How could I forget the LoK series? And yeah, Blood Omen 2 was a goddamn mess. Originally a Chakan: The Forever Man title, recycled and frankensteined into Blood Omen...
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To add reasons:
Earthbound: To me there aren't many RPG's from the NES/SNES/etc eras I can go back and play, and end up with a "holy shit when did it get 7 hours later" issue. Earthbound still does this to me, along with having some of the most unique and charming of settings for a traditional JRPG. In a normal fantasy setting the battles could be confused with Dragon Warrior, but the addition of a modern-ish setting that slowly becomes more and more outlandish as you progress puts this game in a class of its own.
Lufia 2: A sequel with a twist to the ending that,
in reality, makes it a prequel.
Also I'd like to amend my choice of Symphonia. As much as I do love the game for it's glorious battle system and story, I'll have to put Chrono Trigger on a higher pedestal. It's probably the only game I have absolutely zero faults to find. Every JRPG should be this good. Music, characters, story, the combo skills in battle actually making your party selection something more than pick who looks the coolest.
GasBandit
Staff member
Ok, so I'm supposed to add reasons:
Supreme Commander FA: The best RTS hands down. No micromanagement, all strategy and tactics. Excellent option customization and robust map community. Warhammer 40k DOW: "BY THE EMPRAH, IT WILL BE DONE." Company of Heroes: Excellent WW2 RTS, a little micromanagey and the unit limit's kind of ridiculous. Otherwise very fun and immersive.
Dark Age of Camelot: The Best PVP MMO ever devised. It hasn't aged all that well, but in its heyday, everything going on under the hood was a textbook example of how to do PVP right. Also, the only MMO to ever do a player housing system right. It literally added a year's worth of playability to the game. Warhammer Online was DAOC's spiritual successor, but it got rushed to market and then EA fired everybody and put Bioware in charge. With story and dialog already set, what was left for bioware to do, really, that is there strong suit?
Contra. Player simultaneous shoot everything and stuff. Tons of fun with a pal. I haven't played it recently, but last time I did I could still beat it on 3 lives. Not as good as I was as a kid - there I could beat it without dying. Blast corps was a lot of fun because wrecking shit is fun. Bulldozing houses, drifting dump trucks through buildings, all with a very satisfying CRUNCH as you tried to smash everything as fast as possible.
Until Skyrim came out, I would actually still periodically play Ultima Underworld. It was basically skyrim with Wolf3D graphics. I shouldn't have to explain anything else.
Burnout Takedown: The controls were spot on, the balance was awesome, and it was before they started adding in that "traffic checking" nonsense and you could still be reasonably assured that grinding a rail wouldn't guarantee you die by hitting a concrete pillar or something. Multiplayer fun. Burnout Revenge was a massive disappointment, but Paradise is almost as good as Takedown. Split/Second is in the same vein, except instead of ramming each other you cause "accidents" by remote control, causing dams to burst, buildings to explode, heavy stuff to fall from the sky. It's got an interesting strategic element on top of driving skill.
TF2. It's just amazing how much they got right. Yeah, it has some freezing/crashing problems and sometimes it doesn't want to start and joining a server seems to take years... but once you get going, it's hard to find a more fun, balanced, replayable, addictive PvP experience. Left 4 Dead (and 2, really the same game/an expansion pack IMO) is a cinematic co-op masterpiece. Not only is the gameplay excellent and enjoyable while still being simple to pick up, it's got jawdropping ambiance and visuals, great characters with witty banter that just happens "naturally," all around great stuff. And you can't say "Cinematic" without bringing up COD in the FPS field. In my opinion, the series peaked with MW1 and went downhill from there. BF1942, especially with the desert combat mod, is still king of the 64 player roost, in my opinion. I like it better fighting out in the open desert rather than the claustrophobic cities and foliage the sequels seem to be in love with. However, nothing will ever replace UT2k4 in my heart. Awesome engine, awesome gameplay, so many different game modes, so many mods and maps and characters you can get, intelligent bots, and the last game with a pixel-perfect sniper rifle.
