Most worthwhile game/gaming experience

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
What game do you consider to be the most worthwhile? What gave you the most pleasure, and what made the biggest impact?

Those aren't really the same question, and my answer to each would probably be different.

Worthwhile? Civ2. Good strategic mind food, easy to play but a fair bit of depth under the hood, replayability out the yingyang, good sense of accomplishment when you win (regardless of which path to victory you chose).

Most pleasure? Wiz8 by a country mile. The game gives me everything I want for entertainment and I can play it constantly (and have) for years at a time.

Biggest impact? Depends on how you define "impact". MM6 changed the way I played computer games. From diehard and nearly exclusive TBS to mostly RPG. One game, and a complete paradigm shift on what gaming entertainment was about. OTOH, the game with the biggest "wow" factor (if you use that approach to "impact") was Bioshock1. The game itself was good but not great, but the immersion and environment were just stunning. I don't generally put much stock in immersion since it's usually just not that important to me, but Bioshock1 had me singing about the ambience from the highest mountains.

Biggest impact: Wolfenstein 3D. Saw it at my (then) boyfriends and it made me buy my first 'real' computer.
Most worthwhile: Dunno. Perhaps Hexen. Still playin' it - at least twice a year since it came out -, and I still have to think about where to find what and how to get where.
Most pleasure: It depends. Thief: The Metal Age, Ocarina of Time, Realms of the Haunting, System Shock (1), Unreal Tournament, Lands of Lore and Morrowind all compete for this. Depends on my mood, actually. These games all gave me … something. Though shagging Garrus in ME2 was quite pleasurable, too.

Baldur's Gate 2 (latterly, with mods). I don't think I've enjoyed any game more than BG2 and have replayed it many, many times. Even now I get the itch to fire it up when I hear about someone soloing a wizard slayer (ha ha) or that the next version of Sword Coast Strategems has been released. I came late to PC gaming and BG2 was the bug which bit me.

Originally Posted by HiddenX
The Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight (Amiga version) - I played many games from different genres before, but after this game I was a true crpg-player.

It was very hard to map the game (teleports, spinners).
Combat was extreme challenging.
The feature to capture enemies permanently for your own party was great.

Oh sweet bejesus I forgot about that one. The amount of graph paper I went through on that game and the grinding for levels. It was excellent. I remember encountering sourcerors who could summon ninjas so alway left a sourcerer alive until I got fed up as the ninjas gave good xp and unlimited summons of them gave unlimited xp. I also had the amiga version and I think it was my first rpg too.

This is a VERY hard question. I've played many "worthwhile" games. I take a lot pains to avoid games that aren't worthwhile. Time is too precious.

Going to go with Ultima 7 as well. For the time, it was just so far beyond anything else in terms of interactivity and richness of the world and its inhabitants. Even in the past 2 decades since then there really haven't been much in the way of games that can compare to it.

Morrowind is up there too, but I think the bland npcs kind to took some of the immersion away for me. Still, it's got an utterly unique setting and environment the likes of which I've never seen before and will likely never see again. I also spent more hours in that game than any other thanks to the construction set, though most of that time was not spent actually playing the game.

Frontier Elite , from the 1st hour i knew i was born to play space-sims

Just from the experience while playing, without any thoughts and reasoning applied post-playing?
That would still be Ultima Underworld 2. There are many factors to that, I was much younger, it was my first 3D game, etc. but it also was a pretty great game! And I dare say, the automap that allowed you to make your own notes is unsurpassed to this day

Runners-up: System Shock (the original), Morrowind, KotoR

Hmm, tough question to narrow down to a select few games. Despite single player CRPG's being my main genre, none of the ones I am going to list are those.

Biggest impact: Everquest - First MMO, with not much training wheels as well. Risk, fear, reward - it had it all.

Most worthwhile: Persona 4 - A PS2 rpg that brought me back into gaming, when I thought I may never come back. So much storyline content packed into a 50+ hour rpg.

Most pleasure: Transport Tycoon - I loved planning and designing new transport routes, watching the money roll in, upgrade existing setups to become more efficient.

It was a game I first laughed at and declared an instant failure. If it hadn't been for some persistent friends I would never have played it. It was my first introduction to mmos. I probably don't need to name it. I was the first time I grew attached to my character (a hunter) and my turtle. Oh, what fun we had! Hehe. Now the setup was a club house where some friend of mine had set up a LAN. If you havn't played on LAN you don't know what you're missing out on! This game was perfect for this. You could sit and chat while playing, group while leveling up or doing dungeons. It had a very nice dungeon progression system on max-level, where your class quest lead you through a series of dungeons that teached you how to play your character class in combination with other, then finally lead you towards the raid dungeons. For us this meant joining our small guild with a larger guild of players from another part of our country (regnfylte bergen). Our merged guild was still too small to raid so we collaborated with a danish guild, then grew and parted way with the danes and resulted in a large guild for casual raiding (with upwards 130 active members). We set up forums and I got to do some "administrative" work, including working on a loot system where I got to experience how it is to be a politician. Let me tell you, created a balanced loot system for a casual raiding guild isn't hard - it's bloody impossible! Our guild ultimately crashed and burned when a friend of mine created a mutiny and formed a new more hardcore raiding guild. It wasn't to be the last guild he ruined so we gave him the fitting nickname "Destroyer of Guilds". All in all, we had an amazing time. The joy of experiencing a first down on a raidboss is hard to describe if you havn't experienced it for yourself. It's very much a team sport. Ultimately this also where the game's excellent progression system ends, and you can only do things so many times before repetition kicks in, so most of us left the game after about two years of heavy gaming due to anger/despair/boredom/fatigue. I'd finally like to note that my enjoyment was in large part due to playing it with friends and being part of a national casual guild. For players who did hardcore raiding the game was extremely brutal, especially for students. Luckily for me I was already finished.

