I can't wait. Duck Tales is a great pick.

#28. Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory: So You Want to be a Hero

The Quest for Glory series was one of those defining series for me throughout middle and highschool and hell even into college. At a glance it looked like any other standard PC adventure game, but this one had something unique going for it. It was also doubling as an action RPG. You chose a character class, assigned some skill points, and then while solving the adventures as you would in regular games, you would occasionally come up against an obstacle that you needed to improve your skills upon in order to pass. For instance, early in the game you need to retrieve a ring for the local medicine woman that had been stolen by a bird. If you're playing as a thief the most direct way to get it is to climb the tree, but your climbing skills need to be practiced before you could climb all the way up. It added an extra element to the game that most adventure games didn't have. It's a fairly common feature today, but it was pretty unique at the time. On top of that there was combat (not the strongest feature in the game, though it got better in later installments), a day/night cycle that made it necessary to plan your day and revist certain areas at particular time, a great story, and a sense of humor that was clearly written by someone who was a huge Monty Python fan (seriously, they actually ripped off the "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladened swallow" question from Holy Grail).

The whole series was amazing, and I can't tell you how many hours I spent playing this first installment, let alone the entire series. Of course you had to play as each of the three character classes to get the full experience, but each new installment allowed you to import your character's data from the previous one and bring it over to the new game. Everytime that happened I would start the series over from the beginning just to try to bring an uber character in with nearly maxed out stats. It was really a completely ridiculous thing to do, because you could spend about an hour in the game practicing your skills and get close to the same level as if you brought a powered up character from a previous game, but that hardly mattered. They were all fun. But there was something very special about the original. As the series went on and the stories went to a grander scale a few things didn't work out quite as well as when the game was focused on a small alpine village and the hero was only concered with rescuing the kidnapped children of a local baron.

Ironically, as much as I loved the Quest for Glory games, I never played the 5th and final installment. The husband and wife team that made the first four games divorced and the publisher, Sierra On-line, was bought by another company. When the 5th was finally developed by the new owners they took the game into a very different direction and it just didn't seem the same anymore. But, I'm still grateful for the first four games, and despite knowing the game down to the last pixel, I would still spend a day playing through the original if it was offered up to me/

Hey no breaks for you!

#27. Wizardy 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant

Wizardy 7 was a massive sci/fi and fantasy RPG. I don't know the total hours it took to complete because I was constantly restarting to keep finding a better team combination, but it's safe to say I put in well over a hundred hours in it. Your little team found itself caught up between different races that were at war with one another, and some that were even fighting amongst themselves, all the while trying to stay ahead of this mysterious being called the Dark Savant that had a reputation for fucking shit up. As someone who had only played console RPGs, this was different on every level. I'd later find out it was pretty innovative in its own right too. It had a giant highly detailed world that required the players to do a lot of exploring, a diplomacy feature that later would be emulated by many other games, and it was also one of the first RPGs to have the players actively competing with the NPCs. There were key items in the game that other characters in the game were after, and if they beat you to it, you'd have to even be a super skilled negotiator or you'd have to get ready to fight. And god knows fighting with NPCs rarely works out well.

The summer I was 15 years old was Wizardry 7 was pretty much my life, and it was unlike any game I had ever played before. It was basically a D&D dungeon crawler, both of which were foreign to me aside from the one time I played an actual game of Dungeons and Dragons with my cousin and his friends when I was 6 years old and died within minutes when a giant centipede ran over me. Fortunately Wizardry 7 was a much better experience fortunately. It forged my love of games with giant character class rosters as well as dungeon crawlers. My life was pretty much listening to a sports talk radio station (that oddly talked very little about sports), and playing this game from dawn to dusk. No other game mattered that summer. How devoted was I to playing this game? In the middle of July the air conditioning broke in my family's home in Atlanta making it hot and horribly uncomfortable in the home, but particularly upstairs where my PC was. Even with the blistering heat and humidity I kept playing that damn game.

Oddly enough the game's conclusion is told in Wizardy 8, which is also the final game in the series and the final game that the developers SirTech ever made, and I have still never played it. There was almost a 10 year gap between the two games, and I just never got inspired enough to give it a shot. After writing this, I have to admit I'd tempted to jump onto Steam right now and fix that.