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I've got some: I remember playing Torin's Passage, a Sierra adventure game, with my older brother. I think it (and a "board games of the world" compilation disc) came free with our family's first computer in 1995. I thought it was really dark as a kid because your parents get kidnapped right at the start. You do get a purple kinda-sorta dog thing as a pet, though, who can shapeshift to help solve puzzles. I remember that there's some rear end in a top hat old man at the start who you have to make juice for or whatever before he'll help you, and then you fall through a forest and get put in on trial or something and we never got much farther than that. We'd replay the early part of the game a bunch, though. At school, almost our whole class of farm town kids would come in early each morning so that could we pack the decrepit computer lab and play Bolo on the networked Macintoshes. It was loving NUTS to have a 16-player game in real-time like that in those days. The game felt insanely complicated and nobody ever won, but we loved it. I think the only other game that ever got that much play before or after was Oregon Trail. Also at school but years later, some friends and I were always on the Toonami website and playing some browser games on there. Those were pretty much always a couple of Dragonball Z games (Mission to Namek and Tournament) as well as a Gundam Wing game. I had no idea what Gundam Wing was, but I loved the gameplay. This one is mostly old (although it's probably pretty obscure outside of Japan), but I don't even want to know how many hours I put into Dragon Warrior Monsters on the original Game Boy. I got so goddamn far in this game but never quite beat Rank S. I remember the insane tension of going through one of the warp gates or whatever once you were super far into the game and not knowing what the hell kind of broken enemy teams you would encounter. And this is more obscure than it is old (although it's somehow already been 12 years), but the very last game I ever rented from a Blockbuster was Full Auto for my brand-new, gameless Xbox 360. The first game you play in a new console generation is always memorable, but I think I put like 30 hours into Full Auto during my two-day rental; the racing and vehicle destruction felt loving incredible and I'd uploaded my Modest Mouse music to the 360, so I was rocking out to "Cowboy Dan" and "Trailer Trash" the whole time. Holy poo poo, that was so fun.
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Jul 27, 2018 02:49
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There was a NES game I loved to rent with friends because it was a prefect 2 player game. It was called Conflict and it was a turned based stratagy with one player being Blue (who had US units) and Red (who had Soviet stuff). It was some RNG, as once my buddies infantry shot down my MiG, but over all it was fair. There was an SNES version that was based around the gulf war, but gently caress that. I was sick of war in the desert stuff even then.
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Jul 27, 2018 03:19
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surf rock posted:This one is mostly old (although it's probably pretty obscure outside of Japan), but I don't even want to know how many hours I put into Dragon Warrior Monsters on the original Game Boy. I got so goddamn far in this game but never quite beat Rank S. I remember the insane tension of going through one of the warp gates or whatever once you were super far into the game and not knowing what the hell kind of broken enemy teams you would encounter. I played the poo poo out of that game, but I really don’t remember it all that well beyond that it made me extremely compulsive about getting every monster I could. I’m going to have to look up a Let’s Play on youtube or something and get my nostalgia on! Thinking about that, though, made me recall two other (potentially obscure?) Game Boy games that I loved and no one else I knew had ever heard of: Sword of Hope II (can’t speak to the quality of the video, just linked the first thing I could find) and Battle Bull. I’m not even sure what you’d call the first one. Adventure? It was a turn-based RPG but you moved between screens by picking which direction you wanted to go. I don’t think the encounters were random, but I might be wrong about that. Also I’m pretty sure the main character was called THEO which I found charming. Battle Bull was a puzzle-ish thing where you drove an upgradeable tank around crushing all the other robots on the level with blocks. Simple, awesome, and cheap enough for a poor kid like me to afford!
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Jul 27, 2018 04:30
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I always thought Advance Wars was a remake of Desert Commander because of how similar the two are but apparently they're totally unrelated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4TFwMj4xf8 Neddy Seagoon posted:Even heard it in the guy's voice. I remember unlocking Jin once then the VMU took a poo poo and died and I couldn't be bothered to regrind up for unlocking him again.  Wiseduck was the coolest anyway. Its special is an alpha strike!
