Top 20 PC Games on Windows XP 194
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?
The Goods (Score:5, Informative)
19) Halo: Combat Evolved
18) Rome: Total War
17) Unreal Tournament 2004
16) Medal of Honor Allied Assault
15) Neverwinter Nights
14) Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
13) Command & Conquer: Generals
12) Guild Wars
11) Civilization IV
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
09) Doom 3
08) F.E.A.R.
07) Company of Heroes
06) Battlefield 1942
05) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
04) Call of Duty
03) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
02) Half-Life 2
01) World of Warcraft
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The Goods (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Woo hoo! (Score:2)
Perfect score, I never played any of them! (Ok, really not that hard since I only use Mac and Linux OS on modern machines).
Re: (Score:2)
Warcraft 3 and Starcraft run just fine on WINE, and from what I know, WoW works on Cedega. Games from ID Software usually have Linux binaries. NWN has a Linux binary, too. Try again, it might surprise you.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm... I think I've played three games on that list: Halo, Warcraft III and NWN. Halo was fun. The latter two were dropped within hours, since watching paint dry was more entertaining. Coincidentally, I think the reason was similar in both cases: when you've played the BG series with a party of six, and RTS games with armies of hundreds of units, somehow you+henchman or "armies" with only a handful of units just don't seem spectacular or varied enough as drop-in replacements. You could certainly have games
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The Goods (Score:5, Interesting)
20) Rise of Nations - yeah, ok, this seems fair enough. It's a nice concept and still a fun game to play. I may even have moved it a little higher up the list. Graphics are dated quite badly now, so a sequel wouldn't go amiss.
19) Halo - w... t... f... - sure, the Xbox version was great, even if its own sequel does comprehensively out-shine it, but the PC version always felt like a nasty hack at best.
18) Rome: Total War - reasonable pick and probably in about the right place on the list. Very solid game.
17) Unreal Tournament 2004 - this made me go "hmm" at first, but on balance, I think I could live with this here. It was definitely the best iterration of the series. I'm not quite sure how TFA manages to claim the original is better.
16) Medal of Honour Allied Assault - I guess you have to include one of the WW2 shooters and I guess this one is the obvious candidate. If this were the only one on the list, I could have been perfectly happy. Unfortunately, if you look further down...
15) Neverwinter Nights - ooooh, tricky one. On the one hand, the game as released, straight out of box, is pretty damned poor, with an original campaign that falls waaaaay short of the usual Bioware standards. The sequel is massively better in this respect. However, I will grant you that, with two solid expansions and a huge mass of mods available, NWN has grown way beyond what originally came out of the box.
14) Max Payne 2 - Can be completed in about 4-6 hours by an average player and has no replay value. No thanks.
13) Command and Conquer: Generals - Oh god no. Command and Conquer with a slight graphical facelift, but none of the production values that made the very early installments in the series great. Gameplay that was outdated compared to other RTSes even at release.
12) Guild Wars - not played it, so can't really comment.
11) Civilisation IV - frankly, the Civ games have never done it for me. However, I will grant that they do seem to push the requisite buttons for an awful lot of people, so happy to let this one stand.
10) Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos - yeah, good pick. Probably the best of the small-scale RTSes from the XP era. I'm mystified as to why the article says the controls were tricky, though. They were basically the same as any other RTS around, if not slightly better due to the decent hotkeys system.
9) Doom 3: Yep, decent pick. I know a lot of people found fault with it, but this game scared the living shit out of me (at least for the first half of the game). I'd probably have put this in the bottom end of the list, though, given the lack of variety. I actually felt Quake 4 was better, so may just have substituted that altogether.
8) F.E.A.R: again, a decent pick just on account of atmosphere. Plus the graphics were beautiful and the AI probably the best we've seen in an fps.
7) Company of Heroes: Hmm... maybe. Personally, I'd have substituted Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War for this, though. They're basically the same game underneath but, particularly with the expansions, I find Dawn of War slightly deeper. Still, there's no denying that Company of Heroes is very, very pretty.
6) Battlefield 1942: Yes, I'd probably go along with this, on the proviso that all of the sequels and expansion packs are excluded. BF2 in particular was an utter crock.
5)Knights of the Old Republic: Yes, definitely. Proof that Lucas should have let Bioware write Episodes 1-3.
4) Call of Duty: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO. What the fuck is it with this game? Why the hell do it and its sequels continue to attact such plaudits. An inferior, dumbed down Medal of Honour clone which brought nothing new to the genre at all. On a related note, why do all these countless WW2 fpses only feature battles from the second half of WW2 which the Allies won (oh, and Pearl Harbour). I grow tired of the "inevitable march to victory" feel of these games and feel that it actually fails to do history justice.
