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Last post Author Topic: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?  (Read 116463 times)

HankFriedman

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #75 on: May 03, 2006, 07:05 PM »
My favorite computer game, on the Apple II, was called Aztec.

Recently, I found it on the 'net in a form that runs under emulation on a PC.

It's an Indiana Jones type of game, walking into traps, fighting monsters, and collecting strength and weapons.

Really creative and fun. And hard to win!!!

mouser

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #76 on: May 03, 2006, 07:45 PM »
welcome to the site, hank.

Aztec pic:
aztec2.jpg

info: http://www.classicga...com/rotw/aztec.shtml

actually thats a nice site for this kind of stuff: http://www.classicgaming.com

Mr.Fancypants

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #77 on: May 03, 2006, 11:36 PM »
Wolfenstein/Spear of Destiny (favorite shoot 'em up)
Raptor, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Doom, RipTide.
Tetris, and Card games (most time wasted)
NFL Blitz (most fun)

Lashiec

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #78 on: May 04, 2006, 05:54 AM »
Reading all your posts, I really feel young :D, since my favourite game during my childhood was "Sonic the Hedgehog" on the Mega Drive (the one called "Genesis" there in the USA). I was really hooked up with the game, and it provided hours and hours of mindless fun, although it wasn't that long.
« Last Edit: May 04, 2006, 05:56 AM by Lashiec »

tinyvillager

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #79 on: May 04, 2006, 12:05 PM »
Oregon trail,it was the first computer game i ever played.Had to play it at school though cause i didn't have
a computer myself.

Cloq

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #80 on: May 06, 2006, 11:54 AM »
actually thats a nice site for this kind of stuff: http://www.classicgaming.com

On that note, VDMSound should be installed on any system that will be used to play "classic" games. It emulates DOS Soundblaster and other sound cards so that your games have audio/music when you play them in dosbox window.

Dosbox
dosbox.sourceforge.net/

VDMSound
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=2071

With those two programs, most dos games should play rather well in windows.  8)

JavaJones

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #81 on: May 19, 2006, 11:30 PM »
Wow, some great lists! Glad to see Lode Runner on a number of them. :D Take a look at the developer credits on this image
http://www.mobygames...rt/gameCoverId,6923/

Doug Greene was my dad. :) He ported Lode Runner from the Apple II to the IBM/Tandy, redoing/updating many of the levels in the process. I was around 5 when it was in development and I was his first tester. :D So naturally Lode Runner is one of my all-time favorites. I was also glad to see a lot of people still interested in it any many versions for today's machines floating around the 'net.

So I started gaming way back then on an Apple II, playing games like "Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear" (which I never got very far in) and Karateka (the end ruled, once I "got" it, lol). I loved Crystal Quest on the Mac Classic (and got really good at it). My dad worked for Broderbund so we got a lot of those games for free. I moved to the IBM/Tandy when he ported Lode Runner. Wings of Fury came out a while later and I quite liked that (another Broderbund game). Prince of Persia was certainly a classic and a big favorite, as was the sequel. Later PoP games, especially more recently (from Ubisoft), have been great, but the original 2D approach still beats all. A little-known top-down shooter called (amusingly and very appropriately) "If It Moves, Shoot It" was definitely a favorite for a while.

Eventually things moved on and Wing Commander came out and everything changed for me. :D I am a huge fan of the Wing Commander series (Privateer 1 in particular), and several of the other Origin sim/adventure titles, notably the underappreciated Strike Commander (best adventure flight sim ever! we need a sequel!). X-Wing and Tie Fighter were absolute classics and are very high on my list of favorites. Wolfenstien I used to play with a friend of mine - one of us on keyboard, one on the mouse. Later in life playing FPS's in a big way I thought back on that and it seemed a very odd way to play, but it worked surprisingly well. I was surprised to hear from a friend that he has also played FPS's this way - with two people controlling one character. True co-op! :D

One lesser-known game of that time that I absolutely loved was simply called "Stunts", again from Broderbund. It had about 10 wildly different vehicles (from Indy Car to Humvee) and 5 or 10 weird, roughly animated characters, with silly exaggerated personalities, who you raced against. The physics weren't spectacular, neither were the graphics, but the racing was pretty fun. What was remarkable about it were the stunts. Loops, jumps, slaloms, bridges, etc. What was even cooler was the built-in track editor that you could use to create your own tracks with all of these features. We spent hours and hours with the track editor! Many years later in the early 2000's when I was working at The Learning Company, which had just bought Broderbund, I tried unsuccessfully to get them to make an updated version of the game. Finally several years hence we have the "Trackmania" series which seems to do all the same stuff, except for the quirky characters to race against.

