Your "Best Game Ever" Award

[Stilgar]

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

[markasstrick]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ES_box_art.jpg

Best & Fav

[Exoduso]

The mech system sucks balls compared to the Xenogears, and frankly the storyline is made of fail IMO.

Made of fail? Story is Xenogears on crack with even more religious/philosophy reference and the world is much more detailed if you read the database.

lol made to fail...ooooookay, play through all 3 and then say it.

And yeah 2 is not generally liked because the battle system has insanely long fights and is extremely annoying connecting with combos... but I really liked the Jin/Margulis story (which keeps going in #3 in more detail) and the whole Jr./Albedo/Nigredo storyline (which had an amazing ending IMO at #3.)

[Elesirdur]

Grim Fandango

Last great classic adventure game.

To me, what makes a 'great game' is not just pure entertainment or sales volume, but an entire package that advances the art of game design and takes on a life that's something more than just an entertainment product. Games like Rez, Katamari Damacy, Homeworld, the aforementioned Grim Fandango, System Shock 1/2; those games, and others, were a lot of fun to play but they were titles that made you think about gaming in a totally different light. I have a feeling if you talk to game developers and directors you'll get a lot of smaller games on their list of best/favorite titles because of the way they were designed and what was done in them that made it different.

Some games are 'great' because of the historical significance or innovation they bring to a genre or to an industry. Watershed titles like Marathon, Doom, Quake, System Shock, Half Life, Rainbow 6, F.E.A.R. - those are all FPS games that innovated (mouse look, atmospheric sound, wide spread TCP/IP play, RPG/FPS hybrid, seamless storytelling, the birth of the stealth/sim shooter, modern innovations in storytelling and AI) and changed the way people thought about the FPS genre and had attributes that were widely imitated. Then there are mega-selling titles like Super Mario Brothers, StarCraft, The Sims, and GTA3 which were fantastic games in their own right, but they advanced the medium of gaming into a broader public space (or notorious as the case might be). Then there are games that are significant because of what they did for a system. Halo made the XBox a success for legions of people, similarly FFVII designated Sony systems as the system to have if you wanted to play Japaneses RPGs. (I would also say FFVII is significant to the history of gaming because it introduced Japanese-styled RPGs to so many people and even made the distinction between JP and Western D&D/medieval swords and sorcery RPGs - which were what RPGs were by default - an important one.)

But it's very hard to be objective about this kind of thing. I never found Halo, Zelda (any of them), or really any FF game besides 11 and 12 to be terribly compelling experiences. Sure they were fun, but they were never games that stuck in my mind as the pinnacle of game design. Obviously, others will claim that FFVI was the greatest game ever made by man and I won't deny it's merits, but to me it neither innovated or furthered the general discourse of game design.

[Haiko]

wow no one mention Secret of Mana yet...well fu all!

[Insanecyclone]

http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/2...0003445hj2.gif

[Zylo]

Wow, a few mentions of Shining Force 3. I love 1 and 2 so I guess I'll go find the ROM for 3...

I'm really not sure which to choose, Shining Force 2, FF7, Suikoden 2, FFXII...but I think I might lean towards Master of Orion 2.

Yeah, if you can find a ROM, definitely give it a shot; the battle system if pretty similar with 1 big difference, your characters learn special moves for each weapon type, so when your main dude (Synbios) attacks, he might just do a regular sword slash, or he might shoot some fucking crazy ass glowing energy out of his sword (think of it like Zinc's [sp? too lazy to look that shit up] laser beam thing and Kiwi's fire breath in SF 2). Also, there are some really hard ass bosses in 3, which is a nice change from the relative ease of stuff right up to king Galm in 2. One final cool thing is that if you can find ROMs for all 3 scenarios, hey are all interconnected, IE the stats you end with in scenario one will show up later in scenario three.

[izembo]

Shining Force 2

[RuBP]

All the Ogre Battle games except the shitty GBA one.

[Zylo]

All the Ogre Battle games except the shitty GBA once.

:O I totally forgot about those games! *busts out t3h SNES to play some Ogre Battle*

[Ghost_Wheel22]

Alternate Reality on the Commie 64. A game with that much depth that long ago still blows me away.

