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Time-Tested Gaming
1up has an interesting piece looking at games that have withstood the test of time, aging gracefully where others have not. Titles discussed include the Korean powerhouse Starcraft, Nethack, and the Sim series. From the article: "It's hard to label which games are suitable for repeated lovin' and which are forgettable. One gamer's Halo is another gamer's Superman 64. But when it comes to firing up a favorite, some adventures hold the same appeal they did when they were released years ago -- and jumping in for the fortieth round is every bit as pleasurable as the first time."
has been released for practically every game medium
I mean, sure, it is one of the first real games for the PC (Right?) and it runs on a myriad of systems but I never got the allure of it, and I'm a RPGer myself. Can anyone say what really draws them to this game? I'd like to know.
Not an adventure, but IMHO definitely the best game around: Civ II. I don't know how many months (man months, not calendar months) I've spent playing it...
The first game I thought of was Zelda, but it was nowhere to be found in this article.
I have followed Zelda games ever since I was a child, and even today, tons of people follow it. It was simply a perfect game. There's a community online that makes their own quests with an engine:
http://www.zeldaclassic.com/
Also, a person has redone the original NES rom and made another game that's fantastic on its own:
http://rha.cymoro.com/zelda3c/ZeldaC/
On the other hand, I think there's a hidden appeal to the higher-quality 2D artwork of yesteryear. The glory days of 16-bit artwork like the stuff featured in Chrono Trigger will always look cool in my eyes, where first-gen 3D console titles will stick out as primitive and likely ugly.
I still find myself firing up Red Alert, Tie Fighter, Sonic 3 or even Worms 2 time after time.
Red Alert is a kind of game that still ends up fun, even after eight years. Those times when you turn around and go for a new kind of rush, taking down a Tesla coil with dozens of infantry, or just reliving tank rushes for the sheer hell of it!
Tie Fighter had all the elements of a successful space fighter game, and allowed you to play as the bad guys. That in itself made it fun to play.
Sonic 3 might be a bit different for me, since it was the very first game I played, so I obviously see it with rose-tinted glasses. Somehow, it got the formula just right and it keeps you going throughout, pure brilliance.
Worms 2 should never age. The cartoony graphics, the silly voices and the brilliant weapons all come together to make something truly fun.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
Yoshi's Island is one of those games my GF has bought for SNES, GBA(i think), and she'll probably want the DS one as well. It's just one of those fun games that's really easy to play.
"1up has an interesting piece looking at games that have withstood the test of time, aging gracefully where others have not."
Solitaire!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoDonPachi
About 9 years old and still an example of shooting perfection. The graphics still hold up fairly well. The sequel is great too, but I still come back to play a few credits every now and then... and for some reason get better each time.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
Although, both Tetris Attack on the SNES, and Panel De Pon on the GBA (part of Dr. Mario and PDP) are excellent versions of Panel De Pon. Now lets all play together, under the clearest of -blue skies-. :)
Hmm, here is another list that might resonate more.
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*Oldies but goodies
Go
Chess
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*More recent classics
Civ II
Risk
Seawolf
Monolopy/Checkers (Just hear me out on this one)
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The pattern that makes these popular and still "Fun To Play!" is that it requires you to use your brain and think strategy. (And to a lessor extent this applies to Monopoly/Checkers)
Sudoku is a recent blip on this theme.
Any game that allows you to beat any other opponent based solely on your mental ability will be coveted by the non-jocks of the world, (and we ALWAYS outnumber the jocks.)
It doesn't require physical skill. (Which is why most FPS games are mere blips in the pan, would you really devote 20+hrs to Wolfenstien3D again these days?)
One brain vs another, priceless domination.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
That game still kicks ass after 10 years.
ResidntGeek
Transport tycoon is fun to this day, and with OpenTTD its only funner. The scope for track design is amazing and if you were ever into toy trains then this is the ultimate. There are always challenges you can set yourself, you could for instance only use ships. Or limit yourself entirely to passenger cargo.
The scope of that game is amazing.
I may agree with a lot of what Nadia's written, but I think the final page has the most unfortunate linking of titles and graphics around.
"A well-developed game will live for years." next to a picture of KOTOR 2, a game derided as being rushed to market (rather than being allowed to percolate to perfection), complete with locked-up content showing off the mostly-unfinished proper ending. At least Halo 2 had most of the bugs fixed before the "SEE YOU IN HALO 3" ending flashed up, while Kotor2 would often leave gamers stuck in the floor.
I'd argue that KOTOR2 is a textbook example of how to kill a good game release. KOTOR1 didn't seem to suffer for its April/May release time frame, yet the publisher of KOTOR2 demanded a holiday release. And release they did -- a turd!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
the heading for the nethack section was (and i quote) "@ versus the evil %".
