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What games gave you the best time you ever had?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for what you think is the best game, just for the ones that gave you the most engulfing, satisfying, terrific experiences.

In my case:
1. The Baldur's Gate series. I got immensely involved in the story, the npc's, the romances. I actually felt some real emotion when I finally ended ToB and read about what happened to the other partymembers after ToB, the people who had been side by side with me all this time.

2. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss and Labyrinth of Worlds. Up until then, the only PC games I knew were Pacman and the like. But this... this was a whole world, with strange people and beings that you could interact with. I would keep playing until very, very late, be really apprehensive about opening a door in a dark corridor because, who knows what would be behind it? How the heck was I supposed to get this item that X had asked me to retrieve?

3. One Must Fall 2097
So simple, yet so addictive. I still play it from time to time.

4. Thief: The Dark Project and The Metal Age
Creepy as heck and you couldn't solve a problem by hacking and slashing away. Sometimes I actually yelled in fear and surprise whenever I got busted.
Sneaking around, being clever, there was never only one way to break into the next vault. Ah, it's too bad that, at least IMHO, you can only play this game once...

So, what do you people think? Did you ever play games that made you cry (in a good way), shudder or ROFL?

The Wing Commander series.

This series took me by storm, it was some of the first gaming I did when I bought my first PC back in the early 90s.
This games cinematic and effects where always cutting egde and the feeling when jumping into the c0ckpit of a space fighter, blowing down enemies and then returning to the carrier/base for some well earned R&R .... damned I miss that feeling

This series is amongst the best I've ever played on computer.

Dune2: I must have played this game for years, just like the rest of the C&Cseries.

I also like (some of the) Final Fantasy's great story's and spend nights playing with a buddy.

And ofcourse the BG series.

I have my favorites allright...

Everyone who has read my posts in the Morrowind forum knows my favorite RPG:
Gothic. Gothic, and to a slightly lesser extent Gothic 2, are top-notch RPGs, with credible NPCs, interesting stuff to do (like smithing swords, cooking etc). The rules are simple and good and the mood is wonderful. Only Morrowind has come to the same level as Gothic.

Which, of course, brings us to Morrowind itself. This too is a game in my tastes. Even though there is a character class-choice, it matters little other than what you start with. I loathe the class-bound rpg-systems; they are silly and unrealistic and often just boring. Morrowind too has the creative liberty (and perhaps even more so) that I cherish in Gothic; creating your own spells, enchanted weapons and potions is fun. It gives a feel of an interactive, living world, not something that is closed, finished and done.

Tie-fighter. That ancient and wonderful game. I was truly happy when I found the remixed edition, suitable for win98. It is graphically ancient, but the story is superb. When it comes to star wars, only Alliance comes close to this.

There are many more of course, but I shalln't bore you with a list.

I can't resist these type threads

1. Starflight - this was a game designed for the IBM XT (thats an 8088 processor with 2 meg of Ram and dual 5 1/4 inch floppies to you young-uns). A great space exploration game that I literally played for 12 hours at time from the moment I got home from school till 4:00am for about 2 months.

2. X-Com UFO defense. I actually stopped playing PC games for about two years after Ultima VII. This game brought me be back with a vengance. It is the most atmospheric and spooky game I have ever played. Play it in a dark room late at night with headphones on and you will have nightmares.

3. Warcraft II - the other game that got me back into PC games - and the first multiplayer game I played.

4. Command and Conquer Red Alert - I used to manage a Gateway Country computer store. We had training rooms with 12 computer system LANs. I used to get 6-8 of my employees in early every Sunday to blow each other up. So fun it felt illegal. The female voice that subtly announces "nuclear weapon lauch detected" was the bomb (sorry bad pun).

5. Quake II - same as above. Fragging your friends and trash talking them at the same time is priceless.

6. Baldurs Gate - brought me back to my D&D playing roots.

7. Planescape - best single player RPG ever IMHO.

Thats the list - I almost included the original text versions of "Zork" and the sprite based dungeon game "Rogue" - but that would have given away my age too easily

Planescape: Torment - For all the reasons everyone's already listed here and in the P:T forum.

Fallout series - I always wanted to see where I was going next, see what I was going to do, and see what guns and enemies were around the corner. Had some really funny moments and dialogue was always a blast. NPC's were great too; I loved to see them blast the crud out of the Enclave, while I stood to the side. Some great easter eggs too. I also really liked how there wasn't really any alignment to base your actions against. I wasn't restrained and could literally do almost anything I wanted to.

Other than that, I can't remember any game really tearing me away from reality.

Originally posted by The Z
<snip>
Fallout series - I always wanted to see where I was going next, see what I was going to do, and see what guns and enemies were around the corner. Had some really funny moments and dialogue was always a blast. NPC's were great too; I loved to see them blast the crud out of the Enclave, while I stood to the side. Some great easter eggs too. I also really liked how there wasn't really any alignment to base your actions against. I wasn't restrained and could literally do almost anything I wanted to.
<snip>

Well - there were reputations in the game, so some alignment base was present. You had a global reputations and reputations for single areas/towns also. Still wasn't as restrictive as the D&D reputations for sure, but they were there

The Fallout series are my favorites too - the first RPG's I finished.

