What is your favorite game... and why?

(and yes, if it's just too hard of a choice and you can't make the decision, you may add some runners-up... but add "why" for them as well)

Mirror's Edge because it is perfect for me. Everything from the aesthetic, the gameplay, the soundtrack, the levels and the animations to even the fact that cutscenes play during load times is just right the way i want it.


My favorite game series is Castlevania because i like gothic novels and enjoy both the gameplay and the aesthetic of the series. So all those games would be runner ups.

Darklands

The game was such a great RPG and it had so many amazing mechanics. It managed to convey the idea of navigating a rich and complex open world, using mostly an interface consisting of static screens and text.
A map for navigating the world and facing random encounters (which I suspect strongly influenced the world-map of Battle Brothers) and an isometric view for the combats. I could be mistaken but I think it was the first RPG to use the "real-time-with-pause" mechanic for the combats, 6 years before Baldur's Gate made it famous. And it already included a system for randomly generating the main quest locations, so that every new game forced the player to search for the objectives.

The game would have already been perfect if it was set in a Fantasy setting. But it even had the amazing and innovative concept of being set in 15th century central Europe. Until the appearance of Kingdom Come I can't remember any other RPG set on "real" medieval Europe.

And even the music was incredible (considering the MIDI quality, that is). It was thanks to this game that I first made contact with secular medieval music.
https://youtu.be/WuEcR_CjKMw?t=111

To this day I'm still waiting for some sort of remake,sequel or hommage game which can really be worthy of this amazing game which - unfortunately - failed to make a splash and almost faded into obscurity for many years.

Neverwinter Nights.

I'm referring to the non-enhanced version because that's the version I own. Some of the user created adventure modules really do surpass what originally came in the game box.

One such module is Baldecaran's Honor Among Thieves. What makes this module really special is the NPCs. Shopkeepers leave their homes every morning, walk to their shops, and close up every night to go home and sleep. Other NPCs without jobs either hang out around their house or wander about town. Some quests need to be done in a sequential order only because that's how the NPC who gives them does things, but a lot of them are non-linear. Most quests have multiple ways of solving them, including the game's main quest that has multiple endings. You're not locked into completing everything by the one method that the author intended. I really do wish that more games were like this one NWN module.

Another thing with Neverwinter Nights is that you're not locked into a situation of Steam Workshop or nothing like with a lot of other games. Any mod worth downloading can be found at the Neverwinter Vault.

You might want to check out Serpent in the Staglands. One review on GOG compares this game to Darklands, and when I was asking about that game, SitS was mentioned. Utlima 5 and 6 do this (I think 7 might, but I don't remember for sure). The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion does this as well.

Thanks for the suggestion.
I admit I have bought SITS on GOG some years ago. But I always heard it's a complex and tough game and I've been waiting for when I'll have time and disposition to give the game the focus it deserves.

EDIT: and I also bought it exactly because some people mentioned the Darklands influence :)

Thanks! I already own Ultima 5, 6 and 7, so I'll have to put more effort into playing through the Ultima games. I don't have Oblivion and tossed it onto the wishlist.

Jagged Alliance

Turn based tactical games are the my favorite type of game overall and I enjoy pretty much all of their varieties- but Jagged Alliance is the King. No other game of the type comes with an overall campaign that feels like a genuine mercenary operation where you take over (and defend) the map sector by sector in the order you want. Many other recent games have excellent combat, like Gears Tactics, but none can ever match the JA campaign- all the others have canned individual missions, or they have procedural randomly generated maps or ruin their pacing by trying too hard to be RPG's and tell stories, or they have too many scripted sequences. JA 2 has better mechanics I admit, but even the sequel still doesn't match the campaign of the first game.

Two of them.

