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Community RPG Codex Top Non-RPG PC Games RESULTS!

Joined
Sep 1, 2019
Messages
19
Don't get me wrong, they are both great games, but I think I underestimated how much Codex enjoys its stealth games.
The Codex enjoys Thief, period. The two games simply encompass everything that gamess can be and what they should strive for.

How recently have you replayed the first game? It has a lot of levels that aren't good.

The developers, according to Randy Smith, put in the levels with the undead, beasts, etc. to hedge their bets, as they weren't sure that a stealth game would sell. Of course, you can sneak past most of those enemies, and in small quantities they work well (e.g., Cragscleft), but most of the levels where they are the main enemies are mediocre at best.
 
Joined
Sep 1, 2019
Messages
19
What I want to know is why Dishonored 1 is so much higher than the sequel. Dishonored 2 was an improvement in every way.
It's weird. From what I can tell, on the internet, Dishonored 1 is commonly held to be the better of the two due to its story and characters, which is bizarre since those were bland to begin with (those elements aren't Arkane's strong points) and the games aren't story focused.

However, most of the posters in the Dishonored 2 thread seemed to consider it an improvement, so it's an odd result.
 

DJOGamer PT

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Lusitânia
CKN LIFE IS STRANGE AT 95??? IN THE FCKN TOP 100!!! WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU RETARDS!

It's placed above Chaos Theory. Let that sink him.
But what's even more inconceivable is that it's not a decent or even mediocre storyfag game. It's shit. With even worse writing and no redeeming qualities.
Yet the local storyfags think otherwise. It just goes to show that this forum has declined even in the quality of storyfags, to the level of the twitter plebs.

 
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selkin

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 26, 2012
Messages
108
I don't understand it either, how is Age of Empires II, Max Payne and Half Life 2 is in the top 25? MP was great because of bullet time but other than that it was hollow and boring. Also had annoying storyline. AoEII was simply the biggest dump of shit compared to Starcarft or even to Warcraft II at the time. HL2 was a tepid pile of crap either.

By the way I did not give 5 points to HoMM3, Thief or Starcaft, although I played the shit out of them and we still play with them to this day with my buddies. I gave the fivers to other games because they are more important for me as I got really hooked on them back in the days.

The list is dope though! Thanks a lot for it!

Edit: Doom 1-2 Hexen and a few other sequels could be added together I think.
The Qauke games as well maybe.
 
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Nano

Arcane
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
How recently have you replayed the first game? It has a lot of levels that aren't good.
Mind listing some examples? There's Strange Bedfellows and Escape, and the quality of Thieves' Guild and The Mage Towers is debatable. But that's still a small minority of the levels. The good outweighs the bad by far.
 

Butter

Arcane
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but it's also the start of the the decline in the GTA series
That's just pure wank you're spouting, dude. If we just had San Andreas release I'm certain the nostalgiafags here would moan about how GTA going 3D was start of the decline. If it was also the decline I don't get how it was followed by GTA IV (Technically, there was LCS and VCS as well), which I consider to be my second favourite GTA.
Have you considered that your taste is bad? GTA 4 was legitimately terrible. The whole city was brown and grey and every street looked the same, so you were forced to follow the directions on your phone in order to get anywhere.
 
Joined
Jun 24, 2019
Messages
694
What surprised me:

Too high:

Starcraft - 4
Half-life - 8
Warcraft III - 14
Minecraft - 53

Too low:

X-COM ufo defense - 5 (behind Starcraft, are you serious ?)
Myth: The Fallen Lords - 62
Blade Runner - 87
Master of Orion - 98
Myth 2 soulblighter - 103
Syndicate - 128
Stronghold Crusader - 136
Warhammer: Dark Omen - 136
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 - 172
Commandos: Behind Enemy lines - 187
All Age of Wonders games

Didn't make it(top 200):

