what would you vote most important computer game in the history of gaming?

Frogger

I’ll raise you with Scramble.

King-ocelot – Member

the character design was different Freeman being a scientist not a macho hero

A scientist engine-of-death, though, which didn’t really make any sense. Oh a helicopter gunship? Luckily my PhD thesis in Wibbly Wobbly Science included a section on firing rocket launchers. Yes I did pass my viva despite never speaking.

Shenmue 1 & 2 on the dreamcast.

The Hobbit on sinclair spectrum which lifted role playing games from the mire and into true interactive intelligence on small computers

Horris Goes Skiing, ZX48k

DooM

I think I first got it on 3.5 Floppy on a magazine as shareware. Still got the disks somewhere. Cakewalk was on the same disks 0_o.

RE scared me but SH freaked me out big time, never played that in the dark.

I loved the first two Silent Hill games. Seemed to lose it’s way a bit after that. Properly creepy.

Proper 3D freedom of movement and the possibility(likelihood) of completely losing yourself. Descent

Back in Doom’s heyday, we had half a dozen machines LANned up at work, and used to play in the evenings. Everyone else had played a lot, and I spent the bulk of my gaming time dead. I never really got my head around the map and where all the weapon spawns were.

When Descent came out, we got that running on the LAN. I immediately gelled with it, whereas the others took to it like a duck to petrol. I was hurtling around, barrel-rolling and twisting with abandon whilst everyone else was going “uh, which way is up?” After months of humiliation at Doom’s hands, Cougar’s Revenge was complete and I battered all comers.

I think it’s something to do with the way my brain works. I’ve got good spacial awareness and can instinctively fly in free-roaming 3D space, whereas the 2D Doom engine just left me bewildered. I appreciate that makes little sense. I can do the Rubik’s Cube, but those 4×4 slidey-block puzzles confuse the proverbial out of me.

The Hobbit on sinclair spectrum which lifted role playing games from the mire and into true interactive intelligence on small computers

see my post on page 1 or 2 🙂

” SAY TO BARD “SHOOT THE DRAGON “

F1, lets talk about REVS then on the BBC Micro.

PACMAN has to be the biggest single wide-ranging game that got everyone into thinking about games as a mass market money maker!

A scientist engine-of-death, though, which didn’t really make any sense.

Yes it was ridiculous, having a tedious intro sequence that you are forced to play through doesn’t make the character a scientist when after that he behaves in exactly the same way as any other generic FPS protagonist. It’s not even a slightly original set up either, being largely just a rip off of Another World.

I guess I can only answer this in terms of ‘for me’…

Zelda: Ocarina of time. The N64 in general made 3D gaming looking really credible on a console but Ocarina of Time took it to a new level. Final Fantasy might have felt big but it was all a bunch of pre-renders. This felt big, I mean you needed a **** horse to get around!

Half Life 2: for me this was the tipping point at which games became more than toys. This was better than any film and people talk about the technological advances it brought, for me it was the cinematic and story telling experience it brought. Maybe the tech allowed that but it was just a means to an end in that respect.

Goldeneye: Took FPS games to the mainstream that no other has done. Even my Dad has stayed up night after night trying to finish it on ‘007 difficulty’…

X-pilot was a landmark game in the pre-mainstream internet era, a multi-player space shoot-em-up – anyone play this? Ran on unix workstations networked worldwide – computer science students in the early 90s will have logged massive hours playing this. Great game, simple but effective play.

i spent 3 hours playing Elite II last night 🙂

Dunno if it’s been mentioned before, but a few folk have wondered about getting Elite/Frontier up and running on a modern PC.

Have a look here: DosBox

And then here: Elite downloads #1 or Elite downloads #2

I still play Frontier now. Totally brilliant.

Ox, my dos window is non-scalable… any way of getting dosbox to run larger than about 500×350 ?

Does Alt-Enter work?

Does anyone remember Lotus Turbo Esprit challenge on the Spectrum??

It was apparently a big influence on the whole GTA series of games.

The graphics were a bit more primitive though…. Its not *quite* 1080p resolution:

Does anyone remember Lotus Turbo Esprit challenge on the Spectrum??