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Jul 27, 2018 04:40
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As a kid, I was way more into RTS games than I am now because at some point (probably the release date of Starcraft +/- 0 days) they stopped being about having the biggest tank army and more about "actual tactics and skill" and that was weird and confusing. Still played a lot of Starcraft and WC3 but nothing much else afterwards. Anyway, when I still liked them I tried a lot and one I got from a friend I've never heard mentioned anywhere else, called Thandor: The Invasion. Judging from the barren Wikipedia article, it wasn't exactly a smash hit ("Developers of game and critics says that storyline is present, but is not interesting"). I didn't realize before that it's a German production, so that explains why someone even had it over here. Its main feature was probably that you could design your own units, relatively simple but neat: different chassis (wheels or treads!) and turrets (machine gun, flamethrower, tank gun) to make your own army. Which is also one of its biggest disadvantages because every faction has the same set of lego blocks so it got samey really fast. I played something like three missions and got pasted into dirt really hard because I sucked at the S part of RTS', see above. But I did realize something: if you put a tank gun on a wheel body, your unit can shoot while moving. This is a problem (for the enemy) because projectiles have travel time. Therefore, if you have a single lovely-rear end tank just moving back and forth in front of an entire army of enemy vehicles, you will never get hit while you keep sloooowly whittling them down. It was hilarious. For 10 minutes. Then I never played it again. Also, eventually a flamethrower tank just drove up to me and roasted my one tank. And this is the story of how lil' Simon discovered "micro" and decided it was bullshit.
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Jul 27, 2018 12:45
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That reminds me of a game I think I remember where you had a squad of vehicles that you had to bolt lego-style parts on to give them different abilities to complete objectives in a mission. I never played it, only seen ads and such, so it may not work as I recall or even actually exist.
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Jul 27, 2018 13:00
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The best part about Torin's Passage was sometimes it would glitch right at the end of the game so you couldn't beat it. I have a soft spot for 90's Sierra games. Its such a weird time for PC gaming where 3d games looked kinda crappy still so they tried a bunch of different ways to make good looking games.
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Jul 27, 2018 13:40
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surf rock posted:This one is mostly old (although it's probably pretty obscure outside of Japan), but I don't even want to know how many hours I put into Dragon Warrior Monsters on the original Game Boy. I got so goddamn far in this game but never quite beat Rank S. I remember the insane tension of going through one of the warp gates or whatever once you were super far into the game and not knowing what the hell kind of broken enemy teams you would encounter. Dragon Warrior Monsters loving ruled. Sure they were just trying to get in on the Pokémon craze in the late 90s but they managed to make something that (for me) felt more complex than Gen 1&2. I never did all of the superboss warp gates and got completely stomped by the superboss arena fight but I still put a ton of time into the game and had a pretty badass team by the end.
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Jul 27, 2018 14:34
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I had DQM (or maybe the 2nd game), but personally I didn't find it that engaging. My main problem was not being able to see my monsters in combat. It's a tiny thing, but it really bothered me for whatever reason.
