Just as with books, movies, plays etc the past holds a treasure trove of amazing experiences. Unless you have a lot more free time than I do it’s unlikely you’ve played anywhere near the majority of the classics. Let’s get out those pink sunnies and compare notes on some of our favourite releases.
I’ve recently been going back in time a little on the retro pi and looking at console games I never had.
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I have to say Chrono Trigger blew me away with it’s stunning art, puzzles with surprisingly little moon logic, and beautiful music.
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Mario golf on the SNES is very simple but for tired evenings cuddling on the couch it’s been a winner in our household.
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The n64 Zelda games are surprisingly great too although that awkward period of 3d had some unusual controls. Even the gameboy ones are a blast although the water temple in oracle of ages it a bit frustrating.
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Heroes of might and magic 2 and 3 hold a special place in my heart and I can still dump hours into skirmishing with those (32167 for when hom2 gets too frustrating amiright?)
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I loved neverwinter knights as a kid but recently tried to check it out again and just… idk the magic wasn’t there. I think now I’d rather just play some actual ttrpgs instead of sprawling CRPGs
PS1 is a mystery box to me so I’d love to hear some recommendations from that old thing. All I ever played on it was time crisis at my mates house (which was and is soooo coool, RIP lightguns).
What about you folks? What games hold a special place in your heart? or what have you checked out for the first time recently and found it’s actually pretty good?
One of my all-time favourites is Freelancer, 2003. Just a really fun arcade space sandbox with an engaging campaign and great multiplayer and modding scene.
Mischief Makers for n64! its a puzzle platformer by treasure, its controls are a little unintiutive at first, but the games grappling/boost mechanics are so much fun once you get it down.
also, SHAKE SHAKE!
Beyond Good & Evil, 2003. It’s been so long since I played it, I don’t remember much other than it was a sandbox and it had some neat mechanics and cute characters and I loved it. The closing credits musical sequence is magical, too.
One of the first games I played that was translated in Dutch with good voiceovers! Loved it and made me more open to localized games.
I think I rented it for the gamecube but never played much. Apparently it’s famously good! I’ll have to check it out.
I definitely have a lot that really get me feeling nostalgic. Couldn’t even count the hours I spent playing games as a kid lol but here’s a random list of a few:
- Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete (My favorite of all time)
- Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age
- Dragon Warrior VII
- Final Fantasy: Tactics
- Chrono Cross
- Phantasy Star I and III
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Minish Cap
- The Sims 1
- RuneScape
Putting DQ7 on here is almost a bit spicy, but I think it’s one of the best representations of the series in terms of scope, pacing, gameplay, and storytelling. It’s absolutely slow, but that was sort of the point.
I definitely have a few controversial choices. But DQ7 is legitimately my favorite DQ game and I always thought it didn’t get the attention it deserved. It was a long one to get through though.
I’d argue that having Chrono Cross and not Chrono Trigger is even spicier lol. But I think it’s really just nostalgia since that’s what I sunk a lot of hours into back then. I remember hunting everywhere for Final Fantasy Chronicles because it included a copy of Chrono Trigger, but I could never get my hands on it.
I can get behind the CC vs CT take. I finished CT first circa 1998 but found it pretty boring (I have a better appreciation for it now). CC was a lot more enjoyable to me–combat had a lot going on, and the music is an unmitigated masterpiece.
Had a partner want to practice hacking a 3ds before they closed the shop so I can play PS1 games. The first one I put on that mofo is Azure Dreams, my first and probably favorite dungeon crawler roguelike with a city builder. Also Breath of Fire IV is one of my absolute favorite games ever.
Both Azure Dreams and BOF IV were great. Haven’t heard mention of them in years
I just picked up Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (the original, not the Remaster) again. Installed it on my Steam Deck along with DSFix after a year or so of scrolling past it and seeing the “unsupported” icon. Looked it up on ProtonDB and apparently it works just fine.
What a game. The level design is still unmatched imo
I have that edition and can’t for the life of me get my xbox controller to work with it. I swear I’ve tried ALL of the solutions people give and just gave up in the end.
