Ooh, here’s a couple more that might bring back memories:
Pirates!
Command HQ
Earl Weaver Baseball
Populous
Chuck Yeager’s Flight Trainer
Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat
688 Attack Sub
Railroad Tycoon
Star Control
Did anybody ever have enough patience to finish that Sentinel Worlds game? Or Hard Nova?
Didn’t I mention the TRaSh-80 above? Ours was the cheapie Color Computer model, too. We had the oh so impressive audio cassette drive. Woo-hoo! I would still recognize it’s awful screeching if I ever heard it again–reminiscent of a fax or modem connecting, but all three are distinctly different. My brother donated it to a school, but they never used it–it was just too old by the late 80’s.
Here is a place online where you can play my favorite Infocom text adventure, Wishbringer.
Kinda tough without the instruction manual (you have to combine a bunch of items together to be able to wish for certain things, and if you don’t know how to do this or what to wish for, you’ll get nowhere fast.
It’s pretty fun, though–if you can find the instruction book online (I haven’t bothered to look), check it out. It’s got a great sense of humor, as did most of those games.
I remember playing Oregon Trail on a Tandy way back in 1982 or so. My class at school was the first class in the entire school district to get a computer. It was supposed to be used for school work only, but my teacher would let us play Oregon Trail on it during recess when it was raining or snowing outside.
Just a few:
Zork & Co. from Infocom. Already described well enough above.
Elite: Likewise.
Paradroid: I’m amazed how many people never heard of or played this game. Any list of Top 10 games I’ve seen for the C= 64 has this listed. It’s not all that hard to figure out, you’re some little droid controlling unit on a space ship and you have to destroy all the other droids. Since your weapons suck, you hop from droid to droid, blowing them up with your stolen weaponry until the droid you’re on burns out and you’re forced to hop to a new droid.
Archon: The IBM version of this game sucked after playing the C= version. I mean, you could hit the phoenix while it was flamed! What’s up with that? Sort of a Fantasy Chess game where the pieces actually fight when they take a square (in actual controleld combat, bot pre-canned moves like Battle Chess).
Pirates!: Never before has such an amazingly simple and repetitive game been so addictive to me. Take ship, go to port, get men, take more ships, get more men, take a few cities, divide the loot. Repeat about 2500 more times until you’re a Duke of the French, Dutch, English and Spanish.
Mail Order Monsters: I loved this game, and it was funny to see the Goblins from Archon imported into those club weilding dudes who lived in the mountains (Wampas or whatever they were called). Buy a monster through the mail from the catalog, equip it and send it out fighting to earn more cash for better eqipment and genetic upgrades.
Adventure Construction Set: I saw this first in an advertisement in an old copy of Compute! and read that ad some 30,000 times. But I could never find the game because it was out of print by the time I saw the ad. then one day, I found it in the discount bin at Sears. Bought it and loved it. I used to convert favorite novels into adventures and make my friends play them. But I have to say, the adventures it would generate itself sucked big time. Each one was “go to point A to open point B to get into point C to…” until at point H or I or so, you got the breifcase and won the game. Or something dumb like that.
Pool of Radiance/Curse of the Azure Bonds/Secret of the Silver Blades: Those and the Krynn series sucked up more of my time per week than school did. Was I the only one who would sit outside the library in PoR and “Rest” for 1 year, 6 months, 2 weeks and 3 days just because memorizing and casting cure spells was such a chore? Thank God for the “Fix” button in later games.
BASIC games I loved were the Lemonade Stand one, some game where you had to build a house in one month and figure the materials cost and time involved (never won that one) and my all time BASIC fav, “Hassle Castle” where you had to explore and fight your way up to the ground floor of said Castle.
For all you C= fans out there missing your games, try these emulators and links:
http://arnold.c64.org/
http://ltd.simplenet.com/c64/games/a/
I can’t believe I forgot about Paradroid!
I’m kicking myself forgeting to mention Mail Order Monsters, too.
One I haven’t seen mentioned: Mission Impossible. It had voice (“Welcome. Stay awhile. Stay FOREVER!”), one of the first PC games to have it. You juped around avoiding robots with lightning projectors as you searched for parts of the punchcard that would let you deactivate the Death Machine of the Evil Scientist. It had puzzle solving aspects as you tried to put the pieces together, and the animation was fantastic for a C64.
Very very first pc games I played (circa 1981):
Microsoft Decathlon
(what do you take for a headache?)
Serpentine
Apple Panic
All time favorites from the pre-1995ish era:
NETHACK (like Rogue and Hack, but so so so much better)
Wasteland (anyone else have fun reading through all the fake “paragraphs” about the martians and the fire lances? Anyone else ever kill the nightmare?)
