I played the hell out of Daggerfall, but never finished it. I was traveling a lot at the time, and it was something to do while staying at various hotels in boring places. Unfortunately, I lost the thread of the plot somehow, and the story became irretrievably lost, so I just wandered around exploring random dungeons and hauling out wagonloads of loot. The result was the beginning of my habit of creating egregiously overpowered characters in Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.
The best thing about Secret of Evermore was the running gags. Secret of Mana had its silly bits, but it was mostly a standard fantasy. It didn’t poke fun at itself the way Evermore did. Evermore had things like the protagonist’s obsession with bad (and nonexistent) movies, his habit of introducing his shapechanging dog as, “This is my dog, [whatever you named the dog]. He hasn’t been himself lately.”, and having a Final Fantasy protagonist (Cecil) running a medieval fantasy weapon shop.
Oh man, I forgot all about that. Yes, I played it - at the time the “free AOL disc” thing was funny. Not so much now, or at least not for the same reason.
My arcade game of choice was Heavy Barrel, which wasn’t terribly high profile but there were some home computer versions of it so someone else must have played and liked it.
I played and beat it. It had a guy with a gun and his dog if I remember. I think that game was made entirely in the US instead of being a translation from Japan which gave it a different look and feel that didn’t appeal to as many players. But I liked it.
Which is why I qualified it. But it wasn’t a huge hit like the later games.
Correct, some of Square’s translations at the time were questionable, even if that was sometimes part of the time. But this one had a very American nostalgia feel.
I also played Daggerfall, it was my introduction to the Elder Scrolls series (at the time, Daggerfall was the latest entry). I later went back and played Arena and Battlespire (that weren’t that great) but Daggerfall got me started.
At first I was blown away with the freedom of choice in character creation and development. And the world was IMMENSE and full of so much to do. But it didn’t take long to figure out that what I was doing was the same “go to random place, kill X number of random monsters, come back after”. There didn’t seem to be anything unique anywhere. It didn’t hold my interest for long. It felt like it had the potential to be a good game but it wasn’t.
Morrowind though had everything Daggerfall lacked. A story that drives the gameplay, real NPCs, unique quests with their own stories behind them, etc. For me that’s when the Elder Scrolls finally became good.
People Pong. It was an Apple ][ game where you had to bounce naked women in the air, pong-style. If you missed, they landed on spikes beneath the paddle and blood flowed down. Very strange for such an early game. I played it fairly often as a kid.
I loved Make Trax (also called Crush Roller) when I was in college. Did you ever get to the point where you thought you were done with a level, and just stood there waiting for something to happen until you noticed that one small corner of a path wasn’t covered?
Anybody else play SimTower? How about Commander Blood, or Sundog: Frozen Legacy (the latter was only on the Apple II and Atari ST, I think)?
The Atari ST - speaking of things I think I was the only one that used them…
8-bit side-scroller game, you are a ninja fighting enemies in a grove. You can fight hand-to-hand or throw weapons, and collect the occasional power-up (invincibility, etc.)
16-bit 2-d space exploration game. At one point some bad guys sneak a vial of some reactive substance into your inventory, which you have to jettison in order to finish the game without blowing up.
“Chernobyl”-type nuclear plant simulation. Will run on a Commodore-64. The lying liars simulated a completely different type of reactor, as far as I could tell.
One game I know I wasn’t the only person to play but I loved it and it seems to have fallen down the Memory Hole is Ghost Master. It was a haunted house simulator and you are the ghosts with the goal of scaring the people inside until they leave. It was great fun and had good graphics and sound design for the time.
The original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
I played them on an MSX emulator.
The version of Metal Gear released for NES was a crappy port, and the versions released as part of Subsistence were from what I understand updated a bit.
When Two Worlds War. A interplanetary war game released in 1993. Perhaps some have tried it, but I played this for hours and never heard of anyone else who have heard about it.
One that I’ve never seen much talk of was Dark Reign. It was an RTS that was very heavily derivative of the Command and Conquer games, but they developed it to a very high polish. Especially good was the variety of complex orders you could give your units: You had sliders that you could use to set their independence, aggressiveness, and damage tolerance (too much damage, and they’d automatically head home to your repair bay, and then once repaired automatically proceed to the bay’s designated rally point), and you could do things like order them to “search and destroy”, for when you’d basically won and didn’t want to bother with searching down the last few enemy units yourself. It also had a pretty good story, and you could give your units orders while paused, which is an interface idea I’m fond of.
You’ve not met me, but I’ve played it. A few times through and through.
Still love the soundtrack which does still get played: Jon Pertwee, Frankie Howard and Ian Dury doing a version of the Tempest to some excellent music.
Indeed, a lift in a hotel I recently regularly stayed pronounced “Six floor” with a pause and intonation, that I always remember back to Jon Pertwee saying “This sixth age shifts into the mean and slippard panteloon… etc”.
A weird little game, but a wonderful soundtrack to a shakespear play…
Hurrah! I suspect your ears immediately pricked up when you heard about the Black Mirror “Bandersnatch” episode as well. I think Charlie Brooker is of our vintage.
I played Mission Critical - a lot of the plot has stuck with me through the years: the ship-board anti-tech terrorist who was radicalized by watching his parents die in a nanotech accident, the drone warfare, the “happy ending” where humanity cedes its future to AIs. Good game! Not as much Michael Dorn as advertised.
Also played on of the Journeyman Projects, but my machine was waaaay to slow for it. Five minute waits between screens meant I never finished it.
Played a lot of Ascendency back in the day. I think I stuck with it longer than I might have otherwise, just because the music was so amazing.
Return of the Obra Din is amazing, and contemporary. Everyone should go play it immediately!
I paid money (well, had my mom pay money) for SimAnt, which is possibly a reason I have a generally bad reaction to Sim- anything games these days. SimCity was great, and then there were so many crappy spinoffs. SimAnt was probably the worst, though.
Agree that Daggerfall doesn’t belong here. It was a huge hit. Sure, the market was much smaller than it is today, but it was still a huge hit.
My own? Citadel, a dungeon crawler that made heavy use of the new icon-based UIs that were becoming popular at the time, including basing the combat system around it. Spent hours and hours on it. I still have the hint book somewhere. Never met anyone else who’d heard of it.