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Recommend classic games you feel everyone should play at least once
I want to use some of the free time I'll be having during this quarantine to play some games and was thinking maybe I should play some classics, what do you think?
I really suggest Doom 1 and 2. They still are super fun and don't feel outdated at all. I've been playing on the Switch port which has some nice QOL stuff, but other versions are great too.
For anyone on PC, there are a(n overwhelming) number of source ports you can use to get the games running on modern systems with modern QoL. I believe GZDoom is the one recommended for most players.
The main reason for using a source port over vanilla is that the original Doom games feature a very unusual movement setup by today's standards, where moving your mouse forward and backward actually moves your player forward and backward. Using a source port can convert the game to WASD+mouselook, which is much more comfortable for most people when playing FPSes.
I want to say that it needs to be done as old-school as possible. I feel the constraints give it a more intense experience. I did a run on Chocolate Doom after having never finished it, and it felt nice, even with conflicts between wasd+mouse and moving accidentally.
Doom has no vertical aiming. It’s fundamentally different from contemporary games, and the controls make sense for that.
Besides, if OP is looking for an old school experience, there’s nothing better than the original.
And there’s nothing wrong with Doom default controls.
There's nothing wrong with someone playing the game in a way that makes it more comfortable for them. I switch between source ports depending on my mood. I have Chocolate Doom for when I'm feeling more old school, and GZDoom for when I want some more modern quality of life tweaks.
There is absolutely nothing wrong, of course. I just don’t think that’s what OP requested.
...and real Doom is keyboard only whats all this mouse talk
You can't enable it in Chocolate Doom, but I think horizontal-only mouselook feels better than using keyboard-only.
I’m not sure I get the point of Chocolate Doom. They say they seek to replicate the experience of playing the original. But wouldn’t it make more sense to just play the original release?
The original requires MSDOS, a soundblaster compatible card, a DOS mouse driver, etc. It's not that difficult to get it running within DOSBox, but Chocolate Doom is an attempt to make it compatible with modern systems, including things like TCP/IP networking, PNG screenshots instead of the obsolete PCX format, etc.
Most other ports go further and try and fix bugs and limitations in the engine, whereas Chocolate Doom only fixes harmful bugs and preserves quirks.
I see. It would be awesome if someone released this on consoles, maybe as a free DLC. None of my friends play on PC, but we all love Doom. This would be great for coop or something.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if Bethesda reached to these modders and released for consoles a Doom Classic Collection including original, chocolate and a bunch of variants like Crispy and Brutal Doom? Maybe that’s a licensing nightmare, but one can only dream!
The point is to make the vanilla experience available on modern operating systems without an intermediary software like DOSBox. While many source ports sought to extend the game, fixing bugs and extending/removing limits, Chocolate wanted to preserve this. The mission was extended into supporting other DOOM-engine games, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, and Chex Quest, specifically, which didn't really have any dedicated source ports.
Also mentioned by others was the ability for network play, which you lose in DOSBox.
I recommend playing the campaign on LAN with friends, it's super fun that way.
Brutal Doom and the Doom Metal Soundtrack Mod made the game so much better. Just adding the reload mechanic to the shotgun made the game play different.
Try the Maps of Chaos updates of the original maps.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom
I enjoyed all those games, but... Deus Ex totally blew my mind when I was a kid. I was all about aliens and conspiracy theories* back then and that game hit all the right notes! The choice and flexibility and actions with consequences was damn well done, too.
*(government cover-ups and X-Files and stuff, not the curtain for racists they're thought of as, now)
What sort of genres do you like?
Right now I'm currently on a SNES RPG kick. There were a ton of great RPGs for the system. Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and Secret of Mana are probably my favourites. Super Mario RPG, Secret of Evermore, Illusion of Gaia, Breath of Fire 2 are in my runners up list. There's a bunch that only came out in Japan, but have been patched with English translations, like Tales of Phantasia, Bahamut Lagoon, and Seiken Densetsu 3 (sometimes called secret of mana 2). This is only scratching the surface. The Lufia games had some great puzzles, Legend of Zelda - A Link to the Past could be considered an ARPG I guess. There were some Dragon Quest and Dragon Warrior titles, Terranigma is a game I've never played, Shadowrun was apparently a really good cyberpunk dystopia RPG, etc.
I've argued for a long time that the SNES was the best system for RPGs ever made. Partially because I never had a playstation growing up, so I never got into the 3D final fantasy titles.
