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Which Classic Games Have Aged Well?
thesp writes "We're all waiting for the releases of the next great games (naming no names) which have been mentioned over and over again here on Slashdot. No doubt they will look gorgeous and even be playable on not-too-unreasonable hardware. But there are some games that have an inherent capability to expand to take advantage of higher resolutions and improved rendering as the technology progressed. Would Slashdot like to suggest other titles that, although consigned to multipacks and bargain bins, have aged well and are even more beautiful in their old age, on modern systems, than they ever could be at the time of their release?" This may be subtly different to titles with "Olympian system requirements" at time of release, a category that definitely includes Ultima IX.
But, I'm just revisiting Front Mission 3 to go through the 2nd path...that's still a damn good game.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
5 years proudly benchmarking 3D accelerators and CPUs. I'd say it's had a pretty good run.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I vote for Empire, any version, by Walter Bright. The original was played on very slow computers and was fun even when you had to wait a couple minutes for the computer to complete its turn. Now the game is much better for two reasons. First, the computer takes its turns almost instantaneously. Second, the game is free for download from Walter Bright's website. See http://www.classicempire.com/
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
It's 6 years old, but still tons of fun!
Some people think I'm a weirdo, but at LAN parties, I still like to play Q2. It's the lowest common denominator. But at the same time, when you crank up the res and play it on a fast video card, it looks nice, as nice as Quake 3. Now, maybe people snigger at that, but I Q3 and UT are about the best my old PC or iBook will play. :P
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Still one of the best, I still play it. Often.
Actually, this was the first game I was able to get my wife to play.
Bad User. No biscuit!
Quake 2 and Marathon (er, Aleph One)
Great game! Better than Civ3 in a few ways. Light hardware requirements, still looks good, incredibly good game.
Plus there's a Linux version floating around.
no thanks
"Ancient" engine - still top of the charts. Has gotten better and better over the years.
Three game series' that were great back in their hey day were the Sonic the Hedgehog Series (sega / dreamcast. saturn kind of sucked), Mario (nes / snes / 64 / gc. all good ), and can't forget about Donkey Kong Country.
Whatever happened to Rare, makers of DKC? I think it'd be awesome if someone came out with a really good remake of some of these classic games. Maybe I'm wrong and the classic days of 2-D games is gone forever, but I hate to see these classic characters die off.
I'd love to see these guys reincarnated on the XBOX or GC or PS3. Anyone else agree? I mean, if they were able to remake Asteroids into something halfway decent, I'm sure they could do something cool with interesting characters like these.
Oh yah, another really old school game that'd probably be cool redone is Contra.
My favorite game is still Tempest. There are some others that have come close like Test Drive: Le Mans on the Dreamcast.
I still think Paradroid on the C64 is a good game. When Paradroid '90 came out on the Amiga I still liked it, and if Andy made a PC version now I think I would still like it. It would probably be a third person type view nowadays.
This "summer olympics" simulation is as timely today as it was when it first came out. I still bristle with anger whenever my brother wins an event and the Soviet national anythem bellows forcefully from the SID soundchip as any patrotic commie-hating American would.
Solitaire. Minesweeper. Tetris.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
also, so nobody forgets, super smash bros, arguably 2d, is still around and kicking
Look on fileplanet for the free release of the game!
Say what you will, I've played this game off and on for ten years and it's still lots of fun.
What I've found interesting about the game is that it doesn't have a retro feel, or make me long for the "good ol' days"; because all the levels are randomly generated it's always fresh and new as if playing for the first time.
The Myth series have always been my personal favorite. Thanks to project magma, the Myth 2 engine is continually being updated too.
Both excellent space shooters with ace intro sequences, great graphics and HUGE ships.
People are still doing some interesting things with Doom/Doom II and Quake. Since they are open source they can adapt when new technologies come out. Plus the whole map/mod community has done a lot of interesting things with them.
So, the question is "Which classic games are better on a modern console?"
Usually it's the opposite - the emulation tends to be off on the modern commercial "classic collections". Not usually too far off to disturb the casual gamer, but those who remember the game will notice the difference.
Having said that, I do tend to like the classic games better when played on an emulator on the PC. Why? Because I can load/save state when I'm not particularly good at the game! (ie) Kid Icarus NES)
Maybe it's because they're about the only computer games I still have (or maybe they're the only ones I still have because I enjoy them over and over), but I can keep going back to Starcraft and Warcraft II when I need a gaming fix.
Even the campaign games are fun again after a year or so away from the game.
Alex.
I play it at 1280x1024 now and it still looks pretty good.
It's comic based graphics scale fine even to higher resolutions without looking crappy and it's still one of the best adventure games out there.
Still awesome.
Thank God for emulators!
I find that I still enjoy playing ...
;)
Baldur's Gate 1
Phantasmagoria
Jumpman
every once in a while
I'm still playing "make sound work in KDE"!
"Derp de derp."
As another poster said, Half-life looks very good with more modern machines. And the FPS/quality ratio of that game is outstanding IMO.
In the "There should be a remake" section: Rock and roll racing (SNES). Anyone knows any remake? I liked this game a lot.
I would say a FF4 and/or FF6 remake, but I think Square is already working on a FF4 remake huh? (That's funny, I held shift a little too long, and the result was "FF$", which is not an unrealistic representation...)
perception is reality
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
They simply cannot be beat, especially the special Christmas version with bouncing Santa hats....
Lemmings
3D lemmings
DHTML Lemmings
Three Squirrels
Out of this World still knocks my socks off.
For classic Ultima3-5 style play, you can't beat the Avernum trilogy. Coherent plotline(I'm looking at you, British), cool quests, gigantic world to explore. All done with an interface that will have you cursing your emulated dos box.
