As a programmer, what game is the most impressive youve seen?

#21 I have to disagree with you on the FPS thing. Yes graphics is a major issue, but those games don't exclude all else for it. Halo (the first) introduced things like only carrying 2 weapons, melee attack and jumping (I might be wrong about the jumping one), all of which our now standard in a lot of games. Halo 2 added duel weilding. Doom is extremly terifying! and the graphics are part of its gameplay, espcially the lighting (its extremly scary when everywhere is pitch black except for where your torch is pointing). The element of fear I got was totally different from any other modern FPS i have played. I can't say I have played HL2 to any great degree, but is the physics a major part in its gameplay?
Yes a lot of FPS shooters go all graphics no gameplay (I havn't played them but i think that was the flaw with killzone, Pariah and kin), so the leaders of the genre must be doing somthing else...otherwise they wouldn't be the leaders.

#22 From a pure code perspective, Doom III. I look at the lighting in that game and the kind of coding tricks it must've taken to pull off scares me.

Rome: Total War is also up there, for how they were able to get all the little men to be individual and yet act as a group at the same time.

#23 Karl Nyborg wrote "Freespace I (Someday I WILL buy Freespace II! Even if it costs $200!)"

You do realize that Freespace 2 has one of the most liberal licenses around that legally allows you to download and distribute the game right?

You owe it to yourself to get it now: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4150

#24 Honestly the most inspiring game from a coding standpoint I have ever seen, would be Planeshift

I mean the whole thing was written from scratch, is completely open source, the code base is mammoth in scope, it's totally crossplatform, and it's free to own and free to play.

Followed a close second would be just about any game actually shipping that was made with TGE, again, the codebase for TGE is just SO massive, that anyone who can take an engine written for a game released several years ago, and with a minimum of rewrites create something completely new, and modern looking, I have to tip my hat to them.

#25 @Tom: Halo ain't all that:

Limited to 2 weapons: Could be. I'd hardly call this an "inovation" but it does seem a bit more realistic than the usual arsenal you're alowed to to carry around in other similar games.

Melee attack: lots of games had melee attacks (doom let you punch), but using the butt of the current weapon is something I hadn't seen elsewhere.

Jumping: Not even a little bit. I'm pretty sure you could jump in quake, and perhaps doom as well (though it's been a while). You could probably find it in other doom-era FPSs with a little searching.

Dual Wielding: The original UT let you dual wield the pistols when you picked up a second one, and there were "akimbo" mutators for letting you dual weild other things.


Doom I & III are both great for scaring the piss out of you, as is AvP (when playing marines).


If you want to talk "inovation", how about UT's mutators. That's what made me pick UT over Q3:A at the time.

I really don't see the facination people have with the Halo series. Sure, they added a few small twists to this feature or that, but I don't see a reason for all the praise it gets (I've played both on a friend's son's XBox(ouchouchouch, gimme a MOUSE!)).

But this thread is about "wow, that must have been hard to code":

*Anything Carmack has ever done. He's constantly pushing back the edges of "what's possible" in real time rendering. Amazing stuff. OpenGL would barely be a blip on the radar without his support back in the days of Quake I (from my outside-the-game-industry-looking-in), outside high-end rendering (movies, CAD and so forth).

Elite: HUGE universe packed onto a single OLD-SCHOOL floppy. The joys of algorithm-based data generation (much like these "fps in ***<*** 100K" contests they do these days). Managing any kind of 3d graphics on an Apple ][ ain't too shabby neither.

EDIT: got the > < backwards. Meant "less than". "greather than 100k" doesn't sound all that challenging, does it?

#26 I'd have to say Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.

Even by today's standards, it had an absolutely huge playable area and extremely flexible, open-ended gameplay. I still find it hard to believe that it only needed a 486/66 with 8 Mb RAM.

#27 "Black and White"

Definatly that game. The AI is amazing and what they are coming up with for Black and White 2 is just on par if not better than #1. The graphics at the time were very nice and the missions and system for making your villagers worship you was excelent. Also the fact that you world, creature, and whole environment changed depending on how good or evil you were was a pretty cool feature as well. There was nothing like having your village all sunny and peaceful at one time then an hour later its dark and evil. ALthough I did enjoy playing the first few levels...after that i grew tiresome of the game. I tend to pick it up every now and then.

#28 I dont think Halo introduced anything at all. Even Turok, which was years before Halo, had jumping, dual weapons and melee attacking.

#29 Several games really hit me when I was a kid and first getting into writing video games:

1) Starflight. This game /consumed/ me. It was huge, and funny, and scary. It had a massive universe - 800 planets, many of which you could land on and explore - that fit on two 5 1/4" floppy disks. This was one of EA's first titles, and harkens back to when EA was a company to be respected. This game is still among the best open-ended space adventure games ever made.

2) Commander Keen - Goodbye Galaxy. I was about 15 or so when this came out, and my friend and I had spent an awfully long time trying to get something similar going, and to see this come out - better than anything he and I could ever come up with - it was truly a disspiriting moment. Impressed as I was with how smooth the scrolling was, how fast things displayed... even the Terminator-style opening sequence... I was floored.

3) Wolfenstein 3D. Enough said.

4) Duke Nukem 3D. Though Doom was impressive, this was the first time I felt like I was really /in/ the game. The level of interaction was amazing, and the level design was inspired. From a tech point of view, they did some really clever tricks to make it feel like you were going above and below the world, even though the engine wasn't able to do that.

