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The Top 15 PC Games Of All Time
jerkychew writes: "The UK Web site Gamespot recently released its list of the 15 most influential PC games of all time. It's a pretty extensive and well-prepared list, covering the obvious games, as well as a few I had forgotten about. The article can be found on their Web site."
But where's Leisure Suit Larry? :) I mean, come on, I started off with the "classic" adventure games, but Larry got me "gripped", so to speak, on the whole computer gaming scene.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Somebody else pointed out that the inclusion of Doom and the exclusion of Wolfenstein 3D is ridiculous, and I've got to back this up. Additionally, leaving out King's Quest I is most unfortunate. It spawned a whole genre of games, and also brought in a whole new type of gamer.
-Waldo
You give the impression that nethack is not under active developement, version 3.3.1 came out rather recently. It can be found at http://www.nethack.org. Other roguelikes worth mentioning are ADOM (don't worry, he's better at designing a game then a website), and Angband. There are several derivatives of Angband and Nethack, while ADOM is closed source. A good list of other roguelike games (with links) is available at http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/links.html. All of the popular roguelikes and most of the rest have linux binaries, and the source code is often available too! Nethack is even released under the GPL license.
The other side of text-based gaming are text-based MUDs, a nice list of them can be found at The Mud Connector.
The article also fails to mention that there is a free version of civilization that will run on Linux and has multi-player capability. Check out www.freeciv.org for information and downloads.
Gamespot's list seems to be heavily skewed toward titles which sold very well and managed in the same breath to be influential. All of the games are personal computer games, meaning that console and stand-up arcade games are completely ignored. Because of the factor of sales, they are of course going to be limited to the last decade, by and large, since the computer gaming industry didn't really become a huge playing field until then.
All the same, they do give a nod to the 80's with "SimCity" and "Ultima III." By both of their apparent criteria, they wouldn't really be able to avoid these games.
They completely ignore some of the biggest genres of the past, however. Some are because they were primarily console games, but they completely ignore some of the most influential titles in favor of flashier, more recent games.
Text adventure games, from the simple "Hunt the Wumpus" to "ADVENT" to "Zork" and Infocom's entire line are given the shaft, despite their contribution in showing the possibility of translating a rich world (and in many cases, complex plot) into a computer game. To my knowledge, no game company has developed a text parser which even comes close to matching the sophistication of Infocom's earliest engines.
They also ignore the hybrid text-adventure games pioneered by Sierra, such as the early "King's Quest" line and such classics as "Leisure Suit Larry" (which showed the viability of an adult-only game).
Early turn-based strategy games, such as the ASCII "Starbase" and its clones are likewise ignored, along with "Rogue," "Nethack," and its (still maintained) successors in the "Angband" line.
Early first-person adventure games, such as "Wizardry" and "Bards Tale" were left off completely, as were their predecessors in the table-top RPG world ("Tunnels and Trolls," "AD&D," and the like).
The shareware craze of the late-80s and early-90s is also left off, despite the fact that folks like Apogee and id Software brought the entire gaming industry kicking and screaming into the world of "this demo is more than a guided walkthrough for the first five minutes of the game; it's actually the first quarter of the game, uncut." What game reviewer worth their salt could ignore this craze?
They also completely ignore ganes which were influential in their development on the computer, such as ChessMaster, its predecessors, and its successors. The AIs developed for chess have shaped our perception of Man vs. Machine indelibly, especially recently, with the defeat of Kasparov.
All these (and many other genres) aside, of the list they selected, there are many games I would have chosen from other deveopers. They give - in my opinion - sufficient props to id Software for Doom and Quake, but they seem to ignore other game developers that deserve kudos. Blizzard they credit only with Diablo, and they don't mention Looking Glass at all. While Dune II might have been the formative stages for real-time strategy games, Blizzard's XxxxCraft line defined it.
I could go on, but it has been better covered in other posts, and I have to do some actual work today. :)
Aaaaah!
And you have to start all over again until you get it.
And then you get within one second of your best score... noooo!
And then, your dear sister goes and beats your best score...
I'm sorry, but this game must have wasted more hours of people's lives than any other.
Some people think it this is some sort of internal, hardware based program that is the reason their employers bought them that 900 Mhz PIII.
Juln
On the offhand chance someone else hasn't done it:
And the top-ten runners-up were:
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
What on earth is Diablo doing in the list? It's a half-hearted rip-off of Angband (or any of the other rogue-like games), but with all the gameplay removed and replaced with flashy graphics. The game has *no* depth to it at all, and I can't see me still playing it in a few years. In fact, I don't play it any more now. In contrast, I'm still playing Moria (in it's Angband form) over a decade after I first played it. That's the mark of a true classic...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Why are there no platform games ???
Where are "Manic Miner", "Commander Keen 4", "Prince Of Persia", "Lemmings", "Flashback" ? Also, what about all time favorites like "Bratacas, "Breakout",, "Asteroids", "Space Invaders" , "Pac Man"?
Come on, let an older journalist write such articles !
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Hi? Greatest game ever made? Ringing any bells here? 12-odd years since I first laid eyes on it and I'm still engrossed by it. Dungeon-based RPGs, ah... hell. 90% of FPS games take place in a dungeon, so there's no mistaking the influence this one had; the rogue(like)/variants are superinfluential badboys. Also, Myst? Huh? Honestly now. What games did it influence? Riven? Anything else? I mean, the game was gorgeous and were it not for the COP OUT ending, I'd have bought RealMyst already. But come on. Also, totally not getting the Cult of Half-Life. The game was good, but not mind-blowingly so...
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Here is my list of the games that have consumed the most hours, days, and weeks of my life. All of them were good games. The one thing most had in common, they all had a "just one more level/planet/room/battle" mindset.
15. Tetris (we had it installed at my work-study job in college)
14. Total Annihilation
13. Outlaws (a lucasarts western FPS)
12. Zork (and a few other infocom games)
11. Privateer and Privateer II (really cool Wing Commander spin offs but I still haven't finished either...)
10. StarCraft (thanks to battle.net)
9. WarCraft (especially once we got two computers connected on a null-modem)
8. Diablo
7. Baldur's Gate
6. SimCity and SC II (days)
5. XCOM (days)
4. Master of Magic (days/weeks)
3. Master of Orion (days/weeks)
2. Civilization and Civ II (weeks, months?)
1. NetHack,Rogue,zangband,moria, etc. etc.
Probably spent more time on these than all the others combined. Can download quickly onto any computer, can play at work without anybody noticing, always interesting, and very, very hard to break away from...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.