There were four games in total which utterly consumed all my free time when I was a kid: Elite - Frontier, Realms of Arkania 2 - Star Trail and both of the Dark Sun games that were released by SSI back in the day.

The first among them, Elite, was a game that I just couldn't get enough of. To have my own spaceship, to just travel from one system to the next - it's a vivid memory for me, getting my very first Asp and lifting off while Great Gates of Kiev played in the background.

RoA 2 was probably the first game where I just ignored whatever the story was and made my own adventure just traveling through the world. I remember getting lost in abandoned mines, yet feeling quite content in exploring them and nothing more. No game since has really caught my attention like RoA 2 did at the time.

Dark Sun games were a thing unto itself. I knew nothing about the setting beforehand, so Athas was really a brand new world for me and the way the usual fantasy races were played off, barring some usual archetypes, really intrigued me. I never saw elves handled that way before - here, they were nomads and thieves and swindlers and they weren't kind or accepting of half-breeds. Halflings weren't some queer and quiet folk living off by themselves amidst hills, they inhabited the jungle and they were ruthless savages who had no issues eating the flesh of other sentient races. Half-giants and muls and thri-kreen were all unknown to me before I played DS - Shattered Lands. But said races weren't all that pulled me in about the world. It was its history, unveiling it through the game's dialogue and coming across ruins, wandering across the desert, learning about defilers and preservers... basically, it was all of it. I still replay the games from time to time.

 

One of several reasons why the ideal strat is to bench Lavitz/Albert for Haschel at the earliest opportunity.

 

I loved Red Alert, I had it on a pirate copy I think on playstation. That and the original Age of Empires were defined as much by their gameplay as their cheats. Young me did not value challenge. With Red Alert I remember the free nuke cheat and the plane drops of parachute bombs which were amazing. Even with cheats though, those ants were tough.

And age of empires had weird cheats galore. Babies on tricycles, bmw's with uzis, laser troopers and long range nukers. It's weird how I can't remember close childhood friend's names, but I can remember e=mc2 was a free future trooper and freepizza was the money.

This. This is what this is for. I hope it was at least cathartic

 

Very technically I don't have the original snes game anymore, but little Cjon was obsessed with Megaman X as a kid. Though I was reunited with the game when the PlayStation 2 came out with that anthology

 

Fable 1. But I've still got it. I've got like...five copies, across consoles and versions.

 

So there is this small German studio, Piranha Bytes. They have been making the same game for 20 years. It comes out under different names, but it's always the same old familiar open world RPG where controls could generously be described as "clunky", writing is... well, it exists. And everything wants to fucking kill you.

The first Gothic is a one of a kind game. If you compare it to the fluidity of control of modern games, then in comparison Gothic belongs in the neolithic. The graphics are painful. But there is lightning in this bottle.

This game had a proper dark fantasy atmosphere when Soulsborne games weren't even a fraction of an idea. It is bleak. You can't take more than a few steps off the safest paths (and even those aren't guaranteed to be safe) before you find a monster way above your level that'll kill you in two hits. For 8 year old me, who was only just starting to get into games, this was an RPG, a strategy game, a resource manager, and a survival horror all in one. All of this murderhappy AI, combined with the colors, the day-night cycle and the music made for a really oppressive experience. Main theme. Listen to the full soundtrack too, if you like game music.

Gothic 2 is, at first glance, friendlier. The colors aren't just a mix of depressing grey and depressing brown, and you aren't dropped in without context. But even just getting to the town is an adventure. True to the spirit of the first game, step off the beaten path at lvl 1 with only a rusty axe for a weapon, and you'll either get your ass beaten by bandits, or cow-sized insects, or you can get swindled by a right rotten bastard upon first sight of civilization. Oh sure, he'll help you get into the town, but he'll expect the favor returned.

Then, a bit into the game, you return to the area of the first game. Now, it's smaller (some of it is fenced off because reasons) but it's still an exciting moment. You spent the entire first game there, what's it like now?

Even fucking worse. In he first game, orcs kept to their corner of the map. In the sequel, the rule the place. Your first objective is to get through a ring of orc warriors, generals, and mages (and you're not tough enough to fight them yet) just to get into the castle. And the gate is closed. And no, there is no secret passage. You have to climb up the battering ram. And the game doesn't tell you that you can just buy a shapeshufter scroll and morph into a wolf. Or you can drink a sprinting potion and dodge fireballs and hope the potion lasts long enough, and you don't sprint right off the fucking ramp because the controls are hardly better (although they gave us a lock-on function this time).

