- Kerbal Space Program
- Minecraft
and for my final year:
- X3

I would take games with a lot of content in them so I would not get bored playing over and over.

I guess that would be Morrowind and my all time favorite Thief 1 (+all the fan missions available).

In prison, give me HuniePop and nothing else. :D

I'm pretty sure that would fall under "cruel and unusual punishment".

I am with Breja, that would be part of the sentence.

As for me, I don't think deciding which games to take would be of the highest priority...

Fine, poke fun. When you are surrounded by big ugly men 24/7, some anime porn is going to become a life saver, not to mention it will likely keep your cell mate from raping you five times a night. :P

Neverwinter Nights
Civ 4
IL2 Sturmovik

What an interesting question!

The usual way to ask something like this is by means of a desert island. And I always understood that question to mean something more like: "You can only have 5 games and never get any more for the rest of your life. Which do you bring?"

But this question seems to predicate that you will be playing these games most of your waking time. Perhaps that is what at least some of the "desert island" questions meant, but I never understood it that way. I have always figured I would have an awful lot to do if I were stranded on a desert island. And I never considered using the games to ward off loneliness. That doesn't work. But they are awfully nice for some civilized past time.

But this prison question. Much like the desert island scenario, I would not count on the games to pass the time. If I were playing games 8 hours per day, I would become miserable indeed, and which games does not matter at all. Even if chess is one of the games, it is not what you actually do all day. You keep it in the back of your mind most of the time, while you are doing other things.

I would have to construct quite a day-to-day routine to survive 3 years of imprisonment. Excercise, prayer, reading, writing, and find creative ways to have both short and long-term goals that I can make some measurable progress in. Games could be a part of my routine. Again, like the desert island, it is quite nice to have some civilized form of entertainment, but to rely on the games heavily for my sanity?! Oh, no.

All that in mind, I would choose

CIV V complete - or some likewise big 4X game
Don't Starve - some likewise big survival/crafting game
Skyrim - or some likewise big open world rpg-ish game

Point is, I would want three very different kinds of games, and yet games that could be played 1-5 hours per week over a period of three years.

Cheers.

How exactly do you want to power a computer on a desert island?

1. Total War - Shogun 2 or Rome 2
2. Tetris
3. Fifa or any other sports game, because it is more fun to play together.

Who says, that they wouldn't do it, while watching the porn?

Take a generator, there's plenty of BP spills around to power it.

Technically this could make it worse.

As now your cellmate can just imagine / pretend you're the cute anime girl while raping your a**, making him want to do it even more often.

Well, I'd want something with both replayability and variety. So basically, 4X and sandbox games. The only problem is that I don't like those one bit. I'd sooner spend a year playing Tetris than "play" Minecraft for half an hour.

If playing online was an option, I'd go with a Quake-like shooter. Probably OpenArena, because I don't know if there are still servers for Q3A.

But since it isn't, the only thing I'm certain about is some roguelike - most likely TOME4. Finishing it with all the different classes and subvarieties would take a long while. And it's moddable, so I could entertain myself that way as well. In fact, I think programming would be my main "game" - judging from some recent indie RPGs, three years is nothing :)

A fighting game might work, if I could play with other people and I knew these other people weren't the sort to shank me because they got pissed off. So probably not.

Something with insane griding potential might also work. Disgaea comes to mind. On that note, here's the top 20 longest games according to howlongtobeat.com: Well, there's stuff wrong with that list: #1 is a clicker "game", and only two users, so let's chuck that out. #6 doesn't seem to be a game, likewise for #19. And #7 is online multiplayer only, so it's out as well. So we need four more titles: Egads, more Monster Hunter and Animal Crossing.

Same idea, but from gamefaqs.com, min 50 votes, adjusted for duplicates (same game, different platform) and MMORPGs: Phew, that should be twenty. Annoying. Since they're all just "80.00+", I'm not sure how they differentiated between them, which makes this one somewhat less useful. But it's mostly the same games. Monster Hunter ad nauseam.

- Bejeweled 3
- The Witcher 3
- Need For Speed: Most Wanted (the old one)

And I saw someone mention Steam, no internet, cracks and all... One can just take games on CDs, no client required. Or are those not popular anymore?

It just means that any games that requires you to be online (whether constantly or just log-in from time to time, as does Steam) wouldn't work without Internet Access.

And technically same goes for games from CDs that require Steam to run, even if everything you need is already on the disc...