My Favourite Video Games Ever.

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41

I beat Demon’s Souls over spring break. As soon as the end credits rolled, my beard grew an inch, I immediately got a girlfriend and slapped her in the mouth, and then I drank a steak. So that’s my favorite video game in a long dang time. I could compose a list, but I’ve played so very many…

Oh, and since you brought it up, FFVII may have been a little weak, but FFVIII was obviously designed for the tiniest of girl-babies. Honestly, I think the last FF game that was made with any sort of challenge in mind was Tactics. FFXIII just looks embarrassing.

42

Tactics is about as challenging as the baby toy where you match the blocks to the holes of the same shape.

All you have to do is make everyone a lancer and then level them a bit.

FFVII can be difficult if you want to achieve 100% completion. I believe it is Ruby Weapon (Maybe Emerald) under the water that you get to with the Shin-Ra sub, and I’m sorry, but that boss is no picnic.

In fact, I might argue that FFVII was more difficult than FFVI (Japan FFIII) because Magi Master on the tower of Kefka was the only difficult boss in that game. That boss was actually pretty easy, though, if you knew that Super Balls always dealt 9,999 damage and went around and acquired about ten of those.

43

The only video game worth playing is Command and Conquer: Generals. Of course some others like Mario, Halo, etc can be somewhat amusing as well, but ultimately pointless.

44

“Pointless”! :laughing:

I take it that playing C&C: Generals is useful because it’s practice for the tactics of real war… Hail Caesar!

45

Fuck yes. Kefka is easily the coolest villain Squenix (Square-Enix) ever came up with.

My list isn’t in any particular order, and only includes those games my sleep deprived brain can think of at the moment:

I might actually have to break this down into console, as I’m a long time gamer with a better memory than criteria for “favorite”

Arcade
Pong
Q-Bert
Pac-Man
Asteroids
Centipede

NES
Super Mario Bros I - III
Battle Toads (stupid bike sequences got me every time, but it left me craving more!)
Battle Toads and Double Dragons
Ninja Gaiden I - VI (Arguably the hardest damned games in existence)
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!
Gauntlet I and II (who doesn’t remember “Red Warrior is IT”?)

SNES
Super Mario World
Super Mario RPG
Final Fantasy VI
Mario Kart
Chrono Trigger
Contra III (didn’t play much of the others, so I’m only listing this one)
Clay Fighters Series
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
The Lost Vikings

N64
Super Mario World 64
Mario Kart 64
007: Goldeneye
Donkey Kong 64
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

Gamecube
Mario Kart Double Dash
007: Everything or Nothing (the coop made this game amazing)
Ikaruga (stupid hard, but freakin’ fun, too)
Prince of Persia I - III

Playstation
Chrono Cross
Final Fantasy Tactics

Playstation II
Final Fantasy XII

Playstation III
Call of Duty 4
Call of Duty 4-2 (Yeah, yeah, it’s technically 6, but I call it this to irritate my nerdier friends)
Demon’s Souls (soul-crushingly difficult at later stages of the game…and it had a PvP boss, the boss was actually another player, if you played online)

XBox 360
Dead Space
Left 4 Dead I and II
Dead Rising

Gameboy
Pokemon Red/Blue (come on…who wasn’t a closet poke-fan back in the day? Fuck the rest of the series, the first two were amazing)

PC
Daggerfall
Marrowwind
Oblivion
F.E.A.R.
F.E.A.R. II
Half Life
Half Life II
Portal
Unreal
Unreal II
Unreal Tournament GOTY Edition (had awesome proximity mines that taunted victims…so freakin’ sweet)
Tribes Vengeance (‘Skiing’ system was pretty innovative and fun to use, though the occasional mortar shell ruined your day)
Bioshock (have yet to play the sequel, but I’m certain it will also make the list)
Fallout III (sadly I have yet to play its predecessors)
Deus Ex
Starcraft
Diablo I and II
Warcraft I - III
World of Warcraft (due to the stupid amount of time I put into this damnable game, it has to make the list)
Duke Nukem Series (yes, even the first two 2D platformer Duke Nukems were amazing)
Doom I and II (Doom III was pretty bad in comparison to its predecessors)
Quake I - III (there’s a web browser version of Quake III here if you’re interested)
Black and White I and II
Dungeon Keeper (the sequel wasn’t all that great, but the original is a classic)
Evil Genius (it could get slow at times, but it was well worth it for the devious trap systems, like a wind machine blowing an agent into a piranha tank)
Worms (all of them are great, with exception to that Bubble Bobble rip-off version ‘Worms Blast!’)