Btw, the Home of the Underdogs has all the old games.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Ms. PacMan, Dig Dug, Galaga, Q*Bert, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Centipede.
A lot of the old Coin-ops were bad, and the sequels of good ones (Super Pacman, Dig Dug 2, etc) were pretty bad too. But a few of them never get old. I can't help but play a classic when I find one at a bar or restaraunt. As long as it's not a hacked version, or someone decided to set the DIP switches to things I don't care for...
Let's not forget Tetris. Puzzle games never get old.
I think most RTS games have aged very well and have become more fun to play.
I have loaded on my laptop and still play:
StarCraft
Command and Conquer 2
Caesar 2
Civilization
System Shock 2(I think system shock has aged very well)
Plus a lot of others that I keep around. Low resources, so it plays on most anything (On my old laptop I used to play C&C2 a lot on the hour and forty-five minute train ride to work, and the battery would get down to half - and that's with using the CD as well).
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
System Shock 2 is absolutely amazing, and the original Deus Ex is still incredible. If you're interested in great games from yesteryear, go to http://www.the-underdogs.org/
Excellent story, great game.
I just finished replaying both Ultima 7 and Ultima 7.5 on my much more modern machine, thanks to Exult.
I'd say the Ultima series has aged very well. I had a blast replaying the game, and I was more immersed than I've been in a long time.
As for immersion... I'd have to give kudos to the Civ series... I still replay Civ II all the time, but Civ III has me so hooked my wife is ready to divorce me.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Has anyone tried playing this on there machines today. I put that thing on african swallow speed (very fast) and a year goes by so fast I cant stop it to turn the speed down.
I personally like several older games... but oftentimes don't have the time to play them anymore since work and school have taken over most of my time.
- Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire is still one of my all time favorites
- Total Annihilation with Core Contingency and Battle Tactics has a reserved place on my hard drive. Finding this game is a bit difficult, and the Commander's Pack can go for $70 bucks or more!
- SimCity 2000 is my obligatory SimCity love
- Transport Tycoon Deluxe enhanced with the unofficial TTDXPatch (http://ttdpatch.net/)
- Original Doom enhanced with either jDoom or one of the many other open source projects dedicated to improving it.
- Super Mario Brothers 3 for NES
- Galaxy 5000 for NES (difficult at first but it grows on ya)
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
Time pilot has to be one of the best shooters out there. Easy to learn, strangely addictive, with great control. It's MAME's killer app baby!!!
Dungeon Keeper II ('99 - Bullfrog). The graphics have really stood the test of time, in part, if not in full, b/c they didn't try to go realistic. The game-play is fun (and actually quite funny), though there are some compatibility issues. I can still hear the sound the little imps made when you slapped them around... to say nothing of the Dark Mistress. It doesn't require epic level hardware to run, either. I've heard Startopia is a good member of the DK/DKII tradition, though I've never played it.
//e Enhanced absolutely and without doubt qualifies them as "standing the test of time."
Battlezone II: Combat Commander ('99 - Pandemic Studios). Again with the graphics and the testing and the time. The game play is phenomenal, and will run on older hardware. The ability to control a single craft (FPS-style), or be the commander in charge of base installations, supply and overall strategy (RTS-style) was is still amazing and allowed for hours and hours (and hours and hours) of LAN gaming.
I don't think either has much in the way of ongoing community support, which is sad, as both stand in my mind as great games, always deserving to be installed
Then there's Ultima III and Ultima IV. The fact that my original ~20 year old 5.25" diskettes still run on an Apple
] D
I saw only *one* other poster mention System Shock, and that was the sequel. (Which was one of the best games ever created) The original was released the same year as DoomII and the original Marathon. The gameplay is similar to Marathon, but IMO a bit more in depth. What's more, the game was re-released with wonderful voice logs, which really really really add to the atmosphere.
Those of you with questionable morals might check out The Underdogs download to play it yourself.
--LordPixie
I always wished that someone would do a 3D-accelerated re-make of Betrayal at Krondor, a really nice but unappreciated RPG game that Sierra put out in 1993. It's got some primitive 320x200 software rendered 3d graphics, which could look a lot nicer on modern hardware.
:)
A great game regardless. It's based on the writings of Raymond Feist, who was highly involved in the game design, so it's a got a very rich game world and storyline. Aside from the main story you can just travel around and explore, lots of non-essential side quests and fun things to do. And it was released for free by Sierra awhile ago, so you don't have to feel guilty about downloading it
I can still go back and play any of these and have the same amount of fun and interest. Talk about replayability...Starcraft came out in 1998!
Those are probably two of the greatest games of all time.
Unreal Tournament -- It runs on what's now "low end" PCs, and has a better "feel" that UT 2003 (IMHO). Single player with bots just as enjoyable as multiplayer. And there's tons of maps and mods out there.
Civ 2 -- I had my girlfriend addicted to it. With the low hardware requirements, it'll run well under VMWare. Multiplayer support isn't great compared to modern games, but it's adequate.
Planescape:Torment -- I got it out of the bargain bin years after it had been released. Even after playing Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale, P:T's story and characters made it worthwhile.
Starcraft + Brood War -- Lots of fun, numerous options that favor different styles of play (defensive, offensive, etc). Game balance is pretty close to perfect once Brood War is installed.
I dusted Redneck Rampage off the other day. I forgot how fun it was. I can even play at full resolution now. Lester T Hobbes was the funniest boss character I've ever seen in a game. I couldn't beat him the first time around becasue I was too busy laughing at his "I am the law, Lester T Hobbes!" and "Don't shoot at me while I'm loading my guns!" Now if I can only find my cuss pack... "F#$% you and the horse you rode in on!"
