Great games you've been playing/played!

[Sadface]

If I could find the right emulator and ROM file, I'd be playing
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete. I loved that game...but now
my playstation(s) are broken

[Anonymous]

Triangle Wizard is really cool. It's an arcade roguelike with about 90 spells, 500 enemies and lots of fun.
Website http://trianglewizard.webs.com/
Download http://cid-c2c1c94098d53fb1.skydrive...R701%20ZIP.zip

[grobblewobble]

Gut, there are some free go-playing programs available, such as Gnu Go:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/beta.html

Did you also play human opponents?

[JellySlayer]

I enjoy playing both chess and go, although I rarely play them on the computer anymore... I have a hard time taking a game seriously if there isn't a real person sitting there in either case, and I prefer club play anyway where there's a bit of casual chatter added to the game.

As far as other games go, I haven't really played anything terribly recent since I don't really have time or inclination anymore. A non-exhaustive list of my top games would include:

Civilization 2: Great concept, well designed, excellent replay value. Game would be perfect if the diplomacy system didn't collapse entirely at high difficulty settings.

Baldur's Gate 2: Excellent storyline, extremely interesting characters, some of the most epic fights of any RPG I've played, and generally just a really fun RPG to play.

Wizardry 7: I might be dating myself here a bit with this one This game was sort of the precursor to rogue-likes for me... steep learning curve, very tactical and challenging, but fascinating and enjoyable once you get the hang of it. Such a shame that Wiz 8 turned out so poorly compared to this.

I have working NES and SNES kicking around my home (now I'm really dating myself ) and occasionally play some of the old Final Fantasy games, Chrono Trigger or the SNES Legend of Zelda.

FFVI is one such game. It not only has a set of characters that are rounded and human (for the most part; there are a few side characters that are there for combat-weirdness, like the mime that just does whatever the last guy did and the sasquatch that you can't control in combat), but the themes dealt with in the storyline are actually very adult and real, and games before or since don't really push the envelope in terms of the heavy subject matter they contain. (I'm completely ignoring guns, violence, and blood; these are not "adult" in the sense I'm talking about.) Suicide, teen pregnancy, the loss of loved ones, and above all, real, believeable hope; these are all in the game, and all handled in a way that actually pulls at your heartstrings. Every time I watch Celes (one of the main characters) jump off that cliff halfway through the game because, as far as she knows, she's the only person left in the entire world, I still cry a little, and I've played through this game more times than I can count.

I realise that I'm going against the grain on this one, but I've always thought FFVI (SNES version at least, can't comment on the recent remake) to be very overrated in the story department compared to some of the others in the series. The first act (everything up to Zozo) is very well-written and quite engaging. The second act (rest of WoB) is okay, although pretty much every character except Locke and Celes are just there for the fights. The third act (World of Ruin) is dreadful--they pretty much just slapped an one scene closure onto every character's main conflict so that they'd all have a happy ending, and the entire section has no motivating storyline to speak of. For the characters themselves, throughout the entire game, most have basically the same joyless, melodramatic personality, and there is only a serious attempt made to develop three--Terra, Locke, and Celes. Pretty much all of the other characters are superfluous to the main storyline, and only a few have subplots that are really worthy of note.

[F50]

There are three games that I enjoyed more than all others. Only one of them is commercial. All the others are free.

The first (at least, its the first one that I played) of these is ADOM. Right now I don't play it that much, but I know that I will spend plenty more hours on it in years to come. At very least, I owe at least one completion of the postcard quest.

The second is Portal. "This was a triumph!", the puzzles within the Aperture Science research facility are incredible. I've completed everything there is to do in the base game, and some extra puzzles that I downloaded as well. The only thing is: its short. That fact is probably what made the game as good as it was (not dragged out into boredom), but its replay value is much more finite than my other favorites.

The third is Tremulous. This is an excellent FOSS online multiplayer FPS. Its based off of the game Gloom and uses the ioquake3 engine. It is aliens vs humans, each aliens class or human weapon has a different personality, and as you kill enemies, you gain credits/evopoints which allow you to get better weaponry. Each team has a bunch of different buildings they can construct (all from the 1st person), which allow players to spawn, buy items (for humans) harm invading enemies, etc. After several years without a release, they have very recently released a beta of the next version (1.2).

Two other games that I've played recently:

Transcendence (I'm returning to this one for the third time now). Its a 2d, space shooter rogue like. Its an interesting concept, and its scheme-like scripting language allows for lots of modding.

Dwarf Fortress (Dwarf mode only, I've never tried the rogue-like "adventure" mode it has). Dwarf fortress is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. You are trying to build a fortress for dwarves, its kind of a simulation game. But there are sooooo many things that you can do, and sooo many things that can kill you and your dwarves, and sooooooooooo much detail in general. It has a very steep learning curve as far as keybindings go, but once you get past that, you move on to survival, and from there...Anywhere. Challenges, mega structures, butchering small kittens (actually that's more of a survival thing), time bombs, and thermonuclear catsplosions (requires modding, but can become necessary in certain situations). Everything is simulated from Dwarf personalities to body temperature, to fluid physics. Its easy to get lost in the details though, and sometimes the seasons can be slow or boring.

[Sadface]

I have working NES and SNES kicking around my home (now I'm really dating myself )

I've got a working Sega Genesis around here somewhere, occasionally
I play one of the original Sonic games or even the dreaded RPG of
repetition, Shining in the Darkness.

Though it freezes really easily, so I downloaded SitD onto my Wii and
I usually use that instead...no more losing data every 3 days

I also just picked up Kirby Super Star Ultra...maybe it's because I
haven't played a kirby platformer in forever and a day, but I can't
seem to put it down.

[vogonpoet]

Backgammon - Best. Boardgame. Eva.

[boris_pankov@inbox.ru]

The greatest game I ever played is X-com: terror from the deep and UFO: Enemy Unknown.
Damn.. that were great times.. sweet poor 90`s.

[Sadface]

Hmm. Just discovered the game Torchlight (it didn't come out very
long ago, 27th of October)...WOW. It's amazingly addictive, and I'm
fairly certain was made by the same folks that made Diablo and
Diablo 2 (the Blizzard North folks that were laid off from the big
company). It even has "hardcore" mode, like Diablo and Diablo 2,
to emulate a roguelike's one-life-only gameplay.

[Evil Knievel]

Either it wasn't mentioned yet or I missed it: Civilization.

Especially Civ1 cost me as much lifetime as almost no other game. Civ2 I like less but mostly because I was inflexible from going away from what I was used to. Civ3 with its addons are a Civ1like game but highly perfectionized. I like it a lot, but well. Needless to say that all Civs are greedy on lifetime, and so Civ4 could never really reveal its beauty to me, as around the time it came out, I was to much involved in finishing my studies. And in my case it seems now, that these amounts of freetime I had earlier are lost forever - or until I go to pension. Maybe I should keep an old machine around with these games installed and still running in 40 years.

Also, it is kind of obvious that I also recommend Master of Orion. Little shorter, but nice gameplay. Part two is nicely made but too lengthy in the end, and too much based on a single big battle after which either you or the opponents are beaten. Unfortunately, it will take a lot more tedious hours to really win after that. (Little bit like some of you report on Adom after the ACW, not for me, I die at every point in Adom.)

Babblings babblings: Dune2. The Trilby games. Hidden Agenda (weird but Adomplayers might like it, too). Ohh and Red Baron - excellent realism feeling, and adomlike in letting you die.