What are the most engaging and memorable games you've ever played?
I am thinking more in terms of story or emotional impact.
I think for me it has to be either Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock 1, Red Dead Redemption / II and probably GTA V which also took it to another level to be fair.
What about you guys?
Danny King | Editor-in-Chief | GameFront.com
In alphabetical order:
* American Truck Simulator
* Banished
* Cities: Skylines
* Euro Truck Simulator 2
* Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (The REAL one, not the EA garbage.)
* Star Wars: Republic Commando
In no paricular order:
- Star Wars: Dark Forces
- Outcast
- Planescape Torment
- Baldur's Gate 2
- Fallout 2
- Witcher 3
- Sid Meier's Colonization
- X-COM: Terror from the Deep
- Command and Conquer 2: Red Alert
- Silent Service 2
Ride to Hell: Retribution
Bubsy 3D
Carrier
Illbleed
Sonic (2006)
Daikatana
All of these games had an impact on my soul.
Last edited by biozeminadae1 9 months ago
My current MobyGames top listing is (subject to change):
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 / Yuri's Revenge
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars / Kane's Wrath
- FireFly Studios' Stronghold Deluxe
- FireFly Studios' Stronghold Crusader
- Ion Fury
- RollerCoaster Tycoon
- Saints Row 2
- Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines / Beyond the Call of Duty
- Worms: Armageddon
- Age of Mythology / The Titans
- Heroes of Might and Magic III: Complete
- Sid Meier's Civilization II
- The Operative: No One Lives Forever - Game of the Year Edition
- Two Point Hospital
- Saints Row IV
- Star Trek: Armada
- StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
- Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force
- Star Trek: Starfleet Command - Gold Edition
- Space Colony
- FIFA: Road to World Cup 98
Ah, games with story and emotional impact.
Mechwarrior 3
I've felt for a long time that the briefings were a really clever way to set this game's story up. I don't see many, if any , games take this approach nowadays and in some ways I think that's a shame. There's a lot of unnecessarily clumsy narrative delivered as a consequence of choosing to deliver all the storytelling through the perspective of a character. I mean heck, look at the most recent Mechwarrior game, playing that outside of missions (and even to some extent inside them) is like stabbing your brain with an icepick. Repeatedly. Until the stupid stops.
Homeworld.
Adagio for strings. If you enjoy space opera and strategy games you're really missing out if you haven't played this one. The voice acting is top notch, the graphics aren't half bad (there's a remastered version on Steam,) and the story is... yeah, I can't think of another strategy game that's done the same sort of story.
Homeworld also managed navigation in a large 3d space very smoothly. Like it's 21 years later and that sort of smooth well-developed interface is still a rarity.
The Witcher 3
A good overaching narrative and lots of smaller interesting narratives stitched together in a world that actually invited you to discover those narratives. Compare Skyrim's fetch quests to... almost any quest here. The expansions came with a goodly amount of content too. I remember pausing in this game to make moral choices, and that's not something that I do a lot in games.
This is still my high-water mark for roleplaying games. The graphics for the time, and still for today, were pretty darned good. Like this is probably the first roleplaying game I've played where the cities felt city-like. Comparing the cities in this to the cities in something like Dragon Age 3 is... the comparison is laughable.
The other thing that I found especially interesting about this game was that it's an open world that actually contains interesting things in a way that's discoverable. Take Skyrim by way of counterpoint example: endless miles of frozen tundra with... not a whole lot in it that was linked in to easy hooks. Sure you could randomly wander the countryside, but why would you?
Knights of the Old Republic 1 (with a cautious recommendation for 2)
The first one was far more polished, although the second one had a far more complex narrative and better developed characters. The second one is very much like comparing the first and second Ghost in The Shell movies; the first Ghost in The Shell movie was an action movie with some philosophy, the second Ghost in The Shell movie was a philosophy film with some quite esoteric references and happened to have some action in it. Knights of the Old Republic is a traditional story with some touches on more complex themes. You could hand it to a 12 year old and expect them to understand it. The heroic arc, the prodigal knight. It's fundamentally a morality tale. Knights of the Old Republic 2 is a character based story that's placed into an arc that happens to be the vehicle for the story.
IMO still the best Starwars games ever made. (No, that MMORPG abomination doesn't count.)
Mass Effect
Look, the follow ups weren't great, I'll just say it. Mass Effect 2 was when it went to shit. You went from being a radical military officer to enlisting with the fucking space Nazis because everyone else in the galaxy was suffering from terminal stupidity.
All the following games were better polished, the mechanics were better, they flowed better... but they weren't good ways to tell a complex character-based narrative because the things that the characters were written into stripped the choices in 1 of their consequence and the characters of any desirable personality.
Take Joker for instance, a wise-cracking pilot who moves on to enlisting with people who perform experiments on soldiers, because they give him a neat ship to fly. Like, fuck that guy. That guy's an asshole. There are choices that you don't get to make and remain what you were.
Mass Effect 1 is a great game though. I remember storming the Citadel to stop space-cthulhu with music in the background and a glass of whisky on my desk and darn.
Mass Effect 1 had some fairly good world building in it as well. People don't touch on that a lot, but it did. They threw a lot of that away in the follow ups, for reasons that aren't really clear, and you didn't see much of it on screen, but the codex is well worth a read.
(On a grumbling hand, you also made a lot of technological advancements in Mass Effect 2 that don't really filter over into Mass Effect 3. Like you, operating independently, take a tiny frigate into something that can blow up a heavy cruiser in an operationally relevant timeframe. Why don't all the ships in 3 have this? It's not like it required a complete tear down of the ship in dry-dock or anything. ¬_¬)
My top games:-
Call of Duty modern warfare 1,2 and 3
Assassin's Creed 3 and 4
GTA 5, of course
Devil may cry 1 and 4
Doom
These games are not in a particular order.