Arcade days of youth, yes. Man, the money I spent in those dadburn places. Seems like they had a built in mechanism to keep us playing and spending money on the game. Do I or do I not want to insert more quarters to keep playing...hmmm (hands a twenty to a friend to go get more quarters fast), heck yeah I do.
I was a bit old when i found out about Baldur's Gate 2 so that doesnt count.
on PC
Thief Gold that game had *So* good sound and i still remember the mission Return to the Cathedral playing that mission psychologicaly broke me... imagine you live in a world full of zombies and you... i always played with my friend Zaxaris but at that mission i couldn't move Garrett i stayed in a corner watching and hearing zombies pass me by.
Final Fantasy 7 oh those days... i used to go to Zaxari's home and sleep there just for that. Might & Magic 8: Day of the Destroyer
on PSX
Silent Hill Metal Gear Solid i loved that game those cut-scenes were Cinematic ! Syphon Filter
@dreamtraveler there are, but it's not the same as living through the times when these games are considered state-of-the-art.
Three lives, no saving, "extra lives" and "continues" were gold-dust (and if you have a power outage you're going back to the start!), no graphics menus (no need to change graphics settings), split-screens and dual controllers are the only way to play multiplayer, and if you're stuck you have to wait for that episode of Gamesmaster or the issue of Amiga Format with that particular walkthrough. Graphics and sound were 8-bit (or 16-bit if you were really lucky), and the music was usually one or two lines of midi simple enough to be performed on just about any instrument (or just hummed!). Back in the day, when we had to walk 15 miles in the snow...
Thirty years of gaming... thirty years of wasted hours... hours I'll never get back. XD
Back in the day, when we had to walk 15 miles in the snow...
Uphill ... Both ways ...
With only dustbin liners for shoes...
More Atari/Amiga classics: Cannon Fodder, Paperboy, Another World (and its sequel Flashback), Dungeon Master, the Monkey Island games, Double Dragon... and let's not forget the Amiga's attempt to do the whole Doom thing, with Alien Breed 3d, and Gloom (I kid you not, that's what one of them was called! XD)
More arcade classics: Outrun, Afterburner, Super Hang-on... those old arcade rigs where you actually sat in/on something, and some of them moved!
Well there's a loads of memorable games from my youth, mostly from Atari/Amiga era (but not only). But here are the ones I remember the most:
1. Wings - Cinemaware's classic that drives me and my friends insane for couple of months until we have managed to shoot our first Fokker After that it was just tons of fun! We even run the notebook with every damn mission. The game lost some of its charm, though, when we find out how to save the game on the 3,5" disc. There's a remastered edition on GoG.com, which I bought, but didn't have the time to try out yet. 2. Sensible Soccer and Sensible World of Soccer - outstanding games, where with a bit of expertise and luck you could score a goal from a half of the pitch. Classic 3. Manchaster United Europe - another classic football game. It drove me nuts, because one of my friends always picked Man U, where there was a guy named Ryan Giggs... a best player in this game. He could literally run past every and each of my players, starting to run from his own goal. 4. Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - ooh, the battles I fought with my pals on the Hot Seat. That was something worth remembering. 5. Might and Magic VI - the best part of series by far. Granted I didn't play parts 1-5, but I'm rather confident they would not give me equally fond memories. 6. Gunship 2000 - the one and only game where I managed to shoot a MIG by a helicopter. That was something! 7. F29 Retaliator - another combat flight simulator that I used to play. 8. Desert Strike - a classic from EA. Loved this game back in a day. 9. Ishar - a great RPG, first part of the series is the one I remember the most. 10. International Karate - one of the first classics I remember. We fought fierce fights with my cousins. 11. Captain Cosmo - this was literally the first computer game I have ever played. It was silly, but it produced my first "wow" when I got my new shiny Atari
Arcade days of youth, yes. Man, the money I spent in those dadburn places. Seems like they had a built in mechanism to keep us playing and spending money on the game. Do I or do I not want to insert more quarters to keep playing...hmmm (hands a twenty to a friend to go get more quarters fast), heck yeah I do.
I can't remember where, but I actually played this on some no-name console.
Most of my memorable PC games I was actually able to get and play again (thanks GOG!) and have played them again at one point or another. Notable entries include:
Phantasmagoria:My first point and click adventure game and horror game all-in-one. The story was fairly cliche looking back now (think The Shining, but there's no kid and the wife is the hero).