I'm also still very happy playing my favorite FPS, Rise of the Triad. Non-FPS games that I think have aged well include Jet Moto, Twisted Metal II, Space Quest IV and V, Ms.PacMan, TRON, Galaga, and Buster Bros.
Here I am trying to avoid blabbing off about old video and computer games, trying my best not to look like a total geek, and then Slashdot goes and posts a story that there's no way in hell I can avoid replying to, practically begging me to waste half an hour talking about all the great, old, forgotten games that litter our flea markets and clog up eBay search results.
Aren't the answers to this one obvious by now? Let's get this over with as quickly as possible. I'll just hit the highlights, honest. I'll even leave out the obvious answers (Zeldas, Metroids, Marios and Sonics)
Rampart
The emulated version in Midway Arcade Treasures is best if you don't have an actual arcade machine. The SNES version, while different in lots of ways, is also great, as is the PC version (available on Home of the Underdogs).
M.U.L.E.
How many times have I talked my fool mouth off about this thing? It's just the best multiplayer computer game of all time, period. If you have enough mojo you can even play it, with four players, full-speed on an unmodded Dreamcast... or an Atari 800, if anyone remembers that far back.
Nethack and Rogue
I'm not trying to karma-whore I swear, despite the fact that almost any Nethack-related story is sure to make Slashdot's front page. These days Nethack seems to not qualify for "forgotten" status as much as previously. But lately I've come to a new level of appreciation for Rogue, which continues to surprise me with how much fun I have playing it, after almost twenty years, despite its tremendous difficulty. I finally had my first "winner" game last week! Rogue is starting to edge out Nethack in my estimation.
Some quickies (in case you're at a flea market and want to separate the chaff from the wheat, remember folks downloading ROMs is evil and wrong. Evil and wrong! You don't want to be evil and wrong... do you?):
Overlooked NES games: The Adventures of Lolo I-III, Air Fortress, Blaster Master, Bomberman II, Cobra Triangle, Goonies, The Guardian Legend, Rare's pinball emulations: High Speed and Pinbot, Life Force, R.C. Pro Am, Solar Jetman, Solomon's Key, Wizards & Warriors (the first one, not the sequels) and last, but NOT least by any means, ZANAC.
Overlooked SNES: ActRaiser, EarthBound, King Arthur's World, Kirby Superstar, Kirby's Dream Course, Spindizzy Worlds, Ogre Battle (yes, I consider it overlooked), Q*Bert 3 (awesome music, arguably better than the arcade game), and Uniracers.
Overlooked Genesis: Flicky, General Chaos, Herzog Zwei, Kid Chameleon, King's Bounty (woefully under appreciated), Junction, Starflight (the game's much more accessable on the Genesis than PC), the Thunderforce series, ToeJam & Earl (!), Todd's Adventures in Slime World (better on the Lynx with eight players, but honestly, who knows either people all with Lynxes and copies of the same game these days?), Zany Golf and Zoom (both these last ones originally for the Amiga).
the first system shock is heads and shoulders above the second, esp. with the voice logs (excellent voice acting). I've tried system shock 2 a few times but every single time I gave up bored a few levels in, nowhere near as immersive (or creepy) as the first.
:(
Total Annihilation is another game that aged really well, I'd like to try SMAC but nobody seems to sell the Linux version anymore and the win32 one seems out of print as well
-- the cake is a lie
Elite is the grandaddy of them all. It's a 3D 1st person space flight sim/trading game where you can go from pirate to slave trader to bounty hunter to rock miner and back. There are 8 galaxies, each with several hundered solar systems to explore. The sheer variety of ships and missions is amazing - from destroying stolen military ships, to capturing Thargoid alien attack craft, saving refugees from supernovas, evading police, docking with space stations, clearing asteroid belts, skimming suns for fuel, malfunctioning hyperspace untis, civil wars, and edible arts graduates.
It's from 1984 and originally ran in 32k of memory.
X-com: UFO Defense
Every game designer (and gamer, for that matter) worth his salt should know and love it. An old blab on it:
X-com is essentially a simulation that asks a simple question, a perfect question to build a game around: what would the practicalities of defending the Earth from alien invasion be? The beauty is that it's not trying to build a game around a story, a fundamentally linear endeavor, but that it uses invasion only as a metaphor for a deeply engaging simulation. Every part of the game is relevant to every other part, and all of them are self-canonizing. They just don't make 'em like this anymore.
X-com is comprised of three parts, each one of which could have been a game in and of itself: research/base management/building, UFO incursion management (receiving funds from each country based on how well you protect it), and the excellent 3rd person tactical combat (in fact, 'Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate' is an entire game based on the X-com combat system.) The genius of X-com is that all three of these systems are keenly interrelated. You must shoot down UFOs in order to have access to technology to research at your bases, which then provides you better means to shoot down UFOs and better weapons for dealing with alien landings, and so forth. Both of these systems, the base and the salvage/ground assault, require large amounts of money to maintain and operate, which is provided primarily by funds allocated by the various countries of the world. If you allow UFOs to go unchecked and unchallenged in a country, that country will pull funding.
So you have this gardening aspect; you have to choose where to plant X-com bases, find the most 'fertile' soil (the countries that provide the most income) and if your base grows you can reap the fruit. Then you try to choose the next most fertile place for your next base, or you can use the game's graphs of alien activity to try and find an area that is overgrown with weeds (aliens), and till it and make it grow. If you leave an area untended, the weeds will invade other parts of your garden and you'll be overgrown and lose.
