A few that seem under represented here:
Oregon Trail
Sim City 2000
Earthworm Jim
Clair obscur.
Half life 2. I could conceive of shooter games but until playing HL2 as a teenager, I didn’t quite understand how much storytelling they could pack in. Suddenly, it felt like games could be thoughtful and entertaining pieces of art instead of solely fun time
Definitely Ace Attorney. It hits a lot of marks; it gives you the feeling of beating enemies by being clever, rather than powerful. It ties in with a sense of justice, and contains some murder mysteries that rival some of the greats of Agatha Christie with twisted, complex motives and multiple lying witnesses. It has VERY creative character designs, making each new face very memorable. Its localization team had their own sense of humor, conveyed well with how they chose to adapt many things. In spite of the humor, they often follow through with deeply emotional endings to each case.
Fallout New Vegas set my expectation for quest choice and faction interactivity. I could go on about that, but everyone knows what people think about New Vegas.
Last year, I beat Dark Souls. That’s now set my standard for RPG gameplay. There’s bullshit, same as any game, but I don’t think I’ve ever played another RPG where I’ve felt my skill going up alongside my in-game stats. Then you get to the Bed of Chaos, and that kinda goes out the window…
Great question! For me it’s definitely Minecraft with my kids - watching them discover redstone mechanics and build together taught me so much about collaborative creativity. Also Stardew Valley for showing how peaceful, non-competitive games can be just as engaging.
Spyro the Dragon:
This is basically the pinnacle of game design to me. It is a collect-a-thon of course, but the gems always sparkle no matter how far you are from them so that if you are in line of sight you will know that they are there making it easy to find them.
Far off sections of the map are basically always reachable and rewards you for trying to get there and utilizing uncommon paths through the map.
When you beat the game to 100% it rewards you with extra stuff and a little more game to show it had fun being made as much as you hopefully did playing it.
All with a fun story that wraps it up and doesnt require anything special to jump in. I want to see games that have thoughtful level design and world building while using the game mechanics in fun ways. The fact that you jump into levels directly and the loading screen is akin to you actually flying to the world is all engrossing to the world.
When I was 6 I was so excited to get a SNES. I wanted the bundle with super Mario World but it was sold out. So my parents gave me the option of waiting of getting this other bundle with this Zelda game. That sounded kind of girly to me being 6 and knowing nothing, but I was also 6 and had no patitience so Zelda it was.
I got home and started playing and was immediately hooked. I spent the next few years exploring every inch of Hyrule and the Dark World.
To this day I still don’t have Super Mario World and have only played a few levels but I have played every Zelda since.
I’ve played dozens or hundreds of games since thrn, many that were absolutely amazing but nothing until Breath if the Wild gave me that same magic of wanting to discover every nook and cranny of the world just to see what’s there.
Minecraft and Terraria are to me the definitive mining/crafting games you can find.
Stardew Valley sets the bar for farming sim.
The Messenger holds a nice contender of a well-balanced game, one of the best in its ranks.
There will be no better ARPG contender to me than the Diablo series, even if Diablo has made some questionably dumb choices.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall/Fallout 1 and 2 are some games that demonstrate the importance of depth and how your choices matter in their games. Something I feel nearly all RPGs should have.
World of Warcraft. After it, a lot of player retention mechanics became super obvious in other games for me, especially because a lot of said games were copying “the king of MMOs”
Dwarf Fortress is my main go-to example of procgen done right. Whenever there’s discussions of “game X sucks and is lifeless because it’s mostly procgenned”, I look back at DF. Lazy procgen is the problem.
I know at some point I saw a game with absurdly high damage and health numbers, I can’t remember which one it was, whether a mobile thing around 2014 or a korean mmo, but that was the point where I very easily understood “big number better” is total bullshit
Elder Scrolls Morrowind was the first game I’ve played that gave almost complete freedom to the player, with lots of things carrying consequence, especially in relation to NPCs. That shopkeeper you killed? Still dead. This essential NPC that is a literal demigod? Yeah, you can kill him, have fun in this broken timeline you just created where you can no longer advance the main quest.
