I’ll second Soul Reaver 2. It has a great story, and makes me want to play the first one (is it any good?) and the next installment.
I’m also looking at these other suggestions; is Grim Fandango a computer ?
No, but Grim is a computer game :). It’s very good. The graphics are a bit dated in that it’s a low resolution, but the design is still brilliant.
I really liked Soul Reaver 1. It’s story is just as good. It has a few irritating puzzles in it whose type were thrown out of the sequel, but it’s nothing you shouldn’t be able to deal with.
All you guys that mentioned Silent Hill–what did you think of Silent Hill 2? That’s the only one I’ve played, and it confused the hell out of me. Even after I beat it, I needed to read about it on GameFAQs to get the gist of what just happened.
I agree.
Damn. Beat me to it. Fallout 2 has, by far, the greatest story, and allows the most control over the story, than any other game ever made in the history of games on earth and on mars and jupiter too.
Really? If anything I thought the plot of SH2 was much simpler than SH1. If you missed a few clues in SH1 you had absolutely no idea of what was happening between the two girls
SH2 was much more straightforward, albeit in a psychosexual horror sense. The only confusing thing was the timeline with regards to Laura/Mary.
why on earth has no-one mentioned ‘monkey island’ and ‘monkey island - le chucks revenage’ two incredibly funny games with very clever puzzles and jokes.
Also MGS was one of the most compelling games ever, MGS2 was certainly good, but slighlty fantastical.
Quoth DarRRva:
Tell me about it. I once managed to run the Zerg completely out of resources and kill every single Zerg unit on the map (without, of course, destroying any buildings), and a huge wompin’ swarm still spawns in at the end. So then, I do the same thing, with such honkin’ massive defenses by the Zerg ramps that I can stop that swarm without loss of a single unit or building. And she still gets slimed.
I wish I gave Silent Hill 2 more of a chance I played it for a while and returned it. I just couldn’t deal with the mindless fighting. Perhaps I should have though of it more as an interactive fiction than an adventure game.
I’m going to give my bid to Mafia. Played out like a great Mafia movie. Plus you get to kill lots of people.
I also have to give credit to Blizzard Entertainment. They made almost about every computer game I’ve ever owned (and loved 'em all). So that includes Warcraft I-III, Starcraft, Starcraft: Brood War, Diablo and Diablo II. And I can’t forget Lost Vikings (Which is being re-released! As is rock’n’roll racing! Yay!)
I really liked the story of Half-Life… Because of the way it is unfolded.
Starcaft story is a great one too.
Oh, and the best one goes for Grim Fandango.
I preferred Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Legacy of Cain: Soul Reaver over Soul Reaver 2. Both of them have many secrets, extras, powerups, etc, whereas Soul Reaver 2 was focused completely on the story. Of course, you may like it that way, but I like a good story along with extra stuff.
Phantasy Star 2 for the Genesis
Halo.
A coalition of alien races find ancient technology and texts on a deserted ringworld that describe a plague spreading through the universe. They worship the creators of the ringworld as gods. After an encounter with humans in space, they decide we are the plague their gods spoke of and declare war against us. During the war, a lone human ship on the run from a Covenant(alien coalition) attack makes a blind hyperspace jump and ends up in a solar system with one of the ringworlds orbiting a gas giant. The human ship is shot down and crashes on the Halo.
The tech on the Halo is far above both human and Covenant tech. It is guarded by an ancient AI, which mistakes the human representative as one of its former masters (the Forerunners).
The Covenant accidentally release the Flood, which was stored on the Halo. The Flood is an interstellar virus, an organism that takes over any biological lifeform of sufficient mass. It is the plague the Forerunners wrote of. It was studied on the Halo, more than likely escaped, and wiped out the Forerunners. The only way to stop a Flood infection is to wipe out its food - all sentient life in the universe.
The Halo is just the weapon for the job. When activated, it destroys all biological life in a 25,000 light-year radius. There are multiple Halos throughout the universe.
You as the player find out the Halo has been fired before to stop the Flood. By the Forerunners.
Who were more than likely humans.
Which means that the Covenant want to destroy humans based on their gods, who were human. And despite the humans managing to destroy the Halo before it can be fired, the Covenant are winning the war.
And in the Halo2 trailer, they’ve reached Earth.
Wow, now I’ve got to play Halo.
I’ve thougth about it and I’d also like to cast my vote for the Fallout series. The more I remember the better it gets. In case you don’t know the story:
It all starts with the oil crisis and the creation of AI. Basically all the major countries are rushing to tap the worlds last source of oil. I can’t remember exactly where it was but I think it was out at sea. So anyway, the only two countries capable of drilling out the oil are China and the United States. Both are very close but an unfortuante “accident” on the Chinese rig knocks them out of the race and the States sucks out the last bit of oil in the world. At this point Canada agrees to be annexed by the States in exchange for 10% of the oil. The Americans plunder and stockpile the resources and basically declare martial law in the north. Around this time Chinese troops appear in Alaska, but they are very low on fuel and unable to penetrate very far. Also as this is going on fallout shelters called Vaults are constructed around the globe. Then the nukes start going off. You start in Fallout 1 as a guy in Vault 13 that has to travel the wastelands in order to replace a water purification chip in your Vault. You find towns built by people whos Vaults opened long before yours. And your search continues. This is just the first one, I won’t spoil much else for you but I will say that in Fallout 2 you discover the nukes weren’t set off by the governments. They were launched by the AI computers because they were bored. They had all become depressed and suicidal and so decided that nuking the planet would be a fun idea. Makes for a great game.
And by extension, the series of games to which Halo is either a preqel/sequel to or a remake of:
Marathon.
And I’ll even provide a cite:
Marathon’s Story
Fans of the Marathon series have spent years deconstructing every nuance of the storyline in all three of the games, down to the last byte’s worth of garbage-text gibberish shown on the computer terminals of the malfunctioning A.I. characters of the game.
In fact, the intial advertising for Halo consisted of what came to be known as “The Cortana Letters”, a series of forged-header emails sent from the game developers’ headquarters to the maintainer of the Story site. As far as word of mouth advertising goes, I doubt they could have gotten better results.
I wasn’t sure if Bungie verified that Halo takes place in Marathon’s universe, so I didn’t mention it. The last I recall, there were some timeline issues, not to mention the fact that the Cortana in those letters is unabashedly batshit. She’s not that way in-game.
I never got to play all the Marathon sequels, and I’m still looking in the bargain bin for them.
Wearia,
Where did you get it was the A/I’s that launched in Fallout 2? I don’t remeber that at all. Maybe you played it a diffrent way than I did. I was to busy tracking down Horrigan and his crew. Man, that was a rough fight.
That’s currently the big debate on the Marathon story page. Certainly, many elements, such as the Cole Protocol, and SPARTAN cyborgs wearing Mjolnir armor are common between the two.
The timeline issue is one of technology, really: Going both by calendar year, and references in Marathon’s story, the events in the game Marathon should be after Halo. However, the technologies present in both stories don’t match up.
In Halo, they have Faster-Than-Light capable ships. In Marathon, the ships are sublight, requiring a mulit-generational Born On Board (Bob) crew. There are arguements that the Marathon colony ship was launched prior to the development of FTL, but that leads to another problem: Marathon has point-to-point teleportation technology, and Halo doesn’t.
My personal view is that Halo is a remake of Marathon, which is why specific plot elements are different, yet the themes are so similar.
Another vote for Grim Fandango (boy I love that game), as well as Day of the Tentacle and pretty much any other LucasArts graphic adventure.
However, I must also add the Tex Murphy series to the list, especially Under a Killing Moon.