The Shrine

I think it's always hard to figure out which games are your favorites, because there are so many that you may like, and it's hard to prioritize them. Well, this will be a list based solely on how many times you replayed a game. After all, the more times you replayed it, the more you liked it.

You don't have to be in order, if you don't want to, but at least try to list all of your games that you've replayed at least once and how many times you played it. Obviously, games like Super Mario Bros and the like might need to be adjusted based on hours played, etc.

Final Fantasy Tactics - played 3.5 times (was in the middle of a complete auto-battle game)
System Shock 2 - played 3 times (damn near wrote a storyboard FAQ after the third time)
Castlevania: SotN - played 3 times (both characters, plus the luck code)
Alternate Reality: The Dungeon - watched my parents play it first, played twice (tried out some save state hacks the 2nd time)
Super Mario World - completely finished at least twice
Chrono Trigger - played with a friend plenty of times; finally had a chance to play by myself once over a while later
Xenogears - played 1.75 times (2nd play was inspired by finishing Xenosaga 1/2/3)
Final Fantasy 7 - played 1.3 times (trying to get Shellie into it)
Final Fantasy 6 - played 1.1 times (trying to get Shellie into it; also tried a custom ROM version I made)
Chrono Cross - played 1.2 times
Zone of the Enders - replayed 1.5 times (2nd time was trying to get the bad ending; got the ending halfway through the game)
Racket and Clank: Up Your Arsenal - replayed 1.2 times (was in the middle of a "keep your weapons" games)

I think nowadays, with games easily available and not enough time to play them, I tend to replay games a lot less, even for games that I really like. I feel like I have so many games to play that I must play one and move on to the next. It's a shame, really.

Resident Evil 2, Halflife 2 and Episode one countless times (well, at least 4)
Shadow of the Colossus (2 times)
Resident Evil 4 (3 times on the GC, 2 times on the Wii)
Dawn of War and both expansions (didn't beat the campaign, just play the skirmishes over and over and over and over again)
Ace Combat Zero, 4, 5, and 6 (at least 2x each)
Osu Tatakae Oendan 1&2 and Elite Beat Agents (over and over and over)

I want to play Zelda: TP again.... but I can't bring myself to.

Tetris Attack/Pokemon Puzzle League/Planet Puzzle League - even after you beat it on the highest level of difficulty for single player, there's still the best two-player puzzle game ever, the online of Planet makes it essentially endless; my fav puzzle game
Zelda: Ocarina - so damned fun you can play it over and over again..I've beaten it 3 times
Zelda - 3 or 4 times, once with the "Zelda" name
Final Fantasy 6 - the quasi non-linearity of the World of Ruin coupled with the sheer awesomeness of the game give you a different experience each time.....assuming you haven't used a FAQ or guide to find everything; 3 times
Mega Man 2 - one summer I used to beat this game every day
Super Mario Bros - I actually got to 8-3 using my feet; could beat this game in well under 10 minutes back in the day. It was actually THE reason I got a Nintendo, was my fav arcade game as a kid
Goldeneye - played it over and over again even after beating it even on 007 to get that damned invincibility (never did)
Chrono Trigger - got I think 7 of the 11 endings
Chrono Cross - 4 of the endings
Guitar Hero 1 - even after beating it I kept going back to play it for a while
Panzer Saga - beat it twice, one of the best games ever

There are a lot of older ones I've played many times over (like Mike Tyson's Punch Out), but I don't really play much nowadays so I really haven't played too many multiple times recently. Also there are some games like puzzle games that you play over and over again. I put Tetris Attack in there as it's incredible, but Tetris and Tetrisphere could easily be up there as well.

I think I have probably played Chrono Trigger, FF6, and Earthbound about 50 times combined. Captain Skyhawk, Super Mario 3, Sonic 2, Final Fantasy Legend 2.

Skies of Arcadia, Xenogears, Banjoa Kazooie, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy 8, Vagrant Story, and Zelda Ocarina of Time for recent games. Soon to be Resident Evil 4 Wii, I am on my New Game+ Leon playthrough now (my second playthrough), and I love this game, there is so much quality content and for such a great price.

Why did you never get RE4 for the GC, Seeker? Or did you?


As for me, I've probably put the most hours into FF4, 6, and 7, Guitar Hero 1 & 2, Romance of the Three Kingdoms 6, Starcraft, Chrono Trigger, Suikoden 3, GTA: Vice City, Megaman 2 (maybe not the hours, but countless times through), Star Wars: KOTOR, and Goldeneye (multiplayer alone).

