Galactic Civilizations II

Sins Rebellion

FreeSpace Open

C&C Tiberian Sun

Mass Effect series 

Top 5 Vintage Outdoor Games


1. Pétanque
2. Croquet
3. Rounders
4 Skittles5. Parlour Games
==============================
Top 5 Modern games

Dragon Age
Never Winter Nights
Knights of the Old Republic
Civilization IV
Starcraft

Can't pick just 5 each -

Kings Bounty - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Bounty - The original, better than any of the HOMM's that came from it

John Madden Football - The first one (1989?).  Countless hours were spent making plays which I can not figure out why they don't have that feature on the console version.  They didn't have the rights to all the player names like they do now, so Joe Montana was Joe "Idaho"

MoM - My favorite game of all time

Gold Box Games (Pool of radiance) - PoR was the only one I got to play enough to get to the end, wonderfully written games all of them, loved the turn based tactical combat, best way to do these types of games IMO

Might and Magic II - Best map ever, hand drawn, magnificent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cron.jpg (picture does not do it justice), probably have more hours in this game then any other, however this number is skewed by the fact that you had to replace the floppy every time you went into a new world area.  A long, long, long game, time travel was involved like it didn't take long enough to explore the current version of the world, never did beat it, the amiga 128 was state of the art when I started playing it, by the time I gave up Pentium 60's were being released.

Mechwarrior - Really fun real time gameplay with (at the time) excellent 3D graphics.  Great story, very cool open ended gameplay, ahead of it's time, damn shame that all the original mech's are locked up in copyright hell, loved that shadowhawk.

X-Com - Maybe my second favorite all time

Sim City - I mean, they had scenarios for the Chicago fire and Godzilla rampaging in Tokyo, would more can you ask for.

"New" Games List:
Baulders Gate I and Ice wind Dale
Oblivion and Skyrim
starcraft I and II - Easily my favorite new game
Warcraft I/II/III
Warlords Battlecry II/III
Neverwinter Nights
Fallout 3

I'll do mine by 5 favorite genre

4x: (tie) Master of Orion 2 / Master of Orion 3 modded with Pedxing Chocolate mod

RTS: Total Annihilation

MOBA: Demigod

RPG: Skyrim

Space Adventure: (tie) Star flight / Star Control 2

Good call! That game was one of the hardest I've ever played. I never beat it either, I got darn close (only because I accidentally stumbled on some magic fountain that gave all my characters an extra permanent 500 HP when they had ~40 before) on the Genesis version. There were the long nights where my friend and I would take turns, there was a mighty cheer when we beat the Spider Queen.

Also good call on Mechwarrior, I remember getting Mechwarrior:Mercenaries bundled with our new Sidewinder joystick... really felt like you were driving one of those things with that.

Ha, yes, that joystick was the tit's, I remember my friend had it it was fantastic for any kind of simulation including simulating driving Giant Robots!

In no particular order other than the amount of integrated time I have spent with these games:

Master of Orion 2 (no further comment needed on this one: just fantastic; too bad none of the new genre in this 4X vein allow similar tactical combat; you could really do some master attacks)

Civilization 2 (Civ IV and gasp Civ V have a lot to recommend and I have spent much time with them but Civ 2 was the most ahead of its time at the time)

European Universalis 3 (very surprised not to see this on anyone else's list)

Imperialism II (saw that one someone else's list; also wondered why the franchise never had future versions)

SimCity 2000

Galactic Civilizations 2

Sins of Solar Empire

Swords of Stars ONE (amazing how messed up TWO is) 

... and somehow I think Hearts of Iron 1, 2, 3 ought to be in this list but the developer just "never got it fully right," mostly because I think the AI couldn't do well with the complexity of the game.

But what does this link say about the folks on this forum?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games

Interesting. MOO3 was SUCH a disappointment. I have not tried this mod. Does it save MOO3 --- is it worth an evening trying out the mod?

Forgot about Age of Empires/Myth.  There are some good games in there, the various Sims games owning the top spots....I don't get it.

Oooh boy.. I'll have to pare down this list. Best probably to stick to the ones that I'd only play again without batting an eye (the ones that survive nostalgia and are actually still fun to play despite graphics), or that took up so much of my life in the past.

