this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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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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[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 points 12 hours 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 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 hours ago

Yeah it's hard to get the mix of space exploration, interesting aliens to meet, and a good overarching story that Starflight (the first of this kind of game) right out of the gate.

And yeah you didn't scan that planet and check the gravity levels? You're dead. If you didn't notice in the report how hostile the animals on the planet are? You're dead.

But it kind of got it right, there wasn't a cut scene where the science officer explains that it's too dangerous to land on the planet, it's you deciding it's too dangerous. It had an element where there's danger but if you get the science right the danger isn't an issue. Space is scary but science makes it less scary.