-Thief
-Thief II
-Deus Ex
-NHL 2001
-RollerCoaster Tycoon (and add-ons)
-Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed
-Space Quest series
-Wolfenstein 3D
Jman
I’m gonna put in another vote for M.U.L.E. (for the C64, NOT for Nintendo). I’ve got a list of favorites, but most of them have been mentioned already.
And I want to gloat. I BEAT Impossible Mission! Not just once, but consistently. Once I figured out how to do it, I could generally beat it by 1:30. I never managed to beat it by 1:00, but not for lack of trying.
I wonder if my old C128 still works…
By the way… I don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but I have to throw in my support for it…
Silent Hill. Makes Resident Evil seem like an episode of Barney.
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Redneck Rampage
Another great one I played once or twice was TRACON; you played the part of an air traffic controller in whatever area of the US you selected. Weather conditions, pilots’ attention to your directions, volume of traffic, randomly injected emergencies, etc. were all variable. This thing will leave you in an absolute cold sweat in just 10 minutes. There’s supposedly a TRACON II on the streets, but haven’t tried it…yet.
Half-Life
This and its counterpart add-on, Opposing Force, is the most fantastic and well-developed single-player FPS I’ve ever played.
Black and White
The depth to this game is simply incredible. Totally absorbing, and totally addictive.
Unreal Tournament
This is without a doubt the best multiplayer deathmatch FPS out there, bar none.
Starcraft
I can’t say I’ve ever played Total Annihilation or that I want to, so I can’t compare the two…but in its time, this game and its expansion pack were supremely entertaining and addictive.
Yes indeed! I loved that whole plote arc. I could name off every point and click puzzle and RTS game but in particular;
Command and Conquer;In a way this game marked another turning point in my life. One day I was pushing plastic Para’s around the dining room table, the next the PC came and C&C followed. An hour to set up all your troops on the table vs an hour of wasting an opposing army with tanks, choppers and what have you. I never looked back.
Total Annihalation; An excellent game, gone is the tank rush (sort of) welcome real strategy.
Starcraft;For the reasons above, I really need to satisfy the SF fan inside me.
Samn’Max;Why has noone mentioned this Masterpiece? Or Day of the Tentacle Witty,taxing, and irreverant. (And cheap, if obtainable at all, pick up a copy at once)
Civilisation & Simcity 2000;Hey, there’s a megalomaniac in us all!
Wrong-O. Counterstrike, pal, counterstrike.
Then again, the two are markedly different (no rocket launcers or gatling guns in CS, for example).
Oh Christ on a pogo stick, If wanted to watch a movie, I’d rent it. TA is the simply the best RTS out there. Starcrap may have great story, but thats it. The AI sucks, the graphics suck, the gameplay is just lacking. One of the reviews I read said it the best, Warcraft 2 in space.
Scoff.
Total Annihilation: A generic game with a plot taken from an L. Ron Hubbard book, using moving boxes for characters, and about as much pizazz as gruel.
Know why StarCraft is good? Because people WANT to play it. They WANT to know what happens next. They become engrossed in the story and keep feeling the urge to “turn the next page”, as it were. Sure, some people may find an actual plot to be too difficult to comprehend, but hey, to each his own.
Whereeas on the other hand, people want to play Total Annihilation because it has strategic depth. A lot of us here feel the emphasis should be on the gameplay, not the story. They are called computer games after all. Having both is ideal, but given a choice between good gameplay and crappy story, or crappy gameplay and good story, I’ll take the gameplay.
Unless of course you are talking about an RPG, in which case you really need both.
Pong had good gameplay, Sturm. Doesn’t mean it’s swell.
Blizzard has a reputation of trying to insert as much character into it’s games as possible. You actually give a damn what happens to your characters - Raynor, Kerrigan, Tassadar. In my opinion, StarCraft’s gameplay is excellent. While the focus of the game isn’t entirely strategy (although, for those who say there is NO strategy, well, there’s just no helping you), I find it to be very well-rounded in all respects.
TA, by contrast, is very one-sided. They focused so much on gameplay that everything else wound up lacking (I’m sorry, but those graphics were very dated even before the game was released). And, forgive me, but the storyline is so banal and B-movie that I can’t possibly take that game seriously. Like I said… somebody read an L. Ron Hubbard book and thought, “This would make a great game!”
