PC Video Games: what games do MeFites love the most?

I am digging Far Cry

I just can't believe that nobody's mentioned http://www.nethack.org/ yet.

I can't believe that no one mentioned Wing Commander II, or WC Privateer. There are free dos systems availible online, anyone want to recommend one as good for this (old school gaming) purpose? http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1 is pretty much the gold standard of DOS emulators for gaming.

Betrayal at Krondor, a chapter based RPG. Who doesn't love digitized actors running about in their bathrobes? One Must Fall 2097, a fighter. Robots that kung-fu fight! And they go CLANG when they hit! Trade Wars 2002, a BBS trading game. A friend started one up on a personal server a few years back and it was like 92 all over again!

Civ II and Riven. Also, maybe Unreal Tournament just for its polishedness and straight fun multiplayer. Beats the hell out of Quake any day of the week.

Actually, a stupidly simple, graphically crude (text mode), but highly highly addictive older game, was called pyro (I think). The idea was to burn down the building. The screen would depict a floorplan, with a few barrels of explosives already placed (plus you have a few you can drop yourself), and you would move your character (a coloured square) around the floorplan leaving a lit fuse behind you which burns ever shorter. When the lit part of the fuse passes a barrel, it explodes igniting all walls within the radius, which will spread the fire to other walls. Fire will kill you (so you can't walk into a burning wall, or let yourself be caught in a barrel blast radius when it goes off, or wait around until the burning fuse trail you leave behind catches up with you). The object was to set up the fire such that it would burn as much (or all) of the floorplan as possible, yet you would escape in one piece (which means setting it up so you can reach the exit before the fire spreads to that area, if you're aiming for a perfect score). Kind of a real-time puzzle game, lots of fun. It was shareware, so never a smash hit, but surprisingly good.

Cobra: Good point. I think modern hardware is fine, but the operating system is trouble. A lot of dos games work best (or only) on dos. A dos boot disc or something is probably much easier than trying to get them running under a modern operating system. There are free dos systems availible online, anyone want to recommend one as good for this (old school gaming) purpose? Also: Star Control 2 had an option where you could turn off the game timing function and it would run the game as fast as the computer was able too, instead of at the intended pace. Back in the day, this might not have been any faster, but a few years later, it was insanely fast, and today... I'd love to select the AI for both sides and watch the battle on modern hardware!

To ask a really stupid piggyback question: with some of these older games (say, X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter), would it be silly to expect them to work decently on recent systems? Oh, and I vote Civ III for greatest game, with strong showings by Civs I and II.

Dungeon Seige 1/2 also deserve honorable mention here. The problem with many of these old-school games is that yes.. they are great but if you have never played them before the graphics, UI, and controls are going to seem horribly outdated and frustrating. The proper question perhaps is "What games stand the test of time best?" For my money, i wouldnt go back further than about 5 years unless you can find it free or supercheap on the net. I tried playing Baldur's Gate II a few months ago and while it is a great game the genre has grown by such leaps and bounds that I just couldnt get into it. Think long and hard before jumping into an established mmg if you dont have friends to help you. In my opinion, RTS-type games tend to stand the test of time best (Civ & Starcraft are still great even if you somehow missed them 10+ years ago), while FPS games die off very quickly once the next generation of graphics make them obsolete (1-2 years), and RPG games occupy a shady middle ground still pick-up-able after 3-5 years depending on your patience. If you find something that looks interesting, at least check out some screenshots from google's image search. I am by no means a graphics whore, I just think you will save yourself some time and $$$ by being picky.