So Retro!

[Niya]

Get DosBox....I run all the classics like Prince of Persia, Commander Keen and Dangerous Dave using that. Those are DOS games though. Games that came out during the Win95 era like Pitfall, I don't know.

[sapator]

I think W95 helped good old games to "die". What i mean is that at first the support for DOS to w95 were at least , sh^thy and we had to have at least 100% extra processing power to play DOS games and after that everyone was going to the directX without caring about the gameplay. Of course exceptions like M&Magic and of course Baldur's gate like games were there but the main ingredient that makes out a game, aka gameplay was starting to matter less and less. This probably be understand from people that were there when great games were born. If someone tells you that p.e. Fifa 2013 is the best soccer game ever and you have played kick off 2 then you will probably laugh at his face (or even puke if you are a sapator clone). I agree with the assumption about how good they were and not how bad the look now from people that did not live that era. For me Dosbox is a favorite.
Ah, forgot to mention the death of adventures. We don't really need people to 'think" when they are playing a game, we just want stupid game players with Wii and Waa and whatever to jump up and down their living rooms. Thankfully Lucas remastered the monkey islands a couple of years ago and i really suggest them to anyone that does not want to touch DOS, although i prefer the scumm interface meself. Also do not forget the Boxes. Maps, adds, balloons (Ghostbusters 2 had one), mugs, notebooks. Now we have a disk and a cover. Ok i can also say that many games back there were simply lousy but i won't because we all know that we played even the lousy games.
P.S. What comes to your mind when you hear "what is the best game(s) ever?" is it Tetris, Pacman, Bubble bobble, kick off or is it Fifa, BioShock and THE WITCHER 2 (although the first Witcher was quite good but they decided to "consolize" it).Ok also.....SHINOBIIII!PC version was so bugged that if you have finished it on PC (tell the truth and, how, or i will know) then you though that you have conquered the planet. I have finished it and i was allowed to keep the BOX as a trophy.
P.S.2 Let me copy paste my 5 top games here also:
1) Space Quest 3 Pirates of Pestulon
2)M & Magic Clouds of Xeen
3)Sensible Soccer
4)Double Dragon 2
5)Probably Wing Commander or Bubble Bobble since i have played it with my cousin at least 1000 times.
After that is all about Sierra and Lucas Games. Space Quest,Larry,Monkey Island,Indiana etc etc.

[Jacob Roman]

Yeah back then, gameplay is what made the game, but there were a few rarities that had killer graphics and not always unique but awesome fun gameplay. Sometimes even in combination of that, the music is so epic, it sucks you in, and gets you more into the game. Personally (and I recommend you play some of these off of any emulator just to get a glimpse of what I mean) these are my top 5 games of all time even to this day:

1) Turrican 2 (Amiga 500) Yeah I had to bring this in. Gorgeous graphics, awesome sound, and the best music soundtrack even to this day. And that was quite a feat for 1990. And now I can play this beast on my smartphone using the Winuae app for Android, which is an Amiga emulator. There are those out there who know about this game, and played it that consider this the best game ever made. And for good reason. It starts by giving you a superb 7 min 30 sec long title screen story line, with comic strips to illustrate the story, along with some epic music to go along with it. The controls are perfect. The gameplay itself is flawless, and fairly difficult. Not too difficult, but not too easy either. The level design was very well done, leaving you a ton of options of finding secrets and hidden rooms. And the levels give you a ton of variety, such as outdoor desert, dark alien ships, underwater, a futuristic factory (my favorite), some scary "Aliens (The Movie)" HR Giger style levels, even a level that completely changes genres on you, and the game ends up becoming a spaceship shooter! The boss battles to this day are nearly as epic as the boss battles in World of Warcraft, and leave you a good feeling of pride after you defeat them. But thankfully not as hard as WoW. Combined that with a various soundtrack where you'll never hear the same some twice and holy cow! By the time you finish this game, you are left with a sastisfied feeling and enjoyment, which was not so common back then off a video game. No other game left me with chills like this one did.

2) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game (Arcade) To this day, its the best TMNT game ever made in history. And the only game I would dish out $10-$15 in quarters for the countless lives lost in this glorious masterpiece. The only thing that would come close is TMNT: Turtles in Time for the SNES. Although the NES version of TMNT The Arcade Game was 8 bit and obviously watered down, it still holds up, but will never truly be as good as the arcade.

