Games

+1 on the Max Payne mention...great game!

Came out near the time of my favorite PC game, Unreal Tournament.

As far as arcade games, I'd say maybe Rygar or Dragon's Lair...but those are so old (like I am) that I might not be remembering them so well?

With endless replay. Rollercoaster Tycoon 1&2. Shout out to Open RCT (sim city 3000 is a close second)

Console favourite- The Legend of Zelda Links Awakening

Sound track - Chrono Trigger

That long play (where you forget what you were doing if you put the game down) - Metroid Fusion/Prime

Pokemon - Emerald or Soul Silver depending on my mood.

Probably Morrowind.

Properly distinct beast races, freedom to fuck up the world, really rewarding exploration, awesome scenery and concepts, great soundtrack, you can free slaves, and Argonians have never looked better overall.

Second place, probably Red Dead Redemption 2. Every single aspect of that game is outstanding. The pacing, the story, the characters, the combat, the exploration, the horse genitals, the music, the graphics, the massive scale of the world.. Just truly a masterpiece of a game, and I think Rockstar will never surpass it.

Honorable mentions for Caves of Qud, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy 7 (original AND remake/rebirth) and Starflight (mostly played on C64 but Genesis/Megadrive version is far better)

Oh, fuck, and Silent Hill 2, that's somewhere in the top three. Both original and remake. Fucking exceptional works of art.

Probably Metroid Prime but some days I think it is Dark Souls 1. Both are similar in terms of trying to embody an adventure with strong environmental storh telling.

Age of Empires II is my all time favorite game. Gears of War 1 - 3 are a close second.

The OG X-Com is probably up there as a game that I keep coming back to. Especially after I learned about some of the total conversion mods for it.

That's a tough one to answer. I have to say league of legends, because it's always our friends fallback game.

But other favorites are:

• Terraria
• Subnautica
• Bravely Default
• Warcraft 3 - mainly the custom maps, we played so much of that
• Slay the spire

World of Warcraft!

I know people like to look down on it here but it's trully an amazing theme park metaverse experience.

I don't have much time for it these days but just playing couple of hours every week is such a joyful experience. There's just so much to do in the game, great writing, legendary characters, great people playing it. True metaverse experience everyone has been chasing lately.

I play almost every genre (minimal interest in sports games, admittedly), and my favorite changes all the time. But in general, here are some of my all-time top games:

Final Fantasy Tactics

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (people who think BL2 is better than TPS are wrong)

Spider-Man (PS4)

Hades

Civilization 6

Transport Tycoon was fantastic and thanks to OpenTTD I still play it from time to time.

Gothic 2 is by far the best Action RPG of all time. Witcher 3 comes close, but still fails to surpass it in so many places.

Banished always gets me with it's atmosphere. It feels cozy but at the same time you are close to complete annihilation. Oxygen not included hits the same mark, but also has a distinctive art style and humor to it which I love.

Stanley Parable (and it's Deluxe edition) never fails to make me laugh. But it can get tedious sometimes...

I can't choose an absolute favorite, that's like choosing a favorite child.

It's a toss up between the Mass Effect Trilogy, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher (in partiuclarly 3) and (most) of Fallout games (but in particular 1 and 2).

If you were to put a gun to my head I'd probably pick either Mass Effect Trilogy or Cyberpunk 2077, probably based on what game i've played for the millionth time most recently.

Sekiro.

I probably can't decide on a single one but if I had to list:

• Operation Flashpoint (a big candidate on best)
• Mafia 1
• Giant: Citizen Kabuto
• Half-Life series
• Portal series
• Dark Souls/Elden Ring
• Age of Empires II (also big candidate on best)
• Mass Effect series

And I'm gonna stop myself here because there's way more which just complicates choice

I have to say for me, I know this won't be everybody, my favorites are going to be the ones that change the way I felt about gaming, not necessarily ones that I would want to play again.

In fact, I have found that going back to some of the seminal games, or the ones that were most impactful to me, hurt my feelings because they were from a time... Where let's be real, technical limitations made a lot of very basic quality of life things nearly unavailable.

I think the 1st that changed the way I felt about gaming was Ultima 4 - they had flushed out the systems of the earlier three, which were pretty primitive, and made morality, all kinds of wonderful internal game systems, relationships, secrets, optional paths, total exploration. 5 and 6 were games that I explored and played molecularly because they were just a joy for me as well.

Another one I talk about a lot is a game called Squares Deluxe which the developer thankfully changed as freeware a few years ago. So anybody with DOSBox can download it and play it legally, and in my view, it's the best shape packing game ever made - there are so many amazing mechanics, and if you play Extreme mode and get a great run going, it can be the most thrilling experience!

