Tetris (Game Boy/TI-83) and Nokia Snake. Those were my main mobile games for many many years. I don’t think I need to say anything about the games themselves. You all know what’s up 😆.
Warcraft 2. (I played this before Warcraft 1.) (Un)holy fuck. Everything about this game at the time was so metal. Started my lifelong bias for playing as Orcs in video games. Art and music are 😘👌 classic.
Deus Ex. I won’t call it a masterpiece, but it’s an iconic piece of gaming. I thought the “solve the missions however you want!” aspect was a bit oversold but replaying it during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic just made me realize how good the story and lore writers were. Music was great too, and it’s a good source for memes.
Lots of people will keep saying it was good until the next announcement at which point they’ll admit that it was bad but the new one actually looks good
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.
Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, all of these still hold up, and are totally worth a play even if you never played them back in their day.
Also, Alpha Centauri has SUCH a great narrative. Each faction has a strong identity, each leader has a fitting personality, the whole package is great.
It really deserves a remake to update the controls and UI, it still plays really well if you can get past that though.
I do think Valve not being publicly traded allows them to be different in some ways such as the flat structure (“enshittification” as defined by Doctrow doesn’t apply to Valve because there are no shareholders to please) but there’s nothing “left” politically about Valve. Some of it I think is just not having to look good to shareholders allowing Valve to make actual good business decisions.
Valve’s support of free software is because during the Windows 8 era Newell gained the fear that Microsoft would phase out Win32 in favor of UWP, cutting into Steam’s business big-time. Microsoft definitely isn’t going to pull that now that Windows Phone and the Start Screen concept both died and they’ve stated they no longer see UWP alone as the future, but I do think Valve administration still thinks it’s best for their business to not rely on Microsoft’s whims.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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’ve completely lost interest in the Bethesda-style RPG in the 12 years since Skyrim’s release, but I am very hyped for Baldur’s Gate 3 (having not played or seen much of early access at all).
I’m just hoping it’s at least another quality leap in storytelling from Divinity Original Sin 2 as that game was from the first.
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.
The name game engine is somewhat wrong at this point. The difference between them and software actually designed to make video content in particular is fairly small. I remember several years ago Unity was making a big push to be more useful and more recognized by movie makers.
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