Classic Windows Games – Page 2

The 7th Guest

The game’s creators, Rob Landeros (a graphic artist) and Graeme Devine (a programmer for Virgin MasterTronics) followed the success of The 7th Guest with a sequel, The 11th Hour. Although their company, Trilobyte, was initially flush with cash from the success of The 7th Guest, increasing tensions from divergent visions of the company’s future and spiraling production costs exhausted their funds, and eventually their partnership sundered. However, in 2004, another gaming company, Lunny Interactive, announced the reunion of both Devine and Landeros and the imminent development of the long-awaited third game in the series, The Collector. Six years later, the game is merely another vaporware legend, which is really unfortunate, as the gaming world could always use a little more Stauf to play with!

Classic Windows Games Computer Games

Konstantinos Dimopoulos

Buccaneer: The Pursuit of Infamy

On the other hand, not everything is perfect. Land bombardment for example is quite frustrating, as aiming at particular buildings is nigh on impossible, while sometimes the battle area is a bit too small for proper maneuvering. Then again, when you got those fantastic graphics, the tons of available -and surprisingly varied- missions, some excellent and highly amusing multiplayer options, a fine selection of Steam achievements, an amazing sounding ocean (!) and a convincing atmosphere, you just can’t complain. Buccaneer is quite fantastic.

Classic Windows Games Computer Games

Konstantinos Dimopoulos

Gemstone Dragon

Actually, Gemstone Dragon is the most Baldur-eque gaming experience I’ve had for quite sometime, what with its sword and sorcery plot, the traveling around fantasy worlds, the looting of corpses, the quests and side-quests, the real time combat and a plot about some sort of ancient evil rising in the way ancient evils always rise in games like this: covered in conspiracy. Now, even though its game-mechanics are not based on D&D, the game remains as traditional as one can imagine, starting off with the player selecting a portrait and his/her gender and going on to gain xp, fame and shiny bits of armour.

Classic Windows Games Computer Games

Dan Epp

SimCity: The City Simulator

In SimCity, players had to construct an entire metropolis starting from nothing but a bulldozer and random terrain. Along the way to full city status sims begin to populate your city and make demands. They may need more housing or shopping centers; perhaps crime is rampant and a police station is needed; maybe frequent brown outs are creating a demand for a new power station; perhaps your sims are bored and want a stadium…and so on. Meanwhile, the city needed just the right level of taxes to encourage growth, yet still pay for all those fire and police stations.

Classic Windows Games Computer Games

Dan Epp

Tie Fighter

While John Williams’ original soundtrack plays in the background, the player gets to fly a variety of space craft, which include: TIE fighters, TIE bombers, TIE Interceptors, TIE Advanced, TIE Defender (awesome!), and assault gunboats. Personages you interact with include Emperor Palpatine, Grand Admiral Thrawn, Grand Admiral Zaarin, and, of course, Darth Vader. If you complete the game and save the Emperor you can expect a closing ceremony reminiscent of the one at the end of the original Star Wars movie, except this time it’s all in the Imperial motif.

Classic Windows Games Computer Games

Dan Epp

Star Wars: Dark Forces

The action is in the first-person perspective, and unlike DOOM, you can look up and down for your enemies, all the better to locate and eliminate them. Although later in the game series Kyle hears the call of the Jedi, there’s no lightsaber action in this game. However, there are plenty of other weapons to keep you interested, including the Bryar pistol, the standard stormtrooper E-11 blaster rifle, thermal detonators, the absolutely awesome Stouker concussion rifle, and the Dark Trooper assault cannon (the best way to take those bad boys out).

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Dan Epp

The Secret of Monkey Island

The guiding force behind The Secret of Monkey Island was Ron Gilbert, who based the game’s ambience and feel upon his experience at the Disneyland attraction Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as on the novel On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers, which was the inspiration for many of the game’s characters. He went to the point of writing a series of short stories based on his ideas for Monkey Island, which he used to help convey the spirit of game to his creative partners, Tim Schaffer and Ron Grossman.

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Dan Epp

Zork

Who could forget Zork’s opening: “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.” The text-based parser would respond to your directions, such as “Open mailbox” or even just “open”. Actually, the parser was quite advanced for the genre, as it was able to handle conjunctions and prepositions, such as “open the mailbox and read the leaflet,” and had a wide array of verbs and nouns that it recognized. Of course, if you tried a command that it didn’t know, the parser would just respond with, “I don’t understand that” or a pre-programmed witty response if you tried something the programmers anticipated you would, like typing in “jump” and getting “Wheeee!!!” as a response. For fun, type in any of the following: zork, win, repent, yell, and see what the parser says back.

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Dan Epp

Wing Commander

The creator of Wing Commander, Chris Roberts, characterized his game as “World War II in space.” The player took the role of a fighter pilot for the Confederation, battling the war machine of the Kilrathi, a race of feline aliens. Attack runs and defensive missions were launched from a space-going aircraft carrier, the TCS Tiger Claw. If the player was successful in meeting mission objectives, the storyline continued with Confederation forces pushing back the Kilrathi armada.

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Dan Epp

Civilization

Players started with a single settler (a covered wagon) at the dawn of civilization, chose a location to found their first city, and from that built an empire as the game timeline progressed to the Space Age. Sometimes you’d find another computer player right next door, and either had to keep the peace with non-stop diplomacy, or – more times than not – send in the troops to crush them like the insects they truly were. Up to six other civilizations were out there to discover, and they all had to be dealt with, one way or another (either the Americans, Aztecs, Babylonians, Chinese, Egyptians, English, French, Germans, Greeks, Indians, Mongolians, Romans, Russians, or Zulus.)

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Dan Epp

Planescape: Torment

Since your memory is gone, you choose what class you want to level up in as you gain experience, and you are not limited to that class each time you reach the next experience plateau. More importantly, experience is rewarded for more than just combat. How you speak to NPCs can result in a bonanza of experience points, as can completing tasks. The choices you face in every encounter can adjust your alignment depending on what approach you take. In short, everything about Planescape: Torment is open-ended, the hallmark of an excellent RPG.

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Dan Epp

Duke Nukem 3D

Duke Nukem sold over 300,000 copies in its first week of release. It went on to spawn several re-releases, like the Atomic Edition, East Meets West, and 3rd party level compilations and other mods, like Duke!Zone and Nuclear Winter. In the end the sales of Duke Nukem 3D were in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and made Duke Nukem easily one of the most recognizable franchises and characters in the gaming world.

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Konstantinos Dimopoulos

The Last Express

Importantly I also found out that I’d better get the passenger list, some papers and a certain suitcase from the off-limits luggage compartment. Following characters and trying to either chat them up or spy on them proved quite a bit revealing too, whereas climbing in and out of my cabin’s window has not been particularly enlightening though incredibly fun, but, I’ll admit, hardly as elating as breathing the atmosphere of the turbulent and politically tense times before the First World War.