Holding the simultaneous title of best and worst ever for me is Black and White. I’ve never before seen a game with such incredible originality and potential, and grabbed me immediately with its gameplay, yet became mindnumbingly boring and frustrating after only a couple of hours. If premature ejaculation were condensed into a game, this would be it.
Best: FFVI. Story, characters, Kefka, worldwide destruction = heaven in a cartridge.
Worst (that I have played): James Bond 007 for the GBA. Controls so bad I wanted to slap Broccoli’s corpse for ever inventing Bond.
E.T. at worst; Castlevania : Symphony of the Night at best - though if asked on a different day, my answer might change on that one.
worst? Criticom…this asstacular bit of programing was supposed to be a fighting game along the lines of tekken or MK but instead you could choose some toons like robots or some crap…and then just for kicks you had the lamest moves ever and coulndt even hit each other unless you were face to face. no combos. nothing led into anthing else you were as well off just mashing the punch button as doing anything else.
best?
FPS Tribes 1
mmo WOW, for getting pvp right in every single way evercrap never even came close to.
rpg? GTA San Andreas, OH MY GOD…one of the very very VERY few single player games that holds my attention.
I think thats my list.
Tecmo Bowl is my vote for best as well. I still play it on a Nintendo emulator on my computer. They packed an amazing amount of fun and challenge into that little football game. These days I try to go for personal records like scoring over 100 points in a game or passing from end zone to end zone for a touchdown.
Worst is definetely E.T. for Atari. The game didn’t even work right and the design was terrible even if it did.
I must have been the only kid on the planet who liked E.T. and had no earthly idea it was universally reviled. I only found out recently while watching that gaming documentary.
The Civ games are definitely the best games of all history, but really, how many games of all history are there? 
Seriously, though, for my “best” vote, I’m going to say Tetris. Yes, it’s old, but it’s still released for anything vaguely resembling a computer that anyone ever builds, and people still play it. Nobody’s ever used the lit office windows in the side of a building to play a 200-foot-tall game of World of Warcraft, or wrote a version of Final Fantasy that runs on a wristwatch. A thousand years from now, people will still be playing Tetris.
Runners up would include Starcraft and Civilization for sure, and probably also Doom II. As well as many ofthers, of course, which I haven’t played and thus can’t objectively rate.
As for worst, again sticking only with games I’ve actually played, I’m going to have to go with a piece of trash called Companions of Xanth. The book it was based off of wasn’t exactly great to begin with, but the game brought all new levels of suckitude. As an example: Near the beginning of the game, you picked a companion, a native of the magical land of Xanth who would guide you through the rest of the game. There were four choices, except they had only actually written dialog for one of them. The first “puzzle” in the game, after that point, had you in a cave with four exits. And before you got a chance to do anything, your companion would pick one of the doors, with no justification at all. If you picked the “wrong” companion, he or she would pick a wrong door, and you died instantly and had to reload.
Or, another example: In the very beginning of the game, before the companion-picking, you were in your house. Once you entered the magical land, you couldn’t return to the house at all, during the game. If you wandered around the house before that, though, you could get a jar of mustard out of the fridge, for no apparent reason. Then, very near the end of the game, there’s a trap-puzzle, where you need to use the mustard to be able to get out. If you happened to not have picked it up, oh, so sorry, there was nothing you could do, and you had to start over again from the very beginning.
I’m finding that trying to pick one single game as the best game ever is almost impossible. How can you compare Tetris to Starcraft? Or Super Mario Brothers 3 to Quake 3? Or Civilization to World of Warcraft?
I think I’ll flip a throw a dart at the monitor and pick Starcraft. I logged countless hours playing game offline, at LAN parties, and on Battle.net, and I still fire it up once or twice a year.
And picking the worst is almost harder, so I’ll go with the biggest disappointment in recent years: Doom III. It sounded like it would be 100% greatness, but aside from the visuals is was a huge letdown. Quake 4 might qualify for this distinction as well. I played the hell out of Quake 2 and Quake 3 Arena. So when Quake 4 came along I was pumped to relive some of that past glory. Unfortunately, the game was just OK. It didn’t run well for a lot of players and the online community never really got behind it. I got tired of playing CTF on the same 4 maps over and over and moved on.
GTA is considered a roleplaying game now?
twitch twitch
Let’s see – Take on a character role, develop stats and skill sets towards the goal of defeating a final enemy (with tons of quests and side missions along the way)? Sounds like an RPG to me.
Maybe not a Fantasy RPG, but it certainly fits the literal definition of “role-playing”.
best game? Impossible to answer, really, I’ll name a few.
Eve online ** (I’ve played this game for more than three years now, and even though I’m taking a break from it right now, I have no intention of stopping playing it)
Super Mario 64
Zelda A link to the past
Zelda (the original)
Starcraft
**
As for the worst… I’d say Matrix online This piece of filth was one of the worst games I’ve ever played, which is really a shame, because it could have been great, if they had done it right.
Best: Final Fantasy Tactics- the original for PS, not the disappointing GBA version.
