The Top 10 Games Of All Time

[draalr]

If you aren't smart and careful, bam! You die.

Don't you just cower in secure zones to stay alive?

Or from when I played, you try not to piss off the beta testers.

[Finsternis]

If you aren't smart and careful, bam! You die.

Don't you just cower in secure zones to stay alive?

You can if you want to. I don't. I've got 40,000,000 skill points. I can take care of myself.

[Finsternis]

I hadn't even opened Civilization when Doug "Finsternis" Linder came over, saw the box, said "I've heard this is really good, can I borrow it?" and I said sure. He left with the box that night, and I never got it back.

I will note here that you never asked for it back, either. I simply forgot to give it back to you.

even back then I knew that if there was something he liked so much that I couldn't get even a borrowed copy back from him, it certainly wasn't anything I wanted anything to do with.

So, if I like something , you assume it can't be good. Nice logic. Even you admit that you were completely wrong about that. And have been many times since then.

I told Doug about my affinity for these games, and he suggested I go back and try Civilization, since it was, in his words, like "super-Empire". I couldn't imagine anything more wonderful, but still my repugnance for this man's tastes and suggestions was stronger than my desire for a super-Empire game, so still I steered clear.

Thus retarding your enjoyment of great games for that much longer due to your silly personal bias.

It was, truly, super-Empire.

Just as I said.

As my hours with Civ IV went on, though, it began to occur to me that this might not just be the best genre, but the perfect entry into it.

No. Civ 4 is a fine 4x game, to be sure, but it not only is not the #1 game ever, it isn't even the #1 4x game ever. While it's enjoyable, it has many flaws. Some of them are due it its design, and some of them are simply due to inherent flaws in all 4x games.

Sure, you can't hear wind in space, that's not the point. Does it affect the strategy or game design? No. Does it finally raise the 4X genre to the level of art? Absolutely, and with poetic flourish.

Not even close. Hey, it's a decent game don't get me wrong, but it does not approach art or even "best 4x game ever".

Everything you need to know about the game is no more than two mouse clicks away.

Untrue. Just tonight I was trying to figure out some unit statistics and found it nearly impossible to get any information at all about unit strengths and which ones I needed to build.

This is the desert island game, the last and only game you will ever need. Civilization IV is the greatest game of all time.

No. Wrong. Sorry. It's a game that is very enjoyable, and one could do a lot worse in this genre, but if I had to pick games for a desert island, it wouldn't even be in my top 10.

Hey, don't feel bad. It's well-done and nothing to be ashamed of. It's a damn good game. But it has too many designed-in flaws to earn it such high praise. It doesn't even make "best 4x game ever", let alone "best game ever". It's more like "4th-best 4x game ever".

[pinback]

You make a lot of good points.

Okay, I rescind my list!

[Finsternis]

You make a lot of good points.

You're right, I didn't really mention specifics. When I get a little more time I'll be more detailed.

Okay, I rescind my list!

Oh,you don't have to do that. So we have a different opinion. I'm sure my top 10 list would only include a few of the games on yours. As I said, I don't think Civ IV is a bad game by any means - it just wouldn't be my #1.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Okay, this is gonna be the week where I actually do play GalCiv2. I promise.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Er, well, I am sure that when Ben is living here, I will do some GalCiv2.

Right now, a spigot died outside, so I am a little distracted.

[Worm]

I still don't grasp why you're so concerned with this spigot. One time at my house ours went to hell and then it iced up so we didn't have to think about it anymore.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

It is inexcusable that I never played GalCiv2. So, on the new PC, I am attempting to do just that. It's downloading now. I do kind of like how other companies handle some of this shit for me.

If a man says a game is the best ever, as Pinback did, I am inclined to try it out.

I have been finishing some things I've been meaning to finish - I finished "Caught Stealing" by Charlie Huston after a three year delay. It was a good book - I think I originally put it down because there is one scene which was so brutal, it made it difficult to pick back up. But then I realized that made me a baby, and I went forward. So, there's some precedent to finishing things as of late.

