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Stark wrote:They ALSO didn't ruin the display by having their utterly retarded 'highlight the squares you can see' system

Hashing was the standard way to do fog of war up until we got usable alpha blending. If you hate it in the Infinity Engine games then presumably you hate most 90s RTS games.

In fact hashing and dithering are a point of some debate in GUI design, or at least they used to be. For most people, high frequency textures like that are subconsciously blurred when they aren't being actively examined. However, some people seem to blur random/pseudorandom dithering better, other people blur ordered dithering more. Some people are simply more bothered by it than others, similar to the variation in how easy people find it to view autostereograms. Some people hated both and preferred horrible barred gradients to any sort of dithering. Unfortunately there wasn't any good answer back when we had VGA displays and inadequate power to do alpha blending.

and the viewport is larger. Games with small viewports always suck.

I don't consider it a serious issue with PS:T because it has virtually no ranged combat. Most of the environments are pretty confining as well. I agree it's still annoying; PS:T actually uses a status panel the same size as Fallout's, it's just that Fallout would run at 800 x 600 and PS:T wouldn't (probably because the framerate would dip too low for real-time battles).

Yeah, ALL those art-based RPGs would look way better if you used a modern resolution. I'm pretty sure there's a Baldurs Gate hack that does that. I can't find my PST image so I can see if it's possible to make it larger.

Are you saying that different people percieve hatching as more or less obtrusive? The fog in PST appears to me to be a horrible mess or varying thickness lines over often 25% of the screen.

It's a shame that more projects don't exist like UQM - even SS is tolerable with hacked interface.

I forgot to add in

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance My introduction into the series, which kind of spoiled me because I can barely enjoy the older versions since Path of Radiance added so many good features that are completely gone from the earlier ones. Epic story, tons of characters, tons of development, its super replayable, decent soundtrack, fun turnbase gameplay that isn't dull and then some. I should finally be able to get my hands on Goddess of Dawn (its sequel) some time this month.

Stark wrote:Are you saying that different people percieve hatching as more or less obtrusive?

Yes, my undergrad HCI (human-computer interface) textbooks devoted quite a few pages to this. It stayed relevant for printing even after we got 24-bit displays, since printers still have to produce gradients by dithering together four (usually) basic colours. There are a wide variety of quite sophisticated dithering algorithms that try to minimise high-frequency pattern perception in the gradient, i.e. how visually annoying it is, for typical viewers. Most of those algorithms were way too slow for real-time use. I don't think anyone studies this any more except people who write printer drivers, escalating DPI has made it irrelevant.

The fog in PST appears to me to be a horrible mess or varying thickness lines over often 25% of the screen.

I don't have PS:T installed at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that it's supposed to be a 2:2 regular checkerboard. Are you running it in full screen mode on an LCD display? That is almost certain to cause horrible scaling artifacts that match what your description. If so the solution is to use x2 fixed scaling (assuming you are running 1280 x 1024 or above) and black borders.

Last time I played it non-scaled, but the nvidia drivers don't let me change scaling settings anymore so if I played it now it'd be stretched.

You can get a widescreen hack for Infinity Engine games that allows you to run them in modern resolutions, including widescreen resolutions.

It makes everything fiddly and small, but does remove the scaling horrors.

Ultima series (except for 8 and haven't played 9) (including Underground 1 & 2). My first true RPG game I played was Ultima 7 and I loved it then got the rest except for 9.

Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret. C-list acting but it was fun to play.

Civ series (not including Call to Power. CtP had some great things in it but the gameplay somehow irritated me to the point of snapping the disc in half)

Fallout Series: Fun fun fun. A bit disappointed in Fallout 3 that I could not have a totally destructible environment or that I could not kill anyone I wanted.

GTA series: It had its ups and downs but overall I liked the series.

SMAC: Too bad they haven't made any more.

Thief series:

Arcanum: I loved it and occasionally I'd play it again.

Total Annihilation.

Silent Hill series. The first time I played SH, I ended up turning off the controller's vibration option and refused to play at night.

Star Trek: BotF. A ST turn based strategy game. Loved despite some gameplay stupidity (phasers are useless at least in the first round and the battles are mostly determined by torpedoes)

Starfleet & Klingon Academy games: I had a lot of fun with these games.

