If you like ITB, check out their other game FTL…and while you’re at it, check out Cobalt Core which was one of my favorite games of last year (even though it’s from 2023)
I’ll recommend Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2, too, but they’re a different kind of strategy to what you’ve posted.
In college, quake 3 arena came out about a month into school. My roommate and I stayed up all night playing together. That was when we moved from roommates to friends.
I was probably 10 when my best friend (at the time) and I would play Super Contra on the NES for hours. We loved everything about it. We’d get as far as we could. We’d give each other lives. We could sing the soundtrack. When it was game over, we just restarted it.
Those days were simple and beautiful. I don’t think another game could give me anything like that experience, since it wasn’t really entirely about the game.
Okami. That game was an absolute joy to play and the visuals and music were beautiful. My wife even mentioned that I seemed calmer and relaxed while playing it.
Getting to the final boss of persona 3 as my first SMT game, feeling actually scared irl, fighting it for over an hour and then getting wiped out when it had zero pixels of hp bar left. The party AI was sabotaging me and I was coming up with new strategies in real time to counteract it, it was great
The final dungeon of FFIV-2 (yes I agree most of the game is shit). I had to finish it in one night because it was the end of spring break and I was driving back to college the next day. My real world scheduling was good but I didn’t plan for it to be the longest final dungeon in FF history. Luckily this was the best part of the game and I played for 12 hours until sunrise, delirious while taking down the final boss and getting to see the credits roll.
PC only I think, the at style was interesting it was photo/high quality drawn. I remember seeing it on YouTube but can’t remember whose channel I was watching it on.
There are too many. Completing Lode Runner on my C64. Playing the Oregon Trail as a kid and making silly names ‘Tit face has died of dysentery’. The first time I played Sonic on my megadrive on Christmas day 1991. Playing Wonder Boy on my game gear for hours with my little bro. Crash Team Racing or FIFA tournaments (any FIFA after 16 is rubbish) on PS1 with my mates. Playing Echochrome on the PS3 on LSD. When the nuke exploded in Modern Warfare 2. Playing through Inside in one go in the dark by myself. Winning a PS5 in a raffle the day after my xbox1 died.
I never did beat Lode Runner on my Atari 800. What an absolute banger of a game though. Speaking of which, I remember playing Encounter on the Atari 800 and Mercenary III on the Atari ST, and realising “this is the direction of video games”. Incredible stuff.
I don’t know if you’ve played Oracle of Ages/Seasons, but those are two more great Capcom Zelda games.
I saw someone else say CrossCode, and I can second that. CrossCode is the only game I have ever played to perfectly capture the way games felt on the Nintendo DS. Control, aesthetic, everything. It made me immediately nostalgic the first time I played it.
For “rare” games like some of my oldies from the 80s and 90s (one or two that weren’t even on the abandonware sites last I checked) I have ISOs I ripped and store on my NAS. Same with stuff bought form smaller/sketchier stores (I am sure it is backed up millions of times over, but think Romero’s Sigil).
For gog or steam or whatever games? I just don’t bother. The French Monk Incident more or less taught me there is zero chance of maintaining archives of GoG games. Their servers are “fine” at the best of times (let alone when the site is “dead”) and they don’t publicize when an installer is updated or not.
So if gog or steam or whatever goes offline and I still really want to play… Darklands? Piracy.
Way back at the start of GoG (I want to say year one), CDP did the “joke” of suddenly taking down the entire site except for a text page saying they are shutting down. I forget if they said that people would have 24 hours to back up their games or if they said we were up shit creek, it doesn’t matter.
They then basically said “Ha ha, april fools! But you see, that is why you should buy all your games from us because we are DRM free and you own them”. Which… rightfully angered a LOT of people.
So GoG did a video where a “french monk” (which is really weird since they are Polish but…) apologized and gave away a discount code or something. And in The Witcher 2, an NPC was added who alluded to all this and I think gave away a free copy of The Witcher 1 if you beat him at dice poker or whatever?
Short term? It led to a lot of us actually trying to back up our games. And realizing that was not feasible because GoG would almost never post changelogs or let us know which installers had updated versions and ain’t nobody got time to manually scrape every download page. Long term? You can generally tell who was a “GoG OG” in that we look at ANY “And we are the best site ever because we have no DRM and preserve everything” bit of PR from GoG/CDP because it is painfully obvious this is just advertisement for them.
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