'%' in nethack represents food, not any enemy. sure, when enemies die their corpses are considered food, but still not quite the point.
'C','c','&', or pretty much any other character on the keyboard would have sufficed, but I think the title should have been "@ versus the evil @".
But maybe that's just me.
Come on who here hasn't heard of the purple tentacle?
Most of the gaming I do anymore is playing SNES games (through ZSNES) or DS or Gameboy games, mostly because 90% of my gaming is in quick 10 to 15 minutes sessions. There are a few things that I've noticed that most of the games I play over and over again have in common.
First, most of them lack much of a story. I think this works well for replay value because it can become tiresom to sit through the game telling you a story when you've seen it a dozen or more times already. Second is that most of the games a short. The games I replay most often are games that can be beaten in a single playthrough if you really want to. Finally, many of the games I replay regularly are games that, at least when I first played through them, were relatively difficult. Generally, I enjoy replaying games that were hard the first time I played through them, but subsequent playthroughs allow refinement to your skills until eventually you can simply blaze strait through the game without batting an eyelash. I also enjoy games that allow some amount of sequence breaking. The Metroid games are good at this. The first time you play through a metroid game you don't know where any thing is, and the game is much more difficult than the second time. Subsequent playthroughs allow you to better hone your skills at fighting the bosses and work out more efficient routes to the items, and once you have mastered that you can work on sequence breaking, getting items early, skipping items, etc. No game that I've run across does this better than Super Metroid, which is IMHO one of the best games to have ever been created.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
If only because it hasn't been remade. I'm replaying it at the moment, and it still holds up as a solid strategy game.
It's also just about the only game I played back in the day that doesn't have a modern equivalent - LSN isn't nearly as good, and the only other game I can think of that came close was Fallout (which is also a gooc classic in it's own right). In fact if it weren't for the lack of more recent choices, I probably wouldn't be playing X-com; I don't do the whole "classic" game scene normally.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
First 1942, the the Desert Combat mod, and now Battlefield 2 (lets not talk about BF:V).
Been hooked on this series since the day it came out, and play it regularly, usually about 10-12 hours/week.
No other game gets my adrenaline up like this one can, and gives me the variety of play I crave. What do I feel like doing this respawn? Take a tank to support the attack? Make a fast assault in a humvee or truck with a couple squadmates? Join in a defense of a flag as a medic or assault? Go sniper and sneak around the periphery or find a good concealed point? Blow up the enemy artillery? Take a plane and attack from the sky, or ride along and drop laser guided bombs? Ride in a helicopter and see where the pilot goes? So many options.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
Star Trek Birth of the Federation, a TBS from 1999 still has me hooked, although the multiplayer support has long been dropped.
It even has a relatively dedicated (though slow working) group of people developing a sequel that can actually be modded!
> Be prepared to spend the first ~hour or so dying many times, mostly from starvation and YASD (Yet another stupid death).
That's why I'll never play Nethack. I don't enjoy games where you're forced to "learn by dieing." It's like a stupid platformer game where you're forced to memorize the first N jumps only to fall off at N+1, so you have to start over from 0, only to fall at N+2. Repeat ad infinitum. It's bullshit. I've got better things to do with my time than explore the infinite number of ways some sadistic asshat decided it should be possible to fail. It's like a poorly written choose your own adventure where 99% of the choices are wrong.
In the real life and also in games I consider fun, 99% of choices lead to non-negative outcomes. (* Note that I make a distinction between positive and non-negative.)
Sorry for the rant, but I had to vent somewhere.
http://www.lgm.com/bolo/
http://www.winbolo.com/
Neverwinter Nights immediately springs to mind - how long has it been since release, now? Five years? Granted, Atari *just* announced EndOfLife but up until then the support from Bioware has been fantastic.
The community-constructed modules ("adventures") have definitely made NWN worth coming back to.
Try looking at the level texturing* of painkiller. Just because something's three-D doesn't mean that it has to suffer artwise.
*Like the opera house.
Now available for free as The Ur-Quan Masters, downloadable from http://sc2.sf.net/ or your distributions packages.
It doesn't even need a platform, after you try to stop it keeps on playing in your head!
At the top of my list for games that have stood the test of time is Heroes of Might and Magic 2. I still play ti occasionaly and ahve friends who play regularily.
I still crank up the Homeworld games periodically. They are still fun.
1) Nethack Page Title: @ versus the evil %.
In Nethack, a % is food. It's not evil. The character they were looking for is & (demon).
2) Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
The writeup is all about how you're no longer stuck going through linear levels - how now there are items to find, and you can backtrack and unlock previously-locked areas.
Apparently this author's never heard of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest - released in 1988 - with all of these features.
Last post!
It's always fun to go through it again and try different things.
I still play Descent from time to time. It's just fun and scary and these robots have their personality.
I use D2X-XL version 1.6.6.
