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Community RPG Codex Top Non-RPG PC Games RESULTS!

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653
Vice City being higher than San Andreas is just silly, SA is the better game. Did people dunk more points into VC more because they felt San Andreas was overrated or something?

a) a non-trivial number of dexers are opposed to having to play as a black guy and stories involving lower-class black people
b) San Andreas has nuisance features like eating and having to grind swimming to continue the critical path plus the difficulty spike of mandatory flight school and the subsequent flying missions. The only big difficulty spike I recall in VC is that one race.

it was cool to go full Al Capone in the end,
:hmmm:
Tony Montana. VC's story heavily homages/rips off De Palma's Scarface and Carlito's Way.
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
What I want to know is why Dishonored 1 is so much higher than the sequel. Dishonored 2 was an improvement in every way.
 
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unfairlight

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 20, 2017
Messages
4,092
5 years is ridiculous. Do we have to constantly replay our favourite games long past the point of fatigue to get to call them our favourites? Cmon dude.
5 years is half a fucking decade. If you play over 10 games each year, which I imagine most do here, it is a trifle to fit your favourite in there somewhere.
Second, correct me if I'm wrong but in your original post you were basically implying that some new titles simply better than similiar older ones.
No, I didn't, and fucking what? All I said in my original post is that San Andreas is better than Vice City, which is truly is.
b) San Andreas has nuisance features like eating and having to grind swimming to continue the critical path plus the difficulty spike of mandatory flight school and the subsequent flying missions
Eating wasn't actually required after the Ryder mission and when replenishing health you usually had hot dog stands which were no different to using health pickups in VC, and usually more widespread for that matter. You technically could starve in the game, but it was so improbable if you saved somewhat regularly.
Swimming, I suppose. It took like 5 minutes and I really don't consider it enough to drag the game down when SA is 30 hours long.
I never found flying difficult, even when I played the game as a kid on both PC and PS2. Maybe people need to get better at games. For that matter, you can make the same argument for the RC missions in Vice City which in my opinion were worse. You could skip the Zero missions in San Andreas entirely.
All faults you can point to San Andreas are completely negligible when you consider the better writing, mission design, map, customisation, gameplay, physics and vehicles. Effectively everything in San Andreas was better in every single way.
 
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unfairlight

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Aug 20, 2017
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4,092
What I want to know is why Dishonored 1 is so much higher than the sequel. Dishonored 2 was an improvement in every way.
I replayed the first and played the second for the first time a week ago and I don't think so. Dishonored 2 generally has less enjoyable characters, the boat is boring compared to the Hound Pits, the supernatural stuff just feels way off, the plague isn't anywhere near as interesting and generally the missions were a lot more dry and boring. It just generally felt less believable and interesting. Gameplay and level design wise, the gameplay was largely the same and the level design took a few too many extremes. Infiltrating a party is believable and fun. A massive mansion that shifts rooms that you barely see because you'll take the blatant stealth path anyway alongside a few forced combat sequences? Not as much.
But as for the poll, it is because it's a popularity contest. More people played Dishonored 1 than 2, since 1 has been out for much longer and 2 wasn't much of a hit.
 

Nano

Arcane
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4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Dishonored 2 generally has less enjoyable characters,
The characters in Dishonored aren't enjoyable in general, that's not one of Arkane's strengths.

the boat is boring compared to the Hound Pits,
Meh, they're both just places to catch your breath between missions. There's nothing of interest going on in either.

the supernatural stuff just feels way off,
How so?

and generally the missions were a lot more dry and boring.
YMMV. I thought missions like A Crack in the Slab and The Clockwork Manor were a lot more interesting and novel than anything in Dishonored 1.
 

Strange Fellow

Peculiar
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Joined
Jun 21, 2018
Messages
4,013
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
5 years is half a fucking decade. If you play over 10 games each year, which I imagine most do here, it is a trifle to fit your favourite in there somewhere.
It's not about making time, it's about not running my favourite games into the ground just to reconfirm something I already knew in order to counter some insipid "muh rose-tinted glasses" bitching.
 
