Ask Lemmy

Maniac Mansion or Zack McKraken on the Commadore64. At the time...at that age... we were living in the future, and it was amazing.

As someone who never played the games as a kid, I can be more or less impartial in saying that Mario Bros. was probably the gaming industry's big break.

Guild Wars (the original) Just so nostalgic to me. Gameplay is fun even after all these years.

Gothic 2.

earthbound. my first RPG that I understood, plus SNES is GOAT.

Final Fantasy 1 - It wasn’t the first RPG, but it pretty much defined the series. It still has tons of playability, I revisit it more or less every 5 years. I still have yet to beat Warmech, and only have encountered him a handful of times.

But most of all, it’s the game that saved Squaresoft. If it had failed, we would have missed out on so many great games, including ones also mentioned in this post.

Runners up have to be Donkey Kong, which brought us Mario, which in turn restored vitality into the at home console game industry, and Double Dragon, which brought us PVP and Co-op combat.

Honorable mention would have to be that Simpsons arcade game where Marge can fight with the vacuum cleaner and TMNT 2 - Two classic, very difficult, drain your change jar games. I’d throw Mega man 2 into that mix as well.

Just cause three. blow shit up, kill bad guys, just enough story to explain it all. even better, it strikes a good balance of minimal story and compelling story, which a lot of games like that kinda suck at.

Ocarina of time. All Zelda games since are to some degree compared to it in terms of how successful it is monetarily, gameplay and story-wise. So many modern adventure games are based on this one game. It’s the game that finally made target tracking in 3D work. It’s so well thought out, that a blind streamer is able to play the game probably better than I ever will. If most common people know of “zelda” it’s because of this game. There are so many memes from Zelda in general. It’s one of the few games from my childhood that I will replay for the rest of my life.

Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary. (Chronicle is a close second)

Puyo Puyo Tsu is the greatest competitive puzzle game ever made. Such a simple set of mechanics gives way to an incredible amount of depth. I think its greatest strength relative to the rest of the genre is how much importance it places on actually paying attention to and adapting to your opponent. Some of my favorite other puzzle games are guilty of feeling more like a game I play adjacent to my opponent rather than against them, and I'll give them a pass if the core gameplay loop is fun enough, but I consider Tsu king of the genre for having the most true versus in its versus mode.

But Tsu's skill curve is terrifyingly impenetrable for beginners, it's one of the hardest competitive puzzle games to learn. Just understanding how to make chains is extremely daunting, and that is but the tip of the iceberg. Paying attention to what your opponent is up to while still being able to concentrate on what you're doing is an order of magnitude harder, and that's kind of where the real game begins.

20th shines by being the most comprehensive package full of additional content for players of all skill levels alongside the classic Tsu ruleset. There's a whopping 20 different game modes to play around in, many of which are much more immediately fun for a beginner to pick up, get hooked on, and hopefully enjoy the game enough to want to eventually learn to scale the mountain that is Tsu later.

Sadly, this game never got released in the west, and none of the games that have come anywhere close to it. And I think that's a large part of why the series is struggling to gain any kind of recognition in the west, we've never seen the best of what it has to offer.

Quake 1.

The game is kinda meh, but the modability spawned an endless amount of awesome stuff to this day. Even Half-life is basically just a Quake mod.

Ultima IV. All the JRPG stuff started here.

Twisted Metal or Resident Evil

Command and conquer generals zero hour

Since everyone's just saying their favorite game, I'll say The Finals!

It's fuckin great! It's the first FPS in years that gets me legit excited to play. I like that the game requires decent strategy, movement, and teamwork to get wins and not just good aim/luck. Everything about it feels fresh. Best of all it's freaking free. A free AAA game in 2024 that's more than decent and has an awesome dev team? Sign me up!

It's wild to me that it's not huge compared to games that go mainstream (not gonna mention names. lol), but I'll appreciate it while it's here.