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Jul 27, 2018 14:36
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Zanzibar Ham posted:That reminds me of a game I think I remember where you had a squad of vehicles that you had to bolt lego-style parts on to give them different abilities to complete objectives in a mission. I never played it, only seen ads and such, so it may not work as I recall or even actually exist. Was it Tanktics? That had a system where you could jam any set of wheels/treads/hover-devices, engines, a few weapons (ranging from trebuchets to sci-fi lasers, gradually unlocked through Stone Age/Medieval/Modern/Future campaigns) and a radar dish on top to build a new tank. C-Euro posted:Dragon Warrior Monsters loving ruled. Sure they were just trying to get in on the Pokémon craze in the late 90s but they managed to make something that (for me) felt more complex than Gen 1&2. I never did all of the superboss warp gates and got completely stomped by the superboss arena fight but I still put a ton of time into the game and had a pretty badass team by the end. DWM had the whole breeding system, which was more complex than Pokemon's equivalent - you could breed any two monsters as long as they were different genders, you had to pick a "pedigree" out of the breeding pair that dictated what the results were, certain combinations would give ones further down the chain, and afterwards the two parent monsters would run away so you couldn't try again. I actually replayed it pretty recently, and it's a lot easier to plan out teams now that I can look up the breeding charts online - getting a Unicorn pretty early, and just breeding it with monsters that give it better defensive stats so you've got a +9 Unicorn that's functionally immune to non-boss damage and can heal the whole party at once, makes the game a lot easier. Dungeons in DWM were a collection of randomly-generated floors, except for the last one in each. They'd be little setpieces for the respective boss monsters, like a cave with a captured princess for the Dragon boss. One of the last ones is some demon in what is clearly a torture chamber, who explains to you that for your crimes against monsters you've been sentenced to the guillotine, and you're given the option to agree with him and go put your head in it. Obviously the game doesn't actually kill you there (you can just back out and fight him regardless), but it's the kind of graphical assets I can see in a creepypasta of a haunted gameboy game and go "oh hey, I know those torture implements".
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Jul 27, 2018 15:12
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Yeah, it must have been Tanktics! I remember the cover image with the sheep!
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Jul 27, 2018 15:21
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Brofessor Slayton posted:DWM had the whole breeding system, which was more complex than Pokemon's equivalent - you could breed any two monsters as long as they were different genders, you had to pick a "pedigree" out of the breeding pair that dictated what the results were, certain combinations would give ones further down the chain, and afterwards the two parent monsters would run away so you couldn't try again. I actually replayed it pretty recently, and it's a lot easier to plan out teams now that I can look up the breeding charts online - getting a Unicorn pretty early, and just breeding it with monsters that give it better defensive stats so you've got a +9 Unicorn that's functionally immune to non-boss damage and can heal the whole party at once, makes the game a lot easier. I was super gun-shy about breeding at times because I didn't like losing my monsters after the fact, especially for the breeding chain where you could get monsters of all of the Dragon Quest end bosses since you have to give up some really high-level critters to get those. Also you would sometimes meet other trainers in the world and you could steal their monsters from them with enough consumables. Those monsters would sometimes have extremely difficult to breed movesets and the like.
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Jul 27, 2018 15:35
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Yeah, it must have been Tanktics! I remember the cover image with the sheep! I can't really focus enough to dig up the info I'd need to make a big post about Tanktics right now. I only ever played the demo, too. But it was a memorably quirky game. C-Euro posted:Also you would sometimes meet other trainers in the world and you could steal their monsters from them with enough consumables. Those monsters would sometimes have extremely difficult to breed movesets and the like. You could, should and indeed must steal monsters from foreign trainers by stalling out battles long enough for you to throw sirloin steaks at them until they liked you. You could only ever recruit one monster per battle (the last one defeated, if it was friendly enough), but there was nothing stopping you from chucking poisoned meat at a trainer's other monsters to debuff them so you could swipe their dragon, then immediately breeding it away to get something even rarer. As a kid I had the opposite problem of breeding monsters too often, which meant I had a lot of level 1s and not much else. You need to keep at least one high-level guy around to make training up newly-hatched ones at all viable.
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Jul 27, 2018 18:24
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Empire Earth and Civilization : Call To Power are knockoffs of Age of Empires and Civilization respectfully. They're pretty forgotten these days, especially CTP. Empire Earth you took your civ from literal cave men to the far future. It was really cool in that respect. CTP was just civ but different units and techs, but it also went into the future as well. I found it weird that people complained about the future part, often "These future units and buildings confuse me! I don't know what they're good for!" which is really really dumb because all these games tell you what they do. It was not hard to figure out drop marines launched into space then came back down on the planet. It also had techs that let you build stuff under the sea and in orbit. Both got sequels, but they were not nearly as good as the first. CTP2 probably had the single worst UI i've ever seen. In order to see messages you have to select another tab, which didn't indicate you had a message. So you'd sometimes not know someone had declared war on you until you started losing units or cities to them.
