Gaming often fetishises the new but many great things exist in the past, so let's strap into our time machines and talk about our favourite games released before say 2010?
Just as with books, movies, plays etc the past holds a treasure trove of amazing experiences. Unless you have a lot more free time than I do it's unlikely you've played anywhere near the majority of the classics. Let's get out those pink sunnies and compare notes on some of our favourite releases.
I've recently been going back in time a little on the retro pi and looking at console games I never had.
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I have to say Chrono Trigger blew me away with it's stunning art, puzzles with surprisingly little moon logic, and beautiful music.
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Mario golf on the SNES is very simple but for tired evenings cuddling on the couch it's been a winner in our household.
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The n64 Zelda games are surprisingly great too although that awkward period of 3d had some unusual controls. Even the gameboy ones are a blast although the water temple in oracle of ages it a bit frustrating.
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Heroes of might and magic 2 and 3 hold a special place in my heart and I can still dump hours into skirmishing with those (32167 for when hom2 gets too frustrating amiright?)
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I loved neverwinter knights as a kid but recently tried to check it out again and just... idk the magic wasn't there. I think now I'd rather just play some actual ttrpgs instead of sprawling CRPGs
PS1 is a mystery box to me so I'd love to hear some recommendations from that old thing. All I ever played on it was time crisis at my mates house (which was and is soooo coool, RIP lightguns).
What about you folks? What games hold a special place in your heart? or what have you checked out for the first time recently and found it's actually pretty good?
Not a unique opinion, but Portal is probably the closest thing to a perfect game. Nothing feels unnecessary, and every part of it (story, gameplay, visuals) is not only good on its own, but also work together to make the game better than the sum of its parts.
Portal 2's also great but suffers from a lot of fluff imo. The analogy I like to use is Portal 2 is like a big feast of really good food, while Portal 1 is just one small dish, but it's the best version of that dish you've ever tasted.
Beyond Good & Evil, 2003. It's been so long since I played it, I don't remember much other than it was a sandbox and it had some neat mechanics and cute characters and I loved it. The closing credits musical sequence is magical, too.
One of the first games I played that was translated in Dutch with good voiceovers! Loved it and made me more open to localized games.
I think I rented it for the gamecube but never played much. Apparently it's famously good! I'll have to check it out.
My response to this will look like a who’s who of Dreamcast games. The Dreamcast was the first console I bought myself, so I have lots of fond memories.
Had a partner want to practice hacking a 3ds before they closed the shop so I can play PS1 games. The first one I put on that mofo is Azure Dreams, my first and probably favorite dungeon crawler roguelike with a city builder. Also Breath of Fire IV is one of my absolute favorite games ever.
I haven't even heard of either of these so I'm definitely going to have to check them out!
I definitely think they are loads of fun but they both have amazing soundtracks, too! Breath of Fire IV still brings me to tears!
Both Azure Dreams and BOF IV were great. Haven't heard mention of them in years
The first Fable for me. Loved that game so much as a kid!
All the old MechWarrior games, starting with MechWarrior 2. That was my childhood. PGI didn't have what it takes to recapture that with MechWarrior Online or MechWarrior 5.
Shout out to Half-Life 1 and Team Fortress Classic (1.5). THAT was my teenage years. I played an insurmountable amount of TFC, adminned a couple servers, and took zero interest in TF2, because it just wasn't the same without concs, throwable frag nades, etc.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was a gamechanger though. That released when I was in college. Fell in love with the hopeless atmosphere, good gunplay, and the eurojank. I still play the various S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods to this day and am eagerly awaiting the release of number 2 (slated for December, but we will see. Devs have been through a lot).
I played the first STALKER at uni as well and loved it. Along with Red Orchestra that a mate was a play tester for.
All games paled in comparison to how much time I sunk into WoW between 2006 and 2011 though.
I know a lot of people that played WoW back then, and their experiences were largely the same. I didn't get much into MMOs beyond Guild Wars 1 at that time. Final Fantasy XIV was good for a time, but Elder Scrolls Online blew me away after they basically redid the game. That was obviously much later in life, though, and that's a very different framework of MMORPG than classic WoW and its early expansions.
One of my all-time favourites is Freelancer, 2003. Just a really fun arcade space sandbox with an engaging campaign and great multiplayer and modding scene.
I played Max Payne and its sequal recently and I was surprised how well they held up. The gameplay and level design kept it consistently fun
The first game definitely shows its age, but is fun nevertheless. The second game, though, has always surprised me how amazingly it has held up.
Fantastic games.
Soldier of Fortune. I will remember that whistle darn it!
But I lived through the golden era of arena shooters such as Quake III and UT2K4 which was amazing, but most of all the whole FPS genre was really ramping up to new heights every month back then with HL2/CoD and mods such as Counter Strike, Garry's Mod and the like.
Oh man, I remember when Soldier of Fortune came out. It was the first FPS (that I was aware of at least) that had dismemberment. I remember my mind become completely blown after shooting a guy's legs off with a shotgun.
Nowadays, it's nothing special, but back then it was insane.
For me it was metal gear solid 3 snake eater. I thought it was the perfection of the metal gear formula. I’m exited to see its remaster.
Eternal Darkness
Silent Hill
Resident Evil 1+2
Call of Cthulhu
Quake 1-3
Doom 1+2
Chrono Trigger
Final Fantasy 3, 7, Tactics
Metal Gear Solid (all of them)
Shadowrun (SNES)
Castlevania 1-3, SOTN
I could go on...
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (PC version). Be aware that PC version is a completely different game from the console versions.
I still play Doom 1 & 2 most days. Nothing matches it for speed of play. Doom is fast.
Doom 2016 is a good game too, but I'm it lacks speed.
Same. Project Brutality makes the old Doom games quite enjoyable as well. It's a bit edgy but it's kind of a mix of modern Doom with the old ones. It's the perfect kind of game to just turn your brain off and shoot some demons without having it be too difficult.
Doom Eternal is too much of a dance to play, you have to swap weapons all the time and carefully juggle ammo, chainsaw, dashes and a bunch of other buttons to play optimally.
This game is actually a bit before my time since it was released two years before I was born, but the original XCOM game (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) is still one of my favorite games of all time. And it's just gotten better over the years with fixes and modding through OpenXcom.
I like the modern Firaxis games a lot too, and Xenonauts even moreso, but nothing has quite hit the same as the OG.
I loved the bullet time in OG Max Payne game (2001).
I was addicted to EverQuest since I started playing it in 2001 for at least 10 years. They don't call it "EverCrack" for nothing. No matter how I feel about it now, it will always hold a special place in my heart.
I also played PlanetSide MMOFPS for at least 4 years since it released back in 2003, and it was so great. I hear both good and bad things about its successor, PlanetSide 2, but haven't tried it for the fear of it ruining my nostalgia of the original.
Starsiege: Tribes was an awesome game too. I was a beta tester for that one way back in '98, in the days before broadband was a thing. I still have an installation CD hand-signed by the devs that they had to ship to all the testers, because downloading 500+ MB over dial-up was not feasible.
Earthsiege 2 was the game for which I went out to CompUSA and bought a joystick that had swivel function (MS SideWinder 3D Pro).
Civilization III. Still undoubtedly the best from me, every subsequent change to the series has been negative.
Mischief Makers for n64! its a puzzle platformer by treasure, its controls are a little unintiutive at first, but the games grappling/boost mechanics are so much fun once you get it down.
also, SHAKE SHAKE!
Unfortunately some of my favorite games are no longer around in a playable state.
I friggin loved Atlas Reactor but it shutdown in 2019. Another all time favorite, which is still around but does not have the community to keep it feeling alive is: Shattered Galaxy.
Other games I think deserve to be in the all time best games of all time list are:
No spoilers please but I'm finally sitting down to playthrough and beat the original Deus Ex. Installed GMDX mod and have been having a blast so far!
Oh you are in for a treat! I'm thrilled for you.
All I will say is experiment. Follow that "huh I wonder if?" relentlessly.
Definitely. It's starting to fall into the "They thought of everything!" levels of ways to solve puzzles and beat missions. I love how my character's personality seems to be driven by the sub missions I do and don't do. Very cool game so far.
I just picked up Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (the original, not the Remaster) again. Installed it on my Steam Deck along with DSFix after a year or so of scrolling past it and seeing the "unsupported" icon. Looked it up on ProtonDB and apparently it works just fine.
What a game. The level design is still unmatched imo
I have that edition and can't for the life of me get my xbox controller to work with it. I swear I've tried ALL of the solutions people give and just gave up in the end.
I had the same problem with elden ring.. turns out if I unplugged my Nintendo Wii IR sensor from my pc it allowed the Xbox controller to work.
Guessing it's something to do with detecting a certain peripheral as player one but I honestly have no idea!
Have you tried something like xpadder where it just maps the keyboard keys used in the game to your controller buttons? I've had to use that from time to time way back with older games before controller support got better. Not ideal, but seems to work usually when all else fails.
I'm not sure if/how it works exactly since I mostly do my "PC" gaming on Steam Deck these days, but if it's possible to use Steam Input on Windows, you may be able to do something similar right in Steam.
I'll try that, never heard about it! Steam input is an option in steam on windows, I guess it's the same deal? Thanks for the xpadder thing, it will come in handy for sure.
Nice, I'm glad I could be of some help. Let me know if you get it to work.
Steam Input is amazing, it's one of my favorite features of the Steam Deck that nobody really talks about. The amount of customization you can do for controller layouts for individual games is incredible. You can even create radial menus if you want.
Baldur’s Gate II is and will always be the most influential and important game of my life.
Final Fantasy Tactics(PS1) remains my favorite game to this day. I really liked messing with the various classes and abilities, and it's a rock-solid tactics game, to boot. Couple that with amazing music and a great political story, and you've got a classic.
TG Cid is hilariously broken, though.
FFT has an active modding scene, too. Lots of rom hacks are still being made for the PS1 and PSP versions of the game.
TimeShift came out in 2007, and that game was the bomb. Loved the concept with the suits that can control time, and the game play felt really smooth. Nothing beats freezing time and grabbing the enemies' weapons from them and shooting them with it.
Every Star Wars fan owes it to themselves to play Knights of the Old Republic, at least once. And if you play it once, you'll want to play it through again, as a different character class. And if you play it twice, you'll want to play it through again, as a dark-side Jedi. And if you play it thrice, you may be tempted to play it through again, as a Droid.
It's a wonderful story, that feels like Star Wars (which, for those of us older Star Wars fans, who at the time were suffering through the cumulative disappointments of the prequel trilogy, became our salving solace), with plots and settings and characters and ships and light-sabers and action and betrayals that were (and still are) as rich as any of the movies or shows.
The people who run the franchise keep teasing canonicity, so play it soon, so you'll gasp like we do when Darth Revan makes an appearance.
Revan's introduction in KotOR was mind blowing.
There's always Diablo 1.
But my favorite is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which was made by some of the people who created Fallout and has a LOT in common with it. It's an open world, a combination of classic fantasy with elves, dwarves, and halflings with a rising steampunk technology that competes with magic. There are many schools of magic and technology, as well as social, stealth, and combat skills. The graphics are very crude by today's standards, but the gameplay is outstanding.
You know, I never tried Diablo 1 even though I grew up religiously playing Diablo 2. Also love the original fallout games, I definitely need to make time for this.
Diablo 1 has the same gameplay as the other games but in terms of scope and concept it's much more self contained, it's a different experience. Good game, but d2 is what the sequels have all tried to recreate, so it will feel quite different.
Thanks for the warning, but I don't mind different; different can be good. I'm excited to see the beginnings of my childhood game, I think it'll be worth the patience. Though, having a hard time finding it, it's not on the blizzard downloads list. I'mma do more digging tho, it's gotta be out there somewhere.
I definitely have a lot that really get me feeling nostalgic. Couldn't even count the hours I spent playing games as a kid lol but here's a random list of a few:
Putting DQ7 on here is almost a bit spicy, but I think it's one of the best representations of the series in terms of scope, pacing, gameplay, and storytelling. It's absolutely slow, but that was sort of the point.
I definitely have a few controversial choices. But DQ7 is legitimately my favorite DQ game and I always thought it didn't get the attention it deserved. It was a long one to get through though.
I'd argue that having Chrono Cross and not Chrono Trigger is even spicier lol. But I think it's really just nostalgia since that's what I sunk a lot of hours into back then. I remember hunting everywhere for Final Fantasy Chronicles because it included a copy of Chrono Trigger, but I could never get my hands on it.
I can get behind the CC vs CT take. I finished CT first circa 1998 but found it pretty boring (I have a better appreciation for it now). CC was a lot more enjoyable to me--combat had a lot going on, and the music is an unmitigated masterpiece.
The original Red Alert is still one of my favorites! In the expansion you can even fight Giant Ants!!! (Not sure how many people knew)
@insurgenRat the king kong movie tie in game its actually really good and extremely innovative and alot of the ideas I've never seen replicated sadly we'll probably never see a remaster cuz 1 it's a tie in game and 2 it was made by ubisoft
I'm going to go waaay back to a gem of a '90s CRPG: Betrayal at Krondor.
The main quest-line was engaging, the combat was cool, and the puzzle boxes were fun, but I remember being blown away by the size of the world. You could wander for literally hours, exploring new terrain, and discovering additional characters and bonus quest-lines. Its world was expansive and immersive, and it felt alive, like nothing else playable on a 386sx ever had been before.
The next time I felt that sense of aliveness - but better - in a video game was about a decade later, when I took my first Wyvern ride in World of Warcraft, and realized that everything I was seeing below me was really happening. This wasn't a teleport: if you saw someone fighting something down below you, it was because another player was really fighting something down there. Mind-blowing!
I remember buying Betrayal at Krondor back in middle school simply because it came bundled with the book. I loved both reading and gaming, so it was a win-win for me.
you know I've read the book but never played the game (I don't recommend the book. My god Raymond e. fiest was sexist as hell)
I remember trying to read the books, inspired by the game, and not being able to get through them. I'd like to think that I recognized the sexism, at whatever-teen I was at the time, but I doubt that.
I suspect they're not very well written? There were so many poorly-written fantasy books around in the eighties; my buddy and I referred to them collectively as "Cheap Tolkien Knock-offs".
"Any good?", I'd ask. "Nah. CTK," he'd reply. Sometimes I'd read them anyway, but not unless everything else was checked out of the library.
In addition to the many amazing games already mentioned, I'll throw in the 1995 gem "Ascendancy" from The Logic Factory. The user interface is a bit rough by modern standards but, for its time, it was a fascinating 4X turn-based strategy game (despite the broken "AI") with an impressive array of alien races with unique art and music for each. It's been in-and-out of the "abandonware" classification over the years, so there may not currently be any legitimate way to acquire a copy of the game--which is a real shame for those who might want to experience a nearly 30-year-old game that I think was groundbreaking for its time.
It is deeply tragic that the IP is being tossed about like a pirate ship on stormy seas. Things like this really keep fans at bay.
So many great games from my childhood.
Quake III but no I or II? I see you've got DOOM on your list, I'm curious, did you not like the first two quake games or just didn't play them? Otherwise you've got my list down pat (plus a few extras).
Nope, I only ever played Quake III Arena.
In my old party days circa 2000, I had a nice party house in the hood. The neighborhood wasn't all that great, but it was a nice big house for cheap rent. Lots of rooms and space. I was young and had more knowledge of computers than money, and this meant I could bus to work instead of driving and paying to park.
I worked at a large engineering company. They upgraded their computers for the Y2K bug. This left them with an extraordinary amount of old PC's they had to actually pay to dispose of properly. To save money, they yanked the hard drives and raffled them off to the employees. We're talking nearly 400 PCs. 386's, 486's and even some (then highly coveted) 486-dx2's.
A few people that won just gave me their PC. They didn't want it since it wasn't usable without a hard drive but knew I did. I cashed in a few favors here and there to get a few of those choice 486-dx2's from those that won them where I could. In all, I made (6) pretty decent Dell PC's and set them up in various rooms in the house. I also had my cadd workstation and my roommate had his PC as well. I put Windows 98SE, VNC and Twisted Metal 2 on each.
I lan'd together all (8) PC's into a home network using a partial reel of CAT6 cable that I got from another friend in exchange for devising and assembling his wife a new PC for her birthday. He was in the IBEW and the cable was scrap surplus from construction at a major airport. He gave me some speaker wire as well. In hindsight, it was for a public address system and was not the best for musical range but it did work. I borrowed a crimper and helped myself to some RJ45 connectors from our IT department. I ran the lan cables to network the PC's. I placed a speaker in every room and wired them into the home stereo. Mono, but I only had so many speakers. I then converted my workstation to more of a home theater, running a video out to the TV. PC audio was outputted to the home stereo as auxiliary.
It made for a kick ass home theater system for the year 2000. In it's day, it was pretty hip. We had some great multiplayer games for years to come and nearly everyone had their own room to play in. TM2 was really neat in that it could take up to 8 players.
VNC gave you control over any computer from any computer. You could watch a movie on the Home Theater in any room you want to, or all of em even. Kick on winamp with milkdrop and just jam out. Put on 'The cat sitter' and get the cat all riled up. Ahh, good times.
In all, and not accounting for any time spent or software licenses, I may have invested 30 dollars for a new corded drill (which I still have today). Beer was probably the highest total expenditure for the project. There were some wire coat hangers that got away fishing the wires through the walls that are probably still there.
Also, I totally agree with you on Chrono Trigger. It has another title set in that same world that can be tricky to find called Chrono Cross. I personally think Trigger was the better of the two titles but Cross is play worthy.
Why'd they have to get rid of the hardware? Y2K is almost entirely a software issue.
Those old machines did have an issue with the real-time clock not handling post-Y2K dates, but that doesn't matter much as long as the machine gets the correct time over the network once it's booted.
At that time, no one knew what was going to happen. They didn't want to chance it so they upgraded nearly everyone.
Whatever the reason, it made my decade. I experienced no problems at all on any of my machines.