I also loved classic RTS's like Warcraft I and II (they lost me with III) and Command and Conquer. I tried in vain to get good at Falcon 3.0 but always had to settle for lesser flight sims. I just wasn't serious enough about it I guess. ;)

A brief stop at console games, my biggest console experience was with the SNES. I loved Pilot Wings most of all. The helicopter level at the end ruled. :D F-Zero was also a great one. As you can see I'm not much of a console gamer.

To this day I am still a huge FPS fan. Half-Life is of course a big one. I wasn't actually that big a fan of Quake, but loved Quake II multiplayer. The original Unreal Tournament probably remains my favorite multiplayer FPS though. The feel established in that game hasn't been matched or reproduced quite yet. I guess it must be a game feel that not enough people liked, but I vastly prefer it to the "looser" feel of Quake 3 and subsequent games. I also played a huuge amount of Marathon on the Mac in my school days. Tons and tons of fun. The Unreal Tournament mods for it are worth checking out. Deus Ex is probably my all-time favorite "FPS", though it's really an RPG/FPS hybrid. Truly a fantastic game - it's a shame what they did to it in the sequel, seeminly motivated by closer cross-platform (console and PC) development concerns. More recently I have really enjoyed Far Cry (mostly the first half - I thought the enemy difficult did not scale well on later levels) and FEAR, plus Call of Duty 1/2 and the like. CoD (the original) remains the best WWII FPS I've played.

I also want to make a special mention of some great underappreciated games. I've already mentioned several above - Stunts, Strike Commander, Privateer.

Strike Commander serves some more to be said about it. I really just feel it was the perfect mix of sim and arcade in a flight model. It also had extremely impressive graphics for the time. Added to that it had the classic Origin Wing Commander-esque storyline driven by animated cut scenes, sometimes with branching dialog. It also had a slight strategy and resource management aspect to it as you could eventually select your own missions and had to manage your money to purchase replacement fighter jets, weapons, etc. All these aspects were "light" enough not to interfere with the core of the flight sim, but meaty enough to enjoy and provide a great setting for the flight elements which could otherwise be very meaningless and disconnected. I still enjoy flight sims today but they always lose my interest because the stories are so poor, and in particular poorly told. The more mixed genre, arcady sim is almost a console-exclusive thing these days, and that's really a shame.

Privateer also deserves some more in-depth discussion. Here was a game based in an already rich universe created by Wing Commander I and II, both great games in their own right. Privateer takes that universe and literally opens it up to an unprecedented degree of freedom. Tons of systems, planets, a range of ship and upgrade options, and a broad, open-ended story. Absolutely a fantastic game! They really let it down with the sequel I felt. It was fun, but it just wasn't a real sequel and was nowhere near as good as the original. I was hoping that Freelancer would be the sequel we had always deserved but it just didn't hit the mark. These are all in the Elite mold, of course, but we really need a proper game to fill this genre today. The "X" games don't do it either. *sigh* It's tragic being a fan of an apparently unpopular genre.  :P

Another very notable game, not all that old but not new, is Blade of Darkness. Here is a game that was doing full environment and character shadowing with multiple colored light sources, limb severing, blood dripping down walls, and all kinds of advanced graphical stuff well before Doom 3 made it big with basically the same features updated for newer systems. It also had a fantastic realtime combat system unmatched by any other game before or since. It was admittedly a bit clunky, but if given a bit of time it really is a gem.

For the future I am most looking forward to Spore, Crysis, the FEAR expansion, and the new Command and Conquer 3.

Hoorah for gaming! :)

- Oshyan
« Last Edit: May 20, 2006, 03:18 PM by JavaJones »

superboyac

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #82 on: May 20, 2006, 02:08 PM »
Stunts!  I loved that game!!!  Oh man, that one was great.  I played that and saved the videos of me doing crazy crashes sent my car like a mile high.  And I also saved the videos of me finishing the race super fast.  That was a great game, my little sister and I played it all the time.

JavaJones

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #83 on: May 20, 2006, 03:16 PM »
Oh yeah, I forgot you could save replays! That's definitely something a lot of PC racing games missed out on for a while after Stunts came out, too. I think most have it these days, but honestly I think it's a feature most every game should have - easy recording and maybe even editing of your gameplay sessions. It's really pretty simple to setup something like that in a game, most games already have some kind of "demo" component to play back a sequence of actions anyway, and it can help create a cool community element from almost nothing very quickly. Sharing tracks is also a great way to inspire community. Imagine if someone could come up with a way to "virtualize" someone's driving style. Watch them driving and then create an AI based on them that others could play against. :D At the least you could share people's runs of particular tracks and let people drive against ghost cars. Obviously there's the multiplayer element too, but how often are you going to be able to play against the best drivers out there? They could just share their best times as ghost car files and then you could practice and compete against them, learn from their moves. So many cool possibilities. :)

See, this is the kind of stuff I wanted to do with "Stunts 2" at TLC. I think they missed out on something good. :D

