P&B Ranks: The Top 42 Video Games of All-Time

[NotThePars]

7 minutes ago, djchapsticks said:

Never played this but it's pretty much Gears Tactics, which I do like!

My haute take is Gears Tactics plays and feels better. Perfect series for that kinda game anyway.

[madwullie]

I spent years looking for a game like laser squad from the pre-da days. Only in the past year did I discover that the x-com games were the answer. For some reason in my head I always thought that were a shite futuristic fps. Fucking idiot sometimes.

[BFTD]

X-COM: Enemy Unknown was one of mine, and is just utterly superb. One of those games you can play time and again, with a dizzying array of difficulty modes and gameplay options if (IIRC) you have the excellent Enemy Within add-on. It's always available somewhere for a couple of quid as a complete pack with all the DLC, and I really can't overstate what an incredible bargain that is.

X-COM 2 is terrific as well, if you enjoyed the first game, and also has an excellent expansion called War of the Chosen, which takes the bizarre step of cutting out some of the major missions from the original version of the game, the events of which are still referred to during the campaign. Bit of a shame, but both versions of the story are well worth playing through.

Absolute double-hard b*****ds on the higher difficulties, though. Don't feel bad about starting off on Easy; I still get my arse handed to me on Veteran.

[GAD]

14 hours ago, BFTD said:

X-COM: Enemy Unknown was one of mine, and is just utterly superb. One of those games you can play time and again, with a dizzying array of difficulty modes and gameplay options if (IIRC) you have the excellent Enemy Within add-on. It's always available somewhere for a couple of quid as a complete pack with all the DLC, and I really can't overstate what an incredible bargain that is.

X-COM 2 is terrific as well, if you enjoyed the first game, and also has an excellent expansion called War of the Chosen, which takes the bizarre step of cutting out some of the major missions from the original version of the game, the events of which are still referred to during the campaign. Bit of a shame, but both versions of the story are well worth playing through.

Absolute double-hard b*****ds on the higher difficulties, though. Don't feel bad about starting off on Easy; I still get my arse handed to me on Veteran.

Yeah, I picked Xcom as well. I love all the new ones, but went for unknown as it was the first one I played, and I still play now. There is such a fine line between getting everything right and breezing through a mission where the baddies can barely get a shot off, to making a complete c**t of it and getting wiped out. I've tried to get into games that claim to be similar, but none have ever clicked with me like the Xcom ones do.

[BFTD]

6 minutes ago, GAD said:

Yeah, I picked Xcom as well. I love all the new ones, but went for unknown as it was the first one I played, and I still play now. There is such a fine line between getting everything right and breezing through a mission where the baddies can barely get a shot off, to making a complete c**t of it and getting wiped out. I've tried to get into games that claim to be similar, but none have ever clicked with me like the Xcom ones do.

I can't do Ironman. Tried a few times, but it always ends in disaster. You have the phase where you need to quickly build up a squad of 4-6 hardcore badasses before you can start swapping one or two out on each mission to build up your reserves, and there always comes a point where the RNG fucks you over badly and the aliens pull off all sorts of ridiculous shit to massacre your entire squad. By that point, the aliens are tough enough that a team of rookies are cannon fodder, so it's game over.

The first Enemy Within mission (Portent?) is usually the one that ends me. Everyone online that I've seen claiming that mission is easy has memorised where the Thin Men are going to drop in, and has their troops set up to Overwatch that spot and immediately slaughter them. I don't think that counts as skill!  

Also, there's a mission about halfway through Enemy Within where the aliens track down your base and invade it. I don't consider that a spoiler, as everyone should know this is going to happen before starting the game, as it's thrown in to deliberately screw you over for playing the game as it encourages you to. As resources are scarce, you'll end up allocating your best armour/weapons to the soldiers taking part in each mission, so your reserves are all "naked". When the Base Defence mission starts, it allocates a random squad of soldiers for you to use, most (if not all) of whom will have basic armour or weapons to take on an army of the game's toughest enemies, and you will lose. Losing that mission is a hard Game Over.