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Jul 27, 2018 20:44
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surf rock posted:At school, almost our whole class of farm town kids would come in early each morning so that could we pack the decrepit computer lab and play Bolo on the networked Macintoshes. It was loving NUTS to have a 16-player game in real-time like that in those days. The game felt insanely complicated and nobody ever won, but we loved it. I think the only other game that ever got that much play before or after was Oregon Trail.  I only ever got to play it 2p, but I still remember the methodical taking-out of neutral Pillboxes and the scramble to build boats/roads during chases. It sucked waiting for your little mechanic man to parachute back in after he got shot...Bolo tried to do a lot of things in one game--I wonder if a spiritual successor to it exists?
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Jul 27, 2018 23:23
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I got into X-Com pretty young, so any turn based game was right up my ally. Soldiers At War really stood out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71IdryupIak Video graphics seem super sped up, but you get the idea.
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Jul 28, 2018 00:12
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XkyRauh posted:gently caress, yeah--Bolo! It absolutely makes my day that someone else remembers Bolo. Also, it was a totally different game with 16 people; it was just constant warfare where you try to carve out a little portion of the map and survive.
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Jul 28, 2018 02:22
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C-Euro posted:Also you would sometimes meet other trainers in the world and you could steal their monsters from them with enough consumables. Those monsters would sometimes have extremely difficult to breed movesets and the like. And other times you could get your monsters stolen.  I think I pretty much quit the game when one of my monsters was effectively deleted when I offered to light someone's barbecue. For some reason that consumed my fire monster entirely just to open a dumb bonus dungeon portal.
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Jul 28, 2018 02:36
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Richard Petty's Talladega. Qualifying to race was easy enough. Then the controls became pretty unforgiving, as evidenced by the player's tire exploding and ending the game within a minute of starting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U8CBjrOIPU Moon Patrol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr7ULBe2VHE
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Jul 28, 2018 02:46
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pro starcraft loser posted:I got into X-Com pretty young, so any turn based game was right up my ally. Soldiers At War really stood out. Oh man I haven't thought of that in years. It would crash every time I finished the first battle though.
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Jul 28, 2018 06:50
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pro starcraft loser posted:I got into X-Com pretty young, so any turn based game was right up my ally. Soldiers At War really stood out. What about Jagged Alliance 2, the only game I've installed on literally every pc and laptop I've owned
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Jul 28, 2018 09:16
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I remember a couple bad strategy games. There was Conquest Earth, which at least tried something new where you could either play the humans or the alien invaders, they worked differently and there was this weird fog of war mechanic where each side had to generate their own air to see/breathe in. Then there was L.E.D. Wars, which was so bad the first level refused to end after I completed all the objectives.
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Jul 28, 2018 09:19
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Okay, so there was a first person driving game that's pixel art. You only control one arm and hand, and as you grab pieces of the car they fall off. It's not Jalopy, that's too new.
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Jul 28, 2018 10:09
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bony tony posted:Okay, so there was a first person driving game that's pixel art. You only control one arm and hand, and as you grab pieces of the car they fall off. Enviro-Bear 2000?
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Jul 28, 2018 10:30
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surf rock posted:It absolutely makes my day that someone else remembers Bolo. Also, it was a totally different game with 16 people; it was just constant warfare where you try to carve out a little portion of the map and survive. twistedmentat posted:Empire Earth and Civilization : Call To Power are knockoffs of Age of Empires and Civilization respectfully. They're pretty forgotten these days, especially CTP. Empire Earth you took your civ from literal cave men to the far future.
