HalfLife 1, unreal

Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
• Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
• Max Payne 1 & 2
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
• Gothic 1 & 2
• Risen
• Deus Ex
• Thief: Deadly Shadows
• Freelancer

If you need more recommendations, I suggest going to Metacritic and checking their highest rated games by year.

A few of my top XP-era games include:

• Battlefield 2
• Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
• F.E.A.R.
• No One Lives Forever 2
• Rainbow Six: Vegas
• SimCity 4

I read NOLF 2. I agree, it was awesome. Comple with Soviets who take no less than two headshots to take down and you running from an overweight Indian police officer. Hilarious stuff.

Repeating some of what was said, some of my favorites include:

* DOOM 3
* Original FEAR and both expansions
* Prince of Persia trilogy: Sands of Time, Warrior Within, The Two Thrones
* Rayman 3
* Beyond Good and Evil
* GTA trilogy: III, Vice City, San Andreas

GTA3 and Vice City
Red Alert 2

My favourite XP games are the following:
>DOOM 3
>Unreal Tournament 2004
>GTA San Andreas
>Far Cry

Saw some games older than Windows 98 in this thread. 🙄 It would be better if we define "Windows XP era" first.

Windows XP became "generally available" (GA) on 2001/10/25 so any game published before then should be excluded. The end of the era, however, was much blurry and debatable. Some important dates were:

• 2006/11/08: First DirectX 10 GPU (GeForce 8800 GTX)
• 2007/12/02: Last DirectX 9 GPU (Radeon X1650 GTO)
• 2009/03/24: First DirectX 10-only game (Stormrise)
• 2009/04/14: End of Windows XP mainstream support
• 2009/10/22: Windows 7 GA
• 2010/03/18: Windows 7 SP1 GA
• 2014/04/08: End of Windows XP extended support

IMHO the end of year 2009would be appropriate, giving WinXP eight full years (Q4 2001 to Q4 2009).

That said, I had few games bought in that time period, partly because I was quite busy with other matters in my life (serving the country, graduate school, first full-time job). I could only recommend the following ones:

• Call of Duty (original) + United Offensive expansion pack
• Call of Duty: World at War
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein
• Syberia

For me XP era includes demanding Win98 games such as GTA which benefits greatly from XP era hardware.
Only 2 I have that haven't been mentioned are
C&C Generals
Simpsons Hit and Run

• Fable
• Mafia

Yes, MAFIA!!!
I was just reading through the thread and was hoping someone would mention it... which it was just the last post above. Indeed a top XP game, IMO.

Others:
- Need For Speed Underground 2 - love the driving physics in that game. I feel all the other NFS games before and after it lack something in that area... with the exception of Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed - that one is solid.
- Collin McRae Rally 04 - arcade-y physics, but a lot less than CMR 3 and 2005, and overall nicely balanced.
- Half-Life 2 - I like the diverse gameplay this game offers. And Havok engine game physics are still awesome to mess around with. Story-wise, I like the original HL(1) better.
- Portal - it's just a classic now. Need I say more?
- and of course, gonna mention Mafia again... because it's just THAT good.

Probably could list more, but the above are more or less "the core / basics" I put on just about every XP machine that can handle these.

rain wrote on 2024-07-21, 12:07:

HalfLife 1, unreal

XP would warn about installing these...

Too many mix-ups with Win9x era and runnable games here.

Limiting games to Windows XP (usually Windows 2000 also included - the so called NT5+ group) as the minimum required OS in the System Requirements will be more appropriate for this thread title.

Malik wrote on 2024-07-22, 22:59:

Limiting games to Windows XP (usually Windows 2000 also included - the so called NT5+ group) as the minimum required OS in the System Requirements will be more appropriate for this thread title.

OP did say XP era which I think would be understood as games people typically played when XP was the primarily used OS.

Limiting to games requiring XP would rule out a lot of games people played under XP, while also ruling in a lot of games not ideal on XP.

I think XP era, and I think a lot about the Athlon XP and Athlon 64 chips, and some really high end EAX experiences before Vista killed it. Stuff like Doom 3 and Prey. EAX aside, I forget which games had it or not, I really loved Freelancer, Tron 2.0, Unreal Tournament 2004, Painkiller, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, Darwinia, Galactic Civilizations 2 and Titan Quest. Towards the end of 2007 I upgraded to a Core 2 Duo with Windows Vista and my XP era ended.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-07-22, 23:20:

Malik wrote on 2024-07-22, 22:59:

Limiting games to Windows XP (usually Windows 2000 also included - the so called NT5+ group) as the minimum required OS in the System Requirements will be more appropriate for this thread title.

OP did say XP era which I think would be understood as games people typically played when XP was the primarily used OS.

Limiting to games requiring XP would rule out a lot of games people played under XP, while also ruling in a lot of games not ideal on XP.

Exactly. Most of the games listed are actually Win 9x era games, and they were made to run on these OSs. XP didn't necessarily run them better, since the graphics card and CPU that supported XP also supported Win9x OS those days. Only towards the end of the XP, drivers stopped supporting Win 9x.

The title and lists are blurred quite a lot to merit a proper classification.

Malik wrote on 2024-07-22, 22:59:

Too many mix-ups with Win9x era and runnable games here.

Limiting games to Windows XP (usually Windows 2000 also included - the so called NT5+ group) as the minimum required OS in the System Requirements will be more appropriate for this thread title.

I don't think it's that clear cut. Some people used Win9x until 2005, while others upgraded to Win2K/XP as soon as those became available. So defining when one era ends and another begins tends to be subjective. Furthermore, most games didn't actually start requiring Win2K/XP (i.e. can't be installed under Win9x) until 2004-2005.

On the other hand, a lot of games released in 2002 and onward will run better when using a newer, more powerful CPU/GPU. Meaning, a system that doesn't have Win9x drivers, and therefore needs WinXP. Heck, even some late 2000 and 2001 titles will deliver superior performance in that scenario, because they were poorly optimized, and didn't run well on period-correct hardware.

Of course, this applies if one wants to play games at high resolutions, with AA/AF, while maintaining a locked 60 FPS. But if that level of performance is not desired, then Win9x running on less powerful hardware can be used for games from the early-mid 2000s.

Not mentioned so far:
Battlefield 1942
Civilisation iv
Age of empires III

All games I sunk many hours into during the XP era!

dormcat wrote on 2024-07-22, 01:59:

IMHO the end of year 2009would be appropriate, giving WinXP eight full years (Q4 2001 to Q4 2009).

sensible enough approach with a bit of spill-over either end as XP owners bought budget releases with patches of older games and towards the end enthusiastically got games their machines could barely play

i'd add unreal tournament 2003, i always liked that one even though the obvious choice is ut2004

empire earth was fun, rise of nations too
morrowind
battlefield 1942

so many good games!