After playing that 18 hours straight with a friend to see if we could get it to roll I had everything about this star wars game permanently ingrained in my head to the point I could close my eyes and still see it.
Even though looking at this I can’t believe how much of the screen the UI took up.
This one makes me warm, fuzzy, and incredibly tense and terrified:
Oh yeah, Xcom, never going to forget that one.
Childhood trauma in 256 colors.
I endorse this screenshot.
I never played this version of Rebelstar but I remember looking at the adverts for it for ages in my Dad’s computer magazine and imagining what it’d be like. So for me it’s this version:
Wow, you just committed brain archeology (in my brain, no less) right now. I remember playing that game, but I had no idea that memory was there until I saw that image. Wow. That was soooo long ago.
Possibly the first free-roaming 3D game I played, I remember the exhilaration of finding a key on top of a shelf that was hidden from view unless you climbed onto another object! The joy of simple things…
Ico. I loved the atmosphere in this game so much. My husband couldn’t watch me play it though because it made him seasick.
Maxis always had a knack for creating graphical styles which could make building towns and cities look rather beautiful, especially if you went out of your way to design for beauty. Even SimCity (2013) for all its faults still has a certain Maxis charm to it, and it is one of the few elements that Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines did not top.
SimCity 2000 has to be favourite of the lot just due to childhood nostalgia, and we have the A-Train series to thank for the style that Maxis went with for SC2000.
I loved this, and played it to death
Well we all know what the 3D craze did to 2D video game graphics unfortunately, which is likely partly why the later games by Tilted Mill went with 3D graphics despite having the same great Impressions Games artists. Truly a shame given how beautiful the 2D sprites and artwork of the Impressions Games could look, and will still look even in a decade. Unfortunately, often the genre is just not deemed popular enough these days by most publishers\investors to be worth the gamble, according to the information I have heard.
Half the problem is that with all the old Impressions Games city-builders locked up in Activision you essentially need to build not just a good game but also brand awareness from the bottom up. That rebirthing of the Sierra brand by Activision sure was short lived sadly, so we never got to see any of the city-builder brands reborn. The name ‘Caesar’ still means something to a lot of people so even rumours of a Caesar V could generate some buzz, however, selling a brand new IP is a much tougher proposition.
Somehow city-builders were one of the few things that did not ride the wave of Kickstarter that has seen genres like the old school isometric RPG be reborn. Ubisoft and BlueByte have carried the torch with pride for the longest time thanks to The Settlers and Anno games, until Paradox and Colossal Order struck gold off the back of the SimCity 2013 drama with Cities: Skyline.
Yeah, so relatively few games explore just the indirect control dynamic let alone the diverse mix of cross-genre ideas that Majesty threw together. I should try out Driftland: The Magic Revival someday since it explores the same indirect control dynamic from Majesty. Whether it could ever hook me like Majesty 1 is a different matter; it has a similar aesthetic style, that many Eastern European developers seem to love for some reason, to Majesty 2 based on screenshots.