Hitman series.

The Movies. Wished they made a sequel.

C&C series: There were some clunkers but overall I loved it.

There are more but I cannot think of them at the moment.

Super Mario World - Maybe I'm biased because it was my first game ever, but I think it's better than 3. There wasn't a single moment of this game I didn't love. Except Tubular. Fuck Tubular.

Pokemon Gold - The scale of the adventure was epic, and although it lacked the refinements of the later games at least the type balancing wasn't horrendously broken like in Red/Blue.

The Legend of Zelda - All of them. I have my favorites, but I can't say that my preferences don't arise entirely from nostalgia.

Metroid Prime - No game has ever achieved made me feel quite that level of immersion.

No More Heroes and Desperate Struggle - You can cut people in half and suplex them to death. Need I say more?

RedImperator wrote: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Possibly my favorite game on the SNES console. Every single thing the game tried to do worked. The graphics and sound still hold up today. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur, but I've never gotten the hang of the 3d Zeldas--I much prefer the 3/4 overhead view.

You would think that the DS versions would have been able to build upon that. But they simply sacrificed content/substance for graphics and gimmicky controls. Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are the only Zelda games that I ever played just once.

Halo CE, Gears of War and the Civilization series are the ones I always come back to.

The Vortex Empire wrote:
Chromehounds: This was one of the best console online games ever made, but they shut it down back in January. WHY?!

Management at SEGA and the development all felt the same way that the game ended up being DOA. It had a cult base, but it wasn't enough to justify the servers. So they shut it down because it wasn't the million seller takeoff hit SEGA and From Software had wanted it to be.

Chrome Hounds was cool, it was different even if it was totally broken and had no semblance of balance at all. It's pretty sad that the developers decided to store more than 90% of the game's content in its online mode. So when they shut down the servers, they literally killed the entire game. As it is now Chrome Hounds is so worthless people won't even take it for free. Sad really, it had good ideas.

On topic, I usually rate a "Favorite" game by how strongly attached I felt to it, how long I played it and how immersed I felt by it. I judge all games by the standards of the time they were released. In that regard, a lot of my personal favorites are,

Battlezone - No game has even tried doing what Battlezone did so far. Battlezone was literally just one of a kind.

Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast - One of the few Star Wars games that really felt like Star Wars. Story was terrible, voice acting was hilariously bad, but the levels were well designed and the gameplay was cool.

Halo: Combat Evolved - By the way, what Stark said is true. Halo is wildly over rated, but it's also got good reasons for some of its popularity. Good AI, excellent controls and HUD design, first recharging health system, big levels. Halo ultimately did more right than wrong, while it *is* over rated, it is also, ultimately, a good god damn game.

Call of Duty: United Offensive - Took Call of Duty's boring multiplayer and made it interesting. Foy is still my favorite multiplayer map of all time.

Gears of War - Will always be way more original than people give it credit for. The true Bro' game.

World in Conflict - A uniquely designed multi player RTS that had the balls to ignore the Starcraft cliches and do things differently. I still play it, a lot.

To this day, my favorite game of all is still Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. I had just never played anything like it, and I still haven't played a game that approaches its scale.

Halo was quite good at time of release. The problem with playing it in retrospect is that practically everything it did well became standardized in the FPS industry within a few years, and so looking back on it now it seems very generic.

The first Halo has some sort of weird thing where I never get sick of it though. I mean I must have cooped AOTCR like a zillion times now and it's still always fun.

Do games count for this list if you only play them modded? I'll assume yes:

Diablo 2, LoD + PlugY (mod): Already listed and explained by other people. Simple gameplay, fun enemies to kill, the ultimate incarnation of pleasantly mindless grinding and itemquesting. I prefer the PlugY mod over everything else because it 1) Gives effectively unlimited stash space (about 1.5 million 10x10 pages), 2) Gives a 'shared stash' option (did your barb just pick up a piece of Trang-Oul's set? Place it in the stash, switch over to your necro and equip it!), 3) Allows stat and skill-point re-distribution, so that you can correct early-level mistakes and tweak your build without having to create someone new and re-grind eighty levels), and 4) Mimics Battlenet settings (so you can get ladder-only items in single player and do the uberquests that came out with the recent patches, awesome for people like me who despise the Battlenet population with a passion). The ability to recreate the Cow level as many times as you want is a nice bonus.