Master of Orion 2:First turn-based strategy game and still surprisingly fun to play, there's even a mod available that increases the difficulty and various other stat changes etc.
Can't think of any others that aren't in the Forgotten Realms series.
@tbone1 , I had one of those, and could spend hours with it. Interestingly, it worked more on the same principle as Candy Crush or Tetris than on actual football. I also could spend hours with one of these:
I got an off-brand of it for Christmas one year that had eight colored buttons and tones instead of four, that I actually liked better.
I saw when I looked up the picture that they still sell these.
Holy. Fff...ck YES! Oh man, best game ever! I mean, just watch the intro and try to NOT be engaged. I dare you all! It's old as hell, but the AMBIENCE, the SETTING, the FEELING! IT's making ME CAPSLOCKING THE HELL OUT OF THIS POST! That's how good that game was.
EDIT Just realized there's a sequel to Another World that was released on Sega. Damn, what a waste to release it on only one console though from what I read now quickly, maybe it was for the best.
Pirates! By Sid Meier - on my c64, Amiga, and in two iterations on the PC. Pirates! is the story of my life. Been playing it on and off since 1986 or so.
There's an enhanced version of Another world available on Steam these days. We had a demo of it back in the 90s. The demo ended in a cliffhanger and it wasn't until Let's play's on youtube came around that I finally got to know what happened next.
My wife and I have been watching The Video Game Years on Amazon Prime; apparently she was much more of a gamer than I was. I recommend this for any other fogy who played games in the 80s, be they arcade or console or computer.
I have mentioned that we had an Intellivision when I was in high school. Our family are all sports fans (you did NOT interrupt my mom during the Kentucky Derby) and the Intellivision's sports games were way ahead of Atari's. However, the system had a couple other games that I really liked.
B-17 Bomber was a 1981 game where you flew B-17 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe. It came with a piece of hardware that added voice synthesis that was very impressive for the time. This was a tough game. If you flew three straight missions and lived you were doing well. I guess in that sense it was pretty realistic, too. There was a good map for the time where you picked a target to fly to; a screen called Gauges to show altitude, speed, fuel, and so on; a flight simulator where you had to dodge flak (or "Killing Me Softly with His Bombs"); a set of four screens to shoot down enemy fighters (at 3, 6, 9, and 12 o'clock); and a bombing screen where you had to carefully time the dropping of bombs onto the target, and IIRC, if you left the screen before the bombs hit (to fight enemy planes) the bombs did not reach the ground. Frustrating, but great.
Utopia was a 1981 strategy game for two people where each had to build up their island nation, spending gold on houses, schools, factories, farms, etc. It was turn based, but also had real time elements involving simple algorithms for rain (increase in crops), tropical storms, hurricanes (death and destruction), schools of fish, and pirate ships. There was a good bit of strategy in this; there were some places that got more rain so you should plant there. Lack of housing really lowered production and your score and generated rebels. And you could hire rebels to take over pieces of your opponent's territory. This was in 1981 for a console, about ten years before Sid Meyer gave us Civilization on a computer.
BB gun wars Dress up with many layers and head out hunting for brothers and friends. The 3max air pumped limit usually went out the window as soon as someone got tagged pretty good. Yep, there be some scars.
I grew up in Florida, so we didn't bother to layer up before shooting BBs at each other. How no one lost an eye or something, is beyond me. They were just the spring firing BB guns, so not as bad as air guns could get after a few pumps, at least.
How about orange fights in the orange grove with bowie knives? We'd hack down oranges with knives, pop the orange with the knife, and throw it at each other. Once you got good, you could knock oranges out of the air with a knife. Kind of like a real life fruit ninja.
YES! I remember that game. At the time the graphics were a huge deal.
The only atari game I really remember was the Empire Strikes back, asides from the arcade ports, like QBert and Pacman, oh and of course there was Pong. I have some vague memories of a seahorse game, coconuts, and some sort of clown game on the Commodore. I played pretty much all the classic NES and SNES games, Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, the Final Fantasy games, Kid Icarus, etc.
