Saturday, October 6, 2007

Tribes and Other Classics

Recently a couple of my friends and I picked up the game Starsiege Tribes again. Well, to be honest, its again for a couple of them and the first time for me. Anyways, I've spent a little time with the game and really enjoyed it, especially when I can play with other people I know and we're all in the same room yelling and bitching about who shot who.

So now I would like to elicit a bit of response from you, the reader. My experience with PC games both old and new has been limited. So I would like to hear from everyone what their favorite older PC games are so that maybe I can get my hands on each game and fill in that little piece of my childhood that I seemed to miss.

My hope is to actually play any game that you guys mention, so anything that is now free or really cheap would be awesome. I am after all a cheap college student. =(

1 comment:

CandiedYams said...

I really enjoyed an old DOS game called Masters of Orion, we'd call it MoO for short. I'm pretty sure the company who made it went belly under, so to my knowledge it isn't even illegal to get a copy for free on the internet. Any website that archives old old PC games will have it. It can be a pain to run on new computers, since new OS's like Vista don't include DOS, but there are ways to get around that with programs you can also get for free.

If you can get beyond the 90's graphics and lack of sound, the game is really still pretty good. It's like playing Civ 4 in space, but you have to custom build all of your ships. Your old ships soon become useless with new technologies, your old colonies can be improved with terraforming, and new colonies can be formed on hostile planets with better colony ships.

Speaking of games with cruddy graphics, you should look into Dwarf Fortress. It's new, still in Alpha testing, and the 2 guys (ya, only 2 people) who have been working on it for years will let anyone download it for free from their website. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
It's the most complex, yet very user unfriendly, game I've ever played. It's like playing Sim City, but you control every single person. You start with 7 dwarfs and assign them different jobs, but soon your fortress will grow once you've cut into the mountain, and new settlers will arrive, bringing their own experience and possessions to the fortress. It takes many many hours to get used to the interface, let alone learn all the tricks required to make a decent fort. They are about to release a new version that adds a Z-axis to the fray, taking it to a whole new level of possibilities.