DooM 2 + Doomsday Engine (mod): Again, already many reasons listed for why it's a favourite. Simple, addictive, yadda yadda yadda. The Doomsday Engine just provides a few updates that make it a bit more playable, the ability to tilt the camera, true 3d (even if it's still 2d sprites you're fighting), 3d lighting, and an easy to use system for playing other levels/mods.

Shadow of the Colossus: Okay, the graphics are a little aged, but this is still a stunningly beautiful game. The controls/gameplay are really awesome, I would love to see more games with that sort of climbing/rapelling/horse-riding/swordplay combo. It's just a series of boss-battles, but the best part for me is through a combination of the music, gameplay and environment, they actually make each fight feel really epic.

Doom 3 (+ countless mods): Yeah, I went there. In most aspects, it's a very average shooter/survival, made worse because everyone was hoping for another DooM/DooM 2 and got FPS + Resident Evil instead. I can't really harp on the monster-closets because it would be hypocritical of me not to similarly harp on every tripwire trap in the previous DooM games. What got it on this list, though, was the atmosphere. Doom 3 did Hell right, and I keep going back to replay it because it's essentially a slightly more interactive movie... a really awesome movie.

Favourite: Shin Megami Tensei 3, Nocturne: I've discovered the SMT series are the only jRPGs I will ever play, simply because they're so damn good they do the impossible and transcend the stereotype of suckage that surrounds the label 'jRPG'. Nocturne is easily my favourite in the series simply because I'm a huge fanwhore of apocalypse-porn. The game starts off with the world ending in a psuedo-biblical apocalypse, and you're one of the few humans left, now infused with demonic power, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland swarming with angels, demons, and all sorts of other mythological creatures, charged with choosing what philosophical dictates the new world will be created with.

The turn-based battle system is the best I've seen in any game, a simplistic combination of rock-paper-scissors attacks with resistances and weaknesses, buff/debuff bidding wars, and a good deal of random luck, leading to nearly infinite variety in strategy and options. The bestiary (a constant cast in all SMT games) is a bunch of figures from various world mythologies, from the Greek monsters like Cerberus and the titans to the Norse Pantheon, to legendary heroes like Chu-Chulainne and Saratuhiko, totalling a couple hundred mythological creatures/beings. The characters are pretty cool, the remaining humans slowly losing their humanity to survive while coming up with their own philosophical monoliths.

The best part of the game, though, is a well-functioning moral-choice system. Essentially there is no wholly right answer as to which game ending's the best of the six available. You can follow strength, which is good in that those who have power in the new world truly deserve it, but bad because it's essentially refined social-darwinism. You can follow freedom, good in that you can pursue your own desires without worrying about others, bad in that everyone is isolated from one another. You can follow balance, good in that there will be no more pain and suffering, bad in that there will be no more joy. You can follow hope, good in that the world gets reset back to how things were, bad in that there would be just as much suffering as there was before the apocalypse. You can choose none of the above and go with apathy, in which case the post-apocalyptic world goes on indefinitely. Finally you could say 'fuck the system', align yourself with Lucifer and destroy the new world, becoming his lead general on a quest to storm the gates of heaven and end the seemingly cruel experiment God is running with life.

Oni Koneko Damien wrote:Do games count for this list if you only play them modded?

Well, they better, cuz' I mentioned a vehicle from a mod as my favourite flying game.

In any case, a mod of a game is still a game, so it should count.

And I agree that the really awesome part of Doom3 was the atmosphere. The lighting engine was (and still is, in my opinion) pretty effective, and the environment visual design was impressive, specially in hell (even though I was a bit annoyed at the many leafs they took from GORDON FREEMAN's book there). I particularly liked the buildup for the Cyberdemon (specially since I was really looking up to it), with the environment becoming more hellish as you walk deeper into the ground, and the Cyberdemon reveal with the marine mouthing "oh god" was all kinds of awesome... Too bad it was followed by a mediocre boss fight on top of the lamest portal to hell in the history of everything.

Want some wacky fun, though? Try a cooperative mod for Doom3. Fitting 4 shotgun wielding maniacs into those tight corridors is all kinds of fun

CaptHawkeye wrote:

The Vortex Empire wrote:
Chromehounds: This was one of the best console online games ever made, but they shut it down back in January. WHY?!