Black Lotus wrote:Why did you never get RE4 for the GC, Seeker? Or did you?


As for me, I've probably put the most hours into FF4, 6, and 7, Guitar Hero 1 & 2, Romance of the Three Kingdoms 6, Starcraft, Chrono Trigger, Suikoden 3, GTA: Vice City, Megaman 2 (maybe not the hours, but countless times through), Star Wars: KOTOR, and Goldeneye (multiplayer alone).

I didn't really like the game that much when I played it for GC, it was mostly the control scheme, it works much better on Wii.

Oh and you reminded me, Starcraft! I also played tons of Vice City as well. While I am at it, Civilization 1, 2, and 4.

By the way, I am playing through Suikoden 1 right now, I am going through the series.

RE4's control scheme on the GC is basically perfect. Seeker, you're mad.

A few of mine, on console:

* RE4 (four times now, I think?)
* Vagant Story (twice)
* Suikodens 1 & 2 (both three times, I think)
* The two GBA Fire Emblem titles (over and over and over again)
* FFT (three or four times to completition, I think?)
* Utima IV (Never completed, but sank so many hours into this as a deeply nerdy ten year old)
* GTA 3 (Completed maybe three times, but played through the quests on the first island dozens of times)

Multiplayer:

* Halos 1 & 2 (hours and hours of both, on LANs and on Live)
* Bomberman Online (my friends had a Japanese copy, we worked out the menu options by trial and error)
* Chu Chu Rocket (I sucked)
* Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (probably my favourite puzzle game ever)

PC:

* Every Civ (Far out, I'm old!)
* Transport Tycoon
* Master of Magic
* GTA (there are three basically perfect demos that have ever existed: the one for the first GTA on PC, Crackdown's, and Bioshock's. I don't know how many times I beat the first GTA)
* Ultima Online (the game behind my failing my third semester of uni)
* WOW (on and off since February 2005)

Andrew, Killer Bee wrote: * Ultima Online (the game behind my failing my third semester of uni)
* WOW (on and off since February 2005)

MMO's can't count in "replay value"... they're impossible to finish so you can't "replay" you can "restart" but that's different.

Replay value is supposed to be how much fun it is to play the game a second, third, etc time after completing it the first time. MMO's are in a totally different category

It's replay value when you're playing the same content over and over again.

I was a bit thing about including MMOs, but saw that Civ had been mentioned; then all bets were off.

MMOs don't tend to make the replay value cut for me, because I abandon them mercilessly after 1-3 months.

The big ones for me would be:

Castlevania I (NES) - I think I played this for twelve hours straight once. We downloaded it in college, and my roommate and I were going to trade off lives. I got up to and beat the Grim Reaper without dying, which caused some amusement and consternation to my roommate. His friend later claimed that I was "a robot programmed by Konami, because everyone knows it's not possible to beat the Grim Reaper without dying."

Beyond Zork (PC) - I relish a bit in the fact that I'm most likely the only person here with an Infocom game on the list. (+10 Indie Gamer Cred) But I was like ten when I got this, and had no hint book, and it was a massively fun, innovative adventure game with some of the best writing I've ever seen. I played it incessantly trying to figure out some of the harder puzzles, and got really, really far on my own but could never get to the ending. Then, later, I got it as part of a collection, with the hint book, and played the final puzzles (which were brutally hard but resolutely clever, doubt I would have gotten them on my own) through to the ending, which was far more satisfying than many games with whizbang 3D graphics. Honestly, some of the game design ideas he and the other Zork games used (putting procedurally generated areas and even procedurally generated plot-point items within a larger, static, human-created plot, in particular) are still beyond most games today in terms of design.

Chrono Trigger (SNES) - I played this through multiple "second quest" endings after beating it the first time, but later on I started a game and got a score of 2312 in the bike race (I stayed in front of Johnny the entire time and successfully used all my turbo boosts) on the *first try*. This meant that the high-score board showed 2312, and no other scores, which would instantly have proved a certain amount of gamer cred for the rest of my life, I think.

I then loaned the game to my friend and he had WRITTEN OVER ALL OF MY SAVE FILES, incidentally additionally returning the game to me with a full blotter of acid tucked into the box. That was somewhat of another story, though.