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unfairlight

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Aug 20, 2017
Messages
4,092
The characters in Dishonored aren't enjoyable in general, that's not one of Arkane's strengths.
Yet I was a lot more interested in being a PART of a conspiracy rather than being a solo killer who will solve everything alone alongside my boring black lesbian armless boat captain who trusts and allies with me for no reason what so ever. Everything feels off from the ground up.
Meh, they're both just places to catch your breath between missions. There's nothing of interest going on in either.
Except the Hound Pits was a place where people lived and worked, I could resupply there and all those people reacted to my actions.
Too much of an extreme. The final mission with all the Overseers turned to stone, all the witches all over the place and the undead dogs. All feel wonky and unimmersive.
YMMV. I thought missions like A Crack in the Slab and The Clockwork Manor were a lot more interesting and novel than anything in Dishonored 1.
They technically "were" yet I still felt as if it was another piece that didn't actually fit well. Everything in Dishonored fit extremely well in comparison.

It's not about making time, it's about not running my favourite games into the ground just to reconfirm something I already knew in order to counter some insipid "muh rose-tinted glasses" bitching.
You're not going to run a thing to the ground by playing it once every 5 years, and if you don't actually want to play it then maybe you just chose the wrong favourite and maybe you should choose something you do want to play.
 

Black Angel

Arcane
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Jun 23, 2016
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Location
Wonderland
If you play over 10 games each year, which I imagine most do here, it is a trifle to fit your favourite in there somewhere.
Come now, you can't be serious about this.

The thing about good games are that they're practically timeless. Even more so when it comes to PC games, and moddability which leads to compatibility with more modern system. Like Strange Fellow said, it IS very possible to get sick of something if you play it over and over again, unless you have some sort of mental disorder that makes you endure thousands of hours of playing the exact same thing over and over again without much pause and respite. I only bought Alpha Centauri recently and got so addicted to it I almost get sick of playing it.
And even if you haven't played such good games for a long time, when you come back to it, it would just click as if pulling a lever of a really old but still perfectly working machine, the cogs just turns smoothly without problems.

Obviously there's a matter of taste as well. But when good games meet the taste, the nostalgia argument simply have no place when one could literally boot up their old favorite games and find that all is right with the world.
You're not going to run a thing to the ground by playing it once every 5 years, and if you don't actually want to play it then maybe you just chose the wrong favourite and maybe you should choose something you do want to play.
Why every 5 years? How are you so sure that one 'don't actually want to play it' instead of one wants to have some rest, shake a bit of some rust, and experience something else in the mean time?
 

Carrion

Arcane
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Jun 30, 2011
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Lost in Necropolis
5 years is ridiculous. Do we have to constantly replay our favourite games long past the point of fatigue to get to call them our favourites? Cmon dude.
Agreed. That being said, the games at the top are something that tons of people are probably still playing regularly. Everyone and their grandma has HoMM3 installed on some computer (or at least I do and I didn't even vote for it). Thief 1 & 2 are Codex favorites that people keep reinstalling and replaying all the time, not to mention all the fan missions. Starcraft has been super popular for ages despite getting a sequel that is also super popular. Half-Life got a remake that was in the making for, what, fifteen years, and people still somehow didn't lose interest in it. Alpha Centauri, X-Com / UFO, Doom... How does one even make an argument against these games being on the list seeing how much fun they are even today?
 

flushfire

Augur
Joined
Jun 10, 2006
Messages
771
6HXxD2L.jpg
 

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,871
Location
Eastern block
Was the late 90s the best time for PC gamers [...] DISCUSS!
Yes, they were.

That was the time when video games were just breaking into the mainstream (so Mr Moneybags was willing to throw some serious funding their way) but not quite mainstream enough to have to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. There was still a willingness to take risks and try new things.

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.
 