Saints Row is just the most fun you can have with 2 people in the same room. Character customization done perfect. One drives, other shoots. Both doing the missions... plot line not bad either... everything but the graphics and controls was better in 2 though. But 3 is still fun.
fade
Staff member
Hard question. I think the most fun I've ever had playing a game was Uncharted 2. It was an engaging story, but they didn't really kill the game play to advance the story. You advanced it by playing. Seems like such a novel concept.
I will always be a fan of TIE Fighter. I still have my 8 floppies (including the expansions). Not sure why. Just can't bring myself to toss them, even though I have no way to read them, much less play. One of the best flight/fighter sims I've ever played.
Another good story game was Planescape: Torment. Not exactly challenging, but fun to watch the story unfold.
RE:2 had a good blend of puzzles and suspense. Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 had a nice scary suspense. That freakin' radio static still gets me.
I will always be a fan of TIE Fighter. I still have my 8 floppies (including the expansions). Not sure why. Just can't bring myself to toss them, even though I have no way to read them, much less play. One of the best flight/fighter sims I've ever played.
Another good story game was Planescape: Torment. Not exactly challenging, but fun to watch the story unfold.
RE:2 had a good blend of puzzles and suspense. Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 had a nice scary suspense. That freakin' radio static still gets me.
GasBandit
Staff member
I miss the floppy versions of X-Wing and Tie Fighter. I got the CD "windows XP compatible" version later to play it again, and without the IMUSE system dynamically altering the soundtrack to fit the events... it's just not the same. Used to be I could tell the status of the battle, who was arriving/winning just from the music. Not so with the CD version which just loops the same track over and over.
Ok, so I'm supposed to explain what's up with each of these games? Let's begin.
Oh Hell/Pinochle/Etc have a loooong history. I learned to play Pinochle at 13, and discovered I had a knack for it (for a 13yr-old, at least). Sitting down to a table with my Dad and a couple other folks was an opportunity that did nothing but get better with time. 8 hours of banter, ribbing, and strategically screwing over your opponents can be very satisfying.
Dark Castle was one of the first really slick games for Mac that ignored a lot of the original Mac's limitations (no color, mono sound). It had killer sound design and was a pretty solid platformer for its day. You can find another DC player in a crowd just by making the "you've been stunned" sound and seeing who answers.
StarFlight was my first space opera game which had the biggest world I had ever seen in a game. It is still amazingly vast even today, with a huge overarching plot and a universe populated with hundreds of systems, each with their own individually explorable planetary companions.
Master of Orion 2 built on the original MoO to become the first 4x game I ever played that got it right. It has a long, satisfying tech tree, satisfying combat, and just enough of that "...just one more turn" allure to keep me playing it for a long, long time. Heck, my father has been playing it almost continuously for the last 15 years. I literally drove a couple hours during a Winter weather emergency to get the Mac version of the original MoO from a store which miraculously hadn't thrown it away when it was discontinued (I called, they had it, I went. This was in the days before Amazon).
Riven was a huge upgrade from Myst. Sure, it is linear, but it was probably the most immersive world story pre-2000, and it held up for quite a while after. It practically spawned its own mythology.
Thief. The graphics are dated, sure. But it was the first game to really make use of positional audio, and combined with the gameplay and the fantastic story (which unfolded through cutscenes and better-than-average voice acting) it would stoke my adrenaline, make my heart race, and sweat run down my face as I realized I only had 5 water arrows to last the rest of the level. If this game got an update with modern graphics, it would not look at all out of place on the shelf next to Assassin's Creed or Crysis.
Age of Empires II/StarCraft/Diablo II - Continuing my long tradition of playing multiple games at the same time, a coworker and I got really heavy into Diablo & Starcraft, but when AoEII and D2 came out, it was all over for me, for him, and for a few people in my family. I would play both games for 4-6hrs at a time on my own, and then I would load my tower and a 60lb CRT into my car and drive the whole setup over to someone else's house just because I found some new wand in D2 I wanted to trade or found some new castle-age strategy with the Goths I wanted to try. Either way it resulted in years of lost productivity, and I'm sure that once I find my second set of discs, Kati and I are going to lose another few weeks in D2 seeing as how we've already been through the lost months after I introduced her to AoEII. Sometimes, you just want to build a big army and go crush some stuff, and Kati just loves her some Viking action.
