Keep reloading these on my laptop when space prevails:
At least 2-3 of these games are always installed on my laptop at any one time.
Rome Total War
Freelancer
Jagged Alliance 2
Starcraft
MOO2
AOW Shadow Magic
Heres something that seems to happen to me every year. While I’m waiting for the Christmas rush of game releases, I start up some old game (rpg or tbs with a long campaign). Then the new games get released and I can’t give up the old game.
Over the last few years its happened to me with Fantasy Wars, Fallout Tactics, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Company of Heroes. Some of those games, I didn’t really like them that much the first time, but got totally hooked on the second attempt.
Tony
I play Baldur’s Gate 2/ToB once a year usually, around Christmas.
After the disappointment of Elemental and Civ 5, I’ve been playing a lot of Civ 4 lately…specifically Fall From Heaven2.
If you do, you stand up and crow about it.
I’ve had hard/ironman tribes survive to the end game, but I’ve never had a win. My guess is there are only 3-4 people who HAVE done it. It’s…It’s pretty hard.
I’m in a jaded phase.
For a long time, I played Colonization, but with the remake I’ve stopped playing that.
Diablo II got reloaded a couple of times, but it’s been some time now.
I start up a lot of Civ IV games, but they don’t keep me interested.
Dominions seems to be the only thing that scratches my itch.
Great thread.
I USED to go back to an old Sid Meier/MPS game called Covert Action, over and over. Simple yet fun and addictive. I think Sid has the patent on that. But I don’t have a version that runs on my current machines.
The two that seem to draw me back seem to have nothing alike:
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Fallout 3. With a ton of mods. After winning it, it’s a blast to just go back and play it in completely open world, RPG mode. I still don’t think I’ve seen everything.
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Football Manager 10 (soon to be 11): One of the best role playing games ever. Yeah, looks like a football (soccer) management game, mainly text based with a simple but effective 3D match engine. But it is a role playing game. Start unemployed, see if some small semi-professional lower league club will take a chance on you as their manager. As in all RPGs, upgrading is a key. In this case, instead of finding a better sword, you may be searching for that perfect undiscovered 18 year old striker that blossoms and transforms your team. Upgrade your coaching staff in order to make your team better and give you advice you can actually believe. Deal with personalities: my young promising striker on my current team is a real prima donna, declared how much he doesn’t like two of my top players who are in the starting lineup, is constantly demanding this or that. So even though he’s good, I shocked him by putting him up for sale. After I sold him the team actually played much better because the discord he was creating was effecting their teamwork.
Build a team and watch them become good, become a fan favorite as a manager, then struggle with the decision when a higher prestige team offers you their head coach job at double the salary. Do you take it? And leave behind the team you have molded and nurtured?
The game never ends. I’m in one where I have started running a semi-pro team and eventually was offered (and took) jobs with higher league teams, and now I’m in the top English Premiere league where player salaries are in the millions instead of a few thousand. I just got an offer from Kansas City in the MLS to take over their ailing team. It would be a step down, but Kansas City is a previous home, it would be cool to be giving interviews to the KC Star, and it’s a challenge. Maybe instead of my next goal being offered the job of managing the England national team and getting them to the world cup, I can see if I can do well enough to be offered the job of running the U.S. national team and see if I can get them to the World Cup finals…
This thread is giving me the shakes. I am pretty busy at home until May, and now I want to reinstall a bunch of stuff. All the Icewind Dale chatter lately is killing me too, since I’ve yet to play those games.
With the launch of Free-To-Play I’ve recently returned to Lord of the Rings Online. LOTRO is just such a fantastic system to play in. Between the way the classes are done right, the crafting system is actually useful and the quests/deeds/progression seems to work so well it’s just fun to play plain and simple. Add to that the atmosphere of Tolkien done so very well and it’s a siren song I can’t resist now that it’s free. The best part is that without a monthly sub I don’t feel at all guilty or wasteful if I walk away for a week or even a month or more, though ironically I’ve yet to be out of the game for more than 48 hours since it went F2P.
Also on my replay list recently has been the old Interplay/Black Isle/Bioware stuff. I was tromping through NWN2 again over the summer, and recently started a replay on Icewind Dale 2 (prior to the IWD thread resurgence here on QT3 which I was happy to see occur). That will inevitably lead to a restart of BG2/ToB, though the sheer tenacity required to get all the way through that combo will likely keep me from finishing.
Funny thing, I was in the basement last night watching TV (my wife and kids were controling all the other sets in the house) and the shelf I keep my old games on was right next to me. During commercials I was reaching out and pulling stuff off the shelves and I came across Forgotten Realms Archives Silver and The Ultimate RPG Archives. The urge to install and attempt to get running any number of games from these collections was nearly overpowering.
