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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
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.
Solitaire. Minesweeper. Tetris.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
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.
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.
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.
Still awesome.
Thank God for emulators!
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!
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
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
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
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
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.
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 -
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.
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.
... when someone mentions MOO3. Have you seen Galactic Civilizations? :)
The Tlog - a technology blog
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/
Solitaire.
Driver does work on XP. I've never been able to get past the qulifying mission, so I can't tell if there's a later crash bug, but it seems to work fine, and looks great as well.
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.
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.
Get a 6 dollar "cap kit" from www.therealbobroberts.com, get out the soldering iron and replace them. If it's your first kit, it'll take 2 hours and then you'll be playing Tempest again, they way it should be played. Vector games on raster monitors make baby Jesus cry.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
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.
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.
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 am VERY surprised that Blizzard isnt doing a Starcraft 2 on the Warcraft III engine...
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.
The original Super Mario Kart, please. I bought a SNES recently, for playing Mario Kart and nothing else. Well worth 20 quid on eBay.
Still sucking away quarters in laundromats worldwide.