I’m a rather hardcore/pathetic retro gamer who is always on the lookout for brilliant little games I may have missed, either on a console, in the arcades or on the desktop. Here are a few I can think of along with a question for PC experts.
RPG: Wasteland (EA for the PC) - Actually, I’m betting a lot of you heard of this one. I liked this one ever more than bard’s tale because it had a ton of monsters and cool skills to level-up in, like knife fighting and toxic immunity.
Sports: Baseball Stars (SNK for the NES) - The first sports game that I know of that had a create-a-team mode and an economy/salary sim.
Action/Puzzle: The Immortal (EA for the Genesis) - There must have been 30 ways to die in this game. My favorite was being eaten by baby spiders.
Shooter: Tyrian (Epic for the PC) - a beautiful top-down shooter with plenty of action and power-ups. It was even networkable so you could play your friends on the sly in the school computer lab.
Bizarro WTF game: Ninja Golf (Atart for their 7800) - Like peanut butter and chocolate, ninjas and golf are two great tastes that taste great together. Carry that dog leg on the par 5, then kick ass on your way to the green. Tecmo needs to do an update.
Bizarro WTF game #2: Blue Print (Bally for the arcades) - An incomprehensible puzzle/maze game where your character has to gather pieces of an enormous contraption from nearby houses. Why? Because your wife is being chased across the top of the screen by an anthropomorfic purple bean, that’s why.
Bonus And now for my question. Hopefully one of you who is more learned in game lore than I am can remember this game. A dos-based, third-person, trippy puzzle sort of game. You controled a ship that was basically two triangles glued together. You were in enormous blue and lavendar rooms with the only thing in there being huge bouncy pads. You had to bounce from one pad to another, and every time you hit on a pad it made a beautiful note. The goal was to escape to the next room and more complicated puzzles. Ring any bells with anyone? I’m dying to check it out again.
Best Computer Game No One Played - The Reap. It’s an isometric shooter from graphics wizards Housemarque that featured the greatest turnaround of setting imaginable in a shooter. Instead of playing the guy trying to save the world, you’re the aliens that have come to earth to turn it into goo! Lots and lots of bodies combined with some of the most incredible shooter gameplay since Viewpoint make it one of the best games I’ve played on any system. It’s impossible to get anymore and was never released in the US. It also doesn’t run on Windows XP.
Best Video Game No One Played - This one’s tougher… I’ll name a few.
McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure on sega Genesis. It’s made by Treasure and it’s the greatest use of a license I think I’ve ever seen. Superb gameplay, “I can’t believe it’s Genesis” graphics, but real easy.
Solar Jetman by Rare for the NES. If you ever played Gravitar, you’ve got an idea what it’s like. The gameplay was well-balanced and it’s filled with that Rare style.
Bangai-O - Another Treasure gem on the Dreamcast. What better way to make a fun game than to ask the player to wait til the last possible moment before unleashing the most explosive attack possible. The game thrives on pushing you to the edge and then allowing you to let loose. It’s one of those games where the slowdown is just enormous but it enhances the game to dramatic effect.
Finally, Pulstar on the Neo Geo. Irem, creators of R-Type made this game under the name Aicom. It’s a true R-Type style game and it kicks major ass. You can almost see your Neo Geo coughing and wheezing under the sheer weight of the sprites it’s trying to render. So many bullets and so much graphic power that when you survive a massive barrage, it’s clear you’re a shooter god. It never appeared on any other console.
Ah, Wasteland. What a great game that was. It always disappointed me that the visuals weren’t quite as good on the PC as those in the ads for the amiga version. Still, I loved this game.
I also loved how you could restart the game with your characters at the same skill levels as when they ended the last game. If you took your characters through the game several times, they could become all-powerful, killing enemies with VISA cards. What a blast.
Wasn’t fallout a sequel of sorts to wasteland? I don’t know - I never played it.
Baseball Stars ruled my world for a long time, even though every six months it would wipe out my save data just as I was closing in on a perfect team of 99s. Didn’t matter, I’d start right back up, playing against the Lovely Ladies because they sucked and they brought in the crowds and the money. Woo hoo! Loved that game, thanks for the reminder.
Solar Jetman was also a ton of fun. I can’t even remember if I ever actually finished it, though, but I know I did play it a lot. Didn’t realize Rare made it.
Bangai-O is still in my Dreamcast. I’ve got it hooked up to the TV next to my computer so when I need a break from Warcraft or Magic I fire it up.
I guess it’s hard to tell what the best games nobody played were back then, mostly because I had no real connection to any gamers who didn’t live on my street, but I’ll take a stab. Anyone here play Genghis Khan for the NES? My first taste of a strategy game. Two of my friends, who were brothers, and I were addicted to that game for months. We never owned it, but since our parents would let us rent a game a week, we pretty much had it between the three of us for most of a year. Of course, Mr. Khan’s appearance in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (“Bob Genghis Khan”), pretty much solidified it as one of the defining experiences of our lives :).
Fallout was less a sequel and more a tribute. Ultimately, as much as I loved Wasteland, I loved Fallout even more. If you haven’t played it, you really and truly should. It ages well. I replayed it late last year, and had just as much fun as I did the first time around. Fallout 2 also comes highly recommended. Not quite as good as the first in some ways, better in others.
