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[drupal=589]Random Bits - December[/drupal]
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There are three pieces to a game's success: mechanics, story and environment. A game that does well in two of these will probably be a success. A game that nails all three will be legendary... More.
I'm a huge fan of Portal. That game sucked me in and wouldn't let go lol. I still go back and play it once in a while (in between MW2 and BF:BC2) just because it's so much damn fun
I agree with Shane on practically every point. Truly great games require well-designed mechanics, a captivating story, & breathtaking yet thoughtfully created environments. I remember the first game to truly pull me in with all three was the first Knights of the Old Republic. I could not put it down, because the game engaged me, rather than the other way around. There have been a few titles since then that similarly engaged me, but there is nothing quite like the first time a game grabs you by the lapels and simply won't let go.
For me there are a few games that set the bar very high. The first would be Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. That game changed my gaming life forever. The last time I loaded it up on my x-box, I remember checking my stats and it listed over 300 hours of game play. I beat the game within the first 12 hours so the rest is just wandering play.
The next game to completely captivate me was TES Oblivion. I have well over 100 hours in it, and still have not visited every dungeon / cave. This game is so lare and immersive that I will start playing it, and when I realize that I am playing a video game, several hours have already past.
The Battlefield series is IMO the best military FPS games of all time. Battlefield 1942 was awesome, then came 2142 which was ok, and Battlefield 2 completely changed the way modern military shooters were made. Battlefield Bad Company 2 gets my vote for one of the top 25 games of all time.
As far as non military FPS games go, its hard to beat the original Unreal Tournament. I remember spending hours perched on top of one of the towers on the facing worlds map, sniping opponents as soon as they spawned. The other reason I love the UT series is its speed. I was never a spectacular player, but it was not uncommon for me to get 90-100 kills on a small map with decent sized teams. I could chain my kills together on some maps to "God Like" status in just a minute or two.
Another two games worth mentioning is Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2. I played these games for hours, building theme parks that made hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour. The only other "Sim" style game I got into was a small game produced by Joe Wood Studios named Industry tycoon 2. I would take a break from RCT2 and play RTC for a few hours, building vast cities full of manufacturing industries.
For me it was Age of Empires II (and subsequent expansion) that I still load up and play sometimes. It had great story arcs that intertwined history into the gameplay which would captivate me for hours.
what started it for me was Oregon Trail on the old Apple IIc's in 1st grade lol
Sand Andreas took up WAY too much of my life. That game has everything, and there is a story line but you don't have to follow it! There's so much to do. I'd just fly planes and parachute onto a skyscraper and snipe till I had 5 stars, then sit there with the rpo and shoot down the helis and harriers lol
I did that same thing in GTA SA.
Portal is simply a fantastic game. I personally prefer games that involve problem solving. MYST is another of my all time favorites. It has good a storyline and incredible environment. As much as I would like to get into shooter games I just can't play them without getting ill after 10-20 minutes. What I don't understand is racing and arcade style games that have a similar point of view don't have the same effect. As far as racing games go the Grand Turisimo series is without a doubt tops just from mechanics and environment.
I couldn't agree more! Portal was a true gem. It included all of the elements I mentioned here and added a HUGE portion of humor on top of it. I've not had a game before or since that made me laugh like Portal. It was beautiful, innovative, mechanically superb, and hilarious.Quote:
Originally Posted by SXRguyinMA
Here we will have to agree to disagree. Maybe I got in on it too late, like four years after its release, but it really felt like a badly-made Nintendo 64 game to me. Mechanically I guess it was all right, since it played smoothly, but the graphics were awful, the voice work was hideous and just about everything that moved looked... well, just bad.Quote:
Originally Posted by Oneslowz28
Like I said, maybe if I had gotten in on it at the first. Games go a LONG way in four years, and I had no doubt been jaded by the games that came out after it.
Again, not so much. Unlike GTA:SA, however, this was a good game. I still play it in LAN from time to time. It was also mechanically excellent and the environment was good as well, but the "story" was window dressing at best. Not compelling in any but the most mechanical way. I can get that kind of compulsion from Pong.Quote:
Originally Posted by Oneslowz28
I've never tried any of the Tychoon games and wasn't into any of the Sim Whatever games, but I can see their appeal, if they are done well. Again, lacking in story but certainly a lot more complex and involving than "tournament" or "arena" shooters.Quote:
Originally Posted by Oneslowz28
Doom 3 was a big game for me. It was (and still is) the only game to have physically made me jump. What an awesome atmosphere and fun gameplay. Warzone 2100 was another that was ahead of its time, for a real time strategy game. it was the first 3d strategy game (that I know of) that allowed camera panning. It also had an amazing unit building system where you could build your own units using different track/wheel types, main body armor types, and weapons turrets. very very cool.
The first Command and Conquer game was pretty epic as well.. that was the first game that i ever did multiplayer over dial up connections with. (when I was like 12 or 13 lol... my parents hated that I would tie up the phone lines to play a game)
The other games mentioned here I agree with as well, not so much gta san andreas (its fun, but not so much epic. I would say gta 3 before san andreas just because it was the first of its kind).
For me it would be Unreal, better engine than Quake's (resulting in better graphics and settings) but kept the Quake "FEAL". However, Unreal is still sort of vintage for the gaming comunity and thus I moved on to COD: Black-ops (which was NOT a disapointment either :) )
I've played a lot of good games, but very few that I would consider truly great.
Portal, definitely. The unique concept coupled with the completely unexpected and utterly beautiful story, character development, and environment (and songs :D ) earned it a special place in my heart.
