What computer games do you play and which did you not like?

Cafe Society
1

Reading this thread about the new Sims II expansion pack I looked through my cabinet of PC games that I have near my desk. I knew I had the Sims II in there somewhere! I also realized there was a reason it wasn’t on my computer…because I devoted too much time to playing it. I enjoyed it, but I just didn’t want to devote so much time in it after awhile. I actaully have a few games that for different reasons I don’t play at all, or enjoyed by haven’t got them on the hard drive any longer. What games do you own but don’t play for whatever reason? Heres my list.

Games that I have no longer installed

Pharoah: Has anyone else ever played this? I really enjoyed it, but after some time got bored. Hell, I even have its expansion pack, Cleopatra.

Europa Universalis II: Looked like fun when I bought it, but its pretty much a resource management game. Got bored with it pretty quick, though I think its a good game from my limited playing time…for someone with more patience than I.

Sim City IV: For some reason I get fed up and bored with my cities rather quickly. One of these days I’m actually going to reinstall this game and finish one!

Alpha Centauri: Loved it when it was new, but it wasn’t cooperatring with windows XP when I rebuilt my computer. I know theres a patch, but I didn’t feel like reinstalling it.

Arcanum: I was really close to finishing this role playing adventure game, and it was fun! Then my computer died. I’d have to start all over now, so I never reinstalled it.

Empire earth: I can barely remember buying this. But I do remember not liking it. Can’t remember why, but I knoqw I didn’t have fun and i thought the graphics looked shitty.

Rise of Nations: I bought this, loaded it, played a bit and unloaded it and I have almost no idea whether i liked it or not. I put it on my “reconsider pile”.

Zoo Tycoon: i bought this for my wife thinking she’d enjoy it. I guess she didn’t. i might give it a whirl one day.

Sims II: As I mentioned. I’m thinking about playing it again to be honest, but it may have to wait until winter. Once it gets cold enough that I don’t wanna go outside I may have time for it.

Games that I have installed

Civ IV: I’ve always liked the civilization games, but IV didn’t grab me like the others did. Still, i keep it installed, and will probably play it again. I don’t know why but it doesn’t give me the “one more turn” fever that its predecessors had.

Neverwinter Nights: I’ll probably uninstall it soon. Its fun, I’ve played the expansions and a boatload of the player created mods you can download. But NWN II is coming out soon, so I’ll just wait for it.

City of Heroes/ Villains: I’ve had a blast playing this game, but it is starting to get too much “same old same old” to me. I’ll probably keep it as my subscription is good for a few more months. Its debatable if I’m gonna re-up on it.

**World of Warcraft: ** A few coworkers and friends play so I joined up. I think its fun, so I’ll probably keep it up.

Dungeons and Dragons Online: I only picked it up because there was one copy in the ridiculously small PX here. Hell, usually there aren’t any games at all! Plus the first month is free. It hasn’t intrigued me much yet, but i’ll give it the entire free month to do so. I’ll only pay for 2 subcriptions to online games so DDO better beat out City of Heroes in that time or its bye bye.

2

Considering the list of strategy titles you’ve already named, I seriously doubt you’d like the game one whit. It’s far too simple. Unless you simply like designing parks without a care for the strategy portion of the game.

3

And yes, I’ve played Pharoah and Cleopatra. Can’t remember if I enjoyed them or not.

4

No longer installed
Black and White
The god game that challenges you to feel, I don’t know, strangely ineffective? Got all the way up to level 4, even though I’d gotten bored with it a long time ago.

Caesar III
I enjoyed the heck out of this one, but I can’t persuade it to run on Windows XP. Right now I’m holding off on Civ Rome until Caesar IV comes out, then will pick up the better of the two.

Railroad Tycoon 3
Eh. It was OK; the shipment of goods seemed to be buggy, though. Interested to see Sid’s new take on it later this year.

Homeworld: Cataclysm
Not sure what turned me off this one - I loved the original (which I also don’t have installed - beat it too many times). I know it can’t be just the awful voice acting, but I can’t think what else caused me to forget about it after level 3 or 4.

Sim City IV
Maybe I’ll give this another go with the Rush Hour expansion… one of these days. Too picky, projects fail for small and inexplicable reasons; also, did play testers actually try to run this on the kind of computer an average person would reasonably own even in 2006? My latest Dell ran it much more smoothly, but it would still get bogged in a large city any time there was a fire (and honestly, even Giulianni and LaGuardia didn’t personally attend to every damned fire in New York…).

Sid Maiers Alpha Centauri
I know I’m the only one in the solar system, but I never could get into this. Not the game’s fault, not my fault, there’s just no chemistry…

Master of Orion III
The only time I ever used a CD-ROM as a coaster… my only excuse for purchasing this senseless atrocity was that I’d been looking forward to it for over a year, long enough that I ignored all the warnings. Only good to come of this is that I listen to the folks at Gamespot and IGN now.

