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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."
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...
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.
> 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.
The original Zelda offers a lot that the newer games don't. The game very few restrictions compared to the newer ones. The levels are numbered, but there are very few you have to do in order to do the following levels. (Yes, I know in the later games you can get the item from a level, leave, and go to the next level, but that defeats the point of finishing levels out of order). Within the levels there is more flexibility in the path you take through it.