time" as that's a really important distinction. A list of my 5 or 50 favorite games and 5 or 50 best games has a little overlap but it's a very different list. I think this one falls into the favorite games category more than the best games category. Some huge omissions and a pair of text-based sims.

If I have some time in the future, I'd love to create a thread like this. Heck, even post it to Gamenikki as a feature. Now, if only I could find the time...

SI

sterlingice

08-05-2006, 10:39 AM

Before it got taken over by carebears, UO was the best PvP game ever. People are to dam lazy in MMORPG'S. They want nice shiny loot and they wanna kill big mean computer controlled dragons.

Old school UO there was actual FEAR when you left town. Fear that at any second some PvP'er could come along and nail you. I do admit that there were quite a few griefers and they sucked. But nothing felt better when you finally got a nice sized crew together, then went and took out those griefers. Nothing you do in modern day MMORPG's comes close to that feeling.

I know we've gone around and around on this before, but UO was filled with griefers and the good PvP'ers were much fewer and further between.

SI

Abe Sargent

08-05-2006, 09:45 PM

It's great to read all of your comments. Thanks guys!!!

Abe Sargent

08-06-2006, 01:21 AM

Izulde

08-06-2006, 02:31 AM

A couple of interesting things about this:

I picked up Half-Life, reistalled it, and played through the single player campaign again.

I then played several days of Angband.

Then I played the last few days some Morrowind.

I caused myself to play old games:)

Ironically enough, I've done the same thing with a game that's higher up on my own list than the two already revealed.

JeffW

08-07-2006, 05:23 AM

Bee

08-07-2006, 06:06 AM

The last time I tried Crawl, it had a ton of bugs. Have those been fixed?

JeffW

08-08-2006, 05:33 AM

The last time I tried Crawl, it had a ton of bugs. Have those been fixed?

When was the last time you played? There are *very few* bugs in the current version--I can't think of any that harm my enjoyment of the game much. It's also got far fewer balance issues than say, Nethack or ADOM.

Qwikshot

08-08-2006, 01:18 PM

Where's Tetris?

Havok

08-09-2006, 09:42 AM

Where's Tetris?

right where it should be.... not on this list ;)

headtrauma

08-09-2006, 01:53 PM

Great thread, Anxiety! Really brought back some memories. I've always judged a game my how much mental bandwidth they took up when I was not playing them.

Using that as my guide, I'd have to say Ultima Online is my all-time favorite game. The pure open-endedness of it was pure greatness. After that, I'd have to say Ancient Art of War.

Thanks for the time you spent on this.

Abe Sargent

08-09-2006, 06:15 PM

Thanks!

AgustusM

08-10-2006, 05:27 PM

follow up for me.

As I posted earlier - this list inspired me to purchase 2 of these games that i had never played (there were others that I never played, but was not inspired to purchase) EU2 and Tropico. I got each for around 20 bucks.

Now I haven't had a lot of time to play, but my very initial impressions are thus:

EU2 - I like the look and feel of the game, but I only made it though the tutorial and have not made it back. something about the game is failing to make an impression on me. Perhaps it is my vast knowledge of American History and equally un-vast knowledge of European history - whatever it is, this one is failing to hold my interest and with Madden less then 2 weeks away is seems unlikely I will play this much.

Tropico on the other hand has been a hoot. I can't believe I missed this game when it first came out. I am deeply immersed in this game (although I suck rather bad at it right now) and I can see myself playing this for quite a while.

Abe Sargent

08-10-2006, 09:08 PM

Glad you are 1 for 1!!!

I don't know nearly as much about Euro history as American, and I loved it for just that reason. There's a Beer Revolution in some country or other, for example, and when that happened in game the first time, I just laughed and laughed.

Swaggs

08-13-2006, 09:41 PM

Bump.

This thread got me interested in play Sim City 4 again and, once again, I am enjoying it very much. Although I am a bit pissed that I can't find my copy of Rush Hour. I even found the case for RH, but no disk.

Also of note, while looking through my old games to see if I could find RH, I found my copy of M&M6. I will have to give it a good try now, as the machine I had at the time it came out couldn't quite handle it and the slow speed of it made me give up on it early.

I also might give Tropico another whirl, as I found it, too.

Buccaneer

08-13-2006, 10:01 PM

Can you tell by looking at this map which buidling have been abandoned?

If the demand for cheap housing outstripped your ability to provide it, lower level citizens would take over a more expensive place. You'd sometimes see mansions get overwhelmed by lower level cits, and more of them can fit into a mansio that high level cits could, so it would sometimes put a lot of pressure on your transportation network.

