I'm curious what you guys have to say about this. Are there any games you consider perfect? Can a game even be perfect?
My example of a perfect game is always Portal 1. Portal 2 has more going on, but in 1 there just isn't anything to shave off. From start to end, there is nothing I'd change about the game. It's short, infinitely replayable, great pacing. I like Portal 2 a lot in concept, in concept it should be a perfect sequel, but it just doesn't keep the extreme tightness of the original game.
StarCraft brood war is the perfect convergence of bugs and intentionally difficult mechanics that kicked off the entire e sports industry and it consumed my entire teenage years.
Diablo 2 similarly was a perfect accident by Blizzard. I can go back and play it or the remaster any time and have a good time, even if the remaster has new questionable content
I definitely prefer the diablo remaster just because the original does have one flaw. It hurts my fucking eyes! Actually painful, not even sure why
And yeah Brood War is so good... I spent a few months actually becoming competent at that game when the HD version came out, and it was so fucking cool how the battles would sort of roll continuously in this big back and forth, very unlike SC2 and especially pre-Void SC2 which was just sudden istawins and instalosses from intersecting death balls.
I hate how everything clumps up into a deathball in SC2, and then battles are over after a few seconds of incomprehensible fireworks. Brood War had so much geometry to it's battles.
The real shame is all they needed to do, in my opinion, was balance the game around one different setting - making clumping optional, the way magic boxing worked. Click between, they clump, click adjacent, they stay pretty much in formation. You can literally go into the map editor and change this with some kind of checkbox, apparently.
Brood War is still the only eSport I can bear to watch (well, that and certain fighters). And players are still coming up with wacky shit like remote mining gas in ZvZ to rush to hive tech.
D2 was a balance disaster, but the game itself was perfectly playable with each class. You just couldn't compete on the ladders against the CCB WW babas and the Burritozons and the FW sasas sojsojsojsojsoj.