Favourite game/franchise.

[Seattleite]

Alright, it's time for each of us to list our favourite game or favourite franchise.

 

The game doesn't have to be perfect, it can be heavily flawed as long as it's your personal favourite, and you can change your answer later if you want.

 

My favourite game to date is Dark Souls. If you've seen any of my posts on the subject in the last month you already know that. This game was something I just picked up because it was supposed to be really hard, and within the day I was hooked. I can't get away from it. It sucked me right in, and I've been deeply immersed in the game and its story ever since. Now, it has its flaws, but it's a great game. I can count all the poorly designed bosses in the game on one hand, (Bed of Chaos, Demon Pyromancer, Stray Demon, Centipede Demon and Ceaseless Discharge) and everything else is fantastic. The game is beautiful, atmospheric, just the right kind of difficult (fair and skill based, with by far fewer unfair or luck-based moments than other games), is just generally well designed, has a magnificent soundtrack and despite its lore being conveyed mostly through item descriptions, dialogue and visual design, there's a lot of it and it's very well done. I could lose myself in this game for days (and have).

[BTGBullseye]

Have to say SPAZ, aka Space Pirates And Zombies. They're coming out with a second one early next year.

 

Or possibly Freelancer, since I have close to 1000 hours of play time in it.

 

Or maybe Half-life series, since I have close to 1000 hours of play time across all the games, including mods.

 

Maybe the Elder Scrolls games, since I know I have close to 2000 hours in Morrowind, and 500 or so in Skyrim, and have made dozens of mods for each.

 

There really is too much to list here for my favorites, especially since the favorite shifts over time, but comes back frequently.

[Seattleite]

I can relate. Dark Souls will likely be my favourite for a LONG time, but eventually something will replace it. I'm used to that. If I'd made this thread before discovering Dark Souls, I would've said The Elder Scrolls myself. (Also, I mod The Elder Scrolls as well. Always good to see somebody else who does.) Before that, I don't know.

[K4_Kydure]

F.E.A.R.

More specifically the first F.E.A.R. and it's expansions. They are my absolute favorite games of all time next to the first three Spyro games. It only breaks my heart even more seeing what both of them have turned into.

 

I also love the Fallout, Company of Heroes, and Dawn of War series.

[Blightmare]

F.E.A.R.

More specifically the first F.E.A.R. and it's expansions... ...It only breaks my heart even more seeing what both of them have turned into.

 

This exactly. I still enjoy the second since it retained a bit of what made me like the first one, but the third one... sigh. If it were a standalone shooter it'd be great. The shooting felt exceptionally solid and the gameplay was relatively fun. But it wasn't F.E.A.R. It had little to nothing that made me love the first the way I did. No intelligent story, no engaging atmosphere, no open-ended side-story. The second one lost a bit of that but it still managed to save itself by keeping the story somewhat intriguing. But the third... It had like 1 level, the warehouse, that sorta got close to it but they still didn't do it well enough. It felt too forced.

 

It was basically a competitive coop fps that had F.E.A.R. slapped on the cover of it and that really upsets me.

 

As for series themselves:

 

Pre-Playstation 2 Final Fantasy games

Final Fantasy Tactics subseries

Infamous

Killzone

Elder Scrolls

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (except Clear Sky.)

[K4_Kydure]

It was basically a competitive coop fps that had F.E.A.R. slapped on the cover of it and that really upsets me.

That's what happens when a Call of Duty director and a graphic novel/comic book writer try to make a F.E.A.R. game.

No really, Steve Niles and Marwan A. Abderrazzaq worked on F.E.A.R. 3. Oddly enough John Carpenter was a storyline consultant for some reason.

 

Some of my other favorites would be the Metal Slug, Ace Combat, Stronghold, RollerCoaster Tycoon, and Ghost Recon franchises.

I would add the Soul series of games but I've never played Demon Souls and I thought Dark Souls 2 was absolutely awful.

[Alyxx Thorne]

 

There's simply not a single thing I really dislike about this game and so far it's the only game on Steam I have over 900 hours of playtime in. The reason? It feels like the perfect combination of FPS, RPG, humor and insanity that makes it never boring to play and I keep coming back to it almost on a daily basis (well, not so much more after The Pre-Sequel came out but still a lot). I even bought a PS Vita and the Vita version as well just so I can play it on the go. It really is my favourite game of all time, hands down. And in my opinion one of the best sequels ever made.

 

I pretty much love the entire franchise though. The first game and the recently released Pre-Sequel are both games I come back to a lot.

[Jeb_CC]

Portal series. It's short but it has a lot of content! (Community maps, achievements to achieve) That and it's the only two games I know how to use the hammer editor with so if I wanted to ever make a map I could. X3

[ThePest179]

I can relate. Dark Souls will likely be my favourite for a LONG time, but eventually something will replace it.

 

Very true. I dub these changes in favorites "phases", right now I'm in a Half Life "phase".

[RandomGuy]

I don't think I could choose just one favorite game. There's so many to pick from. The closest I could think of is either Team Fortress 2 or Fallout New Vegas. I could write essays on why they're brilliant. But again, I have no one true favorite. I could easily list my favorite FRANCHISES, though:

 

Fallout

 

Mass Effect

 

Half-Life

 

Total War

[Alyxx Thorne]

Fallout: New Vegas is truly awesome. Definitely a huge improvement over Fallout 3 in my honest opinion.

[optimusjamie]

There's just so many I could choose. Given that the title of the thread specifically says 'game' singular...

Now, I freely admit that Doom isn't perfect. The mazes can get frustrating, the arrow-key control scheme adds loads of fake difficulty, and it's dated in other ways (some more obvious than others), but I will always go back to Doom in some form or another. It's amazing that a game from 1993 still beats out modern triple-A games with budgets that could end poverty, but to me, it always will.

A lot of what I love about Doom has to do with the community. There are still people updating the engine and making new maps, ranging from more of the same to incredible feats of game design like Deus Vult II and Back to Saturn X, not to mention Brutal Doom. There's also something about the 'one main against the world' narrative that I can relate to on a personal level.

So, that's why Doom is my favourite game ever. As for what I think is objectively the best game, that's a hard question. Probably Half-Life 2.

[Alyxx Thorne]

There's just so many I could choose. Given that the title of the thread specifically says 'game' singular...

Now, I freely admit that Doom isn't perfect. The mazes can get frustrating, the arrow-key control scheme adds loads of fake difficulty, and it's dated in other ways (some more obvious than others), but I will always go back to Doom in some form or another. It's amazing that a game from 1993 still beats out modern triple-A games with budgets that could end poverty, but to me, it always will.

A lot of what I love about Doom has to do with the community. There are still people updating the engine and making new maps, ranging from more of the same to incredible feats of game design like Deus Vult II and Back to Saturn X, not to mention Brutal Doom. There's also something about the 'one main against the world' narrative that I can relate to on a personal level.

So, that's why Doom is my favourite game ever. As for what I think is objectively the best game, that's a hard question. Probably Half-Life 2.

Doom is awesome when played in a modern source port.

[Presence]

Crystalis was the game that wowed me the most when I first played it.

 

It was the first action/rpg I played, and they did a great job of avoiding a lot of the worst jrpg moon logic. Wounded npc? Just use the same healing item you'd use on yourself. Imposter npc? Stab it. Between the disguise spell and the forward moving plot, there was quite a lot of bonus dialogue too, and you'd even get special Easter eggs if you tried the right things. The only bad things were having to level grind to be able to damage bosses and having to gear swap to use special abilities.

 

Oh, and they gave enough of a damn to make a real intro and a real ending.

 

Play the nes version, not the gameboy color one.