Humanoid

I'm too used to these multi-year Kickstarter development times, I had no idea Deadfire release was even imminent. If someone made me guess, I would have said early next year. Welp, guess that settles it, there is no chance of my playing PoE1 before Deadfire releases, and if I'm honest with myself, I think the odds are I'll never play it at all. And ah, Arcomage. Like Gwent, it was popular enough to be later sold as a standalone product, though I don't recall ever actually seeing it on shelves. Probably a more successful follow-up to MM7 than MM8 was.

Maybe in a decade or two we'll see them finally sell a complete release of The Sims.

The finest piece of music ever composed. EDIT: Midi version as heard ingame -

OG Sidewinder gamepad for mine.

BG2 was a good game but I thought the map was one of its biggest flaws. Not one that realistically could be solved, but how it compartmentalised everything really hurt the sense of scale of the game. Somehow a supposedly grand city feels remarkably small when condensed down to just the gameplay-relevant points of interest. Give me a seamless, singular world every time - my nominations would be titles like Ultima 7, Sleeping Dogs and The Witcher 3. Skyrim's overworld was good but the countless generic dungeons compromise it.

I started my three week holiday with grand designs of playing supposed epics like Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey on my sister's Switch before buying my own later on this year. Now, on the final day of my holiday, I can say I've played about an hour of them, combined. Not because of any particular dislike, it's just that I found I'd much rather play co-op games, and so my time was occupied by such titles as Octodad, Guacamelee, Overcooked and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. EDIT: I also tried that Project Octopath demo. I was hugely sceptical because of the "from the makers of Bravely Default" marketing - I couldn't get myself to enjoy that game at all. But this new effort is actually pretty good. I mean, the writing is still the standard agency-free JRPG fare, but at least there are no insufferable child protagonists, no weird chibi representations in cutscenes, and it has a far more sensible combat system.

Better than Crystal Skull? It's better than all of the movies, or any other product in the franchise really.

I'd try to play it every once in a while while waiting for something to complete, but then I'd end up playing it for hours on end and forget what I was planning to do originally.

Player one still does everything in the world, but you can pre-assign some of the character slots to player two so that they control them in combat. Yeah, pointless.

Back then with games like dragon warrior, final fantasy, and such being the rpgs from Nintendo, those games were designed around grinding a bit. Also had the TES mentality before TESS came out in that u leveled up ur weapons and magic by using them. Rule of thumb for the old games, u basically grind until u have the money for the latest gear and also ur main weapons/magic are leveled up, unless u want a challenge. Also with combat, watch your stamina in that u want to attack when it's full and back away and/or move. It's on the snes because it was one of the first milestones for being "colorful" (aka graphics) and also it's got a good set up in locations/enemy design/atmosphere/music. Combat is supposed to be the challenge of the game since there's really no puzzles (except the different seasons maze). It had the stamina bar combat setup so u just didn't beat it easy mode by button mashing really fast. Multiplayer though...yeah, it was I believe one of the first attempts to have a rpg that wasn't single player. As someone who lived off this game when I was kid for many many hours, the multiplayer back then was ****ty or not worth doing which was fine because I was used to single player rpgs anyways. I remember they even designed a port to have more than 2 controllers for this game but never bought it. I woulda loved if the snes mini had secret of evermore on it. It's very similar to secret of Mana combat wise but had a really really good atmosphere. OMG I loved the music in it. I did try the multiplayer of Final Fantasy 6 since that's also on the machine. I have to give Secret of Mana credit for making an earnest attempt at implementing multiplayer, while FF6's is utterly pointless. (It's still ridiculous that you have to play 30-60 minutes of single player before multiplayer is enabled though)

It certainly fulfils both those criteria, yes. Though it should be pointed out the tutorial bossfight is completely ridiculous too, and you spend more than half the duration of the fight unconscious. I know nothing of the story, but mechanically this game is a mess. How it's somehow included in a collection of the twenty best SNES games will be one of life's great mysteries. That said, I might try one more session and grind for that one bossfight to see how far the WTF factor goes.

Trying Secret of Mana on the SNES mini, since it's one of the few co-op games available (the games list overall isn't particularly impressive past the first dozen or so). In short, it's ...not very good. Combat, the hitboxes in particular, is janky as hell. Ran into trouble with an early boss and the consensus advice on the internet is "just grind more". Yeah, not a good impression.

I give it at least even chance of it being the first Assassin's Creed instead of Origins.