I had the same problem with elden ring… turns out if I unplugged my Nintendo Wii IR sensor from my pc it allowed the Xbox controller to work.
Guessing it’s something to do with detecting a certain peripheral as player one but I honestly have no idea!
Have you tried something like xpadder where it just maps the keyboard keys used in the game to your controller buttons? I’ve had to use that from time to time way back with older games before controller support got better. Not ideal, but seems to work usually when all else fails.
I’m not sure if/how it works exactly since I mostly do my “PC” gaming on Steam Deck these days, but if it’s possible to use Steam Input on Windows, you may be able to do something similar right in Steam.
I’ll try that, never heard about it! Steam input is an option in steam on windows, I guess it’s the same deal? Thanks for the xpadder thing, it will come in handy for sure.
Nice, I’m glad I could be of some help. Let me know if you get it to work.
Steam Input is amazing, it’s one of my favorite features of the Steam Deck that nobody really talks about. The amount of customization you can do for controller layouts for individual games is incredible. You can even create radial menus if you want.
All the old MechWarrior games, starting with MechWarrior 2. That was my childhood. PGI didn’t have what it takes to recapture that with MechWarrior Online or MechWarrior 5.
Shout out to Half-Life 1 and Team Fortress Classic (1.5). THAT was my teenage years. I played an insurmountable amount of TFC, adminned a couple servers, and took zero interest in TF2, because it just wasn’t the same without concs, throwable frag nades, etc.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was a gamechanger though. That released when I was in college. Fell in love with the hopeless atmosphere, good gunplay, and the eurojank. I still play the various S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods to this day and am eagerly awaiting the release of number 2 (slated for December, but we will see. Devs have been through a lot).I played the first STALKER at uni as well and loved it. Along with Red Orchestra that a mate was a play tester for.
All games paled in comparison to how much time I sunk into WoW between 2006 and 2011 though.
I know a lot of people that played WoW back then, and their experiences were largely the same. I didn’t get much into MMOs beyond Guild Wars 1 at that time. Final Fantasy XIV was good for a time, but Elder Scrolls Online blew me away after they basically redid the game. That was obviously much later in life, though, and that’s a very different framework of MMORPG than classic WoW and its early expansions.
I played Max Payne and its sequal recently and I was surprised how well they held up. The gameplay and level design kept it consistently fun
The first game definitely shows its age, but is fun nevertheless. The second game, though, has always surprised me how amazingly it has held up.
Fantastic games.
- Doom and Doom II: Hell on Earth
- Choplifter
- Duke Nukem 3D
- X-Wing
- Quake III Arena
- MechWarrior
- GoldenEye 007
- Rogue Squadron
- Shadows of the Empire
- Metal Gear Solid
- Siphon Filter
- Ein Händer
- Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell
- Colony Wars
- Colony Wars II: Vengeance
- Counter-Strike
- Half-Life
- Oni
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert
- Total Annihilation
- Dune 2000
- Star Control III
- Delta Force
- Deus Ex
So many great games from my childhood.
Quake III but no I or II? I see you’ve got DOOM on your list, I’m curious, did you not like the first two quake games or just didn’t play them? Otherwise you’ve got my list down pat (plus a few extras).
Nope, I only ever played Quake III Arena.
In addition to the many amazing games already mentioned, I’ll throw in the 1995 gem “Ascendancy” from The Logic Factory. The user interface is a bit rough by modern standards but, for its time, it was a fascinating 4X turn-based strategy game (despite the broken “AI”) with an impressive array of alien races with unique art and music for each. It’s been in-and-out of the “abandonware” classification over the years, so there may not currently be any legitimate way to acquire a copy of the game–which is a real shame for those who might want to experience a nearly 30-year-old game that I think was groundbreaking for its time.
It is deeply tragic that the IP is being tossed about like a pirate ship on stormy seas. Things like this really keep fans at bay.
In my old party days circa 2000, I had a nice party house in the hood. The neighborhood wasn’t all that great, but it was a nice big house for cheap rent. Lots of rooms and space. I was young and had more knowledge of computers than money, and this meant I could bus to work instead of driving and paying to park.
