Favourite computer games of all time. [2]

{{ Good to hear they didn't screw it up, think I'll keep an eye out for it in a sale. How is it on the microtransactions front, nothing hidden behind paywalls I hope?}}

{{ This looks terrible! The latest milking of the Tolkien legacy by Weta, Tales of the Shire- I think its basically Animal crossing with a Shire theme. And of course it has racially diverse hobbits despite that not making a single lick of sense. }}

{{ On a more positive note Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has been announced, making it a great time to get yourself the first one if you haven't played it already. Its generally on sale these days and can be picked up cheaply, its hours of gameplay and if youve wondered what it might be like to live in historical Middle Ages Bohemia rather than fantasy world there is nothing else like it out there.



I loved the original, just wandering about the forest and fields, or taking in what an actual castle or Church in its heyday, full of art and tapestries and life was oddly satisfying in itself, I spent quite a bit of time just taking screenshots as I played.}}

Spoiler:

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ Good to hear they didn't screw it up, think I'll keep an eye out for it in a sale. How is it on the microtransactions front, nothing hidden behind paywalls I hope?}}

No micro transactions. The only paywall is the fact it is 3 games and not 1 as the original... but it is a much expanded game!

{{ Thats good to hear, I expected at least new hats or some other cosmetic money making scheme}}

{{ Fallout London is out! And free! It's a mod, but it's a complete game overall, it's about the size of the vanilla game plus all its dlc. It being London it's quite a different Fallout experience, it's aiming for something a bit closer to the roleplaying of OG Fallout games, with skill checks frequent in conversations and actions, so you're build really counts in what sort of experience you will have and how the narrative plays out. It also has a lot less weapons in it for a Fallout game, you will be hitting folk with melee weapons more often than shooting at them, which makes sense it's Britain not America.

There are a couple of hoops to jump through to play- if you have the current version of Fallout you need to use a downgrader (you should anyway) as Bethseda, being Bethseda, fucked the entire game up with it last update, breaking it. Once you've done that it's mainly a matter of just downloading the mod from Good Old Games (GoG) and following the installer instructions. Switch off cloud saves and never launch through steam if thats how you have the game installed. }}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ This looks terrible! The latest milking of the Tolkien legacy by Weta, Tales of the Shire- I think its basically Animal crossing with a Shire theme. And of course it has racially diverse hobbits despite that not making a single lick of sense. }}

I had no idea this was coming out but my girlfriend was talking about it the other day and seems intrigued (she enjoys the worldbuiling of Middle earth but isn't really a Tolkien fan per se, she's read The Hobbit seen the films and suffered through many a geeky rant by me but not really read any of the books though tbf she is dyslexic and LOTR was a struggle for me the first time I read it) not really a fan of the art style but the basic premise of the game could be fun, the shire chapters of the book are some of my favourites and I always enjoy seeing artwork of it.

I've not played many of the LOTR games, but remember really enjoying 'The Third Age' and the tie in games of The Two Towers and Return Of The King films back on the Playsation 2 (I think I actually still have those lying around somewhere), I suppose with videogames as you are following/creating your own adventure I find the changes to lore/characters easier to accept than the films etc when we are watching a writer/directors own interpretation of the story.

Then again the recent Gollum game was shite (apparently) so lets wait and see.

I still play videogames fairly often, but I haven't bought a new game in years and years, mostly just fire up the old favourites (Skyrim, Fallout, GTA etc) for a few hours of mindless fun now and again. Graphics are important to me, but generally take a backseat to atmosphere and how polished the mechanics/storyline of the game is. Alot of modern games just seem too...shiny and overly complicated to me, and missing the heart of the games I grew up with.

I still have my N64,Dreamcast and Gamecube locked up in storage and all of those still work (or did the last time I dug them out a few years ago), the most recent and frequently used console I have is a Playsation 3.

