The retro gaming thread!

[BOF]

OK peeps, by popular request, I've started this retro gaming thread.  No rules other than to reminisce and maybe lay out in as much detail as you want to what exactly your gaming history is, what your favourites are/were.  Do you still play them?  Online, retro machines, emulators etc.  Anything goes, so have at it.

My CV !
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K+

(+ as in not the rubber button one),

 

 

 

 

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K+2

 

 

 

Commodore Amiga 500

 

various PCs including a Blue Lightning BLX75 (oooh), a Playstation 2 and an original X-Box.  Both of which I still own (somewhere...). 

 

Also spent plenty of time on my mates' SNESand spending fortunes in arcades.

I'll chip in with games later but to start off I'll copy my contribution to the 10 best as they're pretty much all retro anyway

 

 

 

Stunt Car Racer, Turrican, Manic Miner, 4 player Atomic Bomberman, Rainbow Islands, Chase HQ, TOCA 2 Touring Cars, Midnight Resistance, Green Beret, Ghosts & Goblins, Commando, North & South, Nitro, Speedball 2, Chaos Engine, Xenon 2, R-Type, First Samurai, Moonstone.  Oh man the list is endless.  What a well-spent childhood

1 POD - PC - This game brought me to Arkansas (yes, really).  At my peak I was ranked IIRC #3 or 4 in the world.  The hours are uncountable.  The broken steering wheels are uncountable (5 actually).  Ubisoft had an absolute gem with this masterpiece and they singularly failed to get it out to the masses and to the audience that it deserved.  Nevertheless, they continued to release gorgeous new tracks and cars for years after its release, and it was an early example of an 'online game service'.  Stunning racing game with an excellent physics engine and is now a forgotten, or rather a 'never known' stone cold classic.
2 Kick Off 2 - Amiga - What's to say?  The Dino Dini classic.  The gameplay was unparalleled.  The goalkeepers were legendarily difficult.  The zipstick was the ONLY viable controller.  The memories of gangs of mates in sitting rooms playing world cup competitions.  Happy happy days.
3 Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix - Amiga - Truly a ground-breaking racing game when it came along.  The polygons are well dated now, but the gameplay isn't.  Was and still is one of the most playable and enjoyable racing games of all time and set the standard for everything that followed.  At my peak I could win races by just using the trackside cameras, I knew the tracks so well.
4 Championship Manager - PC - Perhaps the game I put most hours into (other than POD), in its various guises from the 92/93 version up to the 94/95 one including the Italian version and on into the more modern and technical ones.  I lost days in a row playing this and it's responsible for me supporting Cremonese !
5 Sensible World of Soccer - Amiga - The spiritual successor to Kick Off 2 and much more accessible (read : easier).  To be able to have the whole world of leagues to choose from was a dream come true to a footy nerd like me and I spent hours and hours devising ever more obscure tournaments and tweaking this and that.  A truly brilliant game for its time and probably still great fun now.
6 Street Fighter 2 - SNES - One of the most faithful arcade conversions I've ever seen, and to think they managed it on the relatively (by today's standards) humble Super NES.  Everything was almost perfecftly faithful to its coin-op cousin and this reminds me of my secondary school years dossing in my mates' gafs while they alternate between SF2 and Super Mario Kart.  I was never particularly good at it though.  I was more a Blanka user and that says enough to any SF2 afficionado.
7 Gran Turismo 4 - PS2 - Slightly later in my gaming life, the accuracy in this game and the choice of cars as my car-mad mate tweaked the suspension to infinitesimal degrees trying to eek out another tenth of a second for me.  This was another huge leap forward in racing games and it was nearly the only thing I played on my PS2 until GTASA came out later on.
8 Spy Hunter - Spectrum 48k - Probably the first game I got hooked on.  I got my 48k when I was 7 years old and Spy Hunter was part of a pack (gif) that came with it.  Still an all-time classic game and had to make this list really if I was to truly chart my gaming progression.
9 Sid Meier's Civilization - Amiga - What. a. game.  What a vast and thrilling game.  Another in the "I'll be here 'til Tuesday" line of computer games that I often let myself get hooked by.  I sank day after day into this one.  Many games followed it.  Populous et al.  But none ever quite captured the character of the original.
10 Fallout 3 - PC - The most modern of the games on the list and my introduction (and so far only attempt) into a proper sandbox world.  What a work of genius! Beautiful, atmospheric, immersive, tense, humourous, great soundtrack.  I had it recommended to me by a mate as it was a bargain bin purchase by the time I came along.  But it was a great example of where things had moved on to since I was a proper gamer.  It also showed me that I still have that gene where I can very easily get hooked on something and lose days of my life. 

