51–60 of 64 posts
My favorite game of all time was made in 1998... 12 years later I still play it maybe once a year. Anyone else a big fan of Grim Fandango? I wish they would resurrect this game, or at least do an update to it like they did with Monkey Island.
I absolutely loved that game, but I lost the disc a long time ago :(
Broadly, there are two types of games that are important enough to remember years (or decades) later: those that are ground-breaking, and those that are good. Ones that are only breakthroughs can stay remembered for their historical significance, even though new iterations improve upon their formulas and eventually surpass them. Games that are good for reasons beyond being a technical breakthrough are the ones more l…
> My personal favorite timeless classic is X-COM: UFO Defense My, this game is so great. It's actually much better now, because you don't need to wait for 20 minutes at each turn in the later levels (yes, up to 20 minutes back when I played it on a 386SX 16Mhz with 2MB RAM).
Granted, they have a long way to go before they match up to the original and there are quite a few bugs if you get far enough along to disassemble UFOs, but I've been having fun playing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, hell yes. I loved Zelda on the SNES. As immersive as was possible given the period's technology. It really took me to another place.
The question is: do you still love it? Does your son love it?
Most of the SNES-era games are still great, IMHO. It really depends on the game as to whether or not it ages well. Even classics like PacMan is still just as fun as ever. Some early RPGs? Not so much. Yeah, I still love the original Final Fantasy, but the original Dragon Warrior has a horrific grind, but so do later games like 7th Saga (a SNES game). The only thing that fixes the grind in FF1 are those two tiles where you can meet giants early and if I didn't know about them, I'd have probably given up on the game by now, because of the steep grind when you hit Elfland.
That makes me believe that our tolerance for clunky UIs changes over time. For example, if I can't automatically keep my items sorted and organized without flipping things around one-by-one, I get frustrated. It's one of the few bad parts of EarthBound (a game I really loved for the creative writing... seriously, even the back of a billboard is likely to contain a joke).
In that respect, Ultima has one of the worst UIs because it was so complex and people hadn't figured out how to simplify it yet. In that respect, later Ultimas seem worse to me, because each one is more complex than the last. I can still have a bit of fun with Ultima 1 on the NES. More than I have with the later ones, anyhow. I wonder if the guy who invented automatic note taking in games was playing Ultima at the time... it would make a lot of sense.
I can't believe nobody mentioned nethack! It's the most well-designed game I have seen to date.
Granted, it hasn't changed much in forever. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some scrolls to price-ID and I'm not sure if that creature over there respects the E-word...
I know it is all a matter of opinion, but as someone who dabbles in game development (I am an admin of the Dark Mists MUD, after all), here is my perspective: If you look across the spectrum of oldstyle games, there are a few aspects off the top of my head that were responsible for our fun: challenge by control limits, challenge by time limits, and challenge by perfection (restarts, saves, etc). Joust is a perfect ex…
Almost no games even touch on these things, but those that do are often considered classics. When in fact they are just "good games".
Witness checkers or chess. Lasted a long time without any graphics or fancy controllers.
I know it is all a matter of opinion, but as someone who dabbles in game development (I am an admin of the Dark Mists MUD, after all), here is my perspective: If you look across the spectrum of oldstyle games, there are a few aspects off the top of my head that were responsible for our fun: challenge by control limits, challenge by time limits, and challenge by perfection (restarts, saves, etc). Joust is a perfect ex…
Good observation about different challenges. Different people like different things. I like games that allows mastery of complex control scheme, and exercises reflex. It's great feeling, when you have complete control. Some games are based on logical thinking, story, strategy, etc - in these games difficult controls is just distraction, and it makes experience worse. Control schemes evolved, so older games had worse…
I always like how people bring up Doom as opposed to, say, Wolfenstein or one of the other 3D shooters of the time. What made Doom feel different with the controls was two subtle things: head bob and acceleration.
In the same vein, there were other side-scrollers that featured characters jumping around. The side-scrollers that added acceleration physics (Mario, Metroid) were the really popular ones.
I am trying to consider Castlevania as an exception to my acceleration theory, particularly the limited jumping movement in Castlevania 1 (similar to 8 Eyes, which allowed you to have neat two-player coop action but somehow was not as popular).
Timeless classic games: - Super Mario 3 - Super Mario World - Mega Man X - Baldur's Gate Still 100% fun. Dunno how they manage it.
M.U.L.E. Seriously, one of EA's first game releases from the early/mid 80's and I still play it on an atari800 emu. Hell, Star Raiders and even Archon/ArhonII are pretty incredible still from that era.
The original Crystal Quest of the mid to late 80's on monochrome Macs and the early color version on the Mac II were great (but not MultiFinder compatible). Very addictive and fast/smooth which was a feat on the 8 and 16 MHz machines of the era. (Not to be confused with later rewrite which just wasn't the same) Just the other day I was wondering about getting an old version of the OS running under SheepShaver to try…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My personal favorite timeless classic is X-COM: UFO Defense My, this game is so great. It's actually much better now, because you don't need to wait for 20 minutes at each turn in the later levels (yes, up to 20 minutes back when I played it on a 386SX 16Mhz with 2MB RAM).
In that vein, you might like the game UFO:Alien Invasion. It's a rather playable open source clone of X-COM. Granted, they have a long way to go before they match up to the original and there are quite a few bugs if you get far enough along to disassemble UFOs, but I've been having fun playing it.