I’ll start:
I could never choose a single game, but some of my favorite games that I played as a child are Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 & 2, The Sims 1 & 2, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Runescape 2 (“OSRS”) and GTA San Andreas.
The RCT and Sims games gave me a lot of freedom, while making it hard to screw up. It was so cool that I could design my own house or amusement park. I loved spending hours doing just that. I also learned a lot about living life, managing people and things like economics.
Medal of Honor Allied Assault was my favorite shooter in that time. It very well might be my first proper FPS. The atmospheric story-driven campaign drew me in a lot. The music and missions gave some very intense moments and the online multiplayer was absolutely amazing. Rifle-only battles, freeze-tag or a regular (T)DM were a blast!
Runescape is one of those games that I never really get tired of. As a child I only played as a free user, while being impressed by every member I saw. I loved the atmosphere, the people that I met and the progression of my character. I went on adventures in the wilderness with classmates or went mining for hours to make some money.
I can still get drawn into this game and really feel like I’m on MY adventure, where anything might happen. There are not many games that have this effect on me, so intensely.
This game also learned me a LOT about life. I learned about having to work for getting a result, I learned about economics and how you can use markets to make some money (this was long before the Grand Exchange). I also learned to watch out for ill-intended people: I stopped playing for a long time when 11 year old me got scammed out of my gold-trimmed black armor that I had been saving up for for a long time.
Lastly GTA SA made me feel in love with the GTA series. I already loved previous games as I had played a lot of GTA 2 and a little bit of GTA 3. But San Andreas was on another level. The huge feeling map, the intriguing story and all the thing that I could do blew me away.
I loved learning about the lore/backstories of the characters and even joined a GTA-related forum which opened up even more to me. I stayed a big fan of GTA and Rockstar Games up untill GTA 4 and bought all theirs games, often multiple times on multiple platforms. GTA 5 was fun to me, but it never really got to me like the previous entries did. I think this is partly because I really enjoy the stories and characters of the previous games, and the (admittedly interesting) choice to use three switchable protagonist resulted in character development that wasn’t as deep and refined as games like GTA SA or GTA IV. But San Andreas… Man, I love that game!
Now I’m curious about the games that you loved playing during your childhood! What made them so special to you?
Heros of Might and Magic 3 is still one of my favorite games. Too many games from childhood to name, but that one holds a special place in my heart.
Asheron’s Call was probably the single most defining game of my childhood. The game itself doesn’t really hold up to today’s standards in most regards, but it had so many cool concepts, some of which have never really been explored since. I loved the way that “quests” were more organic. You didn’t go up to someone with a mark over their head and add a task to your log. You would have to just pay attention to stuff that npcs talked about and infer from that what might be going on. The monthly updates and gm interaction were just a completely different experience from modern MMOs. It also had the advantage of being from a time before everything was mapped in detail on the internet. Maggie The Jackcat existed for some stuff, but it was more of a blog than a resource like wowhead or the like. The game just felt like an adventure, and that type of experience can’t really be recreated today.
On the single player side, definitely Panzer Dragoon Saga. I played through it again a few years ago and the story still holds up pretty well. I loved the exploration, and the customization of the dragons. There was just so much to do, and it kept me busy for months.
I agree with you on Asheron’s Call. I can’t say it was my top pick but I played it quite a bit and thought it was quite an interesting one. I belonged to a guild of some sort. My roommate got hooked on it too and so the social aspect of it really made it for me.
Star tropics was pretty cool. A lot of NES games made you use the manual to solve puzzles and beat certain levels. I thought it was neat.
Some games used the manual as DRM, they asked stuff like input word 24 chapter 3 page 11 to run
Some games used the manual as DRM,
I remember hating that as a kid, because I could never remember what was in the manual, so I’d spend hours trying to solve a puzzle that had an answer key already provided - if only I had remembered that the “minotaur’s ciper” was just printed in the manual. I would always just assume that I had missed something in-game and keep looking, especially because so few games explicitly told you to go check the booklet.
The game being explicit to “check the manual and do X” would honestly have been preferable, but the games I was into always seemed to have like “pirate symbol translation guide” or similar, that could easily be dismissed as fun flavour inclusions and not the answer key to in-game puzzles.
At one point in time my dad threw away the box & manual for some game we’d bought, only to have to go borrow the booklet from a friend and photocopy the necessary pages, so that we could complete the game. Nowadays, watching Mostly Walking hit those games and one of the lads needs to find a sketchy .pdf of the manual for them to progress has been such a cathartic nostalgia trip.
The tip top number 1 for me has always been TIE Fighter Collector’s CD-ROM. Everything about it was awesome. Mindblowing for the time 640x480 graphics, the iMUSE music system that dynamically changes the music to react to what’s happening in game, really fun flight mechanics, a massive amount of missions to complete, and the overall really excellently done Star Wars treatment.
For those who are interested, a free community-made remaster of sorts called TIE Fighter Total Conversion was released a couple of years ago, and has received several updates. It is based on the ancient (although not as ancient as TIE Fighter) X-Wing Alliance engine, and has been hacked and modded so much that it feels like a modern game, and it includes both the original campaign from TIE Fighter and a reimagined version of it that uses things that the newer engine can do that the old one can’t, such as having many more ships present at the same time and the ability to travel from one place to another via hyperspace within a mission, etc.
