Gaming often fetishises the new but many great things exist in the past, so let's strap into our time machines and talk about our favourite games released before say 2010?

Beyond Good & Evil, 2003. It's been so long since I played it, I don't remember much other than it was a sandbox and it had some neat mechanics and cute characters and I loved it. The closing credits musical sequence is magical, too.

Had a partner want to practice hacking a 3ds before they closed the shop so I can play PS1 games. The first one I put on that mofo is Azure Dreams, my first and probably favorite dungeon crawler roguelike with a city builder. Also Breath of Fire IV is one of my absolute favorite games ever.

My response to this will look like a who’s who of Dreamcast games. The Dreamcast was the first console I bought myself, so I have lots of fond memories.

• Soulcalibur I & II
• Sega NFL 2K1 (and I was NOT a sports game person)
• Shenmue I & II
• Jet Set Radio
• Phantasy Star On-Line
• Quake III arena
• Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2
• Hydro Thunder
• Fur Fighters

Not a unique opinion, but Portal is probably the closest thing to a perfect game. Nothing feels unnecessary, and every part of it (story, gameplay, visuals) is not only good on its own, but also work together to make the game better than the sum of its parts.

Portal 2's also great but suffers from a lot of fluff imo. The analogy I like to use is Portal 2 is like a big feast of really good food, while Portal 1 is just one small dish, but it's the best version of that dish you've ever tasted.

I definitely have a lot that really get me feeling nostalgic. Couldn't even count the hours I spent playing games as a kid lol but here's a random list of a few:

• Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete (My favorite of all time)
• Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age
• Dragon Warrior VII
• Final Fantasy: Tactics
• Chrono Cross
• Phantasy Star I and III
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Minish Cap
• The Sims 1
• RuneScape

There's always Diablo 1.

But my favorite is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which was made by some of the people who created Fallout and has a LOT in common with it. It's an open world, a combination of classic fantasy with elves, dwarves, and halflings with a rising steampunk technology that competes with magic. There are many schools of magic and technology, as well as social, stealth, and combat skills. The graphics are very crude by today's standards, but the gameplay is outstanding.

For me it was metal gear solid 3 snake eater. I thought it was the perfection of the metal gear formula. I’m exited to see its remaster.

Final Fantasy Tactics(PS1) remains my favorite game to this day. I really liked messing with the various classes and abilities, and it's a rock-solid tactics game, to boot. Couple that with amazing music and a great political story, and you've got a classic.

TG Cid is hilariously broken, though.

I played Max Payne and its sequal recently and I was surprised how well they held up. The gameplay and level design kept it consistently fun

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (PC version). Be aware that PC version is a completely different game from the console versions.

No spoilers please but I'm finally sitting down to playthrough and beat the original Deus Ex. Installed GMDX mod and have been having a blast so far!

Mischief Makers for n64! its a puzzle platformer by treasure, its controls are a little unintiutive at first, but the games grappling/boost mechanics are so much fun once you get it down.

also, SHAKE SHAKE!

Soldier of Fortune. I will remember that whistle darn it!

But I lived through the golden era of arena shooters such as Quake III and UT2K4 which was amazing, but most of all the whole FPS genre was really ramping up to new heights every month back then with HL2/CoD and mods such as Counter Strike, Garry's Mod and the like.

I just picked up Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (the original, not the Remaster) again. Installed it on my Steam Deck along with DSFix after a year or so of scrolling past it and seeing the "unsupported" icon. Looked it up on ProtonDB and apparently it works just fine.

What a game. The level design is still unmatched imo

Unfortunately some of my favorite games are no longer around in a playable state.

I friggin loved Atlas Reactor but it shutdown in 2019. Another all time favorite, which is still around but does not have the community to keep it feeling alive is: Shattered Galaxy.

Other games I think deserve to be in the all time best games of all time list are:

• Heroes of Might and Magic 3
• StarCraft Brood Wars
• Dota2
• Civ5
• Diablo 2

Every Star Wars fan owes it to themselves to play Knights of the Old Republic, at least once. And if you play it once, you'll want to play it through again, as a different character class. And if you play it twice, you'll want to play it through again, as a dark-side Jedi. And if you play it thrice, you may be tempted to play it through again, as a Droid.

It's a wonderful story, that feels like Star Wars (which, for those of us older Star Wars fans, who at the time were suffering through the cumulative disappointments of the prequel trilogy, became our salving solace), with plots and settings and characters and ships and light-sabers and action and betrayals that were (and still are) as rich as any of the movies or shows.

