What’s your picks and why? (video game genre not limited to just MMOs…)
For me:
Best is Guild Wars. Excellent MMORPG timewaster with no ticking clock monthly fees to make you feel like you need to play it or you’re wasting money. Expansions have added loads of content, and they hold plenty of periodic special events on holidays or random weekends.
Worst for me happens to be Star Wars Galaxies. So much wasted potential, this one takes the honors from games that are outright bad, that you immediately abandon. And don’t get me started on that month I wasted making the best doctor buffs in the game. I actually power-leveled up the mining and crafter professions and invested all my credits into creating a massive stockpile of top-quality medical buffs. In order to make them top, top quality, I mastered the intricacies of getting top quality minerals, crafting components, blueprints, and factories together, then poured all my credits into running the factories day and night to pump out the buff packs.
I power-leveled myself up the doctor profession to use the buffs. This involved many hours of healing random strangers in the hospital. I wanted to be sure I was set forever when it came to buffs. Then, nerf bat comes along and one of the most insidious backward nerfs smacks me in the head.
Remember I had a massive quantity of carefully constructed stockpiled buffs. In order to fit them into my inventory, they existed as 50-use buff packs in stacks of 250. So basically, I had created many tens of thousands of hits of this stuff so my character could always have high health and “mana” stats and I could give anyone else similarly high boosts for about 20-30 minutes (the top level durations). Each of these were extremely rare and valuable. Doctors could just stand in the spaceport selling buffs to help players in the high level areas and it was lucrative.
So, what was the nerf? The sneaky bastards did it so it wasn’t noticeable at first. They left the first 50-use buff packs alone (grandfathered). But the 249 other packs came out with crap stats. :smack: :smack: In other words, I had however uses remaining on my current pack and that’s it. The remaining 12450 uses were now worthless. (multiply by all the stacks I had) I was basically a pauper overnight.
Wow, way to treat your support class characters and loyal customers, Sony. I stuck around a little bit after that but it was clear the nerf would never be undone and so I packed up and left.
The best PC game of all time is probably Civilization (pick your version.)
For worst, assuming we’re only talking about games that were major releases and actually sold in EB and places like that, I’d have to pick… well, there are a lot of choices. Many big releases like “Patriot” and “Outpost” was released broken and so were fundamentally unplayable, and it can’t get any worse than that.
For something that worked but just sucked, “Star Wars Rebellion” was genuinely atrocious.
Best: Armor Alley. 2 dimensional RTS with 3PS elements, too: you basically bought a selection of troops such as infantry, AA, and tanks to go up against the enemy’s line of troops: and they had no where to go but forward since it was in 2 dimensions! So the advantages of that are you have to have good planning and did not have to micromanage the troops while they were on their way.
Plus, above all that was you and your helicopter, which you controlled directly, trying to disrupt your opponents battle lines and helicopter! (While their AA, if any, was shooting at you, and their infantry were invading your towers to put up barrage balloons.)
Worst: some sword+sorcery game of the mid-late 80s, where you, in theory, had to collect spells to perform certain tasks. Only problem is, no matter what spell I used or when I used it, even stuff that should made me immune to fire, nothing would let me get past the fire breathing dragon. I’m convinced it was a programming error.
Best of all time: Final Fantasy VI or Super Metroid. The pinnacles of RPGs and action games, respectively.
I don’t know about worst, but the most disappointing game I’ve played was probably Legend of Mana. I had really high expectations, but practically everything about the game, except graphics, was terrible. Just not a fun game at all.
Maybe not best and worst, but close to the top and close to the bottom.
My pick for (nearly) the best is Tomb Raider. Maybe it doesn’t hold up to today’s standards, but as the first game for my new shiny PS1 (back in '97) it blew me away. I found that games didn’t have to sidescroll. You can explore huge non-linear worlds. I’ve never played a game beginning to end as many times as that.
My pick for (nearly) the Worst is Tomb Raider AOD. I had the same giddy excitement for the first TR on PS2 as I did for the first TR on PS1. All the sequels on PS1 were getting pretty redundant, I was hoping the change of platform would change all of this. Boy, was I dissappointed. The control sucked. There was an attempt on a user defined story line which was depedant on choices the player made through the game. I would like to see how different choices would have affected the outcome, but I can’t bring myself to play the game again. Oh, and the long load times in arbitrary places was horrible.
Best: Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Both ground breaking in the smooth as silk, over the shoulder view 3-D world. Excellent level design, excellent controls, excellent storylines.