[Zilong]

The mech system sucks balls compared to the Xenogears, and frankly the storyline is made of fail IMO.

Made of fail? Story is Xenogears on crack with even more religious/philosophy reference and the world is much more detailed if you read the database.

Well, I played the first one, I wasn't impressed with the whole cast, and the long boring CS that made no fucking sense even after reading through the glossary, and just the whole bullshit "oh we gonna make you waste more money by not concluding anything and answering nothing, BUT YOU GOTTA BUY OUR NEXT GAME!"

Seriously, it says over 50 hours or so playtime on the back, I beat the damn thing in 20, and a good amount of it is playing that card game.

No, not Xenocard, that poker/high low game is more interesting than the entire game.

[Exoduso]

Xenosaga 1 sucked... but the story gets a lot better in 2, and I think Ep.3 is a fucking masterpiece.

You can't come in here bashing the whole series when you only played through the lame excuse they had for #1... #2 was a huge improvement over 1, and 3 was a huge improvement over both combined, so unless you give #3 a shot and beat it, you have no place to comment on the series as a whole.

And on another topic, am I the only one who actually enjoyed .Hack//G.U.'s battle system? I mean the first 4 games were pretty decent story-wise, but had a crappy battle system going... fighting in Vol1 of G.U. is actually rather entertaining, and the story is pretty good, especially if you've been following the //Roots series.

[Zilong]

Xenosaga 1 sucked... but the story gets a lot better in 2, and I think Ep.3 is a fucking masterpiece.

You can't come in here bashing the whole series when you only played through the lame excuse they had for #1... #2 was a huge improvement over 1, and 3 was a huge improvement over both combined, so unless you give #3 a shot and beat it, you have no place to comment on the series as a whole.

And on another topic, am I the only one who actually enjoyed .Hack//G.U.'s battle system? I mean the first 4 games were pretty decent story-wise, but had a crappy battle system going... fighting in Vol1 of G.U. is actually rather entertaining, and the story is pretty good, especially if you've been following the //Roots series.

Can't blame me for judging the game by the first impression it left me...

I fucking hate Xenosaga 1, guess as far as I'm concerned, the series end and die there.

I'll pick up 2 and 3 in the future maybe...

[Exoduso]

I agree with you on 1 sucking because it did, and the story doesn't make sense AT ALL during the entire game... but once you start playing #2 the pieces start falling into place, and you pretty much figure everything out by the end of that game, until you see the ending and realize you know absolutely nothing (and if you actually got the game and beat it when it first came out, having to wait 9 months or so for the 3rd installment to come out was a bitch...)

#3 ended the series on a very positive note for me because the story in 3 was just so goddamn amazing, and the battle system is probably one of the best in any PS2 RPG (oh and, the mech fights own big time in 3 lol.)

[Wulf]

SC/SCBW

[izembo]

i thought xenosaga2 sucked and 1 was better =/

[Zylo]

How are the battle systems in Xenosaga 1-3? I've been meaning to play them for quite awhile, and I was wondering if they're similar to the one used in Xenogears (which is, in my opinion, one of the best of all time ;3).

[Exoduso]

Xenosaga was longggggggg and every single move took about 20 seconds to show... that's one of the main reasons I hated it. (But story was decent.)

in 2, the battle system is more about connecting and chaining and stuff like that, so it's a lot more complicated and can be very frustarting at some bosses if you don't know what you're doing... (They did add mech fights in 2 though, so it was a little better..)

in 3 the battle system was perfect, moves went by smoothly and pretty quickly, and the whole thing just seemed to be going at a very good pace (mech fights made a return and were even better than in 2 IMO)... 3 was perfect all around in terms of everything from storyline to connecting the dots to the amazing battle systems for both normal fights and mech fights.

I would still suggest playing through all three because the story is really good, and skipping either 1 or 2 (even though you can just read all about them in 3's database in the menu), isn't the same as experiencing the story firsthand... that's just me though.




Oh and I just beat the first vol. of .Hack//GU, and I love it heh... too bad there's still no release date for the NA version of vol.2.

[Aero]

Blades of Steel kicks ass,