I went through a SNES RPG phase years ago and there's a ton of great – and obscure – ones to discover if you look at other regions.
I recommend giving Terranigma a try. It's maybe the best real-time RPG (they called them "action adventures" back then) on the SNES. The story is absolutely bonkers anime stuff like, you're literally creating the world from scratch (plants, animals, then... Tokyo?). It was one of the last games released on the system and it's using the SNES to its absolute limits in terms of effects and the amount of artwork and whatnot. Also the music is haunting and beautiful.
But there's one game I like to bring up in these threads that is even more obscure (and IMO better): Live a Live. It never made it outside Japan. Before the SNES Classic, I put it on a level with StarFox 2 as the top "hidden gem" on the system. It's 8 (relatively short) episodes, spanning different time zones, from stone age, to medieval Japan, to a Western town, to mechs and deep space horror on a spaceship. It's so varied and interesting. The combat takes place on a kind of chessboard, which takes into account your position for various attacks. There's a bunch of excellent fan translated ROMs out there. Here's a cute fansite with more info. If you only try one "weird" game on a SNES emulator, make it this one.
I'm absolutely stunned that I've never heard of Live a Live. Back in the day I used to hang out on #romhack on EFNet and was ICQ friends with a lot of the RPGe team who translated FFV and was working on figuring out the compression used in SD3 at the time. I have no idea how this game escaped my attention for this long.
Anyway, thank you so much for mentioning that. It's now at the top of my list of things to play.
While we're on the subject of Japanese translations, if anyone's a fan of Earthbound, I can't recommend highly enough they get a GBA emulator and try out Mother 3.
That's great to hear, I love recommending Live A Live, it was so much fun to discover.
If you wonder how the hell I came across it: I was hanging around MobyGames a lot in the early 00s. They have this feature on the frontpage where people can present good/weird/interesting/unusual games and there's a guy on the site called Unicorn Lynx who is a hardcore RPG expert, like... he played just about everything there is. Everything. Through him, I first heard about Shin Megami Tensei (long before Persona became a thing in the West), for example. Also a fun fact: I just looked up Live a Live on mobygames and discovered that the director of Mother 3 also worked on Live a Live. Small world.
I'd second both recommendations, but I would maybe hold off on Terranigma at first because it's the third game in a series. And while Soul Blazer is probably skippable, I would definitely recommend playing Illusion of Gaia. IIRC it's shorter and more streamlined, which makes it a bit better of an introduction to the series.
Yea, I too went through an SNES emulation phase and that was one of the standout games I tried! I remember being intrigued by it because it was one of the last games produced for SNES. I'd also recommend Tales of Phantasia.
There were many more JRPGs on the SNES than just about any other platform, but the PlayStation had a much greater selection of high quality titles. I would even go so far as to say that the median quality of PlayStation RPGs is higher than some of the best SNES RPGs. Since this was the first console generation where everyone had CD drives, developers were able to squeeze in far more art, dialogue, and music than they could before, and every developer took advantage of it. Keep in mind that the reason why so many of those early SNES RPGs were so terse was because even text takes up valuable space in these expensive microchips they needed to purchase to manufacture their cartridges.
no way
I'm definitely going to second Chrono Trigger. One of the best JRPGs ever made, and almost unique to the genre (at least in my experience), it's a well paced experience that doesn't drag at any point, and at about thirty hours to 100%, it doesn't overstay its welcome.
How did you manage to not get absolutely lost on Chrono Trigger? I tried to beat it many times but at some time I always get lost to the point of no recovery and no walkthrough is able to save me.
One of the great things about the game is how nonlinear it is. There's more than a dozen ways to beat it. Almost all of the story is optional, since once you get the Epoch, you can travel to Lavos at any time to beat the game.
I'm not sure where you got stuck, but sometimes in old RPGs one of the ways they make stretch out the gameplay is by forcing to you talk to some specific NPC to progress. Sometimes the only way to get any further is to go back to the last place you were "supposed" to go, and just talk to every person in town. The really unfortunate part of old RPGs is they tried to get a dozen hours of gameplay into a game that's only a couple megabytes, so they make it needlessly grindy so it takes longer.
I don’t even mind the grind that much, emulators have fast forward. But I usually get lost because I’m probably missing something very obvious.
I feel your pain. Or, I recall feeling that pain over and over when I was young and playing these games for the first time. The worst was when I was renting a game, say for a week, and I got stuck on some part where I needed to perform some specific action to advance the story. I'd often waste the last day or two of the rental trying to get past some obstacle, only getting more frustrated.
