Ok, you asked for it..
Shogun:Total War- 3D "tactical" battles, and had a good atmosphere, especially compared to the other two games in the series. It had a throne room and you had to look for the enemy force on the battlemap.
Medieval:Total War- Bigger map, which is good and bad. Had a time period I'm interested in. But unfortunatley lacked the atmosphere of Shogun, it didn't seem to have as much effort put into it, no throne room and not as much seeking out of the enemy.
What really made it shine was the Mods, the "Blind King of Bohemia's Supermod"(Adds a TON of new units) and "Pike and Musket"(late 15th-late 17th century warfare) in particular.
Rome:Total War- the vanilla version is crap. Too many fantasy units and ridiculous anachronisms, most notably the portrayal of Egypt.
Get this game just for the mods, like Rome:Total Realism, which fixes most of the game's problems-more historical units, slower battes, etc.
I'm personally waiting for "Hegemonia"(Classical Greece) and "The Crusades" mods to come out.
Silent Hunter 3- U-boots are awesome! Playing this game with fully manual targetting also taught me to love Trigonometry.
Fallout- Awesome post-apocalyptic role playing game. Has a perfect amount of humor and interesting charecters and setting. You are unfit to call yourself RPGfreak if you do not like this.
Jagged Alliance 2-
You play the boss of a mercenary team and have to hire people to take over a country. Had great tactical battles, lots of weapons, a dynamic campaign, and some great Mods exist for it. Also, the Mercs you hire have their own personalities and can be quite endearing and/or funny.
F117a Stealth Fighter- A great flightsim from about 1991. So you might not like the graphics. Back in 91, flightsim graphics didn't have much in the way of your fancy "textures". We just had plain low polygon count models, and and we liked it!
Great fun sneaking around enemy territory.
Beast- first computer game I ever played, so this might just be nostalgia talking. Unfortately for your generation of gamer, that's nostalgia for about 1987-8(when I played it, it was made in 1984). It has ASCII graphics and is quite fun in a "simple arcade game" way. The object was to crush red H's with green blocks.
Duke Nukem 3D-Not a technical achievement, if you wanted a soulles tech-demo in 1996 you played Quake(sorry, i didn't like it). but had a lot of personality, humor and neat weapons like shrink rays and trip bombs.
Deus Ex- Great role-playing/adventure/FPS. Great story and dialogues.And it has a good Futuristic atmosphere (although I didn't like the assualt rifle or stealth pistol) If you are into conspiracy theories, this is the game for you!
"Close Combat" series-in/famous for tracking morale of individual soldiers. Had pretty good combat, units didn't fire at eachother from 3ft away like Command and Conquer, but at realistic ranges. That it took morale into account forced you to stop thinking like Rambo if you didn't want your troops to all get slaughtered, pinned down, and run away.
Beneath a Steel Sky-Awesome adventure game. Takes place in a future mega-city. Is very funny.
Interstate 76'- You drive around the South West with machine guns and rocket lauchers on your car. Its like Mad Max 1 with more guns and Funk.
Dark Forces 2- great use of the lightsabre and good Star Wars FPS.
TIE-Fighter-Its fun to play the bad-guy. Best Star Wars game ever.
Commander Keen 4- a fun platform game.
Daggerfall- much better than Morrowind. There's a huge world to explore and its not as alien as morrowind. way too much dungeon crawling for my taste, but the world topside was fun to explore.
Outlaws-Back when Lucasarts was a by-word of game quality, they made this excellent Spaghetti-Western themed FPS. I like the setting, weapons, and cutscenes(they are cartoons, so they hold up well).
Air Warrior 2-unfortenuatly, this requires a Dolorean, a flux capacitor, and Doc. Brown to properly enjoy. Was an awesome on-line flight sim around 1997. I had taking out airfield Acks with the T-34 down to a science so my squadmates/countrymates (C-Land) could bomb and/or drop paratroops to take the field. Also, scrambling in a La-5 and kicking the crap out of anything at low altitude was great fun.
Half-life-Im sure you've heard of this
Sea Legends- A seafaring game taking place in the mid 17th century. Its awesome having a huge fleet and being a privateer and/or pirate.
MUCH better than the new Sid Meirs Pirates! aside from the graphics.
System Shock 2-FPS/RPG with a great horror atmosphere. The game is quite creepy.
Hind-You fly a Hind, a Russian helicopter. I like it for the mission variety, the Hind is a "jack of all trades" sort of deal, so one mission you're bombing villages, the next you're inserting troops and the next has you doing SAM supression and so on.
SEAL Team- Great FPS taking place in Vietnam. One of, if not the first non-"run and gun" FPSs. You had to sneak around if you wanted your team to survive.
God help you getting it to run though. I had trouble freeing up the conventional memory for it even in 1994.
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri-use powered armor to fight people. Had a lot of fun and interesting missions. Marred by Voxel graphics and cheesy FMV cutscenes.
Alpha Centauri-"Civilization" with a LOT more personality.
Sid Meir's "Gettysburg"- Real time civil war battle.
Muzzle Velocity- "Battlefield:1942" meets the "Total War" series in 1997.
Its WW2 game where you could command hundreds of troops and lots of vehicles and planes, so you could say, hop into a tank and fight or be a soldier. Its like Battlefield 1942 with 1997 technology, but with much bigger maps, many more vehicles and troops, and artillery!! Plus you could command the battle from a 2D map, so its like two games and one. Unfortunately, it also used voxels.
wow this is a pittiful thread.
don't just say you like the games someone start saying why. 
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I agree
