I'm not sure how it compares to Sim City, but Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is magnitudes better than Theme Park was, has pretty much all the same features and a lot more. Easy buy with the Steam summer sale coming up.

never played theme park. sim city is solid, considered putting it in but tycoon is just so amazing especially with the expansions. love the tougher parks near the end where the objectives are actually pretty tough. nothing like spending 5 "years" on a park only to fall 10 guests short of the objective because everyone ****ing pukes right near the end and every damn ride breaks down simultaneously and everyone leaves the park. then starting it all over again.

also killing the guests is so fun. you can pick them up and drop them in water and watch them drown. you can make this ride go super fast so it flies off the top and blows everyone up. so much fun.

Theme Park looked like someone had vomited multi-coloured sick all over my monitor. It's a shame you can't go back and play old games. I tried to play this one again and it was absolutely unplayable and depressing. But In my youth, Theme Park was like heroin.

I think Roller Coaster was better because it let you design roller coasters more intricately, which is essentially what everybody wanted to do. You could never go back to Theme Park after playing RCT.

We need a new Theme Park, though. I loved the entrepreneurial feeling you got when someone bought an ice cream or fries.

Late to the party but like I've said before, I use these 3 criteria for judging:
1) Impact at release
2) Playability against its peers
3) Playability now

and I usually come up with:
SMB3 or SMW
Chrono Trigger
GTAIII
Super Metroid
Zelda: OOT
SM:64
Tetris
Portal
Sid Meier's: Pirates or Sid Meier's Civilization
Grim Fandango

I'm sure Sim City is a total snoozefest compared to RT3, in fact, even on its own, Sim City is a pretty boring game by todays standards. I mentioned it purely because Sim City is pretty much the entire reason the whole "management simulation" genre exists.

I haven't played anything in the genre in years, might pick up RT3 on your recommendation though. How many hours can I expect to get out of it? For the genre, I sort of expect 100+.

On the one hand, this list seems awfully Nintendo-centric.

On the other hand, buying an SNES on ebay, brb.

On the other day there's not a game on the list you can't make a case for; so it's an ok list. If it was a list of a video gaming website the fanboys would go crazy though .

Can't believe Grim Fandago didn't get mentioned up til now. I've never played it more than a couple of hours but from what I can remember the game was a big deal .

I can pretty much agree with this. You can always argue but what about Meridian instead of UO or what about Wolf3D instead of Doom/Quake, what about Dune instead of Starcraft or some other beatemup instead of SF but I think those four are pretty solid candidates for genere builders.

Tetris is a decent candidate as well as a representative of abstractish puzzle games (and obviously due to the portability of the GB version and coop play etc) some early sports game like Tecmo might be a worthy candidate as well (or just use Pong for that :P)

I think Sim City kind of needs to be in the list as well same for a Civilization game, I'd go with Civ2 but Civ1 would obviously work as well.

Maybe Rogue should be on the list?

No, just no.

But thinking about shareware reminds me that the Commander Keen series was quite excellent

I personally have a really hard time admitting any game that relies heavily on multiplayer on a best games list. To me, it feels a little bit like saying the basketball court is the best thing ever because the Finals are exciting. MP games are really just platforms, the players make up the majority of the "game".

That said, the only criteria really worth judging in a MP game is balance, so I wouldn't hate anyone that put Starcraft II on their top 10 list.

I don't have much to add, but I saw posts about Rollercoaster Tycoon. I don't know why but from all 'management' games I liked it the most (and I remember Theme Hospital weirdly appealing to me as well). Sim City always felt a bit dull. And also, RT2 > RT3 for me, I guess I didn't like it going 3d (didn't spend all that much time on that neither)

1. LoZ OoT-- not my favorite but maybe the best game of all time.

1. Final Fantasy 3 -- I think the influence of this game has to be respected, also probably my favorite game.

1. Grand Theft Auto 3 -- I think the story and vehicle physics are better in this game than any other, also influence

1. Fallout 2 -- Really groundbreaking in its open-world-ness so much to do and discover. Great story, very funny.

5. Golden Eye -- maybe the best fps ever

5. Mario Kart -- any that I've played

7. Castlevania 64 -- my black horse pick. Most people hated it, I thought it was really engrossing. Amazing music, some parts scared the **** of me when I was a kid. Really hard, one of the few games where when I finished it I felt like I had finished a good book.

I'm willing to give GE a ton of points for it's impact at the time, but can we all take a step back and agree it sucked?

I tried to replay it out of nostalgia like a year ago, and couldn't really get into it. Controls are so bad.

Wow, I feel like Goldeneye maybe had the best controls out of any game ever. N64 controller for the win.