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Jul 28, 2018 19:04
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Due to how specifically similar they are I'm actually planning an LP of the two Fairly OddParent's games on GameCube, Breakin' Da Rules and Shadow Showdown. They have basically the same mechanics as each other and similar ideas for limiting the magic you can do (IE wish star collection for a single little wish, three per level), but the second game basically takes everything the first game did and makes a vast improvement - the levels are more interesting due to more visual flairs and interesting side-rooms, and the wishes actually synergise with each other at times and the plot actually exists and has interesting attempts at complexity, even if it is still fairly basic (there is a misdirect and the levels have a feeling of progression) It's kind of astounding just how much better Shadow Showdown is thought out that the first game. BioEnchanted has a new favorite as of 19:40 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 28, 2018 19:35
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FruitNYogurtParfait posted:What about Jagged Alliance 2, the only game I've installed on literally every pc and laptop I've owned I played it a lot but I still think it's hosed-up poo poo from hell that you start out with loving pea shooters.
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Jul 29, 2018 04:06
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surf rock posted:It absolutely makes my day that someone else remembers Bolo. Also, it was a totally different game with 16 people; it was just constant warfare where you try to carve out a little portion of the map and survive. immolationsex posted:I guess I'm the third guy on the planet old enough to remember Bolo. I never got to play it online, sadly, but single player was enough to make it clear just how ahead of its time that game was. I even remember that bolo apparently means 'together' in Sanskrit or some other south-east Asian language, because it said so somewhere in the documentation. Christ, what a trip down memory lane this thread is. Sup, Bolo-bros!  Back in the very early 90's we installed Bolo on every single one of the black & white Mac Classic II:s in the computer lab at my school and had massive tank battles in class instead of loving around with ClarisWorks like we were supposed to. 
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Jul 29, 2018 19:49
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I have vague memories of a game that was on the Mac in one of my classrooms in primary school. This would have been some time around 1995, probably. It was mostly text with some black-and-white drawings, I think, and it was a sort of RPG but really just the combat from an RPG. You were fighting different monsters and people in an arena and you'd be rewarded for victories with cash and XP to improve your character and fight tougher enemies. Anyone know what that game might have been?
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Jul 30, 2018 00:41
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Jerry Cotton posted:I played it a lot but I still think it's hosed-up poo poo from hell that you start out with loving pea shooters. lol if you don't start by hiring Lynx and Buzz for a day and try to steamroll Drassen with their decent equipment before they kill each other in a bitter divorce fueled rage. God that game had so many great characters 
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Jul 30, 2018 05:06
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I remember the first Jaggad Alliance game where none of my friends could figure out how to get new weapons, no shops no drops, nothing. So everyone was stuck with basic pistols the entire game. One of my friends managed to finish it with that. So I dug out the binder I have all my older games. I had to put them in there after my parents made me get rid of the big boxes I'd keep them in. If only they knew how much Big Box games would go on the secondary market, I could have hundreds of dollars! Most of them are stuff everyone knows; civ2-VI, EU1 and 2, Starfleet Command 1 and 2, C&C and Red Alert games, Diabo, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and so on, basically most big games from the turn of the century. Anyways, one that stood out was tsar burden of the crown. I do not remember this game, I don't remember playing it or even what it was. At first I thought it was the game where you build a town and have to set rewards to get your adventurers to do stuff, but then I remembered that was Majesty. No its a RTS game that looks a lot like Warcraft but also Age of Empires 2. Looking it up it had Xp for units and they could reach higher levels to become heroic and such. Neat! Its available on GoG and has pretty good reviews so I guess its worth checking out. Its weird its such a blank spot in my mind. There was also Soldier of Fortune II, which was a pretty standard FPS game which had one thing that made it stand out, it was pretty gorey. You could blow peoples arms and legs and heads off, and there was modeled damage on the bodies You can see it in action here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpdIXN0DMrQ One i remember playing tons of was Conquest of the New World. Like the more famous Colonization, it was based around colonizing North America, and you could build cities and harvest resources and send stuff back to Europe for money, eventually you'd revolt to create your own country. The Battles were pretty cool at the time I remember https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfRDJm9OoSE Lastly, another I remember little of but I have was Disciples 2. Again I had to remember what it was, and it was like Heroes of MIght and magic or Age of Wonders where you had a hero that went around and conqured lands and built new units. I had the same look at HOMM3 with its pre rendered graphics. I remember the heroes had to plant staves in the ground to claim it, not unlik the creep in Starcraft. I also found my CTP disk so I'll give that a try, see how it plays on my SSD.
