What are your top five (or 10) games of all time?

Video Games
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I’ve actually never played Arkham Knight, I’ve just heard the complaints so I can’t comment personally. I haven’t played any of the batman games.
I think games were better back then in terms of game design. I think another big part is that developers were more-willing to take big risks. Often a dev team would only be 10 people or less, there wasn’t a huge amount at stake. The genres we have today were still being formed and developers were constantly trying new ideas, pushing the envelope and making unique masterpieces.
Today the dev teams are too big: often hundreds in the core team, plus addition hundreds (or a thousand) outsourced for models, textures, sound, etc. There’s too much at stake, so the developers can’t afford to take risks and break new ground. Instead they just follow the cookie cutter formula. Most of the focus is on graphics and often story and gameplay are ignored.
There are so many incredible games from that time and they are still incredible, and it’s not just nostalgia. I can think of hundreds of examples. Thief is a good one, look at Thief (1998), a brilliant game and it still holds up today, still (after nearly 20 years) the best stealth game ever created. Compare that to Thief (2014) a horrible abomination of a broken game, even though the team was larger, it was more expensive to create and it probably make more profit than Thief (1998). The horror.

It’s difficult to describe why modern AAA games are awful because the reasons vary. Sometimes it’s like an interactive movie, too many QTEs, broken console ports, games without story, games without any originality, games without gameplay. Games that stick to a tired old formula. But admittedly there are some exceptions, there are some great AAA games. Things are improving now though, ever since the indie explosion I think AAA devs have realised they will have to start being creative because people are sick of seeing the same tired old manure heaps each year and they’re looking to indie devs instead.Plus with kickstarter now publishers have less power, visionary devs are able to leverage more creative control.

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I was just playing devil’s advocate. I know there are lots of timeless, classic games. Just generating discussion. I play River City Ransom all the time and have a blast. Or Double Dragon, Contra, they’re still a lot of fun. That’s why I collect old games and systems because I think that was the best time for gaming, right at the beginning. I’m sure lots of people disagree.

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I love River City Ransom, but I’ve never finished it. It’s an epic game though, it’s on my bucket list.
I would say certainly that most people would disagree; 90% of people would probably say that now is the best that games have ever been… but it’s because modern games are made for the masses. They make these hand-holding interactive-movie games for modern audiences who want to “win the game” with minimum interaction. Seems like many developers are frightened of giving their players a genuine challenge.

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A couple years ago on New Years Eve my brother and I set out to beat RCR and we did. Took an hour but it was an amazing experience. Really a bonding moment. I never felt that with new games. Maybe because I like 8 bit graphics better or the game play was just superior.

I bet if you ask 80s kids they might agree with me. But maybe they prefer new games too, I don’t know.

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Hmm, I was first exposed to games in the 80’s and early 90’s, it was all pixel art. Even the early shooters like Wolfenstein and Doom were kinda pixel-arty. It was around the Windows 95 era that things switched to texture mapping, 3D, ugly polygons… and also many 2D games went for a cartoon aesthetic.
I love pixel art and I usually can’t stand the graphics style of 2D non-pixel games. Games like Prison Architect and The Binding of Isaac look awful in my opinion. So perhaps I get that from my childhood.
Still though I can definitely appreciate some of the beautiful 3D games. Even the ugly ones from the 90’s still have a certain charm to me, things like Thief: The Dark Project or Quake 2. So I agree and I disagree. For 2D games I agree… but I still have a deep appreciation for many of the 3D styles. Also some of the more recent 3D games are just so insanely gorgeous and detailed my jaw drops.

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personal top 5 all-time favorite games

1, Mega Man 2
2. Kirby Super Star
3. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood
4. Gunstar Heroes
5. Bulk Slash

honorable mentions

  1. King of the Monsters 2: The Next Thing
  2. Soldier Blade
  3. Magic Knight Rayearth
  4. Grandia
  5. Bubble Bobble
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  1. System Shock 2
  2. Silent Hill 2
  3. Resident Evil 4
  4. Shining Force II
  5. Dragon Age: Origins
  6. Mass Effect 2
  7. Mass Effect 3
  8. The Walking Dead
  9. Steins;Gate
  10. Dark Souls

Other notable ones:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
TES III: Morrowind
Planescape Torment
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2
Silent Hill 3
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

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68

That’s really difficult to answer, but I’ll try

Star Wars (NES)
I grew up doing this game, I remember times I stood up and before going to school I finished it quickly.

The Battle Of Olympus
Great game, I guess it has a lot to do with nostalgia,played it many times

Super Mario Bros 1,2,3 … yes, I will list all 3 games and count it as 1 entry in my top 10. To make it easier for me and because you said I could ignore your rules lol. Well, … about the Super Mario Bros games and why they appear in my top 10: I think these games are timeless!