[Flack]

I know I'm a few years late to the fray, but I may also go through and play all the games on Pinback's list. I don't think I've played any game with "Sim" in the name for more than about 10-15 minutes. I grew up on Atari 2600 games that lasted minutes -- the concept of playing a simulation for hours/days/weeks never appealed to me. I got into a few RPGs as a teen but those are probably the only games I played that lasted any length of time.

But if you were to combine all the games on the list and total up how many hours you have spent playing them, I have spent that much time playing Nethack (or more specifically, Epyx's "Rogue".)

[Flack]

I wanted to add one sad note about Rogue/Nethack.

I have been playing Rogue since around 1981. When I first started playing it, I had to load it from floppy. Eventually we got a hard drive, and we copied Rogue to it. For some reason, from computer to computer, Rogue is something that always gets copied over.

Back in the 80s I got in the habit of making a "path" folder (c:\path) for storing things like pkzip and rar and batch files I used on a regular basis. That way I could drop out into a DOS prompt and, no matter what directory I was in, I could use those utilities. Then on each machine I would just append that folder to my path. Whenever I get a new machine, I just copy that folder over from my old machine. A lot of the things in that folder are old and outdated at this point and from time to time I delete stuff, but there's a lot of crap out there that's years old. At some point in time I copied Rogue into that directory too -- hell, it's less than 50k -- so no matter what I'm doing or where I'm at, I can just type "Rogue" and the game launches.

After reading Pinback's great list, I typed "Rogue" on my laptop and got horrible news -- apparently, Rogue.exe is not compatible with the 64 bit version of Windows 7.

You do not know how sad this makes me. That's like the end of an era. I always liked how, in 30 years, that program still ran. I know I can run it in DOSBox or in an emulator or something, but that wasn't the point.

Microsoft, you are doo doo and a Rogue breaker.

[pintastic boombastic]

I know I'm a few years late to the fray, but I may also go through and play all the games on Pinback's list. I don't think I've played any game with "Sim" in the name for more than about 10-15 minutes.

None of my games had the word "Sim" in the name. ???

[Flack]

I don't know why I typed that. What I really meant to say was, "I don't think I've played any of those "Sim" type games for more than about 10-15 minutes." By "sim-type games" I include any game that has "Sim" in the title (which were not on your list), any game that that should have had "Sim" in the title, or any game that was written by a guy who also wrote a game that has "Sim" in the title.

In other words, I've never played Rollercoaster Tycoon (because it reminds me of Sim Theme Park, and I've never played Civ IV or any of the Civilization or Colonization games because they remind me of SimCity.

Of your top 10 list, I've played 6 of the titles, and enjoyed 4 of them. Part of that is due to my curse of getting motion sickness from playing 1st person shooters for too long (like 5-10 minutes). When I first saw Super Mario 64 I thought it was groundbreaking and earth shattering (and it was), but by level two I had such a headache that I just couldn't play the damn thing. Same goes for pretty much any first person shooter past Wolfenstein. I played my share of Doom and Doom II, but by the time Quake rolled around I was pretty much over the genre and they're still milking it.

I put GTA III in the same category as SMB64 -- a revolutionary game changer. We'll be seeing copies of it for decades.

Nethack is genius. This thread inspired me to go grab Sword of Fargoal for my iPhone.

I completely agreed with your review of Asteroids. As a kid it's all about sitting and spinning, and hitting thrust is generally only done on accident. You can't begin to control the game until you can control the ship. It's only too bad my appreciation of the game doesn't translate to any skill in playing it.

I'm with you on the Infocom entry as well. I can remember vivid details from text adventures I played over at my friend's house, but I can't really remember what his house looked like. Or the guy's name, for that matter ...

Pinback, you put together a great list and have inspired me to do the same. I will also give the Rollercoaster game a spin, out of respect. How bad can making people have fun be?