Another exemplary aspect of X-com is the character system. The characters, by being visually generic and using randomly generated names, present themselves as blank emotional canvases to the player. Much like The Sims, to play the game is to wield the brush; the character's actions in the game become their personality and therefore are far more powerful than any preconceived story could be. The game is the story. I still recall with great sadness the moment when Shigeo Akira, my most seasoned veteran commander, was gunned-down from behind by a lowly Sectoid soldier. In my opinion, there's no higher aim than the kind of emotional involvement I've had with some of my X-Com soldiers.
I'd heartily recommend X-Com to anyone, especially game designers. It's one of the greatest games ever created. I still can't believe they managed to make so many seemingly complex and disparate parts sing together in such perfect harmony. I'm floored by it each time I play.
Swink
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction ...Unbelievably popular. The thing still sells between 2-3 copies a week at the store a friend of mine works at.
The game is almost 8 years old. Amazing.
Yay, Tempest. Don't forget Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar and Tempest 3000 on Nuon.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
I remember the original Delta Force game from NovaLogic to be extremely sluggish on the current hardware of it's day; iirc, it's engine wasn't fully 3D accelerated. I'd like to know how it would manage on the latest and greatest hardware today.
I'm sure there are other games similar to this that were resource hogs during their day that would be interesting to hear about how they fare on hardware now.
For my money, there's no more intense game out there to this day than Robotron. And, I have real joysticks for my PSX so I can play Robotron for real! (Thumbpads do not cut it.)
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Check out this free implementation of it....
http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/
I never played the original, but this game was really fun!
Master of Orion 2 is absolutely one of the best games of all time. The playability is awesome, and it still looks OK, even after 8 years. It came out in 1996, I think. It wouldn't play under Win2K, but I kept a dual boot of 98 around just for MOO2.
Happily, it plays GREAT under XP. Killer game. I mean, you can blow up planets! Still on the HDD after all these years. You can still pick up a copy in the bargain bins for about $10-15.
Don't confuse MOO2 with Master of Orion 3! WORST Sequel EVER! MOO3 was so bad I deleted the cracked version off of my drive! Free is too much for that one.
- Think of it as evolution in action -
Especially games 2 and 3.
There's something freshly imaginative about them that makes a lot of today's games feel like rehashes (like Woodman's mechanized forest, or the Hard Hats in the mine quarry setting of Hard Man's stage).
From the new school:
Simcity 4
Civ 3
Mechwarrior 4
Sims whatever
but the best video game ever was by far.... JUMPMAN.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
System shock 2
I've played this game recently, and i swear to God it's the most inmersive FPS i've ever played, not to mention the only "horror" game that actually managed to spook me. My studies suffered while i was finishing that game.
It's graphics are ok (a bit dated, through they look great over 1024x768), and the sound is *excellent*, even on todays' standarts, and creates an great atmosphere for the game. Nothing was more horrifying that listening those damn monkeys coming near you and not being able to spot them...
By all means, if you haven't tried it, do so.
I just recently introduced my 10 year old niece to the old original Adventure game. Now every time I visit I have to set my laptop up to let her play.
No graphics, no action, just plain brain stimulating text.
I'd forgotton how much fun it was to play
"You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully."
Alpha centauri, on my p1.6, at 1280x1024 is immensely satisfying.
I'd also like to throw a vote to FreeSpace2, which I just re-installed, and my 9600 just toasts that game. With all details on, this game is still beautiful.
Other games I make a point to re-install after hardware updates are NHL2002, which will forever hold a spot in my heart, and if I can get slightly on the shady side of legality here, re-playing various N64 games via Project64, and ps1 Final Fantasys through PSXemu has been quite rewarding. You wouldn't think that upping the resolution would do much for a game designed with a fixed rez in mind, but it, along with some of the filters really clears out the jaggies. You'll learn to disdain Slippy all over again.
Recent games which I know are going to go in the re-re-install list are Republic: The revolution, and Neverwinter nights.
The PC versions of Driver and Porshe unleashed would also be in this list, if XP would deign to run them. I'm not about to set up a win98 partition.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
The newer systems make all three of the original Civilization games (Sid Meyers) so much better. on my 133 system on the largest map size the computer turns could take as much as 15 minutes. now I finish them in under a minute. makes for a much better and more involved game all around. The Quest For Glory series by Sierra are also still great games, and now I can turn the graphics all the way up
The Early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese
Deus Ex's system requirements were unreasonable when the game came out, but the GOTY edition on just about any modern hardware runs great - same with Morrowind, that game on highest settings can still tax a pretty strong computer.
Serious Sam and Serious Sam II don't seem to have aged at all, and run spectacularly well on modern hardware.
Total Annihilation is the timeless game. I've been playing it once a month since it came out. Graphics rival any RTS up until WarcraftIII or C&C:G, game play beats both since there is no resouce whoring.
Quake 3 amazed me when I got a modern graphics card, it was VERY pretty. Same for the original UT, though, with a decent modern system it pulls a good FPS, and is still very fun (without the weapon nerfs!).
Of course Civ2, which I think is superiour to Civ3, is still VERY playable.
And of course Fallout1/2, which I still install and play from time to time.
And Dungeon Keeper 2, with the D3d patch. That game still can keep me amused for hours.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
This is one that didn't get enough attention when it was released ~5 years ago. It was really beautiful back then on my old P3-750 and an original 32MB Radeon. I found it in a bargain bin the other day re-released with the original MDK for $5.00.