Flash Games
Bloons Tower Defense 3 and 4 (stupid addicting flash games…)

The list is large enough for now, though be warned it may grow larger. And, yes, these are all games that, if given the chance to play again right now, I would enjoy each and every moment of it.

46

Someone hasn’t tried FFXII’s side bosses…

47

Seeing these games makes me want to pimp one of the greatest websites around: Good Old Games.

www.gog.com

Plenty of awesome titles, for under $10.

Enlarge your penis!

48

I LOVE YOU FOR ALL OF ETERNITY FOR SHARING THIS SITE!

i76, Fallout, Betrayal at Krondor!
You sir…ROCK!

49 
And re-load your saved game every time you don't do a battle perfectly, because if a character is KO'd for more than three turns, he's dead forever.  Just because everybody who plays it exploits the save system to avoid the consequences, doesn't mean they aren't there.

Besides, every game is easy if you go on the internet and ask the world, “OMG, what’s the best class to play so I can beat this??” I can’t imagine anybody playing Tactics, and making all their characters lancers for any other reason- it’s not like you’d be having any fun.

Yeah, a couple of the optional bosses are pretty hard. The main problem with FFVII’s difficulty is, the dumber you are, and the more time you spend wandering around lost, the higher a level you are for each boss fight. If you don’t know how to play video games ,you’ll be a good 30 levels higher than someone who does by the time you stumble your way through to the end, and the monsters don’t scale with your level in that game, like they did in Tactics, and some of the FFs after. So an experienced gamer will reach most of the bosses at a level where their super attack nearly one-shots your whole party, and a clod will reach the same boss fight and not have to heal through the whole thing.

Yeah, that seems like another one of those “It’s easy if some guy on the internet tells you how to beat it” situations. I could be way off as I haven’t played that one yet, but I’ve run into a lot of people who, when they say a game is easy, they mean it’s easy if they have their nose buried in a strategy guide as they play.

50

The lancers are used predominantly for their physical attack power and the fact that they can jump in the event that you are engaged in a battle with an enemy who is also a strong attacker, or can attack from a distance. Personally, it seems like basic strategy to me to either keep them grouped up (but not too grouped up due to enemy attacks with a wide effect range) or at least in pairs of two that way if someone gets KO’d, you can just hook them up with some Phoenix Down.

That’s just me, obviously I can’t prove that I don’t exploit the save system to avoid the consequences, but I don’t. I fight every battle to the bitter end, but typically I don’t end up with just one or two of my characters KO’d either, it usually ends up being a complete ass-whipping when I lose, which is what the save system is for.

I typically play every game of this nature twice. The first time I play a game, my goal is to beat it as quickly as possible and I’m usually pretty good at determining the correct strategy to do so. Sometimes I’m wrong, for instance, the first time I played the original Final Fantasy, I thought I could start everyone off as a fighter and plow through it. Dead wrong. I ended up playing for quite awhile before starting the whole thing over from the beginning because it was completely hopeless.

The second time I play is when I play for fun, usually I’ll just screw around and figure out what all of the different types of characters can do. That, and I’ll also try to achieve 100% completion.

That’s an excellent point, and probably one of the only downfalls with that particular game, and probably also with Final Fantasy VI before it. Your options are to either get completely lost because you do not know what you are doing, or do a bunch of unnecessary levelling at the end. A friend of mine would always go to some map location where the enemies have no chance of killing him, even given a prolonged amount of time (that and someone would be equipped with Phoenix) and set his turbo controller to do nothing except attack and scroll through the fight end screen. I forget for which game he did that, it was either one or the other.

I generally just try to spread the levelling out, if I find a location where I like the random encounters, I’ll hang around there and pick up anywhere from 2-4 levels, then play through until I find another location I like. Of course, if there is a random enemy giving an inordinate amount of experience points, then you have to hang out there for awhile.

I figured it out by myself, but the Super Balls seem to be the only way to do it. I’m not going to lie to you about this one, I probably died at least fifty times before I killed that bastard, but he was still the only difficult boss in that game. He was impervious to physical attacks, magic spells were as likely to help him as they were to deal damage to him because he had a move called, “Wall Change,” which altered his strengths and weaknesses. You could not easily scan him because he always had reflect cast on himself, and when you bounced a scan off of yourself with reflect (which would often hit another member of your own party anyway) he immediately wall changed again, so that was a pointless endeavor. You could cast Ultima, which either hit him in the mid-5000’s or did nothing, it usually did nothing.

Long story short, I tried every spell and every item until I found that Super Ball always dealt 9,999 damage to him. Of course, I didn’t have enough Super Balls to kill him, so I had to go all over the world to try to find more.

