Top 20 PC Games on Windows XP

ApacheVE writes "Voodoo Extreme has up a story called Generation XP: Top 20 Games of the Last Generation. They call out some of the best games released in the Windows XP era, to mark the passing into the 'next generation' of PC gaming this past week. Some favorites include Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament 2004, Civilization IV, World of Warcraft and other titles that helped shape the era." Any titles you see missing from the list? The XP years were truly great, as far as PC titles went; how long do you think it will be before Vista has enough market penetration to make a difference in gaming?

Comments

The Goods

[TriezGamer]

20) Rise of Nations
19) Halo: Combat Evolved
18) Rome: Total War
17) Unreal Tournament 2004
16) Medal of Honor Allied Assault
15) Neverwinter Nights
14) Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
13) Command & Conquer: Generals
12) Guild Wars
11) Civilization IV
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
09) Doom 3
08) F.E.A.R.
07) Company of Heroes
06) Battlefield 1942
05) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
04) Call of Duty
03) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
02) Half-Life 2
01) World of Warcraft

Re:The Goods

[RogueyWon]

Hmm... thoughts on each of these in turn:

20) Rise of Nations - yeah, ok, this seems fair enough. It's a nice concept and still a fun game to play. I may even have moved it a little higher up the list. Graphics are dated quite badly now, so a sequel wouldn't go amiss.

19) Halo - w... t... f... - sure, the Xbox version was great, even if its own sequel does comprehensively out-shine it, but the PC version always felt like a nasty hack at best.

18) Rome: Total War - reasonable pick and probably in about the right place on the list. Very solid game.

17) Unreal Tournament 2004 - this made me go "hmm" at first, but on balance, I think I could live with this here. It was definitely the best iterration of the series. I'm not quite sure how TFA manages to claim the original is better.

16) Medal of Honour Allied Assault - I guess you have to include one of the WW2 shooters and I guess this one is the obvious candidate. If this were the only one on the list, I could have been perfectly happy. Unfortunately, if you look further down...

15) Neverwinter Nights - ooooh, tricky one. On the one hand, the game as released, straight out of box, is pretty damned poor, with an original campaign that falls waaaaay short of the usual Bioware standards. The sequel is massively better in this respect. However, I will grant you that, with two solid expansions and a huge mass of mods available, NWN has grown way beyond what originally came out of the box.

14) Max Payne 2 - Can be completed in about 4-6 hours by an average player and has no replay value. No thanks.

13) Command and Conquer: Generals - Oh god no. Command and Conquer with a slight graphical facelift, but none of the production values that made the very early installments in the series great. Gameplay that was outdated compared to other RTSes even at release.

12) Guild Wars - not played it, so can't really comment.

11) Civilisation IV - frankly, the Civ games have never done it for me. However, I will grant that they do seem to push the requisite buttons for an awful lot of people, so happy to let this one stand.

10) Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos - yeah, good pick. Probably the best of the small-scale RTSes from the XP era. I'm mystified as to why the article says the controls were tricky, though. They were basically the same as any other RTS around, if not slightly better due to the decent hotkeys system.

9) Doom 3: Yep, decent pick. I know a lot of people found fault with it, but this game scared the living shit out of me (at least for the first half of the game). I'd probably have put this in the bottom end of the list, though, given the lack of variety. I actually felt Quake 4 was better, so may just have substituted that altogether.

8) F.E.A.R: again, a decent pick just on account of atmosphere. Plus the graphics were beautiful and the AI probably the best we've seen in an fps.

7) Company of Heroes: Hmm... maybe. Personally, I'd have substituted Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War for this, though. They're basically the same game underneath but, particularly with the expansions, I find Dawn of War slightly deeper. Still, there's no denying that Company of Heroes is very, very pretty.

6) Battlefield 1942: Yes, I'd probably go along with this, on the proviso that all of the sequels and expansion packs are excluded. BF2 in particular was an utter crock.

5)Knights of the Old Republic: Yes, definitely. Proof that Lucas should have let Bioware write Episodes 1-3.

4) Call of Duty: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO. What the fuck is it with this game? Why the hell do it and its sequels continue to attact such plaudits. An inferior, dumbed down Medal of Honour clone which brought nothing new to the genre at all. On a related note, why do all these countless WW2 fpses only feature battles from the second half of WW2 which the Allies won (oh, and Pearl Harbour). I grow tired of the "inevitable march to victory" feel of these games and feel that it actually fails to do history justice.

3) E

Re:The Goods

[GeckoX]

Oblivion better on 360? You have got to be kidding me.

Especially considering the reason you give.

The 360 version has massive control related issues. The resolution is a huge problem.

And the kicker: Show Stopper Bugs.

How can you possibly state that the bugs present in the PC version are a bigger problem than those on the 360? With the 360, you hit one of those bugs, and your game is over. And there are a LOT of these bugs.

On the PC:
a) patches. Patches fix bugs. Bugs go away. Gameplay gets better.
b) console. Console fixes or allows one to work around bugs and carry on with your game.
c) mods. Mods are what make Oblivion really shine.

You are the very first person I have run across that actually prefers the 360 version. That statement alone suggests I should take every game related statement of yours with a large dose of salt.

Win 98 FTW

[regular_gonzalez]

The Vista era was good, but nothing compared to the Windows 98 era (though I don't know that using OSes as a quantitative factor for determining gaming eras is particularly valid). I'll stack up Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Planescape: Torment, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Grim Fandango against the best games from *any* era.