3) Secret of Monkey Island (PC)(Amiga 500) This is the game that got me into adventure gaming around the LucasArts era. It still funny and comical as it ever was. Over the years, its sequels 2 and 3 blew my mind, especially part 3, which was just made on the PC and possibly the Mac too. Although part 4 in my opinion sucked in comparison, and IMO was just a cash in. Known fact: I was stuck in the first Monkey Island game for 3 years near the end. All because I never knew the Magnetic Compass had any use. And it turned out that I had to use the Magnetic Compass that was in your inventory the whole time since the beginning of the game...on a stupid key to get the key from afar by magnetizing it. Wow that was a fail. Never would have guessed that.

4) Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening (Gameboy) I played this game so much that the battery no longer worked on the game cartridge after sometime. This game was one of the greatest RPGs I've ever played at the time. The dungeons were beautifully done, the boss fights were epic, and the ending is one of the few endings that was so beautiful (and long) it nearly made my cry and gave me chills at the same time...mostly cause of the music combined with the long sequence sounded sad, but epic. I was gonna put Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past (Super Nintendo), but felt the Gameboy version was more in touch with my feelings for some reason, and had a huge effect on me. Leaving me with not only a good feeling of satisfaction, but left me with chills running up and down my body in the end on top of that. What game does that? Seriously?

5) World of Warcraft (PC) This game has literally changed my life. I got into this game because of a South Park episode back in 2006. And was once famous in the Drenden server during the Burning Crusade era for not only having the ultra rare Spectral Tiger mount from a very rare card in real life(which goes sometimes for $2000 on eBay), but for being the last man standing on Supremus in Black Temple, which is a level 70, 25 Man raid. Back in Burning Crusade, these bosses actually meant something, and were extremely hard. Even at times, there are even trash mobs that were just as difficult as the boss fights themselves. And back then, to have an epic on ya actually meant something, and gave you a sense of pride. Because back then they were extremely hard to get. You not only needed to be in an elite guild, and be part of their cliquey and common raid team regularly, but you had to do these raids on their raid nights, which at times took hours. And even if you were lucky enough to get the boss down, they only drop a couple pieces of gear for everyone who can wield it can roll on. With that said, it left a slim chance for you to get it. Now and days, Blizz watered down the game to appease the kids who thought the game was too hard and didnt like grinding, and getting epics and experience is like nothing now. The game changed my life because if it wasnt for WoW, I wouldnt have met my current girlfriend, and moved to Miami to be with her. Matter of fact were neighbors. She lives but 20 feet from me. Weve been dating 3 years now and still play WoW, but not as often as we use to due to our busy work schedule. Hell we even work in the same restaurant together.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I just recently started playing Ultima V. That was a game I played in college back in 88-89, or so. I didn't have a computer, so I was playing on one of the school computers. There were only three or four systems with color cards, and those only had four color CGA graphics, but I used them whenever I could. The rest of the time I was generally on amber monochrome. It was a pretty cool game at the time, so I decided to try it out again on DosBox. Showing those graphics on my 27" monitor kind of sucked, as they were SUPER pixelated, but there was still a fair amount that was cool about it. However, I then found the Lazarus project that took the Ultima V game and reworked it to use the Dungeon Seige I graphics engine, so now I have the gameplay of Ultima V with Dungeon Seige I graphics that look pretty good on my system.

[sapator]

Now that you mentioned CGA, i went through all graphic cards but EGA. I don't know what the first graphic card was called but the first one i had was Hercules followed by CGA, VGA, Super VGA, MVGA and whatever is called now.
Jacob, great post i fell the nostalgia vibes there . In Athens we have a certain street named "Stournari" that is the "mecca" of computers in Greece. I was lucky enough to live 15 minutes on foot from there and i was at least 3 times a week there. I remember when they brought the first CD-Player there with a SCSI controller, a revolutionary day. On the side streets there were the console stores so although i have seen every single one of those little bastard$ i never were a big fan but i can still remember the Sonic figure on a screen there and the super speedy movement. On the upper part of the street, near the exarchia square there was the Amiga and Atari stores and some of them also on the side streets. What i also remember was a very tidy,nifty and well taken care of Mac Store that was constantly empty . Anyhow, at least i knew what i will be when i grow up (a pimp and a, eerrr sorry that's not it) but i had no idea that W95 was coming. Yes once more! Damn thing and a really bad day for human race.
I also forgot Doom. That game is probably responsible for every single console game that exists these days and uses a weapon.
On a side note, a glimpse of good ol' days (i can't find my Clouds of Xeen box, probably in the basement) :



And let us explain what gameplay means:

[Shaggy Hiker]

I think it was Caslte Wolfenstein 3D that really got the modern game world going. Doom was the next generation, was better publicized, and had a broader impact, but Wolfenstein 3D came first and launched hundreds of books on ray casting engines. I think it was what showed that real-time, first person, 3D games were possible.

