OT: Oldies but Goodies

[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).

[Erax]

Originally posted by Kamog:
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.

Those are the 'roguelike' games. The first one was called Rogue, in the pre-PC era (it's still around and people still play it). Then came others, such as Moria, Angband, Nethack and ADOM. See the Thangorodrim page for more details. Also check out the ADOM website. Many of those are open source, too. If I could code, I'd make a Star Wars variant for Angband, but I can't so I don't.

Edit: Before you download anything... I had better warn you, these games can be as addictive as SEIV.

[ May 03, 2003, 14:23: Message edited by: Erax ]

[Kamog]

Originally posted by Erax:
Those are the 'roguelike' games. The first one was called Rogue, in the pre-PC era (it's still around and people still play it). Then came others, such as Moria, Angband, Nethack and ADOM. See the Thangorodrim page for more details. Also check out the ADOM website. Many of those are open source, too. If I could code, I'd make a Star Wars variant for Angband, but I can't so I don't.

Thanks for posting those pages, Erax. On the Thangorodrim page, in the downloads section there is some work by David Gervais! (32x32 tiles for Angband)

Edit: Before you download anything... I had better warn you, these games can be as addictive as SEIV.

Ooo, I'm SO tempted to download some games... after all, if it's addictive, it probably means it's good. What's the point of playing if it's not addictive?

[mac5732]

Ultima IV for the atari, man I played that by the hour... cloth map and everything, ah looking for mandrake going down into the dungeons... My Opinion, it was the best of the early Ultima Series....

In Zork, I hated the damn Dam, always got stuck around that thing

just some ideas Mac

[Gwaihir]

I really liked Ultima VII (one of several major omissions) - it had a good storyline, lots of funny bits somewhat in the longstanding tradition of Zork, and it even looked decent (well, thats a relative measure i guess, nothing on todays games, but pretty nice)
-Actually, there's a runner for it, Exult, which runs it on any OS, and a bunch of slowdown utils to make it workable on new, too-powerful comps. Methinks me will try to dig up the old disks again. :-)

-The wizardry series, starting with Wizardry 1 ("written using all the power of the new programming language PASCAL!") - i got an apple ][e emulator just so i could play the first few after discovering the original manual tucked away in a bookcase. Then I started to port it to the TI-83 calculator, but the 3d maze wireframe took too long to render. Mebbe i should take that up again. :-)
-Wizardry 8 - newest (and Last, alas for SIR-TECH) in the series - really neat, nice 3d first person RPG, with good gameplay and character dev, a bit combat-heavy for some, but overall a great game, lotsa people play it over and over to try out different parties (or to go hardcore and beat it with 1 character rather than the usual 6, with only one savegame . . . etc. I'm still working through it my first time, I just discovered it.)