Yes, but why did whole blocks become abandoned in this case?

Swaggs

08-15-2006, 02:30 PM

Yes, but why did whole blocks become abandoned in this case?

Not Abe, but just saw this...

Blocks can become abandoned for any number of reasons. Pollution can damage previously valuable land and cause people to move out in a hurry, as can horrible traffic, high taxes, poor school/police/fire/health coverage, or lack of jobs. Buildings often seem to get built up and then, as time goes, by people move away to more desirable locations and the buildings become dilapidated.

On a SC4-related note to Abe (if you are still following this thread), have you found a good way to make cargo and/or passenger trains run effectively. I tried to set some up to spur on my industries and also to relieve traffic, but they get 0% usage. Not sure if I am missing something stupid or what. I have built the stations, put them near industrial and commercial areas and given the stations both road and rail access. Any ideas?

Swaggs

08-15-2006, 02:31 PM

Edit: Got a little submit button happy.

Abe Sargent

08-15-2006, 03:22 PM

I pretty much dodge trains altogether. I started playing a new city a few days ago. I have ferries, buses, and I'm about to begin work on a subway system. I find trains for freight especailly are only useful on a few maps, and then only if you don't plan ahead.

My new city is an industry heavy city, but I have the industry near the edges of the map, so that they have quick frieght routes. Then I slap down a seaport for the more inland industry and I'm good to go.

I think you only need industrail trains for inland industry thats not near water. For passanger trains, I'd rather stick with subways, ferries and the other basics.

-Anxiety

Buccaneer

08-15-2006, 06:53 PM

Not Abe, but just saw this...

Blocks can become abandoned for any number of reasons. Pollution can damage previously valuable land and cause people to move out in a hurry, as can horrible traffic, high taxes, poor school/police/fire/health coverage, or lack of jobs. Buildings often seem to get built up and then, as time goes, by people move away to more desirable locations and the buildings become dilapidated.

I know SimCity and how it works. I was asking specifically about this case because he said this

If the demand for cheap housing outstripped your ability to provide it, lower level citizens would take over a more expensive place. You'd sometimes see mansions get overwhelmed by lower level cits, and more of them can fit into a mansio that high level cits could, so it would sometimes put a lot of pressure on your transportation network.

That may have been a disconnected thought but it followed right after the question about these blocks being disbanded.

Abe Sargent

08-15-2006, 10:41 PM

That's not disconnected actually Buc, and a good catch. If you have, say, a high level density apartment complex that houses 150 high level sims, and demand for high level sims lowers while it remains contant or increases for lower level sims, lower level sims could move in. That same building could house 500 of the lowest class sims. It will look like stressed building, that hasn't been cleaned with gunk and what around it. It looks ugly, just like real life. This severe increase in the number of people can overtax your mass transit. For example, the wealthy probably used cars and the subway. The lower class will use buses, so a nearby bus station will get hundreds of new people using it. One bus station can transport, at max, 1000 people before it loses efficiancy. If the closest bus station was already at, say 75% capacity, this one change in this one building will likely throw it over the edge and probably by a hundred or more. This will slow down the bus route, then people can't get to jobs, and they start leaving, and buildings cease being stressed and become abandoned, fire hazards, and crime magnets.

It's all interconnected baby.

sterlingice

08-15-2006, 10:43 PM

Whoa, that's cool. That's beyond the level of interaction that just blew me away about SC2K.

SI

Abe Sargent

08-15-2006, 11:19 PM

Hopefully, SI, you can see why I chose SC4 over other options :)

Abe Sargent

12-13-2006, 11:54 PM

Bump for the people reading this from my SCG article today.

Hey All!!!

-Anxiety (Abe)

Izulde

12-14-2006, 12:24 AM

that reminds me, I need to update my own list... except if I did it over again, there'd be a new addition possibly. :o

Fouts

12-14-2006, 02:14 AM

Great list Anxiety. I enjoyed reading it, and some of them bring back good memories. I loved Master of Magic, and wished somebody would recreate that again. I am more of an RPG (Baldur's Gate, IWD, Wizardry, HOMM) type of gamer. I have never even played most of the console games on your list.

Thanks for posting your list.

Abe Sargent

12-14-2006, 10:46 AM

NP Fouts! Glad ya like it!

Abe Sargent

02-21-2007, 01:05 AM

I just finished a fairly long stint for around three-five weeks playing Oblivion (around 80 hours all told). I was lookign forward to playing this game like you could not believe, but I put it off until I acquired a DVD Rom for my PC.

I am very disappointed in teh game. Sure, it was a good game and worth the purchase, but it just didn;t stand up well to its predecessor at all.