[pinback guy not band]

Thanks buddy!

I will say, your comparison of RCT to a "Sim" game is accurate, but your comparison of Civilization is not.

Civilization is a turn-based strategy game, and probably closer to "wargame" than something like SimCity, though conflict comes in more flavors than military.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

There as an article about Pyro II on freeindiegam.es today!

http://www.freeindiegam.es/2012/09/pyro-ii-mike-obrien/

[pinback]

How come someone don't remake that.

[pinback]

I hadn't even opened Civilization when Doug "Finsternis" Linder came over, saw the box, said "I've heard this is really good, can I borrow it?" and I said sure. He left with the box that night, and I never got it back.

I will note here that you never asked for it back, either. I simply forgot to give it back to you.

even back then I knew that if there was something he liked so much that I couldn't get even a borrowed copy back from him, it certainly wasn't anything I wanted anything to do with.

So, if I like something , you assume it can't be good. Nice logic. Even you admit that you were completely wrong about that. And have been many times since then.

I told Doug about my affinity for these games, and he suggested I go back and try Civilization, since it was, in his words, like "super-Empire". I couldn't imagine anything more wonderful, but still my repugnance for this man's tastes and suggestions was stronger than my desire for a super-Empire game, so still I steered clear.

Thus retarding your enjoyment of great games for that much longer due to your silly personal bias.

It was, truly, super-Empire.

Just as I said.

As my hours with Civ IV went on, though, it began to occur to me that this might not just be the best genre, but the perfect entry into it.

No. Civ 4 is a fine 4x game, to be sure, but it not only is not the #1 game ever, it isn't even the #1 4x game ever. While it's enjoyable, it has many flaws. Some of them are due it its design, and some of them are simply due to inherent flaws in all 4x games.

Sure, you can't hear wind in space, that's not the point. Does it affect the strategy or game design? No. Does it finally raise the 4X genre to the level of art? Absolutely, and with poetic flourish.

Not even close. Hey, it's a decent game don't get me wrong, but it does not approach art or even "best 4x game ever".

Everything you need to know about the game is no more than two mouse clicks away.

Untrue. Just tonight I was trying to figure out some unit statistics and found it nearly impossible to get any information at all about unit strengths and which ones I needed to build.

This is the desert island game, the last and only game you will ever need. Civilization IV is the greatest game of all time.

No. Wrong. Sorry. It's a game that is very enjoyable, and one could do a lot worse in this genre, but if I had to pick games for a desert island, it wouldn't even be in my top 10.

Hey, don't feel bad. It's well-done and nothing to be ashamed of. It's a damn good game. But it has too many designed-in flaws to earn it such high praise. It doesn't even make "best 4x game ever", let alone "best game ever". It's more like "4th-best 4x game ever".

Why wouldn't he tell us what the best 4x game was?? Now we'll never know, or we'll need a password to find out.

I'm going to redo this list shortly. Not much has changed, though. Damn. What a great list.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

It's been 4 years and I still haven't played GalCiv2.

I need to stop saying I am gonna do things I don't wanna do.

[pinback]

It's been 4 years and I still haven't played GalCiv2.

I need to stop saying I am gonna do things I don't wanna do.

Looking back, I guess Finsternis is saying Alpha Centauri is the best 4x game of all time.

GOG is my favorite website in the world, and I got AC from them for $3, but they still don't have the expansion, and I'm not going to waste 15 hours of my precious snowflake life on half a game.

CMON GOG WHERE IS ALIEN SHOOTOUT OR WHATEVER ITS CALLED

[pinback]

Holy effing Christ!

I was reminded of Pyro 2 and then wondered, hey, I wonder if whoever wrote that went on to do anything else?

Apparently he went on to be lead programmer at Blizzard and is now president of ArenaNet??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_O%27B ... developer)
(there's no way to keep phpBB from gagging on that, so just cut/paste)

Wow. ASCII boy makes good.