Basically, when the Alien Base Assault mission pops up after crafting the Skeleton Key, DO NOT DO IT! You can put the mission off indefinitely, and the Base Defence mission spawns soon thereafter. Wait until you've kitted out your whole squad with quality armour and weapons.

Spoiler

In XCOM 2, it's implied that the canon ending to the first game is that you were playing on Impossible difficulty, and that XCOM lost the Base Defence mission. I'm amazed they made it that far  

 

[BFTD]

For anyone interested in a gameplay video, Yahtzee Croshaw's series with his Aussie mate are quite amusing, for reasons that will become apparent  

 

[Miguel Sanchez]

IN 29TH PLACE, WITH 15 POINTS FROM 3 VOTES

 

Game: Mass Effect
Platform: Xbox 360, PC, PlayStation 3 (eventually)
Release date: 2007
Gameplay:

 

Zero Punctuation review:

 

Poll-maker comments: I think this was one of the first ZP reviews. As much as I enjoy air drumming to the proper intro I do enjoy the unique songs from way back in the day. I never got into Mass Effect, mainly because it didn't appear on the PS3 until five years after it was released. And I don't like RPGs. And I played the demo for about ten minutes and thought nope, not for me. Still, it appears they're releasing the trilogy this year because that's what video games are now, so at least the option is easily available for me if I want.

[djchapsticks]

Mass Effect is a tremendous series that was slow to start but once it got going, was amazing.

They completely and utterly fucked it at the end of the trilogy though. Any series needs a satisfactory ending and ME was sold on the promise that choices in ME and ME2 would have far reaching and massively varying consequences by the end game in ME3. The reality though was that the choices were nothing more than a mild detour back to the same ending. 

What a shame it ended the way it did as the journey there was an absolute joy. I fully expect to see ME2 on this list much later on.

[BFTD]

Mass Effect's one of mine. Knew nothing about it, only started playing as I got a load of copies cheap to sell on, and needed something to keep my mind off some awful personal shit that was going down, but I had a terrible introduction to the game - I couldn't get to grips with the controls, took forever to slog through the first mission as a result and, after spending a couple of hours exploring the Citadel, the game crashed and the auto-save was corrupt.

Nevertheless, the arrival of Sovereign and the universe that I'd begun to see unfolding intrigued me enough that I had another go, and just thought it was incredible. Exploring an open-world universe that felt impossibly vast at the time, filled with interesting alien races and believable characters, making decisions that affected both individuals and the entire galaxy...the whole thing blew my mind, like how Star Trek fans must have felt back in the '60s.

Not even the hilariously copypasted side mission locations could temper my enthusiasm, and I personally loved pootling about in the hated Mako, with its selective ignorance of gravity. I know the second and third entries are better "games" (and will no doubt be further up the list), but this one set up the universe and it's still the one I enjoy playing most.

Obviously the HD remaster is imminent, but there's been a great (and huge) patch available for years that re-skins virtually everything in the game, and makes it look much better. Also, the Pinnacle Station DLC will be missing from the remake; not that you're missing much there.

[Dunning1874]

On 08/04/2021 at 22:41, NotThePars said:

The new trilogy are such vast improvements on the gameplay that it's difficult to really go back to the earlier games. The combat is much better as well.

I could write a better story than Unity on the basis of reading like 4 books on the Revolution it's incredibly easy to set up Robespierre as an Assassin who's betrayed but the cowards shat out by being liberals. Look what they did to Marx in Syndicate. Condemning violence FFS.

Being an unrepentant AC fanboy I spent much of last year going back to the start of the series to play through them all, although I stopped at Rogue because f**k playing Unity again and I'd played all the rest recently enough. It was quite jarring having become accustomed to the open world style to go back to that, but the Ezio games still stand up well. Black Flag and Rogue are tremendous fun, but even they don't seem as great with Odyssey having ridiculously fun naval combat.

If I was ranking them all:

Odyssey

2

Origins

Brotherhood

Rogue

Black Flag

Valhalla

Revelations

Syndicate

1

Unity

Bubsy 3D

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

3

[Stellaboz]

Mass Effect is a classic. I've never so quickly been taken in by the characters and story of a game like this.
I mind looking for something new to get into and a friend recommended this to me, and I manged to pick it up for buttons at a Blockbuster sale in Aberdeen.

