Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
I’ve been playing since the NES and despite being from a low income family I had the luck of being able to play and own many consoles over the 3 decades of my life, plus some pc.
If you ask me right now? Resident Evil 4 (2005).
A before and after in gaming, to this day still extremely fun to play even for casuals but 20 years ago it was THE masterpiece. And everyone took notice of it, everyone played it, even players that didn’t cared about resident evil. The gameplay was so good that it got photocopied by everyone right after in the action genre.
Arguably the last big innovator in videogames minus Minecraft and… PUBG (Fortnite did it better I know).
Try to NOT pick your favourite game, that’s a different thing.
It doesn’t hold up but while it was happening I don’t think there was a better gaming experience than Vanilla WoW. Obviously for some it wasn’t the first MMO experience, but for many it was, and it was pure magic.
The random friends made, and mortal enemies you would drop everything you were doing to try and kill. Spending 6 hours clearing a dungeon(read wailing caverns) for the first time with random people you met in chat. Getting your first mount, walking into molten core with 39 other people and killing your first raid boss. Getting your first epic. The stupidity of barrens chat/whatever the equivalent the scumbag alliance had. The first time you had guild mates come to your rescue when some no-life higher level person was camping you and it devolving into an impromptu war between everyone in the zone and their friends. That time you pulled off an epic 1 v 2. Shit talking all the other classes in your guilds class chat during raids.
The drama ohh the drama, the e-gf/bf that became peoples husbands and wives, the guild leaders wife e-humping half the guild. Relationships destroyed because someone would rather spend their time in azeroth that just about anything else.
Drooling over the gear the best players on the server had. Battling on the front lines of alterac valley all night, going to bed and rejoining the same battle, sometimes to cheers from your fellow soldiers that you had rejoined the fight.
I don’t think there will ever be anything like it again, we know too much, have access to to much info, but for that brief period in time wow was the greatest game ever.
FFXIV is better. I like the fights better and the lore better. It’s a great social platform, but I think it has jumped the shark. Still a great concept. For very similar reasons.
Wow took over my life for a while there, and then again with WoTLK. The 2v2 and 3v3 arenas were so much fun. The cool thing was that it wasn’t grindy in the beginning, you could just run quests at your level and level up at a reasonable pace while exploring the game. I had played Everquest before WoW and that game required so much grinding just to get a level, sometimes it would take weeks.
Someone already said my true #1. But if I ignore that one.
EverQuest. What a crazy game. So many ideas that are just brilliant but people don’t do anymore. The enchanter is my favorite power set on any character in any genre and nothing touches it. I wish the design philosophy didn’t move away from systems that enable that kind of game play.
Mario Galaxy for me. Idk I just like it, especially the music
Come on, Nintendo. Release some of those old games on PC…
Thatll never happen, but thankfully it doesnt need to. They run flawlessly on an emulator.
Probably Doom for being one of the first games with real mod support
And fear. Actual fear. I remember the demo scaring the shit out of us.
MP was top shit. game was revolutionary
it also went open source later!
Guild Wars (the original) Just so nostalgic to me. Gameplay is fun even after all these years.
As someone who never played the games as a kid, I can be more or less impartial in saying that Mario Bros. was probably the gaming industry’s big break.
Maybe Halo 3? The amount of content, the custom games, the competitive gaming, all of it was just so good and loved by so many people.
XCOM
You better be talking about DOS X-COM UFO Defense or I’ll send a blaster bomb down your gullet :o
…I sadly didn’t know about the series until the new ones in 2012. I’ve played the hell out of them and do want to go back and play the DOS ones sometime.
The remakes are solid for sure but they’re pretty different games that don’t quite fully capture the spirit of open ended gameplay you could do in the originals.
