Ultima 7, both parts. (My opinion: The series peaked here - continuous improvement before, gradual decline after).
Zork. Zork anything.
Also, a little known classic that I really liked: Star Flight 2.
Populous and Oids on my old Atari st.
Doom, Quake, Warlords II on my PC.
Warlords on the Atari 2600 (best 4 player game on the original console)
gotta say it’s nice to see Prince of Persia and Star Con mentioned.
What, no mention of Star Raiders? :eek:
Colossal Cave. I remember when that one hit campus. Stopped all productive work for a good two weeks.
Zork.
Starflight.
Wasteland.
Oh, and lesa, I feel your pain. I say we get out our walkers and show these young whippersnappers a thing or two. 
OMG I forgot the original Descent. That was my first Joystick game, and sometimes gave me vertigo.
Yeah, another fan!
I forgot to mention Jumpman and Jumpman junior!!! oh the memories!!
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffen
Gotta put a vigorous second for M.U.L.E.
The best random event was a stray meteorite that totally obliterated my high-producing plot of land.
Liesure Suit Larry is how a young Eternal learned about how the world works. To this day, whenever I see an apple, I think “Score!” And naturally, I don’t walk into alleys.
CivII/Alpha Centauri/Colonization – Still play each regularly
Doom II – Virtually every day.
RR Tycoon I and II
reaching farther back…
Kingdoms of Kroz
Bard’s Tale
Wizardry
The original Castle Wolfenstein
NukeWar for the C64
Favorite classic PC game? You want me to make a choice? Let me give you a rundown on my game library: [ul][li]Sim City Classic w/both graphics sets[]Civilization[]Tony LaRussa 1 & 2[]Jack Nicklaus Ultimate Golf[]Scrabble[]Hoyle’s Book of Games, Vol. 1[]Scorched Earth 1.5[]Street Rod 1 & 2[]Twilight 2000[]Microleague Action Sports Soccer[]Red Baron[]Railroad Tycoon[]Wild Wheels[]Moonshine Racers[]Death Track[]Pinball Fantasies[]Silent Service II[]Roadwar 2000[]Ultimate Cards[]Prince of Persia[]Populous[]TRACON[]Seven Cites of Gold Deluxe[]Pirates![]Sea Rogue[]Space Rogue[]Elite Plus! & Frontier[]Dungeon Hack[]Command HQ[]Vette![]M1 Tank Platoon[]Gunship[]A-Train[]SuperTetris[]Speedball 2[]Transport Tycoon[]Earl Weaver 1 & 2Bard’s Tale 1 & 2[/ul]That’s just my floppies! Of course, I don’t know if all of them still work or not. :)[/li]
IMHO, I think a true classic is one that had to be installed from floppies.
Gotta 4th Bard’s Tale. Very detailed and fleshed out game for the time.
Also, King’s Quest frustrated my 12 year old mind like nothing else. Rumplestiltskin backwards indeed!
The original Wolfenstein is an all-time classic too. I can still hear the nazi guards shouting “Aus Spice” (or something like that) when they wanted to see your pass, and the “Seig Heil” chants of the leaders when you got into the final room to plant the bomb.
All of the above played on an Apple IIc. Convinced my mom to buy one, then about a year later Apple abandoned it in favor of the Mac and its revolutionary 3.5 floppy drive.
Ultima IV, preferably on the C*64…
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…
Doom…
And on the Console…
Twisted Metal 2!!
gotta plug the first XCOM game. Nothing gives a buzz quite like popping ol’Mr Sectoid in the head with a plasma rifle…ahhhh
for historical WW2 stuff, Steel Panthers tis the cats ass!
I took the gamble in downloading a hundred-plus megs of alpha build of The Ur-Quan Masters. This is an open-source project in porting the 3DO version of Star Control II to run on modern computers and OSes. The version number of 0.2alpha always scared me away before.
What a fool I have been. Thus far, it’s been running with zero problems for me. It lacks the intro (and apparently the ending) sequences, but it has voice overacting, remixed music (and the original PC-version MODs should you be so inclined).
Sweet goodness.
NukeWar.
NukeWar. Man, my brothers and father and I would waste hours and hours playing that and Galactic Empire.
hotwarhotwarhotwar
And M.U.L.E… if that meteorite landed, didn’t it have a chance of giveing you the really valuable crystals? I haven’t played in years and years…
I played Pirates! religiously on the NES. I tried hard to convert all the cities to one nationality. Hard, particularly with the large cities down on the rim of the Gulf of Mexico.
I need to go see if I can find some of these to run on my work PC.
Pacman
Tetris
Chip’s Challenge
Curse you clayton_e.
Every once in a while this type of thread pops up and just further drives the spike of Bill Gates evilness deeper into my broken heart.
My favorite old computer game (I don’t know if it would be considered classic, since you’d be hard pressed to find too many other people who have played it) is Disney’s Stunt Island.
It’s a DOS game, heavy on the graphics, which at the time were impressive in ther polygonalness complete that new fangled Gauard shading.
The theme to the game was that there was an island out there somewhere where all the best airplane stunts were designed, performed and filmed. There was a game to it – where you had to perform pre-set-up stunts, which were filmed and presented to you if you did them right.
But the beauty of the game was setting up your own stunts. You had 100’s of props to choose from and a vast selection of locations on the island. And the you had 8 cameras to work with to film your “stunt”. There were all sorts of rudimentary programming tools to dictate interaction – “IF {plane 1} COLLIDES WITH {prop3} CHANGE {person1} DIRECTION TO {360 degrees} AND CHANGE {person 2} VELOCITY TO {+10),” etc.
There was practically no limit (outside of your imagination) to the films you could create, whether there was an airplane stunt included in it or not. There was a whol sub-culture of SI-Film makers trading their films.
Alas, it was never updated or rereleased, and requires huge chunks of DOS conventional memory. Windows ME will not accomodate this at all, which sucks. My original discs for the game have since bit the dust, but I do have the game loaded on my machine … I just can’t run it.
I’ve been trying to find some sort of DOS emulator or something that would let me run it. I may just break down and partition some space for it and load up DOS 6, if I can remember how to do all that convoluted configuration.
So, obviously this is all Bill Gates fault, that evil devil-spawn.
What were we talking about?
Oh yeah … Disney’s Stunt Island is a good game.
(Longest post in a simple question thread – I win, 1 to nothing)
Doom/Doom II
Descent/Descent II
HalfLife
DoomII was the first game I really got taken in by. Then, Descent II got me completely hooked on online multiplaying - a condition I still suffer from to this day. Human opponents are so unpredicable; makes for great gameplay.
Honorable mention goes to Duke Nukem 3D. If nothing esle, it was pretty funny.
Growing up just means learning how to act in public.