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Great games you would recommend from before 1990? (feddit.org)

submitted 1 day ago by Wrufieotnak@feddit.org to c/patientgamers@sh.itjust.works

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I noticed that pretty much all games I played in my life have been released after 1990. So now I'm asking those with earlier experience here:
Which games can you recommend from before that time?

But: they should still be fun in their own right and not just interesting to play in an historian sense of trying to understand how genres developed.

Games I played that are older than 1990:

Tetris (classic for a reason)
Pacman (interesting but simple)
Prince of Persia (was too young to understand how to correctly play this game, I should maybe try to play it again)
The Legend of Zelda (too old school and clunky for my liking)

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[–] FermiEstimate@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Starflight came out in 1986, and if you liked Mass Effect, you should give it a try. IMO it has a deeper and more interesting implementation of the space/planet exploration mechanics, not to mention a solid story to tie it all together.

The UI looks dated, of course, but it's straightforward enough to use. It influenced the Star Control games, another series that holds up (but just barely misses the 1990 cutoff).

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I hope I don't antagonize the three people here that still remember Starflight, but I'll recommend the Genesis version for its updated graphics and streamlined interface.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Yeah and the Genesis version had some fun little things added like flying a circle around a planet to go orbit it. Driving the vehicle around on the planet felt a lot more fun too. So yeah a lot of little things added that just made it more fun. A rare case of a console port making significant improvements over a PC game.

Though the original had a big paper map that you could draw wormhole paths on when you discovered them. But since it'll be hard to print out the map that big, it would probably be more annoying than fun at this point. So yeah, the Genesis version would be the way to go... if you can get.

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 1 points 56 minutes ago

Console games seldom had this amount of "hard sci-fi" mechanics and that made me super happy.
I still fondly remember trying to land in a planet with massive gravity and immediately pancaking my crew.

I will confess, I had hopes that Bethesda's Starfield would be somehow similar to Starflight, (I mean they called it a Hard Sci-Fi game) but at least there's a high supply recently of games with that theme.

[–] FermiEstimate@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

I'd agree with that. The updated version from the early 90s is the one I played, and it's probably the easiest to find unless you really go looking for the old version.

I still think it counts. It's still the same fundamental Starflight experience.