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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.
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
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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 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.
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."
I have seen Tempest 2000, but all these other variations as well as other cabinets don't have the feel of the original. It's probably due to my old age, too.
When I first saw a Tempest machine in the early 1980s, it was broken. I was intrigued by the black, uniquely wedge-shaped, unpowered cabinet. As I went home, I thought about how the game would look, given the simple controls and cool side panel graphics. I had spent a lot of money on that very same cabinet years down the road. One day, many many years later, I returned and found it was gone from the floor. It was broken again. Only this time, I got the opportunity to buy it. A strange feeling, being able to capture a part of one's childhood.
I don't play the cabinet anymore. Its display's capacitors have long degraded but thank goodness for (Mac)MAME.
It's one of my favorite games of all time, but unfortunately it hasn't aged well, since it seems impossible get it to run on a Windows machine. Now where is the Exult version of System Shock?
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.
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.
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...
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.