The following table details pretty much every PC computer game I've owned. The links lead to short "capsule" reviews. Not all the capsule reviews are finished!
| rating key | |
|---|---|
| A well-executed new idea, a perfect rendition of a traditional one with a new spin, or a spicy melange |
| A decently-executed new idea; a great implementation of an old idea with some new tidbits |
| A decent execution of an old idea |
| A flawed attempt, e.g. marred by bugs or bad ideas |
| A wasted effort; we can learn nothing from this mediocre product |
These ratings are explicitly intended to lump games together in categories, not to allow comparisons like "this one got a 95 and this one got a 97". Even so, I felt some hesitation about some of the rankings on a comparison basis--"wait, is game X really worth an extra star over game Y?" But I chose not to award half stars, as that way lies madness.
| Amount played | Rating | Game |
|---|---|---|
| 5% | | Deus Ex |
| 100% | | Planescape: Torment |
| 3% | | Ultima: Ascension |
| 100% | | Grim Fandango |
| 100% | | Baldur's Gate |
| 75% | | Descent: Freespace--The Great War |
| 100% | | Half Life |
| 35% | | Trespasser |
| 100% | | Blade Runner |
| 10% | | Unreal |
| 90% | | Final Fantasy VII |
| 100% | | StarCraft |
| 50%? | | Curse of Monkey Island |
| 100% | | Quake II |
| 100% | | Fallout |
| 100% | | X-Com Apocalypse (X-Com 3) |
| 50% | | Magic the Gathering |
| 15% | | Betrayal at Krondor |
| 100% | | Quake |
| Exile II (only the demoware part) | |
| 100% | | Full Throttle |
| 100% | | Warcraft 2 |
| 5% | | Wing Commander IV |
| 100% | | Interstate 76 |
| 100% | | Hexen |
| 400% | | X-Com: Enemy Unknown |
| 100% | | Dark Forces |
| 100% | | Crusader: No Remorse |
| 100% | | Wing Commander III |
| 99% | | Descent shareware |
| 100% | | Heretic |
| 100% | | Doom II |
| 50% | | Tie Fighter |
| 100% | | Sam and Max |
| 80% | | Ultima VIII |
| 100% | | Strike Commander |
| 99% | | Wing Commander II + expansion packs |
| 500% | | Doom shareware |
| 100% | | Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle |
| 80% | | Ultima Underworld II: Labryinth of Worlds |
| 100% | | Day of the Tentacle |
| 50% | | X-Wing |
| 80% | | Ultima VII: The Black Gate |
| 220% | | Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss |
The above table is in roughly chronological order of my playing them.
| games I worked on | ||
|---|---|---|
| amount played | rating | game name |
| 100% | Thief | |
| Flight Unlimited II | ||
| 25% | Terra Nova | |
| Flight Unlimited | ||
| 200% | System Shock | |
| games I sort-of worked on | ||
|---|---|---|
| amount played | rating | game name |
| 10% | Thief II: The Metal Age | |
| 100% | System Shock 2 | |
| Console Games | ||
|---|---|---|
| amount played | rating | game name |
| 75% | | SNES: Chronotrigger |
| 75% | | SNES: Final Fantasy III |
| 240* | | N64: Mario 64 |
| 99% | | SNES: Final Fantasy II |
| 300% | | NES: Super Mario Brothers 3 |
A fairly accurate translation of the combat rules of AD&D. The non-main-game UI seems underdesigned for being actually nice to use; not enough functionality on each screen (e.g. lots of wasted real estate that could be put to better use) and lots of missing tools (e.g. no ability to view all character's basic stats at the same time).
Beautiful graphics and a fundamentally bug-free combat engine make the game experience potentially pleasurable. I don't find the combats very satisfying due to its real-time nature and the no-pause-during-inventory rule; these limit tactical decisions significantly compared to traditional turn-based games. In almost all the combats I found myself just doing the exact same thing--little thought, cleverness, strategy, or improvisation required--and the last would be nearly impossible due to the no-pause-during-inventory and AD&D's magic memorization system. (I.e., in a given encounter, you're stuck with the spells you have memorized, and the three items in your 'quick items' slots, regardless of how many potions and scrolls you have.)