My quick eval of Oblivion is that it did not improve on any of the weaknesses of Morrowind yet it had brand new weaknessed.

Now in detail.

Oblivion is another sprawling world where you adventure and explore. Sorta. See in Morrowind you are encouraged to explore. The world is populated regularly all over the place and there are tons of small towns, dungeons, crypts, and more all over teh place. Some of these palces can be explored in a few minutes, others take some time. The wrold is real and vibrant.

Oblivion wilderness exploration falls into several major gaps. First of all, there are sections of the world with few to no places in which to delve. I once spent an hour climbing mountains int eh east and Northeast to in no dungeons, no shrines, no sights, no mines, no ayeleid ruins - nothing.

Secondly, the world is populated only sproadically, and at times it feels like you are adventuring through candy-land with nary a creature in sight. That never happened in Morrowind. All of the creatures you do fight overground are boring and make little ecological sense. In Morrowind, for example, you had a Cliff Racer - an aerial birdish-lizard thing that could be found in moutnains and rocky coasts. Any aeriel creatures in Oblivion? None. In Morrowind, despite there being only three water creatures (four if you count an expansion set) they were all over the plac,e so you had the sensation taht he water was at least inhabited. (that was one of the great weaknesses in Morrowind - the lack of a beleiveable aquatic ecology and its repreated in Oblivion.). Oblivion has less aquatic creatures and massive quantities of aquatic real estate that look like my aquarium before I added fish.

Thirdly, Oblivion has LITTLE FLAVOR. This is my biggest complaitn about the game. Morrowind oozes flavor. The game is all about doing unusual thigns that make total sense, like mushroom grown houses, and beetle sheels and giant silt striders as transportation and so forth. Here you have your typical european RPG with your typical monsters and your typical countryside. Here you have bears, moutain lions, imps, undead, bandits, boars, minotaurs, gargoyles, and such as your overland enemies. Sounds liek every other game, right? Well, in Moprrowind you had well thought out creatures with their own niches like Cliff Racers and Nix Hounds and Wild Guar.

While on the iussue of flavor, in Morrowind, you have the ruins left behind by an ancient race of dwarves called the dwemer (which weren;t actually dwarves but our size, they were named by giants). Their ruins are full of steam-oriiented technology mixed with magic to create a very different sense of things. Then their are Daedric ruins which are something out of a Lovecraft story with non-Euclidian geometry as a guiding principle. They are very unqiue.

Where are these people in Oblivion? In teh story line, it is metnioned that your world (which includes Morrowind and Cyrodiil, the place this game takes place in, which are provinces ADJACENT to each other ont eh same continent) used to be a daedrice world and then the people revolted. That's why there where so many daedric ruins, for example, in Morrowind.

Where are those ruins in Oblivion? Same world, same continent, same empire. Where are those ruins? They aren't held in just the island of Vvardenfell because in teh first expansion to Morrowind, where a mainland city is adde,d there are daedric ruins underneath the city onteh mainland, just a few miles away from Cyrodiil. Seriously, where are they?

We have Ayelid ruins, ancient elven ruins, but none of the other types. There are numerous examples of where they jus tleft behind either creatures or cultures that would make sense in Oblivion and just ignore them.

In Morrowind you regulalry fight daedra, these occasionally demonic and very natural but otherworldly creatures. In Oblivion you go to their world on a regular basis. So this game has even more exposure to deadra than then Morrowind. So, where are some of the daera in the previous game gone to? Take Ogrim, for example. They appear to have completely disappeared.

A bigger compaint is that when you are in the Oblivion worlds, it looks and feels like the Hell levels of Doom. You get a real sense of been here, done that. As a result, the creepy effects like meat corridors and so forth have less of an impact.

I think they spent so much time building the graphics (which on a PC still aren't as impressive as Morrowind, imho) and the interface that they forgot to fully flesh out their world.

Again, some of Morrowind's weakness pop up here as well. There are only two skill sets for melee weapon skills - blade and blunt. And there are only knives, maces, hammers, axes, staves and swords in the game. The only long range weapon is the bow. No slings, no crossbows, no unique weapons to the game, no oriental weapons, no exotic weapons, and no simple weapons like the mighty spear. (On all six continents with indigenous life, natives seperately developed the spear. Sharpening a stick and using it to fight is an obvious tool. Are you telling me that ten seperate races of beings on one continent couldn't think of a spear?)