If you're looking for a goregeous 3d platformer that will scream on today's mainstream hardware, you can't do much better. It's all OpenGL, so it's probably an easier one to get running in Linux (although I can't vouch for that myself), has a good storyline, incredibly large outdoor environments, and a lot of humor. The farting aliens still crack me up.
If it matters to you, MDK2 was done by Bioware, better known for KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Baldur's Gate, etc. This type of game may seem a little unusual for them, but believe me, the quality and design are top-notch.
So I don't know if you'd consider it a classic game as such...when I think classic I think asteroids and Tempest. But it definitely worth the bargain bin price and you'll get 15 or so hours of play out of it.
... when someone mentions MOO3. Have you seen Galactic Civilizations? :)
The Tlog - a technology blog
I only got around to playing Thief 1 and 2 a few months ago - never really thought much about them, but saw them both for about $7/each on the used shelf at EBGames and decided to give them a shot.
I had figured they would be fairly dumb sneaking-type games - rob this house, now rob this larger house with a few guards, now rob this mansion with more alert guards, etc. You know - a dumb shooter turned into a dumb stealth game.
Man was I ever wrong! Thief 1 and 2 have some of the best storylines I have ever, ever encountered in gaming. And yeah, the c.1997 graphics may look a bit clunky to the modern gamer, but they're certainly passable. And in exchange for putting up with that, you'll get some of the best storytelling in the gaming industry (and some great gameplay, too!)
Next, I'm going to find out if System Shock 1 and 2 can stand up to the same scrutiny...
Anyone want to have a go @ FFA? ^_^
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The board game Risk has survived in both original and computerized forms. It's still as much fun as it was back in the day (assuming you have some good people to play with). Of course, I am a little biased, I like Risk so much that I created a videogame version of it. See my sig for details.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
Dangerous Dave!
No one remembers Mario Kart for the Nintendo 64? To this day, nothing beats it for 4-players-on-1-screen-fun!
Well I think counter-strike after 4 plus years is still the highest played online game in the world should definately be on this list. DiabloII also close to 4 years old is still very highly played. Starcraft close to 6 years now is the biggest game in Korea, so popular that tournaments are televised.
Games for which stats are not available. Supermario Bros the oringinal NES game is still alot of fun to play. And back to the atari 2600 days Combat is still alot of fun to play with a friend with all the different styles of play available by just changing some simple rules.
Judgeing from all the internet talk you would think that Duke Nuke em forever is a hugely popular game over the past 4 years
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Or rather, Age of Kings/Conquerors Expansion is a 2D DirectX 5 game that still plays better than any other RTS, including the recent 3D RTS games. I dabbled with Age of Mythology, Rise of Nations, etc. and went back to Age of Kings.
Half-Life is still one of the greatest games ever made, and the mods on that ancient are competitive with everything short of Far Cry and Doom III.
-m
Admittedly, this is because Valve and the mod team have kept updating it, but under the hood, CounterStrike is still the Quake II engine.
I believe the poster was looking for games that got BETTER with new hardware, not just stayed fun due to good gameplay.
I've played CounterStrike on and off for about four years. Every patch or new version (Condition Zero) has brought improved texture resolution, better sounds, and more eye candy to keep the graphics card humming. It's now possible to play 1600x1200 with all sorts of graphics options cranked to the maximum. And since the gameplay mechanics haven't changed much, it's still fun.
James
(I'm going to ignore this article's request specifically for games that would objectively look better now than they did back then, believing that this is irrelevant to their enjoyment today. Rather, these look better subjectively, due to the fact that there have been few if any attempts to replicate them, or perhaps none sufficient to surpass them.)
1 .shtml gives an amusing overview), it looks even better.
h ock_rebirth.htm)
Master of Orion 2.
In fact, now that there's a lousy sequel (http://www.quartertothree.com/reviews/moo3/moo3-
Star Control 2
Nothing quite like it has been even attempted since. (Save a lousy, almost irrelevant sequel.) There's a sourceforge project to port it to modern systems(http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
System Shock 2.
It beat Half Life to the stores, yet actually did a lot of things better (well, besides sales). Still considered by many to be one of the scariest games ever made. There's a graphics patch out there called Rebirth. (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/etienne.aubert/sshock/ss
Wizardry 8
These days, virtually all commercial computer RPGs are either D20 games (AD&D or otherwise), or Diablo clones. Both good and bad ones are starting to feel like generic clones of each other. Even after three years, Wizardry 8 was just about the last decent stat-heavy dungeon crawler. For something different.
And of course since I'm trying to recommend games that not everyone has played, I'll throw Planescape Torment in there. There's even a completely unknown unofficial patch for it that makes it seem better today:
http://www.accesswave.ca/~cthorpe/
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
To get Xcom running on modern hardware: http://www.xcomufo.com/x1faq.html/
Friends have been telling me about these games for years. I just picked them up, and they are (even now) really impressive, fun, funny games.
I would also have to rank Starcraft and Ms. Pac-Man up there. Super Mario Brothers, SMB3, Super Mario World, and the first 3 Sonic games are also standouts in my mind.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
Solitaire.
Several LucasArts adventures have aged very well: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 (I don't mention Grim Fandango because it is too recent to say it has "aged" - but it is a brilliant game). Of course, the reason they have aged well is that nowadays the rare adventures that get produced generally suck.
It's sad in what shape the game was left off.
Just check the list of bugs and technical issues left with the last patch they did:
http://gulbsoft.de/faq.latest.html
Could have been a great game, but instead EA cut off funding early, cut off funding for a patch to get rid of all those bugs, basically destroyed the game.
TA has gotten better with age, with its numerous extensions (Core contingency, Battle tactics) and 3rd party units (TAUCP, UTASP, Uberhack for instance), artificial intelligences, tools like the mutator and the replayer, etc.
