Yeah, I’ve played Total Annihilation and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. Both bite. And I didn’t mean they were knockoffs of StarCraft, I meant they were more victims of Command & Copy syndrome.
3D units? Nothin’ but freakin’ boxes, man. Worst 3D rendering I’ve seen for game characters since Descent. And the AI isn’t worth two shucks of a zergling’s hide. And the music… ugh.
You want a good game, with “true 3D” and whatnot, great music, AMAZING 3D characters, AND a REAL story? Get “Force Commander”, bro… hardly as great as they said it’d be, but much better than TA.
I still say that everyone reading this thread should go out and buy Half-Life. Best game I’ve ever played.
My first computer game, about fifteen years ago, was one of the King’s Quests, which I loved. Then, I was seriously addicted to Warcraft for awhile. Net-Warcraft with six players . . . makes Tim Allen grunting noises The individual scenarios are fun, too. And, of course, for sheer mindlessness, I loved Diablo. I lived in a great house for computer games when it came out, and we had so much fun.
Grand Inquisitor was my first non-text Zork game. I didn’t know there were others. A quest begins!
I’ve always been a bit of a StarWars adict, even if most of the LucasArts games are just StarWars ripoffs of earlier games, I tend to like them quite a bit.
When I got Jedi Knight, I actually played it, without break for sleep, and only stopped often enough to put food in the microwave and get said food from the microwave. Then I got to the last boss (Jarek) and was so pissed that i couldn’t beat him (especially after over 48 hours of contiunuous gameplay) that I almost dropkicked my PC.
Oh, and any strategy game that requires no actual hand-eye coordination and features levels of minutae that boggle the mind tend to keep me enraptured. I had to delete CivII from my machine and throw out the disks for almost failing out of college. I’ve been known to drop 10 hours at my computer without taking a break for eating, drinking, or restroom. Most recently, Caesar III has done this for me, and I am resisiting purchasing the new Pharoh, the Egyptian version of the series, for fear of what it will do to my life.
Having said that, there have been some video games that have made me play them until I was done.
Sega had a cheesy little fantasy game called Shining Force that I just couldn’t stop playing until I was done. Man, my ex-girlfriend really hated that game.
There was a really old fighter simulator called F-19, based on the F-117A Stealth Bomber. My greatest glory was flying that thing all the way across Europe into Russia under Cold War conditions, evading radar and enemy patrols, taking photographs of military installations, and flying back without once being detected. My score (increasing for every minute spent in the air without being detected in this scenario) was so high that I earned the Congressional Medal of Honor! Well, alright, I earned a piss-poor cartoony screen shot of a Medal of Honor, but I was only fourteen and thought it was pretty exciting at the time.
Dry, was it Starflight? It had you choose a crew from several races, including the human, android, some reptile race, some plant race and someone else. I remember that the reptile race hated the plant race and vice versa. You flew around a lot, looking for planets with minerals to mine, drove around, collected artifacts… etc all leading to some grand plot to save the universe or whatever.
Anyway, Doom and Civ II kept me glued to the screen and before that there were games on the Commodore 64 that did it for me. Pirates! was one – a very addictive game considering that all you did was sail around lotting ships, going into port to collect more men, take bigger ships, get more men, take a few towns, divide the gold and start all over. But I never met anyone who played it and hated it. Another was a game called Paradroid where you were some little robot type thingie that cruised around a spaceship taking over larger and more powerful robots. It was a really simple game to play, but almost impossible to win. I remember never winning it on the Commodore and it wasn’t until about a year ago that I played it on an emulator and finally won. You started all over. Oh well, still a fun, fun time for hours on end.
Ahhh, computer games. I love computer games…lets see if I can remember all my favorites. In no particular order (I know most of these have been mentioned already): Warcraft II, C&C: Red Alert, Wing Commander Series, Ultima Series including The Worlds of Ultima games (And SPOOFE, Ultima 8 & 9 aren’t that bad), Starcraft (Which totally kicks TA’s ass), Diablo series, Full Throttle (“Let me go, or else…I’ll call you names!”), Descent Series, Mechwarrior series (Including Mech Commander), Fallout II (Never played I, but god II was cool), Maniac Mansion series, Worms series, SimCity 3000, Rainbow Six (I played that game beginning to end nonstop at my friend’s house).
I’m sure there’re more games but I can’t remember them right now. I’m disappointed in Tiberian Sun and Force Commander. Right now I’m looking forward to Diablo II and Warcraft III…and is it true they’re making a Fallout III?
Yes!! God, I loved this game! Despite how it tortured me.
I swear that I must have had about 10-15 tries at this game before I finally won. And this DESPITE the fact that I’d “back up” my game at “logical intervals”.
A hint that none of you needs–don’t EVER play a game so late that you are seriously sleep deprived and can’t back up your disks correctly. Four or five times, I screwed up, backing up the same disk twice or otherwise botching it. (You had to back up two disks to save your game, if I remember correctly)
One time I played the game really late at night, knew I was going to try something dangerous, saved the game, backed it up, and did the dangerous thing. I “died”.
The next time I loaded the game up, planning to resume it, I found that I’d backed up the same disk twice, or something else equally stupid. Result: I’m screwed. I nearly wept (literally) and put the game away for about 6 months.
When I finally won the game, it was just as well. My obsession was reaching Captain Ahab proportions. :eek:
In my 22 years of computer gaming, one really stands out as the greatest time-sponge for me:
Frontier/Elite2 (and Elite is a very close second).
