Community RPG Codex Top Non-RPG PC Games RESULTS!

[DOS]

I've yet to see a game as thematically consistent as Quake. It's also one of those games where it places a different kind of paranoia beyond the simple "scare-in-the-dark" gimmicks you find in today's "horror" games.

Devil Daggers ranges close in those aesthetics, I suppose...

 

[Carrion]

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.

Yeah, you'd have expected Broken Sword somewhere in there (forgot about it myself) and at least one of the LucasArts games to finish higher up, but maybe they ate up each others' votes. The real travesty for me is The Curse of Monkey Island finishing above LeChuck's Revenge. Of course it's a fun game, but come on.

As for Quake, I played it a ton as a kid, and it might've been the first game I actually got on CD. Before that I had only played shareware versions of Doom, Duke 3D etc., so getting a full version was something else. Despite its great atmosphere I still wouldn't rate it that high.

 

[Falksi]

Some great games on there, good list. Very happy that the following made it:

Secret of Monkey Island
Curse of Monkey Island
GTA Vice City
Star Wars: Tie Fighter
Jedi Knight 1 & 2

Although let's be honest, the real winner should have been X-Com.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Shadow of the horned Rat doesn't appear in the top 1000 even though it has 6 points.

X-COM 2012 received a lot of votes because a lot of people said "X-COM Enemy Unknown" instead of "X-COM Ufo Defense".

XCOM could have been 2nd

 

[Roguey]

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.

Worked with my controller. I used a patch of course.

 

[visas]

Surprised to see DOOM that much higher than DOOM 2. I always saw the latter as DOOM but with a few more months of dev time. Knee-Deep In the Dead seems pretty overrated outside from a historical perspective and Shores of Hell is such a drag.
Tom Hall luckily got kicked before DOOM 2, only map 10 has those airplane hangar-sized half-empty rooms.

 

[Fenix]

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

I can't be sure about Max Payne as it was lng ago, but I'm sure of one thng - it's miles better than Half-Life 2.

HL2 is a great game, and certainly much more impactful than Blood or Duke 3D.

WTF? Did you confused Half-Life and Half-Life 2 somehow? Steam would be here one way or another, with this name or another, from Gaben or from someone else.

 

[beruseruku]

Great list! Time to install some of these again.
Games that would fit the list: Claw, Knights of Honor, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Hearts of Iron III, To the moon.

 

[Thal]

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.

I recently replayed Thief 1 and I have to say that Down in the Bonehoard might actually be the best level in all first person gaming. You'd need a long essay to address every facet of its brilliance. It should be a reference point for all immersive sims and especially first person rpgs.

Also, I disliked zombie levels when I first played Thief around the time of the release. They were simply too much for me at the time, which I believe was the case for many other teen/pre-teen gamers at the time. Now that I'm older and wiser, I can appreciate them for what they are. Almost a necessity when it comes to building tension.

By the way, you guys play and appreciate way too much FPS and RTS games.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

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.

Not that surprising when you look at traffic numbers for the Adventure Games sub-forum; it’s a proportionally small number of users generating a lot of discussion.

 

[Rostere]

No Shadow of the Horned Rat or Blood Omen in top games = bad. Also no Legacy of Kain, but to be fair I didn't vote for it myself, so whatever.

Absolutely and it's just crazy how many of these games were released in 1999. Clearly the RPG Renaissance wasn't only about RPGs, or even video games in general. Sometimes I think there exists a sphere of human thought where all things converge uniformly.

What is clear in this list is how we missed the late 90s with so many genres and game mechanics at almost the top of their refinement. Then, decline arrived with the XXI century.

The truth is, the Xbox arrived and stole a lot of thunder from the PC platform. Microsoft went from supporting PC gaming to supporting console gaming instead, no wonder PC gaming declined. Suddenly all the money was in casualtard hand controller platforms. Impossible to make a good FPS or RTS for those.

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.

Typical pleb-tier Thief opinions. "muh undeads are not fair!!"

Down in the Bonehoard with both burricks and undead is one of the best Thief missions of all time, if you don't understand that, you're hopelessly retarded.

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.

And then, Mage Towers and Thieves' Guild are from Thief Gold, they were cut from the original game.

Thief Gold made more goodness available for fans of the original (which is nice), but it also strictly decreased the average quality of the levels.

 

[Taurist]

Jedi Academy is a substantially worse game than Outcast. The RPG lite systems and early lightsaber are nice changes, but on the whole almost every level is a boring hallway. It was an ambitious sequel cracked out in less than a year, and feels like it.

Neither game is top fifteen FPS status. Lemmings should be higher.

 

[samuraigaiden]

The only Star Wars game that even deserves to be in the list is Tie Fighter, and even then not very high

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

The only Star Wars game that even deserves to be in the list is Tie Fighter, and even then not very high

I don’t know how someone can be so right and then so wrong all in the same sentence. TIE Fighter is a strong contender for the greatest video game of all time.

 

[Onionguy]

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.

I recently replayed Thief 1 and I have to say that Down in the Bonehoard might actually be the best level in all first person gaming. You'd need a long essay to address every facet of its brilliance. It should be a reference point for all immersive sims and especially first person rpgs.

Also, I disliked zombie levels when I first played Thief around the time of the release. They were simply too much for me at the time, which I believe was the case for many other teen/pre-teen gamers at the time. Now that I'm older and wiser, I can appreciate them for what they are. Almost a necessity when it comes to building tension.

By the way, you guys play and appreciate way too much FPS and RTS games.