If StarCraft is just Warcraft in space (IMOSHO, that’s one of it’s better selling points), then Total Annihilation is the “Battlefield Earth” of computer games.
Starcraft (and the subsequent Brood Wars) were better than TA, because of the fact that it had great gameplay, graphics, and an awesome story. TA had good gameplay, and decent graphics.
BTW, my top five would be…
- Starcraft and Brood War
- Counterstrike
- TIE Fighter (Old, but still rules)
- Worms Armageddon
- Diablo II, probably. There’s about 5 different games that could go here.
I’ll eagerly cast another vote for Multiple-Use Labor Element, a.k.a. M.U.L.E.
(Anyone besides me impressed that I knew that?)
It may not have been Oscar material, but what do you even know of the plot? They could have just said Build stuff, make it go BOOM and the game is still more in depth than starcrap.
All starcrap is, is a half assed RTS with pretty colors, and some cutscenes. You play to get to the next cut-scene? What fun is that? Sounds to me like the enjoyment you get from Starcrap is watching the movies, not actually playing the game. Now that you seen them all, do you play anymore? How many times have you played in the past 6 months?
My favorite game is easily Star Control 2. It had excellent gameplay and a terrific sense of humor. And the music was wonderful. Hell, the end credits were actually worth watching.
Drastic: I agree with you that Star Control without music is a very sad thing. A friend and I came up with a (sort of) solution: I played the game on one PC, and he clicked on the appropriate .mod files for the right music on another PC. Another way is
C:> starcon2 /s:internal
which will play the sound on the internal speaker. It’s not exactly wonderful, but it’s better than nothing.
I have all the SC2 music on my machine, and listen to it every now and then.
Sturmhauke: The klingon-like cloaking ship is called an Ilwrath Avenger.
TA rocks.
No less than 10 minutes before you’re blowing stuff up, and using the Commander’s D-Gun to repel that inital rush…tough to beat the action.
I really liked Shogo: MAD but that game never had the support of the gaming community…friends and I would play LAN games occasionally, but I can’t play FPS’s for long before my head starts to spin.
^zertron
Never posted my list!
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Civilization I/II = The creme de la creme. The best video games ever, for any platform. Ever.
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Total Annihilation - Best RTS and multiplayer game ever made for the PC. Starcraft was a good game but hardly in TA territory.
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TIE Fighter - Why, oh why, oh WHY have they not released a TIE Fighter II? The games since have been okay but no big deal. TIE Fighter was so good it’s still one of the best combat games money can buy. Virtually perfect.
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Empire - The first conquer-the-world game, and unbelievably addicting. VERY old (first version came out in 1979) but still terrific.
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Earl Weaver Baseball - I am still waiting for a better baseball game. I’m not holding my breath.
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Red Baron - Dogfighting supreme. For God’s sake, don’t buy the sequel.
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Jedi Knight - Take your Doom and your Quake. Jedi Knight had ATMOSPHERE, man.
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Europa Universalis - My only really recent addition, but a strategy classic. If you like strategy, run out and buy it right away and clear your schedule.
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Harpoon - No other PC game has ever touched this masterpeice. There really isn’t even anything else in the genre.
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Diablo I/II - Yeah, yeah, hack and slash!
Honourable Mentions: M.U.L.E., Railroad Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Everquest, Pirates!, Mechwarrior 2, X-Com, The Ancient Art of War, Age of Empires II, Archon, Tunnels of Doom, Close Combat, V for Victory, Front Page Sports Football '97, NHL '99, SimCity, Simcity 3000, APBA Baseball for Windows, Caesar III, Silent Service II, Wing Commanders I, II, and III, Gunship, Gunship 2000, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Beachhead, M1 Tank Platoon, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Need for Speed: High Stakes, World Circuit II, Front Office Football, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Shadow President, High Command.
I haven’t touched Black and White in a while, on a whim I decided to give Fallout 2 another try (got a ways and then got bored with it the first couple of times I played it) and I’m having a lot of fun with it. Great RPG.
Heh, the first time in Fallout2 I missed giving the little kids in Las Vegas? Reno? a pistol to play with. Or giving Cassidy to many super stims.