What are your favorite games of all time?

I think what often determins favourites is the order you experience new game mechanics in. For instance, I enjoy Banjo Tooie & dk64 on n64, but i felt underwhelmed & felt things were usually too easy, because I had learned the mechanics from super mario 64 & banjo kazooie, thus why they didn't become favourites. If I had played those 2 games first, It would possibly be the other way around. I think that is a huge factor in people's enjoyment of certain games. Popular (and probably great) Games like Fallout 3 can be utterly boring and feel like nothing new depending on what you have & haven't experienced in your years. I think an important factor for a game to be addictive, is for it to create a sense of wonder. Wonder of the mechanics, how things work. If the patterns all look too predictable from the start, the odds of it being fun are less likely. Learn too much, and alot of the great games that come out offer you nothing, they're dull. Minecraft/Terraria/DoD/Super Meat Boy have been the biggest innovations (atleast for me) in the last couple of years.

 

BTW, a record that I AM aware of, was about 24 to 48 hours for a board game (with pizza breaks). it was either Avalon Hill's Civilization or Advanced Civilization (not really the same as the computer game, but one of the designers also helped design the computer game).

Before this weekend, I absolutely loved the game, as did most of my friends. A college buddy of mine who lived in Connecticut offered to host the game, and I and a few other drove up from various locations (NJ, or NYC, or upstate New York). I believe we had a full 7-player game which is what you always strive for with that board game.

I was doing ok in the game, feeling good about myself, but the game was simply taking too long. Among us was a work buddy who I knew was notorious for taking forever to decide what he was going to do on his turn, but he was the seventh, and we couldn't leave him out, so he had to come. Furthermore, if you know the game, there is a lot of trading involved, so even when it WASN'T his turn, he managed to slow the game down to a crawl. At some point of having bad pizza (worst. Dominoes. Ever. -- that pizza had freezer burn, no joke), and being up for too long without sleep, everyone started slowing down. Also, we started getting on each others' nerves. I think we may have actually decided to take a nap at one point (I can't recall for sure). In any case, that was not enough.

After some discussion, at one point I suggested that we just call the game and declare a draw. Another friend of mine suggested that maybe he'd kill me if we did that because he was so irritated at investing so much time in the game that we couldn't just declare a draw.

So I don't even recall who won the game (I think it may have been me, or I may have been in second or third place. Too long ago to remember). But we finished the game. I had to drive home to NJ. I, and the couple of others of us who also lived in NJ all swore that at least once during our trip, we almost got into accidents from lack of sleep.

I'm sure there's more to the story that I simply cannot remember. And to be honest, I've completed Advanced Civilization games in about 6 to 7 hours, so 36 hours, or whatever it was, is very unusual.

 

You're probably right. heheh, I can SO relate. I loved it before they had the in-game maps. I started in kunark era. And just learning your way to a new location was an exciting adventure. Little by little, expanding your horizons, learning the entire world. That's another thing MMO's these days don't have. Too much handholding in WoW & the like.. I call that game 'follow the arrow'. Because you're conditioned to be mindless and just do that. Programmers placing 20 monsters of one type here, kill them, loot item, take to quest guy. Then they send you somewhere else, same deal.. somewhere else, same deal. Lacks some of the detail & sophistication that EQ had, environments not as rich (and I don't mean graphically). .Not immersive to me at all.

I remmember falling down a hole in Dalnir, and surviving a devastating battle at the drop zone. Then looking around, wondering.. 'is it even possible for me to get out of here on my own at this level'. I died before I found the portal exit, and spent hours, days, searching for someone to help me recover it. I sent a higher level buddy in there, and he ended up losing his corpse too. Eventually we found a willing necromancer to get them for us. That sense of exploration.. EQ really revolutionized that, atleast for me.

 

The other thing that made EQ so great, was it's reliance on teamplay. I don't think there's an rpg type game that has relied so heavily on teamwork & player interaction. The world really came to life.

 

I'd wager you trumped that in KC/Fear/SSRA/<insert grind or raid spot here>

 

..Used to sometimes forget to eat I'd play that game so much. At one point I was sleeping with headphones on each night, so If my contacts required my pulling talents, I could wake up & impress. I know all about you crazy eq people!

 

I wanted to again take this opportunity to tell those who loved the original Everquest that there is a free server called Shards of Dalya. They have a massive player base and are still supported. Read the site to learn what you need to play. It is entirely free to play by the way.

https://www.shardsofdalaya.com/
*Edit* It is good. Better than the original in many ways too. DO NOT MENTION "Chuck Noris" or you will be permabanned though. That is part of their rules. They had to endure a massive wave of CN jokes for a long time and finally made and strictly enforce the rules!

