[colecampbell666]

Star Wars: Empire At War/Expansion
Half-Life 2
Age Of Empires II/Expansion
Empire Earth/EE II
Star Wars battlefront/BF II
007: Nightfire
007: Everything or Nothing
Need For Speed Underground 1 and 2
Midtown Madness II
Stronghold/Stronghold Crusader

AND THE BEST GAME EVER: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing FTW!

[lenard27]

Star Wars: Empire At War/Expansion
Half-Life 2
Age Of Empires II/Expansion
Empire Earth/EE II
Star Wars battlefront/BF II
007: Nightfire
007: Everything or Nothing
Need For Speed Underground 1 and 2
Midtown Madness II
Stronghold/Stronghold Crusader

AND THE BEST GAME EVER: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing FTW!

I heard from many, many sources that Nightfire absolutely sucked.  EE, AOE2, and Empire at War are all stellar RTS's, though.  But for AOE 2 make sure you have the Conquerors expansion

[Scooby_Doo]

Yup already got AOE2, spent many many hours playing it.

[Flipside]

Hmmmm.... been playing ORB, see what you mean about unforgiving, the single player campaign is a nightmare, it relies too heavily on luck with ship-ship combat, especially in missions where you are given a group of ships and they have to survive. That said. the story is pretty intriguing so far, good job I can speed-read though

[StarSlayer]

Empire At War was awful, if it didn't have the SW moniker it could have at least have been a mediocre game that I could have ignored.  Instead i bought it played through the campaign and fervently wished my game store would buy back PC games like they do for consoles.  Let's face it the space combat was graphically and gamelay wise leagues behind the Homeworld series which was years older.  It was utterly simplistic and took place on a single plane, and that "movie view" didn't do it any favors either.  The ground combat was even worse, in fact its absolute crapiness dragged the entire game from mediocre to gods awful.  Dawn of War would tear it a new arsehole with a chainsword even though again the game is years older then EaW.

The Battlefront series also is rather ho hum if it were not Star Wars.  Not to say BF 1 was bad, it was rather enjoyable in a sloppy blow stuff up kinda way.  It allowed me to fly round in a Republic Gunship and hose stuff, and do it in Cockpit mode that at least made most stuff flyable and effective.  That changed with BF2, no longer were aircraft available in the ground component, but they dumbed it down severely with no cockpit mode.  Then they add the Space battle component, which really was hideous.  In fact the demo version was in better then the final component.  At least in the demo they had the right number of heavy guns on the Venerator, in the final version they managed to screw that up.  Then on top of that they managed to screw up ship roles and add non canon weapons and capital ships.  Quite frankly it was a huge let down, basically the first game, with the semi interesting air support removed with most of the same exact maps, and a half arsed space battle component tacked on.

A few games i would recommend are:

Dawn of War series (Winter Assault and Dark Crusade)
Homeworld I and II
Brothers in Arms
Call of Duty series
Total War series
Prince of Persia series
Total Annihilation (Brawlers FTW)
Journeyman Project (Time Turbo and Buried in Time)
Rallysport Challenge II
Max Payne
Dark Forces II and Jedi Knight II
TIE Fighter/XWing

[NGTM-1R]

Hmmmm.... been playing ORB, see what you mean about unforgiving, the single player campaign is a nightmare, it relies too heavily on luck with ship-ship combat, especially in missions where you are given a group of ships and they have to survive. That said. the story is pretty intriguing so far, good job I can speed-read though

It's often kind of a puzzle game. It's also often worthwhile to reprocess your existing ships as the situation changes and make new ones. I never completed the Maulus campaign, but I did (barely) succeed in the Alyssian campaign which I started later.

[spartan_0214]

Starcraft (and Brood Wars) - How did Starcraft not get on this list? 

Halo - I know I've been more or less labeled a fanboi (or you may look at my siggy ), but Halo was an innovative game in the early 21st Century. And it has a killer soundtrack...


Halo 2 Bungie should be slapped for releasing this crappy port we know as Halo 2...


the rest are covered (didn't check to see if SW: KOTOR II made it, but it should definitely be here...)

[BloodEagle]

Starcraft was released in '98. 

[Scooby_Doo]

Actually I've played Starcraft, got half ways through before it just got too boring....


Ohhhh forgot Max Payne /me writes that on the list

Starcraft was released in '98. 

