Am I the only old geezer here??
Ultima IV.
You made a little typo - I think you mean Ultima VII. 
[slight hijack]
If you want storylines and interactive novels, have you tried interactive fiction? I didn’t include any of that as they’re not precisely video games, but for computer games, the storylines tend to surpass many commercial offerings.
[/slight hijack]
Okay, interactive fiction. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy all the way. That game is just plain evil.
No, Ultima IV you young whippersnappers!!!
I’ve got to go with a top ten list. This IS in order.
1.) Ultima VII Complete
Very long and deep story line. A good example of how religion can be used to control people.
2.) Ultima VI
The epic battle for understanding between two peoples. How can you not love it.
3.) Full Throttle
Lucas Art’s crowning achievement. The ending felt so RIGHT if a little sad. I’m glad to hear they’re making a sequal!
4.) Chrono Trigger
Play it, you’ll know why. I highly recommend the PS version for it’s anime cut scenes. Talk about characters you CARED about.
5.) Final Fantasy III (The one with Espers)
The opera scene is reason enough.
6.) Deus Ex
BEST… CONSPIRACY… EVER…
7.) Quest for Glorys I-V
The only game to ever allow your character to evolve and be transfered between games. It even added new “hidden” plot elements for imported characters making the plot flow so much smoother.
8.) Maniac Mansion - Day of the Tenticle
Time traveling in a Jonny-on-the-Spot. What more do I need to say?
9.) Stonekeep
10.) Fallout/Fallout 2
Play them. You’ll understand.
Man, how could I mention a LucasArts game and forget Sam and Max? I love it. But I feel the same way about pointy sticks.
Wasteland was also good. Servants of the Temple of the Mushroom Cloud has such a nice cadence to it. The hint book was really well written too.
Alphagene - I never got a chance to play Sam n Max, but Lucas Arts is going to change that. They’re making a new Sam and Max game. Check out the Lucas Arts web site. Saw it when I was looking for my Full Throttle 2 link.
Ummm… no. Maybe the first adventure game (although I doubt that) but not first game ever, and certainly not the only game. The Bard’s Tale series, the SSI Gold Box games, Baldur’s Gate, Dark Heart of Uurkul (didn’t have any sequels, but you could import your Bard’s Tale characters), Wizardry, and Might and Magic all allowed you to import your characters from previous games. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Anyway, my vote goes for Torment. Honorable mentions to Thief II, Gabriel Knight, almost any LucasArts game, Deus Ex, both System Shocks, both Fallouts, Realms of the Haunting, Baldur’s Gate II, and Zork.
Silent Hill. Excellent psychological horror; pushes all the right buttons to really unsettle the player. The “bad” ending is shocking, just because it’s so much more nihilistic than you’d ever expect mass market entertainment to be.
My picks:
Myst
The story, in a nutshell
- You’re thrown into a mysterious, exotic, timeless world, with…absolutely nothing. (Well, okay, you can avail yourself to pen and paper, but that’s all the help you get.) The name of this place, your purpose for being here, where to go, what to do…unknown. You have no choice but to explore.
- In the course of your explorations, you find branches from your starting point (called “Ages”). Your only information source on the island gives you some compelling stories, but they only reveal faint whispers of what your mission is.
- You find out that you have to return red and blue pages to their respective books. There’s a man trapped in each, and they also have long stories to tell…which give you, of course, only faint snippets of your mission. You have to continue the task of finding the pages without knowing why, without knowing what the end result will be, without even knowing what the books really are.
- In the end, it comes down to one huge, fateful decision, which will result in either 1) Total victory, 2) disappointment, or 3) eternal imprisonment.
This game was truly one of a kind, and even the later installments were never able to capture the free-roaming spirit of the original, where you learned of your true purpose bit by bit and were fascinated by the workings of this strange universe along the way.
