Once upon a time, I went to school in a tiny, desolate college located in the large, desolate state of Ohio. Winter in Ohio tries actively to kill you. These are the video games that kept my soul intact.
First things first: this is the only game in which I ever joined a clan. Through their convenient online process, a few dorm-mates and I all got ordained at the Universal Life Church, printed out our ordination certificates, and became {ULC}. If you ever got Garanded in the face by {ULC} Reverend Wang, that was me. Just FYI.
At my college at the time, every dorm room had a crappy school computer, so we set mine up as a dedicated server. Any rocketwhores recieved a quick booting. Satisfying.
I played dozens of hours of UT, but I don't think I ever played online ... not sure why, I suppose nobody I knew was playing it at the time. Instead, I loaded up on mods and engaged in giant bot-battle shenanigans.
It is this game's fault that I dislike Halo and its moon-gravity pea-shooting contests.
This game is not good; it is bad. However, its sniping mechanics were (at the time, for me) impressive.
We'd boot up a deathmatch (the AI in this game is dumb as bricks) and crawl around on opposite mountainsides, looking for dark pixels shifting. Proper sniping in DF:LW requires compensation for gravity, and bullets (properly) traveled faster than sound; you're dead before you hear the shot that kills you. Good times. The rest of the game sucks.
I didn't play this game as obsessively as the first Jedi Knight, but I still probably played it through a half-dozen times. The saber battles CAN be totally awesome, if played ... um ... cinematically.
Turning on Force Speed and swiping through a squad of stormtroopers so they all clatter to the ground at once ... always satisfying. Bullet-time lightsabers > bullet-time bullets.
This game ...
... and this game once sold in one pack for $10 at Wal-Mart. Probably the best money-to-time ratio I've ever spent, with the exception of ...
... this game, which came packaged with my video card. I popped it in, made my character, was unceremoniously kicked out onto the street, and fell in love.
Morrowind deserves a post all its own. Let's do this in a paragraph: after a (15-hour) false start with a Nord warrior, I rerolled as a Nightblade and proceeded to spend 100 hours completing quests, sneaking around, stealing people's stuff, and building a pillow-fort lit only by blue lamps in a section of my mansion. None of that properly describes the attachment I have for this game.
Morrowind is extremely true to its (sometimes terrible) mechanics; it's like living in a world that lives in a level editor. I am certain that explanation is inferior. I love Morrowind.
