Favorite games

[Saulot]

I am not a dabbler, I am a full on gamer. As such, I cannot be constrained by a mere arbitrary 'top ten'. Besides, if you have a top ten list, you're going to see significant repetition (for the most part, the same two dozen games over and over again in most people's lists). So I present a more complete list, not of the top, but simply of games I think of as gems, and would recommend.

RPG:
Betrayal at Krondor
Fallout 2 (& 1 to a lesser degree)
Planescape Torment
Neverwinter Nights
Baldur's Gate
Darklands
Vampire Bloodlines
Morrowind

Strategy:
Dominions 2 & 3
Master of Magic
X-Com
Dungeon Keeper
Stars!
Space Empires 4 (& 5 to a lesser degree)
Medieval Total War (& 2 to a lesser degree)
Hearts of Iron 2
Myth 2
Warlords Battlecry 3
Lords of the Realm 2
Titans of Steel - Warring Suns
Railroad Tycoon 1 & 2
Dune 2
Jagged Alliance
Outpost 2

Action:
Diablo
Warcraft 2 (Yeah, it's not really too much strategy)
Wolfenstein 3d (the original)
Thief Series
System Shock 2
Team Fortress (the original)
Mechwarrior 2 (mostly Mercenaries)
WingCommander Series
Battletech: Crescent Hawks Revenge
Worms Series

Platformer:
Commander Keen Series
Prince of Persia 1 & 2
Abuse
Blackthorne

Racing:
POD
Dethkarz

Fighting:
Golden Axe
One Must Fall 2097

Adventure:
Monkey Island 1 & 2
Day of the Tentacle
Discworld
Pirates Gold

Dungeon / Roguelike:
Nethack
Dungeon Crawl
Mordor 2
ZangbandTK

Puzzle:
The Incredible Machine Series
Varmint's Eittris
Puzzle Quest

Textmud:
DragonRealms

BBS Games:
Legend of the Red Dragon
Land of Devastation
Usurper

Misc:
Gauntlet 2
Arkanoid
Another World (aka Out of This World)
Uplink
Mr. Robot
Notrium
Dwarf Fortress

[Cerlin]

Gah these lists are always the hardest...but Ill try.

Most time spent for me was :

Dark Age of Camelot, more than a year of my life to that thing.
Dominions 3, also a year but i play less frequently.
Civilization 2, this changed my gaming world.

Just awesome:

Fallout 2, I know the first one is good but this one was amazing to replay for many years at many different times.
Baldors gate 2 and Planescape torment, I love the old Black Isle games.
Command and Conquer Red Alert. I enjoyed this more than any other version since.
Oblivion, because it is like the most beaufitul game ever.
X Beyond the Frontier, this ignited my love in space sims.
X 3 - Because it took empirebuilding to a new level.
Galactic Civilization, great space game i suck so bad at. I never won a game ever.


And when it comes to dwarf fort, watch out for that game. it is dangerous. You can lose a day to it without noticing and you really start to like your little dwarfs...then you get mauled haha.

[Foodstamp]

Cerlin said:
Gah these lists are always the hardest...but Ill try.

Most time spent for me was :

Dark Age of Camelot, more than a year of my life to that thing.
Dominions 3, also a year but i play less frequently.
Civilization 2, this changed my gaming world.

Just awesome:

Fallout 2, I know the first one is good but this one was amazing to replay for many years at many different times.
Baldors gate 2 and Planescape torment, I love the old Black Isle games.
Command and Conquer Red Alert. I enjoyed this more than any other version since.
Oblivion, because it is like the most beaufitul game ever.
X Beyond the Frontier, this ignited my love in space sims.
X 3 - Because it took empirebuilding to a new level.
Galactic Civilization, great space game i suck so bad at. I never won a game ever.


And when it comes to dwarf fort, watch out for that game. it is dangerous. You can lose a day to it without noticing and you really start to like your little dwarfs...then you get mauled haha.

Cerlin,

What server/realm did you play DAOC on? . I had a Battlebard (Hibernia) on Kay named Tales.

[Kristoffer O]

Hmm ...

Perhaps ...

In time spent (educated guess):
Guild Wars
Nethack and other roguelikes
Civ1
Starcraft
Masters of Orion

I liked MoM, but never played it much (didn't have a computer that could manage it at the time, and I had to reinstall or do something in DOS every time I wanted to play it).