 

I think when it comes to MMOs, the one you played first is the one that inprints itself on you as the ideal MMO(even if you didn't think it was ideal when you played it). Thus the one that stands out the most to me is Neocron(which went to complete shit after release, my ideal comes from the beta), on that premise I also very much enjoyed Fallen Earth. (I've also played Anarchy Online, Rubies of Eventide, Minions of Mirth, Tabula Rasa, Chronicles of the Spellborn, Nestalgia and Wakfu). Chronicles of the Spellborn was also excellent but flopped. Tabula Rasa had potential, but didn't quite live up to it, fun for a while though.

Of note, 5/9 of those I mentioned I was in the beta testing. There's a few others I either did a free trial, or were briefly in the beta for that I simply didn't care for. All the mentioned ones I played at least for a few months.

 

Honestly, I played EQ for years, and I would NEVER EVER EVER go back to it unless I got paid by the hour. EQ was the game that converted me from a hard-core gamer into a true casual player. Or at least it got me started down that path.

Don't get me wrong -- I enjoyed myself at the time. But it was more of a lifestyle than a game. And I do not ever want to go back to that lifestyle. It turned normally nice people into... something else at times.

Casual is the name of the game for me nowadays. I don't even like raiding anymore. Hell, I haven't played an MMO for at least 8 to 10 months or so.

 

My favorite 4x game, by far, is Stars! I'm also very happy with Space Empires - it's grown a ton in the last 20 years that I've been playing it.

 

You never played planescape?

It's good until you get to the end, and then go WTH???

As to Everquest:
Everquest generaly had the factor that it was a slog (much like Haldurson, you would have to pay me a good wage to play it again). Most creatures were generally tougher than a single PC (that you were meant to fight at your level), even for what WoW would consider a 'trash' creature. Soloing was limited (assuming you wanted to earn any XP from it) to those that were more powerful or could kite effectivly (maybe 2-4 of the 10? classes, pending on how well you played them). While if you died at higher levels you lost enough xp (you could even loose levels) that it would take weeks or even months of regular playing to gain back the amount you lost from that single death. Thats just an idea of what EQ was like (to those that have only played other MMOs) while gameplay was much the same style as you would expect from a MMO.

 

Not everyone fell in love with Planescape. I hated it after all. I loved other games at around the same time, and never gave it a real chance until years later. By then it had been polished into the smelly turd it is.

Borderlands was the shooter that had loot like RPGs. You scum for hours or days to find uber guns and you could take anything. But the end was pretty horrible. Major letdown.

EQ was great. I played solo only, and whenever I helped someone it was just that. I never needed help myself. I would some days gain several levels solo, and some days I would lose several. I sunk a lot of time in that. And every last bit was in SoD. Not the official pay as you play crap.

I only ever played the classes that *Could* solo. But I eventually found that to be every class if you know what you are doing. It was a very deep game too.

 

Clerics could solo a little bit if I stuck with undead, but that changed when I got closer to the level cap, Druids could solo but it would take forever to kill the mobs. Monks could single-pull which made it easier for them.

And Bards... well Bards could do just about anything if they were played well. And about 1 out of 20 bards played reasonably well, and there weren't very many in the game, since the class was so intimidating. It was probably the hardest class to play well in ANY mmo that I'm aware of, at least based on my experience. Above all else, you needed a good internet connection or you would die -- and this was in the days of dial-up. But even if you had a good connection, it took incredible rhythm skills. What made bards different is that they had to maintain as many songs going at a time as they could. You could only play one song at a time, but when you stopped playing it, it actually would last a few seconds longer. So the trick was to alternate songs at a specific rhythm so that you always were renewing a song just as it was about to lapse. Most bards could keep maybe 3, or perhaps 4 songs going at the same time. I knew someone who could, on a good day (no lag, etc.), do 6, which meant that he could solo like a maniac. But a tiny bit of lag on the server would kill him in an instant.

 

Monks and Druids were mostly all I played in SoD. Druids could self-haste, snare enemies, and root too when they were lucky. That a a handful of good DoTs would neutralize anything while keeping you safe. But SoD was harder than vanilla EQ from what I heard. The mobs resisted much more and the danger was great for solo when you depended upon a snare landing reliably to keep them from closing and killing you.

(Even with a self speed buff "Spirit of the Wolf", you usually could not run fast enough to evade strong monsters once they were aggravated, and casting on them sure did that. So you really relied upon both a speed buff on yourself and a snare debuff on them at the same time. Then your DoTs could take their sweet time and do the work.)