Civilization II (PC) - I decided I was going to get the "highest score on the Internet", or some retarded shit. To do this, I played a map size on the largest setting, on the hardest difficulty level, and didn't stop playing until I'd conquered the entire map, with cities placed on every single part of it, except for a single city controlled by one computer rival (since I didn't want a military victory, which changes the scoring conditions). This was in 1917, and I was already up to like Future Tech 8, so I theoretically could have played for another ninety turns and *really* gotten a high score, but at that point every turn takes minutes, and minutes, and I was burned out.

I had completely creamed the high score on the site I was trying to beat, so I submitted mine to it with a screenshot, which was never, ever posted as the guy had already stopped maintaining the site weeks ago. You'll notice a lot of my gaming stories end like this.

Super Mario 64 (N64) - Got 120-odd stars the first time, started again, got them all. Continued jumping around the castle in odd places because it was so much fun.

Goldeneye 64 (N64) - I got the invincibility cheat and almost every other cheat in the game, in addition to beating it on 007 mode (I didn't bother to play the others except where needed to get cheats, later). I still remember getting the invincibility cheat because at one point there was a group of enemy soldiers pursuing me that had gotten so large that when I blew them up with a remote mine, it literally looked like a big, green flower opening up around the blast radius. The invincibility cheat is easily the most insane thing I've ever done in gaming, and it took me a week straight of playing the same level over and over.

Super Smash Bros. Melee (GameCube) - I got about 240 out of the 261 trophies or something. I couldn't believe how hard it was just to unlock everything - Level 51 is just insane beyond reasoning, couldn't believe I beat it. I tried to start setting home-run records, but after looking at how to do it on gamefaqs, I just gave it up - the sequences required to do those properly make Tekken move combos look like Track & Field for the NES. Still, months, months, months I played, and in multiplayer I'm not even that good.

Tekken 5 (PS2) - Oh, my shit, I have played this game *way, way* too much. And not even against other people, because Namco steadfastly refuses to take the series online for some unfathomable reason. But I love Tekken and usually try to master Eddy/Christie in whatever the current revision is.

Fight Night Round 3 (multiple platforms, 360 for me) - I'm 67-120 or something online at this point but *hooked*, hooked, like crack cocaine. I'd say I suck, but anyone that I play other than the online super-hardcore gets utterly destroyed...it's just that, much like Warcraft III, eventually people got so good that mere mortals combust in the first round. But this is my current time-sucker...

KB, I have always found Resident Evil controls to be awkward, don't get me wrong, I love the content of the games, I just found the control schemes to be too weird until the Wii version of RE4 (which is great). I played a lot of RE2 and never got used to that scheme.

And I TOTALLY forgot the Castlevania games, the first and third one were easily two of my most played games during the NES period.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Master of Magic. I played the hell out of that game. And Vagrant Story I played a 2nd play halfway through.

Nev wrote:I then loaned the game to my friend and he had WRITTEN OVER ALL OF MY SAVE FILES, incidentally additionally returning the game to me with a full blotter of acid tucked into the box. That was somewhat of another story, though.

Go ooooooooonnnn...

Er, I was pissed about him overwriting my save file, so I gave half of the acid to a friend and half to my sister.

My sister took it to a party and did it with a guy she was crushing on and some friends of hers, one of whom ended up in the hospital. I have it on good word that the other friend I gave it to enjoyed it very much; he is now a fighter pilot working at 16,000 feet. I guess you could say the story doesn't really end well.

I have a buddy who wants to try acid, I've always been scared shitless of trying it. Had a buddy who had it slipped into a drink, and he saw God that night. He hasn't been the same since :p

Oracle wrote:I have a buddy who wants to try acid, I've always been scared shitless of trying it. Had a buddy who had it slipped into a drink, and he saw God that night. He hasn't been the same since :p

Haha, the first time I ever did drugs, it was me doing a sugar cube of acid, then after thinking nothing was effecting me, smoked/shared two joints. Skipped school and we walked down to a store that had ...ummm...Samurai Showdown I think and played that. Once my friends saw that I was fucked up enough, they said bye and sent me home...alone...on a bus.

The second time I did it, it was slipped into my coffee (because I was the only sober one as my gf was prone to bad trips). That was awesome acid and I can positively state that while I wouldn't do it again, it was an amazing experience I'm glad I had. Characters in some movie we watched started asking my for my debit card and on the patio later, the stars formed a face and carried on a conversation for half an hour with me.