- Oshyan

mouser

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #84 on: May 20, 2006, 03:17 PM »
what about:
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/

UltimateStunts will be a remake of the famous DOS-game "stunts".



ps.
stunts page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts

(can i encourage everyone to post pics whenever possible when posting - more work but much funner to read  :Thmbsup:)
Stunts_race.png
« Last Edit: May 20, 2006, 03:19 PM by mouser »

JavaJones

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #85 on: May 20, 2006, 03:26 PM »
Super cool, great find Mouser! Looks like they'll support all the features I liked and more. There are even plans to load old stunts tracks. I should dig up my old disks of my tracks. "Oh Sh*t II" is really something to behold. ;)

P.S. I originally intended to include links and maybe screenshots for all the ones in my post, but A: I forgot and B: it seemed like it would make my long post even longer. :D I'll gladly go back and redo with some images if desired though, as long as people don't mind the length. I'll try to do links at the least.

P.P.S. Reading the Wikipedia page I am amazed to hear there is an active community still! I'd wager it's a lot more significant than it ever was when Stunts was actually new-ish. Wow! Very cool stuff. I am so glad that this underappreciated game is, well, appreciated now. :D

- Oshyan
« Last Edit: May 20, 2006, 03:29 PM by JavaJones »

f0dder

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #86 on: May 20, 2006, 03:30 PM »
Stunts! How could I forget that? Stunts (aka "4d sports driving") was one of the first games I purchased, for my good old amiga. Love!  :-*
- carpe noctem

mouser

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #87 on: May 20, 2006, 03:33 PM »
you whippersnapper kids and your 3d games !!!!
when i was a kid there was no graphics!

jgpaiva

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #88 on: May 20, 2006, 04:06 PM »
"4d sports driving
THIS IS A GREAT GAME!
I remember very well playing it! Ok, now I want to play it again, e need to get dosbox ;)
Fantastic find, JavaJones! Thanks!

Oh, and thanks for the link to the remake, mouser! I'll try it ASAP! :D
This thread really is a great way to remember those gone games ;)

As always, DC at it's best level ;)
 :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup:

jgpaiva

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #89 on: May 20, 2006, 04:09 PM »
Ok, i've just remembered yet another fantastic old game. But i can't remember the name, please help me out here.
It's a motorcycle game, with a bit of violence, where you could kick or punch the guy that you were passing by. I also played this one a lot, but i just can't remember it's name!

f0dder

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #90 on: May 20, 2006, 04:51 PM »
Hmm, if it also had an "adventure" part, you're probably thinking of Full Throttle. I played the demo, which orcked, but never got around to purchasing the full game :(
- carpe noctem

JavaJones

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #91 on: May 20, 2006, 06:24 PM »
Hm, might it be Road Rash? http://www.mobygames.com/game/road-rash

- Oshyan

jgpaiva

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #92 on: May 20, 2006, 06:34 PM »
Thanks, javajones, i think that's it!
Here's an image:
1134428801-04.png
« Last Edit: May 21, 2006, 06:09 AM by jgpaiva »

f0dder

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #93 on: May 21, 2006, 02:41 AM »
jgpaiva: Doh, referer-checking :)
- carpe noctem

jgpaiva

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #94 on: May 21, 2006, 06:09 AM »
Grr.. On this thread, it's the second time this happens to me!
Ok, fixed ;)

tinyvillager

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #95 on: May 21, 2006, 09:50 AM »
 ;D I loved Road Rash (had the worst music),played it on the Sega Genesis.

saric

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #96 on: January 11, 2007, 03:46 PM »
my favorite game is adventure quest :D

cthorpe

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #97 on: January 11, 2007, 11:10 PM »
Aztec was awesome.  Loved that game.

My favorites were

Wizadry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord http://www.lava.net/...zardry/wizardry.html
Wasteland http://en.wikipedia....land_(computer_game)
SuperQuest http://www.apple2.or.../a2zine/Sel/sqx5.htm

app103

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #98 on: January 12, 2007, 12:19 AM »
I forgot to mention this one...

Crystal Castles

A2600_Crystal_Castles.png

It's one of the few I am still trying to beat that I haven't...yet.

Been trying for 20 years.  :-[

Ruffnekk

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Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
« Reply #99 on: January 12, 2007, 01:43 AM »
My definite favourites from the past are all C64 games:

Commando:

cmdo.gifWhat's your favorite computer game from when you were young?


Q*Bert:

crate_qbert.jpgWhat's your favorite computer game from when you were young?

And of course Yie Are Kung FU:

yie_ar_kung-fu.jpgWhat's your favorite computer game from when you were young?
Regards,
RuffNekk

Programming is an art form that fights back.
« Last Edit: January 12, 2007, 01:45 AM by Ruffnekk »