#30 Ok, well by duel weilding I ment using 2 different weapons. I know several other games enabled the use of 2 of the same pistol. The invoation of only being able to carry to weapons, or the use of two different ones is that it's a little bit more strategic. You can't have the rocket launcher and sniper and still carry the machine gun for killing the little guys off. I haven't played Turok, so I can't really coment. And by melee attack I did mean with the butt of a gun. Just how well halo combines the use of 2 weapons, melee, grenades, jumping etc all at the same, just felt to me like somthing completly different from any other FPS I had played.
I am a console gamer. I much prefer shooters on controllers then with the mouse, don't know why, just feels right to me. Maybe thats why we think halo is so good, because we havn't experianced what you PC players have before, with Doom, unreal and quake. I can't really say anymore about why halo is one of the best. Except to say it also has some of the best AI and music in any game I have ever played. But isn't what this thread is about so I'll let it rest :)

#31 Ill second duke nukem 3d. it really raised the bar with the level of interaction in the game. it had interactive bathrooms, water fountains, elevators, security cameras, and strippers.=)

when it comes to games which impress me as a programmer, i think party games like mario party and fuzion frenzy would probably be take long to write simply because of the variety of gameplay. sports games like nba live and madden probably require very complex coding as well. no doubt simulation racing games like gt require long bouts of game tweaking to get everything to feel just right. i think its usually the most mundane and overlooked aspects of a game which end up being the hardest to write.

#32 I'll third Duke Nukem 3D... A great game in a lot of respects, programming wise I'll echo what others have said with the level of interactivity. Also was a blast to play in multiplayer (the rocket pack was great!).

in the words of Duke

"Its time to kick ass and chew bubble gum and I'm all outta gum."

#33 Yep. It was Duke Nukem multiplayer that ate up countless lunch hours and after-work time on the LAN at the office. I was in love with the pipe bomb... Set up a few, find a good hiding place - most satisfying kill evah. :-)

#34 Lol now your making me want to dig out my old "Kill-a-ton" pack and fire up some Duke Nukem 3D action, wonder how it would run on Xp.

#35 I have to say

The game that impresses me the most as a programmer and just a game developer in general is Jade Empire. I can't imagine how much time it took to create all that dialogue. The fighting system was amazing for me. They took the classic RPG skill base system and make a great fighting game with it. Besides the fighting system which hard to take a huge amount of work. The fact that dialogue and other actions you do affect your alignment had to be difficult just because of how much dialogue there was in that game. The quests, the NPCs, the AI all impressive to me. Think about all the different combat sytles in that game, each one having different effects some working in combos with other styles. The interface that allowed for such smooth control of the player. I think the camera was great simply because I can't remember ever thinking about how annoying the camera was (a too common feature in many games). Then from a general gamedev all the amazing artwork in it and the detail in the characters (from dialogue, to graphics) the cinematics, and the storyline plus all the minor storylines.

After Jade Empire, I would say Fable. Fable was amazing in pretty much all the ways Jade Empire was, but I think Jade Empire did it alot better.

Third I would place Halo & Halo2 on the hardest difficultity. While alot of games have done the things Halo 1&2 did Halo 1&2 did all of them and usually did them better. The control layout on those games made it possible to easily become a awesome killing machine. The AI though stood out to me, it was the first FPS where the AI could beat me without obviously cheating.

#36 There was a game called Starflight that was
originally in some form on Atari I believe, but I played the Sega Genesis version for
YEARS. The game was an impressively large galaxy complete with planets
that could be landed on and mysterious alien civilizations to contact.

I have heard they generated the entire galaxy of solar systems entirely with
fractal algorithms.

From a programming perspective, this game blows my mind. I had more fun
playing this game than many others since.

#37 I briefly mentioned something earlier. Those "<100K FPS" games. THAT is impressive. How the heck do you fit that much _stuff_ into such a small package? Proceedural art and so forth, but still: wow.

#38 Starflight was a great game. I plan on actually finishing it someday - still have a now over 15 year old saved game from where I last left off.

Joe Ybarra was the EA producer on it at the same time that he was producing Arctic Fox with us at Dynamix and we would hear development stories. It was a tough game to get to final. Greg Johnson, who was one of the designers, later did Caveman Ug-lympics with Dynamix.

#39 Though I haven't played it yet, Spore looks impressive. If they'd only release their character creator standalone and allow it to export meshes, I'd have me a tool to make 'not quite so horrid looking' 3d models for my projects.

The Demoscene never ceases to amaze me, the things they are able to do in such insane constraints is mindblowing.(full FPS in 90k complete with normal mapping)

#40 Red Faction was awesome, red faction 2 sucked.

@jumping in halo: you could jump in duke nukem 3d and that was long before halo.

I'd have to say Duke Nukem 3D and Blood,

both games were so immersive and fun.. blood wasn't very innovative but i thought it was fun. the level design was awesome.

I can play those games MANY times after beating them.. and it's still fun. i dont think they would run on winxp though :(

i havent played HL2 much, but the story seems eh... but the gameplay is pretty cool. i admit it is repetitive after a while.. but once in a while there are simple puzzles involving physics.. some of them are brilliant. the characters seem alive.. it's fun. i also like the fact that you can control those ant lions with a pherapod.