3) E
Re: (Score:2)
Farcry started great, but then they introduced mutants and crappy indoor levels. Also, the plotline sucked a bit. It would have been so much better if they kept the whole game outside on that lovely island chain. I hope Crytek hire a decent script writer for Crysis.
I have to agree with your nomination of Dawn of War, though. wonderful game. Shame Dark Crusade is horribly unblanced - Nothing seems to be able to stop an attack move from a big mob of Necrons.
Re:The Goods (Score:5, Informative)
Especially considering the reason you give.
The 360 version has massive control related issues. The resolution is a huge problem.
And the kicker: Show Stopper Bugs.
How can you possibly state that the bugs present in the PC version are a bigger problem than those on the 360? With the 360, you hit one of those bugs, and your game is over. And there are a LOT of these bugs.
On the PC:
a) patches. Patches fix bugs. Bugs go away. Gameplay gets better.
b) console. Console fixes or allows one to work around bugs and carry on with your game.
c) mods. Mods are what make Oblivion really shine.
You are the very first person I have run across that actually prefers the 360 version. That statement alone suggests I should take every game related statement of yours with a large dose of salt.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The 360 version... just works. There may be mino
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That said, I don't play MMORPGs anymore because they are huge time sinks and amazingly addictive at the same time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. Disaster on the pc until the hardware caught up, but still left a lot to be desierd.
17) Unreal Tournament 2004 - this made me go "hmm" at first, but on balance, I think I could live with this here. It was definitely the best iterration of the series. I'm not quite sure how TFA manages to claim the original is better.
Grfx and
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting... Not sure exactly what your complaint here is. Is it that you move from gameplay to watching the walkers attack? Lazy bastard, when I was on that building (if this is what I think it is), I grabbed a rocket launcher and took them down...
Also: Episode 1 is awesome.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with what you said about Doom 3, but:
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 place
Re: (Score:2)
I hear this all the time, but I'd prefer the main charactor speak because I am not going to be able to pretend a video game charactor is me. I am not a resistance fighter, a PhD, or whatever other traits a character might have (a video game about me would be rather boring) and adding "not s
Re: (Score:2)
Also, there is a counterargument beyond that: In Jak & Daxter, Jak never said a word, it was always Daxter making the odd comments and Jak making facial expressions mostly along the lines of "whatever". In Jak II, Daxter is pretty much the same, but Jak does speak, and his first words are not at all a disappointment.
Yet, one big difference is that Half-Life 2 is an FPS -- first person. Your logic is fine, but I don't even make it that conscious -- the "not speaking" is rarely mad
Re: (Score:2)
20) Rise of Nations - yeah, ok, this seems fair enough. It's a nice concept and still a fun game to play. I may even have moved it a little higher up the list. Graphics are dated quite badly now, so a sequel wouldn't go amiss.
Actually the sequel, Rise of Legends, has graphics entirely in 3D, and they're not bad, although I'm not so fond of the fantasy stuff. Glad this game made it to the list tho, it's my favourite RTS.
Re: (Score:2)
(I made up a list for 11-20 as well, with things like Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, and Escape Velocity Nova, but I figured they were
Re:Windows XP games? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
20) Rise of Nations
19) Halo: Combat Evolved
17) Unreal Tournament 2004
16) Medal of Honor Allied Assault
15) Neverwinter Nights
13) Command & Conquer: Generals
11) Civilization IV
10) Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
09) Doom 3
06) Battlefield 1942
05) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
04) Call of Duty
01) World of Warcraft
So, thirteen of the twenty are available for the Mac, I'm surprised and pleased to say. If only I had more money and time for games...
Re: (Score:2)
1. World of Warcraft
Hopefully when my guild dissolves in another couple years, I can start checking out some of these other so-called "computer games"...
Not many on Linux... (Score:2)
17) Unreal Tournament 2004 -- ships with a working Linux installer. My brother has found an insane number of mods for this game, and was up to some 20 gigs of space for just that game and its mods before we both migrated away from that Linux install -- me to another computer, him to a new hard drive and Windows. Surprisingly, when I installed and fully patched the Linux version last week, it has a native 64-bit binary.
