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So I don't have time to really add all the game series I enjoy but it's usually strategy games. I loved the old cnc games but never played any after cnc 3. I honestly feel like it's better than people gave it credit for at the time. Sadly online people spammed units which became highly boring. Last nod mission was pretty tough to beat but not super rough.

Obviously dawn of war makes the cut here but never played dow3 which people hated. I think it's self explanatory why I love this series as do many of you.

Xcom and the endless space and endless legend series are others. The endless series is creative and unique. Pay attention 4x games like gal civ 3 since you failed here. Xcom is just infinitely fun until end game. It has rng but the base management and fights are just too fun and it spawned xcom clones which try and almost always fail to come close to the fun. I've heard some say mutant year zero came close but I haven't gotten to play it yet.

I'll describe more later when I have a keyboard instead of a tablet to type on.

I really enjoyed the X series. 4X space game. Not exactly easy, a ton of things to learn too, but fun nevertheless.

I played all titles from X2 Beyond the Frontier to X3 Albion Prelude. I tried the latter titles as well, but it wasn't what I was used to, and my PC started to struggle with HW demands.

There's some gimmies. Series that are notoriously great but come out rare enough they don't really dominate my mindspace. They're released, I play and love them, then I wait 4 years for more. Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, whatever Platinum is up to, etc.

Of things released often enough to be a constant, Megaman, particularly the X series have always been releases I'm excited for. Also a huge Pokemon fan though Go has largely satiated my need to replay the same experience in "new" games as of late. Armored Core was definitely something I was super into while it lasted as well.

Pretty much everything on LunarSol's list with the exception of Pokemon (not that I have anything against Pokemon, just never got around to really playing them). Always nice to see a shout out for Armored Core.

Another series that I became quite fond of and was very sad to see die off was the Legacy of Kain/Soul Reaver series. Soul Reaver had its 20th anniversary just this August. While Soul Reaver started out as a separate concept, the way it was blended into the the Nosgoth setting was really well done. Such a great setting with interesting characters and concepts that never got to see full realization, unfortunately.

Persona series for me is among my top ones for JRPG's. Same with the Witcher for more normal RPG's and Dark Souls as the OG souls genre game series. Fallout USED to be one of the game series I saw as one of the main game series, but with the recent blunders of FO4 and FO76, it's kinda dead to me now with how little they give a crap about the original canon. For fighting games, Soulcalibur and Super Smash Bros are classics for me. The Yakuza series is another one as far as weird Japanese games go and I have a soft spot for the Ratchet and Clank series as well. DoW for warhammer and the Uncharted series for the action-adventure itch I get sometimes.

Series wise:
Eldar scrolls
Battlefield (minus the last two which sucked)
Deus Ex
Mariokart
Zelda

Would throw in SF2 but really only enjoyed SF2, SF2CE and SF2Turbo.

Fallout 1 - New Vegas. I even forgive Tactics for being what it was. FO 4 just wasn’t what I was looking for and... somewhat shockingly... I haven’t tried 76. I have spent more time on New Vegas than any other video game... in the running for most combined total period. I can’t count the number of times I’ve played through, spending over 100 hrs on most playthroughs.

Final Fantasy 1,2,3 (Nintendo #s) and Tactics. I never got into FF 7 and onwards.

BioShock.

Batman - Arkham series (except Batmobile stuff... that’s garbage filler).

Banner Saga: Beautiful, Norse Mythology. I found myself caring about the characters and “followers” more than I expected to.

Mass Effect: (have yet to play andromeda... don’t think I missed much)

Bah forgot Bioshock and Fallout - good calls.

this might show my age a bit but

Sensible Soccer, the once and future king of footy games

about 1/3 of the Ultima games (4,5,6 and one of the Underworlds), went back and played 1-3 but they where somewhat of their time, and there simply aren't more any after 6...

the Amiga era of AD&D games, came on a hefty number of discs and you still had to read text from the manual...

the ps1 era Tomb Raiders prior to Last Revelation, ditto the Tony Hawk games up to about 360 ones

gta 3, Vice and San Andreas, was never too keen one the new ones although Ballad had a Vicey vibe going on

Dragon Age, yes even 2 which was a neat idea but rushed and/or botched the landing and the end is just dumb

Just Cause, yes its the same game over and over but sometimes being Antonio Bandares and making dumb splodes is enough

@Turnip. That surprises me. Ultima 7 is often considered one of the best. The last before the radical engine/setting changes, and offered a lot more complexity than the mirrored virtues of the gargoyles or the silliness of Blackthorn.

