NSFW Best Thread Ever [No SJW-related posts allowed]

[Arthandas]

 

[NecroLord]

Spoiler

"On the greatest platform known to man."

Bring back those days man...

 

[Rövtomte]

Man, makes me realize how much I fucking hate today's world.

Edit: "The political side" before anyone starts throwing the edgelord tag.

 

[Dark Souls II]

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Judging by that ranking, turns out Arcanum was the actual Oblivion with Guns...

 

[PlanHex]

Weird list.
As the intro says it "excludes historically important games" for some arbitrary reason and ends up with only games released in 1998-2002?
Got Arcanum but not Fallout? Not even Fallout 2?
Escape from Monkey Island as the only MI game?
Weird shit.

Edit:
HoMM4 but no HoMM3?
Dungeon Siege > BG2 should ruffle some codex feathers

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Weird list.
As the intro says it "excludes historically important games" for some arbitrary reason and ends up with only games released in 1998-2002?
Got Arcanum but not Fallout? Not even Fallout 2?
Escape from Monkey Island as the only MI game?
Weird shit.

Those were weird times for gaming as the 3D "revolution" was quickly making games of a relative age practically obsolete. I remember the Ultima 9 previews. They spoke of Ultima 7 and 8 as if they came out like 50 years before those days, it was that crazy. But their list of favorites is consistent with the games that were commonly played back then.

 

[JarlFrank]

Got Arcanum but not Fallout? Not even Fallout 2?

Arcanum is the better Fallout, anyway

 

[PlanHex]

Weird list.
As the intro says it "excludes historically important games" for some arbitrary reason and ends up with only games released in 1998-2002?
Got Arcanum but not Fallout? Not even Fallout 2?
Escape from Monkey Island as the only MI game?
Weird shit.

Those were weird times for gaming as the 3D "revolution" was quickly making games of a relative age practically obsolete. I remember the Ultima 9 previews. They spoke of Ultima 8 and 9 as if they came out like 50 years before those days, it was that crazy. But their list of favorites is consistent with the games that were commonly played back then.

Hmm yeah, in that sense it's not so weird really.
These lists are usually like half filled with games released in the 5 years before, that aren't really instant classics but represents the cutting edge of the time.
It just looks strange here because that period had so many actually good games they could fill it with almost exclusively games from the preceding 5 years, and it doesn't look that much dumber than the top 100 lists from now.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Weird list.
As the intro says it "excludes historically important games" for some arbitrary reason and ends up with only games released in 1998-2002?
Got Arcanum but not Fallout? Not even Fallout 2?
Escape from Monkey Island as the only MI game?
Weird shit.

Edit:
HoMM4 but no HoMM3?
Dungeon Siege > BG2 should ruffle some codex feathers

It's from a magazine that was released in September 2002, making that the cut-off date for potential games on the list.

More frustratingly the final page is missing, so I can't see what the No. 1 game is.

I tried looking up the magazine online, and every issue of 2002 has a readable scan except for this one.

 

[JarlFrank]

I tried looking up the magazine online, and every issue of 2002 has a readable scan except for this one.

Their top pick is so horrifying, the page was deleted from the internet to protect our sanity. A revelation the world is not ready for.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I tried looking up the magazine online, and every issue of 2002 has a readable scan except for this one.

Their top pick is so horrifying, the page was deleted from the internet to protect our sanity. A revelation the world is not ready for.

Perhaps. More likely is that you don't have a taffin' clue what it is.

Doesn't matter. I'm curious because the only HoMM-game on the list is 4, and Thief 2 isn't on the list either. Half-Life 1 is already on the list so that isn't it.

The top spot could end up being

 

[JarlFrank]

 

[Infinitron]

Unkillable Cat felipepepe Interesting bit of historical drama from The Digital Antiquarian (maybe this is old news to you): https://www.filfre.net/2025/01/railroad-tycoon-ii/

Postscript:
Heroes of Might and Magic II and Railroad Tycoon II: Separated at Birth?

When I first announced that I’d be writing about Railroad Tycoon II, reader eldomtom2 pointed me to some allegations that Greg Fulton, the co-designer of Heroes of Might and Magic III, leveled against Phil Steinmeyer in an online newsletter in 2021. In the course of a somewhat rambling narrative that he admits is rife with hearsay — his association with New World Computing didn’t begin until after Steinmeyer’s had ended — Fulton posits that Steinmeyer kept the Heroes I and II source code he had written for New World and used them as the basis for Railroad Tycoon II. When the first demo of the latter game was released in mid-1998, Fulton discussed with his colleagues how it “felt familiar.” One colleague, he says, then “decompiled the [Railroad Tycoon II] executable and found Heroes II references in the code.” Fulton goes on to say that New World’s corporate parent 3DO sued PopTop and G.O.D. over the alleged code theft:

After some legal wrangling, the judge ordered both NWC and PopTop to produce printouts of the complete source code for HoMM2 and RT2. In the end, it was clear Phil had used the HoMM2 source code to make RT2. In his defense, he asserted [that] JVC [Jon Van Canegham] had told him he could freely use HoMM2’s game engine. JVC found this claim laughable.
Ultimately, Take Two Interactive, who had a stake in Gathering of Developers, asked 3DO what they wanted to make the lawsuit go away. 3DO asked for 1 million USD… and there it ended.

I’m not sure whether we are to read that last sentence as meaning that 3DO paid the requested $1 million or not.

What are we to make of this? At first blush, the accusation against Steinmeyer seems improbable. I can hardly think of two strategy games that are more dissimilar than Heroes of Might and Magic II and Railroad Tycoon II. The one is a turn-based game of conquest set in a fantasy world; the other is a real-time game of business set in the world we live in. The one has a whimsical presentation that lands somewhere between fairy tales and Gygax-era Dungeons & Dragons; the other is solidly, stolidly real-world industrial. And yet, surprising as it is, there does appear to be something to the charges.



When you start a new standalone scenario in Railroad Tycoon II, the different difficulty levels are represented by icons of horses running at varying speeds. This is a little strange when you stop to think about it. How are such icons a good representation of difficulty? And what are horses doing in our train game at all? I’ve heard the “iron horse” appellation as often as the next person, but this seems to be taking the analogy way too far.



Well, it turns out that the icons are lifted straight out of Heroes of Might and Magic II, where they’re used, much less counterintuitively, to represent the speed at which your and the other players’ armies move on the screen when taking their turns. I can hazard a guess as to what happened here. Steinmeyer probably used the icons as placeholder art at some point — and then, amidst the pressure of crunch, with a hundred other, seemingly more urgent matters to get to, they just never got changed out.

For what it’s worth, these are the only pieces of obvious Heroes II art that I’ve found in Railroad Tycoon II. Yet the presence of the icons does tell us that Steinmeyer really must have been dipping into his old Heroes II project folder in ways that were not quite legally kosher. Based on this evidence, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that there are some bits and pieces of code as well in Railroad Tycoon II that started out in the Heroes games. Personally, though, I’m willing to cut him some slack here. The code in question was presumably his code to begin with, after all. And, given how drastically different the games in question are and how low-level the code that he reused must therefore be, the repurposing seems likely to have saved him a few days at the most.

So why was Jon Van Canegham — a man once described by Neal Halford, a game designer who worked with him for several years at New World, as “terminally mellow” — so much less inclined to be forgiving? I think there may have been some external factors involved. Greg Fulton remembers Canegham telling him that “Phil Steinmeyer was the main programmer on Heroes 1 and Heroes 2. He offered up ideas, just like Debbie [Canegham’s wife] did, so I gave him a design credit. After he left, he told anyone who would listen [that] he was the reason Heroes was a success.”

Again, there’s some truth to these accusations. While he was trying to build a buzz around Railroad Tycoon II in the months before its release, Steinmeyer was indeed happy to call himself “the designer of the first two Heroes of Might and Magic games” — full stop. In one preview, Computer Gaming World rather cryptically described him as the designer who “will forever be remembered as the man who saved Heroes of Might and Magic from self-destruction.” In addition to being manifestly incorrect in its core assertion — absolutely nobody remembers Phil Steinmeyer in those terms today — this sentence would seem to imply that Steinmeyer has been telling his journalist friends tales out of school, ones that perhaps don’t cast the schoolmaster at New World in an overly positive light.

I think we can see where this is going. Angered by these exaggerations and possible imprecations — and by no means entirely unjustifiably — Van Canegham must then have started working to deprecate Steinmeyer’s real contributions to Heroes II, a game on which Van Canegham had once seen fit to give him a full-fledged co-designer credit alongside himself, not the mere “additional design” credit he received for Heroes I. And he must have told the legal department at 3DO about his other grievance as well, the one he might be able to use to bleed his cocky former colleague. It became, in other words, a good old-fashioned pissing match.

I don’t know whether any of this really did result in Steinmeyer’s camp having to pay Van Canegham’s camp money, much less precisely what sum changed hands if it did happen. As always, if you have any additional insight on the subject, feel free to chime in down below in the comments. For my own part, though, I think I’ll stop chasing scandals now and go back to playing Railroad Tycoon II. I still have the last few Second Century scenarios to get through…

 

[PlanHex]

Weird list.
As the intro says it "excludes historically important games" for some arbitrary reason and ends up with only games released in 1998-2002?
Got Arcanum but not Fallout? Not even Fallout 2?
Escape from Monkey Island as the only MI game?
Weird shit.

Edit:
HoMM4 but no HoMM3?
Dungeon Siege > BG2 should ruffle some codex feathers

It's from a magazine that was released in September 2002, making that the cut-off date for potential games on the list.

More frustratingly the final page is missing, so I can't see what the No. 1 game is.

I tried looking up the magazine online, and every issue of 2002 has a readable scan except for this one.

Oh yeah, I meant that it doesn't take much from before that date. It says in the beginning that it skips e.g. Duke Nukem 3D intentionally.
The little blurb with the one guy's staff picks has NWN at #1 and that's not anywhere else on the list, so maybe that's #1?

 

[Don Peste]

Weird list.
As the intro says it "excludes historically important games" for some arbitrary reason and ends up with only games released in 1998-2002?
Got Arcanum but not Fallout? Not even Fallout 2?
Escape from Monkey Island as the only MI game?
Weird shit.

Edit:
HoMM4 but no HoMM3?
Dungeon Siege > BG2 should ruffle some codex feathers

It's from a magazine that was released in September 2002, making that the cut-off date for potential games on the list.

More frustratingly the final page is missing, so I can't see what the No. 1 game is.

I tried looking up the magazine online, and every issue of 2002 has a readable scan except for this one.

Sorryyyy! That was just me being evil
I didn't want to waste your time, you should have asked! Here's number 1:

Spoiler

 

[JarlFrank]

Weird list.
As the intro says it "excludes historically important games" for some arbitrary reason and ends up with only games released in 1998-2002?
Got Arcanum but not Fallout? Not even Fallout 2?
Escape from Monkey Island as the only MI game?
Weird shit.

Edit:
HoMM4 but no HoMM3?
Dungeon Siege > BG2 should ruffle some codex feathers

It's from a magazine that was released in September 2002, making that the cut-off date for potential games on the list.

More frustratingly the final page is missing, so I can't see what the No. 1 game is.

I tried looking up the magazine online, and every issue of 2002 has a readable scan except for this one.

Sorryyyy! That was just me being evil
I didn't want to waste your time, you should have asked! Here's number 1:

Spoiler

Called it:

Their top pick is so horrifying, the page was deleted from the internet to protect our sanity. A revelation the world is not ready for.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Gaming media at the time went insane with NWN1. They saw it as a technical wonder (admittedly, its lighting effects are kinda great even to this day) and the fact that it had an actual DM mode made everyone cum their pants.
At the same time, these mags would run comments on the then new DLCs for IWD1 and claim that the Infinity Engine was practically stone age tech by that point.