If I am not mistaken, before there was the #Civilization franchise, there was “Empire”. It was a fun game. There is #EmpireDeluxe available on #Steam, but I miss the DOS version that I played a lot.
Modern games today are usually limited to certain themes. If it's flight, it's flight. If it's tank, it's tank. If it's strategy, that's it. Carrier Command have it all.
I know, we can still play this today, however, what I miss with this game is the 2 player mode.
You just play with your friend and blast each other to friendly matches and laughter.
Being able to play 2P mode, face-to-face, is something that we have taken for granted, and now we're all just virtual avatars in online games (even online multiplayer games).
So, how about you?
Q: What are the five (5) video games from the 20th Century that you want to be able to play again today? And why?
The game came out for the Nintendo DS, and made strong use of the touchscreen. While emulators and even Osu provide other options for playing, even touchscreens can’t mimic the feel of hitting beats with a stylus. I even feel moderately the same way about games like Trauma Center, another good DS classic based on performing fantastical surgery.
Definitely the ones that simply aren’t available. If I ever get my PC upgraded, I know I can download emulators, but in the meantime, several incredible games are simply not playable. Since I was an Xbox kid I am currently revisiting:
Jet Set Radio Future
Ninja Garden Black
GTA: San Andreas (the original, far-superior one. It didn’t add visual/gameplay glitches and all the amazing songs are still in it, unlike the “Definitive” Edition)
The thing is, my old consoles still work. It’s the controllers that are bad. I have dozens of original Xbox, 360, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One controllers that drift, are flat-out broken, or a button is just wonky. My solution? An adapter that lets modern controllers work with old consoles! I use the Brooks Wingman XB2, but there are others. My favorite controller ever is the Xbox Elite Series 2. It is not just customizable, but sturdy and has outlasted many of my other controllers. So now I can play retro games, wirelessly, with zero latency, with turbo functionally!
To be perfectly clear, I have no affiliation with either company and gain zero benefit if they double in profits, or die out and close up shop. I’m just a fan…
I don’t exactly know how far back we’re talking 20th Century (I’m dumb as hell), but I’ve got a few games I’d love to play again:
Burnout 3 Takedown - introduced slamming rivals into walls, cars, anything, and fuels my inner road rage. Gran Turismo 1 - ignited a giant fire in me for a love of race cars and cool montages of said cars racing. Mario Party Nintendo 64 - a game where my family would gather and we’d have the best fun ever, before we grew up…
Quake III Arena. It came out in the 20th century, which sounds crazy to me. It was about 10 years ago I last played it or its remakes.
I got into Q3 a few years late, but there was still a fairly healthy local community for it back then. Quake 4 came out and then Quake Live, which I played for a while, but the local community was missing by then.
Sure I could still play it, but I’m guessing there aren’t even enough people to fill a 5v5 capture the flag match anymore, Q3 or QL… a shame. But at least I have good memories of it.
I guess I should mention 4 more. Most of these are playable in some form or other too, but still.
Dune II - I didn’t understand any English when I was playing this as a kid, but had lots of fun with it either way. Open source remake (needs original data files): dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/index.html
Stunts - The first racing game I played. Very nice map editor too. I even remember the bug where if you hit a peak between two ramp edges you’d fly straight up towards the sky! A brief search didn’t give me any faithful offline remakes, but here’s the wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game)
Came out in 1998 a month or so before Half Life and came with a patch cd in the box 🤣
Interesting take on the fps genre with branching routes/alternate levels that change things in the story deepening on your success. It’s a bit janky now but still a decent game.
SimFarm was so much fun! I had a system using oranges that got me huge profitable farms but I haven’t played in quite a while so I don’t remember the specifics
SimAnt, which I borrowed on 3.5” floppy and managed to “win,” which felt like an accomplishment.
SimCity 2000 had such satisfying graphics and I loved building beautiful utopias with infinite money. Still do this with Cities: Skylines!
SimCopter. I spent hundreds of hours flying around cities I built in SimCity 2000.
Inner Space. Unlikely to work very well on a non-Windows platform because of its unique game mechanic: the icons of other programs installed on the computer are the items you’re trying to collect in this game. You’d need a Windows environment populated with other apps for it to use, or write a program that gathers the icons of the apps on your real environment and generates stub executables for the game to find.
