What Game Do You Love?

It's that time of year again, when a person's fancy turns to new games. It's still nice to think of old flames, though, and eToyChest wonders about games you've loved. From the article: "In 1992 I was spending time getting my gaming legs on a then-aging 486 PC. It was loud, ugly, and far from state-of-the-art. But it could still run games off the shelf, and when a friend of mine brought over what he was calling the "best role-playing game he had played since Ultima V", I knew I had to check it out. What began that afternoon stands out as one of the most important events in my life as a game, for as I installed each of the two high density diskettes comprising Sir-Tech's Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, I somehow knew that I was in for a treat. What followed were two years of swords, sorcery, and the slaying of many humanoid rats." So what game do you still remember fondly, even if you haven't played for quite a while?

Comments

Half-Life 1 + 2

[tedgyz]

Half-Life blew me away
Half-Life 2 blew me away again

Other worthy mentions
M.U.L.E.
Diablo
Quake 1/2/3/4

TIE Fighter

[XenoRyet]

I must have played TIE Fighter for hundreds of hours, all on the crappiest of two button joysticks.

This was of course back in the day when LucasArts made good games. If only that was still true.

Re:TIE Fighter

[tibike77]

For X-Wing, you just *HAD* to have a joystick.
However, I spent most of my high-school afternoons playing TIE Fighter with a mouse. It actually plays quite fine, even if it's not a Wing-Commander-like mouse control, and you end up with muscle fever after a few hours ;)

Speaking of which, mmmmm, the Wing Commander series.... those were also nice.
And with the mouse "displacement from center" steering method, you just don't need a joystick at all.
Heck, I find it more enjoyable than actually having a joystick.

Doom

[NorbrookC]

Doom was the first game that really blew me away, and I still have a copy of it that I play from time to time. What made it even better was that there were a host of different maps for it, so even when you got to the point of being bored with the original, there was always something new. It's nice to see that there's still ongoing development for it.

Dungeon Master

[markh1967]

Dungeon Master" on the Atari ST was the best game of its time. It was a very early ST game and was a real eye-opener for anyone used to 8-bit computers. It probably sold almost as many STs as Doom did for PCs. The use of the mouse was perfect and I can still recall many of the rune sequences to cast spells even now, almost 20 years later.

Here's some

[Eideewt]

These are the main ones:
Fallout
Quake 1
Privateer
All three Descent games
Commander Keen
All three Thief games
Mechwarrior 2
Tyrian

I hate making lists like this since I always know I've forgotten lots of great games.

Civilisation ... and other Turn-Based Games

[rewinn]

... I'm a turn-based gamer. Reaction-time games are just not as compelling for me. That promise of "just one more turn" just leads me on ... there's no accounting for taste, I suppose. Civ 2 had a lot of improvements but the basic concepts were in Civ 1. I found Civ 3 to be boring ... Similarly, Heroes of Might And Magic 1 was wonderful; I skipped 2; HoMM 3 was an improvement in every way but still basically the same concept; HoMM 4 wasn't worth the upgrade, to me at least. Perhaps there's some basic "fun" concept at the core of any game that you can mess with, and you HAVE to mess with if your income depends on continued sales, but messing with doesn't necessarily mean improvement.

No Games For Me!!

[RobotRunAmok]

Uh uh. Computers were for work. Spreadsheets, databases, programming. Well, OK, word processing for the character sheets for the home-brew dice-and-pencil RPG we played. Consoles? Fuggeditaboutit. Kid stuff, right?

Until my buddy asked me to advise him on the purchase of a new PC. When I asked him what he was looking to use it for, he named all the regular Office stuff, and then added, "And of course, games. I want to be able to play games."

So I studied up on graphics cards -- in the computer magazine articles I had always skipped prior to then -- and made my recommendations. When his box arrived, naturally he invited me over to configure it, for a few beers. In the course of my new research, I learned that the "Game of the Year" in everybody's graphics categories was something called "Mechwarrior II," so on my way over I picked up a copy for him to christen the new box with. He had a state-of-the-art graphics card and monitor, so I wanted to see what a state-of-the-art game looked like running on it.

When the opening cinema played, "I Am Jade Falcon," and that unbelievable by anybody's musical standards score hit, our jaws hit the ground and we did this kind of Beavis-and-Butthead-Watching-NIN-Video take to each other. It was nothing like anything we old dice-throwers had expected in the least.

So, um, yeah, about 400 BattleTech miniatures, countless PC games, and several dozen console games later, I guess I'd have to say that "MechWarrior II" was the most memorable, if not the most, influential, in my experience.

Marathon!

[adavies42]

Come on guys, doesn't anyone remember Leela, Durandal, and that crazy bastard Tycho? And all is not lost if you don't happen to have an old Performa sitting around--come join us at source.bungie.org and work on Aleph One, the open source version, now available for Linux, Windows, and just about anything else you can think of! (Some nut even has it working on Irix!)