A lot of game balance problems; it's very easy to get sucked along on the main quest without being sufficiently powerful for some encounters, and not realizing it.
In summary: an entirely respectable attempt at doing exactly the same-old RPG experience as every other CRPG.
Some more detailed criticisms.
A perfectly acceptable space-combat simulator. Clearly an attempt to do a better X-Wing/Tie Fighter than the originals. Technologically, it does so. Gameplay doesn't seem particularly better or worse, although I found the waves of enemy attackers in some missions to feel more like the arcade aspects of the Wing Commanders. A few missions have interesting and distinctive design, but for the most part, it's the same old same-old.
I was torn over whether to give Half-Life five stars or not. I really want to; I really liked Half Life, I enjoyed it and would recommend it as it stands unreservedly.
But the degree to which it finds new ground is limited. The "Quake with a plot" moniker doesn't refer to an overarching plot (there sort of is one, but it's irrelevent for 99% of the game), but the idea that every action you're taking every step of the way is for a purpose. You don't want to just get to the end of the level so you can push the button to warp you to the next level; you're trying to find the hoozit so you can put it in the whatzit and hence fargle the frombit so then you can go on to the next level.
And that works. It's great. I found Half-Life much more involving a shooter than all the others. But it's still pretty empty. You don't really do things for a purpose; there's rarely any closure.
I don't think Valve was trying to create a System Shock. So when I don't give it five stars, it's not because it fails to live up to its potential as a System Shock clone; it's because it just doesn't bring that much new to the table as a first-person shooter (FPS). The friendly AIs may seem cool and new, but really, they're pretty limited. (We've seen the same thing in non-FPS, e.g. Terra Nova--and with much more sophistication and depth as well.)
Half-Life's "interruptable in-engine cutscenes" rarely do anything to advance the plot, just as you might expect, since they're interruptable, and since the player might just not see them at all. As such, they work wonders for adding atmosphere to the game. And that's all that they're supposed to do, but then, if so, they're really not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Sure, you end up creating a better sense of a "world", but not that much better; for that you need interaction and simulation.
In summary: a big improvement over Quake--e.g. bigger than Hexen was over Doom. A definite high-water mark for one particular style of FPS.
It's easy to simply say the Trespasser team aimed too high, aiming for something they couldn't deliver. It's easy to just fault Trespasser for the extravagant hype that described a game that is nothing like what shipped.
But when it comes down to it, I don't see much to like, although there seem to be a rabid few who like the not-quite-realistic physics toyset it provides. Exploration isn't fun. Combat with the raptors isn't fun. The dinos just aren't that convincing-- the T-Rex in Tomb Raider was far more scary. "Puzzle-solving", whether of the crate-stacking variety or the colored keycard variety, isn't fun. The arm user-interface is unbelievably unfun. The graphics engine produces bizarre, annoying artifacts.
But I can't fault everything and give it one star. For example, their twisted, aimed-too-high graphics engine allows them to create outdoor spaces that are nothing like what we've seen before, from Terra Nova's large, relatively detailed spaces that never looked convincingly real, to the Unreal engine's large, underdetailed spaces. The Trespasser spaces do seem a lot like real spaces--just rendered poorly. The first town you encounter is the first 3D town I've ever seen in a game which I can believe is a "real town".
I decided to check out Blade Runner after reading some behind-the-scenes information about it in the 1998 CGDC conference proceedings.
I give it four stars because it feels like they were trying a really new spin in the adventure game genre, and they get bonus points for the beautiful visuals--a feature I wouldn't normally care about, but it's Blade Runner, after all. An incredibly complex technology underlies those colorful, foggy, animating backgrounds--and for once, it was worth it. There is no doubt that you are in the Blade Runner universe.