Anotehr example is horseback. They tried so hard to give you horse riding that they forgot that horseriding has a context. In the Dark Ages, a fully armored knight with a lance, mace and sword could charge into a cluster of peasants and kill them all with nary a scrath. Try charging with your horse in Oblivion and you'll just get hit a alot. You can neither attack nor cast spell whiule on a horse, so it's merely fast transport and pretty. No lances, no horse bowmanship, no chargeing, no horseback spell casting. In a world with serious magic and spell casting, don't you think that a mage riding a horse casting long distance damage spells while stayuing out of melee combat would have been developed ages ago?

They pride themselves on having such a realistic world and they they forgot to plug in the lights.

So no, I do NOT like Oblivion as much as Morrowind. I don't like Oblivion as much as Might and Magic VI. I'm done with the game and now I am moving on.

-Anxiety

Abe Sargent

02-23-2007, 02:07 AM

Huh. Guess I thought that'd be more controversial.

Marc Vaughan

02-23-2007, 04:20 AM

Huh. Guess I thought that'd be more controversial.

Controversial - you pretty much summed up my feelings towards Oblivion, didn't get on with it at all way too shallow after a promising start.

The dungeon escape I thought was well done and interesting, then you're dumped into a near empty world full of identical houses and bland NPC's - my first discovery of the realism of the 'world' was bumping into the horse-seller shortly after leaving the dungeon, after failing dismally to find a conversational topic to do with purchasing a horse I decide to try and move one over to her to see if that helps and am promptly attacked by a host of guards for stealing it (hey chaps if I'm stealing something I don't tend to walk up to its owner with it) .... kind of went downhill from there.

I DID however get on very well with Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, its got some flaws but is a very enjoyable game imho.

Neon_Chaos

02-26-2007, 11:23 AM

How could these games have been missed!?!?!?!?!?!

:)

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/7224/imgs/monkey.gif
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/7224/imgs/monkey2.gif

Anyway, the Monkey Island series has simply changed my entire outlook on life. And did a lot to mold my sense of humor. ;) Fighting ghosts with rootbeer? Dancing skeletons? Pirates? Swordfighting and insults? What could be better? :)

Abe Sargent

01-17-2008, 09:05 PM

Hello folks. After about two years since this dynasty, I came across a game that makes the top thirty. Where does it chart? How good is it? What is it?

30. Guild Wars
ArenaNet
PC
2005
GameSpot Review - 9.2
MMORPG

Guild Wars (http://www.guildwars.com/freetrial/)

http://www.guildwars.com/images/wallpaper/gw-highres-ranger_page.jpg

I must have just discovered Guild Wars three months ago. I missed out for years on this game. I have never played another MMORPG like it, and in fact, I defy anybody to actually call it that.

This is a great game from any number of viewpoints. Want an online game to play with your mates? This is fine for that. Want an online game with a nice PvP arena with a focus on group combat? Sure, we got that here.

On the other hand, if you don't even like MMORPGs, that's fine. This is still a good game for you That's because this is NOT an MMORPG. This is an RPG with a plotline and quest structure and all of that. It just happens to be online.

Since it's online, you can get help from real players in your adventure if you get stuck or have need. The adventure in the main and each expansion is highly detailed and each took me weeks of play to complete.

The character development system is very elegant. You have two classes out of six (eventually ten). You can choose any combination and you get some skills for your classes. Each class has a special skill that you only get if that class is your main, so there is a significant difference between an Elementalist/Warrior and a Warrior/Elementalist. You can switch the secondary class later int eh campaign at any time, giving you massive freedom for your character.

As you gain levels, you gain attribute points, which you can spend on your class attributes. For example, a Ranger gets Wilderness Survival, Expertise if a primary, Beast Mastery and Marksmanship. You can put points into any of these that you want.

Then, whenever you are in a town, city or outpost, you can change your points to put them in different stats. You can go from a Beast Master with a nasty pet to an archer specialist to a ranger who specializes in setting traps.

You also have eight skills that you can have equipped at any time. As you adventure, you get more skills. Most skills are tied to a stat, and virtually all are tied to classes. For example, a Bow Attack skill would likely be tied to Marksmanship. As your Marksmanship is increased, this special Bow Attack gets better.

You can change up your eight skills as well, and you can experiment with different builds. Gone are the days of having to min/max your character from the very beginning. If you screw up your character, you can fix it easily.

The game emphasizes playing in a group. You can go adventuring with a group of players, or you can always take some NPCs with you. Because of this group focus, the game plays differently. You have no commands or decisions to make for the NPCs. They act completely as they choose to.

http://www.guildwars.com/images/screenshots/gwscreen060-page.jpg

The game incorporates some interesting takes on characters. Instead of warriors being boring, they have a second energy stat called Adrenaline. They gain Adrenaline as they take hits and deal damage. Some skills require the usage of Adrenaline instead of the more traditional energy, and others require energy. Balancing these, with the low amount of energy warriors get, is very interesting. Its a nice take on the traditional warrior.