AI War
Alone in the dark
Black & White
Blitzkrieg
Cataclysm dark days ahead
Crusader No Remorse and No Regret
Combat Mission
Commandos 2
Discworld
Distant Worlds
Emperor of the Fading Suns
Fallout Tactics
Fragile Alliance
Ground control
Jagged Alliance 1
Lords of the Realm 1,2
King Quest games
Imperialism 1,2
Imperium galactica
Nethack
Painkiller
Populous
Settlers
Serious Sam
Seven Kingdoms
Sins of the Solar Empire
Space Quest games
Space Empires games
Star Control 1,2
Starflight 1,2
Star Wars Battlefront 1,2
Sudden Strike
Shadow of the horned rat
Sword of the stars
Tzar the burden of the crown
Total Annihilation
Tom Clancy Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six
Quest for glory games
Warlords games
 
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RRRrrr

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 6, 2011
Messages
2,303
People should be frankly ashamed of the placement of The Longest Journey. That game is mediocre at best, and certainly not better than Sam & Max Hit the Road let alone the sixth greatest adventure game of all time.

Respectfully disagree. TLJ is great in both scale and ambition. It is one of the few adventure games that makes you feel like you live in these words. As ridiculous as it sounds, the conversations were so long that they felt real, and the locations were so many and so diverse that you felt like you were really there, doing the stuff that you would realistically be doing in April's shoes. Not to mention the voice actress for April being so good.

TLJ really built the world(s) it is set in, and I don't think there is an adventure of this scale when it comes to length, locations, dialogues, diversity, even if there are better written ones or ones with better puzzles.
 
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felipepepe

Codex's Heretic
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Terra da Garoa
felipepepe there's an inconsistency with the votes regarding Life is Cringe. It says there was 5 votes, but you only counted 4:

OIFdXtb.png
Yeah, the point total is right, but the "number of 5 votes" formula was missing the last column.


Also I hate to bring this up

but there is a

Faster than light (588) 3 votes
and
FTL:Faster than Light (70) 28 votes
My mistake, joined them now. It got 3 more points, so went from #70 to #64.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
People should be frankly ashamed of the placement of The Longest Journey. That game is mediocre at best, and certainly not better than Sam & Max Hit the Road let alone the sixth greatest adventure game of all time.

Respectfully disagree. TLJ is great in both scale and ambition. It is one of the few adventure games that makes you feel like you live in these words. As ridiculous as it sounds, the conversations were so long that they felt real, and the locations were so many and so diverse that you felt like you were really there, doing the stuff that you would realistically be doing in April's shoes. Not to mention the voice actress for April being so good.

TLJ really built the world(s) it is set in, and I don't think there is an adventure of this scale when it comes to length, locations, dialogues, diversity, even if there are better written ones or ones with better puzzles.
It's been ages since I played TLJ, and my initially fairly positive view of the game is definitely colored by my intense dislike of Dreamfall. And I concede that the game does have a very ambitious scope along every dimension except puzzle depth -- a huge geographic scope (including a very large number of rooms) with a huge cast of (for an adventure game) well-developed characters. The world has a lot of lore to it (again, much more than in a typical adventure), and it is unusual in having a serious plot rather than being comedic. I wouldn't say it is a bad adventure game, but I don't think it's a particularly good one. Again, perhaps my memory is wrong, but here's what stands out in my recollection:

* "doing the stuff that you would realistically be doing in April's shoes" -- Exactly the opposite reaction. Because the game is grounded in an ostensibly serious, real-world setting, the absence of straightforward puzzle solutions and the presence of truly zany puzzle solutions stands out all the more. We don't need to go to the rubber duck example. The first real puzzle in the game is a crazy electrical puzzle where you use an heirloom ring as a conductor and futz around risking electrocution rather than taking any of a million more reasonable steps. The game rules out maybe twenty reasonable options, but not the other eighty. I say this as someone who conducts his life in a very adventure-gamey way (once dealt with a wasp nest by building a 15-foot-hafted PVC "hammer" with the T junction tip wadded with ammonia soaked paper towels, having girded my body with socks on my hands and a balaclava mask; once fixed a keyboard by weaving a rubber band through its underbody to hold a broken key in place, etc.).