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I miss the old SSI gold box D&D games, but couldn't deal with the graphics and interface at this point.

BG 1 and 2. IWD series was bleh for being almost pure dungeon crawls with no real RPG feel. Planescape Torment was impressive in my mid teens, underwhelming to play again in college, and long since laughable as an adult. The purple prose philosophy is very sophomoric if you've taken Philosophy 101 at any point.
But I still replay BG1 and 2 regularly, though I still have never finished the BG2 expansion. I'm usually burnt out by that point- high level D&D is also pretty terrible (RNG you're dead), so I've never felt the urge to finish it.

For modern series.. eh. DA2 was fine, ME2 was the best of its lot, Andromeda 2nd best and was never really impressed with the rest. Too much filler and time-wasting nonsense, and little actual depth.

Elder Scrolls and the modern Fallouts are decent explore/slash(shoot)/looters, but terrible if you're expecting an RPG experience.

I loved all of the Wing Commander games growing up.

Nowadays the only thing that moves the needle for me is Total War.

Elder Scrolls and Fallout could reignite the flame if they return to form(well, Fallout 3, New Vegas and FO 4 form. The format of Fallout 1 & 2 is never coming back). Not the least bit interested in their latest online outings.

And maybe the Grand Theft Auto series, but they've been so "online" focused that its turned me off.

Baldurs Gate series games. They did open non-linear quest lines. Heck BG2 you get dropped in the middle of a city and that's about it for telling you where to go. They made you explore and discover quests and you did feel like you were finding them rather than "wander and then click on obvious questgiver for quest".
There are also loads of neat little touches, like when you put party members together who dislike each other and they can run the risk of fighting one another; or even argue with your approach to quests and your stance. It made them feel more like characters with their own backgrounds and stories. Even today whilst many RPG games have the "subcharacter background quest" few are willing to risk you losing characters over your choices or even because you finished their quest.



Starcraft. Bias here as Starcraft was my very first PC game ever - but yeah it was epic. Back in the day when manuals had lore in them too. Smooth solid gameplay that defined the RTS genre for, well, decades. SC2 is also loads of fun (though tarnished a bit from a developer team clearly more in-tune with mmo than rts development and from not reading their own background material and messing with it - Xelnaga were NOT space whales.....)


Homeworld series. First game blew me away with its 3D intro and its story. The gameplay was also solid and very novel and remains to this day. HW2 built on it in gameplay and produced a very slick game system, story not as good; but overall still that operatic space rts experience. Even the mini-sequel Cataclysm was a super fun game (and built brilliantly into the original lore whilst going its own direction).


Endless series games - (Space.Legends). I'm throwing these up because I love the artistic direction they've gone for in both games. Their own internal lore and the artistic style really catch my eye and they give me that magical feeling that hasn't been around in a long while. I love that their fantasy game has unique races; I love that their space game has a magical edge to it much like early Startrek films. I like that they've tried to do something different with the 4* combat system and tried to shy away from requiring suprefleets (a feature that still plagues great games like Stallaris).


Total War. Just epic battles. Though I honestly came to this series late. My younger self didn't like the earlier games. However Medieval 2 was so much fun. Sieges and cavalry charges; epic swarms of troops on the battlefield. This was also in the day when most RTS was like Starcraft or CnC - so you really only had a handful of units on the map at once in comparison (long before the age of Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation or Ashes of Singularity). And these things only grew bigger and more epic.
Then they topped it off doing Warhammer. A game I'd wanted to see in their engine in dreams since the Medieval 2 days. BOOM magic, dragons, hydras, orks, elves, skaven, all in brilliant battles. True some areas, like sieges, became more game than epic focused; however I enjoyed the first TW AI in a long while that was actually aggressive in the game - which wouldn't make me spend 20mins chasing them around the map; or entering the city only to chase them again etc... I enjoyed an "in your face" type of AI on maps that were large ,but constrained enough that you couldn't spend 20mins running around reforming lines all the time.