It still looks pretty cool on large resolutions (1280x1024 for example), and the battles with thousands of units are even more exciting than ever.
This game makes perfect use of your proc cycles. It's a pleasure to see.
And it's the best RTS ever.
All three still have a great look to them, and awesomely engaging gameplay.
The very first one. There's just something about being able to spend all of your time slaying monsters and making money.... However, I would say that Super Zelda was awesome too....
For me, the biggest thing that "ages" a game isn't the graphics or the gameplay, but rather how you control the game. A lot of old games have interfaces that are unwieldly or awkward, and directly interfere with your enjoyment of the game.
Since I can't think of any extreme examples at the moment, let's take System Shock for an example. Still a playable and highly enjoyable game (I played it for the first time last year), but you can't say that the interface is intuitive by modern standards. I mean, one hand on the keyboard for movement and look, with the other controlling a mouse pointer? Plus all the extra buttons? System Shock 2 had a much more elegant solution.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
There are many other titles I would suggest that have already been covered by others - so I won't rehash them. Instead, I'll make one offering:
r / - it looks absolutely gorgeous. Add in any of the other mods out there, and you've got a smooth, beautiful, gargantuan RPG.
Morrowind.
If you have an ATI-based 3d accelerator that supports TruForm, and you download the Morrowind FPS optimizer - http://morrowind.nm.ru/Morrowind%20FPS%20Optimize
I'm enjoying excellent view distances on my 9800 pro/Athlon 2500+/512mb RAM. Works like a dream.
InThane
It was 1984 and one of the guys in the dorm had a Radio Shack TRS-80. He bought the first game in the second Zork Trilogy: Enchanter.
That game taught me how to type (granted the words I learned were useless: "Frotz", "Gnusto", and "Rezrov").
Those Infocom text adventures hold up great (the H2G2 game is close to being as good as the book).
My father is a blogger.
...or really just about any well-made Nintendo 64 game (like say Perfect Dark, best SF spy shooter evar). Playing under emulation at 1600x1200 with bilinear filtering on a Radeon 9800 and a 21" screen is just a dream. I can't even play Goldeneye on the TV anymore cause the resolution is so low. Perfect Dark especially looks great even when played at 5x the size it was designed for, the textures and effects hold up very well.
Good emulators: SixtyForce (OSX), Project 64 (Win).
The orginal X-COM: UFO Defense. Best game of its type ever made. Still play it even today! Another good pc game is Subwar 2050. Man those two ate up so much of my time...
At least we have a more reliable way of saving games. I cant count the number of times that ive lost all of my save data on an NES or SNES cartridge. The last time was with my Final Fantasy 2(IV) cartridge. I got about halfway and lost all of the data. Thankfully i've had better luck with a memory card in this department. At least long enough to finish the game.
"Damn TV, you've ruined my imagination, just like you've ruined my ability to -- to, um...uh...oh well."
Asteroids in the original arcade table-top version with pizza greased glass and Big-Gulp rings.
BTW: Most previous posts are NOT classic games! Quake 3, Chrono Trigger, anything-64!?!? COME ON PEOPLE! Sure, "classic" is a subjective term, but can't we at least agree that classic games refer to pre-90's games!?!
Some good examples would be Megaman, Tetris, or Metroid (not Super-Metroid). If these other titles start showing up as so-called "classics" then that means I'm getting old and that just can't be! Who cares about fancy-schmancy 64-bit graphics and sound!? My 8-bit NES still kicks ass with all the latest titles. That 3-D crap is a fad and it will never look smooth!
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
I noticed Conker's Bad Fur Day (N64, one of the last) hasn't been mentioned. The humor, multiplayer, bosses, (The Great Mighty Poo, who will, apparently, throw his shit at you) and multiplayer...squirrels v. teddies CTF with turrets, with teddies as bots on "bastard" skill...ah, those were the good old days.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
The question wasn't to list games you STILL LIKE today, but rather which games TECHNICALLY run better on today's hardware than they originally did.
Was a great precursor to the RTS games we all play today, and there was something strangely satisfying about bringing on nuclear winter if you were getting your ass handed to you (and the game you were playing allowed nukes).
Simple strategy, good game play, lots of fun, and it's still being played.
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
Originally released seven years ago, in 1997. Since then the editing community has made levels that far surpass the original levels, has made mods that completely change the game, and even discovered hidden support for 16-bit textures in the engine. It's still being edited today. Just check out www.massassi.net.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I just loaded it up to see which of us was correct, and sure enough, it tops out at 1024x768.
Even now though, knowing I am probably wrong, I can't help but think I got the game past 1024x768, by accident if nothing else. The reason I think this is the center terminal, where it shows stats, at 800x600, there is only one terminal, at 1024x768 there are 2 terminals, and I can picture in my minds eye seeing those 2 terminals at a higher rez, with way too small text.
Or maybe it was just a wonderful dream.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Check out all of those Unreal engine games that have come out over the years. Many of them were developed under the assumption that everyone would be picking up 3DFX brand hardware to play on, and thus plenty of people would be able to handle games that pulled of a ton of crazy high-poly effects. Unfortunately most people's systems couldn't cope with the games, and great games like "The Wheel of Time" and "Undying" flopped because nobody wanted to touch the Unreal engine with Nvidia cards.
Any of the various Quake ]|[ based games is also worth looking at. Raven's Soldier of Fortune games are badass, and the Elite Force games got great reviews.
He sorta brought them up to modern standards.
Internet play is now supported, which beats the hell out of the null modem that I needed with Perfect General on my 486.
