and about a hundred more, probably. These are all on the ZX Spectrum. No one else start out in the early 80s with a Spectrum or Commodore 64 or Dragon or whatever?!
Looks like I’m one of the oldest here (Pacman guy presumably older)…
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2. The open-world gameplay melted my adolescent brain after growing up on NES games. I haven’t stopped playing such games since, and I still go back and play them again occasionally.
Red Alert 2 & Yuri’s Revenge are my favorite games of all time. I sunk so much time as a kid beating the campaign and then making custom maps and levels for fun. The installer and the cut scenes were so memorable. It also had an amazing sound track. It was also one of the few RTS I tried at the time where the game didn’t feel like it took forever. For contrast I remember playing some C&C and also Dune 2000 as a kid and I remember each campaign easily taking over an hour to complete. I also remember it got kind of boring fast.
Aside from those some other honorable mentions:
SimCity 3000: My first sim city game. It was fantastic with an amazing sound track.
On PC I must’ve spent thousands of hours playing The Sims, the first and second ones. They had fantastic soundtracks and were very chill experiences where you couldn’t really lose and didn’t rely on reflexes or strategy. Above all else I’ve always enjoyed being able to build cool houses. I would barely even play with the Sims themselves, I was mostly just creating families to not leave my houses empty. I had entire neighbourhoods made from scratch, all with wildly different houses with wildly different people living in them. I lost all my data a couple of times but I always kept the CD around with the key code written on it so I’d just reinstall and start rebuilding from scratch (that disc is probably still in my bedroom somewhere). Just selecting an empty lot and spending an entire afternoon building a cool house on it, then making a family to live there and putting all the furniture in place. Rinse and repeat, life was good.
I’d later go on to play other games that allowed me to build stuff trying to scratch that same creative itch. Mostly other Maxis games such as SimCity 3000 and Spore (never got into Sims 3 as it didn’t run well on my PC) but also Minecraft, which was all the rage and would go on to consume countless hours of my life. A few years later I also tried Sims 4, which did run well (on a newer computer tbf), but also felt so limited with the small fixed-view non-customizable neighbourhoods. It’s baffling to me that 4 couldn’t have the same features 2 had a decade earlier. Oh well, at least the building tools are much better than 2’s, so there was that.
Tl;dr: I like The Sims. The first couple ones, not the last couple ones.
My understanding is the The Sims 4 was originally going to be a Sims MMO style game. After Sim City flopped they scrapped that idea and turned it into a single player game, but the foundation had already been set up in a way the critically limited it. Even graphically it was only a side-grade (I think downgrade personally) from The Sims 3, but 3 could do so much more since it was designed to be a single player game. If you haven’t played 3, I’d give it a go. It’s so much better than what 4 can ever be. I’d say hoist the black flag though, because fuck supporting that company. Your money is better given to someone else who cares about their workers and their passions.
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, still the single best computer gaming representation of an epic D&D campaign, edging out even Baldur’s Gate 1-3 in my opinion.
Ultima 7: an RPG built around the goal of immersing the player completely into the game world, eschewing any straightforward gameplay loops. If only the Ultima series had continued going strong, like the Elder Scrolls, rather than fizzling out with 8 and 9…
bin.pol.social
Aktywne