Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
I’ve been playing since the NES and despite being from a low income family I had the luck of being able to play and own many consoles over the 3 decades of my life, plus some pc.
If you ask me right now? Resident Evil 4 (2005).
A before and after in gaming, to this day still extremely fun to play even for casuals but 20 years ago it was THE masterpiece. And everyone took notice of it, everyone played it, even players that didn’t cared about resident evil. The gameplay was so good that it got photocopied by everyone right after in the action genre.
Arguably the last big innovator in videogames minus Minecraft and… PUBG (Fortnite did it better I know).
Try to NOT pick your favourite game, that’s a different thing.
The Witcher 3.
Maybe Halo 3? The amount of content, the custom games, the competitive gaming, all of it was just so good and loved by so many people.
Diablo
The first multi-player lobby over battlenet. Epic lore, great gameplay, created an entire genre.
Roguelike games are named after Rogue, not Diablo.
Usually Diablo and Diablo-likes are called ARPGs, a term that originally just meant “Action RPG” but is now mainly used to describe games similar to Diablo. Isometric, real-time, character builder RPGs.
But Diablo took it and made it real time, creating hack and slash action rpgs. I’ve never heard anyone refer to Path of Exile or similar as a roguelike. Diablo’s development might have started as a roguelike but making it real time turned it into something new.
I would counter & say Diablo 2 is the better game for expanding on everything that the original did & making it better by adding more.
Diablo is also the first game I can think of with a paid expansion. Hellfire was a 3rd party created add-on to put more content into the game. If you want to talk about creating a “genre”, that’s the conversation to have.
Zelda, the entire series/franchise. The OG RPG. Many argue it isn’t an RPG because the original you couldnt level up but when I think of RPG, I think you are a character and you go on an adventure. It also serves as a good gateway to fixed RPGs where everyone basically has the same story. And to strategy video game as a whole. Also, it was Nintendo’s first RPG, when PlayStation and Xbox still did not exist. And the Best console is Nintendo since it lasted so long. Many of the other consoles feel like less of a game and more like your are in an interactive movie.
The entire series, are you sure about that?
Just cause three. blow shit up, kill bad guys, just enough story to explain it all. even better, it strikes a good balance of minimal story and compelling story, which a lot of games like that kinda suck at.
And everything that you are supposed to target is red, as it should be.
I remember “learning” many years ago that all barrels that are red are obviously explosive. Just Cause dialed that up several notches.
Never understood people’s obsession with RE4. It completely changed the series from survival horror to action shooter, as if we didn’t have enough of those already. One zombie used to be terrifying. Now there’s hundreds coming at you at once and they go down easily. They removed most of the puzzles too and dumbed down the ones they left. Somebody please tell me why everyone loves this game!?
Give me the first two Resident Evils over the 4th one any day. Hell, I rather play RE3 than RE4.
What’s more relevant to the world? What felt like an evolution? I love almost every RE but 4 did history for the entire gaming universe, not just horror.
Mario bros 3 - it felt like a SNES game
God I fucking loved that game.
I feel like the NES version was better than the SNES one actually
100% agree. SMB3 on NES just had so much more stuff going on compared to SMW on the SNES. Mini games galore, secrets up the wazoo, and the muthafuckin’ SHOE. For reals using that bad boy was like stepping into a goddamn Gundam.
I think they meant smb3 that was included in super mario all stars, not smw :p
Yup
That was one of my front runners for a long time, but after recently playing them side by side, SM World is much better.
XCOM
You better be talking about DOS X-COM UFO Defense or I’ll send a blaster bomb down your gullet :o
…I sadly didn’t know about the series until the new ones in 2012. I’ve played the hell out of them and do want to go back and play the DOS ones sometime.
The remakes are solid for sure but they’re pretty different games that don’t quite fully capture the spirit of open ended gameplay you could do in the originals.
