I spent WAY too much time on Psi5 Trading Company. You were the captain of a trading spaceship. You had to choose your crew, cargo, and destination. Of course, there are pirates out there…and then there were some friendly folks, too. The key here is to NOT fire on your friends! When you got attacked, you had to contact your repair chief and have him, her, or it send out robots to repair damage. Sometimes, of course, the robots themselves got damaged! It was a juggling exercise. And it was fantastic.
I loved playing The Black Cauldron…that game kicked ass. I didn’t play much of the earlier Ultima’s, but I remember watching my oldest brother play them.
One of the games I miss the most is Dig Dug. That game was so incredibly pointless yet had hours of fun packed in a 4 color game (If even that much).
Hey, any of you people who looged on to the old BBSs: What were the names of the games that were popular?
There was the one where you had a ship and traded for goods, and there was the one where you went into the wastelands to fight people.
Sorry, I can’t be more specific, but they were cool games. (Not to mention some of the 1st internet type of games.)
Civ for PC (I used a 486SX-25 with interal speakers for quality sound!)
Ultima Exodus for the original Nintendo.
Spiderman on Atari 2600
Oregon Trail on Apple IIe
Neuroman. Do I know you in another life??
I didn’t play Digdug, but you got my two favorites–Hack and ** Starflight**.
I got into both around the time I was in college. Hack, I had access to from UCLA’s computer lab and this game had a deleterious effect on my studies—I’d blow off homework, studying, and occasionally going to class to play this game. I even learned how to partially disable a portion of the network to keep the computer “load” low and let me play the game (when the computer load was high, you couldn’t play games).
I was still addicted to hack after I solved it. Heck, I can still play a game–or ten–of Hack.
I recall Rogue as being an older and somewhat inferior version to hack, though fun in it’s own right. Mine had the “wield food as ultimate weapon that will destroy anything in one hit” bug, though.
Starflight I got from a friend, who didn’t like it much. I thought it was one of the greatest games I ever played. I played it during the summer so it didn’t interfere with school. And it taught me an important lesson on the importance of backing up computer disks properly, and not being sleep deprived when doing something important. Starflight required two disks to save and back up, and when I’d played the game all night and saved it during the wee hours of the morning (right before I was going to do something risky), I often found that I’d saved the same disk twice, or overwrote the wrong copy of the wrong disk, or some such. I recall having to start completely over after making considerable progress at least three times. A few of those times, I got so frustrated I wanted to cry.
Anyway…other games I enjoyed, though not as much as those two, were Rogue, Castle Wolfenstein, and Wizardry. Though one of my favorite computer moments was watching some friends of mine at UCLA kill Lord Ultima in one of the Ultima follow up games (with a boat’s weapons, if you’re curious).
Ok, there was one i used to play, on a mac or apple- the Art of war, or maybe the ancient art of war. You ran these small groups of 3 kinds of troops (knights, archers, and umm, boxers?), and your fort(s) produced them. You could set the AI on “Crazy Ivan” to “SunTzu”. There must be a version of this, playable on windows, I know some cracker has done it, I’ll bet.
slythe: i love those M&M games too. Almost done w/ it, but decided to start over again, rather than get to the end.
Old BBS games I remember off the top of my head are Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, and Kyrandia.
I also VERY vaguely remember playing a Star Trek game on the computers where my mom worked from 1977-1980. The computer room was huge, freezing, and full of reel-to-reel machines. Sometimes Mom would even let me run the punch cards through the reader!
I also remember playing a game on Dad’s Timex machine (or TI, can’t remember which) with a cassette tape drive…game was called “Missiles of July.” Sort of a very simplified “Battleship”…you had to deduce and plot where x number of mines were on a grid. That was…'79 or '80 I think.
You want OLD school, I’ll get Tark to post about playing a Star Trek game when he was first getting into computers…they played by printer because they had no monitors. “In two feet of snow! Uphill! Both ways!”
I played that Star Trek Game… it looked like this:
…
…K…
….
…E…
…K
…
And you would move the Enterprise (E) around and shoot Klingons (K) and the * were stars. I remember having to change the name of the game in my personal directory because the boss was getting wise to it and would constantly search for the files.
Elite, btw, was WAY ahead of its time. Fun game.
CandyMan
Similar to trade wars was Yankee trader…i used to be addicted to that game for some reason.
Another good BBS game was the Pit - basically gladiators fighting, with graphics (if you can consider colored ASCII characters graphics)
There was a great “RPG” called Below The Root - I played that a lot. I don’t remember a lot of it but you had to use skills/spells (?) to do various things - you lived in the treetops and, well, I don’t remember much more than that, it was a LONG time ago.
Plus a few of my other favs :
Racing Destruction Set - build tracks, race against your friend, drop mines, blow him up.
Bruce Lee - On player controlled Bruce, the other could control some Sumo guy. Very cool.
Jumpman and Jumpan Jr. - I would play these for HOURS
Darn, I wish my dad hadn’t sold the old 64. I adored it. (Sorry)
OK, I know you were talking about Starflight, and actually Starflight had two disks, Starflight 2 had four disks. The second one was even better than the first, as it had a really cool bartering system. Very impressive that they could pack so much detail and so many worlds into that game.
Did any of you guys actually finish either of them? We (my brother and I) both blew up the evil planet that was caused all the hub-bub in the first one, but the game would always crash after we got some urgent message saying we succeeded or something. Never got to see the end. We never finished the second one, either–IIRC, we got to point where we could go back in time, but there were always these super-powerful ships that killed us. I don’t remember ever getting past it.
