Don’t know about best games, but more favorite maybe. I’m mad for pinball games, so those are always at the top of the list. Final Fantasy Tactics is high on my list, too. Also, both Tetris and Tetris Attack.
Worst game: It is definitely ET for Atari. Because once you fell into that goddamn pit, you spent the next hour trying to get out, if you even kept trying that long.
Please tell me that none of them were Monkey Island games. Those were possibly the best adventure/puzzlers of all time.
Pitfall? Pitfall? That game was classic!
Best games: Archon, Maniac Mansion, Zak McCracken & The Alien Mindbenders, the Splinter Cell series
Worst games: ET, the Last V8 (a rather obscure C64 game), Club Drive (a godawful Atari Jaguar game)
Best game of all time? Wow.
Arcade: Tetris. Hands down. Tetris has been around for 22 years, copied and borrowed and stolen and reinvented for new technology (like my cell phone).
Commodore 64: Jumpman. Maddening, but still challenging, and simple enough that anybody could figure it out. I liked Epyx’s “Impossible Mission” better (“destroy him, my robots!”) but it was a bit too arcane for some people who didn’t have the patience for the puzzle half of the game.
Amiga: Lemmings. While I admit I played “The Killing Game Show” waaayy more than was good for me, way more than Lemmings, it’s the little blue guys who went on to several sequels.
Macintosh: Marathon. Bungie rules. 
Worst: Lazarian for the Commodore-64. Pleeease.
Autumn Almanac & Big Bad Voodoo Lou, I wasn’t going to post in this thread, but you two made me! Old-school Nintendo fan-boy here (not so much since I became pubescent), and I have to say that no matter how much time goes by, the old NES/SNES vs. Genesis era (I do love the old Sonic games, in all fairness) remains my favorite time period for games. There’s just something about those old classics like the first Zelda, Castlevania 3, Mega Man 2, or Ninja Gaiden, or any of the ones you mentioned that just makes me able to pick them up and play through over and over ad infinitum. They never get tired.
New games (and by that I mean the kind usually associated with Playstation; big budget, triple-A titles) just don’t do that. Sure there are games like Crimson Skies, any of the Wario Ware titles, or Super Smash Brothers, but by and large everyone wants to be the next GTA or WoW or somesuch. Sure that stuff’s great, but I love whenever you see a developer crack out something that has that old feel like Konami’s Gradius V for PS2 (a game that, minus graphics and sound, could easily run on a 16-bit system), Ikaruga by Treasure, or Defcon by Introversion!
Anyway, as to the OP:
Best? I would generally want to break it down by era and/or genre, but if I had to choose… Super Mario 64. No one has ever made a better 3D action-platformer/adventure hybrid. After 11 years, I think it’s safe to say they might as well stop trying. Prince of Persia was great, but still didn’t cut it.
Worst? Gundam: Battle Assault for PS1. Granted, I knew it was going to be a two-bit fighting game going into it (silly, non-cannon series spin-off title at that!), but my god this game is miserable (mind you, I’m automatically disqualifying games that were released broken for computers). ET was bad, but it came from an era when games were fresh and new and there had to be colossal failures. G:BA could’ve been a goofball fun game, but it’s honestly the worst 2D Fighting-game engine I’ve ever played!
Okay, skimming over more of the thread, I have to comment on the “Final Fantasy isn’t an RPG” comments. I have three thoughts to add.
1.) Okay, not a ‘role-playing game.’ Well, it’s not an RPG in the traditional conext, no. But do you play a role? Yes. But by this definition any game with a story positing the player as a specific character is an RPG.
Okay then, how about this: in the console videogame industry, the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series have become the benchmark for what is defined as an RPG over the course of some 23 or so years of development. While many gamers of a PC-origin will append either the term “console” or the letter J (for Japanese) to the term for the genre, can we agree that this series is an RPG in a standard form of nomeclature?
Granted there are divergences in the use of this particular term, for example MMORPG’s don’t really involve any role-playing for most people anyways. Yet they are still called that to distinguish the standard gameplay elements from other MMO titles like Planetside, or EVE Online. Second Life is in many ways much more of an MMO-RPG than WoW or EQ, but I think most people think of it as a virtual chatroom.
2.) As for the contention of neorxnawange and RickJay that the FINAL FANTASY series doesn’t allow much character customization is flat out wrong!
It betrays how unfamiliar with the series you must truly be! For example, look at the following:
Final Fantasy X’s Sphere Grid through which all stat growth and skills are acquired. Note that each character starts in a given area, but can branch out however they choose. Note the SIZE of the map.
or Final Fantasy Tactics job system. A fairly massive tree of classes that can be unlocked, and a command card for each character that can be customized using traits learned while playing other jobs (including altering the allowed equipment for one’s current job), and the ability to field a company of characters, allowing the player to have on average 3-6 effective team builds he can pick from for each battle.