[sapator]

Of course Wolfenstein 3D but i meant, as you've said, in terms of publicity and impact.

[Niya]

I think it was Caslte Wolfenstein 3D that really got the modern game world going. Doom was the next generation, was better publicized, and had a broader impact, but Wolfenstein 3D came first and launched hundreds of books on ray casting engines. I think it was what showed that real-time, first person, 3D games were possible.

I think we should be careful about how we define a 3D game. Wolfenstein 3D allows you to perceive moving in three dimensions but it was a sprite based game. Even Doom was sprite based. Sprites have only 2 dimension. I would say that those games are only partially 3D since the actual movement is calculated on a 3 dimensional plane(X,Y,Z co-ordinates). You have a full 3D engine when game elements use polygon meshes instead of sprites. Also, Doom, and all its clones(Heritic, Hexen, Blood etc) are actually classified as 1.5D games. While the movement and rendering is calculated using 3 dimensions, the maps are actually 2 dimensions with rooms divided into sectors each having a height property. This presents certain limitations. For example, it is not possible to place a room over another room in Doom engine games. It wasn't until Quake did we have true 3D maps where its possible to stack real 3D objects on top of one another.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Of course Wolfenstein 3D but i meant, as you've said, in terms of publicity and impact.

I think Doom certainly got the publicity, but for impact, I think Wolfenstein 3D had the greatest because the impact was on the perspective of game developers. That might not have impacted the pure numbers that Doom did, but it sure impacted game development like little else. I still remember my amazement the first time I played that game. I started reading everything I could find on how it was done.

And to blend it into a response to Niya, I would add that sprite based 3D games were the last time I had a realistic hope of being able to do any reasonable game graphics. Once things got to true 3D rendered objects, I knew that my surrealistic lack of understanding of perspective would keep me from ever doing anything satisfactory in that realm. However, I think the novelty that is lumped under the term 3D is more based on the first person perspective rather than how the game world is rendered. The 2D games with a first person perspective were SO hard due to the fact that the world became infinitely thin when perched on edge like that.

Actually, the only first person games that I can think of prior to Wolfenstein 3D were games like Eye of the Beholder which was totally turn based static images without any real motion at all. Smooth motion games existed, but they were all side scrollers of one sort or another that all used 3rd person perspective. 3D was originally used to refer to what amounted to a first person perspective, 2D, side scroller. These were still called 3D, though, even though there was no Z axis to the motion. What Doom brought to the table was a pseudo-Z axis motion. Still, the name 3D was used from early on, sprite or not.

[homer13j]

I never played Wolfenstein but got quite addicted to Rise of the Triad which was originally intended to be a sequel to it. But I could never get past the third boss - the fast black "NME" robot. There's probably a trick to it but I never could figure it out.

Still have a copy of Papyrus' original Indy Car Racing from 1993 complete with the poster. I wonder how much I could get for it on ebay?

I would add that sprite based 3D games were the last time I had a realistic hope of being able to do any reasonable game graphics. Once things got to true 3D rendered objects, I knew that my surrealistic lack of understanding of perspective would keep me from ever doing anything satisfactory in that realm.

Have you ever looked at XNA? Microsoft has recently started driving all XNA development toward the Xbox and Windows phone but there are still a bunch of XNA tutorials out there to get you started.

http://www.riemers.net/

This one helped me get some 3D models I created (and some I stole - including the '69 Charger) into an actual game:

Attachment 101391

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'm using XNA to render individual controls in a WinForms App. The code is over in the CodeBank. I haven't done any game-loop, full screen, XNA apps, but dday wrote up some stuff on that in Tutorials or the CodeBank, or both. It's hard to say where it's going, but it's easy to say that I am way too bad at art to make my own graphics. The mechanics isn't the problem, it's the ability to makes something that doesn't look like a Picasso.

