Favorite Video Games/Recommendations?

Cafe Society
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Hello Fellow Dopers! I thought it’d be cool for all of us to list some of our favorite videogames and talk about them, and hopefully get some recommendations. For instance, if you have a favorite, and you don’t see it listed, but you think I would like it based on what I said I liked then you could say, If you liked X, you might like Y because Z, but it’s different in such and such way… To start things off, I’ll give you guys a quote that any self-respecting videogamer will probably get.

Hermes: Get ready for fun, Fry. Nowadays, we have a type of game played entirely on video.
Leela: We call it a “video game”.
Fry: Uh, “video game” you say? Well, golly gee, you mighty spacemen of the future will have to show me how it works.

So I’ll just throw my absolute favorites of all time out there…
Fallout 2
Deus Ex
Super Metroid

I think it goes without saying that these games are Awesome. I’m thinking of playing Fallout 2 again. I can’t wait for Bethesda to release the sequel. And this is the “real” sequel, not some kind of multiplayer crap. Although I am worried that it might ruin a lot of the things that made it great. Can you believe it’s nearly been TEN years since it came out! The reason I like this is that I love role-playing games, except I am not into fantasy at all. I think the reason being for this, is that I like creative things like this, but I always have to have them grounded in reality. All the MMORPGs I’ve played, Neocron, etc have been of this type. I can’t get into fantasy stuff. Although things based in the past could interest me too.

Deus Ex. Pretty much the same I guess. It’s an RPG played as a FPS. Really great mixture that hasn’t been topped if you ask me. But maybe it has?

Super Metroid. Obviously this is a great one too. I never liked the 3D metroid games. I have also played the GBA versions, which are quite cool. Metroid Zero Mission is my second fave in the metroid series. It’s just like the SNES version but with more control and a slightly better interface, but loses some credibility because it is pretty short compared to Super Metroid. However they were somewhat limited considering how they had to adhere to some degree to the original NES version. After Super Metroid I have a hard time playing games like Fusion. I just miss Zebes, and Crateria, and Norfair, etc. But Super Metroid had it all. The excellent callback areas. How cool was it, when you first started, on Crateria? You looked around, and saw those shafts and platforms. Immediately I though, “yeah, this is gonna rock” Then you descend down to the shaft where the Mother Brain was in the original Metroid! Who didn’t get the creeps being in there, especially since you were so weak at that point. Then you take that elevator down to Brinstar…Which puts you exactly in the spot where you start the original game! "Where’s the morphball? Oh, I don’t know, maybe to the left? There’s something about a sidescrolling Metroid game that really gets me going. It never tries to make things so realistic. I mean you could ask, “Why does Samus discard all of her stuff before she starts a new game?!”

Some other games of note that have been great over time…I hope I can remember them…

Original Half-Life. This was quite a good game at the time. The silent protagonist thing had always been the norm for most FPS games but this time there was a story based on what the NPCs were talking to you about. Quite a cool concept.
Half-Life 2 was pretty cool, but nothing extremely interesting though. I played it at an Internet Cafe once and was happy with it, but in the end the shootemup part of needs some other kind of backup in my book

Goldeneye 007. If you ever played this game with a friend you surely had lots of fun.
Twisted Metal. The original version is still my fave. Why? Well, there was no radar in two-player mode. This meant there was a huge element of surprise. Maybe you can turn it off nowadays, but I remember playing it every day after school as a teenager and really loving it. It never got old.

Sim City 4 Rush Hour.

This game is quite cool, but in the end it simply made me wish that Maxis would update the series. I really wish they’d give us a way to interact with the city on a street-wide level. Hell, make it another game similar to GTA and I’ll be happy as long as I can see what it’s like from a street-level perspective? Of course GTA would be too violent for Maxis, but maybe some sort of game where you run a business, or run for some kind of political office?

My top 3 is kind of interesting, however, because each of them have sequels that sort of missed the point of the game for me.

Fallout…God the sequels were disappointing. I am really sad that the scrapped sequel didn’t get made. I’ve read that Fallout 1 and 2, combined have a very high place in all torrents downloaded of all time. I am sure had Van Buren (a near-complete version of Fallout 3) been released it would have recouped development costs. Why did the sequels suck? They simply missed the point of Fallout. Fallout was great because it was totally open, you could go anywhere whenever you wanted too. The storyline was very compelling and there were tons of geeky references spread throughout. Who didn’t know how to get past the gatekeeper after having seen the Holy Grail!? Secondly the combat was really good. I like turn-based combat.