Someone else mentioned it here earlier. But yeah, it’s not hard to see elements of Turbo Esprit (Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge was a different game, a 16-bit spilt-screen outing) in things like GTA. Great little game.

But although they share elements, does it really make sense to credit one with influencing the other? Surely the real world is the biggest influence on GTA?

Well, it does if it did. Whether it was actually an influence or not, I don’t know. I’d like to think it was, but you’d have to ask the developers.

Apologies for skimreading the last six pages, but surprised to not find zork mentioned anywhere (although half a point for whoever mentioned colossal cave adventure about five pages ago).

IIRC zork was the first text adventure to go massive so, rather in the same way that Doom may not have been the first FPS but it’s success puts it up there, I’d vote for zork in the “influential on the direction of future gaming” stakes.

Yeah, good call.

IIRC, the guys who wrote Zork went on to become Infocom; that’s what the Z in Z-Machine stands for.

Aside from Infocom spearheading the ‘interactive fiction’ text adventure genre, the Z-Machine format was notable for being basically a virtual machine running platform-independent data files. And people are still developing for it today.

does it really make sense to credit one with influencing the other?

Yes, of course it does! Why wouldn’t it?

Ox, my dos window is non-scalable… any way of getting dosbox to run larger than about 500×350 ?

As Cougar says, Alt+Enter switches to fullscreen mode.
Also, you can speed up/slow down the emulation with Ctrl+F11/Ctrl+F12, which helps with all the various graphics detail options in Frontier.

Well, they are both implementations of the same idea at different times, no? Ie drive around and cause mayhem.

Just because one came before the other doesn’t mean it was an influence, generally speaking. It may have actually been cited as a direct influence, I dunno.

Goldeneye 64.

Atari ping pong (?)

Asteroids

Jack and Daxter

Err, that’s it!

The Flying Ox – Member

Ox, my dos window is non-scalable… any way of getting dosbox to run larger than about 500×350 ?

As Cougar says, Alt+Enter switches to fullscreen mode.
Also, you can speed up/slow down the emulation with Ctrl+F11/Ctrl+F12, which helps with all the various graphics detail options in Frontier

without derailing too much, i don’t really want full screen. but anyway… doesn’t matter.. lol

Have you tried moving your face closer to the screen?

You need to amend the config file to change the display resolution, IIRC.

Cougar – Member
Have you tried moving your face closer to the screen?

Well it’s a laptop, i wasn’t planning on strapping it to my head 🙂

Freespace 2 on PC.

totaly unlimited 3 dimentional movment, good missions and hard as ****!

other than that:

sonic
Comand and conquer
FF VII
metal gear solid / Syphon filter / Splinter Cell

Colossal Cave
Pong
Elite
Doom

can’t decide…

metal gear solid / Syphon filter / Splinter Cell

ooooh forgot about them, the first MGS was amazing and paved the way again.

What an interesting thread!

Unfortunately, i’m not really old enough to comment directly, as i missed the early days of PC gaming. For me however, Portal was a revolution in Gaming. Made in someone’s lunch hour, and tacked onto the Orange Box, it really did buck all the trends; and GLaDOS is one of the best characters ever written.

Crysis is also a standout title of recent years. To think, it’s still a real test of a gaming machine’s rendering and processing, and it’s five years old! In an industry that moves as quickly as PC gaming, that’s something special! (lets just forget how crap it gets when the aliens arrive, shall we?!)

“You move EAST
Thorin Enters”

Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.

> KILL THORIN

I’m afraid you can’t do this now.

some great choices there everyone 😀

if any of you haven’t played doom for a while (pc) may i suggest jdoom.

have just downloaded it recently (you do need the original doom wads files!) it is bloomin awesome (doom now in true 3d! 😀

you can also play hexen/heretic with the game engine too 8)

GIBLETS!

Pong
Space Invaders
Asteroids
Galaxian
Defender
Superfrog
Resident Evil
Gran Turismo
Ssx
Metal Gear Solid
Call of Duty
Minecraft

New Zealand Story – best cheat code ever.

Not sure if anyone’s posted this yet but hello 1980’s again 😀

Online ZX Specturm Emulator[/url]

my little netbook has quite a few emulators running on it.
the N64 is a little choppy and buggy but not too pad.
great to play all the classics 🙂