Vintage (DOS, Console, no particular order):

Master of Magic
Master of Orion II
Final Fantasy Tactics
Tactics Ogre (Ogre Battle series) (You could turn a character into a LICH! I mean, c'mon!)
Thief Gold, plus the Thievery mod for the original Unreal engine (Gold was 1 & 2, but it was basically the same game continued, and Thievery was simply an amazing multiplayer experience).

Recent (no particular order):

Freelancer (not very recent, but windows based so not vintage) (The original game sucked me in, and the modding made this game still playable for me today).
Sins of a Solar Empire
Everquest 2 (see below)
Left4Dead 1 and then 2
Prototype

I list Everquest 2 even though I can never play it again. With 2 children now, I simply do not have time to invest properly in MMOs. But if you counted up all my played time amongst my many, many characters... it totaled over 3.5 years (that's in-game time!). It makes the list simply because of that, and because I still get the nostalgia and urge from time to time.

There's some honorable mentions out there: the Mechwarriors (incl. the very first DOS one! Loved the freedom of the game), the D&D RPG games (Menzoberranzan, Stone Prophet, the Baldur's Gate series including the console ones!, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights), the Elder Scrolls series, the Sim Cities games, the various MMOs I've played (DDO, the original Everquest, and my brief stint in WoW), the various quest games (King's Quest, Police Quest, Day of the Tentacle, etc, etc), and the hundreds of NES games I played and bubble into my mind from time to time (Populous, Immortal, Final Fantasy series, etc).

Good lord, thinking back, I think I may have played way too much video games.

Top 10 Games in no order:

Dwarf Fortress

Civ 3

Stronghold 2

Warlords Battlecry 3

Dominions 3

GalCiv 2

Majesty 1

Rome: Total War

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

Minecraft

Extra slot for MMOs:

GW

Wurm

SWG

Vanguard

With that list of best seilling games one also has to remember when some of these games were released.

But sims.. really? No wonder they keep making them then, that always puzzled me

And I cannot believe you put Vanguard on your list. At least when I played it, as it was just released it was bugged insanely. Not even beta worthy. A bard running 3 times faster than a mounted charachter as soon as it picked up drums and off-handers displaying 7 digit crit numbers.. shudders... the map looked awesome though, I just couldnt get over all the bugs to warrant further play.

FAvourite games rated in each category from top down. first being best etc. :

Oldies:

Masters of Orion 2

 Warcraft 2

UFO Enemy Unknown

Baldurst Gate 1-2/Icewind Dale 1-2/Planescape: Torment

Magic the Gathering :  Shandalar

less Oldies:

Deus Ex - in my opinion, one of the best PC games of all times. Everything was friggin perfect. Music, voice acting, graphics (for its time), story, gameplay.. all of it simply brilliant.

Morrowind - the amount of time sunk into this game...

Monkey Island 3 <3

Gothic 1 through 3 - number 4 is a disgrace

OpenTTD

New(er) titles:

Skyrim and oblivion

Sins of a Solar Empire

Galactic Civilizations 2

Civ V (I loved all from 2 to 5)

Mass Effect 1 (and a little 2)

MMOs:

EvE Online - My favourite MMO hands down. By far the best one out there now (and the hardest probably) and as soon as I set food on Danish soil subs will be reopened.

SWG - So I met some guys back in the days in EvE from fountain alliance and we started hanging out on their TS right.. one day, one of them says that hes into SWG.. and I am like.. alright good on you mate, so long as its conscentual. Later turned into be a MMO and it hooked me, it hooked me unlike anything ever did. Slept when servers hit maitanence at 5 am, got up again at 11 am resumed where I left off... half a year later I came to realize where I was headed. Quite scary.

Guild Wars - Also introduced through EvE and though quite adicting too with GvG and all.

Dark Ages of Camelot : They just dont make the third person fantasy mmo's like this anymore

WoW from Lich King and onward was pants, but I loved Burning Crusade, brilliant

Others.. serriously awesome games are too many to list.

Colonization? Nobody mentioned this?

Dungeon Keeper

Quake 1-3

Duke Nukem 3D - thumbs up for pixelated boobs.

Armada2526

The Secret World

Just Cause 2

Saints Row 3

Crackdown 1

Burnout Paradise (I love the newer Need for Speeds as well but they don't do the full on city thing.)

And Arkham City deserves an honorable mention.