On the one hand it sucked, but on the other it didn’t because it was the only challenge in the whole game.

Just to prove my point, as you can see here:

finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Master

My way is apparently not the best way to do it, nor is it even mentioned.

EDIT: That wiki-thing seems to suggest that simply wearing the reflect ring is enough to beat it. I don’t see how this can be the case because he does his, “Wall Change,” even when he gets hit with a reflected attack, so the attack that he attempts to hit you with (which gets reflected) is just as likely to help him as it is to harm him. The thing is right that it must be the reflect ring as opposed to casting reflect, because if you cast reflect on yourself, then he just starts bouncing magic attacks off of himself at you.

51 
 I'm pretty much the opposite of that.  When I play a game, it's usually to express my creativity within the system, use what I think is fun and interesting, and overcome whatever shortcomings my choices provide me. Sometimes I come up with 'rules', like, "I wonder if I can do this without any spell casters".  When I played FFT, my main character was an Oracle/Geomancer, and my other choices were similar. I don't think I had any hard fighters/lancers. 
   I'm also not much of a completionist, especially when it comes to RPGs. I cherish the things I don't do as much as the ones I do - the choice to go here [i]instead[/i] of there seems dimished to me if I load a previous saved state (or indeed start over) to see what 'there' entailed. So it's rare for me to play through again.
   I generally take it for granted that if I wanted to figure out the easiest/best way to beat something, I could, and I don't. Seems like it would take away from the experience for me. 

Really, just about any RPG is like this- they're all easy if you want to do the Tedious Thing, whether it's level grinding, or only using that one weapon the internet told you to use, or playing nothing but one class, or putting all your points in Fireball, or whatever. In Oblivion you can max just about any skill you want by setting a brick on the fire button and going to Burger King.  That's just a consequence of the level of choice in games now.  Honestly, if you measure a games difficulty in terms of how hard it is when you play it the easiest way you possibly can, nothing has been a significant challenge since completely static platform games like Mario where all you can do is play the way they tell you until you do it right. 
 But final fantasy VIII was still obviously made for babies.

Generally I don’t consider leveling in my play unless something happens in the game to convince me I absolutely have to. The Persona games are like that- good plays if you like challenge.

I just started FFVI a couple days ago, so we’ll have to suspend that part of the conversation a while!

52

I know what you mean. Usually, if I determine that a game has such replay value that I want to play it a third time, then I will play with some handicaps on myself. I’ve went through various FF games on a few occasions, in fact, where I self-imposed a rule like, “I am not allowed to physically attack at all, unless the enemy in question is completely impervious to all magic and summons.”

The Madden games are another good example. I once played an entire season and playoffs without calling one single rushing play, regardless of the circumstances. As you know, many of those games are designed to learn (in a limited way) so if you are doing nothing but passing, it will assume you are going to pass. Oddly enough, if you have a huge lead in the fourth quarter, and have done nothing but pass the entire game, the game will still assume that it needs to defend against the run.

That’s interesting, there’s not really much else I can say to that, but it is interesting.

I think that those are all true statements. With Morrowind, you could pretty much do the same thing as what you said with Oblivion, except it wouldn’t work with physical attacks in Morrowind, because a physical attack must connect for it to factor into a level increase. I would argue that if someone wishes to play the game in such a fashion, though, that they should be forced to sit through and do the tedious thing as opposed to cheating.

I might check out that series if I ever get a PS console again. The only reason I’ve ever had any PS consoles has been for the FF series, and I’ve usually ended up selling them after playing every current game in the series, or sometimes I’ll just borrow a console to play them.

53

No conversation about challenging video games is complete without talking about Demon’s Souls. Probably the most innovated PS3 title to date, and hard as hell. It’s amazing, but the hardest thing about the game is meta stuff like how saving works, and what happens when you die. I hadn’t realized how much those sorts of issues have really ruined a lot of games until I played DS.

54

Haven’t played Demon’s Souls, but I hear ya on saving and problems after dying being a pain in the ass. For nonlinear games I prefer the option of saving whenever you want, for linear at least automatic at various checkpoints. It’s one thing to try to not die, it’s another to be so tedious and overcautious–in order to avoid a pain in the ass restart–that it makes the game less fun than it could be.

Did a quick wikipedia read on Demon’s Souls. It does sound interesting. How would you compare/contrast it to something like Fallout 3 (if you’ve played it)?

55

I’ll play that if I get a chance.

56

I’ve played Fallout 3 and Demon’s Souls, and I love them both right to death, but they are very different things. Fallout 3 isn’t even a little bit challenging- the idea is for you to find a unique way to experience the content, but whether or not you are capable of making it through the content is never in doubt.

