This one is obviously The Legend of Kage. (Maybe not, but it fits the description to a T)
Not Starflight, is it?
My contribution… uh… did anyone else play Riders of Rohan
1NSANE was a great car racing game with big open world maps and lots of variety. One of the things I liked the best was how the cars would deform when you crashed them at high speed. You could smash a car into a cube if you hit it enough times. The graphics were very good for their time and actually scale pretty well onto modern machines, but the textures are low-res compared to today.
Played this ALL the time as a kid. I remember sucking at it terribly no matter how much I played though.
As for me, the two that pop to mind are:
Dream Zone for Dos. Omg I never could beat this but I tried SO many times!
Monty Python and the Holy Grail for Windows. Loved this game. The mini games are the best. Corpse Tetris, slap the virgin!
I believe as computers got faster, it became impossible as games of that era relied on the system clock time. Enemies would kill you in a second. DOSBox has a time adjustment feature that might fix that.
Also, you could drop all your treasures in the first room to keep your score.
I played both, but only ever beat the second one. The level where you’re defending the abandoned library from waves of undead is possibly my single favorite RTS map of all time.
Anyone ever play The Colony? One of the first games to render a 3D first-person perspective in real time. Kind of like a really primitive System Shock.
Well I was playing it when it was still a ‘new’ game, so sadly I can’t use the clock as an excuse lol But I didn’t know that tip! Thanks!
I think my favorite Myth II level was the one in the catacombs. It wasn’t the gameplay; they just nailed the spooky atmosphere so perfectly.
Eamon anyone?
The old early 80’s Apple][ text adventures where you would go down to the computer store and pay 2 bucks to make a copy of one of the 100 or so adventure disks. Most were standard fantasy, but I remember one cool one based on Lando’s cloud city where the magic system was replaced by the force. Surprisingly flexible engine for a game that low priced and basic.
I derived great enjoyment from Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time. The hidden game was unsolvable unless you sent your registration card in, whereupon they would send you the answer to the question: “Nobody likes a __________”.
I played that one in college. My roommate at the time owned it.
I thought of another. Robot Odyssey.
According to David Auerbach, it is the hardest computer game of all time: Robot Odyssey: The hardest computer game of all time.
(No, I never finished it.)
But you can play it online now: https://www.robotodyssey.online/
Another one I thought of. In the 80s on my 8086 PC I played a lot of intricate Adventure and RPG games but one day I wanted to get just a dumb shooter to blow off some steam and I found a sci fi shooting game called literally If It Moves Shoot It.
It was a top down game where you are a ship blasting aliens. Basically Galaxian with much better (even for the time) graphics.
I haven’t read the entire thread, so maybe someone else has mentioned it, but how about “Star Fire” by the Exidy company? (We always just called it “Exidy”.) That game always had a line at the arcade, because it was so popular.
This was ca. 1980.
I guess *someone *never had to fake an ID photo by drawing a moustache on your friend’s photo then crafting a fake moustache using cat hair plugged from duct tape taped to a door after spritzing the random cat that… You know what, just fuck you Jane Jensen.
Oh, come on. That meme’s gone for long enough. GK3 wasn’t that bad and Jane Jensen didn’t kill adventure games. The internet did.
If it’s the same game I’m thinking of, that one was simply called Chernobyl:Nuclear Power Plan Simulation by Cosmi. I remember playing that game often with my cousin trying to blow the damned thing up and spectacularly failing every time, as all sorts of safety systems were in place.
We had a bunch of Cosmi games. Do you remember The President is Missing? That seems to be an obscure one. It even came with a cassette tape that had all sorts of clues on it, and you had to transcribe Morse code that was recorded on it, etc. I don’t remember getting very far in the game, but it was an interesting idea for an investigative/detective genre game.
How about Utopia for the Intellivision (or Sears Tele-Games, in my case). Is that one obscure? I’m the only one I know who seems to remember it. I believe I bought it at a yard sale in the mid-80s. It may be the first of the god-type games like Populous and Civilization.
I loved utopia, the first of many city building games I loved. I still remember the horror of that big low-res hurricane destroying all my work.
Oh I liked the game. But that one endless puzzle was really obtuse and pointless.
Yeah, in the early days of adventure games, whether text or graphical (like Maniac Mansion), there were often ways to get the game in the state you describe and be none the wiser to it. I think this was before games programmers figured out this was not a desirable trait for a game. I remember back then, though, just kind of accepting that the game would not necessarily give you feedback if you did something wrong and irreversible. And then there were the Sierra Online games where you had to save every few minutes, as arbitrary and unforeseeable death seemed to be around every corner.
I actually preferred Douglas Adams’ other contribution to Infocom text adventures: Bureaucracy, where "[t]he player is challenged to confront a long and complicated series of bureaucratic hurdles resulting from a recent change of address. "
Maniac Mansion was LucasArts, so not too bad. Most of the unwinnable states could be avoided by reverting a save or two. And by the later games, it was almost* impossible to get stuck. Sierra games were punishing though. Quest for Glory wasn’t too bad, most getting stuck involved a time. But I remember I almost beat King’s Quest VI and had to replay the entire game because I missed doing one minor optional thing towards the beginning of the game.
*e.g. Monkey Island, there was only one place to die and you had to intentionally seek it out.