Your Favourite Video Game of ALL Time.....GO!

General
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Hey ADI!

So, this is going to be a bit of a can of worms. But, I wanted to get an idea of what you all play. And, specifically, what your favourite game of all time is.

This could be any game ever produced - PC (DOS, Windows, etc) , Console, Mobile, anything. (God I hope it’s not mobile, rofl :P)

My favourite game of all time is Jagged Alliance 2. It’s actually still on GOG and you can usually pick it up for a few bucks with a DRM free download.

Basically, a defector from the current regime in a presumably central American country hires you to take out the dictator and restore peace to his beloved country. The catch is, that person happens to be the Queen, and his wife. You hire a team of mercenaries (tons of choices btw) which all have unique abilities, strengths, weaknesses, are fully voice acted and also have per-existing positive or negative relationships with other mercs.

You then set off into the country to link up with the small guerrilla resistance and slowly start to fight your way to the palace, liberating cities and towns as you progress, and ringing more people on board to help you in the struggle.

This game was NUTS for its time. It came out in 1999 and featured:

  • Well written story
  • Fully voiced actors (yes, full voice overs for just about everyone)
  • Destructible Environments
  • Tons of guns and other types of weapons
  • Realistic weapon handling, ammunition and physics
  • Awesome explosions
  • Dialogue choices that changed how your relationship with someone developed
  • Hilarious Easter eggs
  • Excellent RPG mechanics
  • A mix of tactical turn based combat and real time strategy
  • Occupy towns and cities and train militia to protect them

Honestly, if any of you are even remotely interested in XCOM style turn based strategy mixed with some real time elements and blowin stuff up, this game is going to be awesome for you. Mind you, it is old - 22 years old. However, it is a MASTERPIECE of a game, and continues to be my favourite game of all time to this day.

Let me know what yours are!

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I most prefer older single player games with a good story but sometimes I just need to satisfy a pew-pew appetite. In terms of most played and beloved, in descending order ; Freelancer, Skyrim (both), Dungeon Siege, Star Citizen, MW3, COD4, Age of Empires 2, Dune 2000, The Division, Command & Conquer (Tiberian Sun & Generals 2) and StarCraft (both).

Honourable mentions go to games I’ve only played once and enjoyed, such as Destiny 2’s single player game (I loved the music) and Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order. I look forward to playing Star Wars Squadrons, Battlefield 2042 and perhaps EVE or ED if I can find the time.

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This is not in order …

  1. LOTRO before I became weary of the endless grinding
  2. SWTOR - The game I was in before Star Citizen
  3. DDO until I hated having to be in a party all the time.
  4. Tale of Two Wastelands - (a Mod that combined Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas together into one game instead of two separate games)
  5. The Witcher 3 - Best solo Role Playing Game ever!
  6. Star Citizen of Course
  7. Features in Fallout 4 but the role playing sucked.
  8. Command and Conquer Series
  9. Warcraft
  10. Starcraft
  11. Jedi The Fallen Order
  12. Baldur’s Gate 2
  13. Fallout 1 and 2
  14. Questron 1 and 2
  15. Raid on Bungeling Bay
  16. Wrath of Denethenor - this game was way ahead of its time and the traps were deadly funny. And man, death was handed out like candy … lol. I think my friends and I died in that game more than any other during its era.
  17. Sim Copter
  18. Most of the Dungeons and Dragons RPG video games.
  19. XCOM2
  20. Civilization 1, and 2 by Activision
  21. Wasteland 2 and 3

And countless others

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Omg guys, game, not games :wink: :stuck_out_tongue: I know it’s gotta be hard to choose just one. But what if you had to? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Instead of focusing on my favorite game or games, I will go with a genre of game, my favorite solo video Role Playing Game to date, is The Witcher 3. Probably simply because of the story line and video game technology allowed it to take the #1 slot.

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Yay, Jagged Alliance 2! I love that one too. JoWood in general is an underappreciated mill of classic games. Silent Storm 1 and 2 are an awesome series in that genre/company’s stable, too, with the same kind of destructible environments but a WWII alternate history plot where the Axis is building kind of steampunky power armor.

My all time fave is Combat Mission 2, though. The graphics look like you’re recreating WWII battles with Lego men, but the simulation is top notch - from the deflection value of sloped armor to the advantages of digging your tank into an earthen berm for defense.

