Epic old-school games Options

[mirocu]

Well, you know me! I love to talk about games!

As fun as it is to stomp on enemies, run and shoot or drive around, the fondest memories I have are of games that take it slow and make you think and the ones I´m gonna talk about are Zelda: Links Awakening to the Game Boy and Shadowgate to the NES.

Zelda: Link´s Awakening

I loved this game to death back in the days, it was so epic! It starts out semi-sandbox and in order to unlock new areas you have to get new tools. It could be a power bracelet in order to remove heavy rocks or a feather that lets you jump holes and every time you got a new tool you couldn´t wait to get back to obstacles you couldn´t do anything about before, but now suddenly you could!
I also love the puzzles in this game. Naturally as the game progresses, the castles get trickier and trickier, and in one of the last castles you have to throw a big marble on pillars in order to break them so the roof comes crashing down and lets you reach the last area. It gets real tricky as the pillars are scattered all around and you can´t carry the marble around with you everywhere. There are different walls within a screen here and there which let you throw it over to another part of the screen but you can´t jump over it which makes you find out another way to get there so you can pick up the marble again and throw it at the pillar.

It also has the 'pick up an item and trade it for another item' thingy going on, and figuring out who wants what can also be quite fun.

Shadowgate

Another epic game though in the style of point and click. You´re a nameless hero who is sent to defeat an evil warlock who´s about to summon a behemoth with the intent on spreading chaos and fear!

You start at the gates of the castle Shadowgate and have to work your way through hazards, traps and different monsters. Along the way you have to collect many items and solve many puzzles not only to survive, but also to collect pieces of a staff which is the only weapon that´s powerful enough to slay the demon. Figuring out what all the items do and where to use them can be quite tricky and at one point you have to backtrack almost to the very start of the castle with a potion that lets you fly over a gap to reach a room which has one of the staff pieces. But that´s not enough, in that room is another puzzle to solve before you get the piece.

This game was actually too much for my Buffy-esque attention span when I was a kid so I never got through it without help from a friend. Much later I did do it on my own and it was the most epic journey I´d had to that day, almost even to this day!


So there they are, my two most epic old-school games. Hope you enjoyed reading about them and perhaps you have a similar old-school game to talk about? Try not to include games that are too modern, but I won´t go as far as to forbid it. I realise not many have had these old games

[haute ecole rider]

For a long time I've been a fan of point-and-click adventure games that allow exploration. Myst was one of the first games I brought for the Mac. But it was this one that really sucked me in for hours on end:
Qin: Tomb of the Middle Kingdom It had a fine mixture of my favorite elements: archaeology, history, imaginative environments, and puzzles.

I still retain a particular fondness for Star Wars: Dark Forces. This was back when LucasArts was still making games for the Mac.

I also loved playing Wing Commander III and IV. They were fun, challenging, and if I made a mistake in my choices, I could end up flying forever into the Great Beyond. I also liked that the choices you make in the game influence the direction of the plot. They were more interactive novels than linear shooters. It didn't hurt that Mark Hamill plays the lead and happens to be one of the main actors in one of my favorite film trilogies of all time.