The Bard’s Tale 2: The Destiny Wand
Okay, so a huge barbarian army is marching toward the land of the Bard and the six good cities. The only way to save them is to use the powers of the ancient Destiny Wand to form an alliance powerful enough to combat these invaders, but the dastardly wizard Lagoth Zanta stole the wand, divided it into seven segments, and put each in a Death Snare. Of course, it’s up to your intrepid band of adventurers to find the segments, reforge the wand, and slaughter Lagoth Zanta. Along the way, your only source of hints is the mysterious Sage, who charges a pretty penny for his insights.
Now, you have no idea who LZ looks like, you have no idea why he stole the wand or divided it into seven segments, and you have no idea what awaits you in the snares. Oh yeah, and if you don’t solve a snare in time, the whole party dies. Done, kaputsky, finito.
So after dying a thousand deaths and going through an ungodly amount of trouble to get the segments, then fiinally forging them, you return to the Sage to find out where that rotten bastard is hiding.
And learn that the Sage is, in fact, Lagoth Zanta.
And, as it turns out, the reason he stole the wand and set up all the elaborate snares was he loves killing. He wanted to see barbarians massacre good cityfolk, he wanted adventurers to die in the snares, and, now that you’ve found in, he’s sicced his “Balder Guards” to massacre your pitiful little band. BTW, these guards not only can hit anyhone and anything, they have critical-hit ability against anyone not holding the wand.
I admit, after all the megalomaniacs and fanatics and worldshaker, it was refreshing to see such a nauseatingly petty bad guy.
Quoth Max the Immortal:
Good time travel? Tell us more! I’ve never been able to think of any conceivable way of working good time travel into a video game, and I had thought it impossible.
My vote, though, is Dark Reign. There’s very little of the story in the gameplay itself, but there’s a lot in the manual and supplemental material, and it’s sort of in the background for the whole game. Strongly reminiscent of Dune.
Best Video Game Story Ever?
Either Broken Sword (Circle Of Blood) which is also my favourite game, regardless of the fact that it is old and has no replayability factor.
OR
Starcraft…
I thought that was an excelent story, especially continued in Brood War. I was so pissed off at Kerriagn’s Death I stopped playing for weeks, and everytime I play it now, I hope there’s someway I can stop her dying; but alas, I have yet to stop her getting infested. sniff
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
“The president has been kidnapped by ninjas.
Are you a bad enough dude to resuce the president”
Seriously: my votes are for Xenogears (which has a great introduction) and Grim Fandango. Trinity also deserves mention because it was one of the artiest stories I’ve seen in a game. You get transported to a Lewis Carrol inspired world where nuclear blasts on earth appear as giant mushrooms. Some of these mushrooms are gateways to the actual nuclear blast sites, and you experience a variety of mini-stories such as being with a group of school children at Hiroshima the morning of the blast, or with lemmings running from a Soviet A-bomb test. It’s one of the first games I played that was clearly not intended for kids.
my picks are:
Starcraft
Silent Hill
Flashback - Quest for Memory (for the Sega Genesis - one of that machine’s best games)
Grim Fandango
Kids these days.
Doesn’t anyone remember A Mind Forever Voyaging?
Granted, there’s some gaping holes of logic in the basic premise (fallacy of the excluded middle, anyone?), but a good yarn nonetheless.
Sorry to bring this up, but since this is Straight Dope…
The Principle of the Excluded Middle, [symbol]A Û[/symbol]([symbol]a Ú Øa[/symbol]), is a fundamental axiom of higher logic.
I think you might have meant the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle.
My vote goes to FFVII. I just finished beating it all over again. Best story ever and the richness of the world…Tolkien couldn’t have designed that game any better than Squaresoft did.
SInce most my favorites are already put own (usually several times…) I’ll just say Thief I/II, and…
Jedi Knight II. Yeah, yeah, its not original, but it does capture the spirit of the star wars series.
Oh gosh, I almost forgot: Anachronox!
Its an offbeat, American culture meats Japanese RPG style story game. It has the best opening of any game, ever. 
And the sly humor of the game meshes perfectly with the storyline.