Butter

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 1, 2018
Messages
7,523
Vice City being higher than San Andreas is just silly, SA is the better game. Did people dunk more points into VC more because they felt San Andreas was overrated or something?
San Andreas is pretty great, but it's also the start of the the decline in the GTA series. Nobody wanted a girlfriend to take out on dates, or to get a job driving freight trains. SA was where the 4 hours of unnecessary tutorial missions started in the GTA series. It also had the shit idea of mandatory missions working as Tenpenny's bitch. There's a lot of cool stuff in that game, like flying planes and having rural areas instead of just cities, but there was pointless bloat. Vice City is a more distilled product. It also doesn't hurt that they captured the 80s Miami aesthetic so vividly.
 
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unfairlight

Self-Ejected
Joined
Aug 20, 2017
Messages
4,092
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.
Nobody wanted a girlfriend to take out on dates, or to get a job driving freight trains
So don't do it? GTA had optional crap you don't have to touch since the very start. If you don't want freight trains or girlfriends, don't do it (there is one mission where you're "required" to deal with a girlfriend but you can just kill them to skip it if you want.) This isn't a valid argument against the game whatsoever.
 

Reality

Learned
Joined
Dec 6, 2019
Messages
333
Just talking about stuff that stuck out to me

Rayman Origins - Very Breezy game, it does have DKC-style secrets in every level, but other levels seems to be blending normal platforming and "runner" style platforming - it's full jumps and tap jumps with nothing in between, and of course, always at the running speed. I do really like it's multiplayer and art, because triggers for level falling apart do a good job of letting baddies stay alive behind the most experienced player.

Age of Mythology - The fantasy elements and more assymetric factions do appeal to me... BUT I've never been okay with things like it's HUGE HP villagers or self-trading with own marketplaces. Very hostile to early (Classical age) combat and can turn into a dumb infinite resource vs infinite resource grindfest.

X-COM Apocalyypse - I wonder if the votes came from Real time or turn based players - Disintegrating entire buildings seems too important to the experience to me.

Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament 2004 are perfectly tied - I always thought that was a thing magazines did to be noncommittal and not insult either group. I guess it can happen naturally after all.

Majesty at 128 (17 points) Labeling it an RTS is a travesty

Weirdly high
Sid Meier's Colonization (103) I'm honestly never played it, it seems like a back of game box "if you buy Gettysburg and SMAC" advertisement gane that most people never get around too
Caesar 3 (84) Is this an art/theme vote? - Impressions got better as they went further.
Age of Wonders (74) If a MoM spiritual successor is going to beat down so many classic games then MoM itself being lower than HoMM is even sillier.

Weirdly low
MoO 1 (98) One day people will understand that random tech tree is the one true way
Pharoah (108) It's supposed to be better than Caesar 3 isn't it? Maybe people suddenly like the uncut walker system without quality of life now.. at least Zeus's monument mania didn't get in.
Silent Storm (107) I almost hate to bring it up, but it does get so much discussion on this forum -
Gabriel Knight 1 (187) I guess I can understand Lucasarts and Sierra pushing it to the back of people's minds.
 
Joined
Feb 28, 2011
Messages
4,099
Location
Chicago, IL, Kwa
A few head-scratchers aside (why on Earth is Half-Life 2 so high? Bioshock in the top 100? Civ 4 placing over Civ 2?) this is a good list that we can be proud of, with the caveat that it is a popular vote, so less played gems like Psychonauts, Sacrifice, Pathologic, etc. are naturally going to place lower.

Also I have to say I replayed Jedi Knight last week and it’s... fine. Not a bad game at all; decent level design with nice verticality, nice gunfeel on most weapons, and lots of secrets, but one of the greatest FPS ever made? Get the fuck outta here.
 

PlanHex

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2007
Messages
2,053
Location
Copenhagen, Denmark
Sad how far I have to scroll to find any Legacy of Kain entries.
Just barely broke the top 200...
 
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