Actually I think it was around 2000 when I stopped buying games when they started becoming too hardware demanding.

[BloodEagle]

http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/data/25418.html

[jr2]

Starcraft (and Brood Wars) - How did Starcraft not get on this list? 

Halo - I know I've been more or less labeled a fanboi (or you may look at my siggy ), but Halo was an innovative game in the early 21st Century. And it has a killer soundtrack...

< >


Halo 2 Bungie should be slapped for releasing this crappy port we know as Halo 2...


the rest are covered (didn't check to see if SW: KOTOR II made it, but it should definitely be here...)

Is there any way to make the Halo 2 port like Halo 2 4 XBOX?  By copying data from the XBOX game?  Basically, a Halo 2 XBOX > Halo 2 PC port.

[Marcus Vesper]

If you like RPGs I'd recommend the Gothic series and Knights of the Old Republic.  Jade Empire is another good one from Bioware, though it's short.  Neverwinter Nights is a vast treasure trove of D&D goodness.  Both the Vampire: The Masquerade titles (Redemption and Bloodlines) are good but flawed, though there has been community efforts to fix the problems left in the game by Troika after the last official patch, and they've mostly succeeded with everything major enough to matter.  Bloodlines is running off the Source engine (Half Life 2), so it still looks quite nice and of course it's an RPG, so it runs circles around Half-Life's story.  Arcanum: Of Steamwork and Majick Obscura is another good game that doesn't quite match the excellent turn-based combat of Fallout, but it does feature dwarves with guns and the conflict between magic and technology (you can turn junk into all kinds of interesting gadgets).

For 3rd person shooters there's titles like Max Payne 1&2, and the Hitman series (brilliant).  Bloodrayne and it's sequel are something of a guilty pleasure: they aren't all THAT great but you can impale somebody and spin them around, slicing off all of their extremities like you were shaving a block of cheese (or split them up the middle like Wesley Snipes did to Ron Perlman in Blade 2), so that's nice.

RTS games I haven't been into that much these past few years, apart from the Dawn of War series which has been mentioned already.  Dawn of War is probably the first title to actually FEEL like the Warhammer 40k setting, even if it's not abiding by any of the rules.

For the FPS games, try to dig up a copy of No One Lives Forever and it's sequel, as they're fantastic and hilarious all at once.  F.E.A.R. is another excellent game by the same development team, though that's more recent and requires a heftier rig to run properly.  Another good one is Aliens vs Predator (also Monolith).  Jedi Knight is a mixture between the 3rd person and FPS gamestyles, and it's uniformly excellent.  Soldier of Fortune is also great, and very very violent.

[Mustang19]

Steel Panthers 3 (Unlike the other Steel Panthers games, 3 is more a "grand tactical" game then a tactical one; you command larger forces over greater areas. It also, I think, has a more forgiving nature than SP:WaW or WinSPMBT. Also unlike any RTS ever made, this will teach to you a true soldier's respect for artillery.)
ORB (Homeworldesque, but compelling, with decent gameplay. It's not a Homeworld clone, though; Homeworld was much more forgiving then this.)

First, SP3 isn't an RTS, second, I want to hear where you're coming from with the artillery. I don't notice much of a difference. I agree that SP3 does make artillery a bit more of a noob stick, though, as the large-hex scale (250m a hex? Can you truly simulate a tactical game on that scale?) makes it easier to get artillery on target, especially when you're using whole batallions of the stuff.

OTOH I like the orders feature in SP3, which gives you at least some appraisal of command and control problems, but all in all I prefer SP2 simply because of the unit counts. I gave up the Arnhem campaign after a few missions simply because I spent about 90% of my turn clicking on the map telling my batallions to move. Even with formation move, AI orders, and such, once you're commanding a brigade or so of units it gets tedious. It also doesn't feel "down and dirty" like SP2, where you were thinking on the scale of individual tanks and squads. I just like tactics better. But SP3 is a great game anyway, just a lot of stupid exploits (like the unstoppable all FASCAM/ammo truck core).

Can't say much about FPS or RTS. The newest game I have in that area is probably BF42, and also KOTOR but I've never played it.

It's often kind of a puzzle game. It's also often worthwhile to reprocess your existing ships as the situation changes and make new ones. I never completed the Maulus campaign, but I did (barely) succeed in the Alyssian campaign which I started later.