Forgot about the GTA series too. Another good call.
Vice City was close to perfect at the time.

I was actually thinking about how much I loved the Soul Reaver/ Legacy of Kain series the other day.
The Abe (as in from Abe's Oddysee) series has got to get a shoutout too :-)

For Me Total war: God i loved Rome 1.
Until recently, as for three kingdoms and their whole mini series. Not a fan anymore.

Empire Earth: 1 Great game. 2 It's okay . 3 Burning wreck.

Anno: Also until Ubisoft made it an Ubi/epic store exclusive series. Additionally 1800 just does not have that spark, same with the 2 versions before that.

Age of Empires: II and III mostly, i heard a IV is in the making but nothing else, is that true?


Dawn of War: except III that one i skipped (luckily)

Fallout: I played 3 NV 4 and recently 1 and 2. Gotta admit, the story kinda lowers and F76 well the better we do not talk about it.

Not Online!!! wrote:
For Me Total war: God i loved Rome 1.

I almost failed my degree becasue of RTW! Impossible to stop playing that game, it's always just 1 more turn...

 Kroem wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
For Me Total war: God i loved Rome 1.

I almost failed my degree becasue of RTW! Impossible to stop playing that game, it's always just 1 more turn...

Rtw II though.........
Especially on launch, cut content dlc buggy as hell and half the time not working.

I still have the CD somewhere lying around, must have been hundreds of hours for Rtw I

I never bothered with RTW2, I heard it was bad so didn't inflict it upon myself!

I think I played so much Rome, Medieval II and Shogun II that I never want to play TW again though.
TW: Warhammer sounds great, but just the thought of playing yet another TW campaign fills me with dread!

Voss wrote:
@Turnip. That surprises me. Ultima 7 is often considered one of the best. The last before the radical engine/setting changes, and offered a lot more complexity than the mirrored virtues of the gargoyles or the silliness of Blackthorn.

I think part of that was due to other demands on my limited teen income I didn't get a decent PC till around 00/01 and didn't pick up 7 onwards till a few years after that and they did not age well, stuck with Underworlds as reminded me of Dungeon Master

From start to finish? Borderlands and Mortal Kombat. MK went from “fight, there’s a story here somewhere” to “storymode is an excellent movie broken up by occasional fights and you play through the well thought out movie”. Borderlands went from “let’s open a vault and get goodies but story mode is nothing” to “Handsome Jack for best villain in a game ever”.

I'll never not love the Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, or Total War. I think I've played nearly every iteration of these games released since I could play games, and I've hunted down old Zelda games to play too.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
So I don't have time to really add all the game series I enjoy but it's usually strategy games. I loved the old cnc games but never played any after cnc 3. I honestly feel like it's better than people gave it credit for at the time. Sadly online people spammed units which became highly boring. Last nod mission was pretty tough to beat but not super rough.

Obviously dawn of war makes the cut here but never played dow3 which people hated. I think it's self explanatory why I love this series as do many of you.

Xcom and the endless space and endless legend series are others. The endless series is creative and unique. Pay attention 4x games like gal civ 3 since you failed here. Xcom is just infinitely fun until end game. It has rng but the base management and fights are just too fun and it spawned xcom clones which try and almost always fail to come close to the fun. I've heard some say mutant year zero came close but I haven't gotten to play it yet.

I'll describe more later when I have a keyboard instead of a tablet to type on.

I know you played Gal Civ 3 at launch did you keep up with it at all later? I found trying it again after patches and some of the DLC made it into a very different game. The Endless series is very good though.

A game series I really like is Conquest of Ellysium. It is a bit niche since it is a cut down 4x like Warhammer: Gladius but with a fantasy setting and simple graphics. The thing about this game is it really pushes the eXplore aspect of the 4x more than most games in the genre and if you like the game you might find that you are stretching out the defeat of your opponents in order to get to one of the other planes of reality for little more strategic reason than to see what is out there.