Marble Drop
I don’t care that nobody else loved this one; I thought it was inventive, challenging, and fun to just watch. Sadly, it also doesn’t run on XP.

Installed
Civ IV
I’ve played them all except Civ II - and that includes the two Call to Power’s - and I believe this one’s the best. Also one of three games where some of the music has made the leap to my iPod.

Rome: Total War
Ya know what I’d love to see in Civ V? The same world map play you get in Civ, but real-time combat like in the Total War series. All your spearmen are belong to my tank!

Sims 2
The way I play is I cycle through 10 families. I like to keep everyone in the neighborhood aging at about the same pace. This does mean that it’s been over a year and nobody’s even graduated from college yet… is there a patch that enables toddlers to take care of themselves?

Oh yeah - forgot about this one. Hated it at first, when I was playing it like a nation building game. Got more into it when I realized it wasn’t Civ. Didn’t care for the missions, though.

5

SimCity 4 is a blast but you’ve got to have seriously massive hardware to run a large city with all the bells and whistles turned on. When I upgrade to a dual-core system next year with over 1GB of RAM I’ll probably revisit my cities. In the meantime, I find that the flow of commuters from city to city can drastically change based on which city you opened last, and if you open cities in a region in the wrong order, the largest city will have a sudden exodus of transit funds. This can change a $3,000/month surplus to a $7,500/month deficit.

Rise of Nations and its expansion pack are still the best Real Time Strategy game I’ve played. Great balance, a good simulation of real armies fighting real wars, and tense fights all the way through against computers or humans. My only complaint is that the enemy uses nukes predictably and excessively in a counter-value strategy, instead of selectively engaging dense troop formations and trying to bargain you into a surrender - that is, once he has nukes, he’ll go right to Armageddon.

WoW is my current mania. I’m just getting to the level 50+ content now, where the dungeons are seriously difficult and require good teamwork and well equipped characters.

I’ve deleted countless bad games, but the one I was most disappointed with was Warcraft III, which featured 20 minutes of manic click-fest army- and base-building, followed by ten seconds of impossibly fast-paced micromanagement of units, and a devastatingly one-sided loss. The AI’s strategy always amounted to exploiting its resource-gathering advantage to spam out lots of cheap units, and attack before you’re ready. Unlike Starcraft, there was no way to mount a credible defense, so games were often just 20 minutes of hopelessness, 2 minutes of panic, and a depressing score summary.

6

Wow…It’s hard for me to understand how someone can have such an opposite experience of a game from me. I found Warcraft III to require much less micro management then Starcraft and the units were much tougher so you had to create far fewer of them and gave you a chance to retreat when needed. As for defense just build towers. In fact aside from a few advanced missions building enough towers ment you didn’t even have to have units in your base (though having a couple behind your towers always was a good idea you just didn’t need them too often). I’d rarely go into even Low Upkeep and there was only about three missions in the whole game I’d go into High Upkeep (and I’m including the X-pack).

7

Recently played but no longer installed:

Black & White: I’ve actually gone through the cycle of installing this game, playing it for a while until I get bored with it, and then de-installing it several times. Amazing concept, but the game itself becomes tedious work and very little fun once you get past the first few levels.

Homeworld 2: Lovely eye candy. Nearly zero replay value. Beating the game consists largely or memorizing when and where scripted events will trigger and preparing accordingly. Not much actual strategy as the AI is quite stupid and predictable. Played all the way through once then never played it again.

Half-Life 2: Loved it, but the completely linear nature of the plot doesn’t give me much reason to play it again. I’ve been contemplating picking up the recently released sequel/expansion module.

Still installed, but no longer played:

City of Heroes: Started playing it during beta testing, but let my account lapse about half a year ago. Just got too repetitive, lost interest in doing the same basic quests and missions over and over.

Currently playing:

Auto Assault: Have enjoyed it, but my account will lapse in a few weeks, and I don’t think I’ll renew it. I liked the concept and the world, but the gameplay simply isn’t very interesting. Driving around and blowing up random objects and creatures everywhere is amusing, but once you get past that there’s really very little to do.

8

I basically divide games into winners and losers. If they don’t get me interested fairly quickly they get tossed, sometimes to be recovered and tried again but usually into the trash within a few months. Since I usually buy 2-3 titles in one trip, they get subjected to being loaded up all at once where they compete for my attention. The best one usually wins, with the losers rarely played again.

Winners over the last year have been Civ IV, Half-Life 2, Rome:Total War with the RTR mod (my current obsession thanks to xtisme), Oblivion, and a surprise dose of city-building complete awesomeness in Children of the Nile (same team is doing Caesar IV).

