Top 20 PC Games on Windows XP

ApacheVE writes "Voodoo Extreme has up a story called Generation XP: Top 20 Games of the Last Generation. They call out some of the best games released in the Windows XP era, to mark the passing into the 'next generation' of PC gaming this past week. Some favorites include Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament 2004, Civilization IV, World of Warcraft and other titles that helped shape the era." Any titles you see missing from the list? The XP years were truly great, as far as PC titles went; how long do you think it will be before Vista has enough market penetration to make a difference in gaming?

19: Halo - what the hell?

[EvilCabbage]

Seriously. A bloody ordinary Windows port of one of the more dull console shooters I've had a tinker with in years. About halfway through I just couldn't fight back the tears of boredom anymore.

I'd imagine millions of people still play Solitaire, by the 'merits' Halo has, I'm fairly certain it deserves a spot in this arbitrary list too.

Halo?! Doom 3?!

[ChaosDiscord]

Halo? A highly repetitive game that features midget aliens that ran around like toddlers on cocaine? A dark future where the elite special forces get issues crap guns by default? Sure, it was an exception FPS for consoles, but that has more to do with the high level of suck of FPSs on consoles.

Doom 3? A single trick pony, not that "sucks that in the future we'll forget how to attach lights to guns" is much of a pony to start with. It's gorgeous, but it's a crappy game. Game design has moved on since the original Doom.

It's not that there aren't better games. Where is Far Cry, which blew Halo's outdoor scenes away (It jumps the shark midway through, but there is still a lot of great gameplay)? How about Quake 4, which took Doom 3's amazing technology and coupled it with rock solid gameplay (and features the radical idea that a future military might issue its troops useful assault rifles!). NOLF2? Return to Castle Wolfenstein?

*Bah*

Win 98 FTW

[regular_gonzalez]

The Vista era was good, but nothing compared to the Windows 98 era (though I don't know that using OSes as a quantitative factor for determining gaming eras is particularly valid). I'll stack up Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Planescape: Torment, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Grim Fandango against the best games from *any* era.

Re:The List and My Commentary

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac fanboi during the XP era: "Get a Mac. For games, just get a console."

As your comment shows, Mac fanbois missed out on a lot of fun games.

Re:The Goods

[Sosarian]

Thank you, 20 pages of barely readable text with 5 times more ads than story was not worth reading that.

Best game of the generation?

[MotorMachineMercenar]

Best game of the XP generation: Nethack. And Windows ME, 2000, 98(SE), 3.1, MS-DOS, DRDOS, 4DOS, not to mention Macs, Unixes, Linuxes, WinCEs, Amigas, etc. And the only game that literally has survived a human generation - I remember playing it 20+ years ago for the first time. And I still do.

Nethack, the best game of this, past and probably future generations.

Why?

[mqduck]

What the heck is the point of the premise of this article? Why in the world would you group games by what the latest version of Windows was when they were released? Unlike many Slashdotters, I'm not one to bitch about the job the editors do, but it seems to me that they were seriously trolled by these 20 pages of ads.

Re:Win 98 FTW

[CastrTroy]

I don't think that C&C gets enough recognition in the RTS genre. It's my favourite series, and I really don't get why more people don't like like it. My biggest problem with most of the other ones are too many resources. In C&C you had tiberium, and that's all you had to collect. In Warcraft 2, you had wood, gold, and oil, and you need varying amounts of each for building units. Then there's games like starcraft where you have to constantly click around your base figuring out which buidlings you can finally upgrade, and which ones you can start doing research on. On C&C everything could be controlled on the right hand part of your screen. No reason to click on your barracks to build a soldier, or you factory to build a jeep.

Re:The List and My Commentary

[cephyn]

How about the 6 day war? Haven't seen any games on that one. Play as the arab alliance, see if you can win.

Or what about Gulf War II? Starts out as a war game, morphs into a military/city strategy game. A cross between command and conquer and simcity2000. See if you can stabilize Iraq before it can happen in real life.

Far Cry

[SlayerDave]

Where was Far Cry? In my opinion it was significantly better than the other FPSs on the list, with the possible exception of HL2. Doom 3 above Far Cry? I don't think so.

Sequel heaven!

[yroJJory]

Why is it that over half of the games (11 out of 20) on the list are sequels?

• Halo: Combat Evolved
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Medal of Honor Allied Assault
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
• Command & Conquer: Generals
• Civilization IV
• Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
• Doom 3
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Half-Life 2
• World of Warcraft

So...

[FlyByPC]

Every. Last. One. of them involves violence and combat?

Wow. That's sad.

13 FPS Games?

[pugugly]

I'm finding something odd that 13 of the 20 'great' games are basically first person shooters and none of them are from small companies.

This is like a review of beverages that argues between coke and pepsi, or musical talent that's really concerned about whether Britney or Christina are better.

Not that some of these aren't good games, but he doesn't even show any variation in taste in the FPS games - he's got, what, four FPS's about "Let's go kill the aliens", and Thief or No one lives forever didn't make the list?

I'm sorry submitter, but your gene pool license has been revoked - you're no longer allowed to reproduce. Remember, just because we're making you eligible for a Darwin award doesn't mean it *has* to be fatal.

Not if you cooperate.

Pug

Re:Sequel heaven!