I ended up getting better at JRPGs, and better at figuring out the specific thing they're hinting at. Now upon replaying things I'm not stumped as often, but I don't know if that's something that can be taught, or is just picked up with experience.
In older RPGs you need to pay super close attention to dialogue. If one NPC says "I just came back from Townsville, to the east, and it looks like they've got this crisis solved!" and then you talk to another and they say something like "I heard a legend of a shiny thing that solves problems, in the caves in a town east of here." You've got to talk to both NPCs to gather that they're saying the red herring that advances the plot is in the caves of townsville, to the east. It's probably not a side-quest, they literally didn't have space for that on the cartridge.
Me neither. JRPGS seems to require a lot of very specific videogame intuition. I´m terrible at that.
But not totally bad, I went very far on Chrono Trigger. Not that I remember it.
To be frank, the only inferential videogame I ever found to be sufficiently logical (with no guessing or intuition required) was Portal 2.
I don't know if it's in the same vein of the intended question, but Black Mesa was released recently, and it's been a welcome treat during these trying times. It's a recreation of the original Half-Life, but with Half-Life 2 grade textures and models to back it up. It doesn't change the fact that the original game is over 20 years old and so the mechanics aren't as smooth as we would expect today, but it's a faithful recreation that gives you the essence of playing the original, without requiring you to put rose colored glasses on to appreciate it. TheJorro does a far better job describing it, so don't take my word for it.
TMNT arcade. I don't know the correct name but that game OWNED. Really great beat-em-up.
Also the Simpsons game
edit: oh thought that said classic arcade games.
It's not like they aren't available; MAME does very well to make those available. On the arcade game front, I also can't get enough of the Metal Slug series.
Tyrian 2000!
I plugged this in another thread recently, but I'll do so here again. Released in 1995, the game is a scrolling shooter with robust weapon loadouts, branching level pathways, charming writing, interesting secret levels, and a great soundtrack.
It's also easily playable on modern systems. GOG has a version that runs on current Windows/Mac computers. There is also a source port, OpenTyrian, which works on Linux. The game was released as freeware, so you can easily get the required files for the source port guilt-free.
It's not anything landmark and is overall pretty mindless, but it's still fun to slowly build up your weapon set and see all of the various worlds and enemies the game has to offer. All purchases using the in-game credit system are reversible, so you can freely respec your ship's build at your leisure. This allows you to swap out weapons without worrying about losing any firepower.
Thanks! I appreciate the recommendation, I will definitely play this since the Linux source port makes it so much easier for me. :)
Edit: if anyone runs into an error when trying to start OpenTyrian, just run
game-data-packager -i tyrianafter installing OpenTyrian to download the game data.Enjoy! I'm actually replaying through it right now via OpenTyrian on Linux (I literally just ended a play session before hopping on Tildes and seeing your post). I don't know what distro you use, but OpenTyrian was available right in my repositories (I'm on Pop!_OS). The only step I had to take was copying over the original game files (ZIP warning) to
/usr/share/opentyrian/data/. I hope you like it!super mario 64. i remember being able to play it early from an imported console at some random game shop. blew me away. watching speed runs on the early days of twitch got me through rough times.
Please forgive me, I’m old. How can a twitch stream help you through rough times? How does this worked for you on emotional level, and how is it different from playing the game yourself? Or even joining a guild on a MMO or something?
the large speedrunning community is supportive in general. I watched many streams and talked with the streamers and other people in chat. Felt like a guild in some respects.
Prince of Persia! You can play the original Apple ][ version here. To play it, wait until it starts then press control-k to switch to keyboard mode. It uses IJKL for up/left/down/right. Hold down option/alt with those keys to step one step at a time in that direction or to hang from a ledge above to below. U and O jump left and right.
If we're going back to the 80's, I feel like Zork should definitely get a mention too! It's quite likely the original RPG, at least as far as PC gaming is concerned.
Absolutely! I mean, someone else mentioned Hunt The Wumpus. If we're going back that far, let's include Atari Adventure and Colossal Cave Adventure.
Hunt the Wumpus.
It's younger than other titles mentioned here, but I'd recommend Warcraft III and it's expansion The frozen Throne. That game essentially defined the modern RTS, it's story launched WoW (although I'd advise not getting too emotionally involved, because Blizzard is doing a wonderful job at ruining all those characters you so love with every passing WoW expansion), which is a behemoth of it's own right and it's old graphics are timeless. The new remaster botched a number of things, though.