[sapator]

Well i can draw stick people and i am even lousy at that. I would be interested to make graphics but i believe i know my limitations at this field aka i suck bad. That and singing, i may be good for a gore band though, if i gain 30 kilos, reconstruct my face and start drinking my piss..Hmm.
Anyhow. Eye of the Beholder was also pioneer. I can't think what was the first, first person rpg. I have played a game named Drakkhen and riders of rohan, that were my first rpg like games. Of course everything started with, errr, damn, how was it called....
It was a game that you moved to certain areas of land in England that you wanted to conquer and you either had a sword fight or the thing with two horses and the riders holding poles on one another...Ahhh something about king....I can't remember the name. I was 7 or 8 when i played that in a school computer (well whatdoyoukno school teaches you something after all!), king, conquer...Anyhow. I think that was the start for an RPG like thinking in my brain. That and a game that was called castles and sieges in Greece.You know the one that you played with your hands.Had a castle and big bows and catapults and you tried to break your friends walls across the room lunching round plastic, "rocks". In general the first games i ever played was pacman and space invaders and Space Quest I on my cousin IBM but for rpg influence, the pre mentioned.

[sapator]

Ah, i also remembered for Amiga graphs Jacob forgot to mention Dragons Lair.

[sapator]

Defender of the Crown! Defender of the Crown! I remembered!!

[Jacob Roman]

Ah, i also remembered for Amiga graphs Jacob forgot to mention Dragons Lair.

Dont forget Space Ace and Willy Beamish. Willy Beamish alone took 12 disks that you had to interchange unlesd you had multiple external disk drives. You can only have upto 3 externals, and since one is built in, that means 4 disk drives at the same time. Space Ace and Dragons Lair is just 5 disks. I actually still own all these but its all at my mother and brothers house.

[sapator]

Yep. I was going for the first release between the two.
To be fair Willy Beamish was released a couple of years later so it ought to have a graph update and it was comparable to PC version so i wouldn't have mentioned it.

[Jacob Roman]

Yep. I was going for the first release between the two.
To be fair Willy Beamish was released a couple of years later so it ought to have a graph update and it was comparable to PC version so i wouldn't have mentioned it.

Yeah but the only huge difference is that the Amiga 500 did it at just 7 Mhz, and didn't require some crazy video card, drivers, etc. Just pop it in and play. Yup....at 7 Mhz:

[sapator]

Ah, please, we talked about this. I liked my PC back then with it's crazy video cards. It was that era that PC's were overwhelming Amiga and i was enjoying it in full.
I can now accept the Amiga hardware to software delivery but back then i was so happy that we were wining. DOS DOS DOS...Ye and then came W95, as I've said for the 123423time.

[Jacob Roman]

Also I beat Defender of the Crown many times on the Amiga. Even to this day that game is addicting. And I swear in one of the cut scences, that girl he rescued soooo grabbed his johnson.

[sapator]

Lol. Well you had the Amiga version i had this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBie7v4PV_A (initially played on monochrome)
Also my favorite PC speaker music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt5zwsn6V-s (ok we don't need any Amiga comparison here, i haven't heard the Amiga version till 2008 )
P.S. Also my favorite music in general http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D85O96-XIRM had pc speaker but also sound cards here.

[Jacob Roman]

Wait for it.....


Wait for it.....


Wwwwwwwait for it......


Wait for it.....


BOOM!!! Right there! Shes grabbing his johnson!


At 7 Mhz mind you.

[homer13j]

I love a happy ending!

[Witis]

P.S. Also my favorite music in general http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D85O96-XIRM had pc speaker but also sound cards here.

Well there's 14 minutes of music about Roger Wilco's cryo sleep that I'll never get back!

[sapator]

Well there's 14 minutes of music about Roger Wilco's cryo sleep that I'll never get back!

Well not on this Episode.

Jacob this is just a Cinemaware's infinity 3d engine shadow pixels glitch. It goes away with the latest drivers.

P.S. Just show that in SQ3 Roger says "where am i" when he wakes up. In a sound blaster card that is. I did not remember that!I must play this game again to make sure!OMG,OMG!He says "where am i"!!I can't breeth!!OMG!

[Jacob Roman]

Jacob this is just a Cinemaware's infinity 3d engine shadow pixels glitch. It goes away with the latest drivers.

A glitch doesn't grab a mans johnson.

[Niya]

Lol

[Shaggy Hiker]

It's clearly evening, so there's a simple explanation: The roof probably leaks.

She's just helping him pitch a tent.

[sapator]

Lol. If you guys can't look at this as it is then you have to re-play Larry. You can't go wrong there (or can,He? ).