Games That Keep You Coming Back?

The Guardian Gamesblog kicked off a great discussion on their site, talking about games that just keep pulling you back in. Games that, even if you've played through them once, you just have to pick them up again. eToyChest and Kotaku both have related threads. So, what about you? What are some videogames that, even years later, you just have to play through one more time?

For me, besides my ongoing fascination with World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, and Everquest II, there aren't that many that needed more than one playthrough. Both Half-Life titles, of course. I needed to play HL2 just to get everything I missed the first time. Jedi Academy and System Shock 2 required additional plays to try the game at a different angle. Similarly, I've played through the Diablo titles more than once each, as there's just so much clicking to be had. I somehow managed to avoid the gravity well of Civ4 for the most part, but Civilization 3 was almost the only game I played in college. Good times.

BZFlag

[bwd]

BZFlag [bzflag.org] is one of those free multiplayer games that keeps pulling me back in almost every day. The competitiveness of the game coupled with the community is hard to beat. And it's open source to boot!

Koules

[Mr2cents]

One of the koulest games around for linux, eighties style.

Nethack

[undeadly]

is the one game I've been playing for more than a decade, on and off. No fancy graphics, but great gameplay. Yeah, cool slick graphics and corresponding sound is nice, but no substitute for great gameplay.

I'm an old fart

[Nuclear Elephant]

You guys are probably too old to remember some of these classics, which I still play occasionally today:

Crystal Castles (Rocks)
Omega Race
The original Star Wars, with the vector graphics
Xybots (this one isn't too old)

Re:Some games off the top of my head.

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that don't know there is an open source version of Star Control 2 called The Ur-Quan Masters [sourceforge.net]. I would advise against playing that game if you value your job/gpa.

Civilization.

[darkmeridian]

From the original all the way to Civilization IV. Addictive.

Well...

[Kegetys]

System Shock - Simply a stunning game... And although it isn't as scary as it used to be when I played it the first time, I'm still afraid of going to the third level

Nethack - Of course. Though I'm not that good at it :P

Transport Tycoon Deluxe (And OpenTTD) - This one never gets old, and with OpenTTD it gets new features all the time.

Thief 1 & 2 - Simply great, too bad Thief 3 (imo) wasn't nearly as good as these two

Fallout 2 - I hope Bethesda can make Fallout 3 as good as this one...

Operation Flashpoint - Not that old yet, but a superb game, especially in multiplayer co-op

Doom 1 & 2 - Somehow I still can enjoy playing the same old original maps through one more time :)

And of course many C64 and Amiga games, though most of them feel too hard today. I guess the new games have spoiled me.

Re:Tetris (natch)

[falloutgib]

You can get a free version of SCII for 3DO that runs on PC -- voice and everything! Check out The Ur-Quan Masters [sourceforge.net]

Sid's Alpha Centauri

[SsShane]

Great strategy game. Decent AI, good story, and very deep gameplay. You can micromanage to death or automate what you want. I've been playing it since 1999; it's the one game that is always on my hard drive. The Civ games never did it for me.

Re:puzzle games

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get Devil Dice 2 for the ps2. Capcom bought the license from THQ and renamed it to Bombastic. It has 3 puzzle modes (standard (or bombastic), classic (or devil dice), and advanced (or jumbo)). Best of all it's retailing in the $11-$16 range. I got my copy from Amazon and it's probably the best $12 I've spent on a video game.

You can see gamespot's review http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/puzzle/bombastic/index .html?q=bombastic [gamespot.com]

Cheers.

Re:Some games off the top of my head.

[David Horn]

I have to add Crimson Skies to the list. It's a fantastic game that was sadly overlooked by many. Good graphics, fun arcade style flying, interesting back story and excellent voice acting.

adom

[Janek Kozicki]

adom of course. I started playing it about 9 years ago. 3 years ago I've won for the first time. This christmas I just won for the second time. So diverse gameplay, each class/character combination is so different I never can belive it.

oh, and system shock 1, and fallout 2, and elite 2/frontier

I even bought system shock 2, but it wasn't that good.

TIE Fighter!

[PDHoss]

For its time, a really great game.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Paradroid

[Qbertino]

There are a lot of people who think the same. Including OSS programmers. You might want to look up the term "freedroid" in Google. Its an OSS clone of Paradroid.

Re:Obviously...

[porcupine8]

Absolutely, although Link to the Past is my favorite, I've played it at least three or four times through. I'm not a big fan of 3D, I get lost too easily (just like in the real 3D world).

Freespace 2

[Phleg]

Possibly the greatest space flight sim of all time. Freespace 2 was the sequel to the phenomenal Descent: Freespace. The sequel surpassed the original giving you an incredible feel for the massive scale of the ships involved (sometimes many kilometers long, while you flew in a fighter or bomber only a few meters long), and had absolutely incredible dogfighting. Tons of varied weapons, and extremely diverse gameplay; you've got escort missions, stealth reconnaisance, bombing runs, search and rescue, etc.

The game gets complicated with all the different tasks it requires you to do (switch the targetted subsystem to destroy critical points of capital ships, commanding squadmates to attack specific targets, targetting bombs, etc.) but flows into it smoothly with a very forgiving learning curve.

This is an all-around fantastic game. It's showing its age, but still looks excellent graphically.

Final Fantasy 3, still the best of the series

[MillerHighLife21]

And it just never ever got old.

M.U.L.E.

[Ksisanth]

And my heart still pounds as I press the keys with all the force I can muster, as if this will make my planeteer go faster.

Re:Freespace 2

[quantax]

This is an all-around fantastic game. It's showing its age, but still looks excellent graphically.

I agree completely, as far as space-sims go, Freespace II is the single best overall, even compared to newer ones such as the X series and Freelancer which was a bit more arcadey.

However, theres good news regarding the game's aging graphics. If you are unaware, Volition released the source code for FS2 a whiles back and since then the players have unified their efforts into the FS2 Source Code Project in which they are introducing the newer graphical effects as well as completely rehauling the games assets ranging from high-res textures, higher poly models and redone backgrounds. I definitely recommend you check it out; the only problem is that if you download any user-made campaigns, they need to be SCP compatible due to some of the newer stuff introduced with it. Check it out: Hard-Light Forums [hard-light.net]. The wiki covers how to install it.

Re:Games that I can modify.

[Jardine]

The dancing mission in GTA-SA gives me the shits. Anyone got any hints for getting past this using a PC with a Joystick?

Turn all the graphics down to minimum. For some reason, the arrows that tell you what direction to hit and when seem to be badly out of sync. Lowering the graphics settings seems to help somewhat.