Greatest game of all time

Not a lot of driving games getting a mention around here, but for me Pole Position was a work of beauty. Spent a fortune (dinner money) in the local arcade trying to knock a tenth off qualifying time and good enough to get me through my driving test first time. Perfect in every way.

Yes, that was it, Pole Position.

ren

Not a lot of driving games getting a mention around here, but for me Pole Position was a work of beauty. Spent a fortune (dinner money) in the local arcade trying to knock a tenth off qualifying time and good enough to get me through my driving test first time. Perfect in every way.

Yes, that was it, Pole Position.

ren

Triple Screen TX-1 beat the pants off Pole Position

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. No doubt about it, the greatest game ever made. Everyone should play this game. It should be on the national curriculum.

Manic Miner on the Spectrum for perfectly distilled platform brilliance; R-Type and Raiden II in the arcade if you like shooting stuff; Star Wars, the sit-in cabinet, for total immersion in a game; OutRun 2006 Cost-to-Coast on the XBox if you like driving games, or Motorstorm: Pacific Rift on the PS3 if you'd rather go off-road.

Of course, if your preference is puzzle games, then it has to be Buzzsaw+ (Raster-y Pi Edition) in a Speccy emulator on a Raspberry Pi. Or at least, it will be when it's finished...

I haven't heard of half the games mentioned here

But I'm surprised not one person has mentioned it, so here goes: Pokémon. My first one was Ruby, but the amount of time I've poured into that series as a whole is probably huge.

I'm also a huge fan of the two Okami games, they're beautiful and have great, original gameplay.

[stevepdp]

Dragon Age Origins *actually made me cry*. It's the only game whose story and characterisation have been good enough to do that. (And it set me up for a mighty disappointment in DA2, where fully half the characters appeared to have been teleported in from a JRPG and the gameplay made me want to find the devs and hurt them. By spawning behind them.)

I am aware that a game's ability to make you cry might be a particularly female way to judge things.

Not afraid to admit that games occasionally leave me in tears too. Both Final Fantasy VII and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII left me tearful in several cutscenes.

Sometimes the pure awesomeness of some games leaves me joyfully tearful. Portal 2 for example was a game I pre-ordered months in advance, I rode the hype train throughout it's development and when it was finally released it totally lived up to it. Hitting the credits with the great music and such... I was just so happy

There are also some occasions when I get nostalgically tearful, most recently in Sonic Generations and Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2 where they put in suttle references to the music I enjoyed as a kid in the 90's games.

There's this line by Phil Fish (co-developer of FEZ) in the recently released documentary Indie Game: The Movie which spoke to me, "To me, games are the ultimate art form. It's just the ultimate medium. It's the sum total of every expressive medium of all time... made interactive. How is that not... It's AWESOME!".

[stevepdp]

Hmmm, Wizball and Dropzone on the C64 I think, Frontier on the Amiga.

Essential listening for Wizball fans, or anybody who enjoys great music in videogames.

I'm afraid I couldn't stick the drudgery and frustration of Final Fantasy VII's 'game' sections and random battles to get to the best points of the story. And I find it hard to not just suspend but totally warp my disbelief such that a character who I've seen die in battle and get resurrected over and over again should somehow have me crying my eyes out when they get stabbed in a cut-scene. Anyway, I think whoever invented 'random battles' needs to be added to the to-do list of anyone close to perfecting time travel.

But Ocarina of Time and particularly Link's Awakening (an old Game Boy game) in the Legend of Zelda series stand out to me for getting you particularly emotionally involved in their stories and caring about the characters. In the former you want to finish the game to set things right again. In the latter you begin to fear finishing the game for what you know will happen.

The only thing that's brought me close to bawling in a game is Mama's storybook in Mario Galaxy - you get to hear a chapter of this Little-Prince style origin story with gorgeous pastel illustrations for each of the later levels you complete. The last-but-one chapter, how the little girl lost amongst the stars describes how her mama has been waiting for her all the time under the tree on the hill outside their home, and the illustration shows just a hilltop and a tree - oh my.

Hyper Sports in the arcade - love that button bashing
Ancipital on the C64
Level 9 text adventures - great logic puzzles. The Sci-fi series that started with Snowball swallowed hours of me and mate's time.
Portal or Portal 2 - I can't decide. OK Portal 2 for the Cave Johnson lemons speech.
Gridrunner iOS from Llamasoft (actually most of LS's iOS output is worth the next-to-nothing you have to pay for it)

On the Atari STE :

Dungeon Master
Carrier Command
Midwinter

[stevepdp]

I find it hard to not just suspend but totally warp my disbelief such that a character who I've seen die in battle and get resurrected over and over again should somehow have me crying my eyes out when they get stabbed in a cut-scene.

Aeris' death scene is highly regarded as an industry changing moment. The moment when games had become capable of telling stories. A true art form. Kotaku best described the reason recently:

Let me paint you a picture.

You're Cloud, standing in the middle of an ancient city, surrounded by crystals and conch shells and crystallized conch shells. Your hair is irresponsibly spiky. Before you kneels Aeris, that flower girl you're sorta kinda crushing on. Her eyes are closed. She's praying.

Whoosh. Down comes that douchebag Sephiroth, his giant sword pointed directly at Aeris's back and— oh. Oh god. She's dead.

