Gaming

Beyond Good & Evil, 2003. It's been so long since I played it, I don't remember much other than it was a sandbox and it had some neat mechanics and cute characters and I loved it. The closing credits musical sequence is magical, too.

My response to this will look like a who’s who of Dreamcast games. The Dreamcast was the first console I bought myself, so I have lots of fond memories.

• Soulcalibur I & II
• Sega NFL 2K1 (and I was NOT a sports game person)
• Shenmue I & II
• Jet Set Radio
• Phantasy Star On-Line
• Quake III arena
• Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2
• Hydro Thunder
• Fur Fighters

Soldier of Fortune. I will remember that whistle darn it!

But I lived through the golden era of arena shooters such as Quake III and UT2K4 which was amazing, but most of all the whole FPS genre was really ramping up to new heights every month back then with HL2/CoD and mods such as Counter Strike, Garry's Mod and the like.

One of my all-time favourites is Freelancer, 2003. Just a really fun arcade space sandbox with an engaging campaign and great multiplayer and modding scene.

Had a partner want to practice hacking a 3ds before they closed the shop so I can play PS1 games. The first one I put on that mofo is Azure Dreams, my first and probably favorite dungeon crawler roguelike with a city builder. Also Breath of Fire IV is one of my absolute favorite games ever.

Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, all of these still hold up, and are totally worth a play even if you never played them back in their day.

Also, Alpha Centauri has SUCH a great narrative. Each faction has a strong identity, each leader has a fitting personality, the whole package is great.

It really deserves a remake to update the controls and UI, it still plays really well if you can get past that though.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (PC version). Be aware that PC version is a completely different game from the console versions.

Tetris (Game Boy/TI-83) and Nokia Snake. Those were my main mobile games for many many years. I don’t think I need to say anything about the games themselves. You all know what’s up 😆.

Warcraft 2. (I played this before Warcraft 1.) (Un)holy fuck. Everything about this game at the time was so metal. Started my lifelong bias for playing as Orcs in video games. Art and music are 😘👌 classic.

Deus Ex. I won’t call it a masterpiece, but it’s an iconic piece of gaming. I thought the “solve the missions however you want!” aspect was a bit oversold but replaying it during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic just made me realize how good the story and lore writers were. Music was great too, and it’s a good source for memes.

No spoilers please but I'm finally sitting down to playthrough and beat the original Deus Ex. Installed GMDX mod and have been having a blast so far!

I just picked up Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (the original, not the Remaster) again. Installed it on my Steam Deck along with DSFix after a year or so of scrolling past it and seeing the "unsupported" icon. Looked it up on ProtonDB and apparently it works just fine.

What a game. The level design is still unmatched imo

I still play Doom 1 & 2 most days. Nothing matches it for speed of play. Doom is fast.

Doom 2016 is a good game too, but I'm it lacks speed.

I'm going to go waaay back to a gem of a '90s CRPG: Betrayal at Krondor.

The main quest-line was engaging, the combat was cool, and the puzzle boxes were fun, but I remember being blown away by the size of the world. You could wander for literally hours, exploring new terrain, and discovering additional characters and bonus quest-lines. Its world was expansive and immersive, and it felt alive, like nothing else playable on a 386sx ever had been before.

The next time I felt that sense of aliveness - but better - in a video game was about a decade later, when I took my first Wyvern ride in World of Warcraft, and realized that everything I was seeing below me was really happening. This wasn't a teleport: if you saw someone fighting something down below you, it was because another player was really fighting something down there. Mind-blowing!

Final Fantasy Tactics(PS1) remains my favorite game to this day. I really liked messing with the various classes and abilities, and it's a rock-solid tactics game, to boot. Couple that with amazing music and a great political story, and you've got a classic.

TG Cid is hilariously broken, though.

There's always Diablo 1.

But my favorite is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which was made by some of the people who created Fallout and has a LOT in common with it. It's an open world, a combination of classic fantasy with elves, dwarves, and halflings with a rising steampunk technology that competes with magic. There are many schools of magic and technology, as well as social, stealth, and combat skills. The graphics are very crude by today's standards, but the gameplay is outstanding.

Unfortunately some of my favorite games are no longer around in a playable state.

I friggin loved Atlas Reactor but it shutdown in 2019. Another all time favorite, which is still around but does not have the community to keep it feeling alive is: Shattered Galaxy.

Other games I think deserve to be in the all time best games of all time list are:

• Heroes of Might and Magic 3
• StarCraft Brood Wars
• Dota2
• Civ5
• Diablo 2

1. Commando, 2. Black 3. metal gear 4. GTA san andreas 5. prince of persia 6. I remember having an emulator of a lot of old games.

Every Star Wars fan owes it to themselves to play Knights of the Old Republic, at least once. And if you play it once, you'll want to play it through again, as a different character class. And if you play it twice, you'll want to play it through again, as a dark-side Jedi. And if you play it thrice, you may be tempted to play it through again, as a Droid.

It's a wonderful story, that feels like Star Wars (which, for those of us older Star Wars fans, who at the time were suffering through the cumulative disappointments of the prequel trilogy, became our salving solace), with plots and settings and characters and ships and light-sabers and action and betrayals that were (and still are) as rich as any of the movies or shows.

