For me it’s Red Dead Redemption. I throw this game in every 10 months or so and it grabs me every time I play it. The acting is as good as any western movie, both voice and animation. The world feels incredibly realistic and, though empty its one of the only open world games I truly enjoy just riding around interacting with the npcs and exploring the territory.
FTR my top 3 are Fallout 2, RDR and Diablo 2.
My top 3 are morrowind, super metroid, and civilization 4. Civ4 is the newest of that group.
Okami, Chrono Cross, and Planescape: Torment
So it is Okami, 2006.
Probably Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. I was massively pleased at the worthy effort they put into the single-player campaign, since it’s one of the things that’s been massively devalued in currency the last five years. I’m a big RTS single-player fan and it was gratifying to not just get the normal pack of sloppily converted multiplayer maps with bots and slapped together excuse of a plot. (I’m looking at you, Supreme Commander 2.)
I’ve got big hopes for the Heart of the Swarm, though the latest news is putting a dampener on my expectations. (Shorter than the original, 20 maps compared to 30 in WoL.) But considering the absolutely dick move EA pulled with Generals 2 becoming a free-to-play presumably single-player void game, I’m happy to have at least one reliable franchise for quality if not frequent iterations.
My top 3 of all time:
Newest?
Portal without a doubt.
Portal 2 is very good but the original is the best and the original is #3 in my top 3.
#2 has to be the original Legend of Zelda. It was groundbreaking. It was the most polished game I’d ever seen at that time. Every level well though out, a clear goal, an intriguing (if simple) story, great controls, tons of different enemies that all required different tactics…
#1 would have to be the original Half-Life. That game was just such a breakthrough experience that it’ll be very difficult to beat.
Newest is Skyrim, other two are Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft.
Top three, eh? Hard question for anybody who has been playing for 20+ years - those early games are getting the nostalgia bonus yet can’t really hold a candle to modern games in many ways. After a lot of thinking, I’d go with
#1 World of Warcraft
Yeah, it’s a popular target to hate these days, and I’m not playing it any more, but it still is a yardstick for me for many things. And I played a hell of a lot of it, too. I’d still log on from time to time if it was free, but I’m not going to sub to it just to look around.
#2 Angband (and its variants)
Adding all the variants together may be cheating, but they are all branches of the same tree. I first played Moria around 1990 (give or take a year or two) and then switched to Angband when that came out. ZAngband, OAngband, SAngband … I’ve sunk endless hours into them and I still sometimes do, despite how old they are and how slowly they progress these days. Played quite a bit of ToME as the first thing on this new computer a few months back, and that’s a distant relative of the Angbands as well.
#3 EverQuest
My first MMO love. You can’t relive the first and best honeymoon again, though WoW came very close. I played an inhumane amount of it back in the day, when my RL was shit and I really needed a way to escape. I was truly an addict, but thinking back I also feel that it helped me get over all the shit. Who knows how it would’ve gone otherwise. A lot of boring grind, downtime, waiting, trying to get a group - but time has faded all those memories and left only the good stuff, the legends, the feeling of discovery and making friends and exploring deadly caves that held actual peril. Breaking into fully spawned Planes of Hate or Fear, getting horribly wiped by the old world dragons, drama over loot … you had to be there. Today, I can’t bear to play EQ1 - the UI is horrid and the controls and graphics seriously outdated. But those stories, man … those I will carry to my grave.
So that’s WoW as the newest, launched in 2004.
The newest entry is Journey, which is also at the top of my list.
#2 is the original Portal.
#3 is Grim Fandango.
Legend of Zelda, Dialo 2, and My newest: Minecraft. Why Minecraft? Two reasons.
First, its success demonstrates the influence that the indie gaming community has achieved in the last several years. Indie developers have brought us a lot of great games and Minecraft has been one of the biggest examples of success in that arena. More influence from these small game developers can only be a good thing in the future.
Second, Minecraft is a massive sandbox with unknown potential. Humans like to shape and mold their environments, and Minecraft lets them do that in a virtual environment. It lets us play as if we are school children on a playground. We can run around playing tag, or build forts, or pretend the jungle-gym is a castle, or just chat with our friends. But the game takes that sandbox metaphor to a higher level too. Creative builders have been able to make completely new concepts on top of Minecraft, as if it were a development platform. I’ve seen other games like Paintball, King of the Ladder, even a recreation of Olympic events all built around the basic Minecraft game. It has so much potential beyond punching trees, crafting tools and mining for diamonds. And there are a lot of talented people working on amazing things. I think the game will still be popular in 10 years, and longevity and replay value seems to be a common prerequisite for “top X” caliber games.