The thing I like most about it, though, which I’ve never really been able to recreate in any other game, is the ‘mad minute’ style of play. It’s a WWII tactics/strategy game, but you don’t have real-time control of your forces. Instead, you give your orders and then watch how things unfold for 60 seconds - as the forces under your command attempt to follow the orders you gave, for good or ill. They might succeed, or they might get suppressed by enemy fire, panic, and break. They might fall completely out of your control, abandon their vehicle or fixed weapon, and go hide in cover while battle rages around them. Or they might get inspired by their unit commander to do something really crazy and pull it off by the skin of their teeth - you’ll never know until it happens. The turn ends, and you roll with the punches and issue another set of orders, then start the whole process over again. You only see what your forces see, or hear, and get their ‘best guess’ as to what’s just out of sight - they might report hearing armor or a truck but not know whose, or they might tell you they see a Tiger tank when it’s really a less threatening Panther. Green troops make constant mistakes, veterans are more reliable.

I had so many great, unexpected turnabouts in that game - like an American 57mm anti-tank crew that got their weapon blown to smithereens by an enemy German 88, retreated under fire into a pocket of heavy woods, then lurked and got their breath back while the Germans advanced. When the 88 crew pushed up to try to take potshots at my US tanks, the 57mm crew pounced on them with just a handful of 1911 pistols and an M1 carbine, caught them by surprise, and killed or drove them all away - then commandeered the enemy 88 and saved my ass, using it to pound shells into the rear of some very surprised German tanks. Didn’t plan any of that, it just happened over two turns where I had written off that crew after they panicked and ran - but they turned the tide of that battle. The sheer number of surprises CM2 dished out kept me coming back for years.

Unfortunately the company that made the CM games shifted from WWII to a hypothetical modern Syrian campaign that soon after came distressingly true, along with a mechanic to abstract assymetric warfare that really kind of shot the franchise in the foot. Maybe it’s the ‘too soon’ factor, but gameplay that dealt with suicide bombers and human shields sapped a lot of the fun out of it. CM2, though, remains as awesomely unpredictable as the day I started playing it.

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Final Fantasy VII. If I ever get time and hook up the old PS2 I will have to go and play that one again. Assuming I can find my old copy :slight_smile: A current go to for killing time, and one of my favourites as well is Starcraft 2. Awesome for some quick battles.

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Yeah JoWood was really good! Never expected anyone to remember Silent Storm…My lord. We just that old? :stuck_out_tongue: By the way, speaking of JoWood… CHASER. Yay? Nay? :slight_smile:

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ok, another list :wink:

some of the old games from the beginng of my playtime:

Base Building & Conquer Games:
Dune
Command & Conquer Series
Warcraft Series

Flight/Space Sims:
Wing Commander Series
Descent (First Game i know with 6DOF control)
Freelancer
Star Citizen

Simulation Games:
SimCity Series
Populous
Cities: Skyline
Civilisation Series

Shooters:
Wolfenstein 3D
Doom
Duke Nukem
Quake

Others:
Lemmings

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Dude, YES! I haven’t played C&C in SO long. A real shame EA screwed the pooch on Generals 2 years ago and shut down the studio that was working on it. Turns out people hate loot boxes in fully priced games. Who knew?! I wish there is a Generals 2 sometime soon… or at least, a spiritual successor would be nice.

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Never played it, unfortunately. All of my JoWood experiences have been third-person isometric. Looks interesting, though! Unfortunately, the wiki entry totally spoiled the ending twist. X(

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Oh ffs :frowning: Well, it was a pretty fun game. I’d say it was a B at best, but I really liked it, and the multiplayer was pretty hectic and fun too :slight_smile:

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Going to date myself here… Dark Age of Camelot (pre Atlantis).

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My all time favorite is original Deus Ex. Dystopian future, conspiracies, wide variety of body augmentations, non-linear gameplay. You could chose whether to go in guns blazing, leaving piles of bodies. Or take a stealthy approach with hacking, diversions and taking out opponents from the shadows. Heck, you could finish the game without shooting or killing anyone. My favorite playstile was silent undetectable melee assasin. It gave similar vibes as ‘Leon: The Professional’ movie :smiley:

Game released back in 2000, but already had raytracing with true mirrors (rare feature even these days). Dog pncs could detect smell so you had to sneak minding that you leave a trail behind that a dog can pick up. It was also a first game to use actual lipsync technology. All other games at the time was using ‘jaw flapping’.
I think I played this game about 20 times or so :sweat_smile:. And I still replay it from time to time.