Sadly, the dynamic plot elements just didn't work for me at all. The characters didn't seem to have "lives of their own", communicating with each other when they were encountered. Instead, I just seemed to bump into them at the major plot points, and sometimes I couldn't find my boss, and as an adventure game, it didn't seem that great.
In summary: some ideas don't seem to have panned out, but they get points for trying, for making a game that's relatively fun to play, and for that beautiful atmosphere.
I just don't get the Unreal hype. It's a perfectly passable shooter, but not much else. Maybe the fact that for a living I write 3d graphics engines for computer games makes it transparent to me that Unreal's graphic effects are a bunch of obvious special effect hacks thrown on top of a Quake-style graphics engine. Maybe it's the programmer in me that knows that that "smart AI" is just making creatures automatically roll when you fire slow projectiles at them, guaranteeing that you never hit them. Maybe it's just the game designer in me who just doesn't understand the level design--uninteresting combat encounters, meaningless button pushing, seen-it-before "surprises".
Seems to me it's a well-executed "Quake-clone" that brings little new of substance to the table.
Maybe it's unfair of me to keep awarding the Final Fantasies four stars, considering how formulaic their gameplay has been.
But they manage to keep updating the game in interesting ways. Sure, the dialog is never that great (at least, not after translation), and the plots are a little melodramatic, but they have the sense to operate on a grand scale, while making sure their characters are interesting up-close. And they don't mess with the basic formula--'cause it works.
This time around, the combat graphics are 3D, making for much more exciting and dramatic graphics effects--especially the summoned creatures. The overland map is "3D", although it might as well be mode 7 given the degree they bother to leverage it. The "dungeons" are 2D, rendered scenes, and this lends a lovely polish to those areas, compared to the traditional tile-based worlds.
Materia is a lovely spin on magic this time around, further tuning the degree to which the player must make choices and trade-offs. Limit breaks are an interesting spin on the traditional "special character" powers as well, although one that leads to very little additional gameplay for the player, beyond simply choosing to wait to use the break during a later combat.
In summary: basically, it's the same old thing, but it's a great same-old thing, and that sameness includes continual improvements to the game system.
The third in the Monkey Island series, this one sports even yet better graphics than the previous ones. The puzzles are wacky and obscure, and in my opinion, too often too obscure. To some degree, the latter reflects my opinion that adventure games are totally stuck in a rut of how to integrate puzzles into gameplay, one that makes the games too hard, and hence too unfun. From playing the Grim Fandango demo, I got the same feeling; but this topic I will discuss elsewhere.
So I consider Curse a decent attempt, but not sterling.
I'm only reviewing this game for its single-player experience
I found rating Quake and Quake II to be amongst the hardest decisions I had to make. I felt Quake was a real step down from Doom, which I gave five stars. Quake II seems an improvement over Quake, but also buggier. So was it enough better than Quake to deserve an extra star? I don't think so. It didn't even bring as much new to the table as Hexen did to Heretic/Doom.
Quake II adds improved visuals, but only on hardware accelerators; the software renderer has many more bugs than Quake. Gamewise, it creates a more consistent world than its predecessor, and has much better weapon balance.
Nonetheless, it suffers from most of the same flaws as its predecessor: too few enemies that take too many shots to kill and an abundance of Doom-style "surprises". The addition of enemies who move to fixed locations, rather than charging after you, is too primitive to count as AI.
I enjoyed Fallout a lot--in fact, I would've given it four stars if not for the problems I heard other people had with it.
As I see it, Fallout is an attempt to do a CRPG in the Ultima tradition. Now, I can't say how it stands up to the "classic Ultimas", which I've never played, but I can say that Fallout tries out some very interesting new ideas.
More than any emulation-based game I've played before, Fallout tries to provide multiple solutions to every puzzle. Sure, it doesn't really leave room for improvisation, but it beats the pants off of most adventure games and puzzle-oriented CRPGs.