While there are some games like 4 where NO customization is allowed, even entrees like 1 and 6 allowed a little bit of alteration over the course of the game (selecting which spells at each level of magic your mages will learn in 1, and the equipping of Espers affecting what spells are learned as well as the character’s stat growth in 6). Overall, as far as console RPG’s are concerned, FF is probably one of (if not THE) best series out there.
3.) Rick_Jay’s comments deserve special attention. Granted, the real focus of the series has always been the experience (graphics, sound, presentation, etc.) and the stories, but to say “about as much in the way of gaming as the boxes they were shipped in?”
Clearly we’ve played two different game series. Even the most linear ones had numerous hidden features or sidequests, complex boss fights that took a fair bit of thinking and skill to figure out (or a strategy guide, I guess), minigames, etc. There’s quite a bit of gameplay outside of just following the trail for someone who wants to look around a little, or go back and try to get the best possible score on that one mini-game (course, that’s a space-shooter fan’s mentality, maybe not your thing).
PS. neorxnawange You might be thinking of FF-X’s “International” (read European) release. It added an “Expert Spheregrid” mode that changed-up where characters started and how they could progress to give the player a little less direction in the early levels (though, let’s face it, once you’re about a halfway through the game you’re pretty much free to go where you want anyways).
Sigh, missed one of my points, and ran out of time to edit.
Point 2c.)
Again, please read the first paragraph at this link about Final Fantasy II, which had a truly unique and natural system for character growth. Your growth is dependent on your actions in each battle. Fighting raises strength. Casting Fire 1 a lot teaches you Fire 2, etc.!
I came into to this thread specifically to mention Planescape: Torment. Never have been so emotionally affected by a computer game. Why don’t they make more story driven RPGs like this? Or do more things with the planescape universe?
It didn’t sell badly, but not super-duper. The company that made it went out of byusiness because the managers were incompetent. The company which owns the rights to Planescape got bought out, and the new owners are tasteless buffoons.
For the best ever game, can I cheat a little? I would like to choose Ultima Online circa 1999. Before the Renaissance expansion pack. There is no other game that I have spent so much time on. Honourable mentions to Age of Empires (1&2(not 3)), Deus Ex, Morrowind and, if you’ll permit me to go this far back, XCOM.
It suprises me sometimes, when I glance over at the shelf next to my PC, just how long some of the games have kept their place. I still can’t live without Total Annihilation, Age of Empires II, Space Empires IV, Baldurs Gate, Diablo II, etc… Even a couple of games that no longer work hold their place, Theme Hospital as an example.
Although it seems I should be ashamed to admit it, there is one other game that has remained on my shelf throughout the years… Star Wars: Supremacy (Rebellion in the US). That games kicks ass once you get past the awkward interface and non-existant battle graphics. If they were to update that game (‘Empire At War’ was a poor game IMO) then I would never need any other. Screw the shelf, I would build a shrine.
The worst game I played all the way through was Xenogears. The story got worse as the game progressed, until the second disc, where it simply nodded off and I started playing through random scenes that reeked of well-known anime, followed by an anti-climactic final boss fight. The gameplay was confused and meandering, often stopping the action to solve impossible puzzles with no clues, requiring perfect pixel placement of the character. I only beat it because I paid $40 for it, and the playstation’s save function failed.
The best game was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It is the only linear game apart from the Zelda series and Final Fantasy Tactics that I’ve had the patience to replay over and over. Like Tactics, it grips me for hours and keeps me up at night. I only wish it was longer. After the 2d sidescroller went out of fashion, the best of its kind showed up.
The thing that really pissed me off in Xenogears was one section where the characters are wandering through a futuristic factory. People go in, food comes out. The only way it could be more blatantly obvious is if Charlton Heston ran through screaming “It’s people! It’s made of people!”
So as you progress you wind up in a store room and two of the three characters decide that they’re hungry. You don’t have any choice in the matter of the actions. It doesn’t matter that you’d have to have a sub-zero IQ to not realize what was going on, two of the characters have to eat while the third looks on disapprovingly. Then they enter the next room and HUGE SPOILER:
Soylent Xenogears is made of people! People!
So they’re disgusted while the third that didn’t eat preaches at them for being bad people because they ate. This third character knew the entire time what the food was made out of and let the other two characters become inadvertent cannibals so he could take up a position of moral superiority.
Now instead of getting angry and shoving him into the people grinder he’s standing next to the other two characters become ashamed by their behavior. The same point that he wanted to make could have been made without letting the other characters eat people, but then he wouldn’t have been able to get up on a moral high horse. His behavior is far more disturbing than anything else there.