For PC games, I learned to read playing the early King's Quest and Space Quest games. I only played the first 4 King's Quest games, and only the original Space Quest, though. They were great for learning to read and kind of form sentences, since they had command line. Granted the sentences weren't proper, it was always stuff like "Look in Hole" and "Get stake" and the like, but still taught me a lot of words and spelling, since I started playing those game at like 5 years old. I still remember being able to turn on the computer, and once booted, put in the game disk and type kq2.exe. You kids today, with your graphical user interfaces.
I didn’t get into the most popular of the early arcade games (Space Invaders, PacMan, Frogger, Centipede), but I did have my favorites. I have already mentioned Joust, because who wouldn’t want to be an ostrich-riding jousting knight? But my favorite in the day, though I was no good at it, was Defender
This game was awesome. The graphics were phenomenal for the time, in fact they still look good. It was the first game I know of with a radar map. The action was fast, but the controls were almost too responsive and took practice. But man, was that game fun and tough. Completing a screen felt like a good, real accomplishment.
The idea is that you are flying a space ship, defending astonauts on a planet from aliens. They can kidnap the astronauts, turning them into mutants. You can save them (shoot alien, catch astronaut, return to planet) but have to dodge a wide variety of enemies while doing this maneuver. This game whipped my butt, but I and others dropped a lot of quarters on this one.
Maui Mallard on the Sega/PC (I didn't care much for the SNES version). The gameplay itself isn't always the greatest, but I just love the concept, the music and the atmosphere in this game. You play as a Maui Mallard, a Magnum P.I-like detective with a ninja alter-ego. He also is Darkwing Duck's cousin as I recall it. And you get to ninja your way through ancient ruins, volcanoes and the realm of the dead (!) to some awesome music. How cool is that?
If I could choose the next big-budget project from Disney it would be a new Maui Mallard game or TV series. And an animated adaptation of Don Rosa's Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Come on, Disney, focus on the good stuff!
Disgaea is an RPG series where you can and must get into the thousands of levels to access all the story content, I did so to near completion in 1 and 2 (don't even want to know hours spent) and don't regret it.
I'm a huge fan of the movie The Warriors, and the video game adaption is probably one of the only examples of a movie-to-video-game adaption being done right, and possibly even surpassing the original product. (probably because they had a decades-old movie to work with rather than rushing something out to match a movie release date)
Mutliplayer NWN was incredible fun, mostly large scale battles or King of the Hill for me, with the occasional PW. I hope the scene gets energized with the EE.
@Zaghoul@DrHappyAngry My dad has told me stories of him and his friends buying real weapons and going into the woods to "play ninja". Lets just say that I cam VERY close to never being born.
@ThacoBell Heh, from listening to mine, I think they were playing 'speed racer' way to often on bridges and curvy rds. running through the coastal swamps of eastern NC when younger. At least he never got mad if we were caught speeding.
How about jumping off the roof into the pool? There was about 5 feet between the building and the pool that you had to clear, so it would have been a nasty fall on concrete if you came up short. Somehow, nobody missed it.
Thought of another couple old NES games, Strider and the original Ninja Gaiden games. Those were some awesome wall jumping and sword hacking 2d platformers.
I still remember the day I went to the library as a kid, and saw somebody playing the original Sid Meier's CIvilization. I must've been like 11 or 12 at the time, and got the guy to copy the game to some floppies for me. I can't believe I've been playing the Civilization series for more than 25 years. It's probably one of the reasons why I'm so into history. Of course now that I'm an adult, and can actually afford it, I buy my games. In fact I think I bought at least 3 copies of Civ 5 and Civ 6 for friends.
Tempest was a great arcade game by Atari. You had a “ship” that had to rid each level of all the aliens before passing to the next level. It used a spinner for a controller, which was great on the circular/bounded levels, but not so useful on the open ones. It used color vector graphics in 1981 which were surprisingly sharp, clear, and appealing.
The one thing was that certain aliens rose towards you, creating a spike trailing behind them. Once you cleared a level and fell through to the next, you had to avoid the spike or shoot it before you dropped onto it. I learned that the hard way.
Comments
on PC
Thief Gold that game had *So* good sound and i still remember the mission Return to the Cathedral playing that mission psychologicaly broke me... imagine you live in a world full of zombies and you... i always played with my friend Zaxaris but at that mission i couldn't move Garrett i stayed in a corner watching and hearing zombies pass me by.