For example:
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Grenade relay involving 5 soldiers passing across the map until it lands at the foot of a Muton your out of actions scout ended his turn next to
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Blow a hole in the roof of a landed UFO and drop your soldiers in behind aliens watching the doors expecting a conventional assault
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Drive a tank into a single family home to dig out an alien hiding in a closet
Amazing. Some of my favorite experiences in the new ones have also been creative problem-solving, like rocketing open a hole in a wall to allow my snipers to see through, or trying to carry my injured/dead soldiers with the good loot to extraction when I have to cut my losses and run.
Sounds like I should just go ahead and play the old ones too. I started one up earlier this year, but it wasn’t clear what all the buttons did, and I didn’t have the focus to figure it out. I need to look up the manual or watch a video or something.
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Portal
My pick was portal 2. Only game that made me cry when I beat it.
Man the last boss fight it’s just chef kiss
The Opera bit man…
I keep meaning to finish the sequel…
YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE SEQUEL?!?!
No but seriously Portal 2 might be the only game to beat out Portal as the best story/puzzle game ever made.
Just cause three. blow shit up, kill bad guys, just enough story to explain it all. even better, it strikes a good balance of minimal story and compelling story, which a lot of games like that kinda suck at.
And everything that you are supposed to target is red, as it should be.
I remember “learning” many years ago that all barrels that are red are obviously explosive. Just Cause dialed that up several notches.
even better, about 67% of the game was red.
Red Dead Redemption 2, no contest.
The game world is so close to feeling real… the physics and horse handling feel basically perfect. They took their time to make you feel like you were in 19th century America.
Tedious gameplay almost ruins it
That’s the problem with asking such a subjective question. What you hate others love. I thought my friends raving about the slow pace of the game were insane. Who would like that. Then I played and fell in love with all of it.
Where you saw a turnoff, plenty more saw enjoyment.
I’ll disagree with that, it’s sooo slow. Perhaps it’s just my ADHD but man it hurts to play sometimes 🥲
Yeah I agree. The world is incredible, but the missions and gameplay not so much.
Flashback A plateform game with a nice story telling. Graphics and music was unbelievable
Castle Wolfenstein, it took 2D and made it POV 3D, really can’t explain how much of a reality changer that was at the time, and since. Only had to wait an hour for the 1MB file to download over a 24.4k Modem from a pirate BBS, but then you were fucking golden.
Ultima IV. All the JRPG stuff started here.
For me it’d have to be Ultima II, aka Time Bandits: The Videogame. Although back then, both had those cool cloth maps.
I think it’s time to dust off my Ultima playthroughs. I’m coming for you Iolo you bitch.
Anyone else play Shephard because it’s weak AF but then you can get that sweet ass Dupre instead of having to carry those fuckers as a paladin?
Make the codex my bitch
Seriously fuck you Iolo.
Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary. (Chronicle is a close second)
Puyo Puyo Tsu is the greatest competitive puzzle game ever made. Such a simple set of mechanics gives way to an incredible amount of depth. I think its greatest strength relative to the rest of the genre is how much importance it places on actually paying attention to and adapting to your opponent. Some of my favorite other puzzle games are guilty of feeling more like a game I play adjacent to my opponent rather than against them, and I’ll give them a pass if the core gameplay loop is fun enough, but I consider Tsu king of the genre for having the most true versus in its versus mode.
But Tsu’s skill curve is terrifyingly impenetrable for beginners, it’s one of the hardest competitive puzzle games to learn. Just understanding how to make chains is extremely daunting, and that is but the tip of the iceberg. Paying attention to what your opponent is up to while still being able to concentrate on what you’re doing is an order of magnitude harder, and that’s kind of where the real game begins.
20th shines by being the most comprehensive package full of additional content for players of all skill levels alongside the classic Tsu ruleset. There’s a whopping 20 different game modes to play around in, many of which are much more immediately fun for a beginner to pick up, get hooked on, and hopefully enjoy the game enough to want to eventually learn to scale the mountain that is Tsu later.
Sadly, this game never got released in the west, and none of the games that have come anywhere close to it. And I think that’s a large part of why the series is struggling to gain any kind of recognition in the west, we’ve never seen the best of what it has to offer.