I worked at a large engineering company. They upgraded their computers for the Y2K bug. This left them with an extraordinary amount of old PC’s they had to actually pay to dispose of properly. To save money, they yanked the hard drives and raffled them off to the employees. We’re talking nearly 400 PCs. 386’s, 486’s and even some (then highly coveted) 486-dx2’s.
A few people that won just gave me their PC. They didn’t want it since it wasn’t usable without a hard drive but knew I did. I cashed in a few favors here and there to get a few of those choice 486-dx2’s from those that won them where I could. In all, I made (6) pretty decent Dell PC’s and set them up in various rooms in the house. I also had my cadd workstation and my roommate had his PC as well. I put Windows 98SE, VNC and Twisted Metal 2 on each.
I lan’d together all (8) PC’s into a home network using a partial reel of CAT6 cable that I got from another friend in exchange for devising and assembling his wife a new PC for her birthday. He was in the IBEW and the cable was scrap surplus from construction at a major airport. He gave me some speaker wire as well. In hindsight, it was for a public address system and was not the best for musical range but it did work. I borrowed a crimper and helped myself to some RJ45 connectors from our IT department. I ran the lan cables to network the PC’s. I placed a speaker in every room and wired them into the home stereo. Mono, but I only had so many speakers. I then converted my workstation to more of a home theater, running a video out to the TV. PC audio was outputted to the home stereo as auxiliary.
It made for a kick ass home theater system for the year 2000. In it’s day, it was pretty hip. We had some great multiplayer games for years to come and nearly everyone had their own room to play in. TM2 was really neat in that it could take up to 8 players.
VNC gave you control over any computer from any computer. You could watch a movie on the Home Theater in any room you want to, or all of em even. Kick on winamp with milkdrop and just jam out. Put on ‘The cat sitter’ and get the cat all riled up. Ahh, good times.
In all, and not accounting for any time spent or software licenses, I may have invested 30 dollars for a new corded drill (which I still have today). Beer was probably the highest total expenditure for the project. There were some wire coat hangers that got away fishing the wires through the walls that are probably still there.
Also, I totally agree with you on Chrono Trigger. It has another title set in that same world that can be tricky to find called Chrono Cross. I personally think Trigger was the better of the two titles but Cross is play worthy.
Why’d they have to get rid of the hardware? Y2K is almost entirely a software issue.
Those old machines did have an issue with the real-time clock not handling post-Y2K dates, but that doesn’t matter much as long as the machine gets the correct time over the network once it’s booted.
At that time, no one knew what was going to happen. They didn’t want to chance it so they upgraded nearly everyone.
Whatever the reason, it made my decade. I experienced no problems at all on any of my machines.
I still play Doom 1 & 2 most days. Nothing matches it for speed of play. Doom is fast.
Doom 2016 is a good game too, but I’m it lacks speed.
Same. Project Brutality makes the old Doom games quite enjoyable as well. It’s a bit edgy but it’s kind of a mix of modern Doom with the old ones. It’s the perfect kind of game to just turn your brain off and shoot some demons without having it be too difficult.
Doom Eternal is too much of a dance to play, you have to swap weapons all the time and carefully juggle ammo, chainsaw, dashes and a bunch of other buttons to play optimally.
There’s always Diablo 1.
But my favorite is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which was made by some of the people who created Fallout and has a LOT in common with it. It’s an open world, a combination of classic fantasy with elves, dwarves, and halflings with a rising steampunk technology that competes with magic. There are many schools of magic and technology, as well as social, stealth, and combat skills. The graphics are very crude by today’s standards, but the gameplay is outstanding.
You know, I never tried Diablo 1 even though I grew up religiously playing Diablo 2. Also love the original fallout games, I definitely need to make time for this.
Diablo 1 has the same gameplay as the other games but in terms of scope and concept it’s much more self contained, it’s a different experience. Good game, but d2 is what the sequels have all tried to recreate, so it will feel quite different.
Thanks for the warning, but I don’t mind different; different can be good. I’m excited to see the beginnings of my childhood game, I think it’ll be worth the patience. Though, having a hard time finding it, it’s not on the blizzard downloads list. I’mma do more digging tho, it’s gotta be out there somewhere.
