Old computer game with guy

The game and its predecessor are both available via Steam. ZZT is the most visually disparate of the games on the list. Despite the fact that it looks so super basