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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.
"1up has an interesting piece looking at games that have withstood the test of time, aging gracefully where others have not."
Solitaire!
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Now available for free as The Ur-Quan Masters, downloadable from http://sc2.sf.net/ or your distributions packages.
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!
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.
> 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
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.
I'm still trying new skill combinations.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
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.
> 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.