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Jul 30, 2018 06:00
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:lol if you don't start by hiring Lynx and Buzz for a day and try to steamroll Drassen with their decent equipment before they kill each other in a bitter divorce fueled rage. I start buy uninstalling the game and going back to the best X-COM game, X-COM Apocalypse  (Not really, I must've beaten Jagged Alliance 2 a dozen times.)
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Jul 30, 2018 06:49
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I had a copy of Bolo on one of those old-rear end 10000 shareware games disks. It didn't make a lot of sense in 1 player mode but it clearly could have been pretty cool. Man, there were a lot of cool games on those disks. Exile was undoubtedly the best, but I spent plenty of time playing Realmz and Taskmaker as well.
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Jul 30, 2018 18:48
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twistedmentat posted:
My father and I sunk soooo many hours into this one. The sound design was pretty good, I still remember the thick and bassy THUNK when you hit an enemy with a few greasegun rounds. And the deathmatch community stayed strong for a good few years. I think it's the only real online multiplayer I sunk any time into. (I don't have the time to practice and become competitively good at any game, so I just stick to singleplayer stuff) When the question comes up about old games you'd like to see revived, S.O.F. is always one of my main picks. If it's designed around meaty and satisfying gunplay, and keeping the gore factor detailed but a little more restrained (I think SOF 3 went too over-the-top here, forgetting to build a solid game around it), I see no reason why the franchise can't make a decent comeback. Then again, I'm the guy that thinks Duke Nukem is still a concept with legs if someone can handle a self-satire w/tasteful-restraint approach. So maybe I'm not someone you should listen to. 
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Aug 1, 2018 23:00
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Tiggum posted:I have vague memories of a game that was on the Mac in one of my classrooms in primary school. This would have been some time around 1995, probably. It was mostly text with some black-and-white drawings, I think, and it was a sort of RPG but really just the combat from an RPG. You were fighting different monsters and people in an arena and you'd be rewarded for victories with cash and XP to improve your character and fight tougher enemies. Anyone know what that game might have been? Could you be thinking of Robert Chancellor's "Darkwood?" I'm phone-posting right now so I can't link to it, but I think you might find it (and the sequel, "Siege of Darkwood") on macintoshgarden.org . These were very, very simple RPG-like shareware games with extraordinarily repetitious gameplay, but somehow still worth it to get to the end.
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Aug 2, 2018 02:55
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Keigel posted:My father and I sunk soooo many hours into this one. The sound design was pretty good, I still remember the thick and bassy THUNK when you hit an enemy with a few greasegun rounds. And the deathmatch community stayed strong for a good few years. I think it's the only real online multiplayer I sunk any time into. (I don't have the time to practice and become competitively good at any game, so I just stick to singleplayer stuff) naw, I think a SoF remake with modern graphics and character modeling would be great. It certainly would be the game with the most gore, more than say Sniper Elite. I just remember the story wasn't that great, but the gameplay was really solid.
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Aug 2, 2018 04:08
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I only played the first one but shooting people in the foot and dick never got old. NPC's actually reacting to damage was mind blowing back then.
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Aug 2, 2018 08:13
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jojoinnit posted:I only played the first one but shooting people in the foot and dick never got old. NPC's actually reacting to damage was mind blowing back then. That reminds me of how awesome that was in Goldeneye. At least until my dad saw me shoot a guy in the dick and made me turn it off for a while.
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Aug 2, 2018 08:34
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twistedmentat posted:CTP was just civ but different units and techs, but it also went into the future as well. I only played it a handful of times but I remember how frustrating it was when you tried to attack and a lawyer sprite would throw papers around and stop you doing that. Legally.
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Aug 2, 2018 08:44
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Leavemywife posted:That reminds me of how awesome that was in Goldeneye. At least until my dad saw me shoot a guy in the dick and made me turn it off for a while. I liked shooting the guns outs of people's hands in Perfect Dark. "My gun!  "
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Aug 2, 2018 08:47
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