A few years ago, one of my good friends introduced me to Wizard101, which is a MMORPG of sorts aimed at a "family" audience. The game is very brightly colored and there are no guns/blood, the gameplay is turn-based (if you can believe a turn-based MMORPG) and the chat is filtered, but it is surprisingly fun for adults. They bill themselves as a game that parents can play with their children, and they're right. There are lots of in-jokes (mostly referencing pop culture, music, or movies) that the kiddies won't get, and the customizations that can be done to pets, gear, your spell load-out, classes, and complementary skills will keep even experienced min/maxers entertained. I swear when I started it that I thought it was going to be cute and I'd be done with it in a few months, but here I am still playing it 3 years later. We have often chewed Harry out for getting us hooked on it.
...But that's ok, because I got him hooked on Minecraft. It went something like this. A year after he got us hooked on W101, I told him he should try Minecraft (back while it was still in 1.1/1.2 beta) after Kati and I had played it for a month or so. We didn't hear from him again for 2 whole days, and when we finally caught up with him on Skype, his first words were, "I hate you." I replied that it was only fair after W101. He agreed. And once I finally figured out how to set up my own (vanilla) server, all three of us have been alternating between MC and W101. And since none of us have enough time/money/CPU/GPU to really dive into anything recent (Skyrim/StarCraft II/Steam), that's where we've been parked. So now we have two games that we can play co-op together, and that's what really makes it entertaining.
--Patrick
God the hours I lost playing those games. I think it was those games that made Star Wars cool to me. "6 New Assault Gunboats from Group Tau have entered the area" *cue Imperial March*
Shit.
Also I was a huge fan of LucasArts Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.
Hell yes.
Ah man, my dad played that and other early war flight sims all the time. I remember trying that one specifically and failing miserably.
GasBandit
Staff member
My favorite non-space flight sim was Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. It hasn't aged well, but I really liked it. I liked how it strove for believable realism as well as spanned 3 wars (all three wars that Yeager himself flew in, incidentally).
Plus, it had a sweet custom mission builder that sounds like a mad lib of an old war vet telling a story.
There I was in my (click click) P-51 at (click click) 10,000 feet when (click) I was jumped by (click) 5 (click) Messerschmidt ME-109s. The guys in those planes were (click)good....
And then you're in the mission. BANDIT ON YOUR TAIL, BREAK!
Plus, it had a sweet custom mission builder that sounds like a mad lib of an old war vet telling a story.
There I was in my (click click) P-51 at (click click) 10,000 feet when (click) I was jumped by (click) 5 (click) Messerschmidt ME-109s. The guys in those planes were (click)good....
And then you're in the mission. BANDIT ON YOUR TAIL, BREAK!
PatrThom I love me a good game of Pinochle. My parents used to drag me along whenever they were headed out for a night of card games with their friends, and even though their friends usually had kids my own age, I'd often times wind up watching the card game and listening to the adults BS rather than hanging out with the kids my own age - but as an only child I was used to hanging out with adults so that was nothing new. Occasionally someone would be out for the night and they'd let me fill in as the fourth and I'd actually get to play the game instead of just watch, but that was really occasionally because while they thought I'd just been listening to their banter I'd actually been paying attention to how the game was played, and they stopped letting me play after my mom and I quite thoroughly kicked my dad and his partner's butts several times running. Unfortunately, now that I'm roughly of the same age that my parents were when they started dragging me along to play cards with their friends, if my wife and I head out to play anything with our friends, it's more than likely a tabletop RPG or a board game. Not that I necessarily mind playing Shadowrun, or World of Darkness, or Arkham Horror; but it would be nice to find a couple to play cards with once in a while. The closest we get is when my parents are visiting and we get a chance to play pinochle or (more frequently) cribbage.
