Er ... strike that, reverse it, but yeah, I recall it being awesome, and it set the tone immediately.

Xenogears. That PS1 game sucked away a good two months of my life and is probably one of the longest and most detailed non-sandbox RPGs I've ever played. I would accept a remake or some kind of sequel that kept the same themes. Giant robots, orbital elevators, and space arks being unearthed on a distant planet far in the future as ancient relics. It would need to create a sense of massive scale and time, just like the original.

Oh, yeah... and the original beat cop-style Police Quest. SWAT stuff is cool and all but I also want to chase after speeders, break up fights in bars, and fingerprint DUI drivers. You could do it wholesome Hill Street Blues style or gritty The Shield style. Visiting my dead partner's wife has a little more emotional impact than shooting random terrorists.

Wasn't the Xenosaga trilogy supposed to be a sequel? Not a terrible game if you love cutscenes. It does give a massive sense of time as you wait 45 minutes before touching the controller again.

The first Police Quest game was surprisingly entertaining given the medium, i.e. really old school adventure games. Most adventure games from the period are known for demanding really ridicuous and arcane solutions to problems that require extremely random items, thus representing Massive Frustration Central. However, Police Quest was interactive enough that it could be fun. You could, for example, enter the serial number of a firearm into the PD computer to get some info, but IIRC you didn't absolutely have to. The game let you buy a beer, vodka, rum, gin, whatever, from a bar, and also tip, and that really didn't feel too railroady.

Maybe a prequel but, honestly, I don't think it was. Some similar themes and general robot-on-robot action but the story and the overall feel were completely different. I did not like the first Xenosaga and didn't play the other two.

Is there any worthy western/gunslinger games out on the market? Or do they all suck?

Computer or PnP?

Sorry, I meant computer games. Deadlands is more than enough of a wild west RPG for me.

There was Outlaws. Old but I had fun with it.
There's also Desperados, which is a wild-west version of Commandos.
While nothing extraordinary, Gun, from what I've played, was quite ok. It's a kind of Wild-west GTA.

I've heard about Call Of Juarez, but I don't know what it's worth.

Gun was extremely short, like could complete the whole game in half a day and not miss any of the side quests either. But it was decent and entertaining. If you are a casual gamer, I reccomend it, but only as a rental. It's just too short to justify buying it.

There was an old Western game for Apple II which combined FPS elements and roleplaying. I think it was called the Law of the West. Considering the apple II and its software is long gone there must be nothing wrong with mentioning it might be found as abandonware.

I have it from multiple sources that Call of Juarez is fantastic. I know it looks real pretty, at least.

Thanks a bunch.

I'm not kidding about Law Of The West. It's worth a few playthroughs, seriously.

Oh and there's a western scenario in the SNES RPG Live-A-Live.
It's fantastically stereotyped as all scenarios in the game but fun nonetheless.

And while I'm talking about the SNES it also had the Steampunk western shooter "Wild Guns". Nice game too but a bit repetitive.

What's Arcanum like?

Good but... not so good.

The Steampunk+magic universe is quite interesting, there are a lot of possibilities and some well-written characters and situations.

But it still felt too much like a fantasy RPG with a steampunk coating for me. You spend nearly half of the game dungeon crawling, disarming traps, opening doors, killing the monsters and looting them before disarming the trap on the next door until you reach the dungeon boss... And unlike in Fallout, they really felt like dungeons to me.
The story was also a problem for me. I didn't really feel compelled to go anywhere or do quests even when the story unfolded itself... I just didn't feel concerned or interested about what happened. And it didn't help that most NPCs were not very interesting either.

I played it once, stopped roughly near the middle and finally got back to it to finish it. A few years later I decided to give it another shot, stopped roughly near the middle and uninstalled it.

Hugely buggy and the system doesn't really work properly. This is mostly because magic/technology hybrid characters are impossible due to the constant malfunctions that crit you in the face, and technology >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> magic in isolation. Also the game has a stupid critical system that can result in you hitting yourself. Which causes a problem as the power axe or whatever it is you get in the second city can do you until the end of the game because it can pretty much one shot kill most things. Including you.

Judicious quick saving so that when it crits you in the face for a billion damage you can just reload is required.

It's kind fun though.

Thanks. I think I'll pass. I still haven't played Fallout yet, so maybe I'll give that a shot.

Do it! Fallout rules!

I have three words for you, then: Oh Hell Yeah.

Oh yes, I've got the strangest battle ever in on of the first dungeons: it started with me and my team knocking ourselves up by trying to kill some monsters, and ended with the monsters killing themselves while trying to hit our unconscious bodies.

@Fortune: Yes, go for Fallout first.

And after you're done with Fallout, play Fallout 2 with my vintage weapons mod.

I actually meant Fallout 2. While I haven't played Fallout (1), I have heard some bad things about it, and was advised to just go with '2'.

Well that's a controversial opinion. Many people over at No Mutants Allowed would argue that Fallout 1 was better.

In my opinion, Fallout 2 was probably a better game, but Fallout 1 perhaps had a slightly better overall feel by way of being a little more gritty and sparse. Fallout 2 had lots of "creative" and/or cheesy locations, so while there was arguably better gameplay and certainly more quests and places to explore, it does tend to feel a bit more cartoony.