[Kjella]

On a wild shot, because the games that are most innovative normally have some rough edges fixed in a sequel? Civilization 4 for example is an iterative development going all the way back to Civilization long, long time ago and while hardly revolutionary in any way it's a damn good and polished TBS game. I was tired of C&C Generals before it even got out, but I know it was better than the C&Cs I played. Warcraft III was also a really well made game. Loved Oblivion, except it brought my hardware to its knees. UT2k4 was again a game I'd tired of before it even it the shelves. I guess the overabundance of FPS games just shows that there's plenty people playing FPSs, I missed several games in other genres more deserving IMO.

There's nothing really wrong with being the very best within your genre, and that's your niche. As much as I'd like to say that I got as much time to play now as I did in my teens and early 20s, I don't. Neither does any of my friends, and judging by the general population in games like GW and WoW, I'd say that's pretty common. If I had a wife and kids (at least I'm not living in mom's basement) I don't see how I'd have any time "at all", judging by earlier standards. What does that mean? That you're constantly selling to a new generation that doesn't know Civ1,2,3 but only your latest and greatest offering for what it is.

Re:The Goods

[SanityInAnarchy]

I agree with what you said about Doom 3, but:

Half-Life 2: I'd move this much further down the list.... While it was undoubtedly fairly good in places, it lacked the atmosphere of Doom 3 and the scope of Far Cry.

Haven't played Far Cry, but Doom 3 for atmosphere? Maybe at first, but honestly, Doom 3 has the exact same atmosphere for the entire game. Whisperings, slowly going insane, hell always just around the corner... I mean, yeah, it's creepy, and yeah, the first hundred zombies jumping out of odd places in the wall scared the living shit out of me. The next five thousand were just boring.

Half-Life 2 may not have had as intense an atmosphere, but it was subtler, more pervasive, and actually changed as you progress through the game.

The one point I'll give Doom 3 (and Quake 4) is a pretty petty one -- good Linux support.

Plus, I found it kept breaking my suspension of disbelief with respect to the setting quite badly. Having a mute Gordon (the guy's supposed to be a PhD and a charismatic resistance leader for god's sake) was a particularly sloppy decision.

Have you played Half-Life?

Giving Gordon a voice may have helped you, but it would've been a much riskier move. Consider that just about any voice they gave him would've been a disappointment for anyone who played through Half-Life -- just as any face they put to Master Chief would disappoint Halo fans.

There's also the element of atmosphere it provides: If Gordon never talks, and you never leave the first-person perspective, you can go on believing that it's happening to you, not Gordon -- that you are Gordon Freeman. For a powerful example of this, go play through the beginning of Episode 1...

Being a PhD doesn't mean you have anything to say, either. And who says he's charismatic? He's a resistance leader because he's a living legend, because he can fight. If anyone's "charismatic", it's Alyx. Or maybe Breen...

Further demerits for Steam.

Anything in particular?

I always hear people complain about Steam, and I don't really get it. I mean, philosophically, yes -- it embeds IE, and it gives them too much control. But the fact that they do Steam and don't do any kind of CD-based copy protection helps a lot -- it means I don't have to hunt for the actual CD, or try to crack Steam. It means I can easily transfer games between one computer and another, even if I have a hard drive failure and lose every physical copy of the game -- I can just re-download them. For that matter, it natively supports burning a backup DVD, which last I checked, can be restored to any account that has those games.

The only things I see as actual concerns are: Your game patches whether you want it to or not; You may have difficulty playing without an Internet connection; and Valve could go out of business or deny you access to your own games. That last one doesn't bother me so much; I've certainly got more than my $50 worth out of Half-Life 2 (and Counter-Strike: Source), so if everything stops working tomorrow, I'm happy. The other two are simply vague concerns in the back of my mind -- for whatever reason, I have never hit any steam problems, whatsoever -- even when I was playing on Linux, Steam was the last thing likely to go wrong.

As for my own picks, I think we're missing some indie games -- things like Darwinia and Lugaru -- and maybe some casual games, things like the Sims, even if I don't particularly like it.

And as always, as tricky as it can be to put them on this list, I think mods deserve some mention, at least. There are only two games that I can play for 8 hours straight and not get bored. One is an MMO (Nexus TK), and one is a Half-Life (1) mod (Natural Selection).

Re:So...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Every. Last. One. of them involves violence and combat?

Wow. That's sad.

Most video games do, particularly high-budget games which are likely to win awards. It's difficult to add depth to puzzle/card/city-builder games (though there have been some notable exceptions), so most high-budget games are those which simulate "reality" (either our world or a fantasy world). Once you've done that, the question becomes: what do you do in this dream world? The answer is simple: you do something you can't do in the real world. You fight an alien invasion, become a special agent, complete mythical quests, engage in futuristic arena combat, steal cars, or build an empire.

Non-violent games generally fall into a few categories: sports (Madden is one of the top selling games, year after year), racing (GT3 is the best selling PS2 game), card/casino (Hold 'Em is insanely popular online, and Solitare is the most distributed and played video game ever), builder/tycoon, and puzzle.

Sports games don't do well on PCs. They play better with controllers and on a big screen with friends. Racing games - ditto - few have a wheel, and no one wants to play a racing game with a keyboard. Card/casino and puzzle games are unlikely to make a Top 20 list (not that they are bad, they just aren't typically deep big-budget titles). As for builder/tycoon games, there have been some standout titles (Sim City, for one), but there hasn't been anything spectacular in the last 5 years - mostly just sequels and rehashes.

So, what does that leave? RTS, FPS, RPG, and MMO games. Guess what? They almost always involve at least a minimal amount of violence.

We did leave one insanely popular PC game out, though. The Sims is the best-selling PC title of all time, and it isn't really violent at all.