Incline 21st Century, here I come!

Silent Hill 2, PoP Sands of Time, Splinter Cell, Max Payne 2, Jedi Academy and Rainbow Six 3 are on PC.

 

Clicky-clicky loot-a-thon Diablo 2 ranked over games like Deus Ex and BG2 is decline city.

 

No, its a great game for what it is and more influential than any of the others in that year

 

Well that's probably true, sadly.

 

D2 single player just needs one tweak to take it from OK to great - disabling monster respawn for HC chars.

 

I've reviewed them all over at the FRUA forum. But I haven't rated them
Over time when my enthusiasm waned my reviews have probably got more testy as well.

 

yeah, that commitment to play all that stuff in chronological order requires massive discipline and can easily make things go sour, probably one of the reasons the CRPGaddicts often sounds like he doesn't enjoy playing CRPGs, because he's forced to play through all the terrible ones and the ones that are similar due to trends at certain times. I mean I love Goldbox games, but if I were playing them exclusively for months I would hate them too

still thanks for the link, although I saw your reviews there before. I assumed you had a massive excel-list with all the stuff sorted and ranked, like all proper CRPG autists

 

Well, I've gotten a bit tired of FPS games, so Deus Ex wasn't quite as exquistite as I remembered it, but still a GOTY contender, though.

BG2 is such a decline after The Underdark, and finally playing the cheese fest Throne of Bhaal soured BG2 a bit for me.

But I'm surprised by how much I really enjoyed playing all seven characters in Diablo 2 (except the Necro was a bit tedious), using PlugY to share loot between them. And I like random loot; as I've said before random loot is what makes fighting endless trash mobs worth it, which is why MM2 is my favourite blobber and the main reason why I'm not a big fan of Wiz 7 which have endless trash mobs but no loot at all to show for it.

 

btw. how do you handle games that aren't linear narratives, say 4x games like Civ, when do you consider them finished? One playthrough, one playthrough on all difficulties, etc. ?

 

One win on highest difficulty.
Or if the factions are really diverse, like in Master of Orion, win on highest difficulty with all factions. Most fun was winning a Total War win with the Darlocks.

Alpha Centauri is kind of a a border case. It's more diverse and unpredictable (and thus more replayable) than Civ 1 and 2, but not as much as MoO. So I only completed it with two of the factions IIRC, before the familiar predictability of Civ became apparant. It's one game I need to return to, I guess.

Of course, to be really hard core, the goal should be to win on highest difficulty on Small maps, instead of the easier Huge/X-Large maps.

 

Not to mention emulators and actual PC ports they've received in the last decade (forgot to include Remake, ToEE and other in the first post).

Finally if he's planning to play the best games of a given of each given year, for both entertainment and research (to see how the tech, trends, designs and priorities changed over the years) purposes, then he's doing himself a disfavor by not looking into games outside the PC, since those had also had a big impact and also produced genuinely great games.
Plus already by the 2003 he's going to have trouble finding good games in the traditional PC genres.

 

He's also missing out on all the great board games that never appeared on PC

 

I'm not playing PC games only, but I play all games on a PC (Wordfeud on my phone being the only exception).
I've already played Wizardry Gaiden IV: Throb of the Demon's Heart with an emulator and enjoyed it.
But I have zero tolerance for anime, so most of the Japanese Wizardry clones are out.

But in general games made for modern consoles (X-Box and PS2 onwards) don't interest me much, being nearly always 3rd person instead of 1st person, and UI made for gamepad instead of mouse and keyboard, for example. But I've grown more tolerant of 3rd person lately and grown a bit tired of FPS games, so who knows which games will be added and which will be rejected.
In the end the deciding question is whether I (think I) will enjoy it or not, and the availability. Steam only games will be put on the bottom of the list (not an issue so far).

Research is a secondary concern. The field is just too broad anway, with too many platforms and too many sub-genres. In comparison I find it much easier to see trends and developments and to get a general overview, when reading speculative fiction chronologically.

 

Dumb reason to avoid good games.

 

For your browsing pleasure.

Postal 2 (And Its Later Expansions), Max Payne 2 & Silent Hill 3 deserve a spot for 2003. And I've no idea how far you have this planned, but Hitman: Blood Money, Dark Messiah, Bully and Empire at War are fit for 2005.

 

Postal 2 is just edgy garbage

 

It is the Edgy Garbage. And the only game of it's kind worth a playthrough.

 

Postal 2's """humour""" gets less and less funny the further we get from the mid-2000s, but the game itself is still worth a play. The whole "the game is only as violent as you are" gimmick is cool (even if obviously exaggerated since all playthroughs are roughly the same), and trying to go through the whole week with minimal carnage makes the game a lot funnier and a lot more interesting.

It's also still funny in parts. If you don't laugh at least a little bit at the rampaging elephants in that weird elephant arena then you might have clinical depression.

 

No Geneforge for 2001? The series is different enough from what Vogel went for with his Exile titles, in case you don't like the latter.

 

When you get to 2002 you gotta play Heroes of Might and Magic IV, if you havnt already. Saying the series takes a drastic turn is putting things lightly.

 

Yes, HoMM IV will be interesting, especially since it seems to have a more powerful map editor, judging by the number of maps and especially campaigns made for it.

 

I'm surprised you didn't even mention King of Dragon Pass.

It might be the best game ever when you consider how unique it is while not being a flawed gem the way basically every other unique game ever is.

 

I don't like CYOA. Except maybe if it was in book form and I was out in the wilderness with no electrical power.

 

I wouldn't really call it a CYOA. Or at least not just a CYOA. But to each his own, I suppose.

So you don't play adventure games? I was curious what you think of Loom and The Last Express.

 

Gave up on Adventure games decades ago.