Interesting thread:

IL2
CFS2
SH4
Janes WWII air combat(very first sim I purchased)
Call of Duty series/Medal of Honor series

Honorable mention: B-17 Flying Fortress. Mechwarrior 3

Seems to be a common theme here:hmmm:

1. Silent Hunter 3 + GWX 3 (Neverending joy)

2. Fahrenheit aka Indigo Prophecy (completed)

3. The Moment of Silence (completed)

4. Syberia 1&2 (completed)

5. Next Life (completed)

6. Secret Files: Tunguska (Completed)

:salute:

1.- Steel Panthers (and all its variants and succesors)
2.- Pirates!
3.- Rome Total War
4.- Civilization II
5.-Silent Hunter 1

1)Freelancer
2)Rome:Total War
3)Star Wars:Knights of the Old Republic
4)Sims 2 (Hate to admit it though)
5)WoW (Another one I hate to admit to)

I kind of have a wide taste in pc games.

No particular order;

Tomb Raider 1 & anniversary (hmmm, nostalgia)
Fallout 3
Morrowind
Rome TW
Operation Flashpoint

Heck, I could go on and on...

My list isn't necessarially the best games ever, but the ones that have given me the most fun.

Counting down...

5. IL-2 Forgotten Battles/Pacific Fighters: WWII combat flight sims are my first love, and this one beats them all by a mile. The original Il-2 raised the bar by a mile in terms of graphics and realism, and Forgotten Battles just made it better. Add in the AEP and PF expansions, and you have the biggest and best combat flight sim ever made.

4. Rome: Total War: I didn't start playing it until recently, but I was instantly hooked. It's just so good in so many ways. Medieval 2 may be the better game, but Rome was just more fun. I had high hopes for Empire until I found that my computer probably can't run it.

3. Fleet Command: It's really the only game of its type that I've come across - a pure real-time, realistic modern combat strategy game. No resource gathering, no grand strategy, just fight the godd*mn battles. The incredible NWP project took it from a good game to a great game.

2. NHL 2004: The best hockey game ever made for the PC. It's sort of sad in a way, since NHL 2004 is old and was outdated in some ways even when it was new (the GUI looks like it's from the mid 90's). But no other hockey game since then has gotten the fundemental gameplay so right. Even after playing it for 5 years the AI still gives me a great game without making me feel like it's cheating. Every game is different - just like real hockey.

1. Sports Car GT: Nobody's ever heard of it, but this game was as fun as it gets. It was the little game that could. It started as project by a then-unknown studio called ISI. It bounced around between three publishers while it was in development, and the series it was meant to simulate went broke before the game came out. After all the delays the game was cobbled together and released as a low-budget game by EA. Nobody really paid any attention to it. It was a hodgepodge of random cars and tracks with outdated graphics and no clear market. It wasn't realistic enough to be a pure simulation, but it was too realistic to drive off the pure arcade crowd.

And it was absolutely brilliant. It was easy enough to sit down and drive a race without any preparation, but challenging enough to keep you interested. The AI was superb for its day - the AI cars felt like humans, since they could beat you but also make mistakes.

But the best part about SCGT was the mods. Anybody with a modicum of computer savvy and Notepad could edit the game. The SCGT community was small, but the modders were talented and prolific. They made hundreds of tracks and thousands of cars. If you could dream it, they probaby made it: 1000 mph dragsters, RV's, boats, blimps, F1 cars, anything. One SCGT mod ended up morphing (via a VERY long process) into a full retail game (the GTR series).

ISI didn't intend for SCGT to be modded, but they realized that it had turned their little unwanted game into a legend. When EA chose ISI to make their F1 games, ISI made sure to make the games mod-friendly. When ISI went independent again, they made rFactor, the ultimate mod-friendly racing sim. A lot of us like to think of it as Sports Car GT 2.

Hey, nice read about ISI, Max, I didnt know that.:up: The first screens from rFactor 2 have arrived, by the way. (virtualr.net)

Wow, hadn't even heard about an rF2! I've been sort of out of the sim racing loop since I didn't bring my racing wheel to school with me.

The history of ISI is pretty fascinating stuff, and I probably don't even know half of it. Intermixed with that is the history of Simbin and the GTR franchise, which is even crazier.

Haha Never hate to admit to, accept your weakness, your downfall your "I have no life" & playing WoW 24/7:rock: :DL

Yeah, I know the later stuff. Btw, to make it even more confusing, Simbin - who published the original GTR series, recently threatened to sue Blimey! - who made the games, because Blimey!(who by the way changed their name to Slightly Mad Studios:o) took ... well all the credit for those games in a online cv. Oh, and Simbin made the recent GTR Evolultion.

The size of the maps in Freelancer is just fascinating. Cruising across one of those mammoth sectors using those jump-highway gates and watching as the planets get closer was simply brilliant.

Haven't played any other space sim to date that gives you a better feeling of free space travel. In comparison, everything else feels like a bunch of square rooms linked by N,S,E,W jumpgate load screens. In Freelancer you can fly between planets without using those acceleration highways but it must take days.

There are wormholes to take you to new maps, but once you get to the new map, it's those intermediate jump-routes that really sets this game apart. I'd love to see em expand on it one day.

How appropriate, since the original Simbin (the guys now in charge of Slightly Mad) got started by stealing somebody else's work.

How so?

What eventually became GTR pre-dates Simbin by quite a bit.

It actually started in SCGT. An Italian guy made a FIA GT carset for SCGT. He was really good, and it was one of the best ever made for that game.

