Was M.U.L.E. even released on the PC? I had it for my Atari 800, but don’t remember a PC version.
Bernse, I totally agree with you in regards to the BZ game - that was an absolute blast!!! 
Damn thing only sold about 30,000 copies though… makes you wonder why they went through the effort to make a sequel.
My list:
Civ/Civ2
MOO/MOO2
Colonization
X-Com
Starcraft
Heroes of Might and Magic II/III (has no-one really mentioned this yet?)
Might and Magic: World of Xeen
Railroad Tycoon II
I’m afraid I’m not an avid enough gamer to give any decent Top Ten list (assuming we’re talking about IBM PC games and not Commodore era stuff). I still enjoy Civ II (bought III but never really got into it), played my share of Doom and had a lot of fun with Fallout but that’s about it. I will, however, share my experiences with the worst game I ever played because mocking games is more fun than lauding them anyway.
With that in mind, I present: Enemy Nations.
I should reinforce that I’m not much of a gamer. So I’m not really sure where Enemy Nations realistically ranks in the world of combat simulations. However, one afternoon after watching some war program on the History Channel, I thought “you know, I should get a combat simulation game and have the fun of ambushing enemy units, providing covering fire and stuff like that instead of the ‘bump into an icon and see who wins’ combat style of Civ II.” So I went down to the store and, after reading some box backs, decided on EN. Choose a race, build an economy on the planet and beat the hell out of the other guy. Basic enough, though the box claimed its AI was revolutionary and you’d be amazed at things like its Fog of War and other aspects.
Let’s begin with the manual. The manual starts off by bragging about how amazing this game is. It claims that its graphics can not be surpassed and in fact it’s so advanced that there’s no way in hell it can be played on existing technology and thirty years from now it’ll still be just as amazing. This may be true in a fashion: I installed it on my newer computer (it was able to play fine on my old Pentium 120MHz) and it still refuses to let me max the graphics or go beyond three opponents as it says my computer can’t hack it. The rest of the manual was fairly standard, except that they show the wrong pictures for some of the buildings and it lacks a Tech tree to let you know what you’re researching. Oh, and in the networking section it has a bit crying about how they were going to get their own Novell port until Novell learned they would let it run through other networks and then Novell took their port away from them.
The AI pathing was a thing of suck. You needed to build roads for your trucks to move on so you could ship iron and whatnot around to build units. Except half the time you’d waste precious oil building a road from point A to point B and your trucks would still decide to trundle along through a forest at .005 miles per hour. On the off chance the trucks did stay on the roads, God forbid two trucks ever meet at a corner on a theoretically two lane road. They’d spend ten minutes doing some ballet that resembled the space shuttle trying to parallel park. Your military units were much the same and you’d start wondering where your tanks were and find them halfway up a mountain where they got stuck and just gave up.
The enemy had the exact same units as you, regardless of its race. Somewhat disappointing. Its military planning was a joke, and raising the difficulty level just meant that it cheated more in production and started with more units, not that it controlled them better. Occassionally, the enemy players would spontanously chance races for no apparent reason. Not even to a better race half the time… sometimes they’d switch to the most inferior race in the game. One minute you’re fighting a military minded race of andriods, five minutes later its a bunch of Ewoks. Once you reached a certain point in the game, the computer would just give up. It’d stop producing units completely and just sit idle despite having the production capability to continue. I’d pull back, leaving their city with tank factories, mines, smelters, trucks, etc and it just didn’t care. Then again, it didn’t have to, because the game didn’t count you as the winner until you destroyed every trace of the enemy race (whatever it was at that moment). You’d literally have to waste hours scouring every inch of the planet with scout vehicles to find the one half built farm someplace and blow it up to get the “You Win!” screen after you’d already destroyed the rest of its civilization. Amazingly frustrating.
I couldn’t tell you how well the game sold; I never met anyone else who’d ever played it or even heard of it. But it did a great job of turning me off to the genre and wasting $30. Despite this, according to their website, the game is still the Second Coming and they plan to release an Enemy Nations II. God help us all.
Did you ever play Shadowgate? Same company, same gameplay, but in a D&D setting. One of the first games I had on my Mac, and a huge nostalgic favorite for me. I player Uninvited afterwards, and realized it was nothin’ but suck. Of course, if I’d played Uninvited first and Shadowgate second, I’d probably feel the same way you do.
There were also the Deja Vu games, which actually were pretty good. Same system again, but set in the hard-boiled detective genre. I got 'em off an abandonware site recently, and they still hold up.
My short list:
System Shock 2- Wow. Great horror atmosphere, a little role playing, and a solid first person shooter all in one. I still get the creeps at some of the scripted events. It’s far and away my favorite game ever.
Civilization III- My favorite of the three Civ games, though all are great.
Wizardry VII- A great RPG. A good conversation system for the time, with fairly good graphics and good plot. I’m not keen on the windows adaptation with cartoony graphics and a sluggish interface. Anybody know if this one runs under XP?
Thief- Great first person sneaker. I love the flash ‘n’ jack.
System Shock- Way ahead of it’s time. I can’t believe this came out before Doom. It’s amazing how overlooked this game is in the lineage of the FPS. It’s also amazing how long your arms are.
Homeworld- Well done 3D space strategy game. Cataclysm cleaned up the interface a little to make it nearly perfect.
Master of Orion- The original was the best for it’s time.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy- Sure, Zork is granddaddy of the text adventures games, but this one is a lot funnier.
Il-2- My favorite flight sim. The only one I’ve enjoyed since Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.
Master of Magic- What do you get when you combine magic with a Civilization style strategy game? MoM, and I like it.
Fair enough, you’re right. Doom isn’t the “best” game ever, whatever that means. I object to calling the puzzles stupid, though, especially since it would be a moot point; you’re there to kick demon ass, not to solve puzzles.
I’d have to disagree with The Matrix being mindless as well, but that’s a whole other thread.
Doom came out a year before System Shock. =)
System Shock did beat Quake though and for the longest time was the only 3D(ish) game where you could lean around corners and crouch. It should have gained a lot more noteriety than it did, but I guess the publisher didn’t pony up the marketing.
I’d love to see the original SS transported to the Dark Engine. AHh, fond memories of cursing Diego, fearing Shodan and running backwards shooting wildly at the trundling autobots.
Civ 1, 2 and 3. Each one ever so slightly better than the one before.
Monkey Island 1 & 2
Starcraft
Half-life
Total War
Yes, I pretty much riped this one off of another poster, but c’mon, he made such good choices!
System Shock II, Dark Forces(!), Freespace II, Starcraft, Warcraft III, Civ II.
One I am getting into now is Galactic Civilizations, and that may eventually make it onto my list.