* The game is very long, but the length is overwhelmingly (1) completely gameplay-free dialogue (i.e., dialogue where the only thing you do is click "continue" or go sequentially through dialogue topics until they're all exhausted) and (2) backtracking at a fairly slow movement speed because the game deliberately sets locks and keys far apart and makes you ping pong back and forth between them. Thus, what I consider to be the essence of adventure games -- the player's deliberate engagement with the obstacles in the game using a variety of verbs and tools -- is a very small minority of the game, particularly in comparison to the other adventure games on the Codex's list.

* Many of the characters and scenarios are not especially creative or well-realized; the whole tech/fantasy worlds hanging in the balance has been done better previously by other authors, the beautiful bohemian types who are the game's heroes are not very interesting to me as a heroes (or even as beauties or bohemians).

Ultimately, there is a roughly contemporaneous game that IMO "matches up" well against TLJ: Grim Fandango. It also involves a huge world with many characters, a great deal of dialogue, and a variety of settings. It has a rich lore and interesting bestiary of fantastical creatures that serves as a kind of strange reflection of the real world. But GF utterly crushes TLJ. Its puzzles aren't spectacular, but they are much better than TLJ's. Its setting is vastly more creative (and more interesting); its characters are, ironically, much more human. Manny is a much more likable protagonist. The story has a propulsive forward force to it that TLJ's lacks. The visuals hold up much better. TLJ's were lovely at the time, but now look like any generic fantasy 3D art -- there's no sense of a unique artist (or vision) behind the game.

"Mediocre at best" was probably too harsh, but it's a game I have no real interest in replaying. It sits around the same level as Dragonsphere in my recollection: it was a satisfying serious fantasy at a time when I was into mediocre serious fantasy of all stripes, but it has nothing meaningful to teach about writing, puzzle design, world building, etc. It doesn't even have the memorable twist of Dragonsphere!
 

RRRrrr

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 6, 2011
Messages
2,303
doing the stuff that you would realistically be doing in April's shoes" -- Exactly the opposite reaction. Because the game is grounded in an ostensibly serious, real-world setting, the absence of straightforward puzzle solutions and the presence of truly zany puzzle solutions stands out all the more.
I don't disagree that some solutions are unreasonably convoluted, but I always viewed this as a staple of the genre rather than a fault of TLJ.

As for the movement speed-there is an option to skip animations, meaning you can travel in seconds. I can see why you might have disliked the game if you sat through the slow animations, I cannot imagine paying the game without this option.

The dialogues are indeed long, but it is something I liked-from the random everyday stuff you chat about in the begining and all throughout the game, the dialogues were at the length I would have had them in real life.

I think our opinion on the game differs because I don't put too much emphasis on the puzzles themselves and for me all the unoriginal ideas were compensated with the vast dialogues and rich setting. I can see why this is not a worthwhile tradeoff for some people, though. I was just trying to explain why TLJ is so well renowned and can be considered among the quintessential adventure games, even if it is not the best one.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Hmm. I wonder if I forgot about fast-travel and am conflating the slow movement speed with Dreamfall, or whether I was unaware of it at the time I played. It's been 20 years, so it's something of a blur. The convoluted nature of the puzzles is a staple of the genre -- but it's a staple that compels certain aspects of tone, setting, etc. In the absence of those things, the zaniness needs to be very limited or it is inconsistent with the rest of the game. (Gabriel Knight gets zinged with a few such examples, which stand out only because the game is a serious one in a real-world setting. The silly mustache puzzle would probably be considered an excellent puzzle if it showed up in a Lucas Arts game, for instance.)

In any event, I'm sure you're right that players who place a premium on scope, lore, narrative, and so forth would rate TLJ highly in the genre. I guess to me something can only be a "quintessential adventure game" if it has the quintessence of adventure games, namely, fair but tough puzzles that are integrated well into the narrative. But that's my own a priori view of what an adventure game should be, and it's clearly not universal (or even the majority view among current adventure players).
 