Shenmue
It was such a different game when I first played it on Dreamcast. Quasi adventure/fighting game with a buncha slice-of-life elements. I highly recommend playing with the English dubs. They're so bad that they're good. Also, I blew all my money on capsule vending machines.
Shenmue was staggering in its time. It probably was the most immersive, realistic virtual world ever made when it came out. The number of voiced NPCs, each with their own homes and jobs and schedules; the day/night cycle and weather generated from actual historical data; the ability to go nearly anywhere, open any cupboard, talk to anyone; the uniquely nostalgic setting and storyline; the feeling of progression as a martial artist... so many things made it unlike any video game that came before it. The graphics were great leaps ahead of other games of the era. It took three whole discs just to fit all the content on it.
Shenmue II upped the ante. The locations were bigger and more exotic, the plot kicked into overdrive. I'll never forget the feeling of exploring Kowloon for the first time. It was a better game than the first, and that's saying something. At the same time, other games were beginning to catch up to Shenmue's ambition. The first Xbox was released and the whole of Shenmue II fit on a single DVD. It didn't get a very wide audience and many people passed it by entirely.
Shenmue III is out now, and frankly it's almost unplayable. I've spent hours running back and forth around Guilin and I'm mostly uninterested in anything that's happening. The game is clunky and terribly paced. I had hoped to be tearing apart a criminal syndicate from the inside, and instead I'm chopping wood and practicing my horse stance. And (spoilers) I know it doesn't even attempt to resolve the story, so I just feel unmotivated to play. As a huge fan of the original two, I was really let down by the latest installment.
That's disappointing, I saw metacritic gave the new game an 80-something, but it sounds like it doesn't deserve even that
The metroid series is awesome.
It's one of the games which gave the metroidvania genre its name. I played the remakes of metroid (metroid zero mission) and metroid 2 (another metroid 2 remake), which makes the game more userfriendly.
If you never heard of it: it is a 2d platforming shooter, which focuses heavily on exploration.
Edit: fixed word
Everybody should probably play the first Super Mario Bros. game because everything that came after is built on it. It's a good game, but later titles surpassed it. Skip Super Mario Bros. 2 (there's an interesting story about why it is the way it is, worth the read), but don't miss the third game. That one is legendary and fantastic. If you have the means, play the SNES "remasters" of these in the Mario All-Stars collection, they're the same games but feature some higher fidelity graphics and music.
The first Sonic the Hedgehog game is very good. Sonic 2 is even better. The two games that came after, (Sonic 3, and Sonic & Knuckles) are where things get really interesting: They're separate games in their own right, but S&K was released in a special cartridge with a slot on top that other Megadrive/Genesis games could be plugged into. If you connect Sonic 2 to it you can play an expanded, reimagined version of that game. But the real tour de force is to plug in Sonic 3, which unlocks a unified version of both games combined. In my opinion this connected form is the intended way to experience both of them. You'll play through a deluxe version of Sonic 3 and then continue straight into S&K seamlessly. Regardless of how you approach them, all four of these first Sonic games are absolute must-plays. They are fast and frenetic, with great level design, boss battles, and legendary music. Whatever your thoughts about the current state of Sonic games (they generally suck) disregard them and play the originals. Then, and only after you finish those, try Sonic Mania. It's the only worthy modern successor.
I also highly recommend all the Donkey Kong Country games for SNES. Great platformers with a wonderful esthetic and sense of humor. The mine cart levels are particularly great, in my opinion.
If you're looking for PC game recommendations, dive into some classic LucasArts adventure games. I suggest you give The Secret of Monkey Island a try. It's got a particular breed of obtusely tricky puzzles that may put you off at first. Online walkthroughs (which didn't exist yet when the game released) can help a lot, but don't turn to them unless you've really attempted to do it yourself first, and are truly stuck. Monkey Island is great for its anachronistic pirate comedy and outlandishness. If you manage to make it through the whole game, check out the sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. It's actually a bigger and better game than the first. Both are available in "HD" remasters with great fully-voiced dialogue. The third game, The Curse of Monkey Island, was made by a different team and they took it in a very different direction. It was still good, just different. I wouldn't recommend any of the sequels that came after it though.
Any of the classic Infocom text adventures.