Alicia Dragoon. I like the fantasy in it and it’s just a great game in my opinion.

Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2! I have spent hours and days and weeks and months and years playing these 2 games and I still haven’t had enough of it. My favorite games of the PS2

This year I started playing PS3 games and I’ve finished about 15 oof them, and I can say that these titles I could add to my top 10:

Dead Space. Awesome shooter

Wolfenstein: The New Order. I loved this, I just finished it a few days ago. Great game despite of 1 major bug and a final boss I didn’t really like because I found it so challenging to beat.

Terminator: Salvation. Easy and short PS3 game, and even though I heard people say it looks kind of dated, I thought it looked really nice.

Splatterhouse! Because it’s so over-the-top and gory. I had great fun with it because the gore in this game is so extreme compared with other games that are supposed to be gory. I wouldn’t mind a Splatterhouse 2. I also like that once you’ve played this game, you have unlocked the older games as well, which were also fun to play.

So only one more title to go to finish my top 10… I knew this task would be too difficult for me lol

Just to finish this top 10, I would say Bulletstorm. Just great fun to play.

When I play a game I don’t really go for the challenge, I just want to follow the storyline and be in awe about the visuals or have a laugh when something funny happens on screen. I don’t know if this would make me an oddball or something but I just don’t like it when a game gets difficult. O well, luckily most games have easy-mode for players like me.

This was a tough list, I could have entered a lot of other titles and I doubt the list is the same still if I would make a top 10 again in the future.

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69

EDIT: I dont know how i missed it. The best game is Obviously HALF_LIFE. It brought us Steam. It brought us endless games with mods,and greatly helped mods become a thing, as well as developers that do not have publishers.


Skyrim really does at times feel like the greatest game ever made as well. It’s one of the FEW things i’ve seen that I can just sit down and do anything wander around and feel very free in a game. You can play this game like an MMO (play it forever) But then there are times i feel the game is so empty hollow and even broken in how lots of things are incomplete, oversights or just not that balanced or bugged…Regardless, Skyrim really has done some things though, one of the most intersting things i came to realize is it rebirthed the classic RPG dungeon crawl that was a first person game. That seems to be a mission statement with bethesda. Let’s take a look at

This was a cult classic of fallout 2. They transformed what was by many considered to be the pinancle of the isometric RPG genre and turned it back into the FPS that skyrim expanded on.

one of the more famous isometric RPGs.It is at the least, Iconic Pure Black Isle gold. I cant count how many playthroughs, saves, reloads and general experimenting i’ve done in this game to explore everything i could. The first game I played that included pop culture easter eggs as a routine aspect of it’s dialogue, item design and narrative elements. Way before memes were a thing.

I like F:NV. I like Obsidian and Avellone and anyone connected to fallout.

Were it not for thief we’d be very poor in a world without stealth games. No System Shock no deus ex, Probably No hitman or dishonored. the game has influenced quite a bit in terms of how to create complicated and intricate maps and how to interact with them.

I love this game. It was a fast paced and great game to just play 10 minutes into in a fast match against bots. It was full of content had lots of mods and had fantastic network support and provided a means to download assets for online games. I’d say there is some historical value to this one because if it weren’t for UT and it’s multiplay asset sharing being so core to the engine the Unreal Engine/UDK as we know it today couldnt exist!

unique. humor lots of interaction. very rough and unpolished, but great idea that eventually got polished down the road by the community to a staggering degree with wildfire v 1.13, etc.

diablo introduced me to the concept of a NG+, hardcore, and other elements. Why, it’s addictive as hell. i’m going to play it after i finish writing this

when i think of best game of the millenium i think of Deus Ex. It was prophetic and terrifying in what it managed to achieve reprsent and describe and does it with so much skill. The maps and gameplay take thief to the next level. you also have solid RPG elements and really cool ideas, such as player ‘choices and consquences’ I never had previously played a game where i spent the remainder of the game wondering if i had made the right decisions or how they’d affect the world.

i havent played the classic and cant fully appreciate this game, outside of the elements in shares with thief and deus ex, as well as having the best antagonist in a game ever.

where to being or end with a game that pretty much jumpstarted a whole bunch of things. The FPS, the shareware license model, I didnt even know what the ESRB rating was until this game. It sparked a lot of media/politics too.

All these games had a huge impact and was time well spent, would still be open to going back and play these on almost any given day with a mod or something. It seems they never go too terribly long without me revisiting them.