ORB: Terrible to mediocre gameplay, great story and atmosphere. That's why I like it.

[Polpolion]

I can't remember when it was released, but Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was a great game.

[spartan_0214]

Is there any way to make the Halo 2 port like Halo 2 4 XBOX?  By copying data from the XBOX game?  Basically, a Halo 2 XBOX > Halo 2 PC port.

       I don't think so. The Xbox uses different file types than PC, so a port is probably out of the question. Big companies like Gearbox are paid to take the raw data and make it available for use on the PC, not hard considering that every game is developed on the PC. The main problem with the Halo 2 PC release is that Bungie didn't deliver on it's promises regarding upgraded graphics. They said that Halo 2 would support 1080i, but it still only runs at 480i, they promised to redo the textures, but they scarcely even touched them, and the list goes on. Another problem with Halo 2 PC was that they dumbed down the editors. You can't do as much with the editors as you could with those for Halo PC, and thus the CE maps aren't going to be as comparatively good as those for Halo PC. If you really want to read more about this, there's a link here in which someone made a rather long list of complaints regarding Halo 2....

[General Battuta]

       Bungie didn't deliver on it's promises

Actually, the port was done by a Microsoft team independent of Bungie, called Hired Gun.

The team's already been dissolved.

[NGTM-1R]

First, SP3 isn't an RTS, second, I want to hear where you're coming from with the artillery. I don't notice much of a difference. I agree that SP3 does make artillery a bit more of a noob stick, though, as the large-hex scale (250m a hex? Can you truly simulate a tactical game on that scale?) makes it easier to get artillery on target, especially when you're using whole batallions of the stuff.

No, it's not, but it's better. So there.

I never played the earlier ones, only WinSPMBT and SP:WaW. SP3 has the scale thing going for it (frankly I'm sick of small-scale tactical games) and having played things like Panzer General or a number of the larger-scale tabletop games that these things descend from, I am predisposed to larger-scaled games.

Name me one RTS, one at all, where artillery was the primary dispenser of death and destruction. Even the other Steel Panthers games I've played don't have it as such. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it in reality, there is a reason field artillery is regarded as the king of the battlefield. It is. What takes a company of tanks a thirty minutes a company of MLRS launchers can accomplish in seconds. This is as it should be. This is as Steel Panthers 3 makes it.

[Flipside]

Supreme Commander was pretty good for longer range combat, so was Warzone 2100 (It was actually possible to use artillery as a primary weapon to win the game, but you still had to use conventionals to establish an artillery zone first).

Must admit though, what I loved about 2100 was the ability to do things like assign a unit to a single radar, and they would only attack enemy contacts on that specific radar etc. That kind of flexibility meant that you could set up a massive military network.

I wish that the Source Code update on it had included larger maps, but I get the feeling that they would have had to have gone through the lot changing a byte value to an int or the like, since the maximum map-size was 256, so it probably would have turned into a seriously big job.

[Mustang19]

Name me one RTS, one at all, where artillery was the primary dispenser of death and destruction. Even the other Steel Panthers games I've played don't have it as such. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty of it in reality, there is a reason field artillery is regarded as the king of the battlefield. It is. What takes a company of tanks a thirty minutes a company of MLRS launchers can accomplish in seconds. This is as it should be. This is as Steel Panthers 3 makes it.

It's just a matter of scale. In SP3 you have the power to call down whole batallions of cluster artillery. Not just "one company". The artillery equivalent of a company is a battery, ie six MLRS. Now tell me that you'd rather have six MLRS than fourteen Abrams. However, logistics hardly exists in SP3 and artillery is extremely cheap.

Because of the unit counts it's hard to understand the scope of what you're commanding at times, but SP3 is a large game that gets hazy around the edges. Obviously there's the artillery, and the Steel Panthers games give you way more artillery than you could logistically support except in certain extreme main-effort situations. Ammo trucks are the major issue here. If you've ever played SP or WinSPMBT online it's usually agreed that only 10-20% of your points can be spent on arty, as just buying hordes of FASCAM (which have more effective direct fire than tanks due to flaky OpFire code) is the gaming equivalent of killing the Sathanas with a Maxim.

But I digress, what was the point of the thread again... talking about shiny new games?

[castor]

I can't remember when it was released, but Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was a great game.

Seconded.
And as for turn based RPGs, Wizardry 8 is about as good as they get