Oldies, But Goodys

I've been playing computer games since before Zork came out for the Commadore 64. That was back on what was called a Vic 20, with these cartridges you plugged into the back of the computer.

Over the last 31 years, I've played many games, different types of games, and on different platforms. Each game stuck out in some way in my mind.

My son Josh and I started doing some Let's Plays with a couple of rather old games. One of them has him just as excited as if I had bought him the latest game that he'd been wanting.

The first game is called Shivers and was released by Sierra Online back in 1995, almost 20 years ago. It was unique in that it was one of the first games that actually required Windows to run (Windows 3.1 or better).
It was also unique in that it was the first time Sierra had put out a game that was based on horror and shock value. Later that year, they would also put out Phantasmagoria, which was one of the best selling adventure games of the time.....but will NOT be one that I do with my son Josh, due to the highly adult content (the live action gore is very disturbing in this game, and there was even a rape scene. The game itself was banned in Australia, and helped spark rating concerns over games based on age).

Many computer users today will find playing very old 16 bit games on their computer can be a challenge on our 64 bit computers, running 64 bit OS systems.
Many can use a free application called DOSBox that will allow you to run very old DOS based games. However Shivers, that required Windows was different, in that if you try to install or play it with DOSBox, it will tell you it can not run.

Many people have gotten it to run using Virtual Machine, running under older 32 bit OS systems, but hate the long load times.

In order to get the game to finally run on my computer (which uses a AMD 6 core CPU and Windows 7), I have to use DOSBox, and then I took my old version of Windows 3.1 (which I had burned to a disk long, long ago), and installed Windows 3.1 through DOSBox.
Then, running Windows 3.1 in DOSBox, I was able to actually get the game to install and run!

Resolution of the game is 640 x 480, so I also had to finagle around with my resolution to not only properly see the game, but so I could record it.

So this will not be a game that you can just download and install quickly to try out. It will take a bit of know-how to get it going. That and you can not really buy it officially anywhere anymore. (or Windows 3.1 for that mater).

So here are some videos of the Let's Plays Josh and I have been doing. The first one is just a very short clip of me announcing I'm going to produce the let's plays, shows art from the game.. The next one is just a short clip of Josh and I goofing off, with the 3rd one being the first part of the Let's Plays (parts 1 and 2 are not that exciting, as you have to get into the game, and by part 3 Josh joins me, and it's getting fun).

Jump past the videos to see the Next game I talk about in this thread:



Josh and I goofing off in the game:



Part 1 of the actual Let's Play:



Another old game, is not quite as old as Shivers, but is still Point and Click style of Play, and is horror, called Dark Fall: The Journal That was first put out in 2002, making the game 12 years old at this point.

What was interesting about this game, is that by 2002, many games had gone over to "free movement" in a 3D environment (either first person view or 3rd person view).
However, even being point and click, at the time of it's release....it still had the ability to creep you out!

The game itself has 2 sequels, also point and click style. I liked the 2nd one, but the 3rd one did not do much for me. The first one, will always be a gem for me.

Here's the first video in that series of Let's Plays:



I'll post more as I get them done and uploaded.

Any old games that are your favorites out there? Post here and let me know! I'd like to see them!

I played a lot adventures and other games on my old i386 PC, back in the MSDOS time. From time to time i still crawl through my archive to (re-)play some of them, using DOSBox of course .

I think some of my all time favourites are the following:

Legend of Kyrandia


(Source: Dosgamesarchive)

With the LoK series Westwood Studios brought some new elements into the whole adventure genre. Some puzzles were pretty hard but for most of them you just had to think a bit in a creative way.

Monkey Island I-III

Everyone knows it, everybody loves it . My favourite part is the second one.

Gateway I & II


(Source: Abandonia)

One of the best sci-fi adventures i ever played. I also have read the books years after that, which are very good too, imo. In this game, you could die due to false decisions or wasting too much time. The possibility to die within an adventure was very uncommon in games at these days and was one element, that made Gateway kind of unique.

Albion


(Source: Abandonia)

It was simply great. The combination between sci-fi & fantasy elements was well done. The graphic was awsome and the sound was not some one-track-loop-something like in many other games at this time.

I also liked strategy & simulation games like:

Civilization, Sim City, Theme Park or Syndicate

Action games and action jump & runs i played often too. There was this one revolutionary game called

Flashback


(Source: Abandonia)

It combined the already well known polygonal graphics with new techniques to make the overall game experience very fluid and enjoyable.

I could continue this a bit more but maybe let's hear, what others have in their memory .

a reply to: Tichy

OOOOOOO!!! Gateway!

I remember when that game came out, I just HAD to play it being a fan of the books by Frederik Pohl.

I never got around to getting the 2nd one however. Hrmmmm. Something to look into, thanks!

originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: Tichy

OOOOOOO!!! Gateway!