My favorites?

1) Hidden Agenda. It's about fifteen years old, but this game still stands as the only in-depth political game for intelligent players on the computer. You're the head of a Central Amercian island government that's just been through years of a dictatorship. Your overall goal is simply to stay in office for a three year term, without falling beneath a revolution of the left or right that boots you into exile. You also receive at the end of the game a "bio" that compares your actual achievements against those you select for yourself at the start.

You choose four ministers from three members of three separate parties; each has a distinctive personality and agenda. These affect how they implement your policies--or quietly don't; and the advice they give in many situations. If you continually buck a minister, he resigns, and you have to appoint another. The party of the resigned minister regards you more poorly, and tension rises significantly in the country.

Years are divided into seasons, and you can have only a pair of interactions with any of roughly 40 NPCs per season. Doing so gives you the option to institute and reform policies, as well as improve your standing with a specific island group. You also get to react to an NPC if a crisis erupts during a given season, and they approach you. Game balance is excellent, and no two sessions play the same way.

One of the things I like best about Hidden Agenda is its genuine flavor of Latino culture. The NPCs are all fashioned from typical cultural groups, and their reactions are appropriate for style and content. There are no stereotypes, either social or economic, and nobody is offered in either a completely flattering or evil perspective. Everybody, even the nun who works organizing people to help in the nation's orphanages, wants something from you.

I remember discussing Hidden Agenda with Phil Steinmeyer when he was only beginning the design of Tropico. Turned out he was another enthusiastic HA fan, and he spoke of updating HA in Tropico. Too bad he didn't, IMO.

Played a few political games back in the old days also - two in paticular called Crisis in the Kremlin - and Floor 13 I think - or 13th Floor ).

Crisis was a good idea but with poor AI - you had to take over the USSR and govern it through its trials, including PR with the rest of the world, balancing the state budget and all. But the poor AI and many bugs made it bad.

The other one on the other hand - I only started to appreciate much more in these modern times.
13th Floor or Floor 13 - can't remember the title - you had to take charge of a secret organisation working to support the UK goverment. You had to evalute newstories and choose to spin them or discredit the source or just let it pass. Futhermore you had to supervise dealings with other organisations that were of interest to the goverment either by infiltrating them, discrediting them or similar stuff. each day you would be presented with the approval rating polls for the goverment, and if you did poorly the polls would drop and so would you (literally - if you lost you would "fall" from the 13th floor to the pavement )
The game was very limited - but the political satire, which were wasted on me back then, was great. Featuring a secret organisatin spinning news for the goverment, infiltrating organisations etc.....

Was good fun even with their limitations

I forgot to tell why I like Fallout. It has a good story, cool guns, and lots of atmosphere.

Originally posted by Xandax
Played a few political games back in the old days also - two in paticular called Crisis in the Kremlin - and Floor 13 I think - or 13th Floor ).

I agree, CinK was very stiff: some events hit you at a certain time regardless of which leader you picked, and how you handled the government, which is unrealistic.

You can download Floor 13, both the game and the manual, here. It's abandonware, meaning the company's gone, and no one has the assets or nobody cares.

As for Hidden Agenda, I pulled up a few emails I exchanged with the developer, Jim Gasperini, a couple of years ago. His misadventures make fascinating reading, in light of what we know about game publishers and history. Here's what he had to say about the title:

That's a curious story about the HA follow-ups. Springboard [the publisher] was basically in the process of going out of business during the period they were supposed to be marketing HA; as I recall they had foolishly bet the company on an early desktop publishing program for the Apple II. HA got very little attention while they went through their death throes. The "disagreement between the designers and the company" was that they had stopped their contractually obligated payments for our work on the four follow-up titles we had in the pipeline, which were to be called "Perestroika," "Allahu Akhbar" (Persian Gulf), "Frontline Africa" and "Fifth Tiger."

Despite Springboard's crapping out I went ahead and spent the next six months getting the most topical of these, "Perestroika," 90% finished, while we tried to market the series elsewhere. I had to keep revising the model: like HA it was designed as a synthesis of the recent histories of the various countries of a region, in this case Eastern Europe. That region had arguably had a rather stable (albeit enforced from the outside) political dynamic since the 1940's. But the year I happened to be trying
to model Eastern Europe was...1989! The year it all fell apart. When the Berlin Wall came down and we still had not found other publisher for the series, I had to give up and go address my accumulated debts by designing interfaces for Citibank.

We tried every angle we could think of, from game publishers to the Markle Foundation, but found no support. "No one is interested in the Persian Gulf," we were told, about a year before Saddam Hussein brought the full attention of the world to exactly the issues our game was designed to address.

