Videogames you think you're the only one who played

The Game Room
42

I loved that one, everything about that game was amazing. The only flaw was the AI…once you defeated an initial fleet, it was a runaway easy win on tech tree and resources.

Apple II: Kaves of Karkhan. A rogue-ish fantasy dungeon delver.

C64: Shamus. A top-down room shooter that had very fast reflex action for its day.

Vic-20: Sowrd of Fargoal Top view dungeon crawler with randomized dungeons.

Sega Genesis: Warrior of Rome 2. Somehow a genuine RTS game with deep options and menus was able to be run on the Genesis. My first exposure to RTS and incredibly addicting.

43

Sure I’m not the only one who played them, but I loved the early Lucasarts fractal-based games “Rescue on Fractalus” and “Hyperball”. Nowadays they’re completely ignored in “influential/great games of the past” retrospectives, but I played the hell out of them on my Atari 800.

44

I thought of another one that goes even further back. When I had an Atari 2600 I had a two player soccer game that was awesome. It wasn’t the official Atari version, rather one of the bargain basement 3rd party releases but it was fast paced, easy to learn and fun as hell. My parents let me set up an old B&W TV in my backyard so my friends and I could all play tournaments. People from around the neighborhood would come watch. None of my friends had the same game and I had no idea where my Mom got it but we loved it.

45

That was not it; I do not have any clear memories of playing Demon Sword, though come to think of it I must have at least a little bit. The “you’re a ninja” genre is evidently not the most unique or original.

46

Sure, SimCity (and SimAnt…) But how much did you play Colecovision Fortune Builder? Not even a Wikipedia article for that one.

47

If we’re going back to the Apple ][e days, we had a huge collection of educational games, which probably included some pretty obscure ones. Most were from MECC, and followed the same general format of “do five math problems, and then play the actual game for a while”, though the kind of math problems and what the actual game was varied.

My favorite was one where you were a palace guard trying to catch the thief who’d stolen the crown but hadn’t yet gotten out of the palace-- Whenever you went from room to room, you’d lock the door behind you, but if the thief caught you, you’d flee and leave all the doors you passed through open.

Plus, of course, some educational games that others do remember, like Number Munchers and Lemonade Stand.

48

Never played Number Munchers but did play Word Munchers.

I still remember in the original version of Lemonade Stand when it said there was a 50% chance of rain it never rained, and when there was a 30% chance of rain it always rained. Rather lazy programming.

Speaking of MECC, I thought of another most people haven’t played: the original Oregon Trail.

Not the one most people are familiar with that uses sprite animations, but the one that used vector polygons. Hunting consisted of a single deer that blipped its way across the screen and you pressed the space bar at the right moment for your buck shot to blip its way into intersecting the thing.

Here’s some gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PySqTm4Qu2A

49

The original actually predated not only graphics, but monitors. It was played on a teletype terminal.

50

I don’t know how badly it’s itching you, but you could check this for the game, then hit Youtube with likely candidates. It will help to sort by date and check the late 80s to early 90s.

51

Sorry, not the only one. I might still have it around somewhere. As you said, the design was good and I absolutely loved the music, indeed.

The game play however, was not OK, but terrible, because of the extraordinary subpar AI. I stopped playing when I realized that I would win even if I was doing literally nothing. Enemy ships would assemble, seeming threatening…but then would do nothing, and eventually I would be declared the winner. Absolutely no challenge.

Also, unfortunately associated in my mind with a break-up.

52

One that could fit the bill is an early Napoleonic wargame, I think simply called “Austerlitz”, even though I could be mistaken, from I guess the late 80s, maybe early 90s.

It had some realistic features that I liked and never found again in any other wargame :

-You were seeing of the battlefield only what your character (Napoleon on the French side, for instance) could see from where he was. Better pick a good vantage point (and not having your headquarters routed, as happened to me once). This one isn’t necessarily unique, though.

-The only other source of information were written messages from your subordinate commanders. That could be more or less reliable, and, since it took time for the messages to reach you, informed you about the situation as it was earlier, not right now. They typically included pleas for reinforcements immediately needed.

-Your orders were also in the form of messages. That would take time to reach the frontline, so you couldn’t expect your units to react immediately, nor could be sure that the orders would still be appropriate when delivered. Assuming that they were delivered at all, since the messenger himself could be killed on the way, for instance.

-Your commanders didn’t necessarily actually obey your orders, or obey them fully (say they launched a short and timid attack when you ordered a full on assault), supposedly according to their historical personality. For instance Murat was prone to launch cavalry charges, whether you wanted him to or not. Could be useful if appropriate in a changing situation, or disastrous.
I understand how these interesting and realistic features haven’t been favored. They mean that the player has only limited information and a limited control on what’s going on, and can very well lose simply because a general failed to execute his orders, or because a report he received was mistaken. Still, that was an interesting take on tactical wargames, and I wish there would be some others like that.

53

Hm, I didn’t play that one but I did play a Civil War sim that I bet was based on the same engine.

54

That could be cool, as long as you could give orders that were conditional, general, or otherwise flexible, and that your generals would have at least some chance of acting appropriately on them. Like, “Advance on this position, engaging any forces you encounter less than half your size along the way, but if your scouts report any forces that look like a significant threat to you, fall back to point B, and if any soldiers flee in a direction other than to a known enemy strongpoint, dispatch some scouts to trail them”.

I’ve seen at least one modern game, called “Gratuitous Space Battles”, where you can’t give any orders to your units at all while fighting, but instead deploy them and give them all general standing orders, and then hit “go” and wait and see how the battle goes. You can also customize all of your ships based on various hulls and modular weapons and other ship systems.

55

I played through that on ZSNES using an English translated ROM. I consider that my favorite all-time SNES game, even though it was never actually ported to SNES.

I won’t lie, when I went back to my home village in the beginning of the game I got emotional. That game was so well-written. And I loved the combat and characters. And music. Okay, I loved everything. :smiley:

…I should go play it again.

56

If this is the “Austerlitz” game mentioned, it’s based on the Sid Meier’s Gettysburg engine, and the Austerlitz game came out in… 2002, not the “late 80s”. Here is a site with some screenshots to the Austerlitz game:

https://www.old-games.com/download/6800/austerlitz-napoleon-s-greatest-victory

57

Two that come to mind are Cranston Manor and Caverns of Khafka.
Cranston was a text game that had some graphics. I’m computer couldn’t handle the graphics so just text for me.
Khafka was a bizarre flying and jumping through maxes kind of game. Both were in the early 1980s.

58

Did anyone play Castle of the Winds in glorious Windows 3.1? Or any of the Steve Moraff games? I think Moraff’s World is the one I played mostly.

Or Castle Adventure?

59

I remember Moraff’s World. I thought the graphics were terrible, but funny, even back then. I googled, and sure enough, the tropical zombie I remembered was on the first page of image hits. (It’s an MSPaint-esque zombie that appears to be wearing a Hawaiian shirt, though the pattern was likely intended to be bloody holes in the shirt.) I vaguely recall that you had, or could get, a dog that would carry your treasure back to town to cash in, but I could be mixing it up with another game.

60

Coin-op game from the 80’s Mr. Do

61

There’s a bunch of games from when I was a tiny arachnid that I quite enjoyed, but I never hear anybody talking about. My go to is 1997’s Dark Earth.

Sure, by today’s standards the controls are clunky and the characters are built with a couple of polygons with pixels the size of a house… and the part where you have to learn and win a dumbed-down version of Go was annoying… But at the time it absolutely blew my mind.

Kick-ass soundtrack, too.