OT: Oldies but Goodies

[Kamog]

Originally posted by General Woundwort:
Ah, you children make me laugh. Now I remember back to the days of the Commodore 64, playing games like Choplifter. Or playing the original Castle Wolfenstein (2d top-down maze Version) on primitive Apple computers (you remember, the ones with the green screens?) on the sly at the J.H.S. library. Heck, I remember playing Pong on the old Panasonic game console, the one that preceded the Atari 2600.

But the one I miss the most, is the old Star Trek simulator. You know, the one where you traveled from sector to sector blowing up Klingons and the occasional cloaked Romulan? Where the "graphics" were just colored text, if you were lucky?

Oh for the good old days...

Yeah, I remember those good old days! I played the old 2-D Castle Wolfenstein on the Commodore 64. You start out with a gun with 10 bullets in it, in a room in the Castle and your mission is to find the plans for Operation Reinhold (or something) and escape with them. You eventually get stuff like grenades, a German uniform, and a bulletproof vest.

I also played the old Star Trek game on the Commodore 64. That game had a lot of nice features. The ship had long range sensors, phasers, shields, photon torpedos, damage control, self-destruct, etc. When you got hit by Klingons and your shields failed, your systems start to get damaged and won't work until they're fixed. You can dock at starbases to recharge and get repaired. It was a really fun game!

Also on the Commodore 64: Archon, Archon II, Black Hawk, Commando, Temple of Apshai, Mail Order Monsters, G.I. Joe, Impossible Mission, Omega Race, Wizard of War. Ah, the good old days. I remember staying up all night playing these games.

[TerranC]

Terminal Velocity; Boy, I loved that game...

Originally posted by Aloofi:
Ah, Homeworld was mindblowing, though the sequel sucked big time.

Aloofi, please tell me how the sequel to homeworld can suck when it hasn't even been released yet.

If you think that Homeworld Cataclysm was a sequel, then it's a clear sign that you did read what the box said.

Oh, and if you would like to know about the REAL sequel, go here, and find the link to the Homeworld 2 trailer.

[Kamog]

The first video games I ever played was on the Commodore Pet computer. It had a small monochrome green screen and a slow tape drive. The games came on cassette tapes and they took forever to load. There was Space Invaders, a racing game, a mining game, and a labyrinth game. I thought they were so cool!

And then I played games on the Intellivision. There were some really fun games: Sea Battle, Utopia, B-17 Bomber, Dungeons & Dragons, Bomb Squad, Astrosmash, Armor Battle, and, uh, hmm, what was that game called? The one where you fight robots inside a maze - Night Stalker?

This was a long time ago... I miss those days.

[Narrew]

I never got into FPS's, but 1 game that I really got hooked on was Transport Tycoon, ran in DOS, decent 2D graphics, I loaded up a while back and played it. Chris Sayer was the programmer, he asked who ever had the legal title to it (I think Micropose) if they would sell/release it back to him so he could revamp it (it had been out of print for a long time), they said no.

Oh well, I dont know exactly why I was hooked on it, but I was.

[mac5732]

ah yes, us older geezers played Doom heritic, duke nukem and the quakes, but how about

the Origianl Zork (atari & commodore), Imperium Glactim (by SSI), Baltic 1998 (SSI), Guadalcanal by SSI for the Apple, and there was Naval Game for the Atair by SSI, I forget the name but I have it upstairs with all my other atari and commodore games....It was fun and you could design your own naval scenerios.... played it by the hour...

just some ideas Mac

[Slynky]

Of all the games I played across a modem....

Empire Delux: Worked flawlessly! I just remember getting upset when my tanks failed to roll off the transport and capture a nice city (100% plus).

DOOM II: A good game that could be played over a modem. Lots of maps to download, but I used an editor and made many many deathmatch levels. Most of them were variations of symetrical designs but with changes (evil grin) so that it wasn't a COMPLETE symetrical arrangement.

For me, Duke Nukem was too hard. Too old to play it. A few more keystrokes to rememer than in DOOM II. Yeah, I show my age to all those young "arcade jockies".

[tbontob]

Mac mentioned the old Zork.

Zork was upgraded a number of times and IRRC, it eventually had graphics.

The original Zork? No graphics! All text and you gave instructions via the keyboard. Your imagination was a vital part of the old game.

And Slynky. I too loved Empire Deluxe. First got hooked on its predecessor, Empire.

[Kamog]

Those text-based adventure games were fun. I remember all the commands were keyboard-based, like [N]orth, [S]outh, [W]est, [E]ast, [u]p, [D]own, [F]ight, [G]et, [L]ook, etc. I never finished any of those games because I always got hopelessly lost in the labyrinths (I was too lazy to map things out on a piece of paper). I sort of just randomly wandered around all over the place, fighting stuff, picking up treasure and eventually getting killed.

Then there were those text-based games that had ascii graphics. The rooms were drawn using #### for walls or something, and there were characters like "r" and "S" and stuff moving around that represented monsters and different objects. I forget what the game was called. Never finished that one one either. I kept running out of food and starving to death. Or I'd eat some dead carcass out of desperation and get poisoned. It got kind of depressing after a while.