I wonder if that MMO with big damage numbers was Shaiya Online?
There’s actually an official “back path” for the Morrowind main quest if you killed Vivec. You need to take an item from his corpse to Yagrum Bagarn, but you also need a high reputation. If you muck up the back path, too, you can brute force the main quest by completing the final step anyway, but good luck figuring out how to do that without a quest pointing you to what you need.
Zelda: Link to the Past.
How it shapes how I view games is how Zelda creates a lot of subconscious rules we take for granted until we see it not being used.
For example:
You’ll often find the “locked door” before finding the key.
You’ll see the treasure chest at the end, but no way to get there.
You see the cracked walls with no bombs.
A lot of puzzles are clearly pointing out the problems without words.
Pharaoh, sims (1), sim city, minecraft. And gta of course, every part except Chinatown wars.
My Younger days:
- Legend of the Red Dragon
- Police Quest 1
- Anarchy Online
- Bard’s Tale (OG)
- Shadowgate
- Metroid
- Forgotten Worlds
- Super Mario World
- Paper Mario TTYD
- Guitar Hero
- Tony Hawk’s Underground
- Star Wars: KOTOR
More recently:
- Cave Noire
- AC: Odyssey
- Fallout 4
- Cloverpit
- Offline Games (Android)
Mostly tried to stick to a single release per platform for the earlier games. I’m sure I’ve missed some.
Newer games…I know the AC and Fallout titles aren’t most people’s favorites, but I love those worlds. Games are all about comfort for me.
Oh man… I was #1 on so many LORD leaderboards in my area code. The trick was to stay 1 level below the other top players, and to assassinate them in the inn… they couldn’t get you back, because you were a level lower! Good times. Thanks for the reminder about the good old BBS days! 😁
Ohhh shit someone else who has visited Rubi-Ka? Loved that game when I was younger
I miss it so much. Last time I tried to fire it up again, it just wouldn’t even run under Windows. And I just haven’t ever found something that hits the same.
I had no issues running it a couple years ago…though it was a pretty disappointing. Very very dated and plain. I couldn’t remember how to get anywhere either and for a game so reliant on portalling around, it was rough
ITT: A bunch of people misunderstanding the question
As expected. Many people just see it as an opportunity to talk about their favorite games. That’s okay.
Honestly I love reading about peoples favourite games! I thought it was funny in this thread
But I mean aren’t our favorite games naturally the ones that have most influenced us and our views on gaming?
In a way, I see it more as a square/rectangle situation. A game that helps to shape you is probably a favourite one, not necessarily the other way around. It’s a good thread either way.
- Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar - yes I’m older then dirt but I played my first real video game on an Apple IIe and it was a revelation real puzzles and my first choices with consequences
- Tetris - ok so a great game doesn’t need a story or puzzles or anything but good game play
- Gauntlet: Red Elf needs food badly. My first exposure to cooperative gameplay.
- Pokemon:RBY - I love the mechanics and they were the best turn based combat.
- Halo - Great storyline’s really do help but the gameplay was a real game changer for me I enjoyed how if you wanted to you could get through a level in several different ways.
- The Last of Us - Literary Characters that I came emotionally attached to. There’s a reason the first season of the TV series was so good it was because the writing of the game was just so good. I still remember the finale in the operating room when I (Joel really but I was so invested) found Ellie I was angry I was mad and I shot the nurses because I was so mad. I’ve, to this day, never felt so inside a character in any media as I felt then.
- Spiritfarer - My first cozy game and the only game I’ve ever played that made me stop and think about what just happened. I don’t ever want to spoil the game for anyone so all I’ll say is it’s less then the cost of a Happy Meal on steam and worth more for your soul then you can put a price on.
