Baldur’s Gate 2 still runs nicely and I replay it a lot.
What annoys me is that the original Baldur’s Gate, from 1998, runs on my Vista laptop, but The Bard’s Tale from 2005 does not. It’s apparently pretty much a known issue, and Vivendi would have been the site to go to for tech support, but they were bought by Activision… which has nothing about the game on their support section. The creator’s webpage has no support forum for it.
I have another game that only runs on XP, not Vista, and it’s not that old… but hell if I can remember what it is. Shows you how often I play it. I haven’t played The Bard’s Tale since switching to Vista, either.
What would you call Company or Heroes of Dawn of War or Sins of a Solar Empire or the combat portion of Medieval Total War II? The combat isn’t turn based, and once you set your forces in motion they’ll continue acting on their own in real time until you give them other orders.
I suppose we can call them modified-real time, but they’re still a subsection of real time strategy games.
Back on thread: consider “Pirates.” The sheer variability of play keeps me coming back to that game. The 2004 version trumps the original, but mostly because I don’t have to mess with DOSbox to run it. Adding the “adult” mod for the bar wench costume doesn’t hurt either.
I found “Red Storm Rising” from an abandonware site and can lose myself for a couple of hours fighting WWIII. That game goes back to ~1990.
Railroad Tycoon, which was always an awesome game, and still is.
My sons have a slightly older Mac still and they crank up SimEarth quite frequently. Especially to create a robot civ.
And I love the original SimCity. Yeah, later incarnations (especially SimCity 4) are much better, but the simplicity of the original is fun!
ETA: Sadly, my only Civ II was the Gold Edition, so I never knew it as a non-disk game.
I wrote a pretty damn cool single player quest for Starcraft:Broodwars. It’s got a bunch of puzzles, as well as several full-blown “build a city and kill the enemies” sections to it. It’s all one single map. The text file I set up to distribute with it has the following claims:
Map Statistics
--------------
673 Placed units (many more are created using triggers)
162 Triggers controlling 1000+ actions
79 Locations
14 different Mission Objectives
7 unique and difficult to figure out special ability puzzles
6 Heroes
4 distinct player against computer melee or melee-like battles
Anyone who would like to play it, PM me your email address and I’ll send it over.
Seriously? Four? I thought that 3000 was the peak of the series and I could see a good argument made for 2000 but four to me was the point where the whole thing broke down.
This is one of the best games ever made. I remember looking around on websites nearly 10 years ago for what a more ‘modern’ game might be and it was still being cited as a better casual sub sim than any game out at the time.
Speaking of ‘real-time’, I managed to get a copy of “Decision in the Desert” going in a C64 simulator and still had fun with it. That one was ‘accelerated real-time’, from ~1984.
Mafia still manages not only to play better but to look better than most new games. Despite its age, the game is filled with vivid colors; it’s actually nice to look at. Everything they release now seems to be the same shade of dirt-brown and gray.
ALSO: Myth: The Fallen Lords and Soulblighter - still as unique and challenging of a game as they were when they first came out.
Another game from the 1980s - Lords of Midnight. There’s a Java implementation available and some on-line resources as well. Though it’s sort of the same game every time, it got to be kind of fun to try and do shortest-time sweep of the map (take every keep & citadel, kill all visible armies). Last one was down to ~70 days and I’m taking a break from it.
The game was so simple in its design and yet so nicely made that it has held up well. It’d be great to see a more modern approach (with a proper AI, for example) that kept it as streamlined.
I adore Mafia in every way except that it doesn’t have quite the same “sandbox” feel as the various GTAs. Having to back out of the mission-based game in order to play the “Freeride” stuff is a big mistake.
