Computer game nostalgia thread

[mmu1]

A lot of the recent posts around here are making me think about all the old (Yes, I said old. No, Gold Box games aren't old, they're ancient ) games the new stuff doesn't quite seem to measure up to...

Darklands
Wing Commander
Betrayal at Krondor
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Syndicate
X-COM
Master of Orion
Ultima VII
X-Wing
Dune II

Back before there were 20 or 30 RTS games on the market, Wing Commander had revolutionary graphics and musical score, Syndicate looked absurdly slick at the amazing 640x480 (and ran on a low-end 486...), and adventure games hadn't been done to death...

So, what are some of your favorites?

 

[Henry]

The two most revolutionary games of their day - the Worlds of Ultima series.

The first one, savage empire, was my favorite, and turned ultima from a series of games to a full-blown franchise. The Avatar hit the big leagues with these two games. But my favorite was the near-absolute freedom you had to create new things from the old.

The formulas to build things is what I refer to here. I absolutely loved making gunpowder, taking a digging stick, making clay, taking water, making a clay pot, baking it, mixing sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter, taking flax, weaving it, cutting it up to strips, dipping the strips in tar, and combining the elements to make crude bombs. (You can bet whoever designed that game had been playing around with the anarchist's cookbook prior to writing the game. )

The number of things you could mess with, play with, create, destroy, and do were absolutely wonderful. I have not seen a game since these two that allowed this amount of freedom. If anyone knows of a more recent game that had the level of creation and manipulation that the Worlds of Ultima did, I'd love to see it.

 

[Chris Tavares]

Star Control!

The original Star Control was a really fun rewrite of the old Space War game with nifty ships and some cool strategic thinking (what systems do I defend)?

Star Control II, on the other hand, was the BEST... GAME... EVAR!

It had:

1) Fun spacewar style ship combat, with a large number of unique ships with nifty special attacks. Fighting with different ships really required different tactics.

2) Resource management - how much will it cost to get this upgrade vs. getting more fuel?

3) Exploration - a VAST universe, with hundreds of stars, thousands of planets, and really neat visuals.

4) A complex, interwoven storyline that was well written, suprising, and a LOT of fun to discover.

5) A remarkably deep backstory, not all of which was explained in the game (left things open for sequels ).

6) A really kickin' soundtrack.

I recently tried to get this running on a new box I'm building - alas, nobody makes DOS drivers for PCI sound boards. :-(

Luckily, the source code for this one has been released on sourceforge and is being ported to modern machines, so I'll be able to play it again!

-Chris

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Hmmm, a lot of my old favorites fall into the 'ancient' category...
Lurking Horror,
Wastelands (part 1 but no part 2 ever appeared)
Hound of Shadows
Adventure Construction Set (on the Amiga, I recently tried the PC version - yecch!)
Dragon Wars

and some that I call old:
Scott Addams adventures
Galactic Empire
Galactic Trader
Warp Factor
Ultima (the first)
Magic Candle
Wizardry (Gods I loved that game)

And a few I call ancient:
Taipan
Santa Paravia and Fumaccio
Zork
Adventure
Temple of Apshai (and all its many sequels)

I remember older ones but who really wants to go back to playing 'Hunt the Wumpus'?

The Auld Grump

 

[mmu1]

Most of those unfortunately don't ring a bell, but then I didn't start out as a PC gamer, the earliest stuff I remember was on a C-64 with a tape drive...

 

[Ranes]

I confess to be replaying the Eye of the Beholder series at the moment, because I never finished the third (and by far the least imaginatively designed) episode with the same party that I'd started with.

I'd spare you this sad trivia were it not for the fact that, running the games under XP, I was peeved to find that I couldn't get them to play with their original, Soundblaster soundtracks, despite having an SBLive in my PC. However, a search on Google turned up a program called VDMS which does an amazing job of emulating the original SB. It's given my old games collection a new lease of life and I recommend it to anyone else who has problems getting sound out of their old DOS titles under current versions of Windows.

I've also been messing around with FTL's Sundog: The Frozen Legacy (via an Atari ST emulator called Stew). I never finished that first time around.

Sadly, my copy of Darklands is on 5.25 inch floppy and I just don't have the hardware to enjoy that game again.

Okay, time for bed. Good gaming and g'night.

 

[Agamon]

Hunt the Wumpus was great. And remember Lemonade? and Aztec?

As for good games, though...M.U.L.E. was good. Oh, and Pirates! was awesome. Wastelands was addictive. Games like Adventure and Impossible Mission frustrated me to no end, but I played the heck out of them just the same.

Wayne Gretzky Hockey 2 was probably the greatest hockey game ever made, and the Hockey League Simulator that went with it is the grandfather of the FHL program I use to run my online hockey league.

Civilization was a lot of fun, so was Doom. Spent a lot of time playing Warlords on that same map, over and over. I think there was only 1 or 2 Gold Box games I never played. Sim City was strangely addictive. I still haven't seen a space battle game to live up to either Wing Commander or Tie Fighter.

X-Com will go down as one of the greatest games ever, why it hasn't been successfully cloned is beyond me. Master of Orion was fun, but I prefered MOO2 (here's hoping we someday get a new MOO sequal that is actually Master of Orion). Daggerfall was great, in all it's buggy glory. Diablo was some crazy fun. And Heroes of Might and Magic II made for many a late night. Civ 2 was multiplayer, yay!

Balder's Gate was the the trimphant return of RPGs, along with Fallout. System Shock and Thief and their sequals were engrossing, to say the least. Need for Speed III made racing fun. Should I be embarrassed that I enjoyed the Sims when it first came out? No, I think I'll reserve that blush for EverQuest...

More recently, I've played of lot of EA's NHL franchise, though I've finally given up on it. No One Lives Forever and Max Payne are both great. Morrowind is breathtakingly beautiful, though it has a few forgivable faults as a game. Civ III with Play the World makes it easy to forget Call to Power. Heroes of Might and Magic IV is more of the same, but a good more of the same. Right now I'm having fun with Sim City 4 (when I can spare the time).

I've been disappointed with a few of the newer games. Warcraft 3 just wasn't what I was hoping for. Take that, multiply it by 1000, and that's my dissapointment in Neverwinter Nights. MOO3 just makes me angry, but that's a pretty fresh wound.

That was a fun walk down PC game memory lane....

 

[Psionicist]

Remember the old game "Gorillas" that came with Qbasic? On todays computers, you get a "division by zero" error because they are to fast.

 

[Welverin]

Not surprisingly some of these have already been mentioned.

Ultima 6, 7, 7 pt 2 (with actual game music I like to listen to!
Wing Commander 1-5
Ultima Underworld 2
X-wing
TIE Fighter
X-COM 1 & 2

 

[Eternalknight]

I have to admit to a fondness for Zork.