The use of intelligence and speech skills to control what conversation choices you get provides the first RPG I've ever seen that tries to meaningfully factor in character intelligence--can you ever recall a GM posing you a puzzle and then rejecting your correct solution because your character is too stupid to come up with it?
Others report that Fallout's quests are very fragile--it's easy to do things out of order, and if you do so, the NPC speeches may make little sense, and even encourage further out-of-order confusion. I personally never saw this, although I did encounter some unreasonable scripting, and several questionnable design decisions.
Still, I'd say it brings more new ideas to the table than, say, Ultima VII part 2, but the world is less rich and the plot is less exciting, and less interwoven into the story.
An attempt to take the X-Com experience to a new level which basically totally fails for me. I played real-time because the turn-based seemed rather hacked (and I understand that the balance in turn-based is bad--the turns are too long). I found the real-time experience robbed the game of all the tactical pleasures of the original. While it may be more realistic and have a prettier appearance, there didn't seem to be compelling trade-offs to make the tactical gameplay require effort, or yield fun.
The giant city simulation seems unfun and largely a waste of development effort.
Nice graphics, an ok "campaign" game, and a really really good try at accurately translating the rules and doing a good AI. The AI is easy to fault--for example, if you both have a bunch of creatures on the table, every turn the enemy AI is very slow; clearly it's figuring things out from scratch, instead of saying 'oh, yeah, this will turn out the same as it will last time'; however, doing that right (given that a new card enters the player's hand every turn) would be arbitrarily hard and likely to be buggy.
Nonetheless, the cards and AI proved to be notoriously buggy. This is no surprise, given the number of rules to deal with (spread out amongst the cards) with and the number of surprising tactics developed by real players (indicating the 'complexity' of a good AI); in fact, it was fairly obvious (at least to me) even before the game shipped that this would be a problem.
The only way to have done Magic: The Gathering "right" (IMHO) as a computer game would have been to make the rules system and the AI system open source; Microprose could have made them a DLL linked into the main game and still been able to sell the game itself. Oh well.
I only played the first chapter of Betrayal. Unlike many, I didn't care at all for Feist's writing, or his books, or his universe. But he didn't write BaK, so I didn't write it off in advance. Nonetheless, I found the writing in Betrayal annoying: the use of the past tense pushes the player away from immersion, and the exceedingly wordy ways of saying "you loot the corpses" got tiresome after the third or fourth time (out of hundreds).
As a game, the magic system sucked in the first chapter (it was impossible to prevent enemies from getting next to your spellcaster, so you got off at most one spell per fight). [Then again, I suppose the AD&D magic system is even suckier.] The plot was irrelevent. Side quests required you to wander off the main quest for no apparent reason, as opposed to being thrown in your way. I didn't find myself compelled to carry out quests like I did in Ultima 7.
The graphics were sufficient for the time they were released, but not really particularly great. The use of riddles for the chests seemed an arbitrary way of introducing something vaguely resembling puzzles into the game.
Doom with better graphics and worse weapon balance. Because of the better graphics, play shifts from a "mow them down with great satisfaction" to "chop down the tree until eventually it falls"--you can probably tell from my loaded description which one felt more enjoyable.
It's as if id didn't understand why Doom was fun. For example, gone as well (or rather, making a token appearance) are the exploding barrels, which were a cool, satisfying element of Doom--one that also allowed you to make a tactical decision.
Doom was a little toolkit which allowed the designers to build areas that were little mini-combat games. The ability to place a large number of monsters in those areas made for a lot of possible mini-games. Quake just seems to have a lot of architecture, toe-to-toe battles, and the occasional guy up on a ledge above the door you just came in through.
The use of creatures with bouncy grenade projectiles simply encourages you to never want to take on more than one creature at a time, encouraging you to use a "draw the enemy away from his friends and then kill him" strategy that makes the game even more boring, as opposed to the run-into-a-giant-firefight play of Doom.
