OT: Oldies but Goodies

[Loser]

Duke Nukem 3D was a game I came back to again and again. I can remember staying up waaay too late, Duke Matching against my roommates, listening to Straus (the waltz seemed to be perfect for death match, still is).

Duke Nukem was eventually replaced by Unreal Tournament as my favorite FPS (I never did get into Team Fortress or the 'classed' FPS spawn that followed it).

Civ kept me up all night, later Civ II and MoO II, then SMAC/X, now SE IV. But I never played them for more than a few months. The thing was, after staying away from them for a few more months, I could come back to them with the same zeal I felt for them at their best.

Diablo was followed by Diablo II and then LoD, which I still play on Bnet every now and then.

WarCraft, WC II, StarCraft, Dungeon Keeper, DK II, Shogun Total War; I still go back to SC BW, Shogun TW, and DK II. They're still great games.

Descent, Descent II, those stood by themselves for me only because I haven't the head for flight sims (can't reason/track/do much of anything in three dimensions...)

Homeworld was an incredibly beautiful game, but I was only barely good enough to beat the single player campaign. I still come back to it, though.

The AvP Marine demo scared the snot out of me, and so did the game (excellent use of darkness!).

The Sims was a great game to play games with, probably the best ever. It amazed me when it came out, but I haven't been too keen on going back to it.

You're right, though. It's been a while since a new game completely blew me away. That's a real shame, because millions of dollars are being funneled into the gaming industry.

Downright unacceptable...

Either we've been missing out on the real kickass games or the whole industry has gone downhill. If anyone knows of a truly great game that went unmentioned, or came out recently, please speak up.

[Thermodyne]

Jane's Fleet Command and TAoW are the two old games that I never gave up on. Still keep an old box just to run them on.

[Atrocities]

The AvP Marine demo scared the snot out of me, and so did the game (excellent use of darkness!).

Oh hell ya!

Would you believe me if I told you that Alien Vs Preditor for the Jagaur was the first game in my life that I can honestly say scared the living goo out of me. I have it on video tape to prove it too.

The PC Version demo for the Marine was a good scare and the sequal was one of the games that honestly impressed me. Too bad it was too short.

[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...

[Suicide Junkie]

Wolfenstien was pretty good when it was fairly new, but in the Last few years it has made me physically sick when trying to turn. Five minutes is the most I can take before I have to go lie down. I don't think I have this anymore.

Doom/Doom2: Played it no more than a week ago.
A bit with the DM-ARMY mod (All the monsters look like multiplayer guys, and shoot the weapons you would expect from a multiplayer game)
Then a bunch with my own deadly mini-mod. (Blood spatters have a 30% chance of exploding like a rocket to represent critical hits. )

Duke Nukem 3D: Haven't played it since we misplaced our serial cable, but with a mod and custom map, still good fun
The mod we always use for challenge gives the basic enemies a 40% chance of spawning 2 more when they die, and a small chance of spawning one of the bigger baddies as well.
Firing rockets into a crowd of guys can actually make things worse
However, they always drop something decent when they die, and sometimes even drop powerful things too. As well, the player nearest to an enemy who dies gets +1 health.

The 4-dimensional map capability of this game is extremely cool!
You could have an open field, with a twilight-zone style door standing all alone in it. Walk through the door, and suddenly you find yourself in the same open field, but at night, and with monsters! Walk around the door instead, and its still daytime

Starcraft is pretty good. Beautiful graphics, and decent gameplay, but not terribly flexible.
I did manage a nice mod to choke off the "rushes" strategy using a custom map. The way "Small Squad Tactics" works is:
1) the minerals available on the map are slashed to a fraction of the original stashes.
2) Whenever you have more gas than minerals, they are traded at a 2:1 ratio.
Since gas vents merely get "depleted" and never run totally dry, you need to capture the vents in order to continue to expand.
With the thin minerals, you need to capture those vents and defend your base with as few units as will do the job. As well, you want to protect the lives of all your units. If you pull out when crippled instead of fighting to the death, you'll save immense amounts of money and time by either doing repairs, recharging shields or healing instead of building a whole new unit with your meager funds.

Going back to the BBS days, my favorite:
Land of Devastation!
Extremely moddable; there is even a programming language to add new stuff to the game!
I've added convenience devices that scan the ground as you walk, and automatically pick up items of value. I've put in all kinds of monsters from other games... Protoss Archons are especially sought after, often in vain attempts to steal their shields, which have the property of self-recharging over time (which I coded in myself )
In VGA mode on the local computer, it really looks good too.

[ZeroAdunn]

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.

Oh for the good old days...

OMG I never thought I would find anyone who still remembers the orginal Castle Wolfenstein. Now that was a complex game! I still have it, unfortunately a couple of important keys are missing from my APPLE IIe, I can still play it, but it is a pain in the ***. God, I used to love that game. I can still hear the gaurds asking, "Our Spice," what were they really saying again? Hall pass?

Then came the jump to windows (Ahh, how I remember it, buying that NEC computer, top of the line... now I have a low end laptop that blows it away ) Games like VGA trek, Civalization, X-com, Stars! And then of course, that led me to look for more games of the type, I found SEIII and have been adicted ever since....

[Aloofi]

Ah, Homeworld was mindblowing, though the sequel sucked big time. Ceasar III and Lords II were my first games, and Age of Kings, my first and Last RTS , with the exception of Anno 1602.