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Top Ten Games |
A list of some games, over the years, that took up FAR too much of my time! Not in any particular sequence. I'm giving much greater emphasis to games that showed great originality - its interesting to me to see how many of these games are from 20 years ago, and still unmatched...
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Lords of Midnight. |
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The Sentinel. |
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Midi Maze. |
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Civilisation. |
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Asteroids. |
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Sonic the Hedgehog. |
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Elite. |
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Halls of the things. |
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Knot in 3D. |
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Doom / Quake. |
Written for the ZX spectrum, a graphic war game with a huge cast of characters, a vast set of locations, multiple ways of completing. Also views from every point, in every direction. Packed into a mere 48k of memory - and Microsoft could not write their own names in that amount of memory!
The essence was to use major characters to gain more, you had a swarm of major characters you could recruit to your cause by approaching them with the correct person - thereby gaining control of their armies. Initially two people, but with friendly armies nearby. Meanwhile you are trying to move a young lad through the middle of these major wars unhurt.
It managed to create key events without forcing them on you, partly by means of a surprisingly effective enemy, who could change tactics at effective moments.
This one was simple, and reappeared in many incarnations for different machines. A a small abstract landscape, with rocks and trees scattered around. You can teleport to any square you can see the top of, and gain energy from absorbing landscape features. But at the highest point is the slowly turning sentinel, trying to absorb you.
It's VERY hard to explain why something this simple is so insanely addictive.
This was the first multi player game I am aware of that allowed up to 16 people to play.
Game play was simple in the extreme - each player is a Pac-man like figure, that shoots forwards, and moves around a simple maze. But with multiple human teams playing it was insanely addictive. The 'midi' in the name refers to the music instrument connections that were used to link the machines together, that came as standard on the Atari ST.
I played this on the IBM PC. The concert is broad in scope, to say the least. You start with one wagon of people in the distant past. Pick a spot for them to settle, and they will then ask what the wise men should be investigating. At this early stage in the game, it is likely to be pottery or the alphabet or the wheel. From this humble beginning you must build a thriving civilisation, (probably complete with a wonder of the world or two), and them head off to the nearest star.
The balance is just superb, and there are always difficult but interesting decisions to be made. I hate to think how long I went without sleep while addicted to this one!
Before the home machines there were arcades. And right at the beginning along with Space Invaders, there was asteroids. Very unusually it was a vector graphics machine, so shapes were drawn, rather than sliding a small mosaic around the screen. Again, many options - at least on some versions, this game went through many revisions. The idea was simple enough, pile on more rocks with every level, while keeping things simple. Much less linear than space invaders, you had to think in terms of acceleration around the screen, not just left right fire.
I knew I'd been playing to much when I closed my eyes to sleep, and saw jagged white outlines of rocks sliding across my vision...
I don't like platform games. And the tunes on platform games make 'Macarena' sound the the 1812 overture. So why on earth did I waste entire weekends trying to get a blue hedgehog in red trainers to jump over things?!?! Simple, but with a hideously strong 'one more go' factor, this sold more Sega Megadrives than was rational. A particular highlight was the underwater level, an insanely catchy tune, the need to suck in bubbles or make it to the surface, and a manic final dash. Mind you, even the easy starter level had its challenges. Not difficult, but with all sorts of 'not obvious' bits to explore - this ensured that even when on the 5th level of 6, you still had something to think about on level 1.
Screw Mario, this is NEAT!
Like Lords of Midnight, another object lesson for lazy programmers. LOM managed to fit a fantasy world into 48k of memory. Elite managed to fit an entire galaxy into less. Well, from memory, 8 galaxies.
David Braban sold an awful lot of machines on behalf of hardware manufacturers. I know people who bought a BBC computer solely to play this game.
What did it get so right?
It's hard to say, but surely contributing factors had to be the graphics, (hidden line removal 3d never looked so good), a superb sense of scale, and a well balanced game system that let you choose the level of challenge you faced. There were a (very) few special missions, but mostly it was a well thought out balanced set-up, with plenty of room for manoeuvre.