How can I forget the very first game I played in arcades which was Atari Warlords at Fiesta Foods! I was bedazzled by the cabinet and I had to have a teenager explain to me what it was! I went flying home and explained what I saw to my mother and she was incredulous, and she took me back to play!

Runestone Keeper. I know that really if you distill it down, you're kind of playing a probability-based card / slot machine game. But play your choice is broad, and I love the fact that the entire playfield changes with every move potentially. Yes you can get screwed over, yes you can have amazing runs, but it's that unpredictability that keeps me salivating. I can't actually recommend anybody play this outside of steam version because the app one keeps changing - I've bought it a few times and I keep losing my license/progress when they change publisher agreements, to hell with that noise!

It's easily The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

It has everything I could ask for in a game: Sword fighting. Magic. Secrets. Dungeon crawling. An alternate dimension. Side quests. Different tools and items. There's enough content that it feels fulfilling to complete it. Peak art. Peak music. NPCs don't talk too much, and there are just enough of them to make the world feel alive. Bosses.

This is really hard. Dungeon Master on the Amiga500 is up there, as is Unlimited Adventures. Today, these don't look so interesting, but man they were great at the time. Amiga also had a neat RPG maker as well whose name I can't recall.

Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. It’s one of the most complex city builders made, and while the interface isn’t great and there are lots of obscure, weird, and downright unintuitive mechanics, it’s so rewarding to play because you can actually construct your infrastructure with materials and time, and so unlike Cities: Skylines or Transport Fever, the game doesn’t become trivially easy when you get a late game map. Those games you can eventually afford massive bridges and tunnels, but that’s not the case in Workers and Resources, because no matter how much money you have, bridges take time to build, and you’ll have to reroute traffic during construction, so you’ll only use them when you really need them.

Also I love the scaling, things like gas stations only require a single truck very occasionally, shall industries require a few trucks, and only the big industries like steel require trains (and only a reasonable amount too). As opposed to Cities: Skylines or Transport Fever where every industry ends up with a massive number or trucks or a silly number of trains.

Fez! I love the low stress puzzle game. I think it’s beautiful and smart. I love that it was made by one guy. It’s too bad he got burnt out and quit. He is very talented.

Morrowind. One of the few games you can fail the main quest by going on a rampage or by selling the wrong item.

Best single game is probably Portal. The pacing, storytelling, innovation, sound, all are top notch even 20+ years later. Graphics aren't phenomenal, but don't need to be. The challenges and easter eggs made it a blast to 100%.

I feel like my “all-time favorite” changes depending on my mood, but if I had to pick just one, I’d probably go with The Witcher 3. That game just hit all the right notes—amazing story, incredible world-building, and so much stuff to do without feeling like pointless filler. Plus, the expansions were just as good, if not better than the base game.

I replayed the entire game after completing Cyberpunk 2077 and finished it this weekend. Sadly for me the game doesn't hold up that well in various aspects and it was one of my favourites. The story is great, the ending is really well done, but the combat is too simple, the leveling of the game is all over the place, the RPG aspect of the game is really underwhelming and the game is just too damn long. I actually ended up enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 more at the end, but TW3 is a better game in general.

As for my "all-time favorite", that depends.

Nier: Automata changed me, the game had a real impact on me.

Zelda BOTW is the game that made me feel happier while playing it.

Sekiro is the game that just clicked perfectly.

DAO was my all time favourite RPG but Divinity 2/BG3 both took that spot.

Chrono Trigger is the game that I'll always remember, the singleplayer game that I've replayed the most.

Terraria is my favourite indie game.

I have a real soft spot for Bloodstained, I loved Casltevania Symphony of the Night and I waited so long for Bloodstained and the guys delivered what I expected. The first game that I wanted to do 100%.

Shadow of the Colossus was barely even a game, it was art. I don't think I even played it for more than 20 hours total but just a simple masterpiece.

Better Than Wolves and Portal come to mind first.

BTW is just a labour of love of IMO a genius game designer FlowerChild (RIP) who out of spite for adding wolves to MC made the best game possible, it's extremely rewarding, all the small details are thought through. And now the community has taken over the torch and are updating it faithfully further.

Portal is just a gem of the game, already mentioned in the thread so not gonna start another one.

Based on play and replay, it seems to be either Payday 2 or Borderlands 2.

Payday2, especially if you have tons of builds and DLC, is a fantastic brain-off mob shooter where you can slightly improve/perfect your build and gameplay with each run. For some reason it just works for me.

Borderlands 2: fun guns; solid story; visuals and mechanics that mostly hold up today. It's just a good time and another skill-tree builder game where you get to feel like a god if you've assembled your skill tree right. The NG+ modes are a bit of a slog, but playthrough 1 is just a solid time.