1. Stalker

Because you can skavange parts of Russia for habar through awesome massive industrial plants of Ussr, while hoarding tons of guns, staying on diet based on kolbasa and vodka and doing the "right things" by shooting bandits, svoboda junkies and brainwashed monolith armed to the teeth with western guns for obvious reasons - and then, when you are covered in artifacts like a new year tree, wearing exo suit and rpg, - you die from a pig hidden behind the next bush and become a stash of habar yourself for other rookies. Or you can roleplay as bandit or svoboda junkie or monolith with some awesome mods, that literally rewrite the whole game from scratch: Anomaly, Lost World, OGSE and many many more.

2. Mortal Kombat 1

Because its like Stalker, but you make "things right" on an island somewhere in China in 2D and you can die easily by mistiming the attack. Of course, no restarts and very hard difficulty only.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

It's here on GOG - https://www.gog.com/game/vampire_the_masquerade_bloodlines

Vampires and the politics of their Secret Society. Their take on California. The heart. The writing. The music - licensed and Womb Music's score. The atmosphere. The characters. The voice-acting. The choices. The immersion. The Haunted House Quest. The feud b/t the Two Twins at the Asylum. A lot of the interesting twists & turns in the story.

It felt like when other games like Deus Ex: IW were dumbing down the immersive sim type of games (which often mix RPG/action/shooter/stealth/other elements) - VTM Bloodlines was trying to keep it alive and kicking.

While combat ain't perfect and it might get a big hard and action-y by the final 1/3rd of the game after the cab - I still love this game to death.

I have reinstalled this and replayed it quite a few times - and I often do NOT replay many games at all.

And God Bless the mod community for keeping this game alive for a LONG time.

Oh... that would be too hard. I will just cheat a lot, if that's okay, and list some favorites of mine that I got reacquainted with while I was recovering from hurting myself recently:

First, these are potato PC games. I was basically limited to lying on the floor and due to the setup at the moment I had an old PC that I set up with a 1280x1024 monitor. Anyway, I had quite a few games available to play but ended up really only playing:

Stronghold Crusader: Along with its immediate predecessor, the original 2001 game Stronghold, I found myself playing this one quite a bit. The campaigns are fun and interesting but really the deathmatch is where the game shines. One of the best aspects of the game for me is the vulnerability of your units. Many of them can be felled with a single arrow hit or two. Spearmen, armed merely with a spear (an effective but cheap weapon) and simple armor (in all likelihood their clothes), are fast but highly vulnerable to archers and armored units, but in a mob can be effective. Likewise, swordsmen are not invulnerable at all but they are as effective as one might guess a dude clad in steel might be. The static warfare, defending and manning your castle, is an interesting gameplay hook that does not come through very well in games like Age of Empires or Empire Earth. Here this is the main hook, creating defenses and seeing your performance against the enemy's onslaughts is frustrating often but enjoyable when it goes right. I also really like the sim aspect, the self managing buildings and resource gatherers. Actually, the game made playing AoE the first time kind of funny because I played Stronghold first. My first thought was, "Why do people cost food, won't they need to eat it?"

That said...

Age of Empires II: (Both the Age of Kings and the Conquerors together) This is a classic for me and many others, as was Stronghold I suppose, but in the end if not for Age of Mythology this would be my favorite Age game. This one has some excellent campaigns as well single player scenarios. The random map is, predictably and unsurprisingly, the main attraction here, The civilizational variety here is decent, even if the visuals are samey across the units barring unique units. Definitely feels better when playing as one of the European powers to see the spearmen or swordsmen walking around... until the random eagle warrior runs through. Anyway, I almost always play as either the Britons or Spanish these days even though when I was younger I would play as Korea or Japan more. The version of the game I play these days is the Ubisoft print which includes AoE II and its ex-pack along with the first AoE and its ex-pack. This one might be one of my favorites for no real reason more than it's my first AoE game, that and the mechanics were fast enough, simple enough, yet there was sufficient complexity to prevent the game from getting mundane, and the feedback from the units was fairly immediate.

Mount & Blade Warband. Just constant battles, lots of management involved and a scaling hardware system that allows me to personalize companions. Some elements I love like the continuous development in terms of troop experience, hardware quality, seizing locations and some limited interaction with npcs. Spent 1700 hours.

Next closest game is fallout 4 at maybe 800 hours.