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."

Comments

Re:What's the big deal about Nethack?

[alfs boner]

The game is amazingly deep. There's just so much you can do in it. There are tons of easter-eggs buried in there and lots of references to other works of fiction

I'm sure others who have more knowledge in Nethack will provide more info. I myself am not an expert on the subject.

One glaring omission

[Crysalim]

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/

Re:What's the big deal about Nethack?

[s16le]

It's also very well thought out. This is in contrast with Slash'em, a Nethack fork. The Slash'em developers basically just add everything they can think of without stopping to think if it really improves the game. There are some good things in Slash'em and I would like to see some of them brought to Nethack. But the Slash'em developers should really try to make the game more balanced. Try playing as a doppelgangen monk to see what I mean (you get polymorph control at level 9 and all sorts of excessively powerful techniques). It's like riding through the dungeon in a wheat thresher.

Nethack isn't perfect though. I think the Monk could use some tweaking (perhaps a slight improvement in fighting ability or the ability to advance beyond the basic skill level in attack spells in exchange for a stricter penalty for eating meat).

OpenTTD

[Frogbert]

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.

Misheaded nethack page.

[spud603]

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.

Re:Misheaded nethack page.

[Cheapy]

No. That is a very apt title.

'trice corpse, choking on a wraith corpse (I knew a guy who did this...With the amulet!), green slime, choking on a melon (I once found bones in Gehemmon from someone who died like this), green blobs, rotted corpses. Did I say 'trice corpse?

C aren't hard. H though... And T. Ts are NOT fun.

Re:Misheaded nethack page.

[spud603]

To bring this discussion full-circle:
One of my favorite ways to deal with the troll problem is simply to kill them once so they become %, then eat them. They ain't regenerating in my gut.

Oh, and to defend my original statement:
Yes, % can kill you in nethack, but to summarize the game as "versus %" is a bit much.

(and on yet a third note, this is my first time seeing /. in its fancy new css clothes. freaky but nice.)

Starcontrol II

[Aaron Denney]

Now available for free as The Ur-Quan Masters, downloadable from http://sc2.sf.net/ or your distributions packages.

Re:Recurring theme; Use your brain!

[Ekhymosis]

If I'm not mistaken, Go (Igo, weichi, paduk) is over 5,000 years old, probably making it the oldest board game in the world. How's that for time-tested?

Re:I'd add X-com to the list

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.the-underdogs.info/ has a patch to the game for on win32 systems and a download of the game itself. It works well on XP for me.

Re:Nadia, you silly...

[Flyboy Connor]

KotOR 2 was a pretty good game, but the ending indeed sucked. It was completely unsatisfactory. There you were, having trained all your crewmates and influenced them to become either good or evil, with lots of tensions rising between them and open ends with nearly everybody... and suddenly your whole crew is gone, and you have to fight through hordes of big-bad-bully-enemies on your own. And the final boss just tells you what happened to everyone, after which you kill her off. This is absolutely awful. And if you scan the sound-files which are still on the CDs, you find that there actually were great resolutions planned for all characters, tuned to how you treated them and how they evolved during the game. That would have been great to have. The problem is that a game with a sucky ending leaves a bad taste, and the bad taste of KotOR 2 was poison. Stupid publishers.