Waking Mars: pretty nice platform/puzzle, not perfect, but is cool to watch the dynamic environment changing plus the melancholic atmosphere.

It's real time combat with pause. Like Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic if I remember right.

I guess technically you could call it turn based because everyone gets "turns" for example when your characters are acting and attacking, but turn based might be considered more like jrpg turn based combat or turn based with grid movement by everyone else.

It really is the most excellent superhero rpg, and I can't think of that many.

I'll second Hostile Waters, although that description doesn't really do it justice. There are more types of vehicles, and you can customize them all (different weapons, armor). While you can pilot them, and often will, you can also assign various AIs to control them, each with a different personality and specialty. You then command the AIs. You will also need to handle resource gathering in order to produce more vehicles. At heart, the game is an RTS.

Sacrifice is cut somewhat from the same cloth. Also basically a 3rd person RTS. You control a wizard who, having travelled to a new world (because his magical experiments ultimately resulted in the destruction of his own), gets involved in a conflict between 5 gods.

The game consists of ten missions, and you choose which god to do a mission for in each case. As such, there are 50 missions in all, but you will only play 10 of them in any given playthrough. Which missions you choose along the way affects the story as well as your arsenal. Depending on your choices, some gods may become unavailable for further missions along the way.

In a mission, you will be fighting wizards working for other gods. Each wizard (you included) has an altar to his or her god. The ultimate object of each mission is to make a sacrifice (hence the name of the game) to your own god on each enemy wizard's altar, thus banishing them from the realm. Combat consists of a combination of magic spells and summoned creatures. Each god has ten levels of spells and ten levels of creatures. For each mission you do, you get the spells and creatures of that god for that level, and those will be available to you for the rest of the game. As such, depending on which gods you choose to work for in which order along the way, your arsenal of spells and creatures may look radically different from game to game.

All these things also mean that the game has excellent replayability. Oh, and the voice acting... It is awesome. Tim Curry as the god Stratos is fantastic.

http://treasureadventureworld.com/

Yes, I'm aware. Lord only knows when it'll be released, though. :)

Am I the only one who has trouble with Sacrifice because I usually don't even get close to the final missions no matter which god I choose.

The controls make it hard to control things, and the joining creatures to monoliths or whatever is a pain, and I can't seem to un-link them again afterwards.

Considering it's Chucklefish? Could be a decade. :D

It was a long time ago, but I distinctly remember thinking beating it with James was very easy. As an aside, I just looked up the name to make sure I wasn't misremembering that Shiny named a god "James". Nope. Goofy bastards. Having looked it up and reading the intro dialogue...damn, I want to play it again. *proceeds to download Sacrifice in hope it will work under WINE*

So you've actually beaten it, with James, hmm I think that is enough for me to re-install it.

No, I haven't even reached past the first couple of missions. I would really like to know how to unlink them from monoliths as I play very defensively (I can't play offense in strategy games, it's just not in my DNA) and since they get a stat bonus, I can slowly creep forward if only I could unlink them.

I would agree with Nox most certainly ! :)

Imperialism II: the Age of Exploration
The best turn based strategy ever and a rare case of grand strategy with tactical, turn based battles.

TeenAgent! O.o

Another good one is Elminage Gothic. Basically, it's an RPG in the style of classic Wizardry games, but more recent and by a Japanese developer. It's the closest game to WIzardry 1 that is available here.

Note that the game is not easy; it starts out gentle (combat-wise; the first dungeon's layout is a little confusing), but the difficulty picks up from there, with enemies that can instant kill your characters appearing in the second dungeon, and enemies that can drain levels appearing later.