Geez, another game that totally slipped my mind. This game sucked in I don't know how many hours. I was a big sucker for Caesar 3, then they came out with Pharaoh which was even better and I sank even more hours into. When this came out I thought, "Well, it will be nice for a change of venue but I don't know how they can make it better than Pharaoh." But wow, this is the best game in the Sierra citybuilder series... and still holds up today. They fixed every little niggling problem I had with Pharaoh and then some. Combine that awesome citybuilder gameplay with the extra-long campaign and great historical references, this one is a clear winner.

Other games that slipped my mind that other people put on their lists:

Dominions 3

Freelancer

Dungeon Keeper 2

Heh a lot of games slipped my mind too, but we were only supposed to have 10. I forgot DAOC, EVE, SoaSE, Morrowind, and a few others.

Emperor and Dom 3 are probably in my top 5 if I actually had to rank my favorite games. Dom 3 has the most amazing magic system ever, even more than WBC3. I would complain that its short on econ, but if you added econ a single late game turn on a 1500 prov map would never end. Magic site searching kinda takes the place of econ also.

The only thing I disliked about Emperor really was that it had such a lackluster military system, but then it was a citybuilder/sim and not an RTS so it certainly makes sense.

In my opinion Need for Speed stopped being truly great after the third one, which was amazing

I totally would have in my opening post, but the cut line had to be made somewhere...not to mention that it had to go up against MoM.

Colonizations IS a really good game though.

Can anyone tell me what EU3 has that EU2 didn't?

Better graphics, resolution scaling, the AI can handle the merchants for you...

Sorry didn't see this until now

Enjoying Moo3 In a nutshell

Even regular moo3 is full of terribly bad bugs that need to be fixed before you can even try and get a feel for the way the game is meant to be played. Here is the site for that. Look at the "fixes" section... I mean, just wow. Entire game mechanics just do not even work.

The chocolate mod, in addition to adding the best 3rd party mods like the mentioned bug fixes and enhanced UI mods, adjusts the way Moo3 was meant to be played.

-It puts an emphasis on early expansion by migration (so you just do not power build colony ships for victory)
-It staggers the tech tree logically
-It reduces the constant need to micro manage DEAs with techs that reduce surplus into useful productivity.

This gives you a chance to explore game aspects of empire macromanagement without wanting to pull out your hair. (because moo3 does not allow you to do this properly the way the production techs work)

Gives you a chance to see how race attributes actually effect the game (because in regular Moo3, production races are best because Colony Ships basically manufacturer population out of thin air)

I like exploring the concept of "make the best of the hand you are dealt with" in games, and Moo3 with chocolate does an excellent job of this, in the framework of macromanaging a large empire. (if this not appealing to you, this may not change your opinion of moo3)

It will also greatly help if you understand the way the diplomacy AI works in normal Moo3, because you can do some truly fantastic things in this game that you can't in others. The way the diplomacy AI works was never really showcased or made to be understood, so you need to browse the forums to get it to work for you)

Hope that helps...

Where is the chocolatev0.999.zip file?  I can't find any active links anywhere.  I just purchased MOO3 from GOG to see how it was with the chocolate mod.

My Top 10 PC games:

1. KOTOR

2. Shogun 2

3. XWing Alliance

4. Mech Warrior 4

5. Aliens Vs Predator 2

6. Medieval 2 Total War

7. Age of Kings

8. Jedi Knight 2 Outcast

9. Janes Fighters Anthology 

10. Duke Nuken 3d

Link to chocolate mod

Sorry, I really feel like a dork harping about the virtues of chocolate 0999, while having misplaced my copy and not noticing all the links for it are dead.

I got a copy from one of the MOO3 community members and uploaded it to my box account.

I know it's off topic, but I'll put a link for it here in case anyone else decides to buy MOO3 from GoG to give it a go specifically on my recommendation.

I still have the MoO3 disks buried in a pile of dust around here somewhere. I'm pretty sure I was one of the few who actually enjoyed the game... there was something neat about seeing those swarms of little fighters closing in on something. It did get boring somewhat quickly after I realized the AI was very very bad. Perhaps if I have some time I'll give the chocolate mod a try.

1. Homeworld

2. Sins of a Solar Empire, Entrenchment, and Diplomacy

3. Stronghold and Stronghold Crusader

4. Age of Empires II: Age of Kings and The Conquerors

5. Age of Empires and Rise of Rome

Honorable mentions: 0 A.D., StarCraft and Brood War, Diablo II and Lord of Destruction, Command & Conquer: Generals and Zero Hour, Stronghold 2, and Star Wars: Republic Commando