Great Games that Keep My Interest
I was taking a break this morning, trying to get rid of a headache that is really killing me, waiting for the Advil to kick in, and was thinking about the fun games that have really held my interest for a long time. There aren't many. But what has kept my interest are the really great games that I've been playing for a very long time.
Risk - this classic board game is a pain in the neck to play with people because if you don't have a good group of at least 5 people, it's not really that fun, and can really get quite annoying if you have a few people that don't even try to play the game. Thankfully, there's iConquer on the Mac which is a superb version of Risk with decent, though not really super challenging, computer opponents. It's a great for 15 to 20 minutes, but if you want a real challenge, you're going to have to play against something with a pulse. They have network play, but again, there's the need to get 5 good people together.
Xconq - this classic adaption of Empire is about as fun as strategy/turn-based games get. There have been a lot of these in the 'bookshelf' games over the years, but again, since this guy has pretty decent computer opponents, it's a great way to spend about an hour. Unfortunately, they are dropping the native Mac OS X interface from the project, and it's even questionable if anyone is supporting it any longer. It used to be worked on by guys from Apple and RedHat, but it's gotten away from these guys and into the general SourceForge community. I haven't received a message on the mailing lists for a very long time. Still nice, so long as I can get it to run, but there will come a time it's dead, and that will be a sad day.
ChopLifter - this has been on Apple ][, Sega, Mac OS X, and probably a dozen other platforms as well. It's the classic 'rescue the guys' game and fun for about 10 min. After that, I get a little bored and my interest falls off. It's fun enough every now and then to hold my interest for those 10 mins., but I can't say that I really look forward to playing it - it's just "there", and I play it for a bit.
I've played a few FPS games - no real interest. Networked games are nice, but only as a way to get those critical people together. I guess I'm just Old School - or just Old.