The people who run the franchise keep teasing canonicity, so play it soon, so you'll gasp like we do when Darth Revan makes an appearance.

• OpenTTD
• Puzzle Pirates
• Mario Golf on GBA
• Bike or Die, Space Traders, and Fish Tycoon on Palm

The first Fable for me. Loved that game so much as a kid!

TimeShift came out in 2007, and that game was the bomb. Loved the concept with the suits that can control time, and the game play felt really smooth. Nothing beats freezing time and grabbing the enemies' weapons from them and shooting them with it.

I loved the bullet time in OG Max Payne game (2001).

I was addicted to EverQuest since I started playing it in 2001 for at least 10 years. They don't call it "EverCrack" for nothing. No matter how I feel about it now, it will always hold a special place in my heart.

I also played PlanetSide MMOFPS for at least 4 years since it released back in 2003, and it was so great. I hear both good and bad things about its successor, PlanetSide 2, but haven't tried it for the fear of it ruining my nostalgia of the original.

Starsiege: Tribes was an awesome game too. I was a beta tester for that one way back in '98, in the days before broadband was a thing. I still have an installation CD hand-signed by the devs that they had to ship to all the testers, because downloading 500+ MB over dial-up was not feasible.

Earthsiege 2 was the game for which I went out to CompUSA and bought a joystick that had swivel function (MS SideWinder 3D Pro).

@insurgenRat the king kong movie tie in game its actually really good and extremely innovative and alot of the ideas I've never seen replicated sadly we'll probably never see a remaster cuz 1 it's a tie in game and 2 it was made by ubisoft

Baldur’s Gate II is and will always be the most influential and important game of my life.

Civilization III. Still undoubtedly the best from me, every subsequent change to the series has been negative.

All the old MechWarrior games, starting with MechWarrior 2. That was my childhood. PGI didn't have what it takes to recapture that with MechWarrior Online or MechWarrior 5.
Shout out to Half-Life 1 and Team Fortress Classic (1.5). THAT was my teenage years. I played an insurmountable amount of TFC, adminned a couple servers, and took zero interest in TF2, because it just wasn't the same without concs, throwable frag nades, etc.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was a gamechanger though. That released when I was in college. Fell in love with the hopeless atmosphere, good gunplay, and the eurojank. I still play the various S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods to this day and am eagerly awaiting the release of number 2 (slated for December, but we will see. Devs have been through a lot).

This game is actually a bit before my time since it was released two years before I was born, but the original XCOM game (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) is still one of my favorite games of all time. And it's just gotten better over the years with fixes and modding through OpenXcom.

I like the modern Firaxis games a lot too, and Xenonauts even moreso, but nothing has quite hit the same as the OG.

For me it was metal gear solid 3 snake eater. I thought it was the perfection of the metal gear formula. I’m exited to see its remaster.

Not a unique opinion, but Portal is probably the closest thing to a perfect game. Nothing feels unnecessary, and every part of it (story, gameplay, visuals) is not only good on its own, but also work together to make the game better than the sum of its parts.

Portal 2's also great but suffers from a lot of fluff imo. The analogy I like to use is Portal 2 is like a big feast of really good food, while Portal 1 is just one small dish, but it's the best version of that dish you've ever tasted.

OK they're a bunch:

• PC: Vampire: Bloodlines, Alpha Protocol, Planescape Torment, Thief 1&2, Half-Life, Duke Nukem, Doom, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, System Shock 2, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, Another World, Tomb Raider 1&2, The Nomad Soul, Alone In The Dark, Myst, L'Amerzone, Full Throttle, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Tie Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, Heart Of Darkness.

• Nes: Shadow's Gate, Super Mario Bros 1&3 2 is good too but really different.

• SNes: Bomberman, Street Fighter 2.

• Megadrive: Flashback, Street Of Rage 2, Golden Axe, Mortal Kombat 1&2.

• PS1: Metal Gear Solid, Soul Reaver, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Medievil, GTA2, Final Fantasy 6&7.

• N64: 1080 Snowboarding, F-Zero X, GoldenEye, Mario 64.

• GameCube: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Soul Calibur 2, Killer 7, Resident Evil Remake, Resident Evil 4.

• PS2: Silent Hill 2&3&4, Soul Calibur 3, ICO, GTA: Vice City, Resident Evil 2.

All this is mostly all times classics but there is also some 'hidden gems' or some meh games that I like...

Eternal Darkness

Silent Hill

Resident Evil 1+2

Call of Cthulhu

Quake 1-3

Doom 1+2

Chrono Trigger

Final Fantasy 3, 7, Tactics

Metal Gear Solid (all of them)

Shadowrun (SNES)

Castlevania 1-3, SOTN

I could go on...

I played Max Payne and its sequal recently and I was surprised how well they held up. The gameplay and level design kept it consistently fun

Mischief Makers for n64! its a puzzle platformer by treasure, its controls are a little unintiutive at first, but the games grappling/boost mechanics are so much fun once you get it down.

also, SHAKE SHAKE!