[Gwaihir]

WOw, this is awesome! Kamog, I too had (and still have and even occasionally use) an intellivision - yes, night stalker is the name. I had both D&D games - the original with the yellow caves and the bow, and the Treasure of Tarmin in all of its green 3d projected halls and 30 some items and 20 some monsters glory. And sea battle until one of the controllers died, and centipede (I got all the way through the level color cycle once, all the way back to where the color scheme is the same as the first level (but the level is WAAAAAAAAAAAYY faster - i think i got one, maybe two levels further and then went kaput. Only managed that once.)

Woundwort - I'm only 19, but I grew up on an Apple ][e, so I've played a bunch of the greenscreen classics - I had the star trek one on my win 3.1 machine (486DX baby!) - One game i got so fed up with the evasive Romulans that I went romulan-hunting, targeting them almost exclusively. That was fun.

-Jump-Man! (whee, system speaker sound effects!)

Text-based:
-Enchanter
-Starlord
-somthing that starts you in an arctic tundra near a secret base - never survived very long in that one
a few others i think

mid-range oldies:
-Commander Keen 1/2/3
-Monster Bash
-Duke Nukem/Duke Nukem 2
-a bunch of similar to the above 3
-Rebel Assault/Rebel Assault 2
-King's Quest 3 (my sister found and played all of them, 1 through 5 or whatever it was, 7 maybe)
-Camelot
-Star Trek - a couple of the kind where there's a scene, you have the away team and you pick stuff up and move it around between screens, do stuff to it and the people in the scenes, and you get a redshirt to save you from one mistake.
-Ringworld - a game along same lines
-Death Gate - similar to above, but first person
(these three are basically glorified text based games - same exact idea, only with graphical scenes and clicking on stuff as opposed to typing "pick up" "put" "go west" etc)
-SimEarth (only Sim title I played)
-Starflight 1/2 - I never finished 2, i go back to it and play a bit more every once in a while - these are real classics (5.25 disks, i had to copy them to 3.5 when i replaced the 486), but loads of fun

wow, theres a bunch in this Category I don't remember - i have a few cd racks (and a looooooooong directory for stuff that was on disks) full of them.

as far as more recent oldies (i hesitate to agree with that label):
-Chuck Yeager's Air Combat - loved that one!
-TIE Fighter / X-Wing vs. TIE (still come back to this occasionally, sloooowly working my way toward maximum rank through melee combat only)
-Wolfenstein 3D (although i got this later than quake, figuring i had to play it for classic value)
-Doom/Doom 2
-Quake (this ran on my win 3.1 machine! the 486! true, it took about 1.5 seconds to go through the kickback sequence for launching a grenade, but it DID run without crashing, if you had the patience.)
-Heretic/Hexen
-Dark Forces
-Duke Nukem 3D
-Descent 1/2
-Terminal Velocity
-Zork Nemesis (the only dark one in the series - myst-like, panoramic rendered scenes)
-MILO - puzzle-based game with a rendered world in which the puzzles reside
a bunch here i'm leaving off too
-Outpost - monotonous, and outright engraging since beating it is kinda unrewarding, and terraforming the planet just gives you a 5-second video clip
-Homeworld - got the demo, loved the idea, but i couldn't get fast enough at the interface to really enjoy it - always felt like i was scrambling too much to get adequate control in a battle.
-Diablo - demo and some play with full Version on a friend's comp - I like RPGs, not what amounts to a 3PS or 3PHEU (3rd person hack-em-up)
-Warcraft 1/2 / Starcraft - Demo only, i never could manage RTS against humans. I do fine vs. computer, but i always screw something up vs. humans.
-Worms / Worms 2 - wheeeee! "foist blood!" hahaha

games I currenly play occasionally:
-Quake 3: TA
-Jedi Knight II
-Unreal Tournament
-Exile 1/ 2/ 3/Blades of Exile - an RPG, simple graphics (think sorta like SE3, but better), but excellent gameplay, huge worlds, good character system. Now remade bigger and with better graphics and some new stuff thrown in under the name Avernum
-3d Ultra Pinball - wheeeee! Addicted, I am
-Asteroids (98) - Activision remake of the classic with pretty graphics and neat new stuff
-Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries - better than a lot of the newer ones, decent graphics on an old computer, capable of pretty nice graphics on a nicer machine
-Jane's USNF 98 - great air combat sim
-

Games i really loved and sometimes go back to:
-Civ II (I can beat deity easily now, in or out of scenarios, so I try every now and then to make Civ rating 300% on deity . . . my best is 287% [so close, and yet so far arrrgh], Last game 265%)
-Myth/Myth II (these are really really great - 3d, very pretty (3d terrain, birds-eye view that moves, zooms, orbits, and tilts, ambient effects, scenery, nice landscapes), but will run on a poor old P2-350/64megs ram, 2 or 4 meg video card, but also just good interface, fun game to play - RTT (real time tactics) - you have units, use them wisely, you don't have a base building stuff as in starcraft, just units (and sometimes reinforcements later) to complete you mission)
-Myst/Riven/Exile (I got stumped on Riven for the longest time, but I came back recently and found the bloody lamp-top pin switch thing (I thought there had to be something in that area, but the only way i found it was by clicking on EVERYTHING in the vicinity, after having looked everywhere several times))

[Xaren Hypr]

Then there were those text-based games that had ascii graphics. The rooms were drawn using #### for walls or something, and there were characters like "r" and "S" and stuff moving around that represented monsters and different objects.

Kinda sounds like a game a friend of mine had once, ZZT (or something close to that name).