#10: Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. A decent singleplayer, an expansion that added heaping meats of content, and endless custom scenarios for you to play for quite literally
years. This game was so fantastic it spawned an entire genre. Failing to put this on your list indicates you had no childhood involving PC gaming. And that's a shame.
#9: Freelancer. A purely personal pick, but I grew up with this game and often played it with my family. We'd make trade convoys and run from Bretonia to Liberty. The scariest run was always doing a drug run from Kusari space, across Liberty, into Rheinland. Because you'd always have that
one patrol come wandering into the ice field, and someone would have to go and play the lame horse and possible get killed so the others could bullrush the drugs and make retarded sums of money. It was one of the only space simulators I played where I felt like I was legitimately exploring entire solar systems, landing on planets, and had a multitude of options as to what to do with my time: Trade, Fight, Become a Pirate or a Bounty Hunter... The choice was yours.
It also had some pretty baller role play servers. Nothing like going in a fleet patrol and seeing your battleship get hit with torpedoes in the nebulae...
#8: Jade Empire. Bioware RPG's often didn't tread far from established tropes and stereotypes, and while KOTOR and Baldur's Gate are solid games, the combat in both of them aged extraordinarily poorly. This one however, aged well, like a fine wine with a simple but effective combat system and a universe that delves into eastern mythology. With flavourful characters and an utterly beautiful world, it is honestly hard not to fall in love with this title, one of Bioware's classics, and one of their best. In my personal opinion, it is their best.
#7: Rome: Total War. A game of incredible depth and complexity, where every faction played uniquely against one another in a perfect sense of asymmetrical combat. Starcraft had three factions that did this. Rome: Total War did this with
sixteen factions and somehow managed to do it in a remarkable balanced manner. The multiplayer was addicting and extremely entertaining. The only thing that holds this game back from being even higher on this list is the AI, which has never been truly fantastic in Total War save Shogun 2. Still...
That music is fantastic.
#6: X-COM: Apocalypse. Many would go to the original and proclaim it the best but this one had pause-able real time combat right alongside the turn based mechanics. It was just as difficult, and refined the formula the original set out with, balancing the difficulty curve so it didn't instantly wreck you and even taking an attempt at balancing psionics. There were certain small details that shined through as well: Like brainsuckers that got a robotic unit would simply die and the robot wouldn't notice what happened as it reported back to duty for you. And, again,
an incredible soundtrack that still sends chills down my spine. Seriously, give it a listen, it is genuinely chilling and is one of the best soundtracks put into any game. The new X-Com is admirable, but extremely simplified. This one is the best of the series, though the user interface is dated and hard to understand if you haven't used it before, hampering it from going higher on this list despite eating countless hours of my childhood.
#5: Mario 64/Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I have a hard time deciding which of these Nintendo 64 staples is 'superior' to the other but I grew up with this console and I adored it, and these two games
made that console worth owning. They both have good soundtracks, they both have entertaining premises, they will both eat hundreds of hours of your time and leave you with several fond childhood memories.
#4: Morrowind. Skyrim gets an honourable mention, but Morrowind really just sucker punches it for having spears, and not holding my hand like a lost orphan child. It straight up will grind you into a fine powder and throw you into the wind if you tread in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyone can die, and the game means it--even plot important NPC's can bite the bullet and die. Siding with one faction can and does put you at odds with others--no more being a member of the thieves guild and assassins guild and fighters guild and mage's guild all at the same time and becoming grandmaster sensei rank in all of them. The only thing Skyrim beats Morrowind on is the combat system. In Morrowind you can miss a person right in front of you because the Dice Gods feel like pissing in your cereal. Which, naturally, stops it from going into the top three. Other than that, fantastic game.
#3: Thief 1 & 2: Garret is the best thief of all time. Thief is the best stealth game of all time. Anyone who has played this will understand what I mean when I say that the stupid tree forest with the mechanical treants in the hammer pagan temple
still leaves me unsettled and jittery. The atmosphere is thick and rich and the game is as hard as you want it to be. The soundtrack, what little there is to say of it, is solid, the sound engine is amazing, the guards are hilarious, Garret is complex and all sorts of witty and wonderful... This is a game I can consistently come back to and I immediately know its every crevice, knook, and cranny. At the very least it's better than Assassin's Creed. Dishonored gets a special mention for being an obvious spiritual successor to the Thief franchise, and a worthy one at that.
#2: Star Trek: Starfleet Command. A complex yet easily accessible space tactical game where you manage the power of your ship to shields, rearrange shield power on multiple fronts, can overload your torpedoes, send suicide shuttles at Klingons, stop alien devices from eating planets, fight the Gorn, and play peek-a-boo with Romulans around a mother!@#$ing black hole. I have so many good memories about this game. Like one time I was stuck orbiting a black hole, I was slowly slipping in until I got my engineer to focus all the power he had and all the repair resources he had into the engines while the enemy fired everything he had to try and stop me. I managed to escape as he fell into the black hole.
I'm serious this is honestly probably the single best attempt to get Star Trek into a game and they nailed it. 10/10.
#1: The only strategy game to make me cry when I failed to protect the homeworld I spent so much time searching for in the original... Then gave me a fleet of warships in real time 3-dimensional space and told me who I should gut for revenge.
This is also the only strategy game I know where you don't want to lose ships because you can scrap them to build different ships. Meaning that a primary method of resource acquisition was to scavenge parts from destroyed battleships and to capture and dismantle enemy frigates. This meant that combat was just as much a game of preserving precious supply lines as it was protecting your mothership, and due to limited line of sight, it was very much a game of hide and seek. You could even tell the clever commanders apart from the infantile ones: The clever commanders knew to send their ships underneath the enemy, because the enemy ships would have to rotate downward to counter-attack and lower armour plating was weakest.
It's the only strategy game to fully incorporate three dimensional warfare and truly nail it. It's the only strategy game to make me honestly cry and feel a true seething hatred for the enemy. It's the only strategy game I know that has heavy arabic themes instead of your stereotypical western atmosphere.
It's Homeworld 2. One of the greatest games of all time.
Shout-OutsPokemon. C'mon
everybody has played this. A lot still do. I still have my copy of Pokemon Yellow around here somewhere...
The Sims. Yes, I know, it's a retarded game, and we all pirate the shit out of it because it's massively overpriced. But you know what? Best pool drowning simulator of all time. Drown you little bastards.
Who is your God now, Gregory?!The Tycoon Series of games: There's probably a Tycoon game for everyone. Mine is Railroad Tycoon. Choo choo!
Valve Games: Portal, Left4Dead, Half-Life, and an engine that has spawned countless entertaining cheap products for me to consume. And Steam. All Hail the Gaben, Lord God Emperor of the Sales.
Mortal Kombat. "FINISH HIM!"
Soul Calibur. I wonder if they just left the typo in the last name intentionally or if they just had to roll with it.
And countless other games I am probably forgetting at this moment.