I played through the shareware part of Exile II. It seems like a perfectly fine and functional CRPG (i.e. RPG with a focus on stat-building, with some story and adventure elements). Just not really my cup of tea.
Wing Commander III again, but with worse mission design (the "camera" that works like a gun) and lame/broken mission design made this a no-go after the third or so mission.
It's possible it got better later on and deserves three stars, but I doubt it; the price of freedom isn't worth the price of admission.
Fun, refined Warcraft I. I played through the humans, then much later, while waiting for StarCraft to ship, I played through the orcs. Not exactly inspired in the same way StarCraft is over this one.
A lot of people complain about the single-player games as simply feeling like "training missions" for the multi-player games. I think this shows a bias in the multi-player gamer mentality. Competitive multiplayer games are like sports in many ways; especially, they are a zero-sum game. In single player, however, that single player can win every battle. I don't have any problem with this model--the gradual ramping up of units, etc. I don't necessarily want to play against a computer AI player which is as good as a human.
An extension of this complaint is that the missions aren't necessarily even fun--you just do your resource management until you're powerful enough to wipe out the enemy. There may be some truth to this analysis. At least, however, it didn't feel as much like puzzle-solving as Command & Conquer apparently did. (I didn't play it, but I watched it being played, including someone attempting the commando mission.)
Umm, drive, shoot, kinda fun, I liked the scavening between missions design, but the AI was stupid, the combat repetitive, and some missions way too hard.
We played this really far in co-op mode, and it was very fun.
The game design "throw switches on one level which changes something on a different level" is MORONIC. One of the things we learned from System Shock 1 is that switches and stuff are both more fun and more compelling if you can directly see the effect as you throw them; in SS1 there was a hangar with a little panel that controlled a force-bridge that you couldn't reach directly, but you could see.
I'm giving more detail about this game in case you haven't played it, because I rated it so highly when so many people haven't ever played it.
I had heard X-Com was really cool, but I had never been into wargames or tactical combat ("strategy") games. I sat down and played X-Com for about an hour, and didn't really get into it.
Many months later, I tried to play it again, and this time, I played it long enough for the magic to take hold. X-Com is my absolute favorite game right now (although System Shock might hold that honor if I hadn't worked on it myself). If there were one game I would want to rewrite, one game worth redoing and fixing all the outstanding bugs: that would be X-Com.
The metagame is oversimplified, and not really much of a game at all. In the games I've played, money has never been really tight. But I think it works well to contextualize the meat of the game, which lies in the combat engine. The game couples these together more than nearly any other game out there, by not merely providing you the ability to outfit before the mission, but by allowing you to have goals in the metagame which you can satisfy in a mission (e.g. capturing a specific kind of alien). [Not to give the wrong impression: they merely uncovered the tip of the iceberg of this aspect of game play; the game in which the mission goals are *mostly* self-motivated by the metagame situation has not yet been written.]
The turn-based combat engine is absolutely brilliant. The range of possible approaches and tactics are enormous. For once, a game posits an asymmetry in the tactics and mission goals for the player and the computer, so the fact that the AI "sucks" is no disadvantage. It's not a mano-a-mano battle like most games; it's a "bughunt". The player must fan out "squaddies" to explore the map, mutually protecting each other, and accept the occasional one-shot-kills loss. Maps are randomly generated from nearly-screen-sized tiles, beautifully balancing unpredictability due to randomness with challenge due to human construction.
The various different overall terrain types lead to different experiences: sweeping a line of men through a jungle is quite hard compared to doing the same thing in the hilly countryside. Maps like the farm have buildings, which require a man or three to explore them--often making it impossible to fully sweep while knowing everything behind is safe. The turn-based gameplay encourages the player to keep moving, rather than, e.g. holding the line while some squadmates explore a building, because you're better off uncovering an alien on your turn than having them spot you on their turn. The process of exploring a downed UFO is very different from the process of exploring the map containing it. Terror missions and night missions throw in just enough variation to cause different approaches to be employed. Weapon power grows satisfactorily through the mission.