Worst: Pole Position. I always hated this game. It was never fun. It was a frustrating excercise in keeping the car on the road. Anytime I ever played it I was either bored or frustrated inside a minutes time. In a generation of Donkey Kong, DigDug, Centipede, and Pac-Man… Pole Position was a waste of a quarter.
I’d have to say FF6 is probably one of the best ever. A great story, mostly great characters, and lots to do. I love Fallout and Fallout 2 as well, they have major replay value.
I wanted to love Legend of Mana. Secret of Mana was great. It wasn’t as good as FF6, but it was a great game. LoM, on the other hand…I have to make my own landscape, experiment with pets and fruits, and generally have to do a lot of crafting in order to play the game. Too much fiddling about with persnickety stuff, not enough gameplay.
I have the dubious honor of having given the absolute lowest score ever given by a Gamespy reviewer: 15% (back when they scored on a 100% system) for an adventure game called Full Moon In San Francisco. If you ever have the opportunity to get your hands on a copy to see how bad it really is…don’t. Back away slowly.
Best? That’s a hard one. The original Half-Life? The original Neverwinter Nights? *Fallout *1 or 2? World of Warcraft? The Sims 2? No, in thinking about it, I’d probably have to go with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The sheer moddability, number of hours of play, open-endedness. All make it one of the games I’ve played longer than anything except World of Warcraft.
Nope - none of the three. I played in in an arcade, but the style of play did remind me of PC RPGs.
ETA: side-scrolling. You had to come at the dragon from a door to its right, then it squirted a line of fire from its mouth at a 45 degree angle to the floor. No matter what spell I used or when I used it, the fire would always hit me and punch me back through the door, losing a life in the process.
Best: Depends on the category, really. And depends on what I’m looking for. God of War (and 2) are probably hands down the best action/adventure games, IMO trumping everything else is in every category except for inventory items. FF6 is probably the greatest RPG, though FFX is probably a close second, but FF12 has been really good so far. Elder Scrolls IV is probably the best designed games, for the sheer incredible openendedness. Eve Online is one of the most incredible MMORPGs, IMO. I could go on for categories, but I can’t just pick ONE game that’s the best of all time
Worst: Not really sure, haven’t played enough games recently to encounter the terrible ones, though I do recall many games where it seems like just getting your character to walk in a straight line was a feat worthy of a victory dance.
The worst game of all time was E.T. for the Atari 2600, followed closely by Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 (how such a great arcade game was fucked over into such a piece of crap console game is a sad, sad, tale.)
Thanks for the flashbacks, man. I was GOOD at Civ. Picked up this dog of a game and wondered where all my mad skillz had gone. Then I realized it wasn’t me, it was them.
Best game ever? Either the Civ series or the Fallout series.
Worst game ever? E.T. Hands down. There is no worse game than E.T. You could hand me a controller, pop a copy of “Prayer of the Rollerboys” into the ol’ VHS, and tell me that I played Corey Haim, and THAT would be a better game than E.T.
Worst: Always hard to say… so I’ll go with sequels that were an incredible letdown:
-Battletech 2: The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. The first game was a super-involved RPG with tons of adventure and customizability and cool stuff to do. The second game was a sequence of battles with no plot or RPG elements at all
-Ultima 6: Threw away everything good about the series (imho). Sure, the world made out of big human-sized squares was not realistic or cutting edge. But it was sure as hell fun
My. God. I had to Google to find out more…The game really is that bad. Review
Warning: NSFS (Not Safe for Sanity)
As for my best and worst…can it be the same game? Omikron, for Dreamcast.
Positives: Insanely original. Wide choice of characters and scenarios. Rich and detailed setting. Incorporated FPS and fighting games into the main 3D adventure. Kick-ass soundtrack by David Bowie. Excellent concept for breaking the fourth wall.
Negatives: Controls were insanely bad. FPS was far too hard, fighting game was far too easy. Graphics, even for the time, were ugly. Save games got corrupted like Amish teens in Ibiza. And finally, my personal “favorite”, the freaking font used for titles and place names was illegible.
There’s talk of a sequel…I don’t know if I can stand to relive the heartbreak.
Best -no such thing. Original Pool Of Radience, Warcraft, Final Fantasys most, Civilization Romance of the 3 kindoms etal. They all appeal to different moods and challenges.
As a colossal NES/SNES fan with zero interest in modern video games, I have to agree. It really doesn’t get any better than those (aside from Chrono Trigger and Legend of Zelda: A Link To the Past alongside them).