Worst: Superman 64
I liked the GBA version except for the fact that I had casaually thrown some quest Item away at some point in the game which I later found out prevented me from completing every quest in the game. :mad:
Best: I have always been a fan of Phantasy Star II for the Genesis. I think that game more than any other shaped what I expect video games should be.
Worst: This is difficult to say. I don’t waste my time on games that aren’t immediately fun. The consensus among gamers seems to put it at E.T. for the 2600, but I think there are worse games out there. E.T. seems to be significant due to the initial hype surrounding its release and its colossal failure.
If the game had been called “Alien Adventure” or something like that it would have gone down as an odd, but creative attempt at an adventure game, that in the end didn’t work. Or at best the developers would have been given some time to work on it until they had a more playable game.
This may change at some point - in the past, I’d have said Diablo II, Worms II, or WoW - but the best for me is Civilization III, in a close race with Tetris, SPECIFICALLY the Game Boy version.
Worst could be any of a lot of old 2600 or SNES carts. I’l pick ET for the 2600.
Joe
Best: Civilization II. It has the best replay value of the whole Civ series.
Worst: Master of Orion III was 100% pure letdown.
(bolding mine)
Way cool!
Two of those elements can be found in nearly every video game ever made. The third, “develop stats and skill sets,” sounds like a pretty weak hook to hang a genre on.
I seem to end up in this argument in virtually every video game thread on these boards, but shouldn’t a role playing game have some actual element of role playing? How much control do you get over what sort of person Carl Johnson is in the game? How many choices do you have in how you interact with other characters? How much influence do your actions have on the outcome of the game’s story? Can you play a different way and get a different ending?
Sorry, don’t mean to rant, but I love RPGs, and it bothers me how frequently the label is misapplied in video games, just because the developers threw in some stat building.
Pistols at dawn, sir. Everquest wasn’t the perfect PvP experience - or even really a great one in a lot of ways - but WoW PvP was the worst of any MMO I have played that has included it (and I’ve at least tried out most of them). EQ was actually pretty underrated in the PvP department, if for no other reason than that they managed to have fights last more than five seconds (and yet people actually be killable as well), no one-hit-kill buttons after the early years, and have actual room for strategy and skill to provide much more influence than you’d think against latency and gear. These are very simple things, and yet virtually every MMO screws them up.
(WoW was a good game, but this was absolutely not the reason why.)
As for the topic, you will get a different answer to the “best game” depending on when you ask me - at the moment it is Final Fantasy Tactics, but there are at least a couple dozen answers that may pop up on a given day for that one.
Worst game? I tend to not have enough free time/money to pick up games that I know aren’t going to be at least above-average. Out of what I have played, I was ridiculously disappointed in how much Ultima, um, 9, I think, was a step back from everything that was good about Ultima.
Best: I think I’d have to go with Civ II. The best of the Civilization series by a longshot, though they were all very good.
Worst: I too have a recollection of a fantasy-based game with great graphics and incredibly boring gameplay, that I can’t remember the title of. I think “Magic” was part of it.
Broccoli? He may have brought 007 to the silver screen, but Ian Fleming invented him.
There’s no way I can limit it to “one” best.
I really like strategy games, the one that I honestly think is the best of all time is Master of Magic.
I loved Civilization, thought Civ 2 was one of the best games ever made (I think 2 is the best in the series, relative to the other games on the market at the time of its release.) Master of Orion 1/2, I really loved a ton as well. I mean shit, in MOO 2 you could build stellar converters and reduce entire planets to asteroid fields, and could also create new worlds from dust in the solar system. You could wipe out an entire population with biological weapons (and gain the condemnation of the galaxy), you could also export conquered peoples from one planet to another, if they were, for example, better equipped to deal with certain hostile environments than was your own race.
But, back to Master of Magic it has pretty much every thing in it someone who loves strategy games and loves fantasy fiction could want. You start out as a very weak wizard who controls a single hamlet from a lofty wizard’s tower. Over time, you acquire magical nodes to increase your mana stores, you research devastating spells, build your hamlet into a sprawling fortress capable of producing very tough units, as well as conquering other cities.
You do battle with other wizards on two planes of existence, and if you finally have an insane amount of resources you can cast a mastery spell which makes you the master of all wizards (banishing all of your opponents to the abyss), but this spell takes many turns to cast, and while you are casting pretty much every one is out for your head.
I loved the customization, at the game start there were so many great ways you could customize your wizard, you could give them balanced magical abilities, or focus heavily on one tree, or two trees. I also really liked the mechanic wherein your wizard tower could be “sacked” banishing you to the abyss for several turns, but eventually you could be restored to the material plane. It was also really cool deep in to the game just how ridiculously powerful your wizard was, able to completely destroy entire armies at times.
Unfortunately MoM is notoriously hard to play on new machines (for a long time I kept an old machine just to play it), unless you want to go the emulation route (which isn’t a bad idea–I’ve found DOSBox runs it pretty well.) The Age of Wonders series and the Dominions series are both great games in the same line of MoM, and the relatively recently released Dominions III is worth a buy for anyone who liked MoM.