I was originally planning to make a mod for Fallout 1 before deciding to do Fallout 2 instead just on the basis that as a newbie modder there were more tools available for me to use for editing Fallout 2.

the engine and system in F2 was definitely more refined, but the plot in Fallout1 is superior in every way, at least partially because on the first playthrough you can screw up and still win, the water shortage you have to deal with until around 1/4 through the game gives you a real sense of purpose, then the real plot hits you and you can't stop

You've really gotta start with the first game. Fallout 2 does a lot of things that assume you're already familiar with the setting, whereas Fallout 1 is a great way to introduce the amazing setting.

That means I have to find Fallout 1 then. Hmmm .....

http://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Bundle-Jewel...8590&sr=1-5

Pimp!

Kind of late coming in on this thread, but the game you were thinking of earlier, DocTaotsu, is Borderlands. New punkish desert Shooter-RPG. Sounds amazing. The weapon creation/drop system in it is supposed to be incredible. I read an article where the design team was saying that they set it up, put all the variables in and such, but they still have no idea what all kinds of things will come out of it. Something like over 500,000 distinct combinations. They were playing through and level and picked up a gun and tried to shoot something with it and nothing happened and they were getting irritated, but then they heard and noise when they pulled the trigger so they held it down while tracking the thing they were trying to shoot and after like 3 seconds it exploded into flame. They said they had no idea that was a possible build for a gun.

Chris

Ah hell yes! Borderlands!

I'm not a big fan of purely procedurally generated games, I prefer the polish of anal retentative game design.

But still, this game has much merit.

From what I understand, there is a lot of polish on all the components and a lot of the actual guns were hand created, but if you get a random gun instead of one manufactured in town then it has every chance of being a scientists wet-dream hand constructed by a master and polished to a shine, or Jedd's shotgun. Depends on the protocols, so it sounds like there is a lot of time and polish put into it as well. We'll see, I guess.

Chris

I never really played Syndicate all that much, but Syndicate Wars is one of my all-time favorite games. A modern sequel would be quite awesome.

Long ago I used to play Syndicate on the SNES. I never finished the game as there was one mission I simply couldn't complete - you had to save some guy from assassination but whatever I did I could never make my agents reach him in time. At best I would reach the place in time to see the victim's death animation before the "Mission Failed" alert...

SNES Syndicate was ok, but it didn't come close from PC Syndicate or Syndicate Wars.

Syndicate was a lot of fun, but IMO it became too easy towards the end once you got the flamer. In most situations the only things you needed was a flamer for close range, that made most things trivial, and the gauss gun for long range shooting at platforms on the atlantis final level. Then perhaps just 1 minigun for situations when you didn't want to use the flamer.

Yes the flamer was deadly, especially combined with the dumb AI. You just had to wait around a corner and wait for the enemies to run through your wall of fire.
The last level was really hard, though, until you found how to do it.

American Revolt, the data disk was really hard though and so were some levels from Syndicate Wars.

I'd really like to see a revamped Dark Legions. And another Crusader game, that'd be awesome.

I've just realized that you should try Deus, which has a lot of realistic survival elements (which makes it a really difficult game).

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/deus/scr...eShotId,218248/

It looks pretty sweet.

Speaking of Remakes...

Bionic Commando Rearmed

http://www.gamerankings.com/itemrankings/l...reviewid=958273

Time to go kill me some 2D Nazi's.

Games that deserve a remake:

I have to second already mentioned:
Alpha Centauri (Far better than Civ)
X-com (a sequel to the first two and not the abyssmal followings that continued in the series)

Adding:
Master of Magic
VOR

and of course the controversial one:

Shadowrun 3rd edition (this is my own honest opinion, and hopefully what Smith & Tinker is working on)

Eh? You mean a tabletop sequel to SR3 or a PC/XBOX/Whatev game based off SR3 (that doesn't blow)?

And I certainly agree that Alpha Centauri deserves a remake and/or sequel. That game had some of the best scripted events in the history of gaming. In particularly I'm thinking of the first time you train a mindworm unit and when that unit dies you rename a city in honor of the trainer. That was a fantastic bit of story telling in a genre that typically is story light.

X-Com should be remade... it should be remade and it should be totally awesome. I'd prefer turn based but a remake that used a Rainbow Six (the first couple) tactical breakdown would fun too. Throwing in some prebuilt levels in amongst the randomly generated ones would be nice too, especially for terror missions involving real world cities and what not.

I also demand that they include night vision goggles in the next one, I guess makes the night less terrifying but a remake that didn't include them would be as offensive as Doom 3's duct tape mod.

Yes. Either.

They need to remake Oregon Trail as an anime-style action game set on a recently-terraformed alien world that coincidentally has geographic features exactly like that of North America.

Who here hasn't played Oregon Trail? It was one of the greats.

I think they actually made that game. I could have sworn I've seen a box cover for Mars Anime-Trail a couple of years ago.

The best part of Oregon Trail was buying almost no food but buttloads of ammunition and eating nothing but meat over the course of the whole trip.

If I had unlimited money to hire a video game "great" such as Meier, Carmac, or Mechner to make some sort of Oregon Trail Ultimate Edition, I'd make hunting/riflery more realistic, and I'd also have the chance to battle with bandits and other hostiles, or possibly raid other wagon trains. You could then make moral choice during your trip.

We had a computer lab in elementary school where we played Oregon Trail as a class. Our teacher forbid us from using all of our in-game money to buy ammunition. The bitch!

What kind of crap is that? It's a legitimate strategy. You make the choice to proceed slowly (hunting frequently) and to accept a high risk from river crossings (where you can lose all your ammunition). As opposed to making a dash to Oregon against a food countdown.