Historical PC games: what MUST I play?

Games
1

As I hesitatingly admitted in the Bioshock postpartum uber-thread, I have never played either System Shock 1 or 2, or Deus Ex. As it turns out, there are many other highly regarded single-player games I have either never played or only got a few hours in before stopping including (gulp): Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Icewind Dale, Diablo 1 and 2, Wing Commander 1-7(?), Dune 2000, Ultima 1-7000, Alpha Centauri, Sacrifice, Myth 1 and 2, Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, Fallout 1 and 2, and so forth. I’m not talking about games that I just couldn’t beat, but games that I never really gave a sporting chance. To be fair, I was mostly a twitch-shooter kid in my teens and early twenties…

My shame apparently knows no bounds.

Thus I have resolved as a Chinese New Year (of the Ox!) resolution to play these games sometime over the next couple years and gradually remove them from my lack-o-gamer-cred list. I’ve got the necessary rig (aka old) and still have operational copies of DOS 6.22 and Windows 98SE to cover in the event of any mentions which do not work in DosBox or other emulation tools.

Some low hanging fruit that I have played: all the Wolfensteins (yes including the text adventure versions), Dooms, Duke Nukems, Unreals, Quakes, Thiefs, and Hitmans; some of the really important adventure/puzzle games like Zork, Myst, Sanitarium, Bomberman, etc.; all the Panzer/Fantasy/Commie General series games; some of the early-ish RTS games like C&C and Tiberian Sun; some early flight sims like Gunship 2000; most early Sim games, including SimCity 1 and 2000 and Civilization 1 and 2.

Therefore, please tell me: what are the consummate must-play PC games? I’d like to tally votes in an Andrew Me/ayer(s) games of the year fashion to come up with a final list of a dozen or so. I don’t want the list of games you never finished or something, but say the top ten dreamteam must play PC games of 1988-2000 (the late 386 to early Pentium 4 era, if you will).

2

Master of Magic needs to be on the list, if you never played it.

X-Com obviously.

3

Master of Magic as already mentioned. Also, Master of Orion, Alpha Centauri, and Civilisation 2 (which I still think is the pinnacle of the series). To that you can add Imperialism I & II. And for RPGs, the Bards Tale series. And if you want to go further back in gaming history and off the PC platform, Loderunner and Impossible Mission.

4

Jagged Alliance 2. A game so good 10 years after it’s release it still has an active modding and player community, and had a major mod released in 2008 (JA v1.13) that added some completely new features to the original game.

5

Darklands

6

Syndicate
Monkey Island 1 & 2
Full Throttle
XCom
Jagged Alliance 2
Flashback

7

Star Control 2 - FREE 3DO Port for Windows duped The Ur-Quan Masters

You should also play:

Planescape: Torment
Fallout
Deus Ex
Thief Series (if you haven’t already)
System Shock 1 if you’re hardcore enough for dated graphics/controls

8

I say, fuck historical games. If you don’t have nostalgia and the context of the times working for you, almost all of them are objectively bad by modern standards.

9

Dungeon Keeper 2. It holds up very well!

10

Wasteland.

11

Play these: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=44067

  • Alan
12

Day of the Tentacle

13

Sid Meier’s Pirates! The latest version will do fine since they’re all basically the same game.

Sir Geoff Crammond’s Forumula One Grand Prix series. The car handling is still unsurpassed. Even with full driver aids on, and playing with a keyboard, you get an extremely realistic representation of modern racing.

Respectfully

krise madsen

14

Nothing. The games you list in your original post is actually better than the games others have listed so far. Don’t worry about other games. Finish the ones in your own list first!

15

You should totally play DreamWeb.

16

What is the law? That Star Control 2 and Planescape: Torment must be played. That is the law. Are we not men?

17

For the retro part of my backlog, I just went through all the millions of “best games of all-time” threads and web articles and picked out the ones that sounded interesting. As stated above, start with the ones in your first paragraph. Most of those still hold up fine.

Unfortunately I am a couple years too late to really appreciate retro. I was sporting the Celeron 400 up until '07 and still enjoyed playing Wasteland and such. I finished the game on my new computer and it just feels like a waste(land) of time. The ones you have listed are fairly modern though.

Make a list (I’d pick one game in a series to start with) and people can tell you if you’re missing anything. Then you can ignore about half of them. :) Coming up with “the” top-ten list from that era would actually be helpful to future searches.

18

System Shock 2 with the fan-made texture and model update packs.

19

GTA III (damn, it’s been 7 years since this came out)
Deus Ex
No One Lives Forever

20

Of the games in your list:

Planescape: Torment: Great game that holds up well, and I believe there is a mod out that increases view distance at higher resolutions.

Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Icewind Dale: Baldur’s Gate 2 is be far the best of this trio. You might want to play BG1 just for the backstory, but the gameplay is going to be a bit clunky. If you haven’t played IWD at this point, I’d just let it go.

Diablo 1 and 2: Iconic games that are well worth playing and hold up well gameplay-wise, but they suffer from resolution issues on modern machines. As in, they only play at small, fixed resolutions (640x480 for D1, and 800x600 for D2 with the expansion), and tend to look ass-tastic on modern monitors.

Wing Commander 1-7(?): One of my all-time favorites, at least until WC4 or so, but I suspect the gameplay will seem archaic by today’s standards. Have you played the Freespace games?

Dune 2000: Avoid. It’s just not a very good game.

Ultima 1-7000: Everything up to 7 is well worth playing, but man: pace yourself. That’s a whole lot of gaming hours, right there.

Alpha Centauri: Great game.

Sacrifice: A unique oddity that I really enjoyed, though I’m not sure how well it would hold up. GoG has it.

Myth 1 and 2: Two of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that getting them to run on a modern machine can be a hassle.

Syndicate and Syndicate Wars: Good games, but maybe not worth revisiting if you didn’t play them the first time around.

Fallout 1 and 2: These are fantastic games that are still great fun to play, and both can be purchased from GoG.