The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
I think that this is a really well made game. I’ve enjoyed the freedom and atmosphere that the game gives you, the unique setting was really cool, and I felt that the choices that you make in this game have more of a impact than later Elder Scrolls games. There are some problems though, mainly with the fact that there is no way to manually fast travel on your own (without using Mark/Recall or having to pay for it at specific areas in the game), and slow run speed. There was also a bit too many fetch quests in my opinion, but theses problems are small and minor when in comparison to the wealth of great things that the game does well. Highly recommend it!
– Real player with 160.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Moddable RPG Games.
A true no frills adventure game. I cannot highly recommend it enough. A few points to follow though -
-
Download mods. Please do not play this without them and expect a great experience. Don’t turn yourself away from the game right away. It’s nearly 20 years old at this point, the game could use all the help it can get.
-
Take it easy. There’s no wrong way to play. There are certainly “sub-optimal” builds for your character, but that’s the fun of the game. You want to swing a big ass mace and cast spells in light armor? Go for it.
– Real player with 138.4 hrs in game
DOOM II
What I liked:
-
Amazing modding community
-
Fast paced, pick up and play with secrets for those that search
-
Gameplay that may seem simple, but offer great challenge and variety that feels badass too
What You Need to Know:
-
Like Doom, this game needs to be modded to play for anyone that is used to mouse and keyboard controls. Otherwise aiming with keyboard and no looking around will turn you off from the game.
-
With mods like project brutality,brutal doom, doom 64, brutal “insert old fps game” mods are all really great and offer tons of variety and fun, along with tons of maps and you can never run short of mods to play
– Real player with 80.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Moddable Retro Games.
Should YOU play DooM 2?
First off you’re expected to be a 90s guy.
-You’re expected to be a filthy masochist. You’re punished for things that aren’t really your fault.
-You’re expected to not have learned controls of such a game. VERY SIMPLE CONTROLS
-You’re expected to be playing your first fps game ever and be amazed by everything.
-You’re expected to like the 90s aesthetic, so American exaggerations over realism.
-You’re expected to replay this. The second play through is more fun than the first.
– Real player with 32.1 hrs in game
Final DOOM
Even though is old, it is so much fun!
The game was released year 1996 (According to Steam) which is a great reason to the pixelated, Psyche-3D graphics.
However, because the game is old also comes with positive sides. For example:
-
Lossless gameplay
-
Nostalgia
-
(Pretty) Simple game controls.
Lossless gameplay:
Means that the game has nothing that breaks the gameplay at any point. You press “New Game”, then you’re already in the game. Nothing in the middle at all. And that’s how the game is all the way until the end (Because then you’ve finished it).
– Real player with 74.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Moddable Retro Games.
Since Final Doom contains two separate megawads (each with 32 levels) I’ll review each separately below. Also, I’ve written this review with the assumption that the reader is an experienced DOOMer who is very skilled. If you are new to the original Doom games then you’re in the wrong place, Final Doom is not for you. Go play The Ultimate Doom and DOOM II: Hell on Earth, then once you can comfortably beat those on the Ultra-Violence difficulty you’re ready to move on to Final Doom.
The Plutonia Experiment
– Real player with 34.5 hrs in game
Freespace 2
There are no words in the English language (or any other, for that matter), to describe how much I loved Freespace 2. Especially Free Space Open from the modding community of the Hard-Light Project, which is basically the definitive edition of freespace, enhanced to todays graphical standards and featuring hundreds of hours of very high quality user made content they could actually charge money for. Writing, voice acting etc. the modding community did a better job at those than many AAA titles within the industry.
– Real player with 36354.8 hrs in game
Why I recommend this game
This game is what made me the gamer I am today. I bought it back when it first came out, I bought it on Good Old Games and now I’ve bought it on Steam. Why? I’ll tell you why - I believe it’s the greatest game ever made.
Why this game is awesome and deserves your attention;
-
The original graphics were fantastic back at release in 1999.
-
You won’t be using the original graphics when playing the game.
-
The story was - and still is - amazing. Far better than the usual tripe.
– Real player with 412.8 hrs in game
STAR WARS™ Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy™
Probably one of the best Star Wars games out there, in between Republic Commando and Battlefront II of course. This was from a long forgotten era of games where the developers cared about what they were doing, and greed wasn’t as prominent as it is today.