The camera slows down. You watch her body crumple as she falls to the ground. Only thing you can hear is a thumping heartbeat. You're paralyzed. She's not really dead, is she? She can't be. You want to cry. Not yet.

A white orb falls from her body and starts soaring up, then arcing down. Camera follows. The orb falls toward one of the nearby pedestals. Slowly. Gently hits the ground with a clink.

And then. Then. Aeris's Theme starts to play.

Break out the tissues. It's bawling time.

I would however argue that it wasn't just the superb score that made the scene epic, but the whole lead up to it, how unexpected it was, fighting J.E.N.O.V.A. afterwards through Aeris' theme etc.

Heck, even the disc-change that soon followed was an experience. Final Fantasy VII was my first multi-disc game, and it really felt like you had hit an important milestone in an incredible story.

Aeris' death scene is highly regarded as an industry changing moment. The moment when games had become capable of telling stories. A true art form.

I just think it's rubbish storytelling if a character who, according to the character roster, may actually be a corpse at that point in the game due to some random battle, is then walking around in a cut-scene in the first place; the idea that I'm then supposed to be shocked by the death of someone who is already dead and I've seen killed a dozen times or more already is some of the worst excuse for storytelling I've ever heard. But then Japanese RPGs are in a barmy world all of their own.

Spectrum: Attic Attack
Atari ST: Monkey Island (even if it did only have 16 colours)
Snes: Donkey kong country
PC: Doom

[abishur]

Aeris' death scene is highly regarded as an industry changing moment. The moment when games had become capable of telling stories. A true art form.

I just think it's rubbish storytelling if a character who, according to the character roster, may actually be a corpse at that point in the game due to some random battle, is then walking around in a cut-scene in the first place; the idea that I'm then supposed to be shocked by the death of someone who is already dead and I've seen killed a dozen times or more already is some of the worst excuse for storytelling I've ever heard. But then Japanese RPGs are in a barmy world all of their own.

Well it's important to remember in all those battles she was only *mostly* dead. There's a difference between mostly dead and completely dead

The only shocker about Aeris' death was that a mainstream game had taken so long to start to "catch up" with literature and film in such repsects (although, of course, video games were actually doing this way before the Final Fantasy VII crowd bewailingly claimed it as their own ).

I'm guessing that the key factor here is that the majority of gamers are male and Aeris was female pixel hottie . Ultimately, though, Aeris was pretty rubbish plot device, and if you cried over her then can I recommend Chrono Trigger on the SNES or Half Man, Half Machine by Goldie Lookin' chain

FF7 FTW!!!!

square enix has openly admitted they have been unable to do any better than ff7 by saying

"we will only remake ff7 if we can produce a game that will out sell it" (um...does outselling itself count? cause if they just remade it with todays graphics it would sell more than the original)

anyway, back on track. i hated aries, i was shocked that a mainstream game killed off one of the lead characters perminantly, it hadnt been done before (to my knowledge at the time) and was like...WTF!

but once i got over that i was more like BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA YES YES YES YES YES!!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO MORE SNOTTY SCHOOLGIRL CRUSH BS! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA YEES WOOOOOO YEHHAAAWWWW!

hehehe sorry.

although, honestly, in FF7, demons gate boss battle. my god i LOVE that battle! its about the only battle in the game that REALLY gets me screamin at the screen because its one tough fight! i'd honestly say harder than the final sephiroth battles. especially if your not prepared for it.

i keep a save file just prior to it just so i can return and have an awesome prolonged battle with it

Definitely BattleZone has to be among the best EVER, a mixture of FPS and Strategy.
Mechwarrior 2, 3 and 4 Also.
Unreal Tournament.
Quake 3.

I'd have to give nods to Silent Hill 2 for its story. First game I remember having a story that really made me WANT to see how things played out instead of just something you ran to completion. Beyond Good and Evil can get a pass at this too.

Mario / Sonic just for sheer cultural impact. I think it'd be a challenge to find someone who was a kid/teen in the 80's/90's who didn't know SOMEONE who had a copy of one or both of them.

counter strike
counter strike
counter strike
counter strike
and
counter strike

Zelda, Zelda 2, Metroid, Battle Of Olympus, Karnov, Blaster Master, All Castlevania's, All Mario's, Contra, Rygar, Etc.....

7th Guest - I just about wore out the CD-ROM drive I added to my DOS machine - I paid extra for a DOUBLE speed drive.

Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle - in fact all the LucasArts games.

And now I'm in my second (third?) childhood and enjoying Witcher

Hmmm... that would be several, Lets see;

Ghouls and gosts
Golden axe
Lionheart (amiga)
Monkey island
Altered beast
The sword of vermillion
Shadow of the beast
Lands of lore
Doom
Duke nukem
Unreal
Silent hunter

To name a view....

Windjammers for NeoGeo

Well for me it would have to be counterstrike been playing 8 years at an average of 2 hours per day I was fair gobsmacked when I worked it out.

[asb]

Typing of the Dead

No other game I've played has provided so much entertainment while actually honing a real-world skill.

It's tricky but I'm plumping for:

Dungeon Master
Warhead
Rebelstar
Baldur's Gate
Speedball 2
Star Control 2 (UQM)

I'll probably think of many more the second I post this.....