Honourable mention
Mortal Kombat - Arcade - I finished it with every character.  That cost a pretty penny.  I was always better at this than at SF2 so for that I'll always be grateful!

EDIT : See?  I'm at it already.  I simply have to add Half Life in here.  Those of you who weren't gaming when this was released simply cannot appreciate the quantum leap that was made by this game.  Overnight it made everything that had gone before completely redundant and antiquated.  In fact it took years for anything else to match it.  Definitely one of the single most important games ever made, and it goes without saying one of the very best and most copied too.  I love love loved that game.

[The_Rev]

I'm on my way out the door in minute, so I'll just leave this here for now:

 

 

[hogso]

My first Final Fantasy game - although I did not know it at the time.

It has a curious history. Developed by Squaresoft specifically for the western audience, to try and demonstrate the RPG genre as being accessible on home consoles. The perception at the time was the the West (or more specifically, America) believed them to be too hard, so they didn't sell well. Therefore, not only did Square make this easier, they also aimed it quite purposefully at a younger audience.

Released as Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest in America, it followed a bunch of other games given the FF branding which weren't technically FF games. Europe had no such fortune though, so this was released simply as 'Mystic Quest Legend', hence why I played it on the SNES as a kid without knowing what it actually was part of. Not that I was aware of FF until VII came out on the PS1, but there it is. It went on to be released in Japan too, as Final Fantasy USA which I find quite amusing. If you think those names are confusing, it's small fry compared to the comfusion of SaGa, Mana and FF Legend games...

It's remembered quite fondly overall, yes it is easy, but it did exactly what Square wanted - it was a 'gateway' game in to the genre. It sold well enough for the Final Fantasy VI aka. Final Fantasy III to be the first mainline game for the series to be released in the America.

[Dante_Lockhart]

I dug out an old favourite of mine for the PC the other day.

 

[Midfielder]

I belong in this thread... will post up more later. But in Dante's one i threw out a retro nostalgia with Operation Wolf. Here's another old classic! Have some, fellow old timers!

 

 

[Designer1]

It's kind of compulsory to post this isnt it? 

 

[nobler]

Our first ever computer was the Amstrad CPC-464, the green screen version. What a whopper that was!

 

[BOF]

2 hours ago, The_Rev said:

I'm on my way out the door in minute, so I'll just leave this here for now

That was great!  Some cracking memories brought back from watching it.  I took notes as he was talking.

The C64 was always 'the bad guy' in many respects that I remember from back then too. The whole philosophy of it.  The inaccessibility of it to code on.  He mentions the Spectrum was like signing up to a coding course and that's true.  I singularly put my career down to owning a Spectrum from age 7.  I wonder would it be different if I'd been given a C64.  The 'Speccy' was the good guy and I like that

It's interesting to hear that it was the people who turned the Spectrum into a games machine and Clive could never understand why, even though he may very well have been responsible for creating some of those programmers.  Them being the days you could code a commercial game on your own in your bedroom.

For me the Spectrum had the better games.

While the C64 had more impressive graphics and sound, its games always seemed to lack character and gameplay.  Almost like they were trying to show off its graphical capabilities at the expense of the gameplay and therefore the gamer's enjoyment.  He mentions that the Spectrum is "easier to love" and had "quirky, creative" games (owing to memory issues) whereas the C64 games were chunkier with more colour.  All true.  Although I find it quite telling that 'Monty on the run' regarded as a C64 classic, is basically a copy of the Spectrum style of game.

I was surprised to hear that the Spectrum had more speed and more processing power.

It was good to hear that those in power at Commodore were basically a shower of arseholes too while it was all going on.