The people who run the franchise keep teasing canonicity, so play it soon, so you'll gasp like we do when Darth Revan makes an appearance.

• OpenTTD
• Puzzle Pirates
• Mario Golf on GBA
• Bike or Die, Space Traders, and Fish Tycoon on Palm

The first Fable for me. Loved that game so much as a kid!

TimeShift came out in 2007, and that game was the bomb. Loved the concept with the suits that can control time, and the game play felt really smooth. Nothing beats freezing time and grabbing the enemies' weapons from them and shooting them with it.

I loved the bullet time in OG Max Payne game (2001).

I was addicted to EverQuest since I started playing it in 2001 for at least 10 years. They don't call it "EverCrack" for nothing. No matter how I feel about it now, it will always hold a special place in my heart.

I also played PlanetSide MMOFPS for at least 4 years since it released back in 2003, and it was so great. I hear both good and bad things about its successor, PlanetSide 2, but haven't tried it for the fear of it ruining my nostalgia of the original.

Starsiege: Tribes was an awesome game too. I was a beta tester for that one way back in '98, in the days before broadband was a thing. I still have an installation CD hand-signed by the devs that they had to ship to all the testers, because downloading 500+ MB over dial-up was not feasible.

Earthsiege 2 was the game for which I went out to CompUSA and bought a joystick that had swivel function (MS SideWinder 3D Pro).

@insurgenRat the king kong movie tie in game its actually really good and extremely innovative and alot of the ideas I've never seen replicated sadly we'll probably never see a remaster cuz 1 it's a tie in game and 2 it was made by ubisoft

The original Red Alert is still one of my favorites! In the expansion you can even fight Giant Ants!!! (Not sure how many people knew)

Eternal Darkness

Silent Hill

Resident Evil 1+2

Call of Cthulhu

Quake 1-3

Doom 1+2

Chrono Trigger

Final Fantasy 3, 7, Tactics

Metal Gear Solid (all of them)

Shadowrun (SNES)

Castlevania 1-3, SOTN

I could go on...

Baldur’s Gate II is and will always be the most influential and important game of my life.

1. Commando, 2. Black 3. metal gear 4. GTA san andreas 5. prince of persia 6. I remember having an emulator of a lot of old games.

Civilization III. Still undoubtedly the best from me, every subsequent change to the series has been negative.

All the old MechWarrior games, starting with MechWarrior 2. That was my childhood. PGI didn't have what it takes to recapture that with MechWarrior Online or MechWarrior 5.
Shout out to Half-Life 1 and Team Fortress Classic (1.5). THAT was my teenage years. I played an insurmountable amount of TFC, adminned a couple servers, and took zero interest in TF2, because it just wasn't the same without concs, throwable frag nades, etc.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was a gamechanger though. That released when I was in college. Fell in love with the hopeless atmosphere, good gunplay, and the eurojank. I still play the various S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods to this day and am eagerly awaiting the release of number 2 (slated for December, but we will see. Devs have been through a lot).

This game is actually a bit before my time since it was released two years before I was born, but the original XCOM game (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) is still one of my favorite games of all time. And it's just gotten better over the years with fixes and modding through OpenXcom.

I like the modern Firaxis games a lot too, and Xenonauts even moreso, but nothing has quite hit the same as the OG.

I still play Doom 1 & 2 most days. Nothing matches it for speed of play. Doom is fast.

Doom 2016 is a good game too, but I'm it lacks speed.

One of my all-time favourites is Freelancer, 2003. Just a really fun arcade space sandbox with an engaging campaign and great multiplayer and modding scene.

Permanently Deleted

• Doom and Doom II: Hell on Earth
• Choplifter
• Duke Nukem 3D
• X-Wing
• Quake III Arena
• MechWarrior
• GoldenEye 007
• Rogue Squadron
• Shadows of the Empire
• Metal Gear Solid
• Siphon Filter
• Ein Händer
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
• Colony Wars
• Colony Wars II: Vengeance
• Counter-Strike
• Half-Life
• Oni
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert
• Total Annihilation
• Dune 2000
• Star Control III
• Delta Force
• Deus Ex

So many great games from my childhood.

Final Fantasy IX is my all time favorite game.