The "standard" mission is a map with terrain and a UFO, which provides some of the magic of X-Com: pacing. This mission format automatically provides pacing, without any triggers or special work; tension grows dramatically as you get close to the UFO and then explore it.
Turn-based combat also leads to a lot of tactical possibility which makes no sense in the real world, but is incredibly enjoyable. For example, one unit spots an alien while moving. You decide to take a gamble and shoot at the alien, even though you won't have enough time units to return to cover. On missing, you decide to bring up another unit in range to fire. On missing again, do you try with yet another unit, or write the two off as potentially dead? Or throw a grenade at the alien and hope to wipe it out? Or perhaps throw a smoke grenade in front of them to provide cover?
Most of all, X-Com encourages you to say, "Oh, I can't wait until I finish researching thing B" in the metagame, and thus you keep playing at 2am trying to get thing B. You might have three or four UFOs come through, requiring two or three combat missions, but they're fun. And then once you get thing B, you'll want to try thing B out for a mission... but then you've already started researching thing C...
Moreover, many games have the problem that the enemy uses thing B on you, and so by the time you get B, you're ready to kick enemy butt, but you discover the enemy already has thing C. (For example, StarCraft's new unit types, and X-Com: Apocalypse's special items like shields and teleporters.) Because X-Com dispenses with symmetry, generates random missions, and has few things of such discrete significance (other than things available at the start), it never gives this feeling. Sure, the aliens send more battleships at about the same time you're getting your better weaponry for your interceptors, but it never feels like the same ripoff. Besides, you're too busy discovering how easy it is to blast holes in farmhouses and bushes using your new plasma guns to care about the alien weapon loadout!
Since X-Com has no real plot, it's eminently replayable. I played it through three times, although I only played the final mission the first time, and I abandoned the third game once my players developed psi powers (which unbalance the game--not necessarily bad, as it causes an interesting change in the pacing of the game on the way to the final mission).
Woo hoo! It's great. IMHO.
An action game using the crappiest, least appropriate engine ever created (the Ultima VIII engine). Oh well. It's pretty fun, although in many ways it seems to be simply the action/combat portion of System Shock translated into 3rd person (healing stations, power stations, security cameras). Fun, annoying engine, and a bit too repetitive--not a game I could ever imagine replaying.
Umm, well. It was pretty Wing Commander-ish, alright. The combats were a little tedious, the mission where they blew up your ultra-weapon was annoying, and the final mission was insanely broken (either I was flying in circles for half an hour, or that trench was WAY too long--I finally just gave up and popped up over the terrain and dropped the bomb while I was being attacked).
Hello? Blue, red, and yellow keys? The enemy AI weren't anywhere near as cool as people seemed to think, the game design was pretty uninspired (beyond the central full-3d movement that is the crux of the game), and making your controls not work correctly after you shot the reactor was WAY CHEAP.
The whole "pick up other people's weapons" deathmatch model really didn't make me happy. One person would end up with the best weapons, and everyone else would throw themselves against him mindlessly.
First memorable networked PC game to allow joining in the middle, though.
Hum. Doom with different ("fantasy") weapons. Executed fine (the book powerup that changed all weapons was kinda cool.)
Ugh. I really didn't care for the overpowered creatures introduced in Doom 2 (the creature which could essentially kill you with a line-of-sight attack--you were warned by the appearance of flames around you before it attacked, but if you didn't know where it was, you wouldn't know how to evade line of sight; the creature with guided missiles).
On the other hand, I played through the first 20 or more levels in co-op mode with two other people, and we had a lot of fun even if it was a lot "easier" and sometimes you missed out on important stuff. One of the most fun co-op experiences I've had, in fact. (When we played Diablo multiplayer a bit on our LAN at work, at one point somebody was launching spells directly into my back trying to hit the monster, and I looked at his screen, and he was standing to one side hitting the monster. At that point I quit Diablo.)