Ah, good, it's still around. I was worried I'd managed to kill this thread.
I'll add 2 more games while I'm at it. These ones are a bit more unconventional...
Vangers: One for the Road was... well, this is one of those games that wasn't so much "brilliant" as "totally unique". A somewhat freeform racing/driving game, with combat and rpg elements mixed in, I'd be willing to bet that it has never, ever been imitated. The story was
weird. I can't even begin to explain it, but suffice it to say you start out ferrying little eggs and vials of phlegm for some worm-like guys, and it just gets stranger from then onward. All the bizarre vehicles you could drive/buy/build had little paper dolls like an rpg, and you could attach various bits of equipment/weaponry to them. Driving around the very organic environments was quite a bit of fun, and the physics were crazy, with cars hopping about (yes, cars can jump in this game) and rebounding off the *deformable* terrain. The reviews of it mostly declared it "average", but it really is a good old game - just not a game most gamers considered worth the $60+ it originally cost. At 9.99 or 5.99, I'd highly recommend it as an unsurpassed mind-screw of cthulhuesque proportions with some gameplay thrown in for good measure.
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolis_(software)]Micropolis[/url] is SimCity. Or rather, it's
not Simcity, because Electronic Arts owns the trademark on the name SimCity. Micropolis is the open source code released by EA for the OLPC and everyone else, named Micropolis because that was supposedly the original development name for SimCity. Unfortunately, being released under GPL, I have no idea if that means it can be distributed for money or not. Nor can I even begin to guess at how to install the thing, because whatever state it's in right now is incredibly intimidating to a non-programmer like me. Of course, if EA has shown any hesitant interest in having SimCity on gog, then it may be best to just ignore Micropolis in case having it alienates them in some way. I don't really know. I just had a nostalgia attack when I found out about it and decided to list it here anyway. :)