Sandbox: M&B Warband

Oblivion/Fallout are pretty, and they have their advantages, but the comabt is far more interesting in Mount and Blade. Also, it has pretty decent multiplayer. Especially if you get the cRPG multiplayermod. Start as a peasant and specialize into becoming a knight, archer, infantryman, scout, etc.

But non-sandbox? Obviously Vampire the Masquerade. Alpha Protocol is okay. Anything by Bioware ranges from mediocre to good. I personally disliked the Witcher, finding combat its weakest point and exploration shallow.

Rune Factory basically Harvest Moon with RPG elements, is worth trying. Either on the Wii or the DS. They're pretty addicting.

NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer is good. Vanilla is not good, and neither is the 2nd expansion. I couldn't even make it past the point where you got the fire mage character in the vanilla game, and the second expansion is just dull.

NWN is too dated for me to enjoy. There are some decent mods for it though.

Ys: The Oath in Felghana gets some praise, I think it's okay though I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Planescape: Torment is old and you're basically comitting to reading a book, but it's good. The Thief series is RPG-like, though it's a stealth series. I'd recommend them anyway.

 

I'd heard Mount & Blade was good, but never got round to getting it. It just looked like there would only be so much you could do in it, and it'd be something I played for an hour every other month.

I agree. Story-wise though it was utterly, totally engrossing, to the point where I'm still hunting for English translations to the books. And though it still won't be sandbox (which I'm not too upset about - it's a throwback to the old RPG days, where plot surpassed single-player do-whatever-the-fuck-ness) they're supposedly working on the combat points for the sequel.

Honestly, the first time I played through it I nearly gave up after the prologue. I found it stunted, buggy as fuck, awkward and the audio / ADR was ridiculous (though I did chuckle the first time I heard a drunk character in the background scream 'Your mother sucks dwarf cock!') but I persevered and am intensely glad I did. The cinematics are utterly incredible, the dynamically evolving story-engine is so perfect that they actually completely alter the course of the master plot depending on your decisions, the ability to fuck half of the women you meet was done in a crass but totally enjoyable way, the character development was above par... I'm entirely of the opinion that the good outweighed the bad.

It's nowhere near perfect (Oblivion, for example, is a better made game) but it is almost the better for that.

 

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, on the DS. Amazing two games before it, so I'm willing to bet that it stands up to claims. I hear the DS has had a few good RPGs in the past few years; anyone tried them and want to share?

 

Actually, I loved Golden Sun 1-2 but the third one has done nothing for me so far. It's really a huge disappointment. Apart of the problem is the localization... but the story itself is pretty bad.

 

Borderlands.

 

Technically a RPS, but still a good game.

Also what the fuck is an emulator, and how do I get one?

 

Somebody on the internet doesn't know about emulators? Lol, I remember learning about emulators when I was in the fourth grade. Played Pokemon Silver before it even came out in English.

Emulators are applications that emulate console hardware. If you have a rom (cartridges) or a disk image (CDs/DVDs/Blurays etc.) you can play a console game on the computer. There are also emulators for the PSP and other handheld devices, so it's not just limited to that.