Sid Meier's Pirates - My favorite open world game of all time. It gave an immense sense of exploration and freedom as you sailed around the Caribbean seaching for rich targets to plunder. After getting a hang of the slighly wonky hit detection you could ever so carefully dance your little sloop around huge galleons while you picked them to pieces with your guns. Then when they were wounded grapple with them and defeat the captain in a sword fight. Having the crew get rebellious with age was a nice touch as well, as it encouraged you to build up a powerful fleet, then as you crew started to mutiny, sell it all off back down to a single ship to start over again.
X-Wing - A near perfect blend of action and simulation with a license that I have a fair bit of geek love for. It required a really solid amount of spatial awareness as you had to keep the location of escort vessels in mind as you blasted waves of TIE bombers before they could unload missles into them. Managing your craft's power balance and issuing basic commands to wingmen gave you just enought to do so that you were on the edge of having too much to keep track of, while never quite pushing you over that edge. The blocky polygons look bizzare today, but they actually have a certain timeless quality to them in how they capture the basic look and feel of familar Star Wars space craft.
Bonus: Best strategy guide ever.
Europa Universalis III - I consider myself a bit of a history buff, and as such I find it near impossible to not love this game. It honestly has a few too many sub systems (trying to keep track of all available province, religious and state decisions is annoying) and the UI occationally totters under the weight of the simulation. That all being said it's just so fun to try to change the course of history. Can you unite Germany as Brandenburg? Conqure Europe as the Ottomans? Colonize America as Japan? The what ifs are just so much fun. It's even interesting to see how the world develops outside of the player controlled area.
Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games - If you reduced this to just the turn based battle system this is still a great game. Carefully managing your AP to set your mercenaries up for a perfect ambush is great feeling. But it is the extra out of battle touches that really put this over the top. Each mercenary has a distinct personality to manage as well as other mercs that they do, or do no get along with. So keeping a good team assembled and happy takes doing. In a way, it feels like a Football Manager sim stacked on top of a turn based strategy and it's a potent combination. It also has rather charming pixel artwork, something that I think was lost with the resolution upgrade in Jagged Alliance 2.
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe - LucasFilm Games forgotten gem and, like X-Wing, another near perfect blend of action and simulation. With all the options in this game you can play it like a serious sim, will control over all aspects of your plane's flight model, playing historical missions from takeoff to landing, and working on an overall campaign that links the missions together. Or you can just mess around with a simplified plane control set in tons of instant action missions. I remember spending much of my time in bomber runs, using the numpad to jump around the gunner stations of my B-17 and fend off waves of attacking german fighters. Pretty much turned it into an arcade shooter inside of a aircraft sim.
Fantasy General - My favorite from the five star general series. For some reason the high-fantasy setting just captured my imagination more than Panzer General from the same series. In particular I liked the powerful hero units that could to toe to toe with full squads of enemy troops. The campaign system was also nice as you could carry over a small set of troops from battle to battle to form a veteran core of your army. In my playthroughs I remember getting quite attached to these units, renaming them with unique names and doing all that I could to keep them alive. Which, let me tell you, was not easy matter. Fantasy General starts off quite easy, but gets quite hard as you progress through it.
Good choral soundtrack as well
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_C_LCPi-cI.
Team Fortress 2 - I've played less of this than I feel like I should (20 some hours) but I have no qualms about putting it on this list, as I've loved all my time with the game. In particular I love how Valve worked so hard to get players all playing the game the right way, as a team accomplishing objectives. No need to get players bickering and arguing about K/D ratios, just show how they are helping the team score points. I also have a love for support classes in team based shooters and this game happens to have two of the best ever with the Medic and Engineer. Just because I play support doesn't mean that I don't want to be all up in the action and Valve actually makes the support classes be the heart of both a team's offense (Medic) and defense (Engineer). The game has also grown into such a content rich game as will, with the amount that I play Valve is actually adding stuff at a faster rate then I can play it.
Jamestown - Lets go ahead and toss one from this year on the list. So how about one with killer pixel art graphics, four player local play, the best menu system ever, and wild Cave style bullet hell gameplay. And all this for a game that I picked up for $5 just a month or two after release.
Planescape Torment - This is one that is going to show up on a lot of lists. So for me I'm actually not a huge fan of infinity engine combat for the most part. Planescape did the best in the series for me at reducing some of the in battle micromanagement needed which kept things moving at a brisk pace. But outside of battle, does this game ever deliver. A wonderful setting, populated by legions of interesting PCs and NPCs all of with killer dialog. The backdrops are beautiful and well worth taking the time to just stop and admire. This game actually stressed me out as I liked almost all of my part members and hated to have to choose who to take along with me. The storyline and the way that the player experiences it is a total high water mark in PC gaming.
King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow - Its got a dangling participle for crying out loud.
