I know I’m supposed to start with number ten today, but in addition to my top ten list, I feel a couple games deserve honorable mention.  I also spent the whole day shopping in the Presidium, so I didn’t have much time to work on my publication here.

The inspiration for this is largely due to a couple comments I received, where I was like, “****, those are really good games.”  So here we go:

Palantas’ Top Ten PC Games of the First 1,000 Years, Honorable Mentions

Diablo: It’s some sort of miracle that a title with gameplay this simplistic could be so entertaining.  Think about it: What do you do in Diablo?  You click on little monsters again, and again, and again, and go through tens of hours of busting barrels looking for better shit.  Why is that fun?  I dunno, but it is.  Diablo has the distinction of being GameSpot’s highest-rated PC game of all time on the old (and better) rating system.  Diablo epitomizes the hack-n-slash RPG sub-genre, and spawned numerous clones and highly successful sequel.

Fallout: Fallout is the opposite of Diablo’s simplicity.  Fallout is heavily story-centered in the finest tradition of Occidental role-playing games.  In a daring move, Fallout shed the high fantasy setting typical of CRPGs and dropped the player in Mad Max-inspired, post-apocalyptic California.  While on a quest to save your home village, you as the player encounter an array of towns and settlements, with their own problems and conflicts.  You can interfere in these in any number of ways, which adds up to Fallout’s greatest strength: The player’s ability to make real choices that seriously affect the game world.  This was particularly stunning in the light that some of the decisions the player can make are morally ambiguous.  There have been few RPGs since that gave the player such a great responsibility to the story.

Master of Orion II: This is the ultimate 4X game.  That’s eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.  (Why they’re not called “4E games” is beyond me.)  This sub-genre of strategy gaming is called “god games.”  Popularized by Civilization, these games put the player in charge of a tribe, empire, planet, or some such, giving him complete control over every element of that society.  Technological research usually plays a key role in these games, as does colonization, infrastructure improvement, and military conquest.  Master of Orion II is, in this writer’s opinion, the best type of this game ever created.  In Master of Orion II, called MOO2 by fans, the player takes control of a single planet within the galaxy, competing against several other races with similar meager beginnings.  You research technology, scout the galaxy, colonize other planets, engage in diplomacy, annihilate enemy’s fleets, and brutally subjugate alien populations.  One of the best parts of the game is that you get to build your own ships, filling them with the technologies you’ve researched.  Better yet, when two enemy fleets meet, the game goes to a tactical mode, where you get to command your recently-designed ships.  It’s a thrill to surge ahead technologically, build the most advanced cruiser in the galaxy, and get to fly it into battle and destroy three enemy battleships.  The tactical mode is not terribly deep, but it gets the job done.  The inclusion of both a grand strategy and a tactical mode in MOO2 predates Rome: Total War by some eight years.

I should probably put Counter-strike on this list, except that as much as I hate to admit it, I never seriously played it.  So, sorry; no Counter-strike.

If I’m not totally hung over tomorrow, I promise I’ll start in talking about Quake.