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90's computer gaming appreciation thread
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[Spoilered for large]
I played it on the Amiga in the early 90s. It was awesome, and incredibly fucking violent.
I remember whenever you gutted another knight with your sword he'd crumple to the floor and blood would repeatedly squirt out of his body for a few seconds.
Splutch splutch splutch splutch splutch
I cannot emphasise enough how utterly cool this game was. I would love to play it now.
Most of my early 90's gaming was on Amiga, starting with the 500, and ending with the 1200. There were SO MANY awesome Amiga games:
- Syndicate
- Wings of Fury
- Cannon Fodder
- Sensible Soccer
- Gunboat
- Lost Patrol
- Seal Team (this was EXCELLENT!)
- F18 Interceptor (flying under the golden gate bridge never got old)
- Civilization
- Jetstrike
After my Amiga I moved to PC gaming with a 486 SLC 33, I think the first game I installed on that was Sim City, then moving on to Doom.
I didn't actually play it during the '90s, but this is still one of my most-played games, and I've been playing since 2002.
Steam: Chagrin LoL: Bonhomie
Was this the game where a broken arm would equal a death sentence?
(1998/1999)
Only if you didn't stop to rest and slow the pace down from grueling.
Jerk.
How could I forget!
NORTH AND SOUTH! BEST GAME EVER!
This thread is making me wish I still had my Amiga. I actually bought Amiga Forever emulator but it's not the same
I still love my Amiga, my CD32 is set up with pride in my gaming room, though it occasionally fuses the entire house when I switch it on. Liberation was an amazing game.
I had SO much more time to put in to gaming in the 90s, night after night could be spent huddled over the computer, playing something. TFX, or rather EF2000, I just ejected upside down near the floor in TFX was awesome fun with my giant flight stick controlle. Then I remember crowding around the monitor for some split screen Fatal Racing (I think it was called 'whiplash' in the states) with a friend. Then we discovered some 'cheat' codes that let you unlock double the number of tracks. Then we discovered some FURTHER cheat codes that let you unlock these utterly insane tracks with crazy anti-gravity bits. Utterly fantastic game.
Same with Carmageddon (that would have been late 90's right?), so much time spent huddled over the keyboard.
Then there was Ripper, one of my all time favourite adventure games. Big name actors, fmv, interesting plot and a RIDICULOUS amount of swearing all made me grin like an idiot when I was younger. I've gone back to it since and whilst it's no Lucasarts-esque masterpiece it still holds up pretty well.
Fond, fond memories.
::edit:: Oh, oh, and "Screamer 1,2 and Rally" were awesome. Lacking a PSX and Ridge Racer, these games MORE than made up for it.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
I remember Birds of Prey which was a ridiculously detailed flight sim with every kind of plane you could think of. I used to put hours of play into that.
More games I used to play and love:
Escape from Colditz
Another World / Flashback
Frontier: Elite II
Dino Dini's GOAL
IK+
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge
Hunter
Pinball Dreams / Pinball Fantasies
Populous II
The Settlers / Settlers II
Good lord did I log some hours into that game - trying to bring the Android to life was the reason for my existance for weeks. It was also the first game we ever registered from shareware to full version.
I also made my own tileset for Mahjongg solitaire...wonder if I can still find it - I bet it's incredibly early 90's.
Hehe, I remember being able to press a key and the guy's trousers would fall down round his ankles.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
"These are all from the same decade?!"
Truly a golden age for PC gaming.
I have a psychic aim with the Mortars, on the button every time, guaranteed.
Death from above.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
I was going through this thread praying that someone else liked this game.
Our very first computer we bought had this game and oh man did I play the shit out of it.
Green lightening gloves FTW
Also Wolfenstein 3D was fucking sweet too.
3DS FC: 5343-7720-0490
I had the shareware. I don't think I ever managed to awaken the Android.
It also had the best soundtrack ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WulGs5aDCb4&feature=related
Also on the subject of 90s soundtracks no single piece of game music has managed to be as suitable for the environment as this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2evIg-aYw8
Wow. I played the public Beta of subspace for a few months, I can't believe it was that long ago.
Tall-Paul MIPsDroid
Zork, huh?
These might be to your liking.
Another World
Settlers + Settlers II
Perhaps these Pinball titles will give you some nostalgia.
If you like MoO3, perhaps you'd enjoy MoO1/2 more.
Have I got the command unit for you, friend! It's just this this.
Total Annihilation + Kingdoms
I wasn't a big fan of Total Annihilation, but I'll give it this: Cavedog supported the shit out of it. Remember when they were releasing new units for free every couple of weeks between expansions? With the last patch and expansion, the game had like 350 official units, and with mods it was in the thousands.
Granted, most of the units were just base setups with different weapons, but still. We're not likely to see a developer give away that kind of content for free any time soon. Imagine if they'd known about payed DLC back then. Maybe they wouldn't have gone under.
Except that they made TA: Kingdoms. Oh god was that bad.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Everyone knows about Quake, so I'll just talk about the racing sims I enjoyed.
Indycar Racing by Papyrus (1994)
The first racing sim I ever owned. I played it on a 120Mhz Pentium with 16MB of RAM running Windows 95. I didn't have a wheel at the time so I used the keyboard, meaning that the only track I could reliably race on was Michigan. Still, I had a blast - even going so far as to run a full length race one time.
When my brother and I discovered you could edit the game files to change driver names & other things, we went wild with fictional seasons.
The next game I bought was...
NASCAR Racing 2 (1996)
I actually went out and bought my first wheel & pedal set for this one, a Thrustmaster NASCAR wheel if I remember right. Growing up in Virginia and being in close proximity to a number of racetracks, NASCAR is what I grew up watching. I spent a lot of time on this, and once again - after learning how to create my own liveries and drivers, my brother and I spent many hours doing fictional seasons.
