Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 29, 2024, 11:41:27 AM

Login with username, password and session length

VW's Top 1000 Games

Started by The Boston Crab, February 08, 2010, 05:51:21 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

HappyTree

I love Mashed: Fully Loaded. I can still be found playing it whilst listening to the radio. The AI is actually not bad. You get convinced that one of the cars starts to bear a grudge against you if you blast it too many times.

My offering:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KtHO3BUkCI

Chuckie Egg, Acorn Electron

A game about collecting eggs and avoiding purple ostriches. These were the days of the do-50-times platformer screens. Why did we never get bored of the repetition? Nowadays I can't stand to do the same screen even twice.

Mr_Simnock

QuoteI'm told the American military used it to train their troops

Did this man tell you?



Sorry for the sarcasm but training the military by getting them to play Hard Driving. Cue reply which shows this to be true which a part of me wants.

Detective John Kimble

#975:  Aerobiz Supersonic



Year:  1994
For:  Mega Drive, SNES
Developed/Published by:  KOEI

Aerobiz Supersonic is KOEI's finest hour, one of the best management sims ever made...and it was a console game as well - one in the eye for all the PC folk out there.  A while back in the list, Bullfrog's excellent Theme Hospital made an appearance - another example of a management sim that allows you to do something different from the usual.  Aerobiz Supersonic is the best example of that – perhaps the only airline management sim ever (well, aside from Aerobiz, the game's predecessor), and it's quite an unbelievable game.

It's pretty easy to grasp – you pick a continent and city to start in, and you're thrown into competition with 3 other upstart airlines.  You'll always start with a few planes in storage, and a few slots in other cities at the ready – you can start using these immediately.  There's a fair bit to tinker with:  The amount of times you fly a week, the amount of planes you use, and the fare – all pretty important.  The objective is to make the route both as economic and as profitable as possible – something that could require hours of joyous tinkering, for all the routes you have. 

Still, you'll need more than what you've got – that's where your negotiators come in.  Negotiators will buy extra planes, negotiate slots in new cities, oversee the building of hubs on new continents, and open business ventures (these can boost your profits, especially in a city that you've got covered).  There's a fair amount of strategy – those 3 questions keep popping up; What, Where, and When.  You get 4 negotiators, and often they'll be out for a couple of turns once you send them away (a turn lasts a quarter of a year, and a whole game lasts 20 years).  There are other things to consider – random events can pop up.  These include big sporting events like the Olympics – a huge bonus if you've got a route going to the city – or Wars, which obviously work in the opposite direction.  Still, it all comes down to the routes.

The console simplicity's matched with excellent, deep strategy and management.  The competition is tight, and there are several different scenarios – from the beginning of commercial flight to the rise of "Supersonic" aircraft.  I first played the game on that old friend Sega Channel (as, I imagine, a lot of other people who played and loved it did) – and I was wowed by it.  It sounded like a crazy game, nothing I'd ever played before at all – but intriguing...and what a find it was. 

falafel

http://www.joltcountry.com/trottingkrips/alter.html

interesting point raised about the supreme WASPish normativity in Alter Ego. I found myself getting quite frustrated by the game going "don't like girls, eh? OH BUT YOU WILL", with no option to spend much of your adolescence furtively chugging off over your sister's old copies of More magazine, ropey early Internet porn and secret homemade VHS compilations of TV scenes featuring shirtless men whilst pretending the reason you never got any fanny was because girls didn't understand you.

Although why on earth would I want to relive that?


#973: SUPER MARIO BROS.

Genre: 2D platformer
Format: NES
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1985
Developer: Nintendo R&D Team 4



Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. The plumbling Italian-American Mario brothers who grow in size (become 'Super', thanks for asking) when they're in contact with magic mushrooms. Mamma mia, that's a spicy meat-a-balla!

Super Mario Bros. is a good platform game. Annoying NES-centric thirty-something Americans cream themselves over it. You can too.

Jumping up to knock coins out of hovering bricks is satisfying. The music is memorable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwIEqNWykzM



#972: STUNT CAR RACER

Genre: cockpit 3D racer
Format: Amiga / Atari ST / Amstrad CPC / C64 / and more
Publisher: Microprose
Year: 1989
Developer: Geoff Crammond



Race around a few high-rise simplistic 3D polygon tracks in your hot rod car. Fairly smooth framerate for a microcomputer-based 3D racing game in the late 1980s. Like Geoff Crammond's other works, the attention to physics is good, and the shock-absorbed landing from hitting a big ramp-off is a joy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn32IgQGrOQ



#971: NIGHT DRIVER

Genre: cockpit 3D racer
Format: Coin-op Arcade / Atari 2600 / and more
Publisher: Atari
Year: 1976
Developer: Atari



Hypnotic. Presumably, you play the role of a drunk driver on the way home from a nightclub. Much like Wipeout HD Fury's 'zone mode', your only goal is not crashing. Night Driver's graphics are extremely simple (so much so that your car is just a yellow plastic overlay onto the telly monitor), so much so that 'night' is an essential conceit, since blackness is a whole lot easier to program than any kind of background detail in a mid 1970s arcade game.