I remember when that game came out, I just HAD to play it being a fan of the books by Frederik Pohl.

I never got around to getting the 2nd one however. Hrmmmm. Something to look into, thanks!

I also love the books. Pohl is one of the best sci-fi-novel writers imo, although he didn't published that many books all in all.

I played the first Part back in the days. The second one i played some years ago via DOSBox for the first time.

You can download it from Abandonia (link see above). I think it's free.

The sound setting on DOSBox for this game can be a bit annoying. Every now and then you have some sort of break or click-sounds but i think there are some good descriptions out there, how to set up your Box right on this .

a reply to: Tichy

It's because DOSBox has to emulate Creatives Sound Blaster drives.

Installing Windows 3.1, I had to download drivers for the old S3 graphics card, and a Sound Blaster driver, in order for it to work....but then I had this looping in the sound.

Turned out that DOSBox has the IRQ set to 5, and Windows 3.1 wanted it set to 7, so went in, changed it and that smoothed it out for me.

Here is another old game from 1993 that I loved playing back then:

Dune

Good write ups guys..

Another I enjoyed was "Alone in the dark" 1992
By Infogames .

Around the times of "Wolfenstein"

But gaming Consoles and PC's goes back further...
From the old green screen to this goodness for stinking pad the you had to read the info off of paper and type it in...
Arghhhh...1001010110011
I cringe...

Lots of classic through the years.

I started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K and eventually got the game Scarthorpe. A town where even the dogs carry jack knives.
I vaguely remember the unemployment office where you had to queue up to queue up.

Moved onto an Amstrad where my favourite game quickly became Hacker where you were presented with a logon screen and had to hack into a mainframe. After several failed attempts you were let in through a "malfunction" in the security system.

Ah. Those were the days.

Ah. The good old days. My first game was Pong. Yes, I'm that old.

As I recall there were 2 Commodore systems shortly followed up by 2 Atari systems. We had both. Star Raiders was fun. There was a "build a burger" one to that was too damn funny to play. Laughed too much to accomplish anything.

Then Nintendo came along and changed everything. MY game:

Tecmo Super Bowl.

Here's another old game....old computer too, hehehehe:

This is me with my oldest daughter in my lap, in 1985, using my Commadore 64 (with 5 1/4 inch floppy drive), playing Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy....

She's 27 with her own two kids now........

originally posted by: eriktheawful
(with 5 1/4 inch floppy drive)

Those were SO bad. Load times? Bwahahahahahaha....... I'm sorry, had to laugh at that "software".

Btw, my oldest is 24 now.

originally posted by: intrepid

originally posted by: eriktheawful
(with 5 1/4 inch floppy drive)

Those were SO bad. Load times? Bwahahahahahaha....... I'm sorry, had to laugh at that "software".

Btw, my oldest is 24 now.

I remember a few times slipping a disk in....and then hearing a grinding sound.....NOT GOOD! Normally ended up with a mangled disk..

I remember when they came out with 3.5 inch floppies. I thought that was so high tech! And at the same time I was having to use rolls of punch tape to load programs into the computers our systems used in the Navy......

I totally missed to point to a real RPG classic. In fact it is still almost the N°1 for me in this genre (actually Fallout 1&2 hold this place at the moment ).

I'm speaking of: Might & Magic World of Xeen

That's right!

Actually there are two titles/parts, each a unique game on their own:

M&M - Clouds of Xeen and
M&M - Darkside of Xeen

The first one came out 1992, the second followed a year after.

The map of Might & Magic - Darkside of Xeen

Now, the real cool part was, that you could combine those two games into an even bigger game, finally called World of Xeen. But that was just one of the things, which made this one so special (at least for me).



The character system maybe wasn't groundbreaking but it was well balanced. You needed to have different kinds of characters within your party to be effective enough to beat the game. Also you could buy new heros in city taverns. Maybe some "Heroes of M&M"-players will yawn at this point but all this was before the first part of HoM&M came out and was something new.

The puzzles were sometimes really challenging. Often you needed to think "around the corner". No simple quests like "Go to Person A and talk about subject C, then return" or "Get me 5 pelts of Werewolfs". Instead you needed to solve them by using mathematics, by unlock areas to get a clue to a puzzle, written by the architecture of the dungeon itself and in general by simply using your brain often .



Of course the action and the classic roleplay elements weren't left out in the cold. Instead you could really enjoy to see how your heroes leveld up and became better, stronger and more powerful, while the enemies were getting harder too. It wasn't just a hack n slash. Often you needed certain spells for example to be protected against enemies, that simply could make one of your party members die in a blink of an eye or (if i remember correctly) even to change your environment sometimes.

Maybe the dialogs with NPCs came a bit too short but all in all this game must have reached the limits of what you could do in developing a game at this time.

a reply to: Tichy

Sorry about the wait in a reply, I was on the road all day today.