Deus Ex. What a disappointment about invisible war…Simply put it was a bad game…Deus Ex was a bit linear at times but it was still good enough. I had always wondered though, why couldn’t they make the story less linear? Wouldn’t be hard to do that, as the travel between levels could be handled as it was in fallout. But regardless the sequel changed the game away from it’s RPG aspects and tried to bill it as a more pure action game. Big mistake, in my opinion.

And then the Metroid Sequels for the 3d platforms. I am not against 3D conversions of sidescrollers, Mario 64 was great, but this seemed to violate some of the things about the game that I always felt gave it it’s appeal. In the original Metroid, and Super Metroid (I never played Metroid II) There was no story. You are alone, on the planet and you go around exploring. You find an unsurmountable obstacle and you find some power and get around it. As you go you retrace your steps becoming more and more powerful. How cool was it to go back and thrash those enemies in Brinstar when you had screwattack and fully upgraded arm cannon?! But I couldn’t get into Metroid Prime. This thing about the visors and such…I just wanted to be left alone to figure things out for myself. Obviously this would be too hard considering how the game was but it would have been quite cool to have things more like the first three games in a 3d environment… Fusion suffered a bit from this problem with the stupid mandatory information from the computer, but yeah it was still necessary to figure out your own way though individual areas. The fight with the evil Samus was quite cool too. However, I wish that it had taken place sooner because I always felt it stupid to have to use freeze missiles all the time. That was an interesting fight, though, because it was an interesting, mobile oponnent.

So, sorry about the long post, but you get the idea. Let’s hear your all time greatest games, and why. Maybe we can all get a few recommendations of great games based on common opinions.

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  1. F-Zero, Super NES: more sway factor (you know, when you lean right because you think it’ll make your car/character/plane go right too) than any other game before or since. And really good music. And because it was the first thing I was better at than my brother.

  2. 007:Goldeneye, Nintendo 64: The best multiplayer game, ever. Brilliant (for the time) graphics, sublime sound, terrific gameplay with one player or four, and the unforgettable yelling of, “UNCLE BENNY!!!”

  3. Fallout/Fallout 2, Windows: The only time in my life I ever shut myself in my room for two weeks because I couldn’t turn off the damn computer. Bad graphics, slightly repetitive combat, but a brilliant storyline and hilarious conversations with in-game characters.

  4. Metroid Prime, Gamecube: The only game that ever actually scared me.

  5. John Madden Football/Madden NFL, Super NES to PS2: Great games, one and all, and maybe one day they’ll figure out how to make the flanker streak less unstoppable.

  6. Destruction Derby, PS: my first glimpse at the future (back then) of video games. The game itself wasn’t that much to write home about, but fun for about an hour.

  7. Joe Montana Football, Sega Genesis: The only reason I’m such an awesome fantasy football manager, because if it wasn’t for this game I still wouldn’t understand football.

  8. Grand Theft Auto 3, PS2: A million tiny games rolled up into one big one, absolutely seamlessly. Vice City and San Andreas are better, obviously, but this one was a giant leap forward over anything else.

  9. Elite, BBC Micro and a dozen other systems since about 1985: None of you will ever have heard of this, but it was a truly awesome game. You flew around a galaxy bigger than any game environment you’ll ever see, even today. The GTA of its day.

  10. Killer Instinct, Super NES/Arcade: I used to stand around in front of this game after running out of coins to play it in the arcade dreaming about having a Killer Instinct arcade machine in my house. When it came out on the Super NES I think I cried.

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  1. Super Smash Brothers Melee. Multiplayer fighting game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s no plot, just various Nintendo characters whaling on each other. One of the things I love most about it (having played other fighting games) is that there are no long combos; every move in the game requires at most a direction and a button press. Other fighting games like Soul Calibur and Tekken make you memorize sequences of up to seven different moves, and if you get any of them wrong, practically nothing will happen. SSBM relies a lot more on a lot of little moves, and knowing what to use when in what setting, than on long strings of button mashing.
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Transcendence (which was much gushed over in this thread) - like a cross between Nethack, Elite and Star Control. It’s not as open-ended as I’d like it to be, but then it’s really just a not-so-simple dungeon crawl. (Or should that be stargate crawl?) I wish I could get a buck every time I pimp this game, but I do it for free because I think it’s a really cool game. In my current game, I have over 4 million credits, an alien jump drive, and omni TEV blaster, a fusionfire howitzer, and over 500 HP in shields and armor, and I’m still getting my butt kicked.

System Shock II is a 1st-person RPG like Deus Ex, except with terrifying monkeys. The graphics are not hot by any stretch of the imagination, but the sounds are very effective.