All you need are white cateyes at the roadside.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK_pwMItCPM



#970: PORTAL

Genre: 3D platforming puzzler
Format: Windows / XBox 360 / PlayStation 3
Publisher: Valve
Year: 2007
Developer: Valve



You must find the exits through 18 (and a bit... hah!) levels of Aperture Science's test laboratory chambers. To assist you in this, you've got a portal gun, which can fire a blue hyperspace oval and an orange hyperspace oval onto certain flat surfaces in the 3D enviroment around you. One of each oval at a time.

Passing through the orange oval means ending up where the blue oval is, and vice versa. Momentum is preserved as you do this, so advanced movement techniques can be applied in later levels.

Tackling each level means figuring out how to get to the exit. Normal movement with your feet alone will not get you to the exit (such as one up on a high ledge across a deep chasm), so intelligent use of your portal gun is essential.

Apart from the wonderful mechanics of the game and taxing puzzles therein, the style of sleek clinical graphics, the unique story scenario, and humourous audio scripting in Portal are outstanding!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpUNuJCvpKo


ozziechef

#969 - Formula 1

Genre: Formula 1 Management Simulator
Format: Spectrum
Publisher: CRL group
Year: 1983
Developer: CRL Group



Not just any Formula 1 game, this saw you take control of a Formaula 1 team. You chose yoyur drivers and invested money to improve the reliability, speed etc. of your car. When race time came it consisted of watching cars racing over the start/finish line whilst text told you of any crashes etc that had occurred.

People talk about Football Manager as the best management game of the era but Formula 1 (or Formula Grand prix as it is somethimes called) was as good if not better than that.

You also got to control the pit crew to complete tyre changes and refuelling as needed. Fantastic fun like they don't make anymore

chand

Quote from: biggytitbo on February 10, 2010, 08:39:09 PM
#977 Pushover
Format: Amiga
Year: 1992

Fantastic, but largely forgotten puzzle game, a mixture of domino rally and Lemmings, you have to position dominos throughout platformed levels of rapidly escalating complexity in order to knockover the striped end domino and open the door to the next level. Like all the best puzzle games, the concept is simplicity itself but the realization is fiendishly difficult.

Totally forgot about that, couldn't remember what it was called, but it was one of my favourite games from the Amiga days.

spanky

#968: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas



Genre: Sandbox
Format: PS2/Xbox/PC
Developer: Rockstar
Year: 2004

Some people prefer the claustrophobia of GTA3's Liberty City or the humour and 80s vibe of Vice City, but the sheer scale and ambition of San Andreas makes it the series high-point for me.



It has a genuine epic feel about it, as you play as a hood gangbanger protecting his turf (I've heard people complain about the Boyz N The Hood setting, but it doesn't really dominate much of the game), an outcast strong-armed by corrupt cops in the sticks, accomplice to a mad nympho fugitive, a garage owner with a conspiracy theorist hippy, partners with a blind triad, a runner for a government agent, the go-to guy for a mafia don, manager to a manic depressive rapper, and the ringleader for a casino heist.



All the while, working your way eventually around the state of San Andreas, the real strong point of the game; three cities which could pass as the entire environment for some games individually, several small country towns, miles of freeway and open road, airports, rivers, lakes, a huge mountain, dense forest, a desert -  the entire experience feels like a journey, and Rockstar convey it better than any other game I've played.


kittens

I just completed Portal yesterday. As good as it was, I found the sense of dread almost overwhelming throughout. But then the silly credits cheered me up and all was well again.

biggytitbo

I know a lot of games claim to be funny but Portal probably really is the most amusing game ever. Well in a playful whimsical way that is.

biggytitbo

Bill's Tomato Game
Genre: Platform/puzzler
Year: 1992
Publisher: Psygnosis

Unfamiliar to anyone who didn't have an Amiga, this is probably my favorite hybrid puzzle/platform game ever. Certainly the one with the best 'ohh just one more go' factor.

You are a tomato. Called Terry. And you have to negotiate a 100 hazard filled levels and are given certain objects on each level to help you achieve you aim - fans, trampolines etc. What starts out easy rapidly becomes almost unfathomable mind bending, some of the later levels will literally have you trying a 100s times to find the right combination and positioning of elements.

I was thinking about this game recently and it really is almost ideally suited to making an absolutely cracking iphone game. Are you listening Bill, you could make a fortune!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxEjI04Dip4


#966: ARNIE

Genre: 2D isometric run-and-gun shooter
Format: C64
Publisher: Zeppelin
Year: 1992
Developer: Chris Butler



A late period C64 cassette tape game with a dreadful cover picture, Arnie is a good run-and-gun shooter that belies its budget price origins. You play the titular hero, Arnie, who seems to be a lone soldier in the John Matrix or John Rambo vein.