So much of modern gaming is wrapped up in visual experiences, but some of the deepest and most interesting gaming experiences I've had didn't rely on graphics at all. The imagination does an amazing job of weaving in the details of any conceivable universe when given a few contextual clues. Sometimes those stunning visuals sabotage the experience by pushing us into the uncanny valley, stranding us in a place where the imbalance between the details we're given and those we're not makes it difficult to interpolate the vital devils in between. The end result is a world that feels less alive than the real one, but also less alive than the one we were simply guided into creating for ourselves.
Sometimes the book is a better experience than the movie.
Oh! I just remembered Descent! We spent tons of time playing that back in the mid-to-late 90s. It's on Steam, and I could swear I downloaded an "updated" version (with higher-res textures) a few years ago from some other web site. (GOG, maybe?) It has one thing that makes it very different from typical 3D games. Since you're in a spaceship, the idea of "up" gets very confusing. And that's half the fun.
I prefer strategy/resource-management/survival games (My current favorites being Factorio and Oxygen not Included).
I think a classic in this genre is Caesar 3. There is also an open-source version of this (you will need the assets from the original) that works very well (even under Linux).
I really miss the old school strategy games like Settlers, Knights & Merchants, etc.
Skyrim is a really good RPG. Many, many quests of varying lengths to go on; character progression is in a good sweet spot, being not too complicated and not too simple; there is one main storyline, but also several medium-sized story arcs that you can take your character on, too.
If, somehow, you haven't ever played a roguelike with ASCII graphics (as opposed to something with a graphical UI), go and do that. Among the many to choose from, Angband is a good one.
The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare, for the Super Nintendo, is a unique game that captures the atmosphere of the TV show with varied gameplay, awesome mechanics (like controlling a bubblegum bubble through the air), an inspired story and a bunch of awesome/whacky well-executed ideas.
For that matter, The Simpsons: Hit & Run.
There's even a pre-alpha JavaScript wrapper in development, and a modern-engine reimplementation.
Depends a lot on what you're in to, and how old you consider a classic to be, but to add a few to the list I haven't seen, Master of Orion 1 (and I suppose 2...), Abe's Oddworld, and Tomba!. First two are the classic strategy games. Much to my consternation, it's been 25 years and 4X has still not moved past MOO2, so if you're gonna play a game in the genre, may as well go straight to the source. MOO1 is an earlier example of the genre that's very streamlined and different, and doesn't suffer the common mistakes and saminess that plague 4X titles. I definitely prefer it, and think it's underrated compared to the sequel.
Tomba! is a quirky, lighthearted, PS1 2D platformer-RPG that's held up remarkably well. Oddworld is, uh, also that, but even weirder and much darker. It does have a PC rerelease, New and Tasty, but I haven't played it yet myself.
Holy shit I forgot one of the best: World of Warcraft Classic!
I'm not sure if it really qualifies as "classic" in the spirit of the question but the original Mass Effect Trilogy, I feel, is a must play series.
The first one has some combat mechanics that take a bit to get used to but they get tightened up in the second and third games.
But the real meat, the real quality, of the games, is the superb story telling and character development.
Most of the characters you meet will change as a result of their interactions with you. Some in small ways, others in larger ways. But the world genuinely feels alive and reactive to your actions as Commander Shepard.
And BioWare did such a fantastic job of making those characters feel alive, with their own hopes, dreams, fears etc. Most of them anyway. Some of the characters are pretty static but with as much depth and detail as BioWare went into many of the other characters, the static, unchanging feel of those characters feels intentional, not lazy. As it BioWare is acknowledging that some people are just stubborn and set in the their ways.
My girlfriend once asked me why I kept playing the games, even though I pretty much play them the exact same way every time(I've already done a few playthroughs exploring different endings). I told her that it was the same reason she reads Harry Potter over and over again. The story doesn't change but it feels like going back to visit old friends.
Same with BioWares other title, Dragon Age. Particularly Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2. I wasn't as crazy about Inquisition.
Homeworld is in my opinion the best single player experience in any RTS made.
The voice acting, the innovative 3D gameplay, the score, the story, the graphics and the immense, beautiful, colossal sense of scale and immersion that all of those things put together exude make it one of my favorite games of all time.
A group of human(oids) living on a harsh desert planet begin to piece together that they have almost no similarities with any other lifeform on the planet.
After a deep space survey satellite gets pointed the opposite direction by accident and finds a massive, faster than light capable ship buried under the sands, the people undergo a colossal, worldwide effort to build a ship filled with 200,000 people in search of their true Homeworld. Some crazy stuff happens along the way.
The intro mission with Adagio for Strings playing still gives me goosebumps.