While I was attending college, a friend of mine gave me a copy of...
Grand Prix 2 (1996)
...which was my introduction to the world of F1. In my little corner of the world we didn't get TV broadcasts or even news about F1, and since my family didn't have internet...well, yeah. I had no idea.
This game resulted in my first league racing experience. After getting hooked on the game I started searching for info about it online at school, and discovered an offline racing league. I was intrigued by the idea - the league gives you the settings to use, and then you run an offline race with the AI, and send in your results. There was a program they used to verify the results, and then times were compared and standings were posted.
I only ran two races at the end of a season, but it was the beginning of my sim racing "career".
After I finished up school and moved out on my own, one of my first priorities was to build my own PC. A blazingly fast P-III running at 450Mhz with 256MB of RAM, amazing! I think I even had a Voodoo 3 for graphics. With that, I played...
NASCAR Racing 3 (1999)
Picking up where NR2 left off, with improved graphics and TCP/IP online play, NR3 took up as much of my time as another game I wound up playing in late '99, that I'll mention later. I spent tons of time racing online in the evenings, joining online leagues (though I never managed a championship - best finish of 2nd) and random casual races as often as I could.
I also was introduced to another developer, Image Space Incorporated, thanks to...
Sports Car GT (1999)
While I didn't give this excellent sim the time it deserved because of my NR3 addiction, it put ISI on the map for me. It's been a long lasting relationship, too...in the 2000's I played their F1 games (published by EA) and now (as you can see in my sig) spend most of my time with their current title, rFactor.
Sadly, Papyrus died out in the early part of the 2000's, though many of the founders regrouped to create iRacing...and Geoff Crammond stopped making Grand Prix games after GP4.
There was one other late '90s game that caught my attention, though...and held it for almost five years.
Because, you see, in 1999 Microsoft and a little company by the name of Turbine released
Asheron's Call
It may have been eclipsed in popularity and media coverage by Everquest, but for me AC was (and still is) the greatest MMO. Nothing else has been able to capture me the way this game did, and to this day I still miss it. Yeah, I know it's still running...but it'll never be the same as the early days when everything that happened just blew me away and I wandered the world thinking "This is the most amazing game I've ever seen".
Another World was a sweet game.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
Amazingly enough, GP2 is still going strong even today thanks to modders.
Behold, the championship winning 2010 Red Bull F1 car:
Just one of the cars in the 2010 carset available at grandprix2.de
edit: in fact, I frequently keep a copy of GP2 + DOSBox on a flash drive that I use for portable gaming.
The beta version got stuck on third last screen of the game.
And a badass main menu theme.
It had a track editor! In 1991! Shit was crazy.
While I'm thinking of early 90's 3d: LHX attack chopper was fucking awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC3OUrgf1Lg
You know what you are? The best kind of human being.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.
Why is this game not available anywhere today? I've been itching to play it in a stable form for years.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Most of my favorites have been mentioned. One I don't hear mentioned, well, at all, that was my favorite for a long time is Conqueror A.D. 1086. It's part RPG, part economic sim, part strategy game, part dating sim, part FPS, and part adventure game. it didn't get great reviews, mainly stating that it tried to do all of those things and didn't do any particularly well, but there was something about it that kept me coming back.
I was also going to mention one of my favorite flying sims, Crimson Skies, but I see that was 2000. It's way better than the console version. It's about the only game I loved from back then that I can't get to run on modern computers. I don't guess anyone knows of a way? Timeslip released a patch that supposedly made it run correctly on ATI cards, but I never got it to work.
I've been a huge Wing Commander fan since the very first one, and I loved Prophecy.
Kath Soucie. Yeah, she did the twins in Rugrats. She's done a ton of voice acting, including a lot of Lucasarts stuff.
Psh, like anyone would bother helping Achenar. Sirrus just exuded confidence and sophistication.
Not to take away from your nostalgia, but everyone feels that way about their first MMO. Its just the way it is. You never recapture that feeling from a second MMO regardless of the quality of each game, and you always have that feeling regardless of the quality of the game.
Unfortunately for me my first MMO was 4 years of Runescape, so I know in my heart its not a good game
3DS: 1521-4165-5907
PS3: KayleSolo
Live: Kayle Solo
WiiU: KayleSolo
Oh yes, Stunts was great. Making tracks out of just jumps, loops and tunnels. There were so many track pieces too!
This is a game I remember fondly:
Yeah, I think this is true. My first MMO was a MUD, and I played it pretty much non-stop for like 2 years before becoming hopelessly burned out. I tried Everquest when it came out and it felt like more of the same, and I just wasn't in the mood. I've tried most MMOs, but never really play more than a month. SWG was the only game I played heavily, and that was only about 6 months.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
I remember the good old heydays of 6 hour overnight Doom 2 marathons back on an old Novell network in my school's computer lab . 4 player games over what was it? IPX/SPX? Always felt nauseous after that. I remember the Up - Down - Left - Right keys being the default, with Ctrl to fire, Alt to strafe and Space to open doors. Took me a terribly long time to transition to WSAD when Quake came. For a long period, I used the mouse to move and shot with the Ctrl keys still. Wonder if anyone else had that experience.
One other game I haven't really seen mentioned here is of course this baby.
First of it's kind to come to the PC, and one of the greats in the series, no matter what others may say 8-) One of the first and last few JRPGs for the PC (yeah yeah I know it's a console port, but still...)
Oh I completely agree - once you reach a certain point with this type of game, you realize you're playing a spreadsheet...playing to increase your numbers more than to just experience the gameworld.
Upon trying out other MMO's I always come back to the same feeling of playing the numbers, except that it happens right from the start, and I'm disillusioned right away.
That said, I still love the AC game world and the lore.