HA was the product of an early period of experimentation in the game world, before things polarized into educational software (99% for young kids) and games, dominated almost exclusively by the tastes of the puerile and the pernicious. I would like nothing better than to have the opportunity to make more games like HA. I got seriously burned back then, though, and the
market now expect the sorts of bells and whistles that only come with large budgets. I have zero confidence in the likelihood of the powers that be in the game publishing world to back anything like HA, and almost as little confidence in the tastes of the "gaming public." I have had to regretfully turn my attention elsewhere.

NWN... Reason is I NEVER played the single player, I only roleplayed online... It's so hard to find a good module with people who actually ROLE PLAY but once you do, it's the msot fun I've ever had.... PLus I was always a fan of chat-based RPGs....

2) The original Jagged Alliance. It came out ten years ago, and was revolutionary: a merc-based tactical title with strong RPG flavor. The neat thing was the individual personality that each merc you could hire possessed. Not only did they have their specialities and skills, but some strongly dislliked one another (leading to sometimes successful deaths at night). Or you may find that if the person you hired with a reputation as a sharpshooter missed his target in combat, he wouldn't leave cease to hit the same target until he succeeded, even if you repeatedly clicked to move him. This gave the idea to Bioware party NPCs who would occasionally take their own lead in certain situations.

3) Murder on the Zinderneuf. This came out in 1985, when EA was really, truly, producing good games--it was developed by the Buntens (for those who know whereof I speak). The graphics are unspeakably primitive, but the thing had almost endless replay value and a teasing sort of "can you better your time and try again?" feeling.

Simply put: It's about 1925. There's been a murder on a zeppelin, among 13 guests. You're a detective, charged with capturing the criminal. Though the game is turn-based, there is a time limit. You can enter rooms and move around (which automatically searches for clues), and accost passengers to ask questions. You win if you assemble enough clues to charge the guilty party.

Twelve passengers means 12 possible guilty parties, with any of 13 possible corpses; so there are a lot of different plots, methods, and even henchmen to consider every time you play. Detectives get to ask up to 3 questions at a time of any suspect, depending upon how well you relate to one another. You also choose an emotional approach before you start a question, and guessing wrongly can mean no questions at all for that suspect, for a while.

You also choose among 6 different detectives, chosen more for fun than any historical accuracy: Holmes is great at finding clues, but he doesn't interact well with people. Dirty Harry is great with women, but men passengers hate his guts. Columbo is loathed by just about everybody, but has a lucky knack for stumbling across clues.

I doubt I'd play it again, but if someone were to remake the game now, I'd gladly invest the time. It was tons of fun when it came out.

My best?

1. Ultima Underworld. It was years ahead of its time, and had absolutely everything you could ever want from a computer rpg. I was practically a gaming rookie when it came out, and it blew my mind completely.

2. X-Com. Probably one of the most eerie and atmospheric games I've ever played, with endless replayability. Influenced every squad based strategy/action game afterwards, but none has made me turn on more lights at midnight as the original did.

3. Torment. For all the reasons stated above, but also because I consider it a fluke. A group of game designers and especially writers gathered at precisely the right time to create something they could never again repeat, even if they tried. I don't WANT a second Torment. There can be only one.

I must admit....i still play the first Eye of the beholder game form time to time,,,,don't know why, guess it takes me back to my amiga days...by no way the best game i have played, just one of the first..

Originally posted by Moonbiter
3. Torment. For all the reasons stated above, but also because I consider it a fluke. A group of game designers and especially writers gathered at precisely the right time to create something they could never again repeat, even if they tried. I don't WANT a second Torment. There can be only one.

They were initially assigned to a followup, until it appeared that PS:T was making decent money rather than great money--then they were yanked off PS:T 2, and put on TORN. When they got into some disagreements with Interplay management, they were fired.

Personally, I'd have loved for there to be a followup to PS:T. But Interplay was too big, taking a hit on too many unsuccessful titles; and as a result, they decided to cut their resources and streamline staff. That's often the beginning of the end; and so it proved, with Interplay.

The original Jagged Alliance. It came out ten years ago, and was revolutionary: a merc-based tactical title with strong RPG flavor.

Wow, I used to love that game... I remember the sniper you were talking about, too! You could modify your weapons & armor, make molotovs and gas bombs, and wear camo. It was also the first game I played where you could create your own scenarios. I used to do that with some buddies, and we'd change maps and scenarios and play them against each other... Awesome! I'd play it right now if I could...

Also, I was a big fan of ultima underworld, as many here have mentioned... I travelled up & down those dungeons quite a lot back in the day. Good memories!

One game series that I haven't seen anyone mention yet is Final Fantasy! Man, I played that game a lot, and it introduced me to the whole series. I even went back & played FF III on the old-school super nintendo after that! Definitely worth a mention...

Kudos also goes out to all the old school games from my childhood, as well. Metroid, Megaman, Castlevania, and a bunch i can't remember the names of...