You're favourite games of the previous generations?

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Spram
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You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Spram » Thu Dec 31, 2015 4:28 am

Bad grammar on purpose!

I just read usgamer.net's 15 best game since 2000 and was happy to see how many good games I've played in that time show up there. So I want to share with you, my homies, what my favorite games since 2000 are... So basically everything from the Dreamcast and up (Dreamcast came out in 1999 but that's close enough). So systems include: Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS2, Xbox (haha) and everything newer. PC games welcome. Indies welcome. Remasters welcome. What a fun topic!

Here they are in no particular order:

1. Red Dead Redemption: The month I played this game was the last time I was truly happy. Probably not because of the game, but it made the game that much better. I want to buy this game to relieve it (and play the undead nightmare expansion) but I'm poor and afraid that the game isn't as good as I remembered. FEELS: :grin:

2. Resident Evil 4: I didn't like the Resident Evil games but I wanted to play this one to see how Japanese people portrayed Spaniards.. well, they're actually zom-ganados and have Latin American accents, but the game was sooo good. Loved the shit of out of it and maybe it's because it's a good game or maybe it's because I was feeling good, just like when playing Red Dead Redemption (the only 2 times I've felt happy since 2003) but it ranks up there as one of my favorites. FEELS: :grin:

3. Dark Souls: Everyone loves Dark Souls. I like it for the world that begs to be explored. Even if the game was easy, I might love it. Who knows? Maybe I should try cheats to find out. FEELS: :smile:

4. Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2: Great fun games that have more ideas in one level than other games have in their entirety. Nintendo painted themselves into a corner by pretty much doing everything that can be done in a 3D platformer with these. I still await a third one. FEELS: :smile:

5. Ico: The game itself wasn't that great. It had solid platforming and climbing and puzzles, but the atmosphere made me feel something I never felt in a game before. I'm rubbing my nipples right now. FEELS: :wink:

6. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Wanker: At first I thought the ocean was too big and most of the islands were too small didn't have enough content. But those complaints come from the fact that playing this game made me think of how much better the game could have been, but was limited by technology. I would love another Wind Wanker game but now with bigger landmasses. The style was also the best one in any Zelda game. FEELS: :smile:

7. Metroid Prime 1,2 & 3: Really good games. I never doubted a first person Metroid game could be done, but Retro Studios did a lot more than what I could imagine. This games are impressive in some ways even today. A fourth one should be made. FEELS: :ugeek:

8. Phantasy Star Online: I played this game a lot even on single played despite the fact that it was pretty small, with only 4 areas of mostly repetitive rooms. The rhythm of the way you attacked felt so good and playing with other was fun too. I don't consider this a true MMORPG but it's as close and an MMORPG I'm willing to play. FEELS: :wink:

9. Pikmin 1,2 & 3: The entire series of Pikmin is good, but the first one had the emotional touch (and fresh ideas), the second one had the gameplay and the third a little bit of both. FEELS: :smile:

10. Skies of Arcadia: I'm playing this now and while the game has aged badly in some ways (slow battles and plot holes) the game does this thing that when everything seems lost, you not only reunite with your friends, but also get the best ship in the world, a base of operations and a crew of people from around the world to help you out. This game has one of the best world-building of it's time and maybe it's because I haven't played many newer games, but it still has the best sense of adventure and discovery in any RPG or open world game. FEELS: :smile:

11. Civilization 4: I play this game a lot but I always end up not wanting to fight anyone, but everyone wants to fight me and they send me stacks of 12 of their best units that completely ruin me and suddenly I don't want to play anymore. I could set "no war" in the options or choose an easier difficulty but that would feel like cheating and I'm tired of being compared to Dan Quayle. I just want to make a pretty Empire with villages and mines and roads. FEELS: :cry:

12. Mass Effek 2 & 3: But mostly 2. 3 had better graphics and action, but 2 didn't have a bleak outlook at a war you couldn't beat without using some sort of deux-ex machina. I like being able to talk to people in games as much as I would like to be able to talk to people in real life and fuck Mirinda FEELS: :cool:

13. Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door: The battles take place in a theater and the better you do the more people come watch your "show". It's so good that I can't go back to the N64 original even if I want to. The story has some fun parts and the characters were mostly adorable. FEELS: :wink:

14. Pixel Junk Shooter 1 & 2: Not the ones that play like Gradius, but the puzzle based ones where you have to rescue scientist and fly around puzzling caves with water and lava puzzles. FEELS: :cool:

15. Odin Sphere: Not the best game. It's repetitive and grindy. The story can be too sad. But I like the presentation a lot. I may have like Dragon's Crown better as a game, but I liked the characters and look of Odin Sphere better. There's a remake coming out and it might fix the problems in the original.. maybe it will do. FEELS: :razz:

Honorable mentions: Little King's Story, Okami, Final Fantasy XII, Super Mario 3D World, Dragon's Crown, Kingdom Hearts, Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Mario & Luigi, Valkyrie Profile 2, Katamari Damacy, Super Mario Sunshine, Portal 1 & 2, Spelunky, Cave Story and I'm sure I'm missing something but I don't know what, if I remember I will edit this post. Not that anyone cares about my favorite games that have been the only bright spots in my gloomy nihilistic hopeless life that is just spiraling into nothingness. Boo hoo.

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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Thad » Thu Dec 31, 2015 12:28 pm

I'll second Red Dead Redemption, Super Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect 2, and Metroid Prime.

Aside from that, I'd say Witcher 2, A Link Between Worlds, and Arkham City.

Honorable mentions: Mario Kart: Double Dash, Xenoblade Chronicles, Skyrim, Dragon Age Origin, Mega Man Legends 2, New SMB Wii, Valkyria Chronicles, The Walking Dead, Crisis Core. And I'm going to count Metroid: Zero Mission and Tactics Ogre because I think they're altered substantially enough to count as games from the past 15 years.

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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Mothra » Thu Dec 31, 2015 1:20 pm

Homeworld's probably my favorite from yon olden days. Amazing atmosphere and ambiance, fun combat, decent challenge, and great story.

Terraria, despite seeming like a Minecraft knockoff, has become by far one of the most enjoyable multiplayer experiences I've had in years. Every time I play this game, I have fun. There's always something to do, something to find, something to build. Combat is a lot more fun than expected, as well.

Valkyria Chronicles is a great attempt at advancing the turn-based strategy genre, and the charming cast and wonderful World War 2 setting keep it fun and engaging. This game scratched that ol' X-Com itch reeeal nice.

Gears of War 2 was a blast when it came out, and still holds up very nicely.

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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby IGNORE ME » Thu Dec 31, 2015 3:09 pm

Asking for my toplist is always a bit like asking what angle my head is resting at inside my ass at the moment, but it's never too different. Here's the list on December 31, 2015 filtered for publication date later than 2000:

STILL THE BEST 2000:
1. Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
2. Diablo II
3. Half-Life 2
4. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
5. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
6. Resident Evil 4
7. Grandia II
8. Metroid Prime
9. Just Cause 2
10. Splatoon
11. Super Smash Bros. Melee
12. Final Fantasy X
13. Dynasty Warriors 5
14. Saints Row IV
15. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

HONORABLE MENTIONS
1. Shadow of the Colossus
2. Contra 4
3. Portal
4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
5. Ys: The Oath in Felghana
6. inFamous
7. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
8. Phantasy Star Online
9. Soul Calibur II
10. Mirror's Edge

POLITELY COUGHING AT BRENT'S UNPOPULAR INTERESTS
1. CloudBuilt
2. Assault Android Cactus
3. Hyrule Warriors
4. Dark Cloud
5. Muramasa Rebirth

Stuff like Super Mario Galaxy and Valkyria Chronicles really should be on the list, but I forgot to add them, and if I forgot to add them then that's probably a sign that they shouldn't be on the list.