Back in the day, nothing excited me more than setting up and successfully executing "shooting the moon." Damn, I miss playing that game. It's been so long now that I don't even know if I could remember the rules, let alone all of the strategy and the gamesmanship and mind games that could go into a good game.
GasBandit
Staff member
You guys missing "realistic" combat flight sims might want to try Wings of Prey, if you can stomach the bad engrish and voice acting. See, for me, though, it was a bit TOO realistic. As in, there are things you can do at full throttle without climbing that will immediately send you into a nigh-unrecoverable stall.
http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-digital-combat-simulator-a-10c-warthog/17-5490/
Is this realistic enough for you?
I'll leave MSFlight Simulator for the true realistic enthusiast. I just want to fly a mission where I am not expected to shoot down 30 planes on my own. Where wingmen will stick with you. Where you are rewarded for completing your mission while avoiding fights. Where certain planes have different characteristics not just same tactics with different skins.... I could go on for a long time.
LOL, look at that... hard disk required. Man that takes me back. The fact that we have gone in 25-30 years from not needing a hard drive at all to me currently having a 2TB hard drive makes me just marvel at what computers will be like in 20 years.
GasBandit
Staff member
Cranial jack wetwire required. And desired. So badly.
Pretty sure that's actually Hearts/Spades rather than Pinochle, unless you mean taking all the point card tricks (which is quite entertaining). I think my finest moment of play was getting the other team to take the bid while I was sitting on double aces around. Classic.
--Patrick
That's what I mean exactly. During bidding you can declare that you're going to shoot the moon, by which you mean that you're going to attempt to take all of the point card tricks. It was always satisfying to announce your intention and then actually succeed - though it was equally satisfying to underbid your opponents and then succeed at taking all the tricks without warning them beforehand.
You wouldn't happen to know a good two-player card game that employs some of the same strategies, would you? All this talk of pinochle, coupled with how boring my nights have become recently, has me wishing for some good, hardcore strategic gaming. I mean, I could go with Chess, but that tends to frustrate my wife and I both; her because she's lost her ability to think 6 moves ahead and me because even though she's lost that edge, she still kicks my ass almost every time.
fade
Staff member
fade
Staff member
We usually played a variation of "cutthroat" Pinochle, wherein if your team did not take at least 20pts in tricks, not only did you not get to keep the points in the tricks, but you also forfeited all your meld for that round. It sounds dirty, but it helps offset "cheap" wins where a team will luck out with a roundhouse and a double pinochle (54pts) and not bid just to lock it in. This way that have to work to keep it.
If you're looking for a quick, no-hands game, you might try Jotto. I'm rather partial to the version I learned, where players take turns guessing 4-letter words and you only return the total number of exact matches.
There is a 2-person version of Euchre I learned a while back that I found quite entertaining, but I am not sure where I have the book that has the exact rules. It is very similar to the version described here, except that:
-The deal was 3-down, 3-up, 3-in-hand
-Scoring was 1pt for taking 4 tricks, 2pts for taking 8, and 4pts for taking all 9 ("going it alone")
I would also like to take this opportunity to pass along the single most frustrating variation of Solitaire I have ever learned.
-Take a deck of cards with no Jokers (just the standard 52)
-Shuffle it and place it in front of you face-down
-In your head, choose any denomination ("5" or "Jack" or whatever)
-Turn over the top card of the pile. If it matches your choice, you lose.
-If not, increment your choice (i.e., "6" or "Queen" or whatever) and turn over the next card. If your last denomination was "Ace," then start over at "2."
-If at any point you turn over a card which matches the one in your head, you lose.
-If you exhaust the deck without ever matching the one in your head, you win.
Sounds simple, right? Heh. Try it.
--Patrick
B
BErt
Never played pinochle, hearts or spades, but we'd play the hell out of some euchre at family gatherings. not so much anymore, which makes me sad.
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