Management at SEGA and the development all felt the same way that the game ended up being DOA. It had a cult base, but it wasn't enough to justify the servers. So they shut it down because it wasn't the million seller takeoff hit SEGA and From Software had wanted it to be.

Chrome Hounds was cool, it was different even if it was totally broken and had no semblance of balance at all. It's pretty sad that the developers decided to store more than 90% of the game's content in its online mode. So when they shut down the servers, they literally killed the entire game. As it is now Chrome Hounds is so worthless people won't even take it for free. Sad really, it had good ideas.

From what I've heard of it, World of Tanks will be Chromehounds on the WWII eastern front. It sounds like it's got the same persistent war decided by team battles thing.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne

I've lost over 100 hours to it, and I'd gladly lose another 100 to it. I think it is the epitome of turn-based JRPGs, surpassing even the older FF games.

FF3/6

Best Final Fantasy, hands down. I still play it on my GBA from time to time.

Crusader Kings/Europa Universalis II

I must have lost literally weeks, if not months, to these games throughout college. Played them two-three hours a day for weeks at a time when I didn't have anything better to do. I still play them from time to time if there's nothing else going on.

Super Mario Bros. III/Super Mario World

Best platformer ever made, as far as I'm concerned. I'll still play them on the GBA every now and again, and I must have played them a million times when I was a kid.

Mass Effect I/II

A bit early to tell if they're on my all-time favorites list, but I'll consider them as such for now.

Oni Koneko Damien wrote:Do games count for this list if you only play them modded?

SimCity 4 is literally broken without a fan-made mod, so I would say yes, it counts if you only play them modded.

That explains why I sucked so much at SC4.

My favourites:

The Sims without the stupid magic expansion pack. Fuck the pets too. I wanna make me some houses!
Halo 1 was a good time. 2 and 3 were okay.
Mario Kart 64 has been replaced by Mario Kart Wii for me.
Super Mario 64 was fun.
Metroid Prime 1 & 2: MP3 was actually the reason I bought a Wii, but I still haven't finished 1 & 2 so I haven't bothered to pick up 3 yet.
Tetris.
Solitaire.

Yeah, that's my list of all-time favourite video games, I think.

Phantasee wrote:That explains why I sucked so much at SC4.

You don't actually run into the problem until your cities are pretty big. The bug is in the Opera House reward, which looks like a landmark but is actually an educational building like a museum or library, with a maximum capacity which is limited by funding. Unfortunately, Maxis assigned the wrong query--the box you get when you click on a building with the info button--to the opera house, making it impossible to raise its funding. When you hit somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people, the Opera House goes over capacity, your education level stalls, and eventually your housing starts to downgrade. And you don't even know about it because most players don't even know the Opera House does anything.

EA never bothered to fix this, so the fans had to. There's a couple other bugs that EA never fixed and the fans can't get to because they're in the source code (including another near-gamebreaker called the Eternal Commuter Problem), but this is the probably the worst.

Ahhh. So there are other reasons why I suck so much at SC4

My favorites? Nearly all very old games:

Civilization 3 (the civilization game that I played the most)

MoO2 (the best interestelar empire game)

Starcraft (one of the best RTS)

Red Alert, 1&2 (also one of the best RTS)

Alpha Centauri (very good, but CIV3 was slightly better)

Diablo 2 (the best slasher game)

World of Warcraft

Fallout, 1&2

Rome Total War

Only WOW and Rome Total War were made after 2001 in my list.

Homeworld and Homeworld Catacylsm-Never got around to getting HW2.

Starcraft-My first RTS

Command and Conquers RA: 2 and Yuri's Revenge, Generals (and expansion Pack), C&C 3)

Sonic the Hedgehog Three

Rome Total War

Zor

Hrm....

Final Fantasy IV/II US, V, VI/III US, and XII.
Chrono Trigger
Kingdom Hearts 2
Hearts of Iron 2
Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun
Samurai Warriors 2
SW2: Empires
Mega Man II
Mega Man X
Ace Combat 2
Ace Combat 4
Twisted Metal 2
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Dawn of War (especially with mods, hours of fun), WiC, CoH and Joint Task Force.