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Pretty simple, list your favorite single player game, write why you like it, your most memorable moments/experiences, how much time you spent playing it etc... I'll choose the winner based on who has similar taste to mine and a good write-up.
1 entry per person, PC games only. Game doesn't have to be exclusively single player, you can for example pick SC but based on the single player campaign experience. Contest ends in 24 hours.
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System Shock 2
...because it's System. Shock. 2.
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Easy Civilization 4 :\, why? Because its so god damn addictive
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Half life series, easily. I already have a beta key though lol
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Postal 2
Take a shovel and decapitate someone. Then wack it around and onto the street. Once someone walks past and sees it, if they throw up, use the shovel to decapitate that person as well, and they vomit will be gushing out of the hole in their freshly severed neck.
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The Sims...why cause Sims is hella fun and can do anything lol
from my expiriecnes from sims 2 and 3, i have had a lot of fun...it was funny to do random stuff and go get pregnant lol. i stopped playing because of Starcraft but i would always cherish the game forever
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Half-Life, the game itself blew my mind but when I learned about mods It took it to a whole new level for me. From escaping from zombies as a failed reporter to trying to stay alive in a Die Hard type setting was just so awesome and kept me coming back to the game LONG after I had originally beat it.
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Grand Theft Auto original
I was 10 at the time and had NO idea what I was doing, or how to even do the missions, but I had the time of my life when I figured out that I could kill the policemen chasing me without my policemen killed metre going up by running on the electric train track and getting them to follow me and get electrocuted =D.
I would play that game every day just to do that repeatedly.. that and driving around the firetruck and shooting the water out was awesome.
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Portal, Because it is so different from all the other games. The puzzles would leave me awake at night if I couldn't figure out how to them better or faster. It was also the only game that made me sad when I had to kill my weighted companion cube .
Man now you made me play Portal again!!
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motbob
United States12546 Posts
There was something about Half Life 2 that I don't think I'm ever going to experience in a single player game ever again.
The game designers in that game were men of genius. They constructed levels of complete perfection; every moment was as epic as it could possibly be. Let me give a few examples.
The moment you pick up the SMG is an example. You pick up the gun, turn down a passageway, an enemy rappels down from the ceiling for the first time in the game and some kickin' beatz play. It's such a simple effect, but it makes the game so good. It happens like that over and over again. Father Gregori gives you the shotgun, and the game makes sure you get a chance to use it right away. The courtyard battle in City 17, dear lord. The game builds up to it, starting with the speech when you first reach the courtyard, which at first is clean and untouched by bullet fire. You sneak inside the building, disable the suppression device, and, slowly, the sounds of battle outside reach your ears. By the time you get back out of the building, the ground is pitted and trenched, with RPGs and strider rounds going off everywhere.
The entire game is like this.
Well, no it isn't, actually. The action scenes are all like that. And that's another thing that Half Life 2 does so well -- it inserts puzzle/exploration scenes in between the action, which makes the action even MORE exciting when you get to it. I know that I'm grateful for the buggy level after Ravenholm . I wouldn't be able to handle more action after killing so many zombies.
The story is good, but any game company can hire a good writer! The graphics are good, but any game company can license a powerful engine! The sound is good, the dialogue, the net code, etc etc etc... but what makes this game special is the design. The pacing. The level of epic.
I don't know if there's ever going to be a full-length game that equals it.
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Syberia (adventure game). It's one of the few games I would classify as art. The whole game is an experience. It's about a lawyer, Kate Walker, who is sent to this backwater village in France to get a contract signed which would get her company lots of money. However, she has to track down a lost heir to get his signature, and she has to travel across Europe to find him, stopping along the way at these hauntingly beautiful locations which have all seen better days. There is a real sense of melancholy which pervades the whole game.
Along the way, you just get attached to Kate, who is a douche at the beginning but becomes this wonderful, 3 dimensional, developed human being, and her robot, and the minor characters and even locations.
I skipped a week of school just to play this game. It's also the only game I know of where someone wrote a 10 page essay on it (I still have this on my computer). I also wrote my high school graduation/university entrance exam essay on it.
