Let's Sperg Classic gaming spergathon - Tell others why your favorate game is totally better then theirs, invalidate their childhood!

[(not) y2k compliant]

While I do enjoy some modern gaming, my heart is really still stuck in a by gone period. A time where gameplay was king, voice acting only existed on fancy CD titles, expansion packs were like whole new games and not just cut content to be sold later.

Perhaps he can share what games still to this day capture out imaginations so many years later, and at the same time maybe find some new games to play from others. It doesn't necessarily have to be games that were notable by the gaming collective at the time, just anything that resonated with you and WHY it did.

I'll start with Tyrian for DOS.

Tyrian is a vertical "shump" but it is unlike so many others in the genre. Most shumps are rather linear in nature and usually only have one or a few selected weapons for your disposal. Not Tyrian. This game gives you a large amount of branching paths, purchasable weapons between levels, tons of secret content, and surprisingly decent story (assuming you can get all the orbs to read it all). All of this leads to a huge amount of replayability, something that I find is often lacking in the genre.

Link to play the updated rereleased version "Tyrian 2000" it in your web browser, keep in mind its a bit demanding to do so and your can't save. Recommend to find a download and play in DOSBox.
https://archive.org/details/Tyrian2000

 

[FP 208]

Wow, thanks OP i played the shit out of that game and even printed out the cheatcodes to get the novelty/joke ships when it was new. Also, the minigame was endlessly time-consuming in its own right.

 

[HomeAloneTwo]

Diablo 2 is a never ending timesink of excitement. WAY better than 3 in every regard. Online still functions well and has an active ladder player base and the core content is solid with one of the best expansions ever to back it up.

Getting it to run on a modern pc is a whole mess though.

 

[Bob Page]

Diablo 2 is a never ending timesink of excitement. WAY better than 3 in every regard. Online still functions well and has an active ladder player base and the core content is solid with one of the best expansions ever to back it up.

Getting it to run on a modern pc is a whole mess though.

When I play the first diablo, I play as a warrior and I do an extermination sweep of every floor... no survivors.

 

[It's HK-47]

Kings Quest VI: Hier Today, Gone Tomorrow has been one of my "go-to" point-and-click adventure games for ages, now. It was one of the first times I can remember hearing voice acting in videogame that was fully-fledged and not just a snippet here and there. I believe Sinistar (1982) was the first game to actually have a voice line, but when Kings Quest VI landed in 1992, voice acting was still such a rarity that to see a game loaded with so much of it sent everyone for a bit of a loop, and given that Kings Quest VI was transmitted on floppy diskettes at the time, that's still pretty impressive to me, even today.

I always thought it was the strongest of the series, though that may not exactly be too fair considering the previous Kings Quest games landed in the early 1980s and look a bit less than ideal by any sort of modern standard, even if you've got some pretty thick nostalgia goggles. Even after all this time, though, Kings Quest VI's art style has held up remarkably well--unless you're looking at the fan-made AGI version-- and if you've even a cursory interest in old-fashioned adventure games and you've yet to play it, you're doing yourself an enormous disservice.

Bring a pen and some paper and a keen eye if you wander into it, though. Kings Quest VI is one of those games that absolutely is not afraid to punish you irreversibly for missing some small detail much, much earlier into the game, and it has no autosaves, although you can actually save the game whenever you'd like, though that can lead to you saving in the midst of an unwinnable situation. One of my worst experiences with it was missing a small, golden coin fairly early on, and not realizing until significantly later that I couldn't pay Charon to cross the Styx, and that was it. There was absolutely no way to progress, no way to go back, I was just there in purgatory for the rest of the game.

Here's a link to an in-browser emulator if you're interested in taking a gander. It can sometimes have some difficulty maintaining a save file, and it's a demo anyways, so like Tyrian I'd recommend downloading it for DOSBox, or if you're keen to see the entirety of the King Quest series, there's a Steam bundle for the entire thing that goes on sale fairly frequently.

King's Quest VI emulator

 

[YW 525]

Tyrian is the fucking shit!! That ship upgrade system is still unmatched.

 

[TrippinKahlua]

Kings Quest VI: Hier Today, Gone Tomorrow has been one of my "go-to" point-and-click adventure games for ages, now. It was one of the first times I can remember hearing voice acting in videogame that was fully-fledged and not just a snippet here and there. I believe Sinistar (1982) was the first game to actually have a voice line, but when Kings Quest VI landed in 1992, voice acting was still such a rarity that to see a game loaded with so much of it sent everyone for a bit of a loop, and given that Kings Quest VI was transmitted on floppy diskettes at the time, that's still pretty impressive to me, even today.

I always thought it was the strongest of the series, though that may not exactly be too fair considering the previous Kings Quest games landed in the early 1980s and look a bit less than ideal by any sort of modern standard, even if you've got some pretty thick nostalgia goggles. Even after all this time, though, Kings Quest VI's art style has held up remarkably well--unless you're looking at the fan-made AGI version-- and if you've even a cursory interest in old-fashioned adventure games and you've yet to play it, you're doing yourself an enormous disservice.

Bring a pen and some paper and a keen eye if you wander into it, though. Kings Quest VI is one of those games that absolutely is not afraid to punish you irreversibly for missing some small detail much, much earlier into the game, and it has no autosaves, although you can actually save the game whenever you'd like, though that can lead to you saving in the midst of an unwinnable situation. One of my worst experiences with it was missing a small, golden coin fairly early on, and not realizing until significantly later that I couldn't pay Charon to cross the Styx, and that was it. There was absolutely no way to progress, no way to go back, I was just there in purgatory for the rest of the game.

Here's a link to an in-browser emulator if you're interested in taking a gander. It can sometimes have some difficulty maintaining a save file, and it's a demo anyways, so like Tyrian I'd recommend downloading it for DOSBox, or if you're keen to see the entirety of the King Quest series, there's a Steam bundle for the entire thing that goes on sale fairly frequently.

King's Quest VI emulator

Glad to see the Sierra legacy already mentioned. I was all about all the "Quest" games as a kid.

Fun Fact. Alexander and the Beast from the Disney production were bothed voiced by 80s heartthrob Robby Bensen.

 

[NARPASSWORD]

Commander Keen was my shit back in the day, at least when I got to play it while visiting my uncle.