Bonus And now for my question. Hopefully one of you who is more learned in game lore than I am can remember this game. A dos-based, third-person, trippy puzzle sort of game. You controled a ship that was basically two triangles glued together. You were in enormous blue and lavendar rooms with the only thing in there being huge bouncy pads. You had to bounce from one pad to another, and every time you hit on a pad it made a beautiful note. The goal was to escape to the next room and more complicated puzzles. Ring any bells with anyone? I’m dying to check it out again.
yeah I remember it. every room had sort of a different emotion conveyed through the colors and ambient music. I can’t recall the name either. I remember it came out a year or so after marble madness, and was vaguely similar. it was true 3d, before the age of texture mapping. solid filled polys - not wireframe. 386 era for sure.
Almost forgot: best games that nobody has heard of:
Midwinter: a great, sophisticated action/adventure by Mike Singleton, released… oh, god, was it 89 or 90? I misremember.
The Last Express: Possibly the most underappreciated adventure game ever made.
Mechwarrior: Everyone remembers Mechwarrior 2, but it’s amazing how few people played the original. In a lot of ways, it was a better game. The metagame was a sort of Starflight-like experience, very open-ended. I wish the current Mechwarrior franchise would go back to that.
Celtic Tales: Balor of the Evil Eye. Really slick strategy game by Koei set in mythic Ireland. I liked it, but most people just give me puzzled looks when I bring it up.
Darklands: well, maybe not so unknown. Most RPG junkies have probably played this (or should have).
More recent games: King of Dragon Pass (for those who think there is nothing new under the sun), the Longest Journey, and Warcraft III. Just kidding about that last one.
“Temple Of Apshai Trilogy” EPYX hack and slash for The Atari 800
“Triad” for the Atari 800 (kind of like a Tic-Tac-Toe version of Archon)
“Phantasie I, II, III” SSI RPG for the Atari ST
“Wizard’s Crown” SSI RPG for the Atari ST
“Demon’s Winter” SSI RPG for the Atari ST
“Dungeon Master” for the Atari ST
“Zolar Mercenary” shoot-em-up for the Atari Lynx.
“Food Fight” for the Atari 7800
“Anco Kickoff”/“Player Manager” for the Atari ST
“Starleague Baseball” for ther Atari 800
“Microleague Baseball” for the Atrai ST
“Breach” for the Atari ST
“Zeliard” platform game from Sierra for PC
“Wages Of War” squad-level strategy for the PC
“Final Orbit” shoot-em-up for the PC
“Lost Dutchman Mine” western adventure/RPG for the Atari ST
“Alex Kid” for the Sege Master System
“Xenon II” for the Atari ST
“Crush Crumble And Chomp” for the Atari 800
Chris Crawfords’s “Excalibur” for the Atari 800
“Raiders Of The Lost Ark” Atari 2600
"Zepplin"shoot-em up from Synapse for the Atari 800
“Blue Max” shoot-em-up for the Atari 800
“Escape From The Mindmaster” Atari 2600+Starpath Supercharger
"Gateway to Apshai " for Colecovision
“Krush Kill And Destroy” good little RTS for the PC with Aussie humor
“Crimson Skies” for the PC
“Softporn Adventure” for the Atari 800
“Motorcross Madness 2” for the PC
“Medal Of Honor” for the PSX
“Battlehawks 1942” from Lucasarts for the Atari ST
“Beachhead” for the Atari 800
“Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception” from Sierra for the PC (played on a modified Atari 1040 ST with a ‘286 Speed’ PC emulator soldered to the motherboard)
My short list of Bests You Never Heard Of that occurred to me while I was reading the thread:
Internet multiplayer game: Xpilot - there weren’t many more fun things to do in 1994 than play Xpilot on Blood’s Music against 31 other players. Only now with UT2k3’s bombing run will there be a mode that seems similar to that (although in a completely different genre)
RPG:
The two classics of Oubliette and Omega that will be consigned to gaming obscurity.
No category weird game: Rockstar. "Your grannie tells you you’ll never survive in the music industry without heroin. " Yeah, grannie knows the score! Game developers need to go back and study that game for the degree of personalization it let you feel with your game persona.
How many of you played Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception?
I played it to death on my friend’s C64, and nobody ever made a Battletech game quite like it. It was a great combination of RPG elements, world exploration, and tactical light-mech combat.
Another underplayed and underappreciated gem is the Genesis Shadowrun RPG. It was a totally different game than the SNES version, and really amazingly good. Sure didn’t sell, though.
How’s about a game called Dragon’s Eye. It may have been by Epic as well. I vaguely remember it, but I recall hours of fun. It seems that it was an RPG-like game where you moved around a little board/map type deal and had random encounters. I have it in a box in the attic somewhere.
Does that sound familiar to anyone?
Oh! Oh! and Lords of Conquest. Strategy game where you had to conquer the most provinces.
Another video game choice… Last Gladiators: Digital Pinball on the Sega Saturn. It’s possibly the best video pinball game ever made for a console or PC. Four tables, an incredible heavy metal soundtrack and super ball physics were combined with a high res display that is just gorgeous.
I’ve heard of and played just about everything listed above. Let’s get some more obscure stuff! These are the best games no one played. Everyone’s played Baseball Stars on the NES. A better choice would be Baseball Stars 2 on the Neo Geo. It’s the greatest game of arcade baseball ever made and you’ve probably never played it! Better yet, League Bowling, also for the Geo!
BTW, great choice Jason with Shadowrun on the Genesis. It sold ok at the time, but it’s a forgotten gem today. I loved it but unfortunately traded it in at some point back then. I’ve been shopping around for one recently and the game has reasonable value today. Cyberspace was so cool.