Your goal is to shoot everything that moves, and reach the end of each level. Nice 8-way scrolling throughout. Chris Butler did a good job with the chunky low-res graphics, with some nice enemy sprites present.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eroYwC8xfkk


#75
#965: EXILE

Genre: Arcade adventure
Format: BBC Micro / Electron
Publisher: Superior Software
Year: 1989 1988
Developers: Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIXuP1n47DM&feature=related

One of the finest games for any 8-bit platform ever, and certainly the best ever seen on the BBC Micro.  Edge magazine posthumously awarded it 10/10 and rightly so; it was a masterpiece, both technically and artistically.

Story goes that you were sent on a mission to an unknown planet to rescue some colleagues who had crash-landed there previously... well, the game came with a novella which set the scene far more richly than this meagre summing-up.  Anyway, game starts, and - oh no! - someone teleports in to your spaceship straight away, and steals the one component vital to your eventual departure from the planet!  Now what are you gonna do?

Exile was a huge game.  I mean, mind-blowingly huge - just when you expected there couldn't possibly be more, you'd find a whole new area of the planet to explore.  The attention to detail was phenomenal for its day - the creatures you encountered had believable AI and, despite their small size, were charmingly animated.  They exhibited characteristics like memory, line-of-sight vision and even a sense of hearing (where sounds were properly attenuated through solid walls).  One of the first creatures you encounter is a harmless bird which tweets and starts to follow you everywhere - cute at first, but quickly becomes a pest.  Nothing a trip to the vicinity of one of the automatic enemy gun turrets can't fix of course...

Exile also has claims of being the first game to ever implement a full physics model, simulating momentum, gravity, wind and other pushing/sucking forces, buoyancy, and robust collision detection and impact resolution.  Basically, everything in the world appeared to move as you'd expect, and here lay another of its strengths - you could progress through the game in any way that the physics engine would permit.  Whilst there may have been an 'intended' way, if you found an alternative solution, that'd do too.  This openness to explore the world and solve puzzles however you wanted was one of the game's greatest features.  Or you could just play around, taunting the game's many creatures - it was fun!

And all this on a BBC Micro with only 32k of RAM - an astonishing achievement!  If you had an expanded BBC with an extra 16k, this was used to augment the experience with sampled sound effects, and to provide a bigger game window.  Later on, the game was ported to the C64, and then rewritten for the Amiga/ST, but this - the original version - remains the best and most accomplished of all of them.

Cheeky Monkey

#964 : TOONSTRUCK

Genre: Point and click adventure
Format: DOS
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Year: 1996
Developer: Burst Studios




"Wacme!"

"Maybe later."

Toonstruck is a massively flawed game - the puzzles are nowhere up to Lucas Arts' standard, some of the conversations seem to go on FOREVER, and the game itself can be completed even by an adventure game novice in a matter of hours.

Toonstruck had a number of problems on release, not least the fact that the publishers were forced to release it half finished, but also that it was unfortunate to be released in a period where adventure games were on the wane, after Day of the Tentacle/Sam and Max/Full Throttle but before Grim Fandango.

Despite all this, the game features one of the greatest voice casts in game history (Tim Curry! Dom Deluise! Homer Simpson! Jimbo Jones!), not to mention the hilariously pasted in image of Doc Brown himself. The music is fantastic, the set pieces memorable, and the animation is excellent throughout. As a young lad it was my first real introduction to adventure games, and I was utterly charmed by it. Judging from the youtube videos I've watched it holds up better than I would have expected - just a shame it's such an arse to run on a PC from post 1998...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6mM5BZLvbo

Quote from: Darles Chickens on February 11, 2010, 03:58:29 PM
#965: EXILE

Format: BBC Micro / Electron
Year: 1989

And all this on a BBC Micro with only 32k of RAM - an astonishing achievement! the original version - remains the best and most accomplished of all of them.

Oooh. I'm glad someone mentioned this. A real polished effort on the Beeb, that.

Wasn't Exile a 1988 release, though?

HappyTree

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a1sspR7h0g

Here's Kissin' Cousins with one of the most unforgiving collision detections known to man. Its unforgiving pixel-perfect platforming meant I never finished this, but the monsters were fun.


Quote from: Garfield And Friends on February 11, 2010, 04:12:54 PM
Oooh. I'm glad someone mentioned this. A real polished effort on the Beeb, that.

Wasn't Exile a 1988 release, though?
Yeah, duly edited.

I knew if I didn't mention it, maybe no one would - and I couldn't let that happen!