The graphics are dated, but the interface has improved, and you can now play at a decent resolution, i.e. see more of the map.
Speaking of interfaces, if you've ever tried to go back and play eg. Ultima IV, you realize how incredibly annoying those interfaces were, compared to what we're used to now. I can't play those games any more, they're too freaking annoying.
Star Control 2. If you've played it, you know, if not, the open source re-make is making good progress. A shame that #3 was so bad.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
I have been playing rogue since before I could read. That was a great game. I also enjoyed Kroz and commander keen.
North and south. It simply rules :) Why can't someone remake it with network support .)
Still causes fights with my brother-in-law, and can still result in a chair being thrown when calgary upsets the kings...
My two cents worth boils down to the next two words: Scorched Earth.
Laziness is a virtue, anyone who bothers to tell you otherwise, is clearly lacking it.
Still a challenge. Bitch to configure the sound sometimes...
I am VERY surprised that Blizzard isnt doing a Starcraft 2 on the Warcraft III engine...
It would've been great @ 1280x1024...
InThane
I thought from an A/V standpoint, Pac-Man still stands tall. It looks great, cool music and sound effects...not only is the gameplay solid (and the GC's PacMan Vs. is fantastic fun for 4 people) but I really think its blue on black board and overall look stands the test of time.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Call me a Star Wars fanboy if you must, but Dark Forces is the first "classic" game that comes to mind (after the obvious ones and those already stated, like the Doom and Quake series, and Half-Life).
A good storyline, dovetails with the Star Wars mythos nicely, with some special guest appearances that made me grin. Plus, it was most satisfying to finally beat the final boss.
"I don't get it." -- ObviousGuy
And may I be the first (second? tenth?) to say "Well, Starcraft was OK, but I always preferred Total Annihilation". I still dig the latter out for a good ol' RTS FutureTankFest every now and then, and I've always regretted not buying the Core Contingency expansion pack when it was still available.
I bought Warcraft III after reading rave reviews, too, but I have to say it was up there with Neverwinter Nights on the "So what was all the hype about?" scale. I did play through the Baldur's Gate series several times, though...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Anco's Player Manager
Wings
Railroad Tycoon
Recently installed UAE, loaded up my old Amiga disks.. had amazing amounts of fun. Back in the days, video games were video games, not just video.
Sim City
Red Alert
Classic games where you can set your own goals, especially Sim City. I hate those predefined narrow missions, games are more fun when there isn't a clear goal and you can set your own demands. Sometimes I want the biggest population, at other times stunning land values.. I still haven't explored all the possibilities in Sim City after all these years, despite the fact that Loki's version runs fine under FreeBSD.
Did anybody RTFA/P?
The poster was asking what games which were choppy or nasty on yesterday's hardware stand the test of time on modern hardware. You can reference Tempest or Asteroids or Chrono Trigger all you want but these games don't scale upward. They're locked on static hardware.
A lot of games of yesteryear claimed that they were designed with tomorrow's hardware in mind, that their highest quality settings with unachievable on then-modern computers. Well, have they hit that peak? For instance, I remember Shiny braggging about the millions of polys in Messiah characters, how it'd scale up. Does it?
We're going to be asking this same question once machines that are capable of running Doom 3 in "ultra" mode become commonplace.
I find this a shame as the game has a wonderfully intricate play-style and meta-game for those who stuck around to master it.
For those who just couldn't wrap themselves around the gameplay, but still have the box hidden in a closet somewhere, the modding/mapmaking community has done some incredible work that produced entirely different games.
These days, you can download a new RPG, RTS, FPS or any number of uncategorizable games each day off of BNet which keeps things incredibly fresh.
Grand Prix Legends! It only requires a Pentium 90. Many of you are talking about games which have lasted because they were simple. This game has one of the best physics models of any game to date! Not to mention, you can now download patches for it to update the graphics. The latest and greatest tracks and patches have enough detail to bring a geforce4 to its knees! Heck, try the latest demo. It is free, and you can add as many tracks to it as you want. I think blackholemotorsports has it. It is AWESOME! It is the BEST LOOKING, MOST REALISTIC, and MOST ADDICTIVE racing sim I have ever played (although Nascar Legends is good too). The best part, you can use your P4 in a Lan race while your friend is on your old P1!
Just about any Infocom game. You don't even have to sit and wait for the floppy drive anymore.
The original Super Mario Kart, please. I bought a SNES recently, for playing Mario Kart and nothing else. Well worth 20 quid on eBay.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
i was born in 85, and in the subsequent 5 years, Mario Bros. - the original- the eternal - assisted my transformation into the geek i am today. i am eternally in its debt. =) also, how much does Mario Bros Rock? its fanastic (that's right, fanastic)
sigSEGV - doy!
Custers Revenge
Bungie's Myth series still hits the spot. Unit graphics are sprite-based (but detailed enough that myrmidions sp? collapse into a little cloud of dust when defeated) but map textures are still lovely.
It screams on new machines and I'd stack gameplay against anything released today. Nothing in gaming has been more satisfying than being literally the last man standing on a blood- and gristle-spattered hill.
I was actually happy, sort of, Bungie sold to Microsoft since I thought their games deserved a wider audience.
Scorched Earth is still one of the greatest games known to humanity. crappy graphics, elementary sound, no plotline, somewhat stilted gameplay, and the biggest damn arsenal you could imagine. (I still remember that in the old version the nuke blast took up 9 inches diameter of my computer's screen.)
I have little to say, but even less to lose by saying it.
Anyone who remembers this classic game will tell you the same - no other platform/puzzle game has ever come close!