Ultima 3 & 5 (the way to kill Lord British (that someone was mentioning above) was (in U3) to get him to chase you out to the backyard of the castle, hop in a boat, and then shoot him repeatedly with the cannon)
Wizardy (can anyone else name the missing artifact: Shuriken, Murasama Blade, Lord’s Garb, ???)
Might and Magic I (oh my was this hard)
Dark Sun (best interface ever)
Several games in the best genre ever, which is almost completely kaput these days:
Prince of Persia 1 & 2
Out of this World (oh my, that part with the flood)
Flashback
(the only game that’s come out recently that fits this type is the FANTASTIC _Abe’s Oddyssee)
and two that I mention because I’m hoping someone else out there also played them and would be willing to try to play the super-difficult-but-fun levels I’ve built for them:
The Incredible Machine
Loderunner: The Legend Returns
The only games I really play on PC’s these days are emulated arcade games, namely
Ghouls and Ghosts
and
Elevator Action
many others that I used to love just don’t seem as fun in retrospect, but those two are just perfect
Oh Maeglin, just to let you know, the first link I had listed there has Alice in Wonderland for the C=. You’ll have to download an emulator for it (from any of those three sites, I recommend CCS64beta) but once you’re done, you’ll hopefully be back in Wonderland Heaven.
I used to love playing on old Commodore 64 game call Jump Man. I don’t think there is anything similar on today’s market but this was one addictive game and I played it for hours on end.
I thought of another great old uncommon game. Remember Eamon anyone? It was a simple text adventure for Apple ][ with a lot of modules. It even had an editor to make your own little adventures. The cool part was that it was shareware long before the term ever existed. The computer store had copies of them all, then you could come in and copy them if you brought your own disk, or buy a precopied one.
Have to second Questron, one of the best games ever.
I beat the game…do you have any questions about it? I might be able to remember the answers. And it’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos. This game had three naughtiness levels (tame, suggestive, and lewd) and you could play as a male or female.
And, Lynn, how naughty were YOU? 
I loved populous as well. I think I got to like level 80 or something like that. Another game I liked which isn’t as old as some of these was Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire (BTW, anyone know where I can get a copy of this for download or something?)
Daniel, I played in all three naughtiness levels, and as both sexes. Not in the same game, of course.
Please clarify this for me–what’s the difference between NETHACK and Hack? I wonder which it was that I actually played?
No one remembers darklands? Set in medieval Germany, you would run your group around, fighting witches, killing dragons, and getting stuff back for people. I loved that game! Best computer game in that era. My only complaint was that there was no way to see what quests you had on the computer, so I always had a big sheet of paper with small notes written all over it. “Don’t touch that! It has the saints I need to research! and the location of a good philosopher’s stone! And my quest for the Medeci!”
Oh, did I mention you could do alchemy? Great game. Impossible to find nowadays.
Hmm, I don’t thi- wait, yes, I recognize you know. You were my nephew in the 17th century who killed me and made off with my mistress! You bastard! Now I shall begin to plot my revenge…
I thought of another one. Werewolf (?) on the Apple IIe. It was this cheesy game with a mud-style interface, “You are in the castle entrance. Do you want to go north or south?” I played this one at my best friend’s house back in the mid-eighties.
I still have my old C64 knocking around somewhere! I bought hundreds of those £1.99 games, they were great!! Among my favourites were:
Way Of The Exploding Fist
Summer Games
Hyper Sports
The Hobbit (when it would load!)
Circus (that really spooky adventure game!)
Paperboy
Hungry Horace/Horace Goes Skiing
Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy
Defender
Pacland
I know there’s a load more, but these are the ones that come to mind right now!
I stuck mostly to RPG’s for the Apple ][, C=64, and TRaSh-80:
Legacy of the Ancients…kept me hooked for weeks.
Apple Adventure…XYZZY ! I sometimes still play a PC port of the original, Advent.
Phantasie and Phantasie III…part II was never released in the US–a shame!
Tass Times In Tonetown…smoked a lot of it while playing this one.
Transylvania…like Advent, only with graphics!
Telengard…The Dragon likes you! Addictive as hell…I think I still have a copy of it.
The Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, Zork, and Ultima (especially part IV)…kept me hooked even longer than LotA did!
I’ve played Questron II but could never find the original Questron.
I remember owning the game Wishbringer as well, but I don’t recall any of the plot. I do, however, remember that a little plastic glow-in-the-dark “wishstone” came with the game…
Oh, do a websearch for “Abandonware” if you’re looking for some of the old PC games (and some ports from the Apples and Commodores, too)…
-David
[QUOTEDidn’t I mention the TRaSh-80 above? Ours was the cheapie Color Computer model, too[/QUOTE]
My apologies. I saw that, but thought you meant the old silver plastic thingy with the B&W monitor and the (how’s this for cool) detachable keyboard.
KC