IntelliMission

I have never used a Macintosh, but it seems an interesting platform for gaming due to the weird exclusives and the early black and white graphics (as seen in the original version of The Manhole). I also love the cool graphical interface years before PCs used windows by default. What are your favorite Macintosh exclusive games? I found this video with 20 of them: From the video, I particularly like Crystal Crazy (simliar to Star Control II, but with direct zoom between the map and combat which looks extremely cool), Pararena (1 vs 1 futuristic sport, black and white game, controls with mouse) and Fazazel's Wand (platformer with cool elements and strategy where you control a wizard).

Donkey Kong, Shenmue... Even obscure games like the first person graphic adventure The Manhole (1988, from the creators of Myst). Sometimes a game comes out several years before a genre is popular. Which game would you say was the most ahead of its time?

Just to clarify, Killer Instinct and Addams Family are pretty decent games that would have been hits in the Lynx, but 1) Killer Instinct is a (IMHO) ugly 2D fighter that I could only play single player while not being a fan of the genre and 2) Addams Family is some sort of a metroidvania that I played for hours, but I ended up tired of the repetitive mechanics and detailed-but-not-so-inspired graphics (I'm not a fan of metroidvanias either, I guess I discovered it in 1997). 25-30 years ago, many of us were often in situations where we just couldn't find the 10-15 games that we would have loved the most for our systems and had to play only what our parents/our friends/stores had. As someone recently said in a status update, the happiness that an evercade cartridge would have brought to us as 70s/80s/90s kids simply cannot be measured. In just about every platform.

Amazing answer from @Crazy Climber. Feels like a time machine. Yep, it looks like the catalog was not very good. Not sure what they were thinking. I bought a Game Boy when I was 17 in early 1997 and played it mostly about 6 months until I had enough money to buy the Playstation. I had like 10-20 games and only about 2 of them were mine. Still, I think both the Game Boy and the Atari Lynx would have benefited from porting games from the C64/ZX Spectrum/Amstrad CPC. There were dozens of hidden gems that didn't require much graphical power. Instead, Atari chose to release some mediocre, mode modern games with more colors. The Game Boy had some very good games and very bad ones too: for me, the problem was that I only had access to certain ones (the one in the shops or ones bought by friends years ago), so the only good games I played were Zelda, Tetris and a couple of Marios. Again, I remember thinking "damn, I wish someone ported my top 10 Spectrum games to this instead of having to play Addams Family or Killer Instinct)".

A few days ago I learned that the Lynx was designed by another company and, after Atari bought it, it took Atari 2 years to make a few design changes until they released it by the end of 1989 (and then Nintendo released the Game Boy one year later). Was this the biggest mistake in video game history? Could Atari have beaten Nintendo with 3 years of advantage?

In real life, animals live in the open, in places where there is sunlight, and in places where there are ecosystems so they can find something to eat. And (most) people don't exterminate them. In Tomb Raider (1996), however, things are the opposite: animals like lions, bears or crocodiles live in isolated caves and their only purpose in life is to wait for you to kill them with one pistol in each hand as you circle around them, jumping laterally while doing somersaults in the air.

Has anyone finished Gateway? I played it 20 years ago or so, but I left it halfway. It's an English text adventure, but it has graphics, you can even click on them, there is a list of objects and verbs... In the end it's like Myst with lots of verbs. I just saw a recent review and the guy really liked the game, he says that the puzzles have just the right difficulty and the plot is based on a series of science fiction books: I'm a bit frustrated with the standard 90s graphic adventures I'm playing lately because they are a bit bad (it is a very difficult genre to design, you always end up doing a game that's either too easy or too difficult), so I may give it a try.

Carrier Command is an interesting case. An amazing 3D open world game that worked perfectly on the PC, Amiga and Atari ST, it also was ported to the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64. Apparently, not too many people even saw or played the 8 bit versions (at least the Amstrad one) back in the day, and Amstrad/Spectrum magazines did not pay too much attention to it either. So the thing is, they turned the C64 version into a top down shooter (considering this and the deformed looking Hard Drivin' port, I wonder if the C64 had any problem with 3D graphics?), but somehow they made really good Amstrad and Spectrum ports:

Wow, I didn't know Destruction Derby 64 was so much different than the PS1 games... The roads instead of race tracks and the techno music make it a different game and it also appears to have much easier controls. It feels more like a Need for Speed clone. Check this video of Destruction Derby 2 and compare. I only had a PS1 back in the day, but years later I started to appreciate the multiplayer approach (and inability to fill a game with long and boring FMV sequences). This console is the only one where you can play a 4 player split screen version of Duke Nukem 3D (by the way, someone should have hacked the censored parts of the ROM at this point?).