I remember Might and Magic. I seem to remember playing the one of the first ones out, but that was long ago. My oldest son (who's 24 now), was a big fan of them, and played many of them that came out.

I think my first "visual" RPG that I played on a computer (because, let's face it, even a text based adventure game like Zork, was in many ways a RPG), was the old computer game Rogue:



You couldn't save, you just played until you died. Each letter represented a monster, and you had to map out the dungeon. I first played this on a IBM PC Jr.

The next one I remember playing was on a Commadore 64, and that was the first Wasteland:



I've played many RPGs since then, all the Fallout games (up to New Vegas), all the Elder Scroll games, all the Mass Effect games, but one that still stands out to me was:

Diablo 2



To this day, it is still my favorite of all the RPGs I played.

I never did get around to Diablo 3. My wife has it and has played through it several times. She said it was good, but she felt that Diablo 2 was just better (game play).

No need for apologizes .

Well, i didn't play Wasteland, i only had a Commodore 4+ instead of a C64 at that time but i played a lot of Amiga games at my uncles place .

About Diablo. I didn't like it. Maybe the second part was better (never played it) but when i played the first one i started the game...went into this dungeon and after the 5th or 6th level i realized, that this is the game.

Hackn & Slay your way through the whole thing. Not my piece of cake to be honest. This is no RPG for me, no matter how many people do like it .

Ultima instead was more about what i was seeking. I think i played the 7th and the 8th part of it.

Also... Realms of Arkania, better known as The Dark Eye or Das Schwarze Auge.



Great Sound/Music for that time (the video isn't the best quality, i bet he didn't set is Box right or something but i was searching for an english version of the game, since it was made by the german game developer Attic)

a reply to: Tichy

The only Ultima I ever got around to playing was Ultima Underworld





Let's see, that was on my 386 computer...ran at 33 Mhz (whew!) and I think I had 8 Mb of ram!

Heheheh.

You can still get this game for free, from abandonware places, and will run on 64bit computers if you use DOSBox. I had a lot of fun with this game back in the day. Kept a notebook full of notes about where stuff was, and about the runes you use in here.

Great thread

Alot of you guys games are a bit before my time, I wasn't gaming until 90's but yeh I still love the retro games, even to this day I'm mostly still buying indie platformers lol.

My earliest game memory was a game called Digger T Rock for the nes I dunno if any of you guys played it but i'm positve that the newer game spelunky was inspired by this -







My first computer was the nes, i had the sega master system and the mega drive and then I played the snes until i finaly got a playstation then playstation 2 and now i'm on PC and dont think i will go back to consoles except retro consoles, I intend on buying all the consoles of my childhood lol, I don't want to grow up it sucks haha.

Oh did anyone play predator 2 on the master system ? that game was awesome.

Some other games I wont forget is Alex the kid, the music to that game is burnt into my eardrums and i still cant stand it lol.

My all time fav games are on the playstation 1 though - abes oddysey, final fantasy 7, the resident evil series, tony hawks 1 and 2 damn theres too many awesome games who could have favourites.

Back in the 80s when I was a young teen gortex I purchased a ZX Spectrum with a massive 128k of raw processing power which started my love of gaming , the games for it came on cassette tape and were mostly rubbish but the one that still gives me a little tingle when I think about it was a game called Fairlight.

It was one of if not the first isometric adventure games on the market and it blew me away , it had a rudimentary form of physics which meant you could move objects in the game world and I loved it , although it was so hard as to be a form of torture for anyone who dared play it , the controls were fiddly and the gameplay unforgiving but the music was great and graphics were out of this world for the time .... Ahhh Fairlight , sweet memories.


Anyone else remember Fairlight ?

I remember playing Utopia in the Commodore I think. When the PC got modern, I liked the Command and Conquer series most of all.

I have been playing video games since the early 80's. Started with Space Invaders on the Commodore PET at school and was hooked from that moment. My dad bought me a Commodore Vic 20 and my first game played on that was Centipede. We spent many an hour typing in code from books that led to mostly disappointing gaming experiences. Loved that machine. Graduated onto a Commodore 64 and played Hawkeye by The Boys Without Brains. My god that game was amazing considering what they had to develop with back them. Very impressive. I'm 46 now and have a family. Ask me what one of the things I am most concerned about in my life at this time is and I will reply my KDR in BF4. I played a 1000+ hours of BF3 and have a good 450+ hours in BF4. In short I love gaming.. always have, always will. They can send me off in a coffin as long as I have my gaming console with me Here's to all the gamers out there! Cheers.

a reply to: PixelPilot

Welcome to ATS!

I had a Vic 20 too! Played plenty of the cartridge games that plugged into the back of it, before I graduated finally to a C64 also.