15) Neverwinter Nights -- Never played the game, but it does see
Re: (Score:2)
19: Halo - what the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The PC version of Halo was a lot of fun. The controls were just like any other FPS and the graphics were on par with other games made in that same year. My friends and I enjoyed playing Halo after ut2k4 became a bore and, in my opinion, it has a lot of great multiplayer maps (Blood Glutch, Sidewinder, and Death Island to name a few). There were many game types and had a decent number of hacks/mods to make the game interesting for quite a long time. If this list came out a few years ago, I would be shock
Re: (Score:2)
No he's wrong, the PC port sucks ass, the graphics (for some reason) played like crap (on a Geforce4 compared to the Xbox's Geforce2), the mouse control was incredibly slow even with acceleration and set to level 10, this combined with the overall boring gameplay (why were all of the levels identical within a "chapter"?) made a truely craptasic game.
The multiplayer wasn't even that inspiring, Quake/Doom/UT style gamplay with crappy weapons (spray "cone" physi
Halo?! Doom 3?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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*
Doom 3 (Score:2)
One thing. (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
It looked like shit, too.
The List and My Commentary (Score:5, Interesting)
19 -- Halo. WTF? It was great on the XBOX but not a good FPS by PC standards.
18 -- Rom Total War.
17 -- UT2k4. Why this version? All of them were really good. Sequels should be disqualified.
16 -- MoH Allied Assault. It was ok. I really hated the way the game cutscened a lot. And the fact that it forced a tutorial sucked.
15 -- NWN. Great game and very modable. Still play this after, what, 5 years.
14 -- Max Payne. Loved bullet time.
13 -- C&C Generals. Never played it.
12 -- Guild Wars. MMO without fees. Awesome.
11 -- Civ4. After Civ3, I was really not willing to buy another Civ game. I still play Alpha Centuari though.
10 -- Warcraft 3. Not a big fan of RTS. Never tried it.
9 -- Doom3. Never played it. Too dark. Duct tape mod really showed how dumb game designers are. And WTF with batteries that last 10 seconds?
8 -- FEAR. Stupid name but great game. The demo gave away almost all the scary parts though. Bullet time and the nail gun was awesome.
7 -- Company of Heroes. Very fun for a RTS. Still, never played it more than a few hours.
6 -- BF1942. Played the shit out of this at LAN parties. Once Desert Combat was out, played the shit out of it again. The follow-ups sucked bad though.
5 -- KOTOR. Another port from XBOX. It was fun. Loved the moddable lightsaber.
4 -- Call of Duty. I was really burned out on WW2 games at this point. God, can we get another war?
3 -- Oblivion. Something about a first-person RPG just sucks. After 10 minutes of not knowing where the last rat was, I gave up and uninstalled it.
2 -- Half-Life 2. I guess it was OK. I only bought it because of CS:S
1 -- WoW. This game is a lot of fun and very social. Most of my friends play this to extremes. Once I got high-level, I quit. I don't have time to do the same 6+ hour crawl 20 times to get the uber sword of pwnage. I really loved the fact that I get credit for *not* playing. Makes leveling much easier.
So, where was X2 or X3? Both were lots of fun. How about GalCiv or GalCiv2? Empire at War was a blast as was Hero Quest. Flight simulators (all sims really) were missing. GTR, Falcon Allied Force, Flight Sim X, LOMAC, and IL2 were a ton of fun. As was Silent Hunter 3. Realistic sims are, for me, what really keeps me updating my PC. Everything else can be duplicated on a console. The first time you complete the ramp start in Falcon, you'll know the PC is king.
Re:The List and My Commentary (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Janes' IAF was a flightsim based on that. Of course, you are no-so-much an arab in that one.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/janes-combat-simulat ions-israeli-air-force [mobygames.com]
>>Or what about Gulf War II?
Falcon Allied Force was about the first Bosnia invasion. Circa 1995. They got the title wrong, but whatever. These have been several GW2 games. A few flight sims and several shooters. None of them were any good. I'd love to see something like a driving sim in a humvee throu
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Win 98 FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Win 98 FTW (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Chris Mattern
No Starcraft or Fallout 2? Forget it! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
So while they are way, way better than some of the games on that list, they just didn't meet the age requirements for consideration.
Best game of the generation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nethack, the best game of this, past and probably future generations.
Re: (Score:2)
Why?
Because Nethack has so many ridiculous game design flaws it isn't even funny.
Every single game designer out there should be forced to play Nethack nonstop until they ascend. That's the only way we'll get the shitty game design elements from roguelikes out of games forever.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
XP?! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This soon? I don't know about you, but I'm still waiting for the progress bar to move past 47%.
Re: (Score:2)
Ahem.