Losers: Star Wars Empire at War (byzantine, probably a good title if you’ve got twenty hours to piss away on the learning curve), Silent Storm (buggy, cheating, nerd rage-inducing p.o.s.), AoE III (yawn), HOMM V (hated it, campaign was shitty, the voice acting made me want to vomit blood), Sid Meier’s Pirates! (zero depth, incomprehensible pirate maps), Neverwinter Nights (ehh), KOTOR II (blech, nice crafting station where’s the story), others. I should probably empty the videogame graveyard this weekend.

9

Silent Hunter III: U-Boat simulation. It’s terrific as far as such games go- truly the heir of Aces of the Deep, but like AoD, requires a great deal of time and effort to play. I haven’t played it in about a month or so.

Rome: Total War (w/ Barbarian Invasion expansion) Love this one. I’m on my third campaign (one in regular RTW as Romans, one in BI as Saxons and I’m playing the Franks at the moment. It has everything- tactical combat, violence, and strategic level RTS-ish play.

Sid Meier’s Pirates While I don’t find the pirate maps incomprehensible, it was too close to the original Pirates! from the mid-80s for me. Well, except for the dancing. That was new, and strange at first, but I can cut a rug now. The big problem I’ve had is that while I can become very powerful and rich, I can’t rescue my family fast enough before retirement time. I’m a bit frustrated with it, so I’m loaning it to my brother to play for a while.

Beyond that… the last games I played were Rainbow Six: Raven Shield (pretty much only multiplayer) and Master of Orion III (horrid AI- could have been good if the other races were more aggressive). Haven’t played either of those in a year and a half at least.

10

Same thing happened to me. It now sits unused on my shelf. I loved the first three, but this one just didn’t seem to have the bite.

Sid Meier is a god among men, and like all his other games, I enjoyed SMAC to the end many times, despite the crappy graphics. Many of the elements in Civilization IV harken back to developments he advanced in SMAC that didn’t make it to Civ III.

My list of games that are languishing or gone because they suck:

Homeworld 2: I loved HW1 and Cataclysm, but after playing a few scenarios on HW2, I gave up. Like Simcity IV, it seemed to lack the “hook” that the predecessors had.

Masters of Orion III: What could be better than Civilization in space? Not this turd. I sold it on eBay for a fraction of what I paid for it new. I heard MOO2 was actually better than MOO3.

Icewind Dale 2: The poor graphics and uninteresting plot drove me to pass this crapfest on at a garage sale. After having played Temple of Elemental Evil to completion multiple times and just falling in love with the interface and game play, I felt like IWD was too much of a let-down.

Emperor: Battle for Dune: If I had gotten paid minimum wage for all the hours I spent playing Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty, I would have made out like a bandit. This was the original RTS that spawned the whole genre. Emperor intends to expand and build on this legacy, and I enjoyed it for a little while, but I never went back after I got tired of it and gave it to a friend for free.

I just bought Civ IV: Warlords. I’m not getting much sleep these days. :smiley:

I also have:

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Let the Tech-Priests bestow your men with weapons of destruction! Not being able to find the first expansion, Winter Assault (which adds the Imperial Guard as a playable faction), for a decent price, I have relegated this game to the back burner. The second expansion, which will feature the undying Necrons and the technological upstarts the Tau, is slated for later this year. This is a “must-have” for any Games Workshop fan.

Dungeons and Dragons: The Temple of Elemental Evil: Many complained that this game was full of bugs and released only half finished. While both of these complaints are true, it is the finest single-player party-based Dungeons and Dragons game on the market, bar none. Even the original Baldur’s Gate games, which were truly wonderful, must step down in the face of this masterpiece. I [permanently] loaned my copy to my brother-in-law, but I can pick up a disk-only version at my local retailer for about 10 bucks whenever I want to replay it.

Sid Meier’s Pirates; Live the Life! I already mentioned that Sid Meier is a god among men. This game only proves that I’m right. Since I am currently addicted to Civ IV, I found it totally acceptable to loan my copy of Pirates to a coworker who overheard our discussion of the Caribbean and thought this sounded interesting.

Metal Fatigue: This giant robot RTS by Psygnosis completely slipped under the radar a few years ago. Imagine a cross between Starcraft and Mobile Suit Gundam, and you have an idea what this game is like. I still love it and enjoy playing it, and even bought a second copy so I might someday convince another human being to give me a fair fight in a network game.

11

Shit… forgot about ** Dawn of War** Played the absolute crap out of it, and the expansion pack. Also played a lot of single-player and 1v1 multiplayer versus my brother.

