Are they the ‘epics’ of their time, or some things that are less well known?
I’m midway through Oblivion Remastered and holy shit is inner 20s me ever happy about this raytracing thing
Final Fantasy 6 but, back in my day, it was called Final Fantasy 3.
Morrowind, Shenmue, Earthbound, all the the Mega Mans, Starcraft
Rayman’s saga Especially Rayman 3 and Rayman 2, I am so excited for the upcomming fan-remake Rayman 2: Redreamed
Master of Orion.
I played lightbike a variation of armagetron (that imo was honestly superior, it had jumping, boosting, maps that took advantage of that, skins back when they were cheap) but I still play armagettron on ocassion, agains the ai for the most part. Loved that ipod game. I wish it was still popular, think they got scared of licensing disputes with disney and a bit greedy with the microtransactions towards the end, started to effect gameplay through boosts.
I wish some of the changes like jumping and maps that were more than just one grid made it over to armagettron or another pc version but those stayed simple sadly.
I would eat up a modern cross platform tron lightbike game with maps like the ipodgame, jumping, boosts, etc. and cosmetics like rocketleague as long as they don’t give you a leg up. It would be all I play.
Age of Empires
Does chess count?
Probably Sims and SimCity, I go back to them fairly often.
Fallout 1 & 2, Final Fantasy 9, Elite
Rogue, Hack, Nethack. Basically nethack, but it built on those before it. Occaisonally Larn. Amiga Larn.
Heroes of Might and Magic III
Worms Armageddon
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
HOMM3 is like a warm blanket when you’re sick and tired.
Worms Armageddon was a classic
They’re all well-known: Pac-Man (first game I ever played), Super Mario games, Metroid games. Anything past SNES I feel like I was too old to consider it my “youth.”
Quest for Glory series! Betrayal at Krondor
Yeeeeah! I haven’t played these in forever but Hero’s Quest was my first Sierra adventure and holy shit was it magic. And Krondor - Raymond freakin Feist writing games!!
Both absolutely epic! Although in my case we’d be playing fast and loose with the term “youth” this was stuff I played after college but still.
Love to hear it! I read and reread Feist’s whole series as a kid, I remember always being so excited when a new book came out. I cut my teeth learning to read novels on Magician in 3rd grade!
You’ll be interested to learn that Feist didn’t write anything for the game, he just licensed the world and the characters. Neal Hallford wrote the story and dialogue which were brilliant, and Feist later adapted the story into a novel.
I just replayed QfG 1-3 last week on a family vacation and the magic is still strong. Something about these games ignite mythic perspectives in me that nothing else seems to.
Wow. Ok so regarding Feist I was only ever able to get through Magician Apprentice and Master. Reading issues, not important. But I didn’t know he was really not involved. Did be base Serpent War or Rift War saga on the game? Don’t remember what was what this many years later.
I have been thinking of getting my ass in gear and setting up a retro system. I have several units just waiting to be configured it’s just other stuff always taking priority.
So would a Pentium machine let’s say either with DOS/3.11 be good or maybe Win 95. I think maybe I’ll setup one of each since I have a few units available. This way I can play some things that need one and other stuff that is better with the other. I recall Crusader: No Remorse, and Crusader: No Regret won’t run on '95 but it will reboot into DOS mode for it lol. There are quite a few other games I’m eager to play again.
Oddly I’ve found that some stuff is ok under emulation but for whatever reasons - speculatively I’d say access to hardware via real-mode drivers that the abstraction layer in NT and forward prohibits - even the best systems like VMWare and VirtualBox seem to not handle more sophisticated game engines, only the simpler stuff. I imagine maybe it can be made to work better with tweaking and supplementary tools but after all the work that requires to get it to cooperate I think just having a real system with older hardware is probably just easier and more reliable.
I want to play the graphical Zork games again, Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Those were so much fun. Nemesis was a huge departure from the Zorkverse it was probably a shelved project in need of an easily marketable title? I dunno but Activision et al did an awesome job with it. I tried it not long ago on my Linux laptop and even with tools like PlayOnLinux/WINE, the animation was far too fast and rendered it not controllable.
There’s so much more stuff I would love to dive into again. Lands of Lore, some more of the Sierra titles like King’s Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, just all their stuff. Between Sierra, Apogee, Activision, Interplay and a few others, the landscape of 1990s gaming is an absolute treasure!
Wow I have really rambled! If you made it all the way here thanks for patiently reading my verbosity.
If you like QfG, you might be interested in Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok on Steam. It was released for free and I imagine that hasn’t changed. But I still ended up donating because I enjoyed it so much.
I still love all of the 90s FPS games like Doom and Quake.
Same. The rise of the boomer shooter was fun but you can’t beat OG.
Have you tried playing on a lower difficulty level?
I love you.
I didn’t have video games in my youth, so I’m just catching up now.