Nostalgia time - computer games from your youth

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Some honorable Mentions:
Millies Math House
Living Books
Humongous Entertainment
Read, Write and Type
Math Munchers
Reader Rabbit
Treasure Mountian
Minesweeper
Space Cadet 3D pinball.
 
Earliest I can remember is playing Centipede on my dads Mac Performa 6400. Spent a bunch of time playing Cro Mag Rally on our iMac g3.

My kids are spoiled by my “hand me down” Xbox One X that they primarily play Minecraft and Lego Batman on… though it’s currently sitting in a closet because neither of the older 2 were behaving themselves
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My favorites growing up were:

Aces over Europe
Commander Keen
Comanche 3
Diablo 2
SimCity 3000

I miss the NovaLogic games.
 
When I was a kid, we had a Magnavox Odyssey 2, then a ColecoVision with the Atari 2600 expansion module. Zaxxon and Starmaster were favorites!

I then got into PCs in the '90s which got me into the Wing Commander series, DOOM (of course), Duke Nukem 3D, Star Wars: Dark Forces, X-Wing/Tie Fighter, Quake II and III (never played the first one until recently, didn't care for it), Redneck Rampage, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life. I split time with the original PlayStation console and loved playing Ridge Racer and Tekken.

The 2000s brought a PlayStation 2 and I spent months playing mostly Gran Turismo 3/4 and Ace Combat 04.

We had/have an Xbox 360 and a One, and a PS4 and now a PS5 but my wife is the one who plays them the most. I'm more of a PC gamer, generally loving first-person shooters but I feel that the games nowadays are getting a bit too complex and long for me and 'not fun' now.
 
The ones I remember of the top of my head.
Atari 2600
Indy 500 - especially in the snow
Asteroids
A few pong type ones

Commodore 64/128 - we had 100's of games but I remember a few.
International Karate
Commando
Defender of the Crown
Archon
Pools of Radiance D&D

Amiga 500
Formula 1 Grand Prix 1, 2
Archon 2
Battle Squadron
Xenon 2
Speedball
TV sports Basketball
A few more D&D games
I really liked playing around with an art program too, had 16 million colours, transparency, reflections, they used it for TV graphics on some smaller stations for a while, can't remember the name

PC
Shadow President
Empire
Duke Nukem
Simcity

Probably spent a few too many hours playing, but we liked the two player ones which were fun with a few friends to take turns with.
 
When I was a kid in the 70's my parents bought the original Odyssey but it was lame. The ball on pong was manually controlled with the "English" knob. Atari was much better.

Played a DOS version of Star Trek or something along those lines back in the mid 80's.

I think I still have the box, disc, and all the paperwork that came with the original Doom and Myth PC games. For whatever reason I kept a bunch of the old hardware for those old PC's so could possibly build a system to actually play it. Pretty sure Doom goes back to Windows 3.1 and Myth was probably W95 or W98?

I still have an original Genesis system and Shining Force and Shining Force II were great games.

Then came the day my preteen/teen boys moved from playing Goldeneye on N64 to Halo on the first X-Box. Two joysticks was a game changer.
 
Decent, Commander Keen, Mechwarrior 1 and 2, Simcity.. many I've forgotten. Don't play anymore and no inclination to do so, when you work on them all day that's the last thing you want to do!
 
I'm sure I've forgotten about more games than I can remember, but my time begins with the early handhelds, from Mattel, Nintendo (Game & Watch), Tomy, Bandai, and others. Now I only play some games on iOS more casually.

Otherwise, lessee:

Arcade (vector) - Asteroids (of course, and there was a similar one where two ships were tied to each other), Tempest, Battlezone, Star Castle, Lunar Lander, Star Wars

Arcade (raster) - Defender, Stargate, Donkey Kong, Robotron, Dig Dug, Joust, Zaxxon, Rampage, and later, Hard Drivin', F355 Challenge

Atari 2600 - Adventure (hitch yourself to the bat and have it fly you around the castle), Combat, Breakout; but things didn't really get good until Activision came around, and elevated the scene with Pitfall, River Raid, Kaboom!, Grand Prix, and others. There was another fortress/defending game where each player had a corner they had to lob and defend against cannonballs or something like that. Many more I can't recall.

Never really got into the newer consoles, but did buy a PSX for Gran Turismo 1 and 2 (with the bugfix disc), Colin McRae, and an Xbox 360 for Forza. Mostly the driving games, but there are a few others.

Apple ][ - Got hooked by Ultima, and from then on, Aztec (which loved to grind the disc drive), Choplifter, Rescue Raiders, Star Blazer, Bruce Lee, Karateka, Dino Eggs, Bilestoad, Hard Hat Mack, Burger Time!, Lode Runner, Hardball!, and some lunar rover game I forgot the name of. Except for Ultima, never got into the games like Wizardry, or Zork. Back when EA was a company you could admire, and Broderbund also published top quality stuff.

Mac - Dark Castle, Maelstrom (Asterioid clone), Apeiron (Centipede clone), Rescue!, Dark Forces, Vette!, Carmageddon, IndyCar (Papyrus), Falcon, SimCIty, SimAnt, and Tetris (never liked the GameBoy version).

iOS - Real Racing (before EA bought the developer and ruined it), Pocket Tanks, Alto's, Egg Inc., Two Dots, Mini Metro, a couple from Donut Games. Recently got into Retro Bowl, but the ones I highly recommend are the Space Marshals series. There is DLC, but none of the IAP garbage. Gameplay is fantastic, replay value is high, and just very well-produced overall, with some humor as well.

I won't buy into the IAP model and avoid most games that have it, unless proven exceptional, and don't play enough to justify a modern console, especially when games can be crippled if they aren't connected to remote servers. That may be how the business runs now, and folks are used to it, but I don't have to support it.
 
I won't buy into the IAP model and avoid most games that have it, unless proven exceptional, and don't play enough to justify a modern console, especially when games can be crippled if they aren't connected to remote servers. That may be how the business runs now, and folks are used to it, but I don't have to support it.

The newest model is paying for an "early access" game that's in constant development and takes 5+ years to finish. Then when you complain about how long it's taking or all the bugs, people shoot back that "it's in beta." I bought an early access game that was supposed to be fully released in 2018 (I have the screenshot from the devs saying it) and it's not halfway finished to this day.
 
Decent, Commander Keen, Mechwarrior 1 and 2, Simcity.. many I've forgotten. Don't play anymore and no inclination to do so, when you work on them all day that's the last thing you want to do!
I mean, I'm on them all day and I still enjoy gaming, lol 🤷‍♂️
 
Typing of the Dead.

Actually, I hate computer games. I spent so much time developing business solutions that I have zero interest in such things.
In fact I am a lousy computer user. I hate computers...
Not only do we have Los Gatos in common, but we have like views of computers and computer games. Large mainframe, multi-million dollar, mission critical systems were my entire career. I had no interest in playing games on a toy computer. Large or small, computers never excited me but somehow I had the innate ability to succeed in that type of work and the money was outstanding so I stuck with it for 28 years. The best part of my career was my colleagues. I got to know some really great people along the way, men and woman alike, some of these friendships lasting to this day, long after retiring.

Scott
 
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