Wesnoth is a GPL turn-based strategy game from 2005 which has been installed on every computer I've owned since its debut. The pixel art, sound effects, music, and gameplay depth are wonderful yet it's very easy to learn! There are hundreds of campaigns available for solo play and it has both local and online multiplayer. Team based multiplayer with friends against AI's is a lot of fun and no one gets their feelings hurt if they lose!

Right now I'm playing the white chamber which is a freeware indie horror point and click adventure game from 2005 with a female protagonist. So far it's doing really well at creating a creepy, suspenseful mystery in a foreboding environment. I haven't finished it yet but it's been fun!

As others have mentioned, Neverwinter Nights from 2002 is still unchallenged for community created storytelling and worldbuilding! If you haven't played it then take a look at what's available on The Neverwinter Vault and some of the online realms. A Dance with Rogues is my favorite module and would on its own be one of my favorite games!

Thank you to everyone else who's shared some of their favorites!

In addition to the many amazing games already mentioned, I'll throw in the 1995 gem "Ascendancy" from The Logic Factory. The user interface is a bit rough by modern standards but, for its time, it was a fascinating 4X turn-based strategy game (despite the broken "AI") with an impressive array of alien races with unique art and music for each. It's been in-and-out of the "abandonware" classification over the years, so there may not currently be any legitimate way to acquire a copy of the game--which is a real shame for those who might want to experience a nearly 30-year-old game that I think was groundbreaking for its time.

In my old party days circa 2000, I had a nice party house in the hood. The neighborhood wasn't all that great, but it was a nice big house for cheap rent. Lots of rooms and space. I was young and had more knowledge of computers than money, and this meant I could bus to work instead of driving and paying to park.

I worked at a large engineering company. They upgraded their computers for the Y2K bug. This left them with an extraordinary amount of old PC's they had to actually pay to dispose of properly. To save money, they yanked the hard drives and raffled them off to the employees. We're talking nearly 400 PCs. 386's, 486's and even some (then highly coveted) 486-dx2's.

A few people that won just gave me their PC. They didn't want it since it wasn't usable without a hard drive but knew I did. I cashed in a few favors here and there to get a few of those choice 486-dx2's from those that won them where I could. In all, I made (6) pretty decent Dell PC's and set them up in various rooms in the house. I also had my cadd workstation and my roommate had his PC as well. I put Windows 98SE, VNC and Twisted Metal 2 on each.

I lan'd together all (8) PC's into a home network using a partial reel of CAT6 cable that I got from another friend in exchange for devising and assembling his wife a new PC for her birthday. He was in the IBEW and the cable was scrap surplus from construction at a major airport. He gave me some speaker wire as well. In hindsight, it was for a public address system and was not the best for musical range but it did work. I borrowed a crimper and helped myself to some RJ45 connectors from our IT department. I ran the lan cables to network the PC's. I placed a speaker in every room and wired them into the home stereo. Mono, but I only had so many speakers. I then converted my workstation to more of a home theater, running a video out to the TV. PC audio was outputted to the home stereo as auxiliary.

It made for a kick ass home theater system for the year 2000. In it's day, it was pretty hip. We had some great multiplayer games for years to come and nearly everyone had their own room to play in. TM2 was really neat in that it could take up to 8 players.

VNC gave you control over any computer from any computer. You could watch a movie on the Home Theater in any room you want to, or all of em even. Kick on winamp with milkdrop and just jam out. Put on 'The cat sitter' and get the cat all riled up. Ahh, good times.

In all, and not accounting for any time spent or software licenses, I may have invested 30 dollars for a new corded drill (which I still have today). Beer was probably the highest total expenditure for the project. There were some wire coat hangers that got away fishing the wires through the walls that are probably still there.

Also, I totally agree with you on Chrono Trigger. It has another title set in that same world that can be tricky to find called Chrono Cross. I personally think Trigger was the better of the two titles but Cross is play worthy.

I'm going to go waaay back to a gem of a '90s CRPG: Betrayal at Krondor.

The main quest-line was engaging, the combat was cool, and the puzzle boxes were fun, but I remember being blown away by the size of the world. You could wander for literally hours, exploring new terrain, and discovering additional characters and bonus quest-lines. Its world was expansive and immersive, and it felt alive, like nothing else playable on a 386sx ever had been before.

The next time I felt that sense of aliveness - but better - in a video game was about a decade later, when I took my first Wyvern ride in World of Warcraft, and realized that everything I was seeing below me was really happening. This wasn't a teleport: if you saw someone fighting something down below you, it was because another player was really fighting something down there. Mind-blowing!