Waxing nostalic about old PC games

System Shock 1 & 2, Thief 1 & 2, the Ultima Collection and Underworld games, many LucasArts adventure games and their Dark Forces series, both Crusader games by Origin, and a whole bunch of others.

(Also, I rather liked mining in Star Control 2. You just had to know where to look.)

My recent interest, since this topic is about retro-gaming, has been Squaresoft's classic 16-bit RPGs that were never officially translated or released outside of Japan, but have undergone recent fan translations. These games include Seiken Densetsu 3, Bahamut Lagoon, and Live A Live. For anyone who is a fan of Square-Enix's current releases, I'd highly recommend checking out some of their older classics.
 
bigred said:
Wow a few old games you have to pay for which are then legal and guaranteed to work whoo hoooo, gotta bookmark that one

:rolleyes:
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Wow. I just don't even know what to say. I invoke Ian's Impenetrable Sphere of Wrongness. (different Ian)

ETA:

Oh look! I just noticed another silly post from the same person!

bigred said:
Not this again...

The end game notwithstanding, SC 3 was much better - never mind the vastly superior graphics and ship to ship fighting, that whole mining thing in #2 gets really old really quick.
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Wow. Doesn't like to legally play games. And doesn't like a sequel made by another team that is not even acknowledged by the original creators of SC to be an SC game.

SC I and II are both far superior.
 
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Almo said:
Wow. I just don't even know what to say. I invoke Ian's Impenetrable Sphere of Wrongness. (different Ian)

ETA:

Oh look! I just noticed another silly post from the same person!

Wow. Doesn't like to legally play games. And doesn't like a sequel made by another team that is not even acknowledged by the original creators of SC to be an SC game.

SC I and II are both far superior.
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:rolleyes:

So many fallacies of logic, where to start:

1 - An opinion differing from yours doesn't make it "silly," sorry.

2 - Disliking the site you posted doesn't mean I don't like to legally play games.

3 - The "original creators" not acknowledging a game has nothing to do w/whether it's any good or not.

4 - PS and oh btw I said I DID like it. Maybe you were trying to say you think SC2 is better than SC3 (using the brilliant logic above) and just screwed it up.

I thought SC3 was better, excuse me for disagreeing.
 
Your flippant attitude in your posts about "wooo hoo" and "Not this again..." will provoke these kinds of responses.

Several design decisions in SCIII were just wrong. The pseudo-3d look in the combat made it harder to aim. Its bug where you can end up in a postion where you can't finish the game without starting over is pretty bad, too. The RTS element was superfluous: either it worked properly and could lead you into an unwinnable situation, or it was fluff to make it look like you had decisions to make but was ultimately designed to let you win.
 
I also remember a game called Gorrillas as well as an air traffic control game and a Falkland Island war game that were pretty difficult. My Father had a subscription to some publication or service that distributed games for the IBM PCs, I can’t remember the name of it though.
 
I've been playing Life and Death again. Great surgery simulator.

Video of me performing a subdural hematoma operation in it's sequel, Life and Death 2: The Brain: (Pixelated blood. May bother you, but I doubt it.)


I've been practicing the original's appendectomy operation. I keep botching one step.

I'm trying to find the 4th in the series, Virtual Surgeon: Open Heart, but I can't find it anywhere.
 
This thread reminds me of the greatest Computer Game EVER! :

 
My first computer was a TRS-80 color computer, which despite its many shortcomings loaded tapes very reliably. I got a bunch of text games from books, and spend a good bit of time with things like "Hunt the Wumpus," "Hamurabi" (always missing the second M because of 8 letter naming), and such. I finally splurged on a full bank of memory, and was able to play the tape version of Zaxxon. It's a pretty impressive bit of programming to fit that much into under 64K of memory. Some of the cleverest games for the CoCo were done by Children's Computer Workshop. We had one called Grobots, in which you had to tend and harvest a bunch of alien plants that grew at different rates, and one called Peanut Butter Panic, in which you got a better score by cooperating with your opponent.

A couple of may favorite old PC games were Fool's Errand, which was pretty challenging, and Wordtris. Wordtris is a tetris-like game in which you attempt to spell words out of falling scrabble-like tiles. It can get very frantic, and requires good typing skills.