Depressed Beyond Tables

Quote from: Mr_Simnock on February 10, 2010, 11:33:40 PM
Sorry for the sarcasm but training the military by getting them to play Hard Driving. Cue reply which shows this to be true which a part of me wants.

All sarcasm welcome and expected after my post about the military using it to train their troops. It was merely a funny image (in my head) of a G.I. in full uniform sitting in one of these trying to avoid a barn, a cow and setting a new lap record.



I remeber reading a Youtube comment where someone had exaggerated the below facts into something along the lines of NASA using the basic Hard Drivin' engine in their rockets.
From the wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Drivin%27

QuotePhysics

The engine, transmission control, suspension, and tire physics were modeled by Doug Milliken who was listed as a test driver in the game credits. In the 1950s his father William Milliken of Milliken Research led a team at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo NY USA (later Calspan) that converted aircraft equations of motion to equations of motion for the automobile, and became one of the world's leading experts in car modeling.

biggytitbo

I remember reading a review of the Amiga game back in 89 that said it didn't approach the 'near photo-realistic' graphics of the arcade version. If they could see car games today they'd shit themselves!

SavageHedgehog

Toonstruck is a great choice, I love that game. I wish you could get on the Playstation or something.

Depressed Beyond Tables

#962 Krusty's Super Funhouse

Usually blatant concept ripoff games are dire. But this one I remember was easily as playable and enjoyable as Lemmings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNZbTjucjSU

Plus there was something way more satisfying about squashing the rats in this game than saving those idiotic lemmings.

hpmons

#961 Planescape: Torment
Genre: RPG
Format: PC
Developer: Black Isle Studios
Year: 1999


(that is quite a poor box image really...)

I don't know much about Dungeons and Dragons, but the majority of computer games which uses the settings are mind-numbingly tedious and clichéd.  You are some generic character who saves the world by blah blah blah...blah blah...blah.  Yet Planescape: Torment is orgasmically good.  My spell-checker says "orgasmically" isn't a word, but if my spell-checker had played Planescape it would know that actually it is. 

You wake up in a mortuary.  All around you are corpses on slabs and zombie workers.  A floating skull called Morte comes towards you, and reads the tattoos marked on your back - information which you placed their to remind you about your past selves.  Amnesia may sound like a tired plot device, but it is one of the integral parts of the plot.  The characters are engaging, the world itself feels alien and intriguing, and there are always lots of choices and multiple solutions to the problems you encounter.  It is also one of the few RPGs which isn't combat-focused at all - I believe there are only three points in the entire game where you have to fight - most other areas you can get through by sneaking or lying your way through.  Though one frequently-cited flaw of the game is that the combat system is pretty poor.



If you don't like games with a lot of dialogue, then, uh...Screw you! The writing is excellent, all of the characters feel distinctive, even the minor characters can be wonderful.  Fun fact: The game's script contains around 800,000 words.  Uh...Good words! Good words!  Trust me.



It is my favourite game of all time.  When I finished playing it for the first time I just sat on my chair with a dreamy smile on my face for several minutes.

kittens

That looks like just the kind of game I've been looking for recently. I'll give that a download. Thanks hpmons!

_Hypnotoad_

Nice one on hard drivin' and stunt car racer, i used to love the fair coming to town as a kid so i could load hard drivin' up with money, stunnign game

hard drivin' 2 as well, slightly better physics from memory

i have a few to post tomorrow when i'm not typing one handed and have something interesting to say about them

which is hard when they're all from childhood and all i can remember is thinking "oh coooool!!!"

Quote from: Detective John Kimble on February 10, 2010, 11:48:19 PM
#975: Aerobiz Supersonic

Fucking yes! I too discovered this brilliant game through the Sega Channel and actually enjoyed it more than Theme Park which I had on PC from around the same time.

Even though growing up every cunt who didn't have Sky had cable, I've never met another single solitary being who had the Sega Channel.

Detective John Kimble

Yeah...the Sega Channel was real good times - I could barely contain my excitement when the nice Telewest men came around in 1997 and installed it, and I played it and it was, incredibly, even better than I thought it would be.  I discovered plenty of games on there - some of them were bad, of course, but the absolute gems made up for it.  Aerobiz Supersonic isn't even the best game I discovered on there, and I'd put that in my top 20.  KOEI also had the amazing Romance of the Three Kingdoms III on there (and the less amazing although still ok Gemfire), but above all else, there was Shadowrun.  Thoroughly superior to the SNES version, and for my money the best console RPG ever made.  I'll do that one later, if nobody else does. 

Depressed Beyond Tables

Quote from: _Hypnotoad_ on February 11, 2010, 09:39:47 PM
Nice one on hard drivin' and stunt car racer, i used to love the fair coming to town as a kid so i could load hard drivin' up with money, stunnign game

Damn straight. Nobody has ever wasted money on Hard Drivin'.