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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Friday » Thu Dec 31, 2015 6:31 pm

(* denotes that the game is in my all time top 20)

Silent Hill 2*
Deus Ex*
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Red Dead Redemption*
Diablo II
Diablo III
Resident Evil 4*
Kotor
Kotor 2
Soul Calibur II
Portal*
Undertale*
Guild Wars
Hotline Miami
Hotline Miami 2
Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (Campaign + Ladder Anxiety + 2v2 with Esper + 4v4 with Romo/Smiler/Doom)
GTA: Vice City
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

A lot of the games on your lists I've heard are super good, but haven't played.
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Friday » Thu Dec 31, 2015 6:54 pm

also lists are boring so here's a blurb of my feelings of each game

SH2:
I rate games by two scales: Gameplay and Experience. SH2's gameplay is pretty lackluster (slow tank controls, boring combat) but the experience is absolutely top notch. The amount of attention that was paid to symbolism alone warrants this game in my all time top list.

Deus Ex:
Though this game hasn't aged as well as some of the others on this list, at the time Deus Ex blew me away with it's world, graphics, and stealth gameplay. The neat bullshitty illuminati conspiracy plot was just icing on the cake, really.

DX: HR:
This game is remembered mostly for it's atrocious boss fights (though they weren't that bad in my experience) but though it's a more limiting game than the original, HR stands out to me as a wonderful and worthy sequel to DX, unlike that other sequel that doesn't exist and has never existed.

Red Dead Redemption:
I just recently finished my playthrough of this game and holy shit. Everything about this game is amazing. It's got flaws but I do not give a single shit. This game is a must play. I will never forget riding into Mexico for the first time.

D2:
This was THE game. For like, fucking almost 10 years. It represented a huge step forward in Blizzard's design and to this day it still blows me away with how amazing it is to play.

D3:
Okay really D3 is just a refinement of D2, and it didn't hit its stride until the expak, about two patches in, and it had the worst thing in any game ever (the Auction House) but man, once it got going this game was fun. Plus the female Demon Hunter's ass was the best ass in gaming.

RE4:
This game is fun as fuck. I don't really know what else to say about it. It just feels so good to shoot people in this game. Yes, it was a huge step forward in RE gameplay etc. You've heard it before. It's just so fun to play.

Star Wars: Kotor
Amazing gameplay and combat with a solid d20 system backing it. Good writing. Revan twist was great.

Kotor 2:
Hey, what if the Force was a massive dick? Turns out yeah, it kinda is. An examination of the Star Wars universe from a different angle. Kreia is one of the best written characters in video games.

SOUL CALIBUR: TWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO:
*sound of nightmare screaming as he swings his sword around*

Portal:
the cake is a meme

Undertale:
you can date a skeleton

Guild Wars:
I have a lot of fond memories of this game. Really good pvp up until the first expak decided to make redundant skills (skills with the same effect but a different name so you could equip two identical abilities) that gave rise to gimmicky builds and then Flavor of the Month team comps. A blast to play with friends.

Hotline Miami:
A hot mess. Shoot, die, shoot some more, die, kills a guy with a bat. Must be played to be understood.

Hotline Miami 2:
Worse gameplay than the original (harder, more focus on gunplay and baiting) but I love the story (as fucking confusing as it is). Was left staring at the wall after finishing.

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty:
kekekeke terran/toss timing push
Some of my favorite gaming memories are from when the crew would get together to 4v4. Campaign was dope. Laddering was anxious.

GTA: Vice City
You can go into a nightclub and throw a molotov cocktail which kills like 50 people all at once. A great game if you're a fucking psycho like me.

CV: OoE
My favorite of the handheld Igavanias. It's not the most popular (I think Aria is) but I love it so. And not just because of Shanoa's bare back when she absorbs a glyph, ok? Ok mostly because of that but
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Esperath » Fri Jan 01, 2016 5:52 pm

(Just listing them as they come to mind)

1. Dwarf Fortress
2. Nethack (just updated last month!)
3. Mount and Blade: Warband (w/mods)
4. Cave Story
5. Binding of Isaac (+ expos)
6. Undertale
7. Crypt of the Necrodancer
8. Endless Legend
9. Civ 5 (w/ expansions)
10. FTL
11. King's Bounty (TL + AP, expansions after that were shit)
12. Spelunky
13. Baldur's Gate 2 + expo
14. Crusader Kings 2
15. Escape Velocity: Nova
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Esperath » Fri Jan 01, 2016 5:56 pm

Also I am currently really digging Banished with the Colonial Charter mod. Honorable mentions to Hearthstone and SC2? (I love SC2 but it didn't make list because I basically can't play ever).

