Sigh, NetHack the insomnia killer. I still haven’t beaten it after all these years (and I used to have a copy of NetHack 1.0.0!)
I’ve just spent the last two hours on Civ III. Man, this is killing the time I’m supposed to be spending on revising my dissertation.
Sadly (and I learned this one the hard way), no, it doesn’t get better. Certainly no different. I know this game was very popular, but if you don’t like it now, you won’t like it after 10 or 12 more levels that are essentially the same.
As for games that kept me up - Escape Velocity (the original) for nearly every hour of the day for four days straight one winter break.
I also remember a game on the Mac, I think it was called cconq, though I may be confusing it with xconq. Doesn’t matter, I’ve played them both until the light came through the blinds.
System Shock (haven’t played the second one yet), Command & Conquer, Wizardry Gold (aka Wizardry 8 I think), and Red Storm Rising kept me up close to all night.
And several Infocom games, especially Zork (1,2,3) and The Lurking Horror kept me awake at nights thinking about them, even if I wasn’t playing them.
Thanks, panamajack. I wasn’t sure if I just hadn’t got to the part that grabbed everyone yet. I guess it’s just not my thing. You’ve saved me a lot of clicking, and a bit of disappointment.
Talking of games that kept you up when you weren’t playing them, I think that I solved a third of the puzzles in The Seventh Guest in bed, while trying to get to sleep. Somehow they got easier when you removed the graphic interface and just thought of them as pure puzzle.
Alphagene
The answer was of course to clog the sink with toilet paper, turn on the faucet to create a small flood. Then press the call button. When the stewardess heads to the bathroom, you pop the egg in the micro… i should have stopped long ago, but man i used to love that game. Where else could you smack a two-headed squirrel with a loaf of stale bread?
Ah, the village of Tambry. I remember it well. And how you could tell when enemies were near because the floppy disk would whir. Why, I’ll bet I could even fire up the old Amiga 1000 right now and it would still work. I never had the heart to throw it away.
I’ll never have that kind of free time on my hands again, though.
Hey, Fenris, have you tried Morrowind?
All the Final Fantasy games, Xenogears (until disc 2 refused to load, and now my memory card isn’t working right, so I’ll have to start over at the beginning), I’ve actually nodded off while playing these games, and usually decaide that that means I should go to bed :o 
I’ve actually spent an entire 20-hour session playing SimCity 3000. Yikes!
And then there was the time I played all the way through Diablo in one night; that had me up until 4 AM at least.
More recently, it’s been Morrowind and Suikoden III. But there are plenty of others that I’ve lost at least one night’s worth of sleep to. Every time a Sims expansion pack gets released, I lose at least one night (and then don’t touch the game again for a few months).
Maybe I should try a different hobby…
Morrowind! Oh christ… I took a week off work to play that game, loved every minute of it. 20 Hour days for seven days, easy.
CivII. No interest in 3 from what I’ve heard about it. 2 is fine for me.
NES: Blaster Master, Final Fantasy 1, 2, 3—especially 3.
SNES: Super Metroid.
PS1: Castlevania SOTN. Silent Hill (though sometimes not by choice). RE 2.
GC: Metroid Prime, Super Smash Bros Melee.
XBox: BtVS, Morrowind, Silent Hill 2
PS2: FFX
Finally, the game that has consumed the most of my time, Dune2000.
Strangely enough, though I love and adore RPGs, the only one I really stayed up nights for was FFX because it was more like watching an absolutely stunningly gorgeous CG movie that I had a part in controlling.
Rather… survival horror games keep me up all night. Not from fear, mind you, the only game of this genre that’s managed to creep me out was Silent Hill; but I think the gameplay and puzzles keep me glued.
Oh, and Counter-strike. ;p
Heh. I feel exactly the same way!
Hey, Fenris, have you tried Morrowind? **
[/QUOTE]
Yup! Though I got bored with the fact that A) My destiny as the grand savior/hero reborn seems to be to run menial errands for lazy morons and B) the lazy morons always want something on the opposite side of the island. Luckily there’s a mod for a teleport ring and a mod that makes the Boots of Blinding speed useful. No more plodding across the landscape for me!
Fenris
Bolo on the mac.
It’s this amazingly simple top-down tank game with a focus on network multiplayer. I can think of several times when we’d sit down for a game around 7 pm and wind up playing well past sunrise. Usually what would happen was the island we’d fight on would take so much damage that there wouldn’t be any dry land left to build on.
Marathon replaced Bolo as our computers got more powerful. We’d frequently have games that lasted all night.
Oh, and Lazerblast for the Atari 2600, but not because it was a good game. It was so mind-numbingly easy that we decided one afternoon to flip the score. However, 9 hours into our lazerblast marathon, we realized that every time thought we were going to flip it it just added on another digit, and that every time it added a digit it was going to take that much longer to flip it, and we wisely decided that we didn’t want to play for 90+ hours and stopped.
Suikoden III kept me up just last night. I’ve completed Hugo’s Chapter 1 and Geddoe’s Chapter 1 and right now I’m playing Thomas. I still have no idea why Chris has been acting like a jerk and I really want to know. But I’m having a grand old time getting people into the castle.
Almost 15 hours and I still haven’t finished Chapter 1. Don’t these people know that The Sims is coming out on PS2 next week?
Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Diablo and Diablo II
Civilization I and II (haven’t played III yet)
Sam and Max
Outpost
Zork (a graphics-based version, can’t remember the subtitle)
Alpha Centauri
There’s probably more. Unfortunately, it seems that if I find a game worth playing at all, I’ll probably be up all night with it at least once. I have poor impulse control.
And yet you waited 2 1/2 years to post here for the first time 
As for keeping me up, Dungeons of Daggorath and P51 Mustang on the CoCo 2, Doom and Soldier of Fortune on PC, and Halo on the XBox.
I have too many games… so I’ve been up for a week.
Now I’m playing Metroid Prime, Metroid Fusion, Zelda: A Link to the Past on GBA.
I started to play Eternal Darkness again. I want to beat that poop 3 times so I can see the REAL finale. It’s a tad diff each of the 3 times. I pre ordered Zelda on GC.
I have too many games… so I’ve been up for a week.
Now I’m playing Metroid Prime, Metroid Fusion, Zelda: A Link to the Past on GBA.
I started to play Eternal Darkness again. I want to beat that poop 3 times so I can see the REAL finale. It’s a tad diff each of the 3 times. I pre ordered Zelda on GC.
SolGrundy:
“More recently, it’s been Morrowind and Suikoden III.”
Suikoden 3 has kept me up late, but not all night. I’d stay up until around 4AM.
Trion: Wait awhile.
As for me, I’ve been at the Final Battle for quite awhile. I just haven’t played in a couple weeks. It’s a habit that I tend to have in RPGs when at a Last Battle.
any of the games in the Heroes of Might & Magic and the Civilization games have kept me up to the point where I didn’t even notice it was 7AM already until it was WAAAYY too late.
Not counting all-nighter lan parties:
Deus Ex
Thief
And FF6 and 7.
Now…regarding thief: I have never, ever, played a game that scared me as much as this one did. Especially when I’m up late at night, no sleep, wired on chai and coffee, crouching behind a pillar in the haunted cathedral, thinking I see a Hammerite…and watching him turn around and see nothing but a grinning skull where his face is supposed to be.
No other game has ever been that scary to me. Not Thief 2, not Half Life, not Doom.
Myst (the original. I never really played the other 2)