Since my laptop was stolen then other week, and I’ve been squeeking by with a new netbook I picked up as a replacement, I’ve been specializing in old abandonware stuff for the past week or 2 now. (I REALLY gotta get an external CD-ROM for this thing…).
Anyways, some of the abandonware I’ve scrapped up from around the web have sparked some great moments of nostalgia for me. WC II will probably always be one of my top 5 games, probably since I won a tournament at my HS back in 98-99. Some other goodies I’ve found are the SIM games (Simfarm, Simant, SimTower, etc…) and of course the CIV franchise games.
Strategy games definitely hold a special place in my heart. I don’t think much else can have quite the staying power of a good strategy game. Puzzle games (Match 3’s, Tetris, Dr. Mario, etc.) can hold their staying power for quite a while as well.
It’s just tough to age a good strategy game down to the point it will never appeal to someone again. Unless there’s some huge bug/glitch you figured out to exploit making the game a cake walk, you can always approach a strategy game with new tactics and try out a whole new set-up you never thought of before. This is what makes FFTactics/ Warcraft 2/3 /AoE and so on, such enduring games.
I’ll second TA, especially given the wealth of add ons, conversions, AIs etc there still exist for them. The ones I’d downloaded really ramped up the replay value of the game, even without the Core Contingency addon I was happily readdicted.
I was suprised that Homeworld was as old as it is (oldish, 1999 IIRC), but it still plays nicely. Perhaps not as well as TA, but very well indeed. And I’ve not even tapped the conversions and add ons yet. Perhaps because I was never able to get past that nebula/solar flare level and finish it first, but what of it
Civilization 2 doesn’t need a CD to play the game after the initial install though IIRC the gold edition does. The same for Alpha Centauri which doesn’t require a CD but the planetary pack with Alien Crossfire does. Maybe I should start an SMAC game sometime; that game has definitely aged well.
Civ II without the CD means that you don’t get the wonder movies nor do you get the high council advice. Both are pretty to look at once or twice, but after that you don’t need them. The rest of the game works just fine.
Civ III didn’t need a CD, either, though Civ III Gold did. I think that the Gold edition is so much better that I’ll dig out the disk when I want to play it.
I recall the graphics being pretty ugly when the game came out (I mean, yeah, the “cinematics” and stuff were pretty, but the actual gameplay tiles and the like were fugly.) so that’s not much of a loss.
Oddly though, SMAC never gelled for me. Too many of the techs felt kinda weird generic. You researched Titano Armor! You can now build… Titano Armor infantry, Titano Armor tanks. You researched plasma weapons! You can now build… Plasma Titano Infantry and Plasma Titano Tanks! Great, thanks. z.z I dunno. Maybe what things are called shouldn’t matter what things are called, but this was the equivalent of building “infantry +1” for me and I got bored in a hurry. Played one game through to economic victory (which seemed fastest) and never touched it again.
I just copied the contents of the CD onto my hard drive, and I can run it directly from its folder without actually installing it. I’m not sure quite how or why that works; it doesn’t show up in the installed programs or registry, but double clicking the .exe runs the game the same way the CD autorun utility did.
I dig out Starcraft now and again. Are there single-player mods for it? I always felt like it needed more single-player human missions. I’ve never enjoyed playing as the Zerg or … other people, whatever they were called. Ultross or something?
I’m replaying Heroes of Might & Magic 3 as we write. Sure, the graphics are quaint, but they were already quaint when the game shipped. And the AI still kicks my ass without even bothering to cheat.
I really enjoyed Conquest of the New World, but my older computer which had Windows 98 on it finally died of old age. I’m not a computer whiz, but have been told that I can’t just install a new motherboard or put the old hard drive into a newer computer and expect it to work. Sometimes older is better. Is there any way to play that game on XP or Vista?
I’m just the opposite.
“Half-Life” is my all time favorite pc game. I’ve played through the original game 10-15 times, and replayed the “Opposing Force” & “Blue Shift” expansions about 2 times each.
But I’ve had “Half-Life 2” installed on my machine since May 2008 and can’t even FINISH it, let alone replay it. It just doesn’t grab me like the original HL did.
Quite a few. Company of Heroes springs to mind. The battle component to the later Total War games, as another.
The inability to give orders while paused turned Starcraft into a bothersome frantic clickfest with no possibility to play it in any other manner. Truth be told it totally turned me off RTS games, and I mean I didn’t even pick one up again, until Dawn of War hit the bargain bin at Walmart.
