Best and Worst video game... of all time!

For best, I’d pick Wing Commander 2. Plot, action, tragedy, victory! For the thinking person, I’d go to the original Galactic Civilisation - the one for OS/2.

These are both very old games. Modern games have a lot more polish, but you can’t beat a great idea that’s sheer fun.

Wouldn’t this definition of roleplaying rule out most Final Fantasy games?

I always found the FF games amazingly linear, even more so than most games. They’re almost all remarkable technological acheivements, but offered about as much in the way of gaming as the boxes they were shipped in. It would have been as interactive to watch the Final Fantasy movie.

I forgot a strong candidate for best PC game ever: “X-Com UFO Defense.” If they were ever going to remake some PC games to meet today’s technology and OS’s, I’d want them to do X-Com, TIE Fighter, and Red Baron.

Ultima 8, people, Ultima 8 was the bad Ultima. Especially coming off Ultima 7.

Joust cocktail, best looking cabinet, worst game.

Best ? Hard to say. Morowind or Oblivion, perhaps.

Worst ? Some obscure Atari ST game where you were a lizard man in a maze. Thing is, the screen flickered every time you moved; it was literally painful to play. I have no idea about how the rest of the game was, because it was too unpleasant to play for more than a minute or two.

Yes, it would.

Yes, but Ultima 9 was the awful Ultima.

Best? Tough choice, but I’ve got to toss in a $0.02 chip for Diablo.

I still pick it up at least once a year to get through it. The Butcher sequence still gets to me, after all these years. Dayum.

Best: Tons of choices for this one but I’ll simplify by going for the one I’ve had the most fun replaying: Resident Evil 4. The voice acting, graphics, and controls are all great. What this game really shines on is replay value. Picking off those little crossbow snipers with an infinite rocket launcher is something I’ll never get tired of.

Worst: Ultimate Spider Man. I’m a big spider man fan. Spider Man 2 is probably the best comic book video game out and a tight game in general. Ultimate…not so much. They took the controls from SM2 and simplified them, taking out all of the creativity and fun that Spider Man 2 allowed. The dialogue was annoying at best and the repetitive catch phrases were so bad that they were annoying to people in the room with me while I played. I was almost happier when Spider Man died. Thankfully that happened often. The bosses often had one specific way that you could kill them with no clue as to what it was. There were several “catch the character” stages where if you fell to far behind, game over. Often this meant following a very specific sequence and being in exactly the right spot or the characters sudden burst of speed or sudden corner would leave you staring at a game over screen retry or end screen.

Then there was the big gimmick. Play as Venom. That seemed fun. Now I can go baddie and destroy the hell out of things right? Again, not so much. Venom was even more simple than spider man. Venom punch. Venom jump. Venom grab people and suck the life out of them to delay his inevitable death. I’m not big on the idea of having a character whose life slowly slips away while the baddies around try to hasten your demise to begin with, but USM took it to a whole new level. I spent more time playing “find the victim to restore my life” than actually fighting anything.

Close runner up for worst: Indigo Prophecy. Kind of a neat concept, but it was demo short. Minus major points for involving indigo children into the plot. Most of the multiple endings the game touted were only available if you died at various points. That’s right. To see all of the endings, you had to fail repeatedly.

I love that game! Still play it now! Nothing so great as seeing the message “A new Imperial Stardestroyer, Bad Ass, has been deployed at Corellia” Love it. Shame it didn’t have more mutiplayer options though. Four people, two controlling each side, would have been great.

Anyway, with regards to the OP, Deus Ex is the best game I’ve played. RPG & FPS in a way never beaten. You really did feel that you could approach each situation in your own way, but sometimes it gave you little choice. Just like life.

Baldur’s Gate series, Final Fantasy VII & Alpha Centauri get honorable mention

It’s sequal could be one of the worst but that might because of my expectations. Master of Orion III for the same reason. The other games I don’t think are very good are mainly down to the fact that I’m no good at them. (eg GTA3 et al.)

Best: Final Fantasy VI or Planescape: Torment

Planescape: Torment is one of the only games where the story held me from beginning to end, without ever letting go.