I may have to play again. It was always a good game. Most of my characters were stuck in the mid thirties though, since the game seems abnormally hard around there. Others swore that you had to group for the thirties and beyond. If so, I would never play again. What is the point of relying upon others for leveling?

 

It would be awesome if we had such place.

 

While I can't say that there's any game that I would call my favourite game "of all time" (simply because I know some things will change and thus at least some of them, even though I'll be nostalgic about them, will stop being my "favourite of all time"), there's nothing saying that I can't simply write about games that I really like, to the point of remembering about them even after I stopped playing them, or playing them even after I should've stopped..

So, beginning with board games of all kinds (that are not role-playing games):

Talisman - as we all know, the game itself is flawed. Some characters are too strong, some of them are too weak, some items are so overpowered that without using house rules it's almost impossible to play if one of players got any of them. But it was fun to play if you had some people, because it could take as long as you wanted (if you had enough boards for it, it could last for a long time), it was pretty massive for a game that actually gave you a quasi-freedom of movement, and it was pretty competitive game, seeing as your character wasn't just a piece on a board, but was instead supposed to represent you. In fact, this game (the 2nd edition, old times...) holds the record for being both the first board game I modified (we got some of those card templates with the game itself, and used them to produce more of the same later; it took some time but we actually managed to change some things; it's all lost now but it was still fun), and the board game that took us the longest to finish, with 33~34 hours (a little over two days) of gameplay for one session (note that we did sleep and eat normally, since we were just kids then, which is precisely why the lot of us had time to spend two days playing one game, wasting our summer holiday in the progress).
Dark Eden - For those of you who don't know it, it's a card game of Polish production. A rather old one, so it's (almost) impossible to get hands on it. But getting to the main point, the setting of the game is a post-apocalyptic one, with every player having an army composed of one commander (the central unit), some buildings (you can construct the base there, and the bigger it is, the more difficult it becomes for your opponents to destroy you), and some units of various kinds (there are 4 "races", and each of them specialises in different stuff). The game itself is pretty average when you have just two players, but the point is that, for as long as you have enough decks and players, you can duke it out with as many as you want, all at once. Which makes the gameplay interesting, because creating alliances becomes vital, and you have to be crafty to back-stab others.
Die Sielder von Catan - I think it's called "The Settlers of Catan" in English version, it's one of the first games I ever got from someone (from one of my cousins, and thus I got the original version instead of one the instruction booklet of which I could actually read), and the only not-so-simple board game that I am capable of playing in German. The game-play is average, but just as in the two examples above, it's a game that becomes better if you have people you like playing with.

Now that we're finished with the simple board games, let's get to the role-playing stuff:

Neuroshima - A post-apocalyptic game made in Poland, it's pretty much a bastard child of Fallout and Terminator. A lot depends on the ideas of the GM ("Game Master", for the unaware) and on the unity of the group, but it's a good game to play if your friends don't like "fantasy" stuff, or if you simply like post-apocalyptic games. And it's the only game I know of that has a "damn hard" skill test difficulty.
Crystalicum - Another Polish game, it's something that caters to people for whom adventure in fantasy RPGs is important, and it's supposed to exaggerate moments when characters do both something awesome, and something stupid beyond all belief. In most cases it's a game that doesn't require an elaborate web of intrigues to be interesting, because, even more so than in other games, your characters are moving from place to place, and thus it's a good game for the times when you want a light-hearted adventure. Also, playing an Ice Elf character is suffering (to elaborate: you are not supposed to show many emotions, so if your group has a rule that everything you do is in-character, that means you can't laugh at that joke the guy on the left just said, even if it makes you explode).
Mage: The Ascension - Most of us probably know the game, and the same things that apply to this one also apply to most games in World of Darkness, but there is one thing that makes this one different. And that is the fact that the characters' powers are pretty much activated via storytelling; there are no set powers, and unless we really use some effects so much that our GM knows what we want to achieve, we have to describe what we want to do instead of waiting for the GM to do that. That, combined with the fact that during our storytelling moment we have to take care to make the whole thing appear inconspicuous (unless we want to kill ourselves), because there is seldom a time when we really have to use magic with no sleepers ("muggles") around.
Paranoia - As an RPG it's pretty silly, but the Computer is so memorable that it's difficult not to hold that game dear after playing it a few times.

