Feel free to add games, reviews & outlinks here - but NOT new WikiLinks for each game's name!
Classic games
- TetrisGame
- Text adventures: Zork (Trilogy), Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Castle Quest 2 - an online MultiUserDungeon(?) Someone should move the review they attempted here.
- Leisure Suit Larry 1: The Land of the Lounge Lizards
- Old LucasArts adventures: Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, any of the Monkey Island series
- Roguelikes: Rogue, NetHack, LinleysDungeonCrawl?, ADOM, *bands - the primordial dungeon crawl
- Maur the dragon, if only it were still around
- Lode Runner
- The old Tex Murphy FMV games: Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, Overseer
- Defender
- EmpireWarGameOfTheCentury
- Elite
- Star Flight (programmed in ForthLanguage)
- The Sentinel : with 1000 random generated levels on a spectrum 48 k !
- M.U.L.E. - Dan [Dani] Bunten's masterpiece, a 4-player Apple/Atari/C64 bidding game, actually a very sophisticated economics simulation. (Fun, yes. Sophisticated, hardly)
- D-Ship
- Escape Velocity
- Myst
God games
- BlackAndWhite (referenced on this wiki for its UI)
- Populous 3 (it is deeply disturbing when you realize the game is training you to enjoy human outcries of pain)
Strategy (mostly Real Time Combat Strategy)
- Starcraft
- Myth 1, 2 (not 3)
- Sid Meier's CivNet?, Alpha Centauri, Civilization III
- Star Control II (available as "The Ur-Quan Masters (OpenSource) nowadays on http://sc2.sourceforge.net/)
- Age of Kings (but not Age Of Empires III? I'm really liking it, myself...)
- Age of Wonders II
- Pharaoh
- Warcraft and descendants
- Total Annihilation (still one of the best), and SpringRts? (a remake: http://taspring.clan-sy.com/)
- Homeworld and Homeworld2 (NOT Cataclysm, which was a buggy POS by a different team)
- Dawn of War and descendants (note that the DoW is mostly about tactical combat; there is very little strategy involved)
- Note that Dark Crusade and its expansions are a totally different game; none of the tactical rules that applied to previous incarnations of the game apply to DC or its expansions.
Role-Playing
- The AD&D Goldbox games (Pool of Radiance, Pools of Darkness, etc.)
- Thief 1, 2, 3
- Planescape: Torment
- System Shock 2 (one of the scariest games I have ever played)
- Legend of Morrowind
- Baldur's Gate 2
- Fallout 1, 2
- City of Heroes
- Deus Ex and descendants
Multiplayer games
- Neverwinter Nights
- WorldOfWarcraft and most other RTCS titles
- Disney's Toon Town (main themes: cooperation and complimenting each other. Who'd a thought that would sell?)
Eye candy
- Giants: Citizen Kabuto (yes!)
- Far Cry (incredible graphics; incredible engine/hardware demands)
- The Legend of Zelda: The WindWaker?. (a good game, with a great look)
- KatamariDamacy
- Halflife 2
?:
Scorched Earth and clones
Web games you can play this second (but still worth playing)
Console games
- Beyond Good and Evil (easy and short, but good voice acting)
- Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance (totally brainless but fun hack-and-slash)
- Resident Evil 4 (A action/survival game done right)
- Street Fighter series. (Fun and deep. Still learning after years of playing those)
- Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Super Metroid...anything Nintendo (including the new titles).
Comments
I am shocked and delighted that this list of games exactly mirrors my own opinions on this subject. I have made a minor edit, and I apologize in advance to anyone offended by it. I removed Myth 3 from this list.
As some might know, Myth 1 & 2 were developed by Bungie and released to great critical acclaim. Myth 3 was a poor knock-off developed by a different team, and was released with a great splat. I could not in good conscience allow it to sully an otherwise fantastic list of Games. -- MrStrange
What is the name of the game teens get addicted to? Everquest? The Sims?
[No it's more a shooting thing. It's programmed by a Canadian nerd]
Counterstrike?
[Yes Counterstrike. This is supposed to be a highly addictive game and many cases have been reported of teens dropping out of school because of this game. My friend had a pretty rough reaction with his son's compulsive habit: he tore the internet connection and that was the end of the Counterstrike compulsion for his son. Incidentally the son is not at all violent. Go figure why he was spending hours behind a fake rifle!]
ModelingHypothesis? vs CatharsisHypothesis
Catharsis of anger and violence is deprecated in psychology. IOW, it's complete BS.
It is well-known and extremely well-documented that "releasing" one's violent tendencies only CAUSES more violence.
No GTA series? I spent hours playing the original. It's just tons of fun to have a quick blast causing maximum destruction
in a virtual city.
I have never been violent in my life. I have played counter-strike and all these other violent games. To say doing something
causes the same effect in everyone is pretty dumb.
"worth playing"? What makes computer games in general worth the time we put into them?
- Amusement -- Playing a well-crafted game can be compared to how we enjoy other forms of art. More often, though, it can be compared to television.
- Gameplay -- A combination of game logic, operations, and rules. The way a game flows and how players' decisions affect the interaction of the game to the players and the players to each other.
- Bonding -- Multi-player games can provide bonds, rivalries, and the other kinds of social structures you see in sports. Single-player games give nerds something to talk about.
- Hobby -- A way to focus your energy; like gardening, I suppose.
- Education -- I'd guess that there are more games that demand that you learn many intricate details about your fictional universe, than there are that teach you useful things about your real universe. How many kinds of PokeMon? are there now?
- Hand-eye coordination -- This was the excuse du decade in the 1980's.
Perhaps we could mark open-source or free games with an asterisk.
Contributors: WilliamUnderwood, TimKing, NickFitzsimons, JuanPabloNunnezRojas, MartySchrader, ComputerScientistGamersEverywhere
See: ComputerGamesNotWorthPlaying
CategoryGame
Computer Games Worth Playing