I still contend that Civ II is the best in the series. Civ III had some features that really bogged down gameplay. (Alpha Centauri is closer to what I expected Civ III to be, but I guess if you wanted to play SMAC, then you should play SMAC.)

But the best game ever, hands down, undefeated for decades without a worthy challenger in sight, is Atari’s multi-genre-forming Adventure for the 2600 system.

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I tend to go toward the classic era of video games when it comes to my interests, although I still enjoy and play new video games as well. I just have two games to mention right now that I’m sure are on a lot of people’s lists of favorites:

Pac-Man (Arcade, 1980, Namco/Bally-Midway). One of the “elemental spirits” of video games. You cannot talk about the history of baseball without mentioning the New York Yankees. You cannot talk about the history of animation without mentioning Walt Disney. You cannot talk about the history of video games without mentioning Pac-Man. Like it or hate it, it influenced its medium in such a way that it is impossible to imagine a world without it, and it still makes a mark to this day. Even after 27 years, Pac-Man is still fun to play. It is one of the most simple premises for a video game ever, yet is so well done that you never really think about it that way.

Tetris (various incarnations, 1985-present). The “great equalizer” of video games. Even more so than Pac-Man, anyone can understand Tetris, play it, and have fun with it. This simple game came from the then-feared Soviet Union out of nowhere and soon grabbed the hearts and minds of most of the world. Again, a simple premise (perhaps even simpler than Pac-Man) is combined with clever gameplay to create a fun game which never ages.

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Company of Heroes - never ever had so much fun with an RTS, and I’ve been around since the original C&C days and’ve literally played them all. Some times, it’s the tactical aggression of it, some days it’s the hysterical lines that pop up seemingly situationally dead on - and sometimes it’s the mind-blowing cinematic effects of a perfectly delivered ranger rush.

It’s heaps and heaps of fun, and the community is to die for. My favourite game of all time.
Second to the top is, probably, the Gothic series. These games seriously doesn’t get enough love. (Though, yes, the most recent game was blah) Any game that lets me spend two hours trying to circumvent the main route into a town, to find that it’s possible if I jump up a crass mountain wall and dive into the ocean (an incredibly hard thing to do) and swim ashore behind the town, only to be met by a NPC which CONGRATULATES ME on doing it - well, that’s just gorramn gratifying. Viva Gothic II.

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Earthbound (SNES) - Probably my favorite game of all time. It was painfully overlooked when first released due to its simplistic graphics, but while not graphically intensive, I absolutely love the art direction of the game. It’s a turn-based RPG that doesn’t take itself too seriously (fighting off hippies and sentient fire hydrants with yoyos and fry-pans), but still manages to create an epic feeling. The final battle is more frightening and intense than any battle I’ve seen in other games, and it has a great twist that goes beyond the goal of merely depleting the boss’s health.

Wario’s Woods (SNES) - This relatively obscure game is my favorite puzzle game ever. Like any puzzle game the premise is simple: Your field is full of monsters, and a helpful fairy drops bombs. As a a little toad, your goal is to run around on your field and line up monsters and bombs of the same color in a row so you can destroy them. Very addictive somehow.

Katamari Damacy (PS2) - It’s impossible to describe the appeal of this game through words, you really have to try it for yourself. You’re a little green guy, and you roll a sticky ball around and pick up various objects to stick to the ball, so the ball can become larger and you can pick up larger objects. You start out picking up things like push-pins and erasers, and by the last level you’re picking up entire continents. And the quirky japanese craziness constantly keeps you entertained.

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Yep, I was gonna mention that one. Great game. It had a great sense of humor and could be really creepy at times.

Poo’s training comes to mind.

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I’m gonna toss in a vote here for Ace Combat 04 for the PS2. It’s a soft flight sim, not too heavy on realism, but it has great graphics, a solid story, and spectacular music, and the radio dialogue during the missions is great (one mission has you flying air support for a ground force retaking a city from an invading army, and while you’re flying around fighting, your radio picks up a news broadcast talking about the fighting going on in and over the city).

If we’re mentioning PC games too, then I’m gonna have to throw in an old school vote for System Shock, if just because the game introduced one of the greatest villains in PC gaming history, SHODAN (I’m not shouting, her name is an acronym).

And of course, there’s the Wing Commander games, a series of space sims detailing the exploits of various Confederation Space Forces pilots (mostly Christopher Blair, played in the later games by Mark Hamil, and later Lance Casey, played by Steven Petrarca). For the most part, these games have solid-to-very-good-plots, engaging characters, and great gameplay, although the balance between gameplay and plot varies from one game to the next. The games also had some great music, especially Wing Commander 3.