Also, Prison Architect, Portal, Dungeon of the Endless, Saints Row 3+4, Darkest Dungeon, Don't Starve, Witcher 2, One-Way Heroics, Defense Grid, Tropico 4, XCOM.

ALSO, lest I forget consoles: Phoenix Wright series, Katamari Damacy, the PS2 DDR games, Gitaroo Man.
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby sei » Fri Jan 01, 2016 7:53 pm

Spram wrote:Bad grammar on purpose!
I feel a little bit dumber every time I see this thread title show up in active topics.
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Rico » Sat Jan 02, 2016 1:40 am

Coincidentally, I just got Skies of Arcadia Legends: Delta Shield, the Game for Christmas (I should also find all my Dreamcast cables, but....).

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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Thad » Sat Jan 02, 2016 1:00 pm

I played the original Dreamcast version years ago. Tried to start it again last year (found a CD image of a cheat system, used a code to start the game with the accessory that lowers the encounter rate). Later I started playing the Legends version in an emulator (it sounds friggin' beautiful in 5.1 surround, but it takes a burly machine to emulate the audio correctly; my main PC can do the job with only occasional slowdown (if I run Dolphin under Windows/DX; Linux/OGL is not up to the task) but my HTPC in the living room can't handle the surround and stutters during cutscenes and if I want to play it in the living room I might be better off just playing it on my Wii -- but then I lose out on the option to play the game in 16:9). Just haven't been able to get back into it, either time that I've tried.

I really liked the game when I played it before, and I'd still love to see a sequel or at least an official PC port, but I've got so many other games to play and I just have so little patience for unavoidable random encounters in my cranky old age.

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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Newbie » Sun Jan 03, 2016 1:27 am

Rather than post a list of my own, I'm just going to mention something about my experience with every game somebody else listed that I've played.

Red Dead Redemption: Bully earned Rockstar a lot of my goodwill, and Red Dead Redemption was the payoff. The game delighted, and I engaged with everything available—to my detriment, as the online mode opened when I was halfway through Mexico. While I enjoyed my initial experiences with both matchmaking and free roam, achievements proved to be my undoing. I am fickle and distracted at my best, and as the online achievements never quite dipped within my reach, my inevitable burnout hastened all the faster. I did eventually finish the game, but my frustrations with the online mode contributed to my ultimate cancellation of Xbox Live. (If somebody mentions Halo Reach, I'll tell the other half of that story.)

Resident Evil 4: I don't enjoy horror games. I respect them, but playing them is difficult. Resident Evil 4 isn't quite a horror game in the same way that Silent Hill or Fatal Frame is a horror game, but it was not far enough removed for me to be comfortable playing it or to play it again in the years since it came out.

Super Mario Galaxy: It's a music box. If you spin the thing on the side, the lid opens up and the figurines move and music plays and it's all very moving and pretty and, on some level, inconsequential. This isn't a fair comparison: there is difficulty. There is a skill requirement. If you weigh the challenge against the gratuitous activities, though, I think it's still mostly a music box.

Super Mario Galaxy 2: Sometimes music boxes have trick lids and it isn't obvious what you have to spin to open them, and also pressing on the wrong panel will knock a bar against your knuckles.

Ico: 2001 is the year I realized that there really wasn't anything stopping me from using my student loans to buy videogames, and also the year that I decided that those sampler discs you could buy at Target to preview a bunch of upcoming games were a pretty cool idea. I spent a lot of time playing the Ico demo. It might have been Penny Arcade's fault, but I think the GIA probably helped. I played through the full game when it finally arrived in maybe three sittings; I did have GameFAQs up for most of the game. As much as I enjoyed it, I haven't really played it again since.

The Wind Waker: It might have taken the "Favorite Zelda" pennant from Majora's Mask if not for all my lingering structural doubts. Shouldn't there have been one more dungeon? There was supposed to be one more dungeon, right? For that matter, how is it that the fish people turned into birds with the rising of the seas, but the mountain people just put on disguises and went about their business? With the series focus on dual worlds, were they really not just setting up the Above The Ocean and Below The Ocean maps?