With Demon’s Souls, what you’re talking about with the ‘tedious and overcautious’ is precisely what makes the game what it is. If you’ve played the first Resident Evil, it would remind you of that. Actually having to plan in advance how to deal with a threat that’s around the corner, backing off when you think something ahead is too much for you, because it’s smarter to take your loot back to base than to risk losing it all when you die…

…that’s right. In Demon’s Souls, you collect souls (ala Devil May Cry or God of War) from everything you kill, and you use this to upgrade your weapons, learn spells, improve your stats, and so on. If you get killed (and you will), you lose every unspent soul you have. These souls appear on your bloodstain where you died. If you can fight your way back to it from the beginning of the level, you can reclaim those souls. But if you die AGAIN, a new bloodstain forms at your new point of death, and the old stain (along with the souls there) are gone forever.

Also, when you die, the place where you died may become harder. Warning you now- if you spam yourself in an area you have no business exploring yet, the game will punish you. There’s 5 worlds, and I had myself locked out of one of them for a week because I made that mistake.

That’s why the save system is so important. In such a system, you’d be tempted to cheat- get an autosave or save point every time you’re about to do everything challenging. That’s precisely what ruins just about every game that claims to be hard- even Ninja Gaiden Black, challenging as it was, just lets you spam yourself thoughtlessly, over and over, at a target until you eventually win. DEmon’s Souls is innovative- it autosaves…constantly. All the time, no matter what. You can just get up and shut the game off whenever, and when you start again, there you are. Of course, this means that when you die and lose a bunch of souls, you REALLY lost them. No backups, no previous save states, none of that cheating that you forgot was cheating because every game lets you. If you use a healing herb, that’s a healing herb you’ll never see again. If you use them all to beat a certain boss, you don’t have anymore until you find or buy some- you can’t go back and do the boss again once you learned the ‘trick’ to make sure you have more items.

Fallout 3 was fun, but I never once (not once!) found myself jumping out of my chair to point and swear at the TV, and shout “In your face!” when I beat a boss. If you make it past the first level of Demon’s Souls, you’ll feel like you accomplished something.

Demon’s Souls also has far, far more character customization than Fallout 3, in the sense that no matter what you ‘choose’ in Fallout, by the time you get to the end of the game, you’re awesome at everything anyway, so it doesn’t matter. In Demon’s Souls, customization choices really affect how difficult some content will be for you, and certain things that you might or might not experience otherwise.

Also, and I can’t stress this enough, you actually have to learn to be good in Demon’s Souls. That’s something I noticed is lacking in God of War- as fun as that game is- it has you leaping all around spamming attacks that you don’t even know, into crowds of enemies, without paying attention to your life meter. And that’s on hard. In Demon’s Souls, you’ll wind up knowing exactly how long your weapon is, what each attack does, when it is and isn’t useful, when you should hold it in two hands vs. one, and if you can interrupt the monster’s slam attack with a stab before he squashes you, or if you should roll away instead (and which way to roll so you’re in position for a counter). If you don’t know these things, you’ll just get your ass kicked forever and ever, and have to play a different game. You’ll come out of it surprised at how bad at video games you used to be. :wink:

So yeah, the major difference is Fallout 3 is like Disney World, doing everything it can to make sure everybody has a good time. Demon’s Souls is like climbing a mountain- it’s certainly rewarding, but it’s there to ASK if you can climb it, not to ensure you can by design.

57

xxx

58

Woah, that’s a pretty killer system; I really like that idea. As much as I get frustrated having to do things over again, that usually applies to some absent-minded mistake that would only happen due to the game being so easy I don’t have to pay much attention and my mind wanders.

I very much like the idea of an actual CEREBRAL action RPG–it’s one thing when a game offers you a lot of options that determine how things pan out (Fallout 3), it’s another when not thinking about them carefully gets you killed.

I watched a video on youtube, the environments are very rich, and eerie. I like the idea that, while online, you can see crossed-over ghosts of other players playing in their realms. I really, really like the idea of, once reaching a certain level, being able to invade another’s ream, or be invaded yourself!

I try to not play too many games, and I anticipate being occupied with modern warfare 2 and bad company 2 multiplayer for some time now, but I’ll be thinking about this game. Thanks for the explanation.

59

My favorite RPG is Ultima IX. I think it’s the best RPG ever.

60

Final Fantasy VII/IX
Pokemon Red/Blue
NFL Blitz
Golden Eye 007
Parappa The Rapper
Fifa 10
Super Mario 64 and Mario Galaxy
Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Marvel Vs Capcom 2