TIE Fighter works fine in DosBox btw. TFTC works natively in modern Windows. If you’re going to play either game I highly recommend using a joystick. Mouse control does work but it is not that fun. Gamepads will probably work too, but still won’t feel ‘right’. Also you’re going to need to keep your keyboard within reach as there’s a whole bunch of keys you’re going to need.
Mystical Ninjas Starring Goemon: I really enjoyed the weird humor of the game. It eventually pointed me to finding a lot of japanese games, in particular the Ganbare Goemon series (the Japanese title for Mystical Ninjas)…most of which wasn’t localized, and translation patches only became available in recent years.
And it turns out the rest of the series had both the humor and some of the best gameplay on both the SNES and N64. The NES, GBA, and DS games are also pretty good too.
Gizmos & Gadgets. An Education game with surprisingly decent gameplay. The only serious issue being repetitiveness.
Space Quest 6. The humor was just great. I’ve had a love for the laid-back story-driven gameplay ever since
Warcraft II, pretty much the reason I was a Blizzard fan for many, many, many years. I miss the narrator VA…
And lastly callout to the original Warcraft III, where I spent most of my childhood and made my longest friends on.
Edit: I’m a dumbass and forgot to mention the game I’ve easily played the most over the years: RuneScape 2 and currently Old School RuneScape. I love it. Lol
The biggest game for me in my childhood was Starcraft: Brood War. It got me into super RTS games, and even though I played it on the Nintendo 64 (which sucked in retrospect lol) it was the first game I really got into.
The next two games that come to mind were Super Smash Bros and Halo (specifically 2, but really all of the ones before 4 I played a ton of) just because these games were super easy and fun to play with friends and family.
And there were some honorable mentions like Phantasy Star Online: Episodes I & II and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 and Star Fox 64, since these were also games that I played a ton of.
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Don’t know why it was so special to me but I played it A LOT. I was maybe 8-10 years old and when I was at my dads place he let me stay up late at night and all I did was play this game.
Wing Commander: Privateer.
I’ll never forget when I went over to my friend’s house and I couldn’t understand how the pirates weren’t attacking him. And then we loaded up my save (off a 3.5" floppy) and he couldn’t understand how the militia weren’t attacking me. It’s the first time we were ever exposed to factions that responded to your actions.
I sank so much time in that game. Never paid too much attention to the storyline, but I did have the fastest ship with highest-end targeting computer and a full load-out of the best weapons.
Link’s awakening was my favorite game on my game boy pocket, which was the first gaming system I ever owned. Ocarina of Time absolutely mesmerized me though.
I go way back to the early days. I played some of the Ultima series on a friend’s computer, Atari 2600 stuff, C=64 etc. Zork and some of the infocom games. First PC game I played I guess was one I typed in on my Atari 400 and saved to casettte.
The first game I played till the sun rose was Populous. 1989. IIRC I had a 286-16.
After that, my great love affair was Ultima Online, which I played on the Baja shard from just around beta. I got a little taste of the dread lord days and into the rep system etc. I lived for that game. Moved on to EverQuest and WoW which both never really captured me as UO did. Spent some time with Ashron’s call.
I’d have to give an honorable mention to Total Annihilation and Warcraft and I am sure many others I can’t recall.
I spent a lot of my summer vacations as a kid playing Asheron’s Call. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Ultima 7 is very special for me. It was such a magical immersive experience when I first played it.
Little fighter 2 is a game that I fondly remember playing. I used to play with my brother, sometimes against each other and sometimes as a team against the computer. It was so much fun, all the fancy moves made me feel really powerful.
Ocarina of time, SSB 64, and DK 64 are nostalgia bombs for me.
GTA2 and then GTA3. The open world of GTA2 seemed so big, and you could do all kind of random crazy stuff. GTA3 then was the same thing but in 3D!
Also another favourite was Prehistorik Man for the SNES. Was just a neat platformer that wasn’t just the “default” Super Mario.
In GTA 2, One of the first things that I did when I started the game (in the first level), was driving all the way down to the far bottom-right corner of the map. The tank that was hidden over there was way too much fun!
This Godzilla game
It’s a 2D puzzle-platformer I played almost a decade after its release, back when I couldn’t even say my own name properly lol. I’d spend a few hours each day until the batteries run dry, then recharge it so I could play the next day. Will never forget the day I solved that final stage, and how I replayed it over and over again looking for other solutions. Man, those good ol’ Game Boy days.I forgot the actual answer: Shufflepack Café. It came in a bunch of floppy disk my father brought home from the office alongside a Macintosh.
The game is airhockey, where your mouse is, well, a pad you move to hit the puck but for some weird and very creative reason it was all set as some kind of dystopian nightmare.
In a few frame at startup the game tells you you are lost, it’s raining, you enter a bar and it’s full of monsters and the bartender is a robot.
As a kid that shit was scary and I never challenged most of the more scary characters out of fear (they were also very strong, each one of them had their playstyle and tricks).
I think I saw some kind of emulation of it floating online once but I didn’t save it, if anybody can find it it would be great. I’d 100% play it again.
I used to love Shufflepuck Café! Many great memories of playing it as a child on my best friend’s dad’s Mac.
Check this out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/259510/Shufflepuck_Cantina_Deluxe
