lets goooooo, my favourite franchise of all time! Techbically, my first monster hunter game was tri on thr wii, when I was a wee bab. I say technically because I was a tiny idiot and I did not know how to do quests so I just spent hours wandering around moga woods in free roam, just hanging out. I still had an absolute blast doing it though!
The game that really got me into the franchise though, and my favourite game, would be world! I just love the incredible attention to detail, and the clear love that went into designing everything! I have more hours in rise because that’s the game my friends all play, and it’s a phenomenal game no doubt, but I always find myself creeping back to World.
The next game, Wilds, is looking like it will far surpass World for me though, the 2025 wait is killing me! The gamescom previews really showed that they have been listening to thr community, and are making the monster hunter game we’ve all dreamed of.
That’s one of my favourite things about the monster hunter teams in fact, that they clearly know how to learn from their previous works! I would readily argue that every generation has been an overall massive improvement over the previous one. I say generation rather than game, because comparing Rise and World is rather unfair. They’re two different games made by different teams for different hardware with different goals in mind, and if you ask me they both achieved their goals spectacularly, no matter what some nerds will say about Rise… Grouping them both into 5th gen and looking at the series by generation, each one has so far been an improvement in nearly every aspect, and I think that’s an amazing track record. That is why I am willing to put my wholehearted trust in the monster hunter teams that they will absolutely deliver with Wilds and any games after that.
I think this was one of the first games on PC that I saw and really wanted and never ended up playing. I gradually lost track of it and now that i have ScummVM and an emulator system i should get back to playing it.
It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!
The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.
H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.
It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.
Elementary school ystael spent a lot of time on Pinball Construction Set on the C64. I think I always turned the physics up to max speed minimum friction, so scoring on my tables was more about flailing and blind luck.
My favorite C64 game, though, was one I didn’t get to play often because I had to borrow it from a friend. (Didn’t know about cracking yet.) That was Ultimate Wizard. The platform physics were kind of terrible compared to Mario, but I loved the way each level was a tiny puzzle-maze, with different treasures moving different blocks when you grabbed them, and one magic spell - just one on each level, out of ten or so - to help you deal with the enemies. And my favorite thing in every game: a level editor! No, my levels weren’t good, they were awful. But I loved laying out the little bricks and skulls and fires anyway.
One of the greats from the C64. A step up from Last Ninja in terms of graphics and gameplay. The soundtrack is killer for the time. Still sad that System 3 never seemed to get close to releasing a Last Ninja 4
The NES was epic for its time, but nowadays those controllers make my hands cramp after minutes. Thank God for the modern big curvy controllers.
Some classics of that time might be of interest to the contemporary gamer, although I think you need to have some kind of historical curiosity for it to be worthwhile. The tools of the times were rudimentary to an extent that hurt what the devs could do even more than the capacity of the consoles imho. I mean, they were flipping bits in assemblers.
The audio though. 8-bit music is fucking stellar. The energy contained, the catchiness, it’s amazing.
As for recommendations: The Guardian Legend is my pick. Cool scifi action-adventure/ shmup hybrid.
The game Overlord on the NES had the best intro music of the generation, IMO. It was a port of Supremacy from Amiga and other PCs. The Commodore 64 version had really great intro music too! (I love SID music and warez chip tunes) The Commodore intro melody was later used in a Machinae Supremacy song.
I really enjoyed the game StarTropics too. It had real world tie in stuff with physical media (anti-piracy, but it was neat), and I enjoyed the music and story. The second StarTropics had graphics that blew my mind, everything just looked so smooth.
My first experience was with a demo of the first game, it came with 3 maps, the only one that I remember by name being the Battle of Kadesh, despite the 2nd map being the one that I played to absolute exhaustion (it was the map with base building, but no gold), since it was very easy to beat the first computer enemy.
Once I got a 🏴☠️ copy of AoE2 (2002-ish?), brother, I spent more time on the map editor than anything else for the first couple of weeks. I loved the huge map size but hated the paltry 200 unit limit. My older brother definitely spent more time playing than I did during that period.
As much as I played, I was always kinda bad at it, mostly because I’m more of a turtle player and always got pissed at how medium AI enemies would always build 4 separate town centers with at least one being very close to my starting area. Yet I would still play and, more importantly, I always loved the numbers and graphics at the end of a game.
Frankly, I think AoE2 really stood the test of time. For a game originally released in 2000 to remain not only relevant but also enjoyable without any official updates or patches for over 15 years (the remaster was announced in 2017) is a noteworthy feat.
i remember getting age of empires ii at compusa in rhode island while i was in university and playing multiplayer with the rest of my roommates all the time. it was the best.
i already remember not being very good at conquest but loving the design aspects and being so sad when i got raided. blobcat, sad
Super Mario 64 has to be my favourite (and is also the most recent one I’ve tried). When that came out it rocked my world, and I didn’t even have my own N64 at the time. I would play at friends’ houses or Toys R Us.
There was a Canadian TV show called Video and Arcade Top 10 and they would frequently give games away. I wrote to them explicitly requesting SM64, and a year later it just showed up in the mail.
Wow I love this story, I used to watch that show all the time! I can still hear the theme song as if I just watched it yesterday. That was super cool of them to send you a copy. I hope you still have it!
It’s a series where a dragon kidnaps a princess, and a plumber from New York must save her. To do so, he must gather mushrooms by hitting bricks while jumping with his fist, jump on turtles to make them hide in their shell, and dodge fire breathing plants.
In the most recent 2d incarnation, the fire breathing plants will sing at you.
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