I tried to play Quake2 in the last month but it was just boring compared to descent, which is older.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Ultima Online is still played *a lot*. There are hundreds of free shards around the globe and the official paid servers are still also online (I doubt they're still profitable, though).
Then, there's also Quake (yes, the first one). It's still played around the world. Quake mods such as Team Fortress (which paved the way to full modification mods as we see today) and some simpler mods such as Total Destruction are still played and there many active communities for these games.
Although America's reality is a bit different, these facts are completely true in another countries such as here in Brazil, for example, and maybe in many other developing countries. This is the positive side of not being able to have the latest graphics card or whatever: people don't focus that much on graphics. They worry about fun. That's why UO is specially popular: people can make their own world and play with their friends, with a server hosted on their own machine. Almost any PC can run Ultima Online without problems (I used to play it on a K6-350 with 32MB RAM).
The culture is really different. The most commercially succesful game here in Brazil currently is Ragnarök, a crappy online RPG. It has terrible mixed 2d/3d graphics and people are still paying to play it. Because everyone can play it. It's not like Half-Life 2 where maybe 10% of the computers can even run it at a barely playable level.
While the theory is sound, I don't think this analogy actually holds for geeky types. Most boardgaming fanatics seem to have have moved on to German strategy games and US block games. Interestingly, go is the only older game to make it into the boardgamegeek.com top 50: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browser.php?itemtype= game&sortby=rank
Chess comes in at a respectable 190, Risk at 2445, and Monopoly at 2914.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
X-COM plays great with DOSBOX. I use a frontend to DOSBOX, D-Fend. Yes, X-COM is my all time favorite. It looks outdated, but no other game has equaled its gameplay in 12 years. Some players want a remake with realistic graphics. I don't. I think the cartoonish graphics are better for a game like this. Put realistic graphics into such game, and I'd have nightmares every night.
What? No mention of the most addictive game ever?
You're making a mistake here. A platform that requires learning as you say is bad, yes. However, in Nethack you just die until you get the fundamentals of the game down. From that point on, it is smooth sailing. This applies to almost any games, even sports.
You can still buy AOE 2 with the expansion pack for $40 in stores in Canada, and it's still one of the best RTS's around, which I play regularly. Not bad for a game that was released in 1999.
> You're making a mistake here. A platform that requires learning as
> you say is bad, yes. However, in Nethack you just die until you get
> the fundamentals of the game down. From that point on, it is smooth
> sailing. This applies to almost any games, even sports.
Odd, I don't recall dying even once when I was learning baseball...
Chris mattern
TA is one game that always finds its way back onto my desktop. Especially with the number of mods (Absolute Annihilation in particular). Castlevania: Symphony of the Night isn't far behind.
However, in Nethack you just die until you get the fundamentals of the game down. From that point on, it is smooth sailing.
Until, after another fortnight of playing, the game suddenly arbitrarily decides to kill you after all. It's usually at that point that people with other things in their lives realise that they don't, in fact, have time for a game where a single accidental death means you have to start all over again from scratch.
This applies to almost any games, even sports.
In Nethack soccer, if the goalkeeper lets a shot in, he is executed on the spot.
In Nethack basketball, every time one team scores, the other team loses their score and the match timer is reset.
In Nethack golf, either you score a hole in one on every hole, or you lose the match.
I really can't imagine many people queueing up to play any of those games. Or Nethack.
You don't die when you play a computer game either.
I love Duke 3d. I will always be a duke-fan, rather than a quake-fan. And to me, yes, it WAS the humour, and the lack of self-importance.
Which is why I also love Serious Sam (First Encounter, and Second Encounter). If you have an XBox (or even PC), I can't stress how much you should pick up SS. Up here in Canada, I got it for 19.99 brand new. It's a budget title, but I'd have to say that it contains some of the most fun I've had with a FPS in a looooong time. Nothing complex, like Rainbox Six or Perfect Dark, although those ARE great games. It prides itself on being nothing more than a title that keeps you running and gunning until its very last moments.
The slate is always clean when you're the one holding the eraser -Newton Tenderfoot
I'm still trying new skill combinations.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Many years ago, I took the time to actually learn the rules of Minesweeper. To this day, Minesweeper is the first thing I do when I install a new Windows OS. Literally. My first action on the first boot is to register ctrl-alt-m as a keybaord shortcut to minesweeper. I now have a personal best of 57 second on expert. Minesweeper is a game which, once you get hooked, you will never escape from, and never want to.
What you imagine and what takes place aren't the same thing. Nethack is popular.
I wouldn't say that the game arbitrarily decides to kill you. It has its own rules, like any other game. Common sense usually helps a lot, but it's difficult to remember common sense in games because few games are as life-like as Nethack. I once killed myself by falling into a pit with an iron ball shackled to my leg, because the ball fell on my head when I landed. Maybe I would have survived with just injuries if I had been wearing a helmet, as tends to happen if a rock falls from the ceiling.