Morrowind, I think, is the single game that has had the largest impact on me. Partly because it was my first RPG, partly because at the time it was really the only game I had...so that's what I played...almost every day...for a year and a half. :D Yes, I was and still am a massive TES nerd. :D The combat left a lot to be desired, but the stories were quite well constructed, and the environment...oh the environment... The thing that best sums it up for me is the central library in Vivec. Four largish rooms, full of bookshelves, and (iirc) every single book is unique (in the room, most are present elsewhere in the game). And it's not like each book was just a couple pages either. I think I may have spent almost as much time sitting in that virtual library, reading the histories and myths of Tamriel, as I spent out in the rest of the gameworld. The amount of time and effort that BethSoft put into just that one aspect for me really represents the level of care that was taken with this game. The transportation systems were another of my favorite things about the game. In Oblivion, you just fast-travel wherever you wanted..not so in Morrowind! There, you would reference your in-game map to see where you were, then reference your real map, find where you wanted to go, then find the nearest Siltstrider, ship, guild teleporter, or whatever, and what route you would have to take to get to your destination. The level of immersion was just...ah, but I'm rambling. :D
Oblivion, I never got into quite as much as I did Morrowind. This is not to say that I didn't spend much time...quite the contrary, I spent many, many hours wandering the lands of Cyrodiil, but I never quite connected as well with it. The story was still wonderful, the graphics were worlds better, the gameplay was...also worlds better..., and the environment was still beautiful and immersive..just not quite to the level that I had come to expect..no more libraries of hundreds of unique books, no, now I could look at a bookshelf with just five or six books on it and see duplicates... :( Despite that, however, I still consider it one of the all time best games I have played.
Fallout 3 and New Vegas are, to me, possibly even better than Oblivion. It helps that I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic stuff, but they really nailed the environment with these games. In fact, imo they got all three almost perfect. Environment, story, and gameplay. ..if only they had spent a little of that time on QC maybe they wouldn't be so buggy. :(
Ascendancy is another one of my all time favorites. It was a small, not very well publicised, galactic domination strategy game released for DOS in 1995. I got it as a gift probably some time in the early '00's, and loved it. The story..well, it's a galactic domination strategy game, they tend to not have much of a story...but it did have a very well done backstory for all of the races and a lot of the technologies. The environment...again, they tend to not have much... The thing that really did it for me though, was the gameplay. It is still, imo, one of the best designed games of its type when it comes to managing expansion, tech trees, and the like.
Sins of a Solar Empire is another galactic conquest strategy game (well, system conquest in this case, but whatever) that, although it was released 13 years later, seems to have borrowed some of the good points from Ascendency that a lot of other similar games missed (similar tech tree and time management, mainly). The story, again, leaves a lot to be desired, but they did make good backstories and cultural identities for the different groups. The thing that really clenched the deal for me with SOAS, though, was the graphics. Combat in SOAS is similar to a lot of other RTSs in that it revolves around lots and lots of small units, a lot less medium sized units, and a few large units. First off, the sense of scale with all of these units is superb. The units are actually appropriately sized for each other and the rest of the environment, something that is missing all too often in RTSs in general and space RTSs in particular. But back to the graphics. The best example of this is battles. You can sit back and watch the whole thing unfold, or you can zoom in as far as you want, even down to the point of the tiny fighter craft, and watch the battle unfold in incredible detail. That was the thing about the graphics that got me, the level of detail on, really, every model..is just amazing.
Most recently, I came across a game that got a lot of mixed reviews, but imo is one of the all time greats. Mirror's Edge. This was the most fun I have had with a non-combat (or even combat, for that matter) game for...I don't even know how long. The story is...ok. It's not that deep, but at least it's well thought out and has more than a few cool twists. The real treasures in this game, though, are the environment and gameplay. It helps that I'm a big fan of parkour (never have been much good at it but I love watching it), but the level of fluidity that is possible with this game is truly remarkable. A lot of people complained about the complicated controls, and I'll admit, they take getting used to, but I for one, find it all the more satisfying to pull off a perfect manouver when I actually had a bit more of a hand in doing it. ..oh, but if FPSs give you motion sickness, you will vomit blood trying to play this game.... :whistler:
Metro 2033. This is a great game on many levels. The Environment is superb. Again it helps that I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic games, but the environment really is stunning. The gameplay, too, is amazing. It is seriously well thought out, and fits into the environment seamlessly, whether it's conserving your good ammo so you can use it to buy a better gun, hunting for that crossbow bolt you know you fired over here somewhere :whistler: , or hoping and praying that your last gas mask will hold until you reach a merchant...and then getting hit in the face by a mutant, smashing the glass enclosure, dooming you to suffocate even if you can kill it, or just pumping up your little hand-held generator to eek a little more life out of your flashlight, everything just fits perfectly into the environment. The graphics are great too, with just the right level of grittiness, but not so much that it overwhelms. I think the one point where it fails...and you will rarely hear me say this...is that it's too hard. It's not that any of the enemies are hideously difficult to kill, or that any puzzles are too complex, but that some of the solutions are so..strange..., and finicky at times, that I honestly think I never would have figured some of them out without help.
Oh, and one cannot mention a post-apocalyptic FPS without mentioning the Half-Life franchise. This was one of those rare games that just did everything right...and continued to do everything right, through 4 sequels. Let's hope the 5th continues the trend. :D
The last one I want to mention isn't actually on my list of all time greats, but instead on the stranger and sadder 'got one thing amazing and failed so many others epically'.
F.E.A.R. Yes, this but of many jokes is, imo, one of the best FPSs ever made....kinda. This game really nailed (no pun intended ;) ) the gun mechanics. I played this game several times, suffering through the abysmal story and annoying "horror" elements, just for those guns. The feeling of firing the guns in F.E.A.R., and in fact, F.E.A.R. 2 as well, is just so much better than any other FPS I have ever played.
