I was a Centipede man in my wilder days—a bizarre congenital quirk that’s bound to land me in a future medical journal, I’m sure. But I digress.
Anyway, back in college, whenever Centipede was around—be it the dimly lit dorm rec room, the shadiest dive bar, or your grandma’s basement—I was there, trackball ablaze. I didn’t just play; I annihilated. I was like a disco dancer of destruction, pirouetting the trackball 360 degrees, firing backwards while casually winking at onlookers as if to say, “You’re welcome.” Naturally, the stunned crowds (okay, maybe two people) dubbed me “The Exterminator.” My ego soared higher than my scores. I was legend (self-proclaimed, but still).
Eh, that meant you could use the flute on most enemies. And once you reached avatarhood, your original class hardly mattered, since any Avatar had the ankh armor and sword and 99 MP.
But yeah, while the game had its flaws, there was also a heck of a lot that it got right.
I was a pro at Centipede, because it was one of only three games I had on my Atari as a kid. On the version I had, there wasn’t actually a proper ending: Each level, the 'pede broke off one of its segments, and so if you beat level 12, it’d try to start level 13 by breaking the twelve-segment 'pede into 13 segments, and then crash.
And I’m amazed nobody else has mentioned Tetris yet.
I didn’t! Did it also have a very enjoyable multiplayer? That’s what I spent a lot of nights doing…killing and being killed. And yelling “stop looking at my screen”.
I don’t think I used the flute on my shepherd run. And you’re right about it getting easier later on, but being a shepherd definitely makes the early game more of a grind. And even these days when you have the internet to explain things to you like “take the staircase hidden behind Castle Britain to the bottom floor of Dungeon Hythloth and fight your way back up to an island on the other side of the world and steer a hot air balloon with the Wind Change spell to land on a single cell in the mountains that you would never know was there otherwise so you can retrieve one of the McGuffins”, there’s still quite a bit of note-taking required to finish that game.
My nominations for this thread;
Uplink: Hacker Elite. Sort of a “'90s Hollywood hacker sim” type of game. You interact with the game via a vaguely Unix-looking computer interface and carry out freelance hacks against various corporations and institutions, stealing data, planting data, executing malware, etc. You use various tricks to steal passwords, route your attacks through proxies to hide your location, and as the game progresses you need better software to crack more secure networks. If you screw up or stay connected too long, the cops trace you and bust you, which permakills your character and forces you to start over. Its wish fulfillment fantasy for every '90s kid who ever fantasized about tapping a bunch of code into a command line interface at lightning speed and declaring “I’m in.”
Final Fantasy VI. Still one of my favorite games of all time and one I have to replay every few years. The gameplay is the best execution of the classic semi-turn-based Final Fantasy format. The soundtrack is perfect and makes brilliant use of leitmotif. The story is amazing, and the overarching theme of overcoming loss and grief echoes in each of the party members’ individual storylines as well as the main plot. I keep waiting for a remake but no luck.
Is Morrowind old enough to count as retro? It was the first truly “open world” type game I ever played, and even though it’s definitely not as player-friendly as Skyrim, its world and story feel far more compelling and interesting. When Elder Scrolls Online put out its Morrowind expansion, I bought it just so I could play through that storyline and then cancelled my account afterward.
It did have a very enjoyable multiplayer, but I believe that in order to enjoy it to its fullest, you needed the N64 Expansion Pak. The number of CPU players that could be employed with it was really quite extraordinary for the time.
Heheh, my submarine sim drug of that time was Aces of the Deep. It actually had pretty good realism and graphics for the time. If you knew where/when a convoy in WWII was, then you could probably intercept that convoy in the game if you wanted to - I’ve done it by looking up convoys in Wikipedia. The detail this 90s sim goes into is kind of crazy.
I kind of felt bad being a successful sub captain for the Nazis, even if it was a game. The soothing balm of that is that I’ve never seen the end of 1943. If you have the realism turned all the way up, by that time in the war your job totally sucks, and every time you escape a depth charge/hedgehog attack with a functioning sub that can make it back to port, it feels like a triumph. If you went down in a Nazi sub as a career in WWII, your chances of being killed approached 80%. This game communicates how suicidal that was that pretty well. You have to kind of try to get killed in 1939-1942 to not come back after a patrol, after that your death seems kind of inevitable if you’re actually going to attack convoys.
I used to have a DOSBox instance that would fire it up, but I seem to have misplaced it. Of course, it’s in the internet archive’s DOS games collection. I just played the first 1939 patrol of a career mode game. 4 out of 6 torpedoes were duds, but I sank two tankers for a total of 6000 tons. I started the second patrol, but left it in real time. I’ll probably go to bed and play it a little before work in the morning. No one is going to attack us this near the German coast this early in the war.
I might actually fire up a career with all of the realism turned down. I wonder what happens if you sail into Kiel one last time after May 8th, 1945. I know you can’t affect the outcome of the war. I’ve had careers where I’ve sunk more than the total tonnage the Kriegsmarine sank, I still can’t live past about August 1943. I kind of wonder if the oom-pah band will still be there.
Plus, yeah. DOOM!!! Doom was the greatest, and some days I think Doom will be like chess and never die. The mods made it legendary. I still fondly remember triggering a wall releasing a trove of imps, which promptly called out in a sublime chorus of “Hey, what’s happening man!?!?” in Cheech Marin’s voice.
I mastered Galaga when it was already vintage in the mid-late 90s. There was this little arcade game nook at my community college and I had hours to kill a few days a week. I could roll the score (999999) and have, I dunno, 7 or 8 one ups lined up.
Back in the day, I probably sank a small fortune into Galaga and Galaxia—my go-to escape whenever Centipede had me feeling like a bug exterminator on the verge of burnout. I never quite mastered those, but I gave it my best shot (and missed plenty of those too).
For a bit of comic relief, those ridiculous flappy ostriches in Joust ? They pecked away at my wallet like it was a bucket of birdseed.
When the home console era rolled in, I rose from my grave and was a beast at Altered Beast.
Fast forward to the golden age of massively multiplayer online gaming, and I plunged straight into SubSpace Continuum. That game was like the Pringles of gaming—you couldn’t stop at just one match. Excellent gameplay!
And then, alas, real life showed up like a boss fight and I retired from gaming altogether. In hindsight, with a failed marriage in the mix… maybe I should’ve kept leveling up in gaming instead. At least the respawn rate is better.
But, with the million-button joystick, frantic games my daughters try (unsuccessfully) to get me to play, I think I made the right choice. Kids these days—don’t those little whippersnappers know how to relax? Get off my lawn!
Some good Commodore games named and others that always come up in threads about classics I could name. But, if I envision me sitting down in front of a C=64 system with a full catalog of floppies, the game I’m going to pull out first is going to be Paradroid. So that’s gotta be my winner.
oh totally agree. It would be completely mind-numbing to play now. But I don’t think the OP was looking for games that have held up the best, just ones that were our personal favorites at the time.
I actually played some Galaga about 2 weeks ago, on my NES Classic. It’s a very good emulation, looks & sounds amazing, and scratches the itch which thankfully only takes 10 minutes every few months. The old NES crosspad controller isn’t right for the game but good enough for the muscle memory and familiar pattern repetition to do its straightdopamine thing on my brain.
In the arcade where I went to college (early 1980s), there were two “rules” that could get you tossed out (besides the obvious ones like abusing the machines):
How about Wing Commander? It was one of the first story-based games I recall that had multiple career paths, and how well the war went depended directly on how well you did in the missions assigned to you.