Made by Raven Softworks, Jedi Academy is the 4th installment of the Jedi series of games, and the last in the series. At the time this game was considered more or less an expansion to Jedi Outcasts rather than its own game. Because of this the initial sales for the game on release weren’t amazing, and critics were pretty harsh on it, but like a lot of old movies and games it has managed to build up a cult following surrounding it years later.
– Real player with 53.4 hrs in game
you know, i have to say. i own this game and Jedi Outcast on cd, and have put 1000’s of hours into both of them. they are amongst my favorite starwars games, ever made. get them, and play them, and don’t forget to use dismemberment cheats in outcast, and a dismemberment mod for academy, (also rebind force pull to mouse wheel down, and force push to mouse wheel up.) What enabling dismemberment in these games does, is remove the hitbox during saber swings, and instead, have the samer constantly do near insta kill damage to anything it hits. therfore, you keep the animations from swings, but they become more diverse, allowing you to use the animations in unique ways to hit enemies all around you. it also affects enemy jedi the same way, making saber duels much like the movies, first one to get hit, loses something. add in a plethera of fun cheats, and the game never gets old. Never before have you felt like such a legitimate jedi. with all the powers available to you, there is so much that you can do, you’ll never want to stop playing. Imagine being able to ligning a room full of baddies into a corner, or backflip shop a guys head clean off, or force push a rocket back into someones face. well you can. but you can do more than that. Try force choking a tough enemy, jumping 3 stories into the air, and force pushing them upwards so high, that the fall kills them shortly after you land. Try slowing down time with force speed, and running around with a rocket launcher, firing one shot at everyone in a room, then speeding up time again to watch them all die at once. Try dueling an enemy jedi with dismemberment on. try turning off enemy targeting in the console, along with noclipping, and setting up unique encounters with enemies in levels you’ve allready played. you can even set up boss fights as you play through the game over, and over again. try spawining in a bunch of enemy sith in the next area, then going back where you were, and spawing in a ton of friendly jedi. then you adventure into the craziest battles you’ve ever seen, and i cant stress this enough, with dismemberment, these fights are thrilling and nuts. try accidently cutting off your allies head, or watching a sith do the same. try force choke, into backflip insta kill. try everything.
– Real player with 46.0 hrs in game
Ultimate Doom
Doom the game, that like the main character, is just too angry to die, living on in a constant stream of re-releases, wrapping those age old wads in newer shinier packaging now with controller support and customization.
The original Doom team started before Id even existed working on making Super Mario Bros 3 work on a PC. The controls were impressive for the game, so mirroring them with the graphics onto a PC was quite the feat. Footage was uploaded by John Romero to celebrate Commander Keens 25th anniversary. From the description Romero says, Nintendo was impressed with the team developing the working clone for PC. Nintendo as history notes didnt want any of their proprietary games running on non Nintendo hardware. So the bad news is no Super Mario for PC and the better news is that we got Commander Keen out of it which then led to the creation of Id the creators of…. DOOM (insert dramatic explosion)
– Real player with 54.6 hrs in game
A classic fps with endless ways of playing it
– Real player with 38.2 hrs in game
Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition
one of the best games ever made. while other games may earn that title by being completely unique, masterfully designed, or progressive for video games as a medium, unreal tournament earns it by being a metric sh*t ton of fun. ut99 doesn’t care about perfectly fine tuning and balancing everything for competitive play, or having a complex story, or even just making sense in general. all it cares about is letting you play whatever you want and do whatever you want within the confines of the game engine.
– Real player with 179.2 hrs in game
This is my
–————- FAVORITE GAME OF ALL TIME —————–
Nothing else even comes close.
Absolutely gorgeous aesthetic, brilliant weapon design, fast-paced and satisfying action.
The BOTS in this game are GENUINELY INTELLIGENT! And you can let their difficulty AUTO-ADJUST to fit EXACTLY at your skill level! Bots should be standard in FPS imo. ESPECIALLY MULTIPLAYER! The player should NEVER be slave to what others want to play. No players, no game in multiplayer gaming. This is why I can still play Unreal Tournament when and how I want FOREVER! And I have done exactly that so far.
– Real player with 163.2 hrs in game
Unreal Tournament 2004: Editor’s Choice Edition
I have like 3000 hours on this game.