I really wish Conquest of Ellysium was a "longer" game! That and the developers getting enough money to upgrade the sprits to a higher quality 2D (though shifting from Dominions 2 to 5 they've already updated a fair bit). Granted you can argue that Dominions is the "longer Ellysium" however Dominions can suffer from that "OMG so many things going on at once per turn" aspect that can lead you to being overwhelmed; it also really likes super-armies (though its not as bad as some others).



Gal Civ games I've tried - bought through bundles mostly - and they put me to sleep. I don't know why but their method of 4* is just boring. I always feel like I can't do anything without taking another turn; whilst I want the feeling of wanting to take another turn to do more (subtle difference). The hsip building is fantastic fun, but can feel a bit empty if you're not spenidng hours at it (and if you then play something ilke From the Depths where placement of weapons and armour and such actually affects how the AI plays the unit out - whilst in Gal Civ its mostly a blob that moves the same no matter how you build it)

the series I will never skip out on:

Golden Sun

Persona

Mass Effect (even andromeda, that was some great combat even if the writing was bad)

XCOM

I have other favorite games, individual entries in series. but these are the games that are guaranteed day 1 purchases for me.

Dawn of War, played them all, including the horrible zero effort broken as gak Soulstorm, personal favourite of the series for me still is Dawn of War 2.

Quite a few of the Command & Conquer games with the very first Command & Conquer being my very first "big purchase" PC game back in the day. I stopped after C&C 3 and Red Alert 3, with the personal highlight of the series for me being Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge, which just about hit the sweet spot in terms of being funny and zany.

Everything Fallout, except for '76 and Brotherhood of Steel, personal favourites still are Fallout and New Vegas.

Half-Life! All of them, including the PS2 variant which had an exclusive coop mini-campaign.

Resident Evil. I've not played all of them and got into the franchise waaaaay back when they did the remake for the Gamecube, but I quite like them. Resident Evil 7 in particular did a lot of things right in my eyes.

The re-re-rebooted Tomber Raider series (Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider), which will hopefully continue some time soon, but without the massive amounts of angst and serial killing.

Far Cry, which I've been playing since the first game, but really started loving with the second one, which kicked off the open-world schtick it has going for it. Played most of them aside from the caveman one and most are quite enjoyable, horrible endings aside..

No One Lives Forever. Played both games, never could find a copy of Contract J.A.C.K. (which was gakky anyway) or the PS2 version which had exclusive prequel Cate as a cat burglar missions. The world could do with more Cate Archer, Magnus Armstrong and the Director, but alas, it shall never be.

 LordofHats wrote:
I'll never not love the Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, or Total War. I think I've played nearly every iteration of these games released since I could play games, and I've hunted down old Zelda games to play too.

Zelda was fun and one of the only things I still enjoyed Nintendo for. Yeah they were all the same until Breath of the Wild but they were all fun and BotW got great reviews.

I used to be addicted to Pokémon as a pre teen and young teen but I grew out of it. Some of the pokemon seem a bit lacking creatively in the more recent iterations which is unfortunate. For me it was an addiction I just had to kick.

Not always a fan of Total War but i'm a bigger fan of their variants that have gunpowder esp. Fall of the Samurai even if bombardments were OP. Total War Warhammer was just the best. It's like peanut butter and chocolate coming together for a better taste than each separately.

I sent you a DM earlier btw just making sure you noticed.

@emptyhat:

Sadly Gal Civ always hooked me with the story mode. When I got Gal Civ 3 I legit had to play the campaign several times to see if it wasn't bugged. It only had 3 missions. Perhaps patches and DLC fixed it but the Endless Series had a much greater beginning experience. Perhaps i'll try it again but first impressions and all.

I feel like I should try Warhammer Gladius but my money situation is currently crapped out. Maybe when you get your new computer and I get enough for a solid state drive esp. since Total War games take forever to load.

@balmong7:

I love XCOM. I still play xcom 2 to this day. I'm totally up for streaming xcom 2 if anybody is interested in watching. I'd prefer just doing it on stream though because Twitch doesn't save unless you have a bunch of followers.