The carset came out shortly before the release of EA's F1 2001. That game was a huge jump forward for EA's F1 games. The previous two games had been built on the outdated SCGT engine, but F1 2001 was completely new. It also had a driveable Safety Car as an Easter egg, which showed it could handle closed-roof, closed-wheel cars, complete with a 3D cockpit. Finally, some SCGT modders dug through the F1 2001 file structure and found that ISI had deliberately made it mod friendly. Some SCGT modders decided to switch to the much more capable (but much more complex) new game. One of them was the Italian who made the FIA GT mod.

There were some initial attempts to simply convert the SCGT mods to F1 2001, but the new game was such a huge leap forwards that the SCGT stuff looked awful and completely out of place. So the Italian guy completley re-built his mod with new car models. He had a time-comsuming job in real life, so he didn't have time to build the drivng model for his mod. That had been a simple afterthought in SCGT, but in F1 2001 the physics could make or break the mod, and it was very tough to get right. So he found somebody else to make the physics model.

When the FIA GT Mod came out for F1 2001 it was revolutionary. There had been a couple sportscars released for the game, and one attempt at a single make mod, but it was all very primitive. The FIA GT Mod changed everything. It had multiple cars, real teams and drivers, completely new physics, and a fancy installer. It showed people what was possible with this new game.

Around the same time, there was a shakeup going on in the online community. Before F1 2001, the community for EA's F1 games was mostly based at a site called High Gear. The SCGT community hung out at a site called Speedsims, while the Grand Prix Legends gang was over at Race Sim Central. When F1 2001 came out, the RSC folks ignored it, the Speedsims folks either migrated to High Gear or stuck with SCGT, and High Gear fell into chaos. The guys who was running the forum at the time was a lazy *****, and when people asked for a dedicated editing section of the forum, he refused. So the guys on the cutting edge of the mod community (including the guy making the FIA GT Mod) fled to a small site that had been mostly ignored up to that point, run by a guy named Ian Bell. It was called Simbin.

After the FIA GT Mod came out, the guy who made it left the community for a while to concentrate on his real life work. Meanwhile, over at Simbin some people started complaining about the physics of the FIA GT Mod. The guy who made the physics (who was still around) stubbornly refused to admit that there was anything wrong with them, and things got pretty heated. In the end I think he either got kicked off the site or left on his own accord. Anyways, some of the other guys at Simbin wrote up some new physics for the FIA GT Mod.

Now, if they had just released their work as an addon for the pre-existing mod, that would have been fine. But instead, without asking anybody for permission, they took the existing FIA GT Mod, re-packaged it, put their new physics in, and re-released it as their own work (the FIA GT Mod Version 2). The people who they stole from weren't around to complain, so they got away with it.

Eventually, the team that had mad Version 2 came together and called themselves the SimBin Development Team (SBDT). They released a Version 3 of the FIA GT Mod, and when F1 2002 came out they started work on an FIA GT Mod for that game, called GTR 2002. Somewhere in there the Italian who made the original FIA GT mod came back on the scene, and joined the SBDT. He re-made all the car models, and GTR 2002 was a huge hit.

However, after GTR 2002 came out, the Italian guy and the SBDT had a huge falling out. At the time it wasn't clear exactly what it was about (each side bashed each other in the vaguest of terms), but it later became clear that it was related to SBDT going commercial. In that chaos it became obvious that he still wasn't happy about the Simbin guys ripping off his original mod, and he had never been quite happy within the team. It was hard to blame him, since he started the whole thing, but within the SBDT he was treated like a minor player. Once money got thrown into that mix, things fell apart.

The rest is pretty well-known. SBDT got financial backing from a Swedish racer in the FIA GT (Henrick Roos) and went commercial, building games on ISI's game engines. The Italian fellow went and worked with another mod team for a while, and has occasionally popped up on the rFactor scene.

The whole Simbin drama was pretty fascinating to watch. It was hard to believe back in the days when it was a dinky little message board that Simbin would end up becoming one of the biggest names in the racing sim industry.

1. Age of Empires II
2. Battlefield 1942
3. Silent Hunter III
4. Command Aces of the Deep
5. Sub Command

1. Medieval: Total War + Viking Invasion
2. Civilization II
3. Operation Flashpoint + Resistance
4. IL-2 Sturmovik 1946
5. Starcraft



For X-Com fans there's a open source variant called "UFO: Alien Invasion".

I remember watching when someone played X-Com but I was quite young at the time. I only remember that I thought the UFO's and aliens were frightening.
Although I did play it a little at the time but my English was quite poor at the time.

Here's a link: http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/

1. Sid Meyer's Gettysburg:yeah:
2. SH1 CE
3.Red Baron 3D
4. Panzer General
5. Call of Duty1 for multiplayer


honorable mention:
When the game didn't crash:stare:, Civil War Generals 2. I loved this game because you could play the entire CW as either side and they had a plethora of campaigns you could do. And it was entirely dynamic! I just wished they did a better job of patching it.

No fully destructible environments? No saving from within a mission?

Meh. You're supposed to add to a remake, not take away.:DL Loved it on X-COM when you took fire from an unknown source within a building that leveling the building was an option.

I do like the lights on the world map, though.

@max2147
Do you get into the Total War mods?
God I love modders! They took the silliness out of Rome: Total War and made it an amazing game. No more New Kingdom Egyptians with kopesh fighting my phalanxes.
And the pike and musket period, for some reason skipped between Med and Empire, superbly modded in an English Civil War "For King or Country"

Vanilla? BAH!

You bastards do realize that you jsut made me look up the original floppy disk with that game on it only to find that they no longer function?
That being said, this game is still as good and as dificult as it was when I last played it years ago, I allmost feel sorry for the poor rookies who get used to draw fire in orer to get the enemies position, so sad. Their life expectance is bellow 20 turns in combat :)