I accidentally copied a "responsive" URL in my previous message that displays a blank search. This is the one I wanted to paste with the Amstrad CPC releasese from Ocean Software. I'm not sure about other systems, but their games for the CPC were pretty solid and well programmed. Here's a more detailed list: - Great 16 color arcade conversions: Gryzor/Contra, Green Beret/Rush 'N Attack, Combat School, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Afterburner, Secret Agent/Sly Spy, Chase HQ. (some of these games had the best graphics for the system at the time). - Great, original games from Ocean Software: Head Over Heels, Matchday 2, Rambo III, The Great Escape, Target: Renegade, Batman (1989). - Special arcade conversion with original content for 8-bit computers: Robocop (yeah, this version was actually a good game!). Maybe NES users suffered from the problems mentioned by other users, but we Amstrad CPC users were quite happy with Ocean.

Ocean has a pretty epic catalog for the Amstrad CPC, including great and colorful conversions of Contra/Gryzor and Combat School/Boot Camp and one of the best games based in a movie ever, the side scrolling platformer Batman: https://www.cpc-power.com/index.php?page=staff

This one has just the right amount of cool graphics, cool music and entertaining puzzles (some of them are very, very unusual and almost action-like) to qualify as an "unusual and very good" retro game:

(My message in the previous page expressing my feelings about modern gaming in a totally respectful way received 3 "Confused" reactions.... Not bad! Let's see if I can beat that). Even if someone gave me a PS5 for free and the console had absolutely no DRM or casino style loot boxes, I would not play it. The reasons are the same why I'm not interested in modern gaming since 2006, when I played my last "current gen" title, GTA: Vice City Stories: - 1 player games focus much more in the feelings, the story, the characters... than the gameplay. - 3rd person 3D controls with an analog stick are much, much, much more imprecise than 2D controls or even tank controls. For this reason, platformer sections are too easy and combat often consists of Z Targetting your way around an enemy, which I find boring and repetitive even if it can be visually spectacular. - Ultra-realism has made polygons invisible in 3D enviroments, reducing the interactivity in platform sections (compare the first Tomb Raider stage design with the latest reboot). - Overall creativity is at its lowest and they're basically selling you the same game over and over and over. - I don't understand online multiplayer, I need the people I play with to be in the same room. - In 1997, I bought the PS1 because it was the only way to play cheap games in my own house, that didn't even have a computer or console except for the Game Boy. In my case, the need to buy a console has radically changed in the last 25 years almost to the point of disappearing (I probably wouldn't even have bought the PS1 if I didn't need to visit my other parent's house to play a 486/Pentium). I believe many of the people buying new consoles and games have emotional connections with characters like Mario, Zelda, Solid Snake, Kratos or Ellie from TLoU, sometimes dating from their childhood. As games like Death Stranding or Shadow of the Colossus proved, I see a potential in realistic 3D environments to recreate deep experiences when you are alone and need to explore or make a journey. Until games like this exist, with no repetitive combat or silly stories and a huge, inmersive environment to explore, I will avoid buying a new console, especially at this price (and especially because I don't even have an HD TV).

In my case it was Hard Drivin' for the Amstrad CPC. You probably know that the 8 bit computer versions of the game are not good. And when you look at the ZX Spectrum version, in black and white and with a much lower framerate, you'd think that you can't get worse than that, right? Right? Wrong. The Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC versions are even worse than that. The C64 version is extremely weird, the 3D graphics feel deformed. And the Amstrad CPC is a direct port of the ZX Spectrum one... which means is even slower, making it practically unplayable. I wish all these versions would be more similar to Race Drivin for the Game Boy. Hard Drivin' was included in the T.N.T compilation with Xybots, Toobin, Dragon Spirit and APB (notice how the fu***rs used arcade screenshots in the back of the box). None of those arcade ports was particularly good, but at least Xybots was a decent game (with Spectrum graphics, another speccy port) and APB and Dragon Spirit used the 16 color low res mode of the CPC. This pack was the last game I ever loaded in my machine before it (the disk drive, actually) stopped working (forever, and my dad sold it). It's really interesting, because a few years ago I downloaded the exact version of the compilation and had the same loading problems in an emulator that I had as a kid... One of the games never stopped loading for some reason (I think it was Hard' Drivin!). The Amstrad CPC disk version of the TNT compilation broke my disk drive! Damn. Thanks, Tengen/Domark.