People with co-op partners, basically.

I was perfectly satisfied with the combat, so it's hardly something that's being universally panned. Certainly not like PoE's is. I thought the addition of dodge in addition to roll made it less clownpants silly than the previous game, though at the cost of making it extremely unwieldy to play with the keyboard.

Also a good game, and also starring a douche. Just play Stardew Valley. You can also be a douche there, but it's optional.

Where is Karzak these days anyway?

I'm totally fine with it unless the submissions are obvious trolls (like including E.T. or something). I mean, ultimately there's nothing at stake here, and I somehow doubt the winner will print the award on their box art.

Possibly my earliest gaming memory is of Pitstop 2 in glorious CGA colour.

That should be fine. You can probably get a model which has a 1/8" analogue output but it's just as easy to find an RCA to 1/8" stereo cable. (3.5mm or 1/8" is the same thing) This one comes with a Toslink cable to save a few bucks. Then get a simple RCA to 1/8" cable or adapter. EDIT: "Digital" speakers aren't a thing, there may be powered speakers that accept a digital signal but it just means they have a DAC (digital-analogue converter, which range in price from these $10 ones to thousands) and amp built in. I'd be a bit dubious about something like that and would instead go with a separate box that contains both a DAC and amp (like the Topping VX2 or SMSL Q5 Pro) and buy a good pair of bookshelf speakers.

As a general rule, I'm not a fan of the RTS genre (and even moreso now that the genre seems obsessed with adding more and more micromanagement). But Total Annihilation gets a mention because it was a gamechanger, a quantum leap over its contemporaries. It seamlessly integrated land, air and sea units with a sensible, consistent and intuitive way. Compare it to Age of Empires 2, which is a more recent game and how ridiculously clunky unit movement was, the laughable way it handled ballistics, and the ludicrous way it implemented naval combat. And as to not pick on just one game, you could substitute Starcraft in there without changing anything else. It still had no sense of motion, no momentum, giant battleships turning around on the head of a pin and accelerating to full speed instantaneously. Total Annihilation had acceleration, momentum, *turning circles*. Destroyed objects don't just dematerialise into nothing. Even by today's measure it's an extraordinarily ambitious game. Not that it didn't have its share of problems, of course. A ridiculously bloated unit list, many of which served no clear purpose. Braindead AI. Minimally differentiated factions. But how it felt at the time was that Cavedog had just made Quake while the competition was busy making Wolfenstein 3D, it was just that much ahead. EDIT: And yes, while most games had terrible AI in those days, I remember reading a dissection of TA's AI routine. It basically breaks down into "build random thing, send thing at nearest valid target".

Time for a proper submission I guess (PMed too of course). As before, I limited myself to one representative from each series, and there's a fairly noticeable scaling factor towards games that are important to me personally rather than being the actual "best". 7 points Civilization 4 Fallout: New Vegas Heroes of Might and Magic 3 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Ultima 7: The Black Gate Wing Commander: Privateer XCOM: Enemy Unknown 5 points Baldur's Gate 2 Crusader Kings 2 Day of the Tentacle Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Master of Orion 2 Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri SimCity 2000 Super Mario World The Curse of Monkey Island Theme Hospital World of Warcraft 3 points Championship Manager 3 Donkey Kong Country F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 Freecell Jagged Alliance 2 Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine SimFarm 25 more games, that if I was compiling this list another day, might have made it. Age of Empires 2 Broken Sword 2 Deus Ex: Human Revolution Divinity: Original Sin Fire Emblem Awakening Grim Fandango Huniepop Jones in the Fast Lane King of Dragon Pass Mass Effect Mount and Blade: Warband Railroad Tycoon Recettear Saints Row the Third Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) SimTower Skyrim Stardew Valley Street Fighter 2 Super Mario Kart Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Total Annihilation Unreal Tournament Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego

This is why you kill their families too.

In both Dishonored and Deus Ex, I very intentionally killed someone right near the start of the game just so I wouldn't be tempted into doing a pacifist run. Besides, they totally deserved it. I still do non-lethal takedowns on 95% of the enemies but it means I don't bat an eyelid when someone dies.

It's helpful to do both, because it's easy to forget some hidden gems. I read through all the posted lists before I started writing mine. I've since come up with a list of 25 other titles, the hard work now is to merge them into a singular top 25. (A task somewhat hampered by the second list only existing as a plain text file on a different device)