Worst: Ultima IX

As I said on my Gamefaqs review, “Does more damage to Ultima than Phantom Menace did to Star Wars.”

That’s Loom, an absolutely brilliant and ground breaking adventure game. Rather short, though, that I completed it in just five hours, but it laid the foundation for graphic adventures after it with its unique interface (one of the first games to completely abandon the parser) and distinct themes.

You’re supposed to turn the dragon’s gold into straw, then he burns it up and leaves.

Best would have to be categorized by platform. The platforms I played extensively:

NES - Super Mario Brothers. Probably the single best video game ever made.

N64 - Aidyn Chronicles. An ambitious project for a cartridge console that came off quite well. It is still my favorite RPG video game and the reason I hold on to my N64. Part of its charm is the turn-based combat, in honor of the original imagination powered RPGs I grew up with. Something near impossible to find in modern gaming.

PS2 - Madden. No sports video game captured the feel, play, and excitement of the original sport than Madden’s football.

PC - Mafia. My all time favorite game. It had it all; the driving excitement of GTA, an involving and compelling story line, great play variation, a wonderful score, good acting, and incredible graphics for its time. Its great attention to detail really brought the 1930’s to life. Also its mod-ability made it last for years past its prime.
As for worst it’d be too difficult to say. I’ve found many games dissapointing, but I tend to stop playing them as soon as I realize I’m not having fun. I can say that after trying three different LucasArts titles and not liking any of them I will never give that brand another try.

I have to agree 100%. I just don’t consider FF games to be RPGs. Sure you build stats but you have no choice as to the paths the characters can take. I enjoyed the FF games I’ve played but they are adventure games not RPGs. I hear that the Japanese version of FFX allowed for much more character customization but I was never able to get my hands on it.

I was 9 years old, coming home from baseball practice. I walked into the deli on the way home to get a slush-puppie. I saw it… I have never before or since seen anything so beautiful. Donkey Kong is, by far, the greatest video game created by man or woman.

The worst? Once I enter a DK reverie I have no room for other video games in my consciousness.

Well, the American version of FFX enabled the player to customize the training paths of the various characters. I think that this was one of the great things about this game. Another great thing was the way the characters could switch in and out of the battle DURING the battle. However, the player STILL had to do many things in a set order, as the game wouldn’t open up Area B until Area A had been completed.

I think that there are very few video games that can really be considered RPGs, but then I used to play D&D (not AD&D) back before it was really popular. I’ll never forget the time when the party finally killed the Big Nasty Anti-Paladin…and my cleric took it into her head to raise him and convert him. The DM was NOT expecting that, but he took a few minutes to think it over and allowed it. There’s nothing like surprising the DM to give the game a little spice, and of course in a video game, you can only do what the programmers have anticipated.

To be fair to the programmers, the Atari 2600 was hopelessly underpowered for doing a decent version of Pac-Man. I don’t know why Atari bothered, other than greed.

I was lucky enough never to have played ET, but I did buy Pac-Man, and agree totally. Some 2600 games finessed the weakness of the platform (like Adventure and Empire Strikes Back) but some just blew it.

The worst adaptation of an arcade game for me was the original Star Wars. It was one of the first games with quotes from the movie, and the vector graphics was great. I got it for the C-64, and it was nearly unplayable, not the least because they got the controls upside down, so you had to move the joystick down to go up.

:dubious:
Don’t play a lot of flight simulators, do you?

I don’t think that character customization is really what defines an RPG. Compare Diablo II and Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, for instance. Characters in Diablo II are extremely customizable: Off the top of my head, I can think of a half-dozen fully viable ways to construct a paladin, all of them using completely different skills. But the moral system is reduced to “Evil is those things that you go kill, good is everything else”, and there’s only one way to interact with the townsfolk. By comparison, in Quest of the Avatar, the characters were basically uncustomizable, and even the different classes were very similar (really, what was the difference between a paladin and a ranger?)… But you could choose to rob the townsfolk, or rip them off, or senselessly kill them, and those choices had an impact on the game. Now, neither of those is really in the same category as human-DMed D&D, but I know which one I consider to be closer.