Final Fantasy 7 oh those days... i used to go to Zaxari's home and sleep there just for that.
Might & Magic 8: Day of the Destroyer
on PSX
Silent Hill
Metal Gear Solid i loved that game those cut-scenes were Cinematic !
Syphon Filter
ah those were good days.
Three lives, no saving, "extra lives" and "continues" were gold-dust (and if you have a power outage you're going back to the start!), no graphics menus (no need to change graphics settings), split-screens and dual controllers are the only way to play multiplayer, and if you're stuck you have to wait for that episode of Gamesmaster or the issue of Amiga Format with that particular walkthrough. Graphics and sound were 8-bit (or 16-bit if you were really lucky), and the music was usually one or two lines of midi simple enough to be performed on just about any instrument (or just hummed!). Back in the day, when we had to walk 15 miles in the snow...
Thirty years of gaming... thirty years of wasted hours... hours I'll never get back. XD
More Atari/Amiga classics: Cannon Fodder, Paperboy, Another World (and its sequel Flashback), Dungeon Master, the Monkey Island games, Double Dragon... and let's not forget the Amiga's attempt to do the whole Doom thing, with Alien Breed 3d, and Gloom (I kid you not, that's what one of them was called! XD)
More arcade classics: Outrun, Afterburner, Super Hang-on... those old arcade rigs where you actually sat in/on something, and some of them moved!
Twin Kingdom Valley (ZX Spectrum too, although better on the BBC)
1. Wings - Cinemaware's classic that drives me and my friends insane for couple of months until we have managed to shoot our first Fokker
2. Sensible Soccer and Sensible World of Soccer - outstanding games, where with a bit of expertise and luck you could score a goal from a half of the pitch. Classic
3. Manchaster United Europe - another classic football game. It drove me nuts, because one of my friends always picked Man U, where there was a guy named Ryan Giggs... a best player in this game. He could literally run past every and each of my players, starting to run from his own goal.
4. Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - ooh, the battles I fought with my pals on the Hot Seat. That was something worth remembering.
5. Might and Magic VI - the best part of series by far. Granted I didn't play parts 1-5, but I'm rather confident they would not give me equally fond memories.
6. Gunship 2000 - the one and only game where I managed to shoot a MIG by a helicopter. That was something!
7. F29 Retaliator - another combat flight simulator that I used to play.
8. Desert Strike - a classic from EA. Loved this game back in a day.
9. Ishar - a great RPG, first part of the series is the one I remember the most.
10. International Karate - one of the first classics I remember. We fought fierce fights with my cousins.
11. Captain Cosmo - this was literally the first computer game I have ever played. It was silly, but it produced my first "wow" when I got my new shiny Atari
Most of my memorable PC games I was actually able to get and play again (thanks GOG!) and have played them again at one point or another. Notable entries include:
Phantasmagoria:My first point and click adventure game and horror game all-in-one. The story was fairly cliche looking back now (think The Shining, but there's no kid and the wife is the hero).
Master of Orion 2:First turn-based strategy game and still surprisingly fun to play, there's even a mod available that increases the difficulty and various other stat changes etc.
Can't think of any others that aren't in the Forgotten Realms series.
I got an off-brand of it for Christmas one year that had eight colored buttons and tones instead of four, that I actually liked better.
I saw when I looked up the picture that they still sell these.
Flashback, although a good game, was not really the same.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wjMf_bEfqIc
EDIT
Just realized there's a sequel to Another World that was released on Sega. Damn, what a waste to release it on only one console though from what I read now quickly, maybe it was for the best.
Also, Pool of Radiance and its sequels.
Then there's the very similar Heart of Darkness.
My wife and I have been watching The Video Game Years on Amazon Prime; apparently she was much more of a gamer than I was. I recommend this for any other fogy who played games in the 80s, be they arcade or console or computer.
I have mentioned that we had an Intellivision when I was in high school. Our family are all sports fans (you did NOT interrupt my mom during the Kentucky Derby) and the Intellivision's sports games were way ahead of Atari's. However, the system had a couple other games that I really liked.