It's ironic, but every time I get to play Down in the Bonehoard again, it gives me a stronger sense of genuine dungeoning adventure than all the other dungeon crawlers/dnd themed games combined.

 

[Thal]

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.

I recently replayed Thief 1 and I have to say that Down in the Bonehoard might actually be the best level in all first person gaming. You'd need a long essay to address every facet of its brilliance. It should be a reference point for all immersive sims and especially first person rpgs.

Also, I disliked zombie levels when I first played Thief around the time of the release. They were simply too much for me at the time, which I believe was the case for many other teen/pre-teen gamers at the time. Now that I'm older and wiser, I can appreciate them for what they are. Almost a necessity when it comes to building tension.

By the way, you guys play and appreciate way too much FPS and RTS games.

It's ironic, but every time I get to play Down in the Bonehoard again, it gives me a stronger sense of genuine dungeoning adventure then all the other dungeon crawlers/dnd themed games combined.

This. Thief isn't really a stealth game, as in a genre. Instead, it is a simulation of being a thief in an rpg, and a brilliant one at that.

 

[Roguey]

Surprised to see DOOM that much higher than DOOM 2. I always saw the latter as DOOM but with a few more months of dev time. Knee-Deep In the Dead seems pretty overrated outside from a historical perspective and Shores of Hell is such a drag.
Tom Hall luckily got kicked before DOOM 2, only map 10 has those airplane hangar-sized half-empty rooms.

Doom 2 is a meat-grinder whereas Doom is nigh-perfection except for one level in the last episode.

Jedi Academy is a substantially worse game than Outcast. The RPG lite systems and early lightsaber are nice changes, but on the whole almost every level is a boring hallway. It was an ambitious sequel cracked out in less than a year, and feels like it.

Neither game is top fifteen FPS status. Lemmings should be higher.

Outcast was made in 10 months, Academy in 14. One would expect Academy to be the more polished of the two, but that's Raven for you.

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeah, the 'Dex should concern itself with RPGs, I see other types of games aren't a strong point. Not that I disagree with a lot of these choices, but the order is all over the place.

 

[Black Angel]

By the way, you guys play and appreciate way too much FPS and RTS games.

Can people play and appreciate way too much RPG games?

 

[Bester]

Why didn't Clive Barker's Undying make the list? Are you fucking kidding me?

 

[Lady_Error]

X-COM 2012 received a lot of votes because a lot of people said "X-COM Enemy Unknown" instead of "X-COM Ufo Defense".

Actually, I also think now that felipepepe assigned too many points to the new XCOM. Here is his list:

When you see people voting only for old classics, then it doesn't make sense to assume that they meant the new XCOM, even if they wrote it without hyphen.

This is 5 points that should go to the original:

5 Points:

1. Panzer General
2. XCOM Enemy Unknown
3. Close Combat A Bridge 2 Far
4. Grim Dawn
5. Master of Orion 2

This one meant indeed the new XCOM, since most games in his list are new and XCOM 2 has even more points:

5 points:

1. Xenonauts
2. Voidspire Tactics
3. XCOM 2
4. Shadow Warrior(2013)
5. Prince of Persia - the two thrones

3 points:

1. Space Rangers 2
2. Conquest Elysium 4
3. Dominions 4
4. XCOM: Enemy unknown
5. The Walking Dead (a telltale games series)

This one voted for both, so it is clear:

5 Points:
1. UFO: Enemy Unknown
2. Unreal Tournament
3. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
4. Age of Wonders 2
5. Minecraft

However, here we have another 1 point that belongs to the original:

5 points

Monkey Island 2
Heroes of Might and Magic III
Hitman Silent Assassin
Championship Manager/Football Manager
Thief 2

3 points

System Shock 2
Duke Nukem 3D
GTA San Andreas and Vice City
Full Throttle

1 Point

Age of Empires 2
Age of Mythology
Civ 3
C&C Red Alert
Medieval Total War
Xcom

And here is another one with mostly old games where the "XCOM" was counted as the new one, but is really the old:

5: UT99, Starcraft, Dystopia (source mod), Star Wars: X-Wing, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
3: Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, Warcraft 3, Crusader Kings 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Doom 2
1: Simcity: 2000, XCOM, Myst, Megarace, Thief, NEOTOKYO, AoE 2, Top Gun, Worms: Armageddon, Solitaire

This one I have as "X-COM: Enemy Unknown" in my list, but it is actually "UFO: Enemy Unknown":

5 points:
-----------------------------------------------
The Secret of Monkey Island
UFO: Enemy Unknown
Heroes of Might & Magic II
Master of Orion II
Thief II

Overall, 12 more points should go to the original UFO/X-Com, which would put it into 4th place ahead of Starcraft.

 

[Ninjerk]

Yes, I did mean the older game. The one I've played is in my Steam library as X-Com: UFO Defense and lists release date as December 31st, 1993.

EDIT: Good looking out Lady Error

 

[Jason Liang]

The only Star Wars game that even deserves to be in the list is Tie Fighter, and even then not very high

I don’t know how someone can be so right and then so wrong all in the same sentence. TIE Fighter is a strong contender for the greatest video game of all time.

TIE Fighter and Star Wars Rebellion

 

[Roguey]

Why didn't Clive Barker's Undying make the list? Are you fucking kidding me?

Quality diminishes after Lizbeth and really diminishes once you're in Eternal Autumn.

 

[Van-d-all]

While the list mostly aligns with my own in strategy games & outliers like stealth or space sims, it's hilariously arcade in FPS department, with only noticeable exceptions being OFP and SWAT 4.

Actually, I also think now that felipepepe assigned too many points to the new XCOM.

Yeah, more than zero.