These games are simply incredible in scope for the time they were made. Frontier seems to have more on one floppy diskette that most current game publishers get on a CD-ROM. If you’ve ever played either one, you know how long it takes to become ELITE (made it in both!). When I finally bored of Frontier, I had also become an Imerial Duke AND a Federation Admiral.
Other favs:
M.U.L.E.
Beach-Head I & II
Raid on Bungling Bay
Pirates!
MicoroProse’s F-19
Falcon (Amiga Version)
Lemmings 5,4,3,2,1,Oh No!POP!POP!POP!POP!POP!POP!POP!POP!
Falcon 3.0/4.0 (hey! a title published AFTER 1990!)
Ridge Racer (The reason I got a PlayStation and a wheel for it)
Diablo (OK in single-player, AWESOME on Battle.Net)
My roommate now has me hooked on Half-Life, even though I dislike First-Person Shooters as a rule. I even bought a MadCatz PantherXL joystick - the best for FPS’s IMHO - just to get more enjoyment out of it. I hate to say it but I am starting to like this stick better than my old Thrustmaster FLCS/TQS/RCS combination for everything except Falcon.
I’m a little tired of Age of Empires II after eight months of playing, I exhausted CivII a long time ago, I’ve been through all the Starcrafts twice. Alpha Centauri was a disappointment. I don’t have the youthful reflexes a shooter requires so I have to stick to the stategy type games.
I’m waiting patiently for Diablo II which should be good for a few months play.
In the meantime I think I’ll have a quick go through Diablo I again. I have the Hellfire extension which gives me a monk character.
Question: How should I build up the monk? Is he a magic specialist or should I emphasize agility and strength?
This is quite likely the only thing that has sucked more of my life into it’s gaping black hole than the SDMB. If I would have poured those endless hours into something productive, I might have cured cancer.
The first computer game to lay waste to great portions of my existence must have been The Bard’s Tale. I literally would race home from work, play the game until I practically fell asleep at the keyboard, then nap for a couple of hours until time for work again. What a dweeb!!
Many subsequent games, most notably Pirates!, vied for significant portions of my attention, but at that time in my life most of them could not compete with my unbridled enthusiasm for anything female. That is, until that demonspawn, straight from the maws of hell, id creation Doom. Looking back, I believe I may have sacrificed a promising relationship at the altar of the Cyberdemon.
Once I had destroyed nearly every user-created level, my obsession began to wane as I searched frantically for my next fix. This is when Satan himself posing as my brother gave me an innocent looking game entitled Civilization. This game’s successor, Civ II, still resides on my hard drive to this very day, just in case of a gaming emergency.
But by far the worst of them all is my current compulsion, Heroes of Might and Magic III. If the previous addictions could be likened to marijuana, this game is definitely heroin or crack. I can pull the needle out temporarily to play a game like the Might and Magic series, or Age of Empires, but eventually the monkey on my back becomes a 500 lb. gorilla, as I gleefully return the CD to it’s proper place in my computer and start a new game.
I suspect my next fixation will be with some type of online game such as EverQuest or Ultima Online. This should neatly encapsulate my minimum daily requirements of SDMB-type community with my computer gaming needs.
I agree about Zork: Grand Inquisitor. It’s definitely worth buying and playing.
Here are two interesting “hidden” elements.
[ul]
[li]You, the adventurer, are wandering with a wizard imprisoned in a lamp, who gives you information and comments on the action. At one point, you listen to another wizard’s voice mail. After one of them, the wizard in the lamp comments, “Isn’t that the fellow who did those Encyclopedia Frobozzica commercials?” The voice on the message was done by Donavan Freberg, the blonde kid who did the Encyclopedia Britannica commercials a few years ago.[/li]
[li]The picture of Belboz, a wizard of the past, is a picture of Stan Freberg, the great satirist who created the genre of funny commercials, and Donavan’s real-life father (Stan’s name is not in the game’s credits).[/li][/ul]
Hardcore, Get Everquest, much more newbie friendly (as far as the game world), and much more fun! I currently have and Enchanter that I have been playing for 3days 15hrs and 6minutes. The whole 3d world is great, and you get to meet some excellent people along with the jerks.
Thanks for the recommendation. I just got DSL last week, so I am anxious to start one of the online games. I might wait for Ultima Online 2. I recently read an in-depth article about it and this game just might hit the sweet spot. The only problem is the predicted release date of Spring 2001.
Does anyone out there play Ultima Online or Asheron’s Call?
Since my repetoire in the types of computer games I play is pretty limited, I can’t really answer the question as to what genre it belongs to. All I can tell you is that I REALLY, REALLY enjoyed it.
I haven’t seen anyone mention the games I love. The first was NEVERHOOD by Dreamworks, the very first time that I understood why my husband spent so much damn time at his computer. Thank goodness, we had a computer each by that time!
The next was PHANTASMAGORIA, which I could not play when I was alone in the house … too scary!
I also really enjoyed Shivers and Shivers II … due to a glitch in Shivers II I got stuck somewhere about 2/3 of the way through and am waiting till the memory of the game subsides before giving it another shot.
Another brilliant, innovative if not full of plot game was Pandora’s Box.
So, any other recommendations for games that fit into this non-genre? I am pretty hard to please aren’t I … and please don’t recommend Myst, I’m with the Myst-haters!!