Ismaul

Thought Criminal #3333
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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
TLJ was pretty mediocre. I was thoroughly unimpressed by it at the time.

There were many narrative adventure games better than it released at around the same time: Sanitarium, Grim Fandango, Blade Runner, Dark Earth, off the top of my head.
 

Carrion

Arcane
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Lost in Necropolis
How recently have you replayed the first game? It has a lot of levels that aren't good.

The developers, according to Randy Smith, put in the levels with the undead, beasts, etc. to hedge their bets, as they weren't sure that a stealth game would sell. Of course, you can sneak past most of those enemies, and in small quantities they work well (e.g., Cragscleft), but most of the levels where they are the main enemies are mediocre at best.
The Dark Project has the best first five levels in any game ever. After that the quality drops off a bit, but almost every one of the later levels is still someone's favorite. Even Escape! justifies its place because it feels appropriately fucked up, even though I don't like playing it at all. The only real stinker in my opinion is Thieves Guild in Thief Gold, but apparently some people like that too.

The undead and the other non-human enemies are always a subject of debate in Thief 1 vs. Thief 2 arguments, but a level as good as Down in the Bonehoard kind of makes that debate seem pointless.
 
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Joined
Sep 1, 2019
Messages
19
How recently have you replayed the first game? It has a lot of levels that aren't good.
Mind listing some examples? There's Strange Bedfellows and Escape, and the quality of Thieves' Guild and The Mage Towers is debatable. But that's still a small minority of the levels. The good outweighs the bad by far.
In addition to Escape and Strange Bedfellows I dislike The Haunted Cathedral (the whole mission struck me as being like the sewers in Thieves' Guild but with some verticality), Return to the Cathedral (it's just a series of fetch quests and the start is terrible), Undercover (the "disguise" system is a bit buggy and the level boils down to hunting for switches) and Into the Maw of Chaos (it is extremely linear and you can just run past all the enemies).

I would call The Mage Towers decent. If not for the sewers, Thieves' Guild would be decent too.
 
Joined
Sep 1, 2019
Messages
19
How recently have you replayed the first game? It has a lot of levels that aren't good.

The developers, according to Randy Smith, put in the levels with the undead, beasts, etc. to hedge their bets, as they weren't sure that a stealth game would sell. Of course, you can sneak past most of those enemies, and in small quantities they work well (e.g., Cragscleft), but most of the levels where they are the main enemies are mediocre at best.
The Dark Project has the best first five levels in any game ever. After that the quality drops off a bit, but almost every one of the later levels is still someone's favorite.
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Lord Bafford's Manor is too easy and somewhat empty, plus the mansion in Assassins is unexceptional and the level involves searching for a hidden switch on hard and above. Cragscleft Prison and The Sword are fantastic, though.
 

Belegarsson

Think about hairy dwarfs all the time ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I thought I was a total casual with no taste until I saw Life is Strange on this list.

Now I feel better about myself.
 
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Joined
Oct 21, 2013
Messages
34
Devil May Cry 3?. The game is great don't get me wrong, but the pc port was horrible. No joystick support at all when the Special Edition port came out.
 

Nano

Arcane
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Lord Bafford's Manor is too easy and somewhat empty, plus the mansion in Assassins is unexceptional and the level involves searching for a hidden switch on hard and above. Cragscleft Prison and The Sword are fantastic, though.
Your opinions kind of suck. Assassins is a candidate for best mission of the series IMO.
 

Jarpie

Arcane
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Codex 2012 MCA
No Broken Sword in 200 and none of the LucasArts adventure games made into top 25? I'm surprised, I'd imagine codex users would like adventure games more. IMO Quake is very overrated, it's impressive technical demo for the time, but as a game? boring brown crap, I always liked Duke Nukem 3D more as a game.
 

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