@BrookM:

It wasn't love at first sight but I found cnc 3 to be a pretty good game. Nod was my preferred faction in that particular game and I found myself loving the nod stealth bombers in later playthroughs though boosting obelisks of light with laser artillery was fun too. GDI had a bit but they seemed a bit too standard. Yeah it was missing some things but it was pretty fun. Never played Kane's Wrath though but it sounded a bit fun.

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I wish there was an rts game taking some of my time but other than Total War and Steel Division 2 (i prefer wargame but steel division was fun) most rts games are just dead now. I still stand by that Act of Aggression was fun but it had a marketing fail.

Streets of Rage.
Doom.
Command & Conquer.
Original Dawn of War and all its expansions.
Batman: Arkham Asylum series.

I used to be addicted to Pokémon as a pre teen and young teen but I grew out of it. Some of the pokemon seem a bit lacking creatively in the more recent iterations which is unfortunate. For me it was an addiction I just had to kick.

For me, I find I just don't have the time to sink in it any more. I'm a completionist and I like doing everything I can do in a game. Pokemon in that regard is a bottomless pit because of the sheer number of pokemon, moves, IV/EV combos that can be made.

I just don't get to enjoy it anymore because I don't have the time to play the game the way I'd like.

The Soulsborne series is amazing and still one of the best series ever made as far as action-rpgs go.

To this day, Total Annihilation *plus expansion packs), Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, and Planetary Annihilation are all still better than the 90% of RTS games which are little more than regurgitated starcrapped clones (including starcrapped 2 itself).

Tropico as a series is a great and humorous adventure in city building and always good fun.

The Batman: Arkham series are nice modern beat-'em-ups with a fun exploration mechanic and lackluster investigation mechanics.

The Smash Brothers series are the premier game I bring out at parties. Pretty sure a lot of people feel the same way about Mario Kart and Mario Party, not really my cup of tea for either one though.

Mass Effect before Andromeda was great. Among EA's games, ME3 by an overwhelming majority the most of my gameplaying hours. Andromeda would have been passable if they hadn't rushed it and launched it with tons of bugs. Ah well. Three games is a good run.

I remember having a ton of fun with 2d jrpgs, but frankly so many of them could be melded together that only a few really stood out in my memory as exceptional, like Chrono Trigger or Lufia 1 and 2.

I suppose I should mention X-Com because of how many hours of my childhood the original series took.

I'll second Legacy of Kain / Soul Reaver.

Quake/Doom/Unreal/Duke Nukem and their various clones were usually fairly solid.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms until it got to the PS3 era and beyond. I just never moved past the Playstation 2 as far as Sony's systems go.

Might and Magic, Ultima, and Wizardry are all classic series, though they're very hit or miss at times, particularly the latter parts of Ultima.

Neverwinter NIghts, Knights of the Old Republic, and to a lesser degree, Baldur's Gate (the latter held back by using an older and inferior version of DnD).

Shadowrun: Returns. Hong Kong is definitely the best of the three, but each of them is worth having. Wish they'd make more campaigns...

The Elder Scrolls, though I've been disappointed in some of the directions they took after Daggerfall.

I'm with Melissia on quite a few of these. Total Annihilation was my first RTS love and I still think one of the best RTS of all time. Supreme Commander was a totally worth successor, although the subsequent iterations less so.

Mass Effect is the only game series that I would pre-emptively take a week off of work for. While Andromeda was not perfect I think it got way, way more heat than it warranted for what were generally minor cosmetic bugs (and one particularly bad line of dialogue).

I also truly love the Dawn of War series, with my absolute favorite being Dawn of War 1. I get the appeal of DOW2 for sure but I like RTS over RTT so it's more of a genre problem then a game problem for me.


Neverwinter Nights was a really good franchise too, I sure sunk tons of hours into that.

I liked Dragon Age but in a way I think few would admit - I liked Dragon Age 2 quite a bit despite the dumbed down mechanics because I liked the story better, and I couldn't quite ever get into Dragon Age Inquisition despite it supposedly being the best game of the series. I got jammed up on that one because none of the romance options really were appealing to me which is a stupid reason not to be able to get into a game, but for those sorts of games I feel like that's a big part of the draw.

For muhmorporgers, I spent about a bajillionty hours playing Everquest, and then segued over to playing a ton of WoW. I've been done with mmogs since 2006 at least though.