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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.
They simply cannot be beat, especially the special Christmas version with bouncing Santa hats....
Lemmings
3D lemmings
DHTML Lemmings
Three Squirrels
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).
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
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 -