Gothic 3 wasn't warmly received at first because it was so different than the first two. Mechanics were different, controls were different, enemy scaling was different, the graphics style was different. But Gothic 3 had something new that was great. You could follow the main quest, sure. Or you could swim across the bay and go into the desert, and stumble through a bunch of main quests that you weren't meant to do until way later in the game. The game preserved what was the core element though, imo--stepping off the beaten path meant running into something lethal.

I could go on, but I think that's enough. Rose-tinted glasses and all. Those games were flawed as hell, but they have that X factor.

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Heroes of Might and Magic. We all know that III is considered the Holy Grail. I personally never got into it. My HOMM game is IV, the one that bankrupted the studio. Yeah. Its crime was being different. The biggest change was that heroes were now actual units on the battlefield and you could have a team of only heroes. I loved this. I loved building lvl 30+ titans who could solo 50 dragons with the correct application of skills, magic, player experience, and immortality potions. This game really is about building heroes, the addiction to min-max everything, to clear the map and squeeze every last bit of xp from it.

But that's not all there is to HOMM4. The music is gorgeous. The stories are definitely the best of the HOMM games I've played. Underdogs to end all underdogs. The base game had everything I wanted. I played the expansions of course, but story-wise they were simply not anywhere close to vanilla campaigns--though they did feature some fun, challenging maps.

I adore HOMM5 as well. It's my favorite Ubisoft game. It was made by Russians. You could really tell that the people behind it understood and cared about the series. First of all, the game is very pretty. Sure, it's 12 years old at this point, but it's still a nice-looking thing even today (except the cutscenes, they suck). They abandoned the 3DO universe and went for a straightforward Big Bad tale across all campaigns, where HOMM4 did standalone stories. HOMM5 was very fun to play though. Heroes were back to old-style off-the map commanders, but the gameplay was rock solid. Factions, creatures, skill trees--everything worked together like a damn-well designed machine.

Town screens in 5 are incredible.

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I was never much for racing games, but there was this little game called Crashday. I'll just leave this here and let the game speak for itself.

 

Shattered Galaxy was essentially just the game I played the most out of other games(I still had tons of time in other games, of course) for a couple years between 2004 and 2006.

 

Hell yeah, Gothic was amazing. I still remember how fascinated I was when I discovered the swamp camp where they were handing out rations of what amounts to fantasy weed, or when I came back from a mine only to have a band actually play bagpipe music in the old camp, while some acrobat was dancing around and a dude was spitting flames. Or the sheer atmosphere of running around at night robbing people blind for a few more lumps of ore.

There was so much to do in that game, and so many things that simply incited my imagination. It was the perfect game for young me. I loved it, and I bought Gothic II on release. And then Gothic III. And about that trash heap Arcania we don't actually have to talk.

 

Yes. Those games brought Polish and German gamers together. Nostalgia is strong. I think I could have a good bit of fun with 1 or 2 even today. Like you said, the little things added up to complete the atmosphere. It was years before I found that in G1 you can climb up the ledges on the left side of the bridge (next to the second old mine opening) and you'd find a goblin and (I think) a chest with a few extra items.

Go a bit into the swamp and you can hunt bloodflies if you're a few levels up from dead meat. Go a bit further and you can get nomnom'd by swamp snakes.

And the attention they paid to continuity between 1 & 2. In G1, you could find a scavenger not far from the start, next to a tree. In G2, there's a dragon snapper in the same spot. Good fucking luck. "Oh, I'll just see if there's anyone left in the New Camp." Hello, lizard people.

We don't talk about Arcania. I played 30 minutes and couldn't stand it. It was distinctly un-Gothic-like.

 

It was FFIX for me. FFVII/VIII took themselves too seriously for my liking but FFIX had the perfect mix of drama and comedy, and it's got the best soundtrack of all the Final Fantasy games imo.

 

I'm biased in favour of III, but IV is underappreciated for sure - for all its little bugs and shit, there was some pretty nifty stuff in there and some great campaigns. I liked the split unit trees and the endless hero customisability the most, though I'll say that the perspective in fights was bullshit.