Prime candidate: World of Warcraft. I’ll play when there’s new content in a semi-casual to core gamer manner. Then after I experienced all I care to experience I burnout for a few weeks or even months and then return with new content.
I also often returned to Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. Blizzard really puts drugs in their games, eh…
Same goes for many of the infinity engine games. The recent gog.com releases are awfully tempting, especially with the help of some mods.
I don’t reinstall shit. Like, ever. I am like a fucking shark, I just keep swimming forwards and eating. Except I take months to finish one game – it took me like six weeks to finish Halo: Reach. Well, OK, I’m like a really slow shark. I’m like some kind of sloth-shark. An unstoppable backlog-eating one.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
While I was hooked on MW2 for a while and logged 240 hours in it, most of those were spent playing S&D with a group of guys I used to play MW1 with. Then I swore off MW2 forever and uninstalled it. I feel somehow less dirty when playing the first game, but I sometimes wish I could bring myself to uninstall it and snap the disc in two. Then I might be able to get to my ungodly backlog.
Just Cause 2. Still playing it at least once a week.
My Dungeon Crawl addiction is so bad that I literally can’t have it installed on any computers I own or work on. It’s like cocaine because when I’m playing and doing well I feel like I’m smarter and better than every motherfucker on the planet except for maybe Steve McQueen in his prime or Harrison Ford in Wanted. I feel like if I was walking down the street and I saw a building I didn’t like I could punch it and it would say ‘sorry’ and get out of my way.
Dungeon Crawl. It’s a helluva drug.
The original Sid Meier Civ
Alpha Centauri
Imperialism 2
Heroes of Might and Magic II
I hope someday someone codes Master of Magic to work to spec.
Really getting into the groove of Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete, recently completed the scenario where you as a Dungeon Overlord have to take out the happy-go-lucky overworld dwellers. Quite fun, even if they did enter my domain before the first week was up.
Just started the Islands and Caves scenario, with the Stronghold and Crag Hack cutting a bloody invasion route to other keeps. Missing out on some Behemoths, but just waiting for the Crystals so I can get the Ancient ones.
Only here to say something about it because I hit that Windows key by accident and it did something of an alt-tab thing to send me out of it.
Not to be Debbie Downer, but Lara Crigger has done a great piece on game addiction for Gamers with Jobs. I know this thread is more about the games you keep going back to, but the second half of its title made me think of Lara’s article. And the fact that I can certainly recognize parts of myself in her story.
PS HOMM series, Disciples series, Advance Wars series, Culdcept series, Pinball, Harmonix games
Oh, I know the game exists, but even with all the patches, the wonderful game specified in the documentation (a humongous manual, the separate small spell book, and some other small book I forget) has never been fully implemented, and it still crashes.
In the past, I’ve just found it too frustrating to be able to get immersed in. But the elements are so good I try again every few years. Maybe Kael and Brad will combine to bring something that makes the old game discardable.
Thought I’d resurrect this thread. I’m not feeling well waiting on surgery. Most of the “new games” seem to have so much more reaction speed and things too them. Sure, when I feel up to it it is fun, but …
I just reinstalled:
Caeser III (patches and working native on Windows 7! not easy though)
Settlers III, with missons and Amazon also native on Windows 7.
Games, slow games. I have the other two old Sierra city builders (Pharoah already mentioned once in thread and Emperor). And if it takes a while to schedule the surgery may end up redoing them too!
It made me think of the pace of games now too. They seem more stimulating, adrenaline things than these old options. And many in this thread are the “slow games”. SimCity’s, old Civ’s, MOO, MoM, IWD, etc. Sure I get a rush after successfully doing a hard boss run in one of the new MMOs with lots of active twitch-based dodging and constant positioning with loads of situational awareness, but there is no exercise of my logical puzzle solving part. Playing these old games, I think I miss that. I also get a good feeling after solving scenarios with proper puzzle like placement and resource management schemes. I just feel like its using a whole different part of my brain. Where did these games go?
I’ve spent most of today playing the original WarCraft. I also play WarCraft II in all of its variations from time to time.
GOG.com has been a great source of old games. I have purchased Master of Magic, Panzer General II, Master of Orion, The Settlers II: Gold Edition and numerous other games from them.
A more recent title that I play is Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization. It is a successor to the older Sid Meier’s Colonization that I also play.
As you can see, I am a retro gamer. Although the new games have better graphics, most of them just don’t have the pizzazz the old games do.
This, I recently realized is why I love these games, too. I honestly am not really in games for the adrenaline rush. The games I really love are about building, development, and fine-tuning systems. I’m not in a hurry. Just give me some goals and let me find my way to them. Zeus is the pinnacle for me (although I prefer Pharaoh’s theme). Anno 1404 is another spectacular example. I thought Settlers 7 was an incredible design, but it was precisely the pace and the competitive pressure that kept me from really latching on to it. I’m sure that’s what others really loved about it.