XP is pretty good about not having viruses or worms if you apply the proper precautions, the first of which is turning on a firewall (default in SP2) and only opening ports when you absolutely have to. And if you don't download sketchy software or mount sketchy disks. I run XP semi-frequently directly on the public Interne
Re: (Score:2)
I should also point out that fixing every problem in a multi-million line piece of code is hard... ...I don't think that this has occurred to anyone on here.
Consumers don't care how hard it is, nor should they.
You try debugging an operating system with the complexity of Windows. When you can do it, then we'll take your complaints about Windows seriously.
If we could do it then microsoft would be out of business. They are a software company that sells an operating system. People pay them money for said OS, so they don't have to make their own. By your line of thinking we should all be doctors/mechanics/engineers/developers/etc before we can expect quality from others.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
GalCiv II (Score:3)
Far Cry (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Far Cry (Score:4, Interesting)
Far Cry allowed exploration and variation in moving around and solving scenarios. The latter two tried to be interactive movies, where story kept you from stepping outside the preset ride, sometimes in really ugly ways. They must be nice as a first FPS experience, but they're not about playing so much as shooting on que.
Far Cry had a crap story with great gameplay and I love it
Re: (Score:2)
These are just more of the same. (Score:2, Interesting)
What about the games that actually tried (and succeeded) to do something a little bit different, like Grimm Fandango, Hitman, GTA, and so forth?
I think you missed the point. (Score:2)
Diablo and/or Diablo II? (Score:2)
Sequel heaven! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow. That's sad.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
- Sports: This includes about 80 hojillion subgenres like golf, tennis, football, the other football (I'll let the reader determine which they want to think is "the other" one), baseball, basketball, and many more, along with hybrid genre-hoppers like golf course builders and simulations, and more recently, there's been a coaching-only NFL-style football game. I guess you still "shoot" in a basketball game, though.
- Sims: With
Re: (Score:2)
No GTA? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Last Generation (Score:3, Interesting)
Given there's one DX-10 card line out there - nVidia's - and they're facing a class action lawsuit because their Vista ready card isn't Vista ready [slashdot.org]... Given that Vista takes away several audio features from Creative's line of sound cards [creative.com]... Given that the best known technical name in the gaming industry says it's not worth bothering with... [slashdot.org]
Can you really call the most current generation that actually works "Last Generation"?
As things stand, I was under the impression that all Vista does for gaming is disable features you have under XP. Oooh... And give you a couple of exciting menus for games and game specs.
Medal of Honour (Score:2)
Back in the day, you could log on and have a really excellent game. Plenty of people on there, good ping times etc. Now, there are far fewer players, and far more of them are part of a clan which means there is little chance of them working with you. I suppose that was one of the best elements. There are plenty of multiplayer shooters, but few managed to get people to co-operate in an ad-hock kind of wa
Morrowind? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
13 FPS Games? (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
Also, the submitter is the administrator of the site TFA is on. (In case noone noticed ApacheVE may in fact be Apache from VE3D, who happens to have ve3d.ign.com as their
Battle for Middle Earth (Score:2)
It had true
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I woret he same rose tinted glasses for a long while, but after I tried a lot of the really great games I remembered from years ago, I have to say that most aren't that good. They were great then, but now they're not worth the effort.
There's still (as you say) some pure classics which can stand the test of time, but most of the games that you remember as good games, you'll be dissapointed to try out today..
Re: (Score:2)
The most popular - WoW - has subscription fees.
Re: (Score:2)
Bull. I spend £600 on upgrading my current system a year ago, and it'll run Vista just fine. True, I "only" bought 2 250GB drives, Athlon X2 4400, motherboard, 7800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a 500W PSU, but for another £300 or so I could've thrown in case, monit
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps it is, but I find it odd that someone who thinks they can put together that kind of system for under £1,000 can't find also the consoles for less than RRP.
I don't much care what "people" said. I personally ne
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting claim. Got anything to back it up?
IME, while businesses continue their three-year upgrade policies because far too many CIOs remain too stupid/naive to question that policy, almost no-one is buying new computers at home at the moment. In fact, the only person I know who is considering getting new kit in the near future is me, and I have specific reasons for upgrading now that are entirely unconnected with Vista.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, I think we've lost the plot here. We're talking about the potential impact of Vista on the gaming market, are we not? In that case, surely the home market is the only thing that is significant!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I was going to retort what about Guild Wars with a wikipedia link but...
Guild Wars shares many features with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). However, it was called a CORPG by its designers to emphasize the differences in its approach to online role-playing compared to other games in the MMORPG genre. Primarily, Guild Wars is one of only a few commercially produced and distributed online role-playing games to eschew subscription fees, instead off
Re: (Score:2)