Of course it's frustrating to repeatedly die and start over, but the game is so random and relatively fast paced that it doesn't matter too much.
It's still to this day talked about, and it's not even out yet! :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
> Odd, I don't recall dying even once when I was learning baseball...
How about basketball when you were forced to be on the "skins"?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Best party game, ever. Bombs and dinosaurs. Doesn't get much better than that.
They also ran the multiplayer game in some weird high-res mode that I've never seen used in another Saturn game, that actually allowed for a map large enough for 8 players (7 human, 1 computer).
What were you expecting?
But basically all games are about as fun to play as when they came out, provided that you're inclined to like old games as much as new ones.
You just got troll'd!
I was so hardcore, I'd find ways around the limitations of the game engine. I was always pissed off that the best you could do was parallel tracks, and that low-reliability trains could even bring those to a halt.
I discovered that, even though the game doesn't support it, you can build automatic parallel switching trunk lines if you're willing to devote the extra land required. WARNING: back in the day I hosted this on my buddy's old Geocities site, please tread lightly.
You can also do fun things like switch over to world-encompassing single-rail loops, and build distributed industries. This way, your commodity trains are always carrying a load, and are making much higher earnings to upkeep ratio. You can even adapt the switching mechanism I outlined in the link above to these lines without requiring so much land.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
They're what, 10 years old now? Yet I still fire it up and play it on occasion. Why?
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Memorable Characters - How can you not like Minsc or loathe Edwin
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Non-Linear
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Scope to play good and evil (but it still makes sense when you do take the evil path)
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MASSIVE! - There are literally hundreds of game hours in there.
Baldur's Gate definitely deserves a mention.SNES games seem to have stood the test of time, probably more than any other system, they really were the height of 2D gaming practices. Of course, there continue to be great 2D games (Smash Bros, New Super Mario, Viewtiful Joe), but the concentration of 2D gaming was so great, and so refined at the time, while still being concidered "cutting edge" (let's face it, New Super Mario is a great game, though a lot of it's appeal is nostolgia, not just quality).
I think one of the main things that SNES games really improved was STRUCTURE. Too many games previous to the SNES had very little structure... and really, all games are is structured entertainment. Sure it's great to THINK about having "freedom" in games, but in practice, I (and many gamers) find freedom to be stifling, since you end up spending more time trying to think about what you SHOULD do next then actually having the fun of doing it. This is why "A Link to the Past" has aged so much better than "Legend of Zelda".
Also, structure allows for surprise. Structure creates a path in which you start to second guess what will happen next... which makes it so much more rewarding when things DON'T happen the way you expect them to. "Forge your own story" can be fun, but then you know everything that's going to happen, and therefor completely sacrifice the element of surprise.
Only a handful of N64 games will stand the test of time the way the SNES games will, because as soon as the GameCube came along, it was able to improve on a LOT of the ideas that the N64 first explored. Ocarina of Time will probably stand as the soul masterpiece of that console. Goldeneye/Perfect Dark have already faded into the distance (overshaddoed by Halo and Doom 3 and all the other modern FPSs), Majora's Mask didn't really gain the huge popularity that OoT did (I prefer Majora, myself, but I realize that most people think of it as OoTs bastard child), Mario 64 was a milestone, but when you think back on Mario 3 or Super Mario World, it's fairly uncomparable in terms of lasting value.
Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, FF6, Secret of Mana, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II: all huge games that will be still popular in their respective genres for years to come.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
It may have aged more gracefully than some, but it doesn't have one thing that a lot of the games in the article do: replayability. And a lot of times that will keep a game being played not only for a long time, but also more often than other games. Zelda? One shot, you're done. And don't tell me about the second quest; it was just a shell game.
Zelda could go on a classic games list (and has, many a time), but there are many hard core gamers who have never heard of Zelda, and wouldn't like it even if they did because it's so one-dimensional with no branches in it's plot.
Guess that depends on what your definition of perfect is. On the high end of the complexity spectrum, mine is NeverWinter Nights because it was designed to be moddable and is infinitely replayable. On the low end of the complexity spectrum, Go is definitely perfect.
That's nice. How long did it take for this community to come about? I might also point out that the article seems to be considering only games in their original form, not unsupported hacks that happen twenty years later.
Nathan's blog
In Nethack soccer, if the goalkeeper lets a shot in, he is executed on the spot.
Actually, in Nethack soccer the goalkeeper summons Jubilex, and then the opposing team becomes deathly ill.
In Nethack golf, either you score a hole in one on every hole, or you lose the match.
In Nethack golf the sandtraps have iron spikes...the spikes were poisoned...the poison was deadly...you die.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.