Related, and some of the first games I really got into, were Might and Magic VI and VII; the former moreso than the latter. It's your bogstandard 90's RPG, and there's no real challenge to it nowadays because I know the tricks, but to younger me? I remember vividly the 'oh fuck' as I wandered somewhere I really shouldn't have wandered - and I'm not talking about Xenoblade Chronicles-esque random superbosses either; the ducking around corners to avoid everything that was being thrown at me, and some really expansive dungeons with a huge variety of enemies, or perhaps not even dungeons - there were outdoor areas swarming with enemies as well: using anything but the fast travel systems in the game was not safe and much running ensued even if I was at a level where I could take smaller groups. (The archers in Free Haven didn't come in anything remotely resembling small groups, nor the werewolves in Blackshire.) The dungeons were appropriately brutal as well, Getting Lloyd's Beacon (port-to-location) was basically a prerequisite for one of the last mid-game quests because you were going to need it on account of status ailments and endless spell barrages, and it only gets worse from there.

Spoiler

Three of the first four late-game quests (the fourth is easy as shit at this point because you just mow everything down) can be a night's worth of fun. One is a puzzle for a password - said password is, of course, available online if you so desire - that requires you to hop all over an expansive castle, ranking pretty highly on the tedious scale. The second requires you to get up close and personal with Minotaurs, which hit hard, and the Minotaur Kings have a Finger of Death spell that has a 40 % chance (pre-resistances) to outright kill one of your characters. Luckily, it's a small dungeon, but if the wrong target gets killed through your resistances, it's time to high-tail it out.

And then there is Castle Darkmoor. Oh boy, Castle fucking Darkmoor. Ogres aren't an issue: you've fought them before. Liches are pests that you may or may not have encountered before, being able to strip all your defensive magic (Dispel Magic is in their list), and that means no protection from magic - in a magic-based dungeon - no Wizard's Eye to know what's coming; not even Torch Light to help you see better. It's extremely annoying, especially when you add the Beholders to the mix that can put your party to sleep, make them afraid, or make them insane. Sleep is self-explanatory, afraid cuts physical accuracy, and insane reduces spell points and is a pretty expensive thing to cure. And there are a metric fuckton of these enemies, and the map system doesn't help because it doesn't differentiate between different levels either.

Tomb of VARN - the penultimate dungeon, featuring outright magic immune enemies and another round of said status ailments, the same map shenanigans, and a background radiation issue that slowly damages you isn't nearly as annoying as this - and I say that as someone who only completed that dungeon as an adult, not as a kid because the map got to me.

It was a good game with good replayability because of, well, the D&D trope of having a party and having more classes than party slots. VII expanded on this, introducing limitations to level of mastery (no more having an Archer be able to master all Elemental Magics), a limited faction system, more classes, and generally being a better game in many ways - I just got it later than VI. It also had the most infuriating quest I have ever had the pleasure to do in any game.

Spoiler

The first quest on the Good path requires you to run through a gauntlet swarming with enemies without killing anything. This being a D&D-influenced game, there is an Invisibility spell in the Air school of magic. Problem: It's at Master level, which means you need to have a Sorcerer or a Druid in your party, and they need to be upgraded to T1 (Wizard/Great Druid) to have access to Master Air - it's unlikely (and I'm not even sure if it's at all possible) that you have the T2 upgrade for Sorcerer at this time for Grandmaster Air. Then you have 10 minutes (IRL ~20-25 seconds?) per skill level (normally between 8-12 at this point if you're not specifically prepared) to find your way through the dungeon and get to the end without revealing yourself. Did I mention you can't recast the spell if there are enemies nearby, and there are maybe two spots in the entire dungeon where you're safe to do so?

Of course, GM Invisibility is completely and utterly broken because it sextuples the duration, but as said, you probably don't have that.

You can, of course, go and do the good old run-through-and-dodge-everything, but I did say it was swarming for a reason, and if you're thinking about casting Protection from X, well... Dispel Magic is in the house. Again.

Oh, and yes, this is more infuriating than Castle Darkmoor in the previous spoiler because at least there you had catharsis from killing the enemies. This isn't an option here.

These are, of course, games that are older than several people on this site, so the graphics have aged about as well as the average seven-year-old-boy's declaration that he'd never kiss a girl because cooties, but they were fun as fuck, and that's what it was all about.