Metroid Prime: Like Goldeneye before it, this is a game I suspect I'm not going to be able to play again because of the specificity of its control scheme. That first playthrough was such a ride, though.

Metroid Prime 2: Diegetic music exists with justification from within the world of the story: consider the music in Fallout that plays from your Pip Boy radio. Metroid Prime's music is nondiegetic—it's a soundtrack designed to set the mood. (I'd still like one day to play Metroid Prime through in its entirety with the soundtrack turned off; it seems only appropriate considering how much time I've spent driving around with the soundtrack playing in my car.) Metroid Prime 2 is the first time I've seen a game set up diegetic content only to frustrate that diegesis with subject matter that is incompatible with the source that is supposedly recording it: you find a "security tape" that's supposed to record what happened to a bunch of soldiers, except when you play it, it's got all these cuts and pans and camera angles that are completely inconsistent with a fixed camera that recorded a bunch of people die prior to your arrival. It seems so trivial to write about now, but that was the moment I stopped playing new 3D Metroid games.

Mass Effect 2: Mass Effect didn't move me. I'd migrated to shooters after growing disillusioned by RPGs, and the hybrid approach Mass Effect took was unconvincing; it was KotOR with new paint. I liked KotOR; ME just seemed blandly derivative, and its walls of text about planets and technologies felt like a compensatory effort. ME2, though: it really felt like they were making their own game. Granted, that game was a little bit of a mess. I fumed about the fact that Kaiden and Ashley were given word-for-word the same speech telling off Shepard for joining Cerberus, and it was a really sloppy transition from the ME paradigm to the ME2 paradigm (we gotta kill Shepard in order to rebuild Shepard, and that will justify being with the Bad Guys and not starting from the place of advantage the last game would warrant). Still: the Suicide Mission and its attendant quests was exactly the kind of thing I was desperate for games to do more of, so I was happy to disregard the franchise's growing pains.

Mass Effect 3: Like Red Dead Redemption above, this was a game where my forward momentum in the story was arrested by only the merest dabbling in the online mode. It didn't help that so many people like my friend Carl were infuriated by the ending. I had to admit: I didn't really care. ME2 interested me; ME3 didn't. I walked away around a third of the way through.

The Thousand-Year Door: I was so delighted by the way each chapter seemed to recapitulate stories from other media that I kind of forgot how underwhelming the villains are. Still, beats the hell out of all the subsequent Paper games.

Odin Sphere just doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Terraria: I'm just going to quote from a message I sent a friend on Facebook—
[...]You've done an excellent job hosting and the community has been perfect. It's been fun so far, although my limited schedule and the time pressure occasionally presented by other opportunities has proven challenging to navigate.

Please do not take the following comments as evidence of a Bad Time:

This particular trip down Terraria Lane has almost perfectly recapitulated my college experience: I went in with every advantage, a solid and in some cases excessive knowledge base on which to build, and quickly found myself breaking ground in directions I hadn't seen anyone else yet move. It was heady. I soon discovered that I'd so distanced myself from my peers that I had not noticed the diminishing returns my efforts were yielding, and their skills and accomplishments had far surpassed my own. While their assistance provided enormous benefit, they could not correct the aimless courses I set for myself, and so I squandered work that went nowhere useful or nowhere new. Now I flounder in a hole of my own digging.

It's been an evocative experience, and I look forward to returning to it. Will I go on to to develop the excessive and gratuitous manifestations of purposeless labor that would one day characterize my late twenties and early thirties?! Only time will tell!

—so, in other words, Terraria is a game I'd like to play a lot more some day, but unless internal and external conditions change to allow me to coordinate with a group, probably only in single player.

Gears of War 2 is one of the better times I had on Xbox Live. It's unfortunate that so many of those games are now undistinguishably mingled memories.

Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence: Did you read what I wrote about horror games for Resident Evil 4? Copy that, but replace "horror" with "stealth". I've beaten each of the first three Solid games at least twice, and it's been a stressful, unpleasant chore each time. This one's probably the best, even if I like Sons of Liberty more.