At the time the amount of effort required to progress as gigantic - the many, many hours of platy required to go from 'harmless' to 'mostly harmless' was astounding.
The docking sequence is worthy of particular mention - straight out of 2001 the simple act of finding somewhere to trade involved matching orbits, lining up with a stations spin axis, and twisting as you brought your ship in along the poles. This step alone took many evenings of practice to master.
Despite being straight from the dawn age of home computers, at the time of writing, (Feb 2004), even the newest space game, X2, is proudly comparing itself to this fossil. And getting reviews that it is not actually as good, though it looks better.
Can any other 20+ year old game claim that?
It doesn't have the reputation these days, but I still consider this the ultimate frantic game. Kind of a graphic dungeons and dragons, with tiny graphics, and big playing areas, it used pretty much every key on the small 'dead mans fingers' ZX Spectrum keyboard. But it had challenge and depth written all over it, and would oak up spare time like nobody's business.
The link built into the section title explains it better than I do.
It's the kind of game you get when people who know and love games write games, while ignoring marketing types who complain that the hero does not look like Bruce Willis.
OK guys, you all remember the light cycle chase from Tron, yes? The one that spawned a million imitators, to this very day supplied as something like 'snaker' free with your mobile phone?
Well, many years ago, a humble ZX Spectrum game took this idea to the next level.
You are a rapidly moving block, racing through a 3d cubic wrap around space, leaving a solid trail behind you. You have something like 30 lives, (you will need them all and more), and lose one whenever you move through a n occupied space.
Initially when the space is almost completely empty, it seems pointless - you may occasionally see the computer controlled blocks leaving trails, but it seems unnecessary to move. However, if you do not you will build up big walls, almost impossible to avoid. And if you do, you will create complicated shapes it is seriously hard to get your head around.
This game requires 3d visualisation skills and fast reactions like no other. Like many on this list, it ran on ancient computers with less horsepower than your watch. And like many on this list it required skill, vision and practice.
I've lumped the doom and quake games together - not least because the sequels have consistently improved on an innovative and superb original.
This one came with several things not seen before - a very good first person perspective view, and network 'deathmatch' multiplay. It was the second bit that cause problems - you needed a LAN for multiplayer in those days, and people did not have a LAN at home. So it invaded offices, where it destroyed productivity, and got people sacked! Any other game you can think of that cost so many people their jobs?! Thought not...
Some people thought that with the graphics engine almost anything would work. But the level design was also excellent, as you could tell when you downloaded levels designed by amateurs. The way they saved the really nasty monsters for even greater effect, the way you could hear the big nasties before you could see them, it all conspired to make a genuinely frightening game. And with subsequent releases, they have improved the graphics, complicated the level design and generally let rip.
It really is astonishing how many of these games are old. Now, I have a PS2 and enjoy playing the games on it very much. They look better than anything listed here, they are stable, and take a long time to complete. So what is wrong with modern games?
I think it has to be a lack of imagination. While the graphics get ever more realistic, and the scenarios are ever better represented, (consider the number of recent WW2 games), there's just nothing new. It's done very well, but we have seen it all before. Gran Tourismo is an excellent driving game, with a million options to twiddle, easy to access all features, good learning curve, rocking soundtrack.
The search for giving value is solved by huge levels, not by innovative absorbing game play.
Maybe this comes from design by committee - games are huge business these days, and expensive to develop. So companies are reluctant to experiment too far. I think that most of the games above were done by one (or at most a very few) people.
A few years back I got a spectrum emulator for my PC. Some games were disappointing, but others were every bit as good as I remembered. In particular the 'Ultimate play the game' games for the spectrum were every bit as good as I remembered! And they even managed to fit most of the early ones into 16k or memory, (and 7k of that was used by the operating system!). If you can't dazzle with graphics you have to impress with game play.
I'd really like to hear of any modern games people reckon break this trend, there's an email link below!
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