The GPU-specific versions of MechWarrior 2. That game originally used a software renderer, but many versions of it were made for specific GPUs (this was before Direct3D and OpenGL were available), and some of them looked quite good. Some of them can be played on modern hardware because there is a shim for the GPU they were designed for (most notably the 3Dfx version), but the others cannot be played any more.
In case you didn’t know, there is a Carrier Command 2 that is pretty solid. It is ideal playing coop but I have been playing solo and enjoyed it a lot.
There was one a while back called Gaiea Mission or something that was ok but not great, but Carrier Command 2 is pretty faithful to the original and if you like that should be right up your alley.
I’m pretty sure you can play my entire list now, but frankly nearly every game worth playing is playable. My list are games that are better than modern games.
Master of Magic - Civ with magic that hasn’t been done as well since. I haven’t checked out the recent remake, but this game was miles ahead of the competition and still stands up as better than most fantasy civ games.
Dune 2000 - basically a Command and conquer reskin, but the factions felt different and balanced.
Dragon Warrior (quest) III and IV - the best RPGs on the NES. III was the finale of a trilogy of games, very customisable and satisfying. IV changed your perspective repeatedly across the story, and I had never seen that in a game before.
SimCity 2000 - probably the best city builder. Newer games looks nicer, have more systems and are generally more nuanced and detailed. However those newer games tend to get bogged down in details and it becomes more difficult to get into them. For me this hit the right balance between complexity and ease.
Shingen the Ruler - for some reason I am convinced that it was called shingen the conquerer, but can find no evidence of this. A sengoku period grand strategy game on the NES. I always want the total war games to be more like this game, but instead the real time battles feel far less satisfying and tactical that a turn based version.
Carrier Command was utterly brilliant. I first had this on my ZX Spectrum ( it only played on 128k models)
The graphics were clear wireframe and moved so slowly but the tactical game was awesome.
Then I later got my first 16bit computer, the Atari ST and it came with…Carrier Command.
Now the graphics were in colour and the vehicles were made of solid geometric shapes and everything moved so fluidly in comparison to the previous version.
Loved the game all over again.
I know there’s an (unofficial?) Sequel on PC but I haven’t looked into it yet.
SimAnt. I spent way too long guiding my ant colony to the kitchen. SimEarth gets an honorable mention here, although I don’t remember playing it for nearly as long.
M.U.L.E. , it’s funny how much time I spent playing a economics game.
Lords of Conquest, it was an 80s strategy game that was kind of RISK jr.
Impossible Mission, I had a hacked copy and didn’t have any instructions so I just guessed at what to do
Project Space Station on the C64. I remember playing that and thinking how far away the 2000’s seemed. I thought we’d have more space stations by the 2020s. It turns out all we have is more memes.
Sheesh, now I need to find a good C64 emulator
Edited to add: OG Railroad Tycoon was 1990 and RRT 2 was 1998, those were a lot of fun, too. I think I bought RRT2 from GOG at one point for the nostalgia
It really captures the fun parts without the drudgery. And IMHO the controls with an ordinary gamepad blow away any of the fancy controllers I tried using back in the day.
I can name one - The Last Express. Still absolute quest masterpiece. Real time, a lot of different endings, pre-wwi setting where every person speaks their own language. Graphics also keeps up.
I’m pretty sure it’s available on GOG. I bought it some years back because it looked interesting but I never got around to actually playing it. I’ll have to give it a go.
Maniac Mansion, Commander Keen, Out of this World, Battle Toads, Time Traveller.
Some because I remember them being funny or having really cool styles, others just because I’m old/lazy and tracking down emulators and making time is too much.
Did you mean Time Commando by any chance? That was one of my favorites back in the day. Controls probably wouldn’t hold up these days but the time traveling aspect was super fun!
I like that one but this was a bizarre arcade machine that projected a « hologram » of the game. I was broke and terrible so lord knows how the game ends:
UT99. To this day one of the best shooters. Can’t play it like I used to, since I don’t have anyone who’d play it with me. Also, only LAN parties are the real deal for games like that.
Agreed. I also loved UT2004 and there are still servers up if you play online. Loved the custom sniping maps with low gravity or the giant team vehicle race maps.
Honestly there are no games like these nowadays. The closest being fortnight? But that game doesn’t have any modding and being 3rd person changes the gameplay from 1st person.
You Don’t Know Jack — the German editions. Loved those games. Unfortunately the new ones didn’t get translated as far as I see, and while I speak English quite well, I miss the cultural context for many questions. And the old ones are somewhat outdated for a lot of questions.
But I loved the attention to detail in those games.
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