14 years later I’m still playing it with my friends, and “online friends” from the UT community, and other people I don’t know of course.
There are still people on the servers (not as much as there was years ago of course, but still, the community is undying and newcomers are frequent).
For serious gaming I especially recommend Team Arena Master mod, or iCTF, which are the best mods according to me.
Beginners may have a bad time when joinning some servers though, many people are already experienced. But as the gameplay is very simple to understand (and at the same time incredibly rich) you can quickly become a good competitor :)
– Real player with 752.6 hrs in game
Sit down, son. You just stumbled upon the page of the best shooter ever made. Pay some respect.
Before the days of shooters that holds your hand and aim for you, that regenerate your health and show you what to do like a baby, there was this. Unreal Tournament 2004 - the most brutal, adrenalin-fueled shooter since Quake 3 Arena, a game so fast-paced its guaranteed you’ll burn your eyes from not blinking for so long. They say we only use 20% of our brains - well, if you play this game on the hardest difficulty, you’ll be using 100% i assure you. Holy hell son, this game uses so much of your brain it pretty much even cures autism. This game is filled with so much testosterone you have to shave your beard every forty minutes of gametime.
– Real player with 262.8 hrs in game
Wolfenstein 3D
Note: I strongly encourage following this guide to setup the ECWolf source port, which allows for full resolution support, including widescreen, automapping, and normal strafing controls. Additional mods can be introduced at that point, if desired.
An OG FPS classic, players should be warned that playing the vanilla game without a source port in the modern era is a harrowing experience with wonky controls and increasingly labyrinthine levels which are brutal to navigate due to there being no in game map. Basically, the vanilla experience has not aged well. However, if you run this with a source port like ECWolf you can enjoy it in all its glory and fully appreciate how much of a masterpiece of the genre it truly is.
– Real player with 13.6 hrs in game
I did not expect to love Wolfenstein 3D. I expected a game with nightmarish mazes full of hitscan enemies. And I was right. However, I was wrong when I thought that I would not like playing through it. It took me many hours of playing the game to actually understand why I enjoy it and don’t find it grossly outdated, despite its age.
Wolfenstein 3D game loop is straightforward: find the exit from a maze, find keys to access it, shoot anyone standing on your way. Manage your health and ammo to stay alive and be able to fight. After you have completed the first level, you have seen the whole game. There are six chapters, each containing nine levels and one secret level. In the end of every chapter, there is a boss.
– Real player with 12.7 hrs in game
QUAKE II
A review for this game is long overdue… I’ll try to keep it short and sweet.
Quake II is without a doubt one of the greatest FPS games ever created. It was ahead of its time in so many ways when it was released in 1997 and almost 20 years later it’s still a great looking game and fun as hell to play.
This game, along with duke3d, was basically my teenage years (I know, I know, biased review, eh?). Between 1998-2001 I’d say I spent 80% of my gaming time on Quake 2. I was there for the q2_test.exe release, before the deathmatch maps (Q2DM1-8) were released, before player models had viewable weapons (this was created by the modding community), and when LMCTF (the original/first CTF game mode also created by the community) was released. Quake 2 was THE game and you couldn’t escape it; it was everywhere and for good reason too!
– Real player with 461.6 hrs in game
Warning: This review will contain d**k sucking and circlejerking. Proceed with caution
Quake 2 is my favorite shooter. I love (almost) everything about it. From the opening level to the final boss there is always something that I appreciate and love every time I play.
Progression is something that is important to me, a feeling of a changing world as your move through the game. Quake 2 is easily in a whole different world with this. Every “Unit” of the game is spearated into a hub world and connecting levels that you go through to complete a variety of objectives. As you continue through the hub world and complete the various objectives, the hub level changes. The best example is in the power plant Unit at the the half way point of the game. As you turn off the coolant for the reactor and turn on the pumps for the toxic waste the actual Reactor Factory you go through falls apart as you run quickly to the exit. It is honestly one of the most sastifying feelings knowing that you are literally changing the world as you go through it. The hub structure of the game does more than just provide a look into your progression, it also serves to make the world feel huge and expansive. From the mission briefing screen before you are put into the Unit until the exit button at the end of the unit it all feels like one huge level. Sure, there are loading screens throughout it but they are so small and come at predictable and understandable times that it makes everything feel seamless.
– Real player with 74.4 hrs in game