+ Show Spoiler +
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Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
From the game documentation, some snippets on the game's design philosophy:
Major design goals: * challenging and random gameplay, with skill making a real difference * meaningful decisions (no no-brainers) * avoidance of grinding (no scumming) * gameplay supporting painless interface and newbie support
The devteam hasn't quite gotten it all right: there is some definite scumming possibility in a few places, food is almost never an issue, and choosing which three of the fifteen possible runes to collect to win is pretty much a no-brainer (well, two of them anyway). And there are still some things that are definitely too powerful in the game, at least in my opinion. But then, even using the stuff that's "too powerful" I have a winrate under 1%, and probably most people who try the game will never even come close to winning.
It's easily the hardest single-player game I've ever played, but mostly fair. It only kills you when you mess up, unless you get unlucky in the first 10 minutes.
My biggest gaming accomplishment is almost assuredly being able to say that I've won ... eight? ... times, without cheating of any sort. Even if those wins were in earlier, slightly easier versions of the game.
There are other good roguelikes out there, but Crawl comes the closest to what I want from them, I think.
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lode runner: mad monk's revenge. so many good memories. it was like a windows 95 game or something and for a game so simple, it had amazing replayability. the two player was good too, but what made it awesome was the campaign editor.
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Fear...scared me obviously.
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Final Fantasy 7, Just the best RPG ever. Influenced a lot of current RPGs and was totally the best storyline ever in a SP game of its time.
It was also ported to the PC so it counts =D
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Knights of the Old Republic. Amazing RPG experience, with a brilliant storyline. Bioware's finest by far.
inb4 deus ex
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Doom 2
One of the first games I've ever played, and still play it time to time now. I was about 5/6 yrs old then and didn't play mario on SNES like all the other cool kids. Back then the graphics for this game were amazing to me. The game itself was a mix of survival horror and action. The game was crazy suspenseful and my heart was pumping everytime I played this game since I was only 5/6 back then. One of the most epic moments was when there was a faceoff between the cyberdemon and spider mastermind. Also, when I discovered the cheat codes for this game, it was like a whole new game for me (iddqd, idkfa, idclip). Can't forget clipping to the back of lv30 and seeing John Romero's head.
Fast forward 10 yrs, I found a new interest in the game from speedrunning. I watched a demo of a speedrun and I thought I had to try it out as well. Doom 2 has insanely fast movement speed, which gets really addicting. I would learn all the fastest routes, the location of items, etc. Plenty of times I will just sit down for an hour and a half (I know record is way shorter, but some of the shortcuts are way too hard so I just take the longer/safer route), and beat all 32 levels. Even now I will randomly play through it, imo the best single player fps.
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Hitman 2:Silent Assasin
Really fun stealth game, and finding ways to do the objectives can lead to Tons of replayability. It's less of a run-and-gun game and more of a puzzle/stealth game. (Although you can choose to play it as a run-and-gun if you want)
I have a key, just want to post a good game!
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Too hard to say, but nominees include: - Nethack - Thief 1 or 2 - Planescape: Torment (though it's more like a one-time experience) - Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 - Deus Ex
I don't want the key btw.
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motbob
United States12546 Posts
This isn't an official entry.
Super Mario World
Again, just like Half Life 2, it's all about design... but since the game is so non-linear, it's for a different reason. Super Mario World is so simple, and yet its levels are so extensive. There are so many ways to beat the game. There are so many secret exits. There is so much challenge in beating the game for the first time... and in turn getting all of the secret exits in the main world... and in turn getting all of the switches and the star road... and in turn using all three switches to ascend to the bonus world. Mastering flying with the cape is a joy. Finding all of the exits to the ghost houses is SO DIFFICULT, etc, etc. There are so many moments that you can completely miss during the first playthrough, and some moments that some people don't find at all, but that's completely OK!
The point is that no matter where you are in the game, there will always be some kind of challenge to surmount. Whether it's that goddamn secret exit on the bridge where you have to fly UNDER the exit, or it's that crazy level where you have to open up gamefaqs to find the correct scores that you have to earn to get to the secret exit, or whether it's completing the bonus world without flying over the entire level, or whether it's collecting all of the Yoshi coins (something I'm sure very few people have done!), there's always something challenging to attempt. That's brilliant design, and it's something that's very hard to accomplish. What modern games can you say do this?
There's a reason why Super Mario World 2 was so different from the first. The first provided a mountain of challenge... and after players got to the top, what could developers program that would keep challenging vets without crushing noobs? Probably nothing. That's why Lost Levels is a terrible game -- it's too hard. It caters to the people who beat SMB1 and needed a greater challenge. It isn't accessible to most people, and, despite what most hardcore gamers think, an unaccessible game is a terrible game.
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