Aaah, all great games listed, but I have one to add. I haven’t really read through all the posts, due to lack of time. But for any serious gamer, POSTAL has to be one of my all time favorites. Any game that came under fire from the U.S. Congress, and is banned in some outside countries, is a surefire hit with all the kiddies. It’s a simple game actually. Your character gets fired from his job, and the bank forecloses on his house, so what’s he do? Kills everyone. Goes from town to town with a vast array of weapons and wipes men, women, kids, ostriches (Yes… ostritches) out! The audio is great, and the video is not spectacular, but enough to really enjoy the game.
No, I’m not some demented psychopath… but I do enjoy a good blow em all to hell game. lol
If you haven’t already, give Myst a try; it really is as good as everyone says. It’s the only computer game I know of that doesn’t put any pressure on you (you can take as much time as you need and there’s no inventory to maintain) and is incredibly simple to play, yet really requires you to think to solve the puzzles. It’s a fascinating, inspiring, and thorougly enjoyable journey. Just a caveat, though: I don’t reccomend the “user friendly” version; the on-screen hints are almost an eyesore against the backgrounds. There are plenty of hint books and websites to help you out of you get stuck.
I’d recommend Riven (which I didn’t like at all, BTW) only if you’re extremely patient, extremely good at recording facts and keeping them in order, and extremely sharp as well (you literally have to be constantly on your toes just ot get around). It’s a much, MUCH harder game than Myst. Oh, and you need a monster of a computer to get it to run right.
If you really want games on the cheap, though, you can’t beat shareware. Just $5 or so to test-run a game, and you only have to register (pay for the whole set) if you want to. Best of all, they don’t gobble up huge chunks of memory or require $2000 worth of add-on hardware to work.
If you want a great flight sim, you cannot beat the Falcon series for sheer realism and playability. You can adjust the realism level from something akin to an arcade game all the way to something rivaling military flight sims. The series has reached Falcon 4.0, but I can remember playing a much older version of Falcon on a dilapidated Windows 3.1 machine back in the early 90s. Note: The higher realism settings on Falcon require a math coprocessor. Most modern computers have them, but you should dig up your old docs just to be sure. Major plus: With Falcon, you can set up friggin’ HUGE LAN games that can be a dogfight ranging up to an entire war with campaigns and missions. Or you can fly it alone and get the same effect from the very good AI. In short, you can drop days into this game. Or you can drop a few minutes into it just shooting up enemy aircraft in an ‘instant action’ mode at the lowest realism and difficulty settings.
Okay, enough on Falcon. I like first-person shooters. I also like Postal, which is technically a third-person shooter (you are viewing the scene from a high vantage point looking down at an angle) but is still very fun. Weapons range from a machine gun to a flamethrower to mines. The game revolves around you going ‘postal’ and killing everyone, cops, military men, even unarmed citizens. A lot of fun.
Wolfenstien 3D, the original first-person shooter, will always have a special place in my heart. In it, you play B.J. Blaskowitz, a POW trapped in Castle Wolfenstien. You must fight your way out using various weapons. Wolfenstien 3D can’t hold a candle to any newer game in any respece, but it’s guaranteed to be cheap, fun, and it will run on any PC that works at all.
Doom, of course, has gone through a series (Doom, Doom II, Ultimate Doom, etc.) but they’re all fun if you want mindless violence against pixels. In Doom, you fight aliens and zombies instead of Nazis, but the games are very much the same. The imagry in the later Dooms is rather intense (you go to Hell and fight demons) but no worse that more modern games.
Duke Nukem 3D is very good as well, and is more advanced than the Doom series. You fight aliens in DN3D, but the aliens have invaded Earth. Of course, DN3D and all its successors have a lot of gratuitous sex scenes (you fight in porno theaters and adult bookshops, to name a few) but that can be stopped using a toggle function in the options screen.
Blood is about as advanced in first-person shooters as I have come because of the limitations of my machine (it won’t run Blood 2). Blood is a very good, very creepy game where you are an undead evildoer trying to fight some very creepy evil beings to reunite with an amoral deity (Tchernobog, to name the Unnamable). As with Doom, there is some intense imagry. It is also more realistic than Doom (better 3D engine), and it demands more of your system.
Well, that was a huge post. Bottom line: Have fun.
Another thing I didn’t care for with Riven- it’s on five CDs. Having to change CDs really interrupts the flow of the game. Myst, thankfully, comes complete on one CD.
Myst is older, too, so its hardware requirements aren’t as demanding as Riven’s.
I played Riven before Myst, and I totally agree with you on the differences between the games. While the graphics are a little better in Riven, the simplicity of Myst makes it the better of the two.
Red Baron is a pretty hard game as I recall from playing the original a few years back. Does it still come with the novel-sized instruction booklet? I actually used that thing as a reference for a paper in high school.
If you’re into flight simulation games, and you don’t want to waste any money, see if you can download a few free demos before actually buying anything.
And, as a person who has spent the past weekend leading my Huns to victory over the Romans, I can tell you that Age of Empires is a really good game. Especially like the latest expansion pack…
If you buy Riven on DVD it comes on only one disk. I got it this way, and got tired of wandering around in circles looking, looking, looking, for something, what I didn’t know (before I read any walkthroughs), because there was nothing to indicate what you were supposed to do next. Interesting to look at, but in my opinion not the best playability out there. Next time I’ll read more reviews before buying. - MC
My big advice for you is that if you don’t plan on being a huge geek about computer games, don’t spend money on them. Just about every major release has a very playable demo that you should try out, and you may even get your fill out of that.
As an example, one of the excellent suggestions your received was to play Descent… If I remember correctly, the demo version of that went on for a long time…