I'd say my favourite games overall (in no particular order) would be:

GTA San Andreas/Vice City (the latter, as for many men of my age is repsonsible for my fondness for 80s rock)
The Elder Scrolls Oblivion/Skyrim (Oblivion for the atmosphere and quests, Skyrim for the exploration and combat)
Fallout 3
The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (I've played others in the series but this is the only one I ever made much progress in...yes it's very dated and small in scale compared to modern entries but was mind blowing to me as a kid and still has tonnes of charm today if you can get past the dated graphics)
Pokemon Heart Gold (I wasn't necessarily a huge fan of the series as a kid, but Gold/Silver was my jam back then and the remakes on the DS improved the game in almost every way. I have little interest in the franchise overall, but really enjoy going back to this one, and White 2 (I bought a cheap DS on a whim a few years ago to see how the franhise had developed and bought these two games, enormous casual fun)
Medal of Honor: Frontline
Red Dead Redemption (really want to play the sequel)
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (I played all of the games, but I think I put the most time into the first...haven't played it for many years though)
The original Spyro trilogy for the Playstion 1 (I have played the recent remake as well)
Age of Empires 2 (more specifically the recent remastered edition, I don't have my own gaming computer but my girlfriend does and she bought it off steam for me, I've not got very far in the campaigns but addicted to the skirmish mode)

My girlfriend has a switch so I've played Breath of The Wild quite alot and was blown away by it, Amazing game (haven't played the sequel yet though) though I never got very far in it yet so not sure I could call it a favourite, though I'm tempted to buy a switch soley to have my own copy.

I was similarly tempted to buy a Playsation 4/5 (or Xbox equivalent) to play Red Dead Redemption 2 and to upgrade to The Anniversary Edition of Skyrim (which has dozens more expansions than the 2 I have on my PS3 version) but haven't got round to it, not sure how easy those would be to source second hand (I don't do online gaming).

If/when GTA 6 and Elder Scrolls 6 finally come out I do intend to finally upgrade and buy the current consoles...

{{ I'd agree on most of those games (and the ones I dont are only ones I have no experience of so cant say). I just added an xbox360 emulator to my retro pc collection, was playing Red Dead Redemption and GTA: San Andreas on it earlier. The 360 was the last console I owned before I jumped ship to the pc Master Race. So my conosle nostalgia and retro appeal ends there for me - but as it stands I have a good selection of games for the : zx spectrum 48k/128k, Mega Drive/Genesis, SNES, 32x, SegaCD, Commodore Amiga (all models), Ps1, Ps2, Jaguar, N64, Gamecube, Saturn, Dreamcast, Xbox360 and a collection of old DosBox games and SCuMM (for those not old enough to remember this was a propriety engine old LucasArt point and click classics like Monkey Island used to run on). I can pick up and play just about any game I used to own for the last 40 years of my gaming life, it's kind of mad and mindblowing. }}

I find the growth in gaming technology and graphics in the years since my childhood to be hard enough to believe, looking back 40+ years must be even stranger. In my mind's eye Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64 etc are just as polished and immersive as the games of today...when I know they aren't, it's amazing how a child's imagination can fill in the gaps and make things seem more atomspheric than they are.

Look at the original Pokemon games-Red and Blue were a worldwide groundbreaking phenomenon at the time, yet if you were to fire it up now you'd find a incredibly basic game with a janky code, bugs and glitches galore and a non existant post-game, but it was enough for me to spend dozens and dozens of hours replaying over and over again.

I'm starting to sound like a grumpy old fart now, but I think one of the issues I have with modern games is that technology is so advanced and the graphics so lifelike it almost dosen't feel like escaping real life anymore, I play games for escapeism I'm not necessarily looking for complete realism or depth.

On the other hand the ability to easily find emulators or download retro games online is equally strange, I doubt any of the crew of say the original Tom Raider were expecting people to still be able to play it all these years later (not to mention the several remakes/remasters it has had), it does feel kinda strange when I look in my cupboards or drawers and come across games I purchased 20+ years ago gathering dust, when most people now just stream new games instead.

{{ My first console was a knock of Atari 2600, it had various versions of pong built in you selected with a an actual physical switch, it was called Tennis though, it had a few variations of games based on what you could do with a couple of straight lines and a moving square. It even had the fake wood panelling look so popular in the late 70's and early 80's on electrical equipment.
But the first system I fell in love with was my rubber keyed ZX Spectrum 48k.
The first game I played was Horace Goes Skiing, it was pack-in before the term existed, and Horace was probably the first system mascot. The game itself was a brutal ripoff of Frogger and a simple skiing game, with sound that would shred your eardrums.