Other games that come to mind…
Jet
Spy Hunter
Maniac Mansion
Space Quest 1, 2, and 3
Police Quest 1 and 2
King’s Quest 1-4
Zork
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Red Baron
One on One (Dr. J and Larry Bird)
Pit Stop
And I remember one game on the old Trash-80 called “Bedlam”, a text adventure about escaping from a mental hospital. I’m sure there are others that just aren’t coming to mind.
Re: Balance of Power
I never got to play this until about two years ago, but I had picked up a book in a bargain store by Chris Crawford about the design and formulas that made the game work. He demonstrated in the final part of the book that it was possible to win on the hardest level with some consistency, but since he wrote the game, he certainly knew when to back down and when to stand his ground. I think I did manage to actually win the game once on the easiest levels. The secret is to pick your fights very carefully. Oh, and never, ever pick Def Con 1 unless you’re so far behind and want the other player to not win. Heh.
If you really want a copy John, I bet you could find it if you looked hard enough, either on an eBay type site or an “abandonware” site. I question the legality of the latter, but you may have a difficult time finding an auction.
On the Apple IIe one of my favorite games was called Karateka. It was a side scroll thing where you could run or walk up to people while invading a Japanese castle. The best part was when you got to the end and saw the princess that you were supposed to rescue, if you approached her in your fighting stance she would kick you in the head - you die, game ends. That would amuse me for hours.
Wow, I remember Kareteka, that game rocked. It’s amazing how many other games you remember playing once someone else mentions them.
I remember playing Bird vs. Dr. J too. I also had a coupld of floppies full of cracked arcade type games we used to play all the time.
I know this is mainly about computer games, as opposed to console games, but some of the old Intellivision games I had were pretty cool for the time too. I saw a web page with some screenshots the other day, and I just sat and basked in the nostalgia (Tron ruled!) 
Ones that have been mentioned already:
Karateka.
Pool Of Radiance
M.U.L.E. This game was EXCELLENT! Nothing like playing four player, and making your friends crawl for the food and power that you were monopolizing.
A few others:
Gunship. This Apache simulator was so far ahead of its time, it was years before I saw another simulator that was as much fun to play.
Wizard’s Crown. An old SSI game. The final part, where you’re trying to get the crown back to the town, was grueling. Monster attacks every step of the way, the party, bruised and drained of mana, finally stumbling through the gates.
The Eternal Dagger. Sequel to Wizrd’s Crown. A very, very cool game. I spent hours on the bad boys.
Anyone else play Questron? This adventure game is more adictive than crack. You can go to towns and gamble, either throiugh double or nothing, blackjack, or Roullette, with one number giving a 25x payout. This game has, to this day, one of the most satisfying victory endings I have ever seen. I have to go with Fallout for an ending that compares.
Mobius. A martial arts game, where doing the right thing and keeping your Karma intact is as important as being able to kick ass.
Well, it’s not really that old, but… the Adventures of Willy Beamish? Anyone else remember it?
I could never get past the goddamn babysitter that turned into a bat.
Not much of a gamer here, but…
a) a “Caterpillar” knockoff called Mouse Catchers. It was on its own bootable Mac floppy and when you booted from it, your Mac loaded the game, not the Finder. Quit the program and it would shut down your computer. This made it fun to stick on folks’ startup floppies or hard drives (once they came into being), and make it the startup application back in the days before MultiFinder 
Then when I bought my first computer, a used SE, I inherited:
b) Leather Goddesses of Photos, a text-based adventure. Never got anywhere with it;
c) Déja Vu, which was one of those games where you have to check out everything in each room for clues and/or add items to your “inventory” to deploy as tools or weapons. In Déja, you start off in a locked office with amnesia and a head injury. Disk read error at some point ruined my copy in my newbie era before I knew enough to make backups.
d) The Uninvited, by the producers of Déja Vu. A haunted gothic mansion, a missing brother, a rather bony rendition of Scarlett O’Hara in the hallway and a frustrating maze full of zombies behind the cemetery. I still play Uninvited using vMac and System 6.0.8.
PS to Motorgirl: you can still run old 24-bit (System 7 incompatible) programs using vMac on a modern Mac (or a PC for that matter). It emulates a Mac Plus (9 inch black & white screen, 4 MB RAM) but for the most part if it is a color game it should run on a modern Mac natively without problems (there having been very few 24-bit Mac programs that won’t run without color).
I wrote:
I should confess that I have yet to figure the damn thing out and I’ve only been playing it (off and on) since 1991!
Well, as I said, I’m not much of a gamer. (One of these days I will figure out how to get past the damn zombies or pry loose the cross in the wall, and and will find a way to get into the bloody seamless box…).
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by mrblue92 *
**
I never played Starflight II, but I DID finish Starflight I. I have to tell you that I don’t remember what happened on the computer screen when I did “win”. I was far, far too excited by the fact that I’d finally beaten a game that had driven me nearly to tears on more than one occasion (not that it was frustrating to play, but because I kept screwing up my saves).
Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear (on the Apple II)–I loved that one
And Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle in the early Mac days were great too (“nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh! ow!”)
Hey! That’s right. I’d forgotten all about Willy. Cartoon animation and a pretty funky storyline. My wife and I loved it. And, I think, solved it with a few hints from a couple of on-line forums.
Can’t recall where it went. I think we loaned it out or something.
KC (Who appears to be the only person in this forum who owned a Tandy CoCo instead of a C64.)