And now that we're finished with everything that isn't video games, let's get to them:

Total Annihilation - The (almost) forgotten parent of the Supreme Commander series, it was one of the first (if not the first one) RTS games that had something resembling 3D graphics and environment, and it was memorable for a few things, like aircrafts behaving like, well, aircrafts, and weapon projectiles being able to miss not on a random chance, but because they just didn't hit. It was pretty slow paced (which is probably why Supreme Commander 2 was toned down), and the CPU was incapable of being challenging unless you used some AI magic, but matches against human opponents were fun.
ShellBlast - It's a small game, something that is a bastard child of Minesweeper and Picross. But it was really fun to get through, and it's the minesweeper game that I think every new OS should have.
Stars! - It's not as much a game as an Excel spreadsheet turned alive magically. But it was fun to play if you don't care about graphics as much as you do about the depth of a 4X game.
UFO series (the first two games, to be exact) - Not much to say about them, other that I sank much time into these two games, and that I never managed to drive the aliens away, as I always died to to funding cuts. But oh well, I'm doing better now that I'm playing the fan remake of the first one.

There are many other video games I could mention (my first list had 11 of them), but I decided to cut it down a bit since I don't want to bury you all with my post.

 

Any thread I make usually invites walls of text. Feel free to go into CSPAN mode and Filibuster the whole thread. We all like games, so we will probably enjoy it.

 

Kazeto... if you want more Dark Eden cards, I've got a bunch of them in a box somewhere, that I'm not using. Just a few hundred cards.

I think I have Total Annihilation with the original box somewhere too.

I also love Mage: the Ascension, but Vampire: the Masquerade is more popular here.

More pen&paper:

Mutant(3 different editions, I prefer the third one "New" Mutant, it's about 20 years old now, hence the ""): A swedish roleplaying game in a cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic mix setting(the first two are more straight post-apoc).

Cyberpunk: Has to be mentioned when talking about cyperpunk RPGs, one thing I love about it conceptually is that one of the goals is being cool. For example if you buy a chainsaw cybernetic hand, it costs more to get one that uses a pull start(instead of thought activated), because it's cooler! And it costs extra for the "shnik" soundeffect if you get wolverine-like claws, etc.

Inquisitor: A novel pen&paper RPG / miniature wargame mix. It has a GM, and is IIRC called a narrated miniature game. It's set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and space marines are super overpowered because they're based on the fluff for space marines, unbound by the need for army balance. It's a universe where EVERYTHING is different shades of evil. There are no true good guys.

I could go on and on...

Boardgame:

Arkham Asylum: Excellent lovecraftian horror boardgame. It's actually tricky for the heroes to win, and there's always the chance of going insane and getting various derangements.

 

About Settlers of Cataan -- I've played it on and off for years. I actually didn't play it much as a board game since I had more interest in other games. But I did play it since it was a favorite in the board game club I was in, and among a couple of my friends. I actually learned to like it a bit more after discovering the computer version, and later, the IOS version. The only major difference between the computer and IOS version is that they haven't adapted the Cities and Knights expansion for the latter yet.

Paranoia -- that's the only paper and pencil RPG (other than a couple of home-brewed variants) that still holds a warm spot in my heart. Note that it doesn't have to be as totally random as you make it out to be. There are at least 3 'official' styles of play, actually delineated by the game's creator:
Zap -- essentially, anything goes. I've never played it this way but I do understand that it has a following, much to the chagrin of the game's creator
Classic -- A game I ran did seem to follow this, probably mostly because most of my players had not played the game before. Essentially, conflict between players is rarely lethal, but it can happen
Straight -- this is how I played it when I was a player (usually at game conventions). You CAN kill other players but you really need to be able to convince the computer or the other powers-that-be that the fellow player needed killing. IF you are unable to support your decision, or at least, convince the computer that it was the right decision, then you probably will wind up dead as well.

I liked Straight because it still had the paranoid aspects, plus there was so much more creativity necessary among the players (and you really had to watch your own back as well) The problem with Zap is that it's too random for my taste. And Classic does not make you feel quite as 'paranoid'.

I also played Stars!. Yes, it did feel a bit like a spreadsheet at times. And reading Usenet made me feel like I needed to be some kind of a mathematician in order to play, so I always stayed with solo games. But yes, it was fun, in a purely OCD type of way.

 

Nah, but thanks for the offer. I've three decks ready to play for when my friends come over (one of them has his own deck, so we have four and that is enough to create mayhem) and four full boxes (the ones that contained the boosters) of spares (that I can't get rid of, because "what if I'll ever want to use them").

The same there. I have two boxes and another set of box-less CDs, actually, as I killed my first two CD sets via overuse.

I like it too, but it's easier to get attached to M:tA for me as my friendly GM doesn't want me to play V:tM (and thus we don't play it; it's a weird story so you probably don't want to hear it [and I don't want to post it, since I only remember bits of it now]).