Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
It's amazing and a technological feat. They did this awesome game targeting the PS2 and Xbox's hardware. 32MB of RAM. The current gen consoles have 16GB, 500x more RAM. The physics and animations are so natural and this is way before PhysX. This game made me feel inside a Mission Impossible / 007 movie. Choose between stealth and action on the fly. The game design offers you multiple ways to tackle each challenge. I'd love to work at Ubisoft if the people who create so awesome game design are there. If you want to learn game design and level design, do look for Splinter Cell and similar titles.
A small annoyance is that the goals are sequential and the game leaves you free to mis-skip some. It's a design flaw because if you skip something and game progresses, unless the game warns you or even blocks you from progressing, you are left with no directions about what is not working or what is missing. Some things must have had been left to paper manuals and if you don't have it there is nothing in game to explain it. I didn't use all the available gadgets because I didn't know how to use them. This game is very old and some things like not being able to switch weapons while you are using long range aim wouldn't be acceptable today.
The A.I. is pretty stupid but I don't know what were the limitations of the time. It's easy to notice how the A.I. misses obvious things and follows on pre-scripted behaviors.
This game made me remember how much I loved Bioshock Infinite Burial at Sea. So much that the Elizabeth part in that DLC I'd give it a higher score than the base game itself.
Unfortunately this game is so old that modern systems are going to have trouble, specially because this game was released when 4:3 aspect ratio was the standard.
Nitpick detail: when you open up the menu to save the game. It first loads up the list of saves to be loaded. It may cause you to load the game instead of saving. Even modern games can have this issue and cause players to accidentally lose all their progress.