Some honorable mentions of games that are fun to pull out every now and then but i can’t really play them more than once in a blue moon but still tend to do just that are:

‘Super’ Smash TV (a rather nice port of Smash TV arcade) not on grouvee.



















https://www.grouvee.com/games/13059-commando-raid

easy to reccomend all if you haven’t. Shining examples of their respective platforms (or eras). though some may certainly not be for everyone

i’ll have to go through this thread and wishlist whats mentioned here. excellent reccomendations by all. much thanks.

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70

Agreed. This is an amazing thread. Too many games on here to play!

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My top 5 would be :

  1. The Last of Us
  2. Red Dead Redemption
  3. Bioshock
  4. Dishonored
  5. Grand Theft Auto IV

Honorable mention : Hitman Blood Money

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How is Dishonored? I have a feeling that this game is a lot of stealth and sneeking around. Not that that’s bad though, just wondering. And nice list!

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Mind if I jump in? Dishonored is a great game, lots of flexibility to how you approach the game. It is a stealth game, if you want it to be, and a pretty good one at that. But if you want to approach it from a different angle other than stealth you can. And how you conduct yourself in game can and will have an impact on certain elements and outcomes.

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That sounds good to me!

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It’s a worthwhile game. It is also aesthetically quite exceptional. The art design is excellent.

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Lots of great games.

I can’t say enough good things about:

Final Fight
Shadowgate
Super Castlevania IV (completed it on my raspberry pi recently. I have the SNES cartridge but it’s been a while. Really amazing experience)
Half Life (Solid game. I didn’t play it a lot, but enjoyed it when I did)

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Somewhat late to the party, here are 10 of the games that have given me the most memorable gaming experiences (some because of nostalgia obviously :wink:) - in no particular order:

  1. King’s Quest 1 (on an old black/yellow PC)
  2. Super Mario Bros
  3. Zelda 1
  4. Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within
  5. Myst
  6. Baldur’s Gate
  7. Tomb Raider
  8. God of War
  9. Oblivion
  10. Skyrim: Special Edition

Honorable mentions: Mega Man 2, Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy VII

EDIT: Currently playing The Witcher 3 for the first time - may very well make the list eventually…

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Oh Boy This is HARD: okay lets start with the big ones:

Honorable Mentions:

Could have put more but that would be over kill.

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Bear in mind that this is my personal top five… I wouldn’t necessarily categorize these objectively the best of all time. The one thing they have in common is how often I’ve returned to them.

  1. Psychonauts is just perfectly crafted to match my sensibilities. I love collectathon platformers, I love adventure games, I love quirky cartooning and animation design. I rarely 100% games, yet I’ve done so three or four times with this one. It may not be for everyone, but that’s almost why I love it so much.
  2. Sonic Adventure has a zillion flaws, but I love it anyway. My brother and I were the weirdos who asked our parents for a Dreamcast instead of waiting for a PlayStation 2, and we played the heck out of this thing. Playing it is basically muscle memory for me at this point, and I can recite every line of cringe-worthy English dialog by heart.
  3. I made the mistake once of looking at Activity Log to see how many hours of my life have been spent playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which I will never do again as it was kind of heartbreaking! I would not be surprised if I’ve played this game more than any other in my life… when I started commuting to work by train a few years back, this was my go-to for much of that time (and still occasionally is). I’ve resisted any temptation to cheat or “time travel,” which has contributed to its longevity for me. I just find it incredibly charming and a wonderfully relaxing way to spend 15, 30 or 45 minutes while watching the Portland cityscape drift by out the window.
  4. Fez was just magical for me. I was one of those nerds taking copious amounts of notes while playing. The game even started creeping into my dreams. There’s also something very joyous in playing Fez… the failure tolerance, the blue sky, the bounciness of the world’s fauna. The soundtrack is incredible, too.
  5. It took me a while to realize the underappreciated Super Mario 3D Land is probably my favorite Mario game. I know, it kind of surprised me, too, but the more I thought about it, the more it just seemed to strike the right balance of approachability/portability, level length and the sort of creativity of the N64 or Galaxy games. I also kind of appreciate its relative gimmick-less-ness… aside from its use of the 3DS hardware and the re-introduction of SMB3’s leaf power-up, it’s as straightforward of a 3D Mario title as you can find.

You can see the runners-up in my All-Time Faves shelf, which I tweak pretty often.

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So now that I consider you the Sonic Adventure expert, how does Sonic Adventure DX compare to the original? I’ve had it for PC for quite a while, and I know it’s a cult favorite for a lot of people. I also have a Dreamcast laying around, and I didn’t know if you thought it was worth trying to find a copy of the original vs. just play the port.

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