The game world is very large and very rich. I love a world that it wholly its own, with no previous intellectual properties mucking it up.

Of course, as an online game, there are special events, quests and such. During Christmastime, there were dozens of extra quests for you to do, including snowball fights in the PvP arena. Lots of fun.

Capturing skills was a fun thing too. There are some skills called elite skills. You can;t have more than one elite skill on your skill bar at a time. You can;t get them in quests or in stores. Instead, you have to find bosses that have them, kill the boss, and use a Signet of Capture, which is a one shot skill that, when used, captures a skill from a bosses then is lost. Finding and hunting down elites is fun.

Every class has special types of skills that only they have,. Only warriors have shouts and adrenal skills. Only Necromancers have wells, only Rangers have spirits (until Ritualists, which add a lot of them), only Elementalists have glyphs, only rangers have traps, only Ritualists have weapon enhancers, only Assassins shadow walk, only Ritualists have items hold spells, only Necromancers have raise undead spells, only Elementalists have wards, only Paragons have shouts, etc.

Later expansions add some amazing depth to the gameworld. Now, I believe a game should chart on its initial merits, not on the strength of its expansions, but I want to mention a few things. The first expansion adds two classes. One class is called assassin, which plays oddly. You have deadly strikes, and a special set of moves called shadow movement which teleports you into and out of combat. You shadow walk in, hit fast, and then shadow walk out, because you do not have the armor or hit points of a fighter. I've never seen such truly hit and run tactics in a fantasy game, and I kill enemy assassins as one of my first targets now.

The best experience I ever had playing a spell caster in an RPG came from the first expansion set's Ritualist:

http://www.pcgame.com.my/images/1133.jpg

A Ritualist is unlike any spell casting class I've ever been familiar with. The class communes with spirits. As such, it can summon a spirit to a weapon, or summon a spirit out right, some of which fight and others which give your party some benefits, or you can summon the ashes of a famous dead person and hold them in your hand for some benefit. You can't attack while holding ashes. There you have a handful of spells that deal with spirits, ashes, weapons, or summon their force to heal, deal damage, etc. You don;t heal as well as a Monk or Paragon and you don't deal as much damage as an Elementalist or Necromancer. It's just meant to supplement your spirits/weapons/ashes. You don't know how weird it is to have your character standing there with a giant urn in her hands summoning ghosts to fight on your half while amping up the weapon of the party's NPC. It's odd.

In the next expansion set, two new additions were great. Dervishes are an interesting take on a warrior, and they added heroes - customizable NPCs. The customizable NPCs are pretty good characters to have with you, and a lot of players use them in all campaigns.

The Dervish class is a scythe fighter who casts enchantnents upon themselves. When an enchantemtn on them ends, they get life and energy for the number of points they have in Mysticism. A lot of their best attacks require an enchantments on them to end, so you need to stack several. Also, a lot of enchantments have abilities when they end. One enchantment blinds all nearby enemies when it ends. Another enchantment heals you when it ends. Some enchantments have abilities when you cast them. A holy aura may deal damage to all adjacent foes when you cast it, make your attacks deal holy damage while it lasts, and then knock down all adjacent enemies when it ends. Therefore, while in combat, you are still casting a lot of spells on yourself, with abilities constantly triggering and going off. It's an interesting take on a normal fighter, and again, it plays differently that any class in an RPG I:ve played.

I felt that this game was good enough to chart at #30, not no higher. It's good, but it's not super amazing or anything Better than BG, but not as good as MR3 or MOO2, which were the next two games on the list.

Therefore, this game officially bumps BG off the list.

I do have a few problems with the game. Many small things in the game are fourth window problems I have with the world. I want a game to be as immersive as possible. Having skills called "It's Just a Flesh Wound" and a quest called "Drakes on a Plain" does not endear me to the world. There are lots of little real life hommages in the game, and I don;t like it in my pretend worlds.

I also love the group oriented focus of the game, but sometimes, I just want to solo adventure, without NPCs, and that's tough.

So the game is no Morrowind, and I accept that. Still, it is the best game I;ve played in the past two years that was not a sequel to one of the games already on the list (Thus leaving out later installments of FM or EU)

One more thing about the game before I leave. Despite being an MMORPG, this game is totally free beyond the purchase price. There are still a lot of people playing (at least I saw a bunch while I was on) so you are fine. This is a good investment, to my mind, as a result.

Hope you enjoyed another trip down memory lane. Good day to you all!

-Abe