Funnily enough, when Tramiel sold Commodore and took over at Atari, I then progressed from Spectrum to Amiga when they became the good guys and the ST was the bad guy.  I like that   Although whereas Spectrums and C64s were just as common as each other during their peak, the ST never got near the number of Amigas over here.  Amiga was THE games machine.  Either that or you went up to the relatively inaccessible 'PC' which was not user-friendly for gaming and would not be for another decade.

Now to some of the games he shows in the video.

The Great Giana Sisters.  I had that on the Amiga.  Very controversial game which I believe was taken off the market because it was a shameless knock off of Nintendo's Super Mario brothers.

Rainbow Islands I mention in my OP.  I had forgotten that the Spectrum version was so good too.

Exolon is a game that I had completely forgotten about until I saw it in the video.

Finally IK+.  I used to play a lot of that on the Amiga.  It's gameplay was lightning quick. 

 

Of course he goes on about some people "carrying the war well into their adult lives" ... ahem, well we did just create a thread for it, that's all  

As he says "I know who won the war.  But you could always ask someone else and get an answer that suits you".

For me the Spectrum wins for many reasons.  Some tangible and some not so much.  But the result will never change

[maqroll]

 

[jacketspuds]

Played this for ages with my mate. Very dark and eerie game but still a lot of fun when you're 14.

[Designer1]

I was one of about 3 people in the Uk to buy one of these bad boys:

I always thought it was unfairly maligned as it was a very decent piece of kit for the time.

AvP and Tempest 2000 were both played to death. Unfortunately, due to a lack of games I traded it in for one of these:

The 3DO, which is still one of my favourite gaming systems to this day.

Unlike the Jaguar, there was a decent amount of cracking games available for it, and one of my fondest memories is spending hours playing Road Rash 3D with the good lady wife (we'd not long met). This was of course in between sessions of booze and naughty fumbling, i'm not that much of a geek

Notable mentions for Need for Speed, Return Fire, PO'ed, FIFA 93 (which had a terrific cheat system which allowed invisible walls and ultra fast balls!) oh, and Wing Commander III where you got to be Luke Skywalker and I kid you not, shag a porn star

Edited November 18, 2016 by Designer1

[jacketspuds]

When I was growing up I always looked at the 3DO as an amazing console that was always something I wanted. Now it just looks like an over-sized VHS player, but I still see consoles like the SNES and N64 in a different light.

It's amazing how nostalgia sways my opinion on things as I'd imagine anyone who has never seen a SNES or N64 before would think they look shite now. 

[hogso]

I got my Gameboy for Christmas in '93 (I think - could have been '94) from Toys R Us, and this was one of the games bundled with it. The other two were Tetris, and an odd football game

Spoiler

It didn't have an official license, played a bit like sensi but worse, but it was still rather fun. I can still remember the sound effects of the 'crowd' - pretty much just a buzz of static, which was a bit louder when you scored. I believe it was released withthe '94 world Cup in mind, hence the American theme on the box. As I said though, no license, so there was just a league mode, tourney mode and friendly mode iirc. England were in it though. I remember Chris Sutton was in the England squad and was really good. Funny how you remember certain things.

Kirby was my favourite though. I now know that this was the very first Kirby game, and what an introduction it was. I later got Mario (and Link's Awakening), but I found this to be a far better game. It looked about a million times better for a start, and you could do stuff other than jump on enemies. Like eat them, and spit them out. Now that was pretty cool.

It was hard though, or so I found it at the time. I never did beat it, and would love to give it a go again now.

Edited November 19, 2016 by hogso

[Tegis]

22 hours ago, Midfielder said:

I belong in this thread... will post up more later. But in Dante's one i threw out a retro nostalgia with Operation Wolf. Here's another old classic! Have some, fellow old timers!

 

 

Just lovely, and wallet-draining, along with this one. I think it was my first go at mulitplaying, definitely more than 2 at once. Warrior needs food...badly

 

Edited November 19, 2016 by Tegis

[RunRickyRun]

Things you don't see anymore part 1:

The computer game section in WH Smiths

Console owners with a library of only 2 or 3 games (usually the ones bundled with the machine)

Thick manuals - Learned the history of aviation during the first world war thanks to The Red Baron's manual.

Chip music on pirated software (usually accompanied by flame wars between the Pompey Pirates and Automation)

[Nigel]

[leemond2008]

 

[leemond2008]

 

[Nigel]

[jacketspuds]