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Oh baby! That’s a spicy one! Deus Ex had a very interesting development cycle, and wasn’t even going to be called that until much later. I loved all the Deus Ex games, but my favorite has to be Deus Ex: Human Evolution. Invisible War was also wonderful.

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Sigh … I was hoping that game that Deus Ex was inspired by was going to be better than it … Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk was good until you got use to everything, were high enough level, and the bugs were squashed, then it became boring. I definitely wasn’t the experience I had in The Witcher 3. I will have to get the next version of Deus Ex.

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Don’t wanna ruin it for anyone, and I think Reeves played the character right, but I hated Johnny and I wish he never existed. I didn’t like CP2077 at all, I mean I played it and beat it, but I never went back to it like I did the Witcher. I just absolutely hate having a timer and the associated stress placed on me in a game that is supposed to be all about freedom. That part stuck with me throughout the entire game and I hated it.

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Timed events never go well. I remember when Interplay made that mistake with Fallout 1 with the search and repair the water reclamation chip mission. They didn’t make that mistake in Fallout 2.

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Master of Magic (1994) and its spiritual successor Age of Wonders (1999).

Fantasy turn-based tactical combat and strategy, diplomacy, base building. i.e 4 x strategy. But the game had some much depth, from the extensive list of spells that both you and your heroes can cast, variety of units, to how important early decisions you made impacted the late game. Lots of replayability in how you built out your Wizard (basically your avatar in the game), managed and used your cities, managed diplomacy with the competing NPC Wizards, and how you chose to finish the game. Rather than go the route of gradually beating down and eliminate every other Wizard, you could also work to build up your spellbook until you can learn and cast the “Spell of Mastery”. But oh boy, timing is everything, cause the moment you started learning it, EVERYONE turns on you.

Sadly Microprose dropped the ball and basically died years later, and MoM2 never happened. There have been various fan attempts at mods and such. Some were useful, fixed some broken things, and one even bolted on a janky multiplayer.

Age of Wonders is a spiritual successor that borrowed from it LIBERALLY, and if it wasn’t for what happened to Microprose, you might have seen a lawsuit imo. In any case it is awesome, added much better graphics, hex grids, and multiplayer. My wife and I killed a LOT of time playing with/against each other in the 00s. They made sequels and expansions over the years. Side note, my wife and I were both beta testers for this one back when that meant more than paying for early access. It was very rewarding and I feel we helped make it better and more true to the MoM roots.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1250690/Master_of_Magic_Caster_of_Magic/
https://youtu.be/OAMhVW45HHM
Enter Slitherine games, who bought up the IP for MoM some years back and have officially updated it with the better fan updates, expansions, and even a new Windows based version that doesn’t require DosBox. In addition, they are FINALLY working on a MoM2 with completely new graphics, but hold as much to the original game as possible.

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I got Collector’s Edition for CP2077 and it’s awesome). As for the game, well, I put it on pause till december so that devs can polish it and so unfinished game doesn’t spoil my experience. Starting experience was okey for me. I agree that timed stuff spoils gameplay, I like to take it slow, explore every nook and cranny. But some games manage to make timed features interesting. Like Baldurs gate 3. You get a tadpole in your head that will turn you into a mind flyer. The difference from CP2077 is that you choose either to fight it or embrace it’s power. And who knows where either option leads). Oh, and that action in the intro is freaking awesome. Best CG intro I’ve seen in a long time)
Funny, but I don’t like Witcher 3 at all). Witcher 2 was okey. I like fantasy genre, I’ve played multiple times throught elder scrolls, gothic, dragon age, thief, fable, dungeon siege, arcanum and some early series of might and magic. All those games establish connection with the player from the very beginning, present with a serious issue or a threat that cannot be ignored and that’s what hooks you to survive, strive and move on. But when I try to get into the witcher 3, I just get bored and emotionally detached. There’s no motivation to folow the story :man_shrugging: