<3 The 7th Guest. Advent of the CD-ROM era.

I also expected at least one of those two to be featured. It was nice to see Blade Runner on there, though. Extremely underappreciated game.

I actually like RPS a lot more now since they included Morrowind and Fallout 1&2 and not Oblivion and Fallout 3.

I'm not going to go into the whole Morrowind vs Oblivion debate again though, it's a waste of time.

Anyone here remember Knights of the Sky? You had to answer a question that you had to look up in the game manual before you could even play it. Never understood that, but it had the best 'War campaign' I've ever played. You played through all of WWI and could call out famous aces to duel. Missions consisted of everything from bombing trenches, to destroying German survey balloons. Very cool game for being over 20 years old.

Mechwarrior 2 is on that list.

I am pleased by their clarity.

That's what constituted copyright protection back in the stone age

I don't quite get why they put Hitman: Blood Money instead of the incredible Hitman 2, but hey. I was glad not to see the likes of Modern Warfare 2 on there.

I don't give much credence to "best of" lists, but if we're going to nitpick, then they're just putting popular games on there. They omitted Darklands, which came out the same year as Ultima VII, and was arguably better. If that wasn't bad enough, they're omitting excellent popular games in favour of sequels (Starcraft). Also, the later years top games were chock full of indie games that, while being quite fun, are NOT suited as "best of" material at all. It's like they listed only popular indie games too, to seem "edgy" or some crap.

That said, it doesn't really matter because it's just a "best of" list, which is meant to make readers go "YES! EXACTLY!" or "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU".

Darklands is random encounters, random quests, random everything. I prefer Ultima VII because of the meticulous detail put into the overworld and massive amount of quests and things to discover.

They couldn't be more different, I wouldn't say one is arguably better than the other.


I dunno if I would classify Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress in a specific year because... well they're both not completed yet.

Darklands has an amazing amount of things to do, and that can happen, not to mention the great historical setting. Ultima VII is great, but it definitely has tons of flaws which people like to ignore (combat). Also, I think it's easy to say that either one is arguably better than the other. We're arguing about it, after all.

Also, I was talking more about Braid and World of Goo when I referred to the indie games they listed.

Yes you can do a ton of things in Darklands, but again most of it is random. Besides the main plot line, it's usually something like "go to this town" or "fight these monsters", not real plot direction or content.

As an example of attention to detail in Ultima VII, I remember one "quest line" where you can follow the mayor of Britain at night and find out he's been cheating on his wife, and confront him about it. Or the note on Lord British that suggests he may be the father of the child of a girl who works in his castle, something most players won't even find since he's nigh invincible.

I did like Darklands, I didn't like writing down every single small quest so I'd remember it, especially since there is an infinite amount of quests. :wacko:

Yes, the quest desgin in Ultima VII was excellent, but if the list is judging by quest design, then where is Arcanum? If random generation is bad, then why is Diablo II on the list?

Darklands and Ultima VII are very different games.

Ultima VII had a map and quests that were entirely designed by hand. The game gave you stuff to do, until it ran out. The story strung you along, and was thoroughly enjoyable. You can go and bake bread to make money, or rob the bank, or go talk to a virgin-detecting unicorn in a dungeon, or charm some fuzzy, tree dwelling creatures with honey. I particularly enjoyed how the NPCs had their own schedules.

Darklands had tons of randomly generated quests that were essentially just the same quests, over and over. But the first time I ran into a village and accused them of being devil worshipers, or walked home a pilgrim and got a warning to avoid a particular bridge, or got caught by the city guard, dug my way out of prison and took sanctuary in a church it just felt awesome. Plus, I'm kind of a svcker for a bunch character building options.

I really feel like Ultima VII was designed to give you the developer's "optimal" gameplay experience (sure you could do things in different order, but it was pretty prescribed), whereas Darklands allowed you to shape your own gameplay experience (you lost some detail for it, though).

That's my point. They're both great games and none needs to be better than the other. :happy:

I suppose Darklands didn't make the list because they weren't aware of it, or that it has a very steep learning curve.

crusader ,- no regret and no remorse --- dood had to have a form of power armor lol

No, they didnt have that in 1990 (unless you were joking). You had to do it every time you loaded your campaign. It gave you a squadron insignia and asked what air unit it was from. I guess it wanted to promote learning or something? Anybody remember Muzzle Velocity? It was like the first Battlefield game but better since you could zoom out and command your units in real time.

I think Hitman 2 is easily the worst game in the series Cause it suffers heavily from having too many "military" levels. 47 should be in civilian places and taking out a target without anyone notice. Resturants, hotels and that sort of thing, not fighting tech ninjas in some remote castle.

I also got disappointed in the game story because it offered no backstory info about 47 at all, which the official website suggested as it told briefly what happened while he was "grewing up" and that sort of thing. The soundtrack in Hitman 2 is very good, though.

As Doubler said, it was the copy protection of the game. Or rather, manual protection To play the game you had to look up in the manual something to proceed, it was quite common in the games around then, until games appeared on CDs cause CD burners were way too expensive for people to buy then anyway.

That said, various forms of copy protection DRM existed back in the 80s for floppy drives, so that's not really anything new either.

As Freddo explained above, I wasn't joking. Having to quote things from the manual (words, colours, letters, numbers, matching pictures, you name it) was pretty common. As were code wheels and other inventive stuff. I'm looking at Professor Zorg's Instant Etiquette anolyzer right now
Copy protection of the day left us with amusing artifacts. Pity modern copy protection will only leave us with non-functioning games.