Half-Life 2: I never threw the can at him until an achievement told me I could.

Aria of Sorrow: I started buying Castlevania games with this one. Somehow, even despite Hammer, Aria manages to have a less embarrassing cast than later games.

Splatoon: Tossing a seeker and launching yourself through the ink trail behind it is not actually a very effective tactic, but it IS lots of fun, which is why my rank never got past somewhere in the middle Bs. Because of the its reliance on almost curated online content (such as the inkredible Splatfests), Splatoon is a very temporary game. It has a heyday (this past summer, trailing into Right Now), and once that heyday is past, it will be gone forever. Play it while you can.

Melee: We played a lot of Smash at KU, and with the release of Melee, I decided it was time to stop trying to force Fox to be useful and to upgrade to somebody new—like Mewtwo! In retrospect, this may have been an error.

Final Fantasy X: "Boy, they sure do a lot of weird and wild stuff with water in Spira. I can't wait to hear the explanation for how Tidus's sword and the blitzball arenas work."

Saints Row IV: My only disappointment is that the end of the Solid Snake segment frustrated the hell out of Julie such that she made me play it for her. Otherwise: totally fun.

The Sands of Time: I started reading [url="http://eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html"]Zarf's game reviews[/url] in 2001, and getting this game was the most satisfying consequence of that. I swore I'd never play any of the sequels, but somebody gifted me the 360 reboot, and I felt like I ought to at least try it; it wasn't awful.

Silent Hill 2: Another consequence of Zarf's reviews. I turned to GameFAQs in the apartments and was appalled to discover how many healing items I'd missed; I think I'd walked past about 80% that were available at that point.

Deus Ex: There's this part where you have to confront a target on an airplane, and Anna Navarre has ordered you to kill him. Your brother wants you to talk to him, though, and this eventually results in a standoff, with the most probable result of Navarre killing him and turning on you. I wanted to try to keep him alive, though, so I planted proximity mines at the entrance to the airplane and started the sequence; she ran right past without setting them off, though. But I still managed to kill her! But then I set off the mines myself when I was leaving, killing myself, and I hadn't thought to save yet! And then every time I tried the fight after that, the target died despite my efforts! So I stopped playing! Still a great game.

Human Revolution: Wound up deleting my saves by accident when trying to make more room on the PS3. I was still pretty early on, but it felt like a good stopping place.

Diablo 3: You don't know how much time I've spent trying to assemble various Hellfire accoutrements. I guess you might know, if you've made one yourself. Still. I've spent a lot of time. I probably won't continue unless another expansion shows up.

Knights of the Old Republic: I cared a lot about Neverwinter Nights, and seeing its legacy paying off in KotOR was almost as satisfying as actually playing it. I think I stopped somewhere underground...? I don't remember. Cool planets, though.

Soul Calibur 2: For someone who kind of hates and is bad at fighting games, I sure did buy this one twice, as well as the next couple sequels. I wasn't completely awful with Talim in this one on the GameCube, but "wasn't completely awful" would turn out to be a standard I couldn't maintain in the subsequent games.

Portal sent me on a Jonathan Coulton kick for a while. Apologies and thanks for your patience, everybody who rode in my car in 2008.

Undertale: I wasn't aware of it at the time, but this is basically the game I was expecting/hoping that LISA would be. I really should level up to max one of these days. I already know what happens, but it'd be something to do it on my own.

Hotline Miami: I mostly just wanted to get my friend's brother to play this, 'cause that guy's some kind of gaming prodigy, and I figured he'd be poetry in motion. He didn't disappoint.

Vice City: I'd always grab the motorcycles, even though the motorcycles would always kill me. Rinse. Repeat.

Order of Ecclesia: Is this the Dark Souls of Castlevania?! No but seriously, this game is good and I can't remember if I finished. Probably not, though.

Dwarf Fortress: The highlight for me was always building some absurd edifice and then using the 3D rendering program I found to demonstrate what that would actually look like. We should do another progression game some time.

Cave Story: I don't know of many games that do such a good job of setting an expectation and then completely blowing it out. I didn't know how much I loved false ceilings until here.

