After just reading a post about how good games these days are being determined by hows great they look in the graphics department, I just wanted to drop a nostalgic post about why a good game is all down to game play, immersion, atmostphere and old school innovation.

For example, to start us off. Pioneer games such as Command and Conquer for the RTS were amazing and revolutionary due to the fact that the sole focus off the game was good old fashion strategy gameplay dynamics. Riflemen > Rocketmen, Humvee > Soldiers, Tanks > Humvee etc. Make no mistake, when C&C came out it was a notch above the rest in terms of graphics ( i mean you could actually see the pixelated soldiers dropping to the floor to do push ups when they were idle! ).
The maps were diverse, the campaign & story line were unparelleled and totally engaging and it had great Cinematics.

The purpose of this post is too just discuss the merits of the old greats of the PC gaming era - Im interested to see peoples thoughts on the topic and what they think were great old school games and what made these games stand out amoung the multitude.

Does anyone remember Reunion or Masters of Orien - what about StarControl or Privateer 2. Man I miss the old days!

Feel free to reminisce

You can find posts along this line in many currently ongoing threads.

Deus Ex, need I say more?

Ye Dues Ex - a total classic. Large maps, lots to do, huge range of weapons and skills and augmentations I remember playing it loads of times trying to explore each map fully. And the story line was good too.

Privateer 2... That was a fun game, but suffered a major flaw, it was one of the last games that required you to drop to DOS to play it and as a result a lot of people never gave it a chance due to the complexity required to get it running. Once you did get it going, it was great up until the second to last plot battle which was for all intents and purposes, impossible. I never beat the game and my game disks were destroyed in a move.


Deus Ex, now there is a game that is truly peerless. That is everything FPSs should have always been and yet there has never been another game since or before that measured up to it. Noone Lives Forever and System Shock 2 were similar in some ways but ultimately took their own paths. Both were great games but nothing lived up to Deus Ex.


Master of Orion and MOO2. Oh the hours I lost playing these games. Its a shame they never made a Master of Orion 3. No matter what anyone says no true sequel was ever made for those legends of gaming.


Elite, Elite 2, Elite 2 plus, and Elite 2 Frontier. This series of games were the definition of immersive when I was young. Exploring, trading, mining, bounty hunting, etc. You picked what you did. It was in many ways the true beginning of the sandbox style game.

Im studying in Europe right now and all I have is my crappy laptop, but Im replaying Deus Ex and loving it! Hands down one of my all time favorites.

Quake, Quake 2, Quake III Arena, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, Blood, Blood 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Shogun Warrior.... they will all remain my favorites...

I used to have these 2 old small games that just owned at the time. The first was cannon fodder which had immense replayability and the second was called Stronghold ( before the firefly series came out ) which was an awesome castle building and community/war managing game. Shogun Warrior and Duke Nukem 3D took hours of my life away, and Im glad for it. They had true atmosphere. < "Shake it baby!" >

In terms of time syncs I remember surrendering my youth to the likes of Fallout1, Fallout2 and Tactics ( which was a truly great next move in the series but I am aware that it did dissapoint some people - i think i might have played tactics the most incidentally ). The post apocalyptic adult atmosphere in the series was IMHO truly unparalled. Loved a close range AK47 to an enemy - they would literally split apart in the most creative ways. It set a tone for that type of RPG leveling system and the feat, skill and attribute allocation is what drove the game.

@ infornography42

I still have the Privateer Disks lying around somewhere at home. Tried to jam it a few years back but even using MoSlow app the game was just tooooooooooo fast. 4CDs of amazingness. Full Motion Video movie story sequences with none other that Clive Owen as Sir Lev Arris. It just stuck with me. Ye - i think i wasted my entire school holiday replaying the game till i could beat the last few battles; which were, as you alluded to before, utter madness in terms of the scale of enemy ships, bases and numbers.

EDIT: And you know the best thing about old games. There was NO patching option in the good old days. When a game was released : it worked. period.

Or.. it didn't and then you were truly f*d

Lol - Ye. I do actually remeber an unpassable bug in one of the Sierra games. Cant recall - I spend a few very expensive minutes to the call centre in the US for help but it was a worthless exercise. The net wasnt that large at all so nobody would write a review on THW on how you couldnt procede after the first 30mins; or recommending to stay away from it. But those games were very rare as games were aware of how severe a bug was and so they would ensure the game was polished and sleek and tested...

Yeah, pretty much a lost concept with games, finish it before you sell it. I actually get excited when I see things like WAR Online getting pushed back to polish it more.

This is turning into a "remember the good old days" topic, which only serves to show that all people participating here (myself included) are getting old.

What would be interesting is by remembering old games, what was good about them and what was bad about them, to see what the aspects are a good game should at least have.

Perceived freedom of movement and choice is a very important one for me. And paradoxically it gets even worse or more important the more freedom you get. For me it is a real turnoff to find myself in a situation where I could only get in the first place because of lots of freedom, where suddenly all my options/choices are taken from me (for instance, I found the end of a map where i did not expect it to be).

They did. It was awful.

If you really want to date yourself....

Does anyone remember how you had to hack your config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get any game from Origin to work?

Does anyone remember when flight sims were king? Falcon? Falcon 3.0 anything from Damon Slye or Microprose?

How about SSI and all those great sims?

I'm getting old. Hell, I know that. I just don't want to do what old farts do. My first kid's graduated from college and is married.

My first game was Zork, the text based game before there was, gasp! Sound and animation.

I have to say, some of my favorites are the Ultima series, Fallout series, and Wing Commander series...There are some other, older ones, but alas, I can't remember theirs names.

Soldier of Fortune - Still playing it online

Quake 1 + 2

Doom

Castle Wolfenstien (back in the cyrix 133 etc days)

Duke Nukem

Sometimes I feel like building an old system about £100 and running these games on their just for fun with Win 98SE and 2GB/ 1GB of ram

No, they didn't I refuse to acknowledge that complete waste of $50.00.

I'd similarly like to see someone make a real sequel to Deus Ex. ;-)

The best game I have ever played is Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

http://www.abandonia.com/

Im not very old, so I can't be much help. What I would like to say is that I grew up playing Dune (the one before the 3D one wich sucked)and it is one of my favorite games ever. I remember calling by dad at work one time because I was so excited when I discovered the Death Hand Missile or something like that (harkonnen special weapon). I loved that game.