B-17 Bomber was a 1981 game where you flew B-17 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe. It came with a piece of hardware that added voice synthesis that was very impressive for the time. This was a tough game. If you flew three straight missions and lived you were doing well. I guess in that sense it was pretty realistic, too. There was a good map for the time where you picked a target to fly to; a screen called Gauges to show altitude, speed, fuel, and so on; a flight simulator where you had to dodge flak (or "Killing Me Softly with His Bombs"); a set of four screens to shoot down enemy fighters (at 3, 6, 9, and 12 o'clock); and a bombing screen where you had to carefully time the dropping of bombs onto the target, and IIRC, if you left the screen before the bombs hit (to fight enemy planes) the bombs did not reach the ground. Frustrating, but great.
Utopia was a 1981 strategy game for two people where each had to build up their island nation, spending gold on houses, schools, factories, farms, etc. It was turn based, but also had real time elements involving simple algorithms for rain (increase in crops), tropical storms, hurricanes (death and destruction), schools of fish, and pirate ships. There was a good bit of strategy in this; there were some places that got more rain so you should plant there. Lack of housing really lowered production and your score and generated rebels. And you could hire rebels to take over pieces of your opponent's territory. This was in 1981 for a console, about ten years before Sid Meyer gave us Civilization on a computer.
B-17 Bomber
Utopia (a poorly played version)
How about orange fights in the orange grove with bowie knives? We'd hack down oranges with knives, pop the orange with the knife, and throw it at each other. Once you got good, you could knock oranges out of the air with a knife. Kind of like a real life fruit ninja. YES! I remember that game. At the time the graphics were a huge deal.
The only atari game I really remember was the Empire Strikes back, asides from the arcade ports, like QBert and Pacman, oh and of course there was Pong. I have some vague memories of a seahorse game, coconuts, and some sort of clown game on the Commodore. I played pretty much all the classic NES and SNES games, Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, the Final Fantasy games, Kid Icarus, etc.
For PC games, I learned to read playing the early King's Quest and Space Quest games. I only played the first 4 King's Quest games, and only the original Space Quest, though. They were great for learning to read and kind of form sentences, since they had command line. Granted the sentences weren't proper, it was always stuff like "Look in Hole" and "Get stake" and the like, but still taught me a lot of words and spelling, since I started playing those game at like 5 years old. I still remember being able to turn on the computer, and once booted, put in the game disk and type kq2.exe. You kids today, with your graphical user interfaces.
This game was awesome. The graphics were phenomenal for the time, in fact they still look good. It was the first game I know of with a radar map. The action was fast, but the controls were almost too responsive and took practice. But man, was that game fun and tough. Completing a screen felt like a good, real accomplishment.
The idea is that you are flying a space ship, defending astonauts on a planet from aliens. They can kidnap the astronauts, turning them into mutants. You can save them (shoot alien, catch astronaut, return to planet) but have to dodge a wide variety of enemies while doing this maneuver. This game whipped my butt, but I and others dropped a lot of quarters on this one.
If I could choose the next big-budget project from Disney it would be a new Maui Mallard game or TV series. And an animated adaptation of Don Rosa's Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Come on, Disney, focus on the good stuff!
Disgaea is an RPG series where you can and must get into the thousands of levels to access all the story content, I did so to near completion in 1 and 2 (don't even want to know hours spent) and don't regret it.
I'm a huge fan of the movie The Warriors, and the video game adaption is probably one of the only examples of a movie-to-video-game adaption being done right, and possibly even surpassing the original product. (probably because they had a decades-old movie to work with rather than rushing something out to match a movie release date)
Mutliplayer NWN was incredible fun, mostly large scale battles or King of the Hill for me, with the occasional PW. I hope the scene gets energized with the EE.
Thought of another couple old NES games, Strider and the original Ninja Gaiden games. Those were some awesome wall jumping and sword hacking 2d platformers.
I still remember the day I went to the library as a kid, and saw somebody playing the original Sid Meier's CIvilization. I must've been like 11 or 12 at the time, and got the guy to copy the game to some floppies for me. I can't believe I've been playing the Civilization series for more than 25 years. It's probably one of the reasons why I'm so into history. Of course now that I'm an adult, and can actually afford it, I buy my games. In fact I think I bought at least 3 copies of Civ 5 and Civ 6 for friends.
The one thing was that certain aliens rose towards you, creating a spike trailing behind them. Once you cleared a level and fell through to the next, you had to avoid the spike or shoot it before you dropped onto it. I learned that the hard way.