[Foodstamp]

You had to change the extended memory. I remember doing that . I just used a boot disk when I wanted to play MoM on ye ole 486.

[B0rsuk]

Kristoffer O said:
Nethack and other roguelikes

Do you know Stone Soup variant of Dungeon Crawl ? It has lots and lots of interface and display improvements including interlevel travel, balance tweaks (missile weapons better now etc), new item brands like axes of returning, removed redundant and boring races like mountain dwarves and ordinary elves... Lugonu - god of Abyss; changes to existing gods to make them more diverse and and interesting. Removal of stupid, ugly metagame annoyances like amnesia traps. Lots of new tricks for Xom ! New character/class combos like kobold venom mages, ogre gladiators etc. Shields are significantly improved and worthwile now. Heavy armour got heavier and it's a bit harder to cast in it. Curare, basically irresistible poison for darts to make them useful past early game. Sling bullets. Throwing nets. Special vaults for Crypt:5. Smoke and steam that obscures vision. Vehumet nerf (still a very good choice for conjurers). Beogh, god of orcs (you become an orc priest and lead other followers). Lots of handcrafted minivaults scattered around the levels. Additional Snake:5 layouts. New spell: Chain Lightning. Kobolds now recover quickly from disease. Most of innate racial abilities now mentioned on 'A' screen. Some new mutations. And there's even a server running that game so you can connect, spectate other players, brag about your highscores, battle other players' ghosts...

http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net

telnet crawl.akrasiac.org

I liked MoM, but never played it much (didn't have a computer that could manage it at the time, and I had to reinstall or do something in DOS every time I wanted to play it).

Huh ? MOM works perfectly fine in Dosbox. Just adjust your CPU cycles and frameskip settings.

If you're on Debian or Ubuntu, just
apt-get install dosbox

otherwise:

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net

And you can download MOM itself from the underdogs.

[Kristoffer O]

It was probably over a year since I played Crawl. New version sounds interesting.

I haven't tried MoM for 15 years or so. Might be interesting.

[lch]

Foodstamp said:
You had to change the extended memory. I remember doing that . I just used a boot disk when I wanted to play MoM on ye ole 486.

QEMM took care of that.

B0rsuk said:
Huh ? MOM works perfectly fine in Dosbox. Just adjust your CPU cycles and frameskip settings.

Exactly, this fine-tuning of cycles and frameskip settings doesn't make it that easy, unfortunately. If you're on Windows, the VDMSound project is an easier way to get the game running for you.

[B0rsuk]

lch said:
Exactly, this fine-tuning of cycles and frameskip settings doesn't make it that easy, unfortunately. If you're on Windows, the VDMSound project is an easier way to get the game running for you.

1. Edit the config file
2. Change 2 lines.
2. Forget about it.

Simple enough for me. Besides, I'm 98% sure K.O. uses Linux at home. Perhaps not exclusively Linux, but...

To anyone considering the new version of Crawl, it's a good idea to join ##crawl at irc.freenode.org . That's where players and developers hang around. And the bots are very useful.

-----------------

My favourite games ? Too many to list. Some of my favourites:

Archon, Archon Ultra(PC)
DooMII (I didn't have an IBM PC at the time DooM was around)
Master of Magic
The original Command&Conquer
Emperor: Battle For Dune (it had serious flaws, but it also got many things right and tried new things)
Heroes of Might and Magic, especially II, III, IV
Magic Carpet 2
Dungeon Keeper 1,2
Horde
Ultima III (on Atari 65 XE)
System Shock 2
Deus Ex 2
Thief 2: Metal Age
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Quake 2
Quake 3 Fortress (Team Fortress mod)
Planescape:Torment
Little Big Adventure 1 (a.k.a. Relentless)
Worms 2
UFO: Terror From The Deep
Sacrifice
Nox

[Foodstamp]

I think he is talking about before Windows. Yes yes, I know it is hard to believe there was a time before Windows.

Master of Magic would not run in DOS unless you allocated more memory in the autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Even then it could be pretty hard to get the game to run, because your cd-rom or other hardware might be hogging so much memory that it was impossible to play MoM, so for instance on my computer, after I got a cd-rom, I had to disable it everytime I wanted to play MoM.

I used a bootdisk to solve the problem on my old pre-windows system.