I really liked Lemmings, too, and went through many of the old shareware games like Duke Nukem and some of its predecessors whose names I can't even remember. I never liked the 3-d games like Doom, which make me dizzy. My kids loved them and played them obsessively.

One game I still have on any computer I'm using is the DOS version of Sierra's Hoyle Solitaire. It originally came on a 720k floppy (when was the last time you had one of those?). It runs in well under 640k, so it is happy in a dos box. The coarse graphics are quite adequate for a card game.
 
bruto said:
went through many of the old shareware games like Duke Nukem and some of its predecessors whose names I can't even remember.
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The original (shareware) Duke Nukm was a great game for its time. Recall spending many hours on that one (the later versions all sucked). In fact vaguely recall spending more than a few hours on various shareware games - there was one that was a Breakout spinoff that had all kinds of "extras" to it (you could get shields, multi-fire cannons etc) and very advanced graphics for the time. Loved trying to see if I could beat my high scores.
 
Seems like based on the other thread this one was maybe worth trotting out :)
 
Silentknight said:
System Shock 1 & 2, Thief 1 & 2
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Hello, fellow Taffer!

I think you'll be pleased to hear that Thief 4 is being worked on as we type. Same group that is producing the sequel to Deus Ex.

As for old games... M.U.L.E. Star Raiders. Good grief, I grew up in this era... I probably still have a bunch of them packed away somewhere.
 
There would be a heck of a market for new games with the "feel" of some of the old ones, but selected enhancements from new technology.

It's done to some extent with updated versions, but it would be interesting to see some original content that matches.
 
I remember lots of the games mentioned, although I've not heard of many of them. Overall, my faves are the ones I wrote (often with some assitance from my friends). We were teaching ourselves how to program, and writing games was a great way to do it.

Among our creations:
  • Cribbage Master: One of the first cribbage-playing programs ever, and it also was revolutionary in that it was platform-independent (that is, it used crude graphics that worked on several different computers in a time when such a thing was basically unheard of). In 1986, I adapted the program to the Macintosh. The best complement ever paid to the program was actually meant as an insult: "It cheats." Since I knew for a fact that the program did NOT cheat, this remark was an indication that the program played a very good strategy.
  • Duke: a John-Wayne-based role playing game. There were very few RPGs at the time, and those that did exist usually involved mazes and D&D fantasy. The Duke could amble to various places in an 1880-vintage town and take on various punks. Woe to any player who ordered the Duke to "retreat"! One feature of the program was that the Duke could be wounded in a fight, and although going to the doctor would fix him up, the Doctor might inform the Duke that he was dying of cancer. In the rare event the Duke DID die of cancer, the game did something that took players by utter surprise.
  • Princess: A game that involved a complicated map and a series of puzzles or obstacles. The object was to kiss the princess and wake her up. What set the game apart was that commands were given in English and a crude parser would decode the commands. Some nonsensical commands could result in humorous responses from the program. For eaxmple, if the player commanded "Kiss guard," the program responded with "This isn't THAT kind of a 'fairy' tale!"
  • Super Star Trek: This game was a total sham. Written long before anyone proposed the Kobayashi Maru scenario, we wrote a Star Trek game that was impossible to win. No matter what commands you gave, a Klingon would appear and shoot you dead within seconds. The "super" aspect was that the instructions suggested that the program had far more capability than other Star Trek programs, but in actuality, the instructions were a bluff and there wasn't a lot of actual code for this program.
 
bigred said:
I thought of another one: Starlight (II). Just average graphics for the time, but really had a lot of depth to it - and I know some might find this nuts, but I actually liked that it took more time to fly to more distant places and that some planets ended up just being more or less worthless rocks; gave it a little more sense of realism.

Never did finish it though. :( Got about 1/2 way and couldn't figure it out any more.
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Starflight II! That was indeed an awesome game. I got the hint book for it and ended up keeping that around forever because it was basically a sci-fi comedy novel and not a bad one either! I wish I could find it again.

I also really liked the first few Lucasarts games, like Loom.
 
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