In Gods, your goal was to traverse the forgotten city and gain immortality. This involved killing lots of monsters and solving various puzzles. There were many ways to finish the game, and many secrets to find, but you could never get stuck as if you seemed to be lost the game would help you out with a handy key or step up. The weapon system was complex and clever too - different weapons had different uses around the levels and you could mix and match as you pleased.
Even now, the graphics are pretty good, as is the music ("Into the Wonderful" by Nation XII IIRC). It stands the test of time because the ideas in it are timeless, something very, very rare in 2D platform games.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Turn based strategy where you strive to be the one and true God over all the land. Steep learning curve, cheesy graphics, complex game startup instructions and foreign spelled names can make it difficult to get into, but once you do, it's an incredible game, if you're into that sort of strategy thing.
AZspot
I think the problem with TA:Kingdoms was simply the gameplay.
In fairness, it had a lot to live up to. The original TA was, at the time, in a class of its own in terms of unit diversity, simple but effective resource system, tech trees, etc. By taking the name, we expected similar things from TA:Kingdoms, but somehow it just never had the same "bang" factor.
In TA, there was always that moment of horror the first time a superior opponent managed to build a group of level 2 units, and they appeared on the edge of your base and started taking out your HLTs before you had any serious firepower to counter them. In TA, when I'm hitting an area hard, I get an image of devastation, as provided by a nuke making it through, or better still several heavy artillery units pounding a base from half a screen away in a desperate race against the superior air force your foe is sending to take them out. When I'm building a base, I want the satisfaction of seeing all his little level one lemmings coming into range just as my Annihilator is completed, and then watching a whole attack wave wiped out as my investment in the right unit at the right time pays off.
TA:Kingdoms just doesn't have any of this. It had so much potential. I'm a fan of "sword and sorcery", and of RTSes in general, and was eagerly awaiting it. And then what did I get? I got a cannon tower with all the punching power of a five year old to guard my castle, armies full of units who couldn't fight unless they could get on top of the other guy, and an interesting spell system that somehow never quite worked. There should have been awesome battles as my knights rode out to fight the wizard unleashing fireballs and ice storms upon -- or maybe over -- the walls of my castle. Instead, we got rather limp hack and slash. They seemed to be on the right lines, as magical units could to some extent have their automatic behaviour coded in, but they just weren't smart enough and if you left one in the wrong place for a couple of seconds, a baby would come and eat it. Whatever it is that makes a great game, TA had it, and TA:Kingdoms somehow didn't.
I'm still waiting for my "perfect" RTS, but one thing that's certain is that the gameplay will be far more important than the fine details of graphics and sound. Personally, I'd go for something either high-tech or mythical with a few key features:
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I just downloaded these puppies last week and played them. They sure seemed a lot longer and more involved 20 years ago.
I'd love to see someone take the original and add some graphics to them.
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/ltoi.html
Still sucking away quarters in laundromats worldwide.
All the Pac-Man, Pong, and Sim City clones.
There some oldies that would be worth looking at that actually fall in line with the original question.
Strike Commander (which was totaly unplayable on any existing system when released)
Falcon 3.0 (again, way aheady of the hardware for the day)
Mechwarrior or Heavygear games.
The abject failure of this idea was also a fantastic game for its day. Mechwarrior (the first), when I last played that on a 486 it was so incredibly fast that the screen would flicker and you'd either die or run off the map.
"Now revolutionary game designer SID MEIERS sets his sights on the real world battlefield!"
Seriously, what sort of game has units that 'slide' from tile to tile rather than walk/move realistically. Combine that with a blocky, poorly implemented fog of war and you have the Lamest Game of the Century!
How could we forget Dungeon Keeper 2?!
Digging tunnels through the underground, filling them with your minions. Looking down on your minions or put your soul in their bodies and see through their eyes. Defeat the goodly lords and corrupt the land.
I pull this off my bookcase about once every year or two for a play through. Plays even better on newer machines, although can take a bit of fidgeting to run.
Where's 3? I've written about 40 pages of a game doc for it but gotten no further. ; -)
One of the games I've found interesting recently for this recently is Ryzom. While I haven't had the time to really follow the development of the beta (not much into MMOs currently due to time allotment etc). One thing that caught my eye is their use of an open source engine called NeL, which is primarily a graphics (OpenGL, and Direct3D I think) engine. Along with some other stuff.
:-)
There's a few other projects on their page by third parties, and a free tech demo. A co-worker in the beta who's an avid online gamer has said the graphics in Ryzom were definitely above average, if not the gameplay yet. Possibly worth following to see if anyone takes advantage of the source and does anything besides cheat.
Full Throttle? Come on the game is totally linear. There is no replay value. I enjoyed it but, once you beat there is nothing left.
the original release of deus ex did play horrible on many machines. it came out just as the 3dfx cards (3000 was what i had at the time) were really starting to lose ground to nvidia. so many people had nvidia which didnt support glide.
deus ex on glide was a pleasure right out of the box. this is because it was built on unreal (or was it UT?).
although, deus ex after several patches did start to play well with non-glide cards. but it took some time. a few montsh iirc.
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
This game happily chews up all the processing power you can throw at it, and asks for more.
When it came out in '98 it looked good, now it looks better, and every CPU improvement makes it look even better - never knew clouds could be so processor intensive !
I recently went out and bought an old N64 just to be able to play my old games of mario karts 64 again. I never played MK on the SNES but on the N64 it's been a constant companion - i know those courses so well they appear as places in my dreams. and those pesky AIs still can beat me occasionally - especially when playing two player grand prix with my gal. for my money it's a classic. i also agree with the poster way above somwhere who listed tempest - that was the best coin op game ever.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it