12

MOO3 was a steaming pile, but MOO2 was great!

I found the gameplay rather underwhelming, although it is an AMAZING looking game. I would love to see a 40k or Necromunda game as a tactical simulator a la XCOM or Silent Storm.

13

There already is a game like that. If you can find a Windows 95/98 machine to run it, do all you can to acquire Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate. It’s a turn-based representation of the Second Edition WH40K rules - Ultramarines vs. the forces of Chaos.

14

Currently in hard rotation on the Rickster’s computer:

Civilization IV, with the Warlords upgrade. Another classic Civ game. Magnificent.

Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. I don’t play it often but I’m getting the parks done, one after another.

Pirates! I bought the original with the money I won as 1990 Senior Public Speaking Champion. That version was worth every penny. So is this one.

Baseball Tycoon 2007. Not a real hard core sim, but fun to play on the road.

Tiger Woods 2006. I actually picked this up in a bargain bin to have something to kill time on during a business trip. I hadn’t played a golf game since like Links 386. I was shocked at how fun it is, and continue playing it.
Games I found disappointing:

Master of Orion III. Absolutely appalling; it was as if all the design decisions had to be vetted by a Committee To Make The Game Hard To Play.

Alpha Centauri. As a game it was pretty good, and the civics options were groundbreaking… but goddamn, it was ugly. It was so ugly it turned me off everything else about it.

SimCity 4. Too hard, no fun, and you needed a monster system to run it. I find it hard to believe they asked anyone outside the dev team to playtest it. Surely if they had someone would have noticed it wasn’t fun?

**SimGolf. ** Much advertised as a great new sim game; could be completely beaten in eight minutes. Like SimCity for children.

**Out of the Park 2006. ** The predecessors were great. This was was atrociously buggy and was made incredibly difficult to play.

**All the Age of Empires clones. ** Empire Earth games, the later Age of Empires, Rise of Nations - they all look and play exactly the same.

EverQuest 2. The biggest disappointment I’ve ever had. I upgraded our system to play this; we were EQ fanatics, and desperately wanted to play the new one. We loaded it up and the graphics were just awesome, the scale of the world fabulous. And then after a couple of weeks… it was boring. Just, dull. I switched to WoW, and while I’m not into it much now, it was worth the switch.

15

My current rotation.

Galactic civilzation II. Great game. I keep forgetting about it for some reason, but civ style with enough depth and uniqueness to be great.(even better than civ IV). Campaign ends really sucky though.

Oblivion. Loved it, won the game. Meant to play again, or finish up every last quest, but I’m just not that motivated to. Not much replay excitement for me.

Civ IV. My stupid computer won’t play it now that it’s 100 Million degrees outside. Graphics card overheats on lowest settings. I would play again if I could. Even Oblivion works better for some reason.
Rome Total War. I keep meaning to get one of the mods, but I havn’t. And the normal game just gets way to micromanagy late. I’ve taken about 5 games to the 30 territory level, then get tired of it. 1300 freakin enemy ships in the Adriatic?

The movies. I loved the game when it was new and played a lot. Then one day it just didn’t generate excitement, and I havn’t touched it sence.

The Settlers: Legacy of Kings. good little game, but I’m done with it, the first to go bye bye when I clean up again.

16

I like FPS games mostly. My favorite is Day of Defeat (the non-Steam version.) Civ4 is very addictive, but unless I have HOURS to play I try to stay away from it. Driving games are great also, like Need For Speed Most Wanted. I’m also having a lot of fun with GTA San Andreas and Oblivion, I love being able to just wander around the landscape.

I’m not crazy about RTS games. I used to love the original Warcraft and Command and Conquer. But I’d like my units to have more intelligence instead of me having to zip around the map telling them every single thing to do. And the Diablo games, I don’t get them. They’re too brain-dead. Click clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick. Click. Clickclickclickclickclickclick.

17

I don’t very many at all. They’re all pretty old school, too.

Maple Story My God, did that game get boring after a few weeks. Jeez. Power leveling is only so much fun after a certain point. Especially when you don’t know anyone else who plays it.

Doom and Doom II I will never get sick of these games. What with all the mods and online play… I can see myself still playing it when I’m all old and in twenties. Hopefully I won’t though, 'cause I don’t want to be one of those losers. :-\

Heretic, Heretic 2, HeXen and HeXen II. Ditto.

Oregon Trail How can anyone not like this game? You can just put your brain on autopilot, massacre buffalo and pray that little billy doesn’t get bitten by a rattler.

Chip’s Challenge I have never been able to beat this game. I think I’m the only person in the world who even remembers/plays it anymore. Level 126 was such a bitch.

I have a lot more on my PC, but those are the only actual “computer” games I have. The rest are ROMs.