The game play was totally fine, but obviously improved throughout the series.

I loved the paragon/renegade replayability.

Choosing your squad also gave a lot of optional stuff, some cracking dialog depending who and where.

Garus is the boy. Everyone knows it.

[NotThePars]

Mass Effect is good. I love the goofy b-movie/ 70s-80s TV sci-fi vibe of it all. The writing shows its age a bit (especially the Ashley Williams "I HOPE YOU DON'T MIND I BELIEVE IN GOD... DESPITE SPACE" stuff but it's all really sincere and full of potential. I still boot it up now and again 15 years later and start a new save. It's been surpassed by other games with the core concepts like the morality system and branching choices but it still holds up relatively well and is a great introduction to a universe that I still love and am glad to see more of.

Mass Effect 3 is good with the hype removed from it. I think there might be a subtle realigning of views on it when the Legendary Edition releases. 

[Homer Thompson]

I literally have no words

[Gaz]

I adored Mass Effect. Can mind I got it and Assassin's Creed on the same day. Halcyon days.

[BFTD]

8 hours ago, NotThePars said:

Mass Effect 3 is good with the hype removed from it. I think there might be a subtle realigning of views on it when the Legendary Edition releases. 

Three was excellent, until the last ten minutes, which was just horrifying. I wasn't even thinking about all the lies about choices through the games affecting the ending, and it didn't immediately occur that the end amounted to "select one of these three unsatisfactory options"; I just sat through the credits in shock about how flippant and disposable it felt.

Played through it with all the DLC a few years later, and so much of it was great, but had to bail before the ending. Just couldn't sit through it again. Bioware don't like to admit it, but it's pretty obvious that they seriously struggled after the scripts for ME3 were leaked during development, and they couldn't come up with a satisfactory conclusion. Shame.

[Gordon EF]

12 hours ago, BFTD said:

Three was excellent, until the last ten minutes, which was just horrifying. I wasn't even thinking about all the lies about choices through the games affecting the ending, and it didn't immediately occur that the end amounted to "select one of these three unsatisfactory options"; I just sat through the credits in shock about how flippant and disposable it felt.

Played through it with all the DLC a few years later, and so much of it was great, but had to bail before the ending. Just couldn't sit through it again. Bioware don't like to admit it, but it's pretty obvious that they seriously struggled after the scripts for ME3 were leaked during development, and they couldn't come up with a satisfactory conclusion. Shame.

Imagine if they fixed the shite ending in Legendary Edition...

I mean, they obviously won't but what a fucking move that'd be. 

[Stellaboz]

17 minutes ago, Gordon EF said:

Imagine if they fixed the shite ending in Legendary Edition...

I mean, they obviously won't but what a fucking move that'd be. 

Apparently they've made the "remake" ending default instead of the 3 original sames. 

 

I haven't seen the extended redone ending. 

To be honest though, I wasn't completely disappointed originally. It's a bit like Deus Ex- the payoff is made throughout the game and not completely in the ending, with the final mission providing enough emotional events to mask over it.

Totally get why everyone was so pissed off though. 

[NotThePars]

There's a 4th ending you can get if you reject every choice where you lose the war but win it for the next cycle and I think, tbh, it's the best ending of the lot. 

[DA Baracus]

6 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

There's a 4th ending you can get if you reject every choice where you lose the war but win it for the next cycle and I think, tbh, it's the best ending of the lot. 

Is that where you shoot the wee fanny and he gets all moody about it?

[NotThePars]

Just now, DA Baracus said:

Is that where you shoot the wee fanny and he gets all moody about it?

I cannae mind exactly what happens there? You just keep picking the, I think, renegade option and then it cuts to a voiceover of Liara saying they were too late but they buried all the Crucible project strategically for the next cycle who finished what they started. 

If Bioware weren't cowards they would've went with that since they teased that the war was lost in Andromeda and made the next game either just about the new galaxy or had some Reaper scouting party or some shit show up.