I think people are mistaking "so awful that I had to stop playing" with "I'm not fan of the genre/control system/approach and I stopped playing".

I'm thinking about finishing Another World (a few months ago I checked the "solution" to the section I was stuck on, it turns out I only needed to use an automatic closing door as a shield for the enemies hand grenades). I'm also considering finally attempting Little Big Adventure, which I abandoned 25 years ago. Finally, here's a very nice series of videos that reviews the best MS-DOS games from 1981 to 1991:

I'm watching the TV series The Prisoner (1967) and I think it's perfect material to create all kinds of games based on it. It's like a combination of Truman's Show and James Bond. The main character is a guy trapped in a small island where inhabitants are called "number 6", "number 12"... They are all trapped for the same reason: a powerful organization want them to confess something, but they refuse to collaborate. The island has its own currency ("Work Units"), it's own so-called "democraticly elected counsil" and some "advanced" technology (for the 60s) like doors opening automatically, wireless phones or punched cards. There are also some cute mini-taxis that travel through the tiny roads of the islands, but walking is often a better option. The leader of the place is called "number 2" and changes every episode. "Number 2" reports by phone to a mysterious "number 1" that is never shown on screen. Often the main character is drugged overnight and/or tricked to believed a new resident is actually his friend, when he/she is actually working for the bad guys. One time he's even tricked into believing he has escaped with a complicated set up complete with fake boats, fake London offices with fake Big Ben chimes sounding and fake Lithuanian spies helping him. When the residents try to escape, they can choose to run or even steal vehicles like an helicopter or a boat, but they are followed by hidden cameras, returned to the island by remote controlled helicopter controls or even chased by some weird, big, white bubbles controlled by the bad guys. When one of the bubbles gets an escaping resident, the bubble covers the person's head and leave them unconscious. I can see sucessful games based on this: - Your typical simple 2D platformer for Atari 2600 or Intellivision (where avoiding bubbles is key) - More complex cinematic 2D platformer - A text adventure - A point & click graphical adventure (1st or 3rd person) - A stealth game a la MGS - A GTA style game (overhead or 3D) where you can steal vehicles and try to escape In GTA San Andreas, I loved how you could try to escape to another zone before "legally" unblocking the bridge by swimming to the other side and then you had dozens of cops chasing you, unavoidably killing you in a few seconds. A similar mechanic could be implemented where you could try escaping and almost succeding, but where you need to take a strategic approach using objects or choosing a better time of the day to escape to get out. Of course, one of the problems of creating an action game based on The Prisoner is that you would not be drugged as a player, and you would know in advance that the bad guys are trying to trick you. Also, how can you confess something as a player that you don't even know? In any case, the setting has potential for action and adventure gaming, even if the option of confessing via dialog trees could not be implemented due to players being unaware of the "secret information" for plot reasons. (I honestly believe the French 1st person graphic adventures Fascination and Lost in Time are heavily inspired by this series, especially by S01E07, where the main character wakes up in an emtpy island and escapes in a wooden raft, later boarding a ship that looks suspiciously similar to the one in Lost in Time and creating a diversion in the kitchen that is suspiciously similar to a puzzle in Fascination).

Dude, you have been in this forum for over 10 years and none of your 24 messages are related in any way to the original Intellivision... What part of "Mattel Intellivision fans" didn't you understand?

As someone who has never even played any game released after 2006 and who has mostly played 8-bit and 16-bit computer games for the last 10 years, it was very interesting to see how a guy is doing a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night remake for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive (that sadly changes the gameplay to make it linear, so it's a new game, but that's another topic). I always say that PS2 era graphics are more than enough for me and even consider then necessary (some great games released between 1995 and 2005 would have not been possible wihout textured 3D graphics), but at the same time I feel that realism has damaged creativity in game designers and "mandatory" 3D has complicated controls and removed precision. I think it all started going downhill when Nintendo released 3D games that controlled and looked worse than their 2D versions, and when games that try to be movies, like Heavy Rain, were released a few years later. Since this is a retro subforum in a retro forum, I wonder in which generation would each of you set the "graphical limit" (if you could magically do that with the press of a button, Dr. Doom style)? I've always been a big fan of PS1/Saturn/N64, but maybe I would press the "16 bit" button*... *Imagine "16 bit" includes Doom for PC