My favourite five games
From a forum discussion, I thought I'd share my favourite 5 games.
Star Control (Amiga) - Top down arcade space shooter with diverse ships. Played loads solo and against friends. Sunk many, many hours into this. Also had the joy of hacking the game to change the ship values and create different play experiences.
Master of Orion (PC) - 4X space game. Hideously addictive, I replayed it over and over. Happy to replay it now in DOS Box.
Champions of Norrath (PS2) - I'd add Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance as its prequel and CoN2 as all part of the same thing; cooperative action dungeon crawling with loot and levelling and so much polish, the quality blew me away. Also had the right balance between complex and playable. Diablo 3 is just overkill, whittling the game down to numbers. Not massively different to a crappy mobile Clicker game. CON had real gameplay, especially with a low tier character at high levels, where you had to work the AI to not get overwhelmed.
Driver (PS1) - Only played this with a group of friends where we'd hot-seat who was playing. Amazing social experience giving advice, criticisms, thinking we could do better and then being unable to. Loads of options for jokes and sillyness. The difficulty was sky-high, giving lots of chance to experiment. I remember on stop-the-ambulance mission where I came up with the plan to get in front, and just got ploughed up into the stratosphere by the shonky physics to watch the city splurge out into a sea of repeated polygons. The crappy graphics also meant the grit of the game was lost on us and it was just a joyful, silly romp around the city. Modern Drivers, like so much entertainment these days, is all serious and realistic, and we're no longer whizzing around getting shopping but instead murdering and maiming.
Hired Guns (Amiga) - This one was short lived, but what a game! 4 player split-screen coop huddled around a tiny screen, but with friendly fire. Every time one player died, the rest would dual it to the last man before reloading. And then we'd have revenge kills and dual again. We never progressed very far. Plus we hacked the graphics and drew our own sprites for characters.
_ Four of those titles are games I played with other people, in the room, eating junk food and having genuine fun. We keep looking for similar games these days and can't come up with anything. Perhaps the limitations of the tech made the experience more enjoyable because we had to supply so much ourselves to the experience?
Ultimately I hope Adventures can bring that simple, fun social gaming experience to the masses.