What really blows my mind is I can play that Horace game still on my spectrum emulator, horrible sound and all, then pull on my VR headset and go for a wander around inside Skyrim, all on the same computer. 12 year old me playing Horace on his speccy would not have dared believe it possible in his lifetime. This was Star Trek stuff (mind you back then so were mobile phones). }}

Having just watched that horace goes skiing video I can vouch for the ear shredding sound! I can see how that would have had some sort of charm back in the day.

mind you back then so were mobile phones

Believe it or not I didn't get a mobile phone until I was about 18-19 (I didn't have much of a social life until then so never really wanted or needed one), and we didn't get broadband internet until 2017(!) (dial up for a few years as a kid, then no internet until my late teens...I relied on dongles and the library etc for a few years until I finally signed up for broadband...so if you look at my earliest posts here changes are I'm arguing furiously about The Hobbit whilst writing in a public library computer).

My parents are quite old fashioned and technophobic so I was rather behind the curve when it came to computers, pop culture, gaming etc growing up and I suppose I still am now in some ways.

It does make you wonder how much further gaming technology could or should go, at a certain point is it really worth trying so hard emulate real life physics and graphics? At what point does it stop being fun...

{{ Most games were ear shredding until the 16bit era, though the Commodore 64 gets a pass for being well ahead of its time in the sound department (but I never liked its blocky squished graphics). But those old chip tunes have a certain charm to me, these days game music is the same as film or tv music, in that its made the same way then just played back at you as you play. In the early days, up till CD, computers and consoles had to have a sound chip and it had to be programmed, it required not just musical talent but programming talent. You didn't just feed it prerecorded music like now, you had write code to make it sing.

And some folk were wizards given what they were working with - you just heard Horace Goes skiing, it uses the farts, hisses and belches the speccy soundchip was famous for - this is another example of spectrum sound, still terrible obviously, but this time, by famed 8bit music programmer David Whittaker-



and when the speccy got an upgrade to a whopping 128k of ram to play with he staretd making it sound like this-



Same machine that plays that horrendous screeching in Horace goes Skiing- now thats talent!

This sort of very electronic early computer music was a massive influence on the dance and rave music that emerged a decade later in the 90's, they grew up playing and listening to this stuff. }}

The Star Wars tune does I admit just sound a bit...farty to my ears! But I can definitely see what you mean about the second video, very 90s rave vibes about that music. But yes i agree, the music does have a charm to it, it feels like videogame music rather the cinematic style music modern games seem to have, again going back to my point about trying to emulate real life or being more cinematic that ever before, techonolgy has replaced atmosphere.

{{ I completely agree. But there is a line you can walk, so far one of the best at it have been Rockstar. Red Dead Redemption 2 has a ridiculous level of detail, and attention to detail, its a game where they paid someone to animate the horses testicles to shrink in cold weather, its that sort of level of detail. Its character models you can see individual skin pores in- but take a closer look at it you see the whole thing is also heavily stylised. The characters are life like, but not actually realistic. The world is lifelike but the colouring, the lighting the position of land and objects on it are all carefully hand crafted and placed to create particular moods and atmospheres or fitting within a single overall art style. I think a game having a distinct style goes a long way to offset the otherwise dreary trend towards ever more real, and so ever more boring.

One of the genres I lament the seeming loss of in the current era of games is the good old fashioned arcade racer - I have been playing Burnout Takedown on the ps2 instead, its ridiculusly overthetop, its super fun and its not in the slightest bit realistic.
The modern racing game seems to be an exercise in who can make it more realistic, more like real driving, more stuff about torque and spin and drag, and spending half the game in a garage staring at charts and stat screens tweaking your spoiler for maximumum co-efficency. And whilst I like the occasional proper driving sim, the lack of decent arcade racers that are just fun is sysematic of the lack of fun in many games released at the moment. }}