Oldest is Ikari Warriors. Second on the list is Donkey Kong. Last is Cyber Sled, which makes my newest game circa 1994.
While the console games are great and I love Black Ops and Forza 4, I still find myself longing for the return of the traditional arcade where I can spend an afternoon taking the other kids to school on their quarter. Especially with Cyber Sled, we had a rule where the loser paid, so I’d play until I got bored and quit or the place closed, whichever came first. I was an arcade legend at that game, like the Mortal Kombat experts that never seemed to lose. XBox live can never capture that because you can play endlessly for the membership fee. Having to pony up for every game made it a challenge worth taking on.
Arcade games remain unparalleled. Kids nowadays don’t know what it’s like to walk into a room with bells and whistles and loud music coming from everywhere. The only thing close to it nowadays is the casino slot machine section. It’s addicting.
Oh, and get off my lawn. And while you’re at it, load up my Atari 2600 with Yars Revenge. I’ll own you at that, too.
My newest is Medieval II: Total War. Started when it came out in the mid-2000s, only stopped this year when it started to crash my PC.
Second would have to be Civ:CtP.
Third would probably be Panzer General, although upon replaying it lately from GoG I’ve been soured on in in comparison to Medieval Total War. Not just the lack of strategic choice, which I had always realized was a deficit, but also a lack of maintenance costs for your units, which can turn the game lopsided pretty quickly, whereas it was a balancing factor in MTW.
After years and years and years of gaming, my top 3 are all pretty old:
Civilization II. My husband and I were so addicted to this game that we set up shifts to play it. (We only had one PC at the time.)
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. Innumerable hours of play, all single player since we were on dialup at the time.
Morrowind. Except for the damn birds :D.
I do like RDR, though. Usually making my character ride a horse or drive a car is a game-killer for me, but RDR was a lot of fun and the characters were great.
Angry Birds
Portal. The other two are Knights of the Old Republic and Star Control 2.
Half Life 2. The other two are the original F-Zero and Goldeneye.
A lot of you guys really seem to like older games. I can’t really get into them anymore. I think that videogames from about 2000 onward are so superior in every way to older games that it’s just no contest. Graphics and sound mean a lot to me. That said, my favorite games are all fairly recent:
Fallout 3
Skyrim
Battlefield 1942 (prefer Desert Combat)
Agree on both counts. If the slot machines were actually slightly quieter and less garish, yet with more video-game like components, I’d play them. However, no one old school video game has the replay value of my top 3. But if I had an old school video game parlor with just a random selection of 1979-1987 games (along with pinball and kinetic game machines from the same era or before) across the street from me, I’d be in there more than I would be playing my top 3.
Along similar lines, there was a *Killer Instinct *box in a mini-arcade in a bowling alley near where I grew up. It might have been the first one in Britain; certainly, in 1994 there was nothing like it. I mean, there was a Ridge Racer machine right next to it, and until KI showed up I thought that was as realistic as a video game would ever look.
It was intoxicating. Once I ran out of the money my mother would give me, I’d spend as much as half an hour at a time just watching the demo screens and hoping somebody else would come along and play just so I could watch that. It was intoxicating.
I still listen to the main theme from time to time.
My three are probably:
Baldur’s gate 2
Neverwinter Nights
Dragon Age Origins
So Dragon Age: Origins wins.
And I say those are “probably” my top three because my top three constantly shift depending on mood. There’s just so many favorite games that it’s hard to settle on only three with finality.
I can’t find it in the Nevada Revised Statutes, but I was told awhile ago, that slot machine manufacturers are prohibited from incorporating arcade-type elements (progressive difficulty, etc…) in their machines. Perhaps it’s a gentlemens’ agreement? Or to forestall litigation?
But yeah, I’m nostalgic too for the arcade experience. It was great as a teenager, walking into Aladdin’s Castle, getting a bunch of tokens, and getting owned by Dragon’s Lair. OTOH, I was much better at Atari 2600 Defender, than I was at the arcade version.
FWIW, my top three are: Civ II, Operation Flashpoint, and Baldur’s Gate 2. (I’m old, so there.) Hard to pick just three. I want to throw Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas in there, along with the original HalfLife and Harpoon. Crap, and Silent Hunter, STALKER of Chernobyl, and MS Flight Simulator. Just too many games, and I’m not a gamer at all. (Still haven’t played Portal, or Planescape, or HL2, or any of the Elder Scrolls games, or Mass Effect or KOTOR…)