For example:
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Grenade relay involving 5 soldiers passing across the map until it lands at the foot of a Muton your out of actions scout ended his turn next to
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Blow a hole in the roof of a landed UFO and drop your soldiers in behind aliens watching the doors expecting a conventional assault
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Drive a tank into a single family home to dig out an alien hiding in a closet
Amazing. Some of my favorite experiences in the new ones have also been creative problem-solving, like rocketing open a hole in a wall to allow my snipers to see through, or trying to carry my injured/dead soldiers with the good loot to extraction when I have to cut my losses and run.
Sounds like I should just go ahead and play the old ones too. I started one up earlier this year, but it wasn’t clear what all the buttons did, and I didn’t have the focus to figure it out. I need to look up the manual or watch a video or something.
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Civilization series.
Civ IV defined my middle school years.
Played on switch, waste of money for me lol
So many hours on civ II. Never did beat deity. Such a fun game
So many hours gone…days probably
One of the first PC games I played in 92… can’t believe I’m still playing it
Ocarina of time. All Zelda games since are to some degree compared to it in terms of how successful it is monetarily, gameplay and story-wise. So many modern adventure games are based on this one game. It’s the game that finally made target tracking in 3D work. It’s so well thought out, that a blind streamer is able to play the game probably better than I ever will. If most common people know of “zelda” it’s because of this game. There are so many memes from Zelda in general. It’s one of the few games from my childhood that I will replay for the rest of my life.
Red Dead Redemption 2, no contest.
The game world is so close to feeling real… the physics and horse handling feel basically perfect. They took their time to make you feel like you were in 19th century America.
I’ll disagree with that, it’s sooo slow. Perhaps it’s just my ADHD but man it hurts to play sometimes 🥲
Yeah I agree. The world is incredible, but the missions and gameplay not so much.
Tedious gameplay almost ruins it
Metal Gear Solid. Every stealth game that has come out since has borrowed something from MGS. Also it is the first game I can really remember that nailed that cinematic video game feel we see so often these days.
MGS also brought us what I lovingly refer to as the “Metal Gear Solid Voice Acting Benchmark.”
Is your big budget first party title not voice acted? Why the fuck not? Konami managed to make every single line of dialog in Metal Gear Solid voice acted, without exception, apparently by hiring randos off the street if they had to. So what’s your excuse?
I’m lookin’ at you, Nintendo.
Absolutely! The voice acting was like nothing else at the time! MGS totally raised the bar and changed the landscape for what we come to expect out of a game. It’s a true masterpiece.
Probably Doom for being one of the first games with real mod support
And fear. Actual fear. I remember the demo scaring the shit out of us.
Dark Souls remastered taught me how to look at life differently. I now accept failure as part of the process of growing, not something that should be avoided at all costs.
Also it taught me how to parry like a G.
It doesn’t hold up but while it was happening I don’t think there was a better gaming experience than Vanilla WoW. Obviously for some it wasn’t the first MMO experience, but for many it was, and it was pure magic.
The random friends made, and mortal enemies you would drop everything you were doing to try and kill. Spending 6 hours clearing a dungeon(read wailing caverns) for the first time with random people you met in chat. Getting your first mount, walking into molten core with 39 other people and killing your first raid boss. Getting your first epic. The stupidity of barrens chat/whatever the equivalent the scumbag alliance had. The first time you had guild mates come to your rescue when some no-life higher level person was camping you and it devolving into an impromptu war between everyone in the zone and their friends. That time you pulled off an epic 1 v 2. Shit talking all the other classes in your guilds class chat during raids.
The drama ohh the drama, the e-gf/bf that became peoples husbands and wives, the guild leaders wife e-humping half the guild. Relationships destroyed because someone would rather spend their time in azeroth that just about anything else.
Drooling over the gear the best players on the server had. Battling on the front lines of alterac valley all night, going to bed and rejoining the same battle, sometimes to cheers from your fellow soldier that you had rejoined the fight.
I don’t think there will ever be anything like it again, we know too much, have access to to much info, but for that brief period in time wow was the greatest game ever.
FFXIV is better. I like the fights better and the lore better. It’s a great social platform, but I think it has jumped the shark. Still a great concept. For very similar reasons.