Just wanted to add Age Of Wonders II, which I found very good as well - it must've been hundreds of hours of played this game !

Biggest Impact: Ultima 3 I was 8 and it was awesome. I held all other games up to the Ultima standard and missed out on a few great ones like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder because a RPG wasn't supposed to look like that. I'll also add Pool of Radiance because it was the first D&D game that I played that offered me a D&D experience (Intellivision's D&D games were nothing when compared to POR).

Most Worthwhile: Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures I still play this to this day because of the active FRUA community. At the time I bought it oh so many years ago the modules I could make was pretty pointless since I had no one to share them with, but now there is an active FRUA community who have done amazing things with this game and made some great modules for it.

Most Pleasure: The Windham Classics games (all of them from Below the Root to Treasure Island), Ultima Series (3 - 6), Staflight Series and Arcanum. Windham Classics, Ultima and Starflight because my mom played those along with me. I have some great memories playing those games with her. Arcanum because even with the bugs and unbalanced combat it still remains the most satisfying due to too many factors to write down. Unless of course you want a three page retroreview on that game

I'd add one more to the most satisfying and that's Bloodlines. If I have to tell you why then you need to go buy it and play it

Gothic.

Maybe 1 a little more then 2

Gothic 1. It really blew my mind at the time, especially the world/atmosphere.

most worthwhile:
probably Torment, for its lasting impression its ending had on me

most pleasure:
that´s a real toughie, but I´d go with Turrican 2, finishing the game from time to time always provided me with, eh, unadulterated joy

biggest impact:
maybe Tír Na Nóg on a good´ole Speccy - lots of puzzles, mysterious atmosphere, exploration, just look at the map
it had pretty cool animations for its time (1984), btw.


Interestingly enough, if I had to choose only one game to answer the question, I´d probably go with Wizardry 7 .

Originally Posted by Captain Buzzkill
System Shock 2. I never played SS1, but the atmosphere and pacing of the SS2 severely creeped me out. I played the game well into the night on several occasions, with little to no ambient lighting in the room, and had to stop well before I wanted to, simply because I was too freaked to play any more.

…

Tricky question since it indicates a "cost/benefit" factor, which rules out bg2 and the likes for me since it took way to long to complete.

But as above, very similar experience and I came to the same conclusion.
SS2 it is.

Honorable mention to Some of the Wing Commander games for me.

Crilloan

Can't name only one. Gothic 1 as others have mentioned was quite amazing. Baldurs Gate was a revelation at the time. Half Life 1 when it first came out was mind blowing.

Everquest 1 for about a year was the only game I could think about and I played it constantly. All of these games were memorable.

Looking at what I said, all the games were in the past. To name more recent games that were excellent that I played:
Tomb Raider Anniversary, Dead Space

Originally Posted by Motoki
Going to go with Ultima 7 as well. For the time, it was just so far beyond anything else in terms of interactivity and richness of the world and its inhabitants. Even in the past 2 decades since then there really haven't been much in the way of games that can compare to it.

Amen brother! I was thinking you and I could perform some kind of ritual sacrifice, maybe sacrifice a goat or something and pray to the Ultima Gods for a true successor to U7. Just a thought

… Kidding of course…

Well since most people are listing separate games for fun and impact, I guess I'll say that Doom would need to be mentioned for it's impact on me. That was the first game that made me really want to get a PC.

Other games worth mentioning would be Adventure on the Atari 2600, and Dungeons of Daggorath on the Tandy TRS-80. I credit those games for introducing me to RPGs in general.

Originally Posted by JDR13
…I guess I'll say that Doom would need to be mentioned for it's impact on me. That was the first game that made me really want to get a PC.

As it turns out, FPS games didn't stick with me in the long run like how CRPGs have. But you are right, at least in my case, about Doom. There was a several year period where I played Doom, Doom II, Heretic, and Hexens 1 & 2 via LAN with a buddy of mine and it was a ton of fun.

It's funny when I think back how we'd lug these bulky desktop PCs back and forth to each other's house to physically connect them and play together via the IPX protocol. Good times.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Other games worth mentioning would be Adventure on the Atari 2600, and Dungeons of Daggorath on the Tandy TRS-80. I credit those games for introducing me to RPGs in general.

Adventure on the 2600 was phenomenal. After the first day of playing it for the first time I remember not being able to sleep too well anticipating playing the next day.

As far as Dungeons of Daggorath… that is the proverbial 'fish' that got away. I had a TRS 'Trash' 80 (not sure why it got that label I thought it was a decent little computer) and bought Dungeons of Daggorath but could never get it to run right.