Games of The Past

Let's take a trip in the Way Back Machine to the early 90s. I was starting my seven year quest to graduate (twice). The fastest machines you could buy were i386s of which I owned a VASTLY powerful specimen clocking in at 33MHz with 16MB of RAM and a staggering 4.2GB hard drive. Ah yes. The glory days.

Games of those days were different. Machines were pretty limited by today's standards (then again, most everything was) so designers couldn't ride the coattails of super-ultra powerful graphics hardware and million poly models. In fact, the best 3D of the time? X-Wing and Doom! Duke3D is still three years away!

Now, I don't know if there's any real truth to this or not, but I've always felt that games of yesteryear were better designed and written--especially those games around my college years. Maybe the hard walls of available computing power made the designers of the time exercise their imaginations a little harder. Maybe with smaller budgets they were able to explore the depths of the art more deeply than we can today. Perhaps in those days we just expected less realism and more fun. I dunno.

One game which I've always regarded with a great deal of nostalgia is Star Control II; a game that I used to sadly say I never finished. I no longer have to say this! I've known of its existance for a while but never got around to playing it. Seems that the fine folks at Toys For Bob released the 3DO port source and the open source community did a port named The Ur-Quan Masters.

This is one of the greatest games of all time. No, seriously, #17 in IGN's Top 100 and here again in GameSpot's Greatest Games of All Time. Let me splain how awesome this game is...no wait, there is too much, let me sum up:
- The game is jam packed full of some of the best dialog I've ever seen, evar.
- Every race has a unique background and motivation not to mention their own theme music!
- The races are extremely unique.
- There's a good amount of cause and effect.
- The game has a good pace both in tactical combat and in the story line.
- You get to save the Galaxy! Come on, how awesome is that?!

I sincerely hope that my former employers (Activision; now Acti-Blizzard or Blizzivision or somesuch) a) choose to make a true follow up, b) hand it to Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford who did the original, and c) don't make it into something lame a la X-COM Enforcer. In any event, you owe it to yourself to play this game if you haven't already done so. It's by far the best game I've played this year.