V + Gods & Kings + Brave New World: I have 274 hours on record. I am lead to believe that this is on the low end...? Julie and I have played a lot of multiplayer, but things have become a little predictable.

FTL: I am not a betting man, which is why I won't put much more energy in trying to be FTL on the harder difficulties. I like it though.

Spelunky: I realize that the shotgun isn't nearly as useful in the hands of master players than things like the teleporter, but I am not a master player, and so I prefer shotguns.

Hearthstone: I had to quit buying Magic cards; I hadn't played in years. I didn't think Hearthstone could fill that void, but the inexorable march of expansions has resulted in enough of my kind of cards that I can lose in some truly spectacular ways. Contrary to the common sentiment, I really enjoyed The Grand Tournament, and most people seem to agree that the League of Explorers adventure is the best thing to happen to the game. I'm excited to see what comes next!

Prison Architect: Looking forward to playing this some more; I've barely scratched the surface, and Cities: Skylines kind of trumped it.

Saints Row 3 is 90% of the reason I have a Kanye West channel on Pandora.

Phoenix Wright games occupy a special place in my heart and I hope I am still able to play them several decades from now.

Katamari Damacy: I tried to get Julie to play this, once. It was too weird for her. She maybe should have remembered this and thought twice when I proposed to her in 2009.
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Thad
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Thad » Sun Jan 03, 2016 1:10 pm

Newbie wrote:Metroid Prime: Like Goldeneye before it, this is a game I suspect I'm not going to be able to play again because of the specificity of its control scheme.


My latest experience trying to run it in Dolphin indicates that the Wii remake does work decently well when you remap the directions to WASD and the remote to the mouse, but I still haven't been able to get the damn thing to run smoothly even on an i7/GTX970.

(Don't remember if I've tried it in Windows or not; as mentioned above, I get vastly better performance from DirectX than OpenGL. But man I sure do hate having to reboot just to play a damn game.)

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sei
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby sei » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:41 pm

Thad wrote:My latest experience trying to run it in Dolphin indicates that the Wii remake does work decently well when you remap the directions to WASD and the remote to the mouse, but I still haven't been able to get the piss all over thing to run smoothly even on an i7/GTX970.

(Don't remember if I've tried it in Windows or not; as mentioned above, I get vastly better performance from DirectX than OpenGL. But man I sure do hate having to reboot just to play a piss all over game.)


Any luck VMing Windows and running games or emulators in it?
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Classic
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Classic » Thu Jan 21, 2016 6:04 am

So for Roast Beef's 30th birthday he, myself, and his wife sat down to play Secret of Mana like it was his smalltimes again.
I was a bit surprised when a 3 hour session got repeatedly extended into an 8 hour binge.
I was intensely pleased when I got a text asking if I'd be peeved if they ground spell levels while I wasn't there.

So...
That's one.

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Thad
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Re: You're favourite games of the previous generations?

Postby Thad » Wed Feb 03, 2016 2:43 am

Finally got around to XCOM (since it was in the bottom tier of the last Humble Bundle) and god damn this is one of those games that's not just a joy to play but really makes me think of design, structure, mechanics, and how even minor differences in these things can hugely change the flavor of a game. Its mechanics have more in common with Final Fantasy Tactics than not, and yet it feels so fundamentally different to play.

I suspect that a lot of the experience comes down to the game making itself feel more high-stakes than it actually is. Yes, having your entire squad wiped out -- or even just a single high-leveled character -- feels devastating, but ultimately it isn't. Having to rotate out characters and keep leveling everybody just in case is just part of the resource management that's essential to the game, and the game can get away with frequently killing your characters because you know that.

(I'm not playing on Ironman, because I reserve the right to restore a save when I die because I accidentally clicked on the wrong square. However, aside from that particular caveat, I have never reloaded a save to take back a move; if I die because I made a tactical error, I'll accept that, but if I die because I fat-fingered a mouse click, fuck that. All of which, in and of itself, makes a fascinating contrast to Tactics Ogre PSP's opposite approach, letting you rewind the fight, like, 40 moves or so if you make a mistake, or a series of them.)

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