Forked Thread: Old PC games you wish you could play again

[Calico_Jack73]

That's easy... I'd love to play Starflight again. It captured the spirit of Star Trek better than any of the licensed games. You started with a ship, selected & trained your crew, explored other planets, encountered other alien races. I spent more time playing that game than any other since. I think it also helped that there were consequences to failure. You had to save your game whenever you logged out but you could NOT restore an old game. The save just saved your "situation/position". If you died then you had to reformat the floppies and rebuild them from the master disks that came with the game. It really made you consider the consequences of your actions. You learned to NEVER land on a planet unless you got an acurate gravity or radiation reading.

 

[Jasperak]

A lot of the games mentioned here can be found at this site.

abandonia

BTW, I am a new convert to Starflight.

 

[SelcSilverhand]

Lots of good titles on this list so far, good memories.

I loved the old Quest for Glory series, especially number 4 with the voice overs. The company redid the first of the series with better graphics and I've seen a web site around where a group is redoing the graphics of the second one as well. Aha! Found it
For those who liked King's Quest, the group is also redoing a few of those titles it looks like.

I loved System Shock 2. Creeping down the hallways and listening to the mutants growls, cries, and confused mutterings were great. The audio logs were a nice touch too. At least Bioshock recaptured most of the enjoyment of those games. I wouldn't mind seeing a System Shock 3 some day...

Freespace 2. Space / flight games are rare these days. Most of them seem to revolve around WW2 games. I loved attacking a capital ship that was 50x larger than you, skimming close into the hull, then trying to outrun the shockwave when it blew. I dug out my discs for this recently but it would crash repeatedly on the last few missions.


Easily my favorite though was Dungeon Keeper 2. You played the bad guy, ,the evil mastermind of your own little world. You designed your own dungeon by having you minions dig rooms and tunnels, then you attract creatures to act as guards or build traps and other goodies. Once you were ready you set out to rid the world of all the upright, goody two shoe creatures.
I <3 the Mistress.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I'm in the process of moving. Yesterday I produced a dusty but hardly used, nice Saitek Cyborg EVO joystick out of a storage cabinet. Then one of the boys came up with a copy of Dungeon Master II of all things out of a box of a ton of worthless games. I later ran it up in DOSBox and started playing. Then I couldn't stand it anymore and bought a copy of Descent for that joystick. Time has slowed to a crawl as I now wait to go zooming round those mines deciding which direction I want to be "up" when I enter the next room.

 

[Graybeard]

A lot of the games mentioned here can be found at this site.

abandonia

BTW, I am a new convert to Starflight.

Wow, lots of great titles on that site. I used to play F-19 Stealth Fighter years ago. Trying to fly into enemy territory and out again without being detected was fun. You had to rely on flying skill and try not to shoot at everything.

 

[Psionicist]

By running windows 95 or 98 in a virtual machine (for example via VMWare, xen or QEMU) you can probably run all these games.

Here's a screenshot of me running OpenBSD from my Windows 2000 box: http://psionicist.online.fr/dasvmware.gif (not the greatest screenshot ever, though it was the only one I had lying around).

Of course, instead of OpenBSD you'd install an old version of Windows.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

I wish I could play the whole Baldur's Gate series again WITHOUT knowing the details of what was going to happen, and without being used to 21st century graphics. That series has to be one of the longest computer RPG series with the same character ever -- the equivalent of Morrowind continuing straight through to Oblivion. Sadly, my memory is very good, and I spent a LOT of time playing -- I still remember too many details about Candlekeep, Durlag's Tower, and, "Interesting, in a what the h*ll is wrong with you kind of way."

Planescape falls into this category, too, along with the original two Fallout games, and even Wasteland.

I've put Fallout 3 aside until all of the DLC is out, then I'm going through again from start to finish. That will have to suit, since there doesn't appear to be a new D&D RPG on the computer coming out...

P.S.: The graphics of older games are jarring...I loaded up Age of Wonders II, which isn't that old, and for a second I thought something was wrong with my monitor, LOL.

 

[Rl'Halsinor]

I would love to play Thief 1 and 2 again (made by the same excellent but sadly defunct Looking Glass Studios who brought us System Shock 2). They were amazing in plot and character. The Haunts could literally make a person jump out of their seat.

I know you can play them on XP but there is a a lot of tweaking involved.

 

[Merkuri]

I played Thief II first back in college and absolutely loved it. I went and bought the original Thief and just couldn't get into it. I think the interface was driving me nuts. I don't remember the specifics, but I think there was a lot of stuff you could do in Thief II but not in the original, and though I was trying to enjoy it and play it within the limitations it gave me I kept yearning for the interface of the sequel so it just didn't catch me the way the sequel did. I'm convinced that if I had played the original Thief first I would've like it much better.

I keep meaning to pick up Thief III but I've got so many games for the Nintendo DS that I'm going through right now that I've been neglecting my PC games.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I got that copy of Descent but couldn't get my spiffy modern joystick to work with it properly. It wants either CH gamestick pro (?) or whatever that other really popular one was or it basically sees it as just a dirt-simple x-y input joystick with one button. You gotta have the hat switch to slide up/down/left/right in addition to roll/pitch/yaw or it's unplayable (imo). Dug up an old copy of the original Roller Coaster Tycoon and instead have been playing that nonstop.