Your top 5 pc games ... EVER

[XLjedi]

Originally Posted by TheSatyr

1)Freelancer

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.

[Max2147]

Originally Posted by stabiz

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) took ... well all the credit for those games in a online cv. Oh, and Simbin made the recent GTR Evolultion.

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

[stabiz]

How so?

[Max2147]

Originally Posted by stabiz

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 The previous two games had been built on the outdated SCGT engine, but F1 2001 was completely new.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.

[Onkel Neal]

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

[Lionclaw]

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/

[nikimcbee]

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


honorable mention:
When the game didn't crash, 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.

[Captain Vlad]

Originally Posted by Lionclaw

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

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

Meh. You're supposed to add to a remake, not take away. 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.

[rubenandthejets]

@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!

[antikristuseke]

Originally Posted by Captain Vlad

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

Meh. You're supposed to add to a remake, not take away. 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.

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

[Dowly]

Hmm.. I think it's time to reinstall Jagged Alliance 2.

[Dowly]

Originally Posted by aaronblood

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.

Ah, what a great game. Didnt like the SP that much, but where it shines is the MP area. Especially the modded servers. I used to play on Aurora that used mod to add tons of new weapons, ships and planets. New ships from shows like Babylon 5 (this was the main area of the mod, almost all of the ships of the most important races were included, Shadows, Narns, Earth Alliance, the old ones etc. etc.). The server also was very heavily influenced by clans, every clan had it's sector where they were free to tax anyone who traveled there. Also, the clans were on two sides, the good guys and the pirates, so quite alot of alliances etc. were formed on the server. Very well organised server and quite possible one of my best online experiences there.

[kiwi_2005]

Originally Posted by aaronblood

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.

Yes what dowly said try MP its a blast. Another game you might like thats similar to Freelancer is the rpg spacesim 'Starwolves' the first one. Starwolves 2 is buggy ive been told so i got hold of Starwolves and am having a blast great game except one major gripe i have with it is the Russian to english voice conversion. The english speaking is terrible Its more like grunt sounds than english! Still overcome that you will with the gameplay if you like rpg type space sims.

[Capt.Warner]

1.Silent Hunter 3
2.Fallout 3
3.Men of War
4.Oblivion
5.Silent Hunter 4

[Lzs von swe]

Only 5
WARCRAFT 2 with expansion.
STARCRAFT with expansion.
Colin McRae series, if I have to chose it would be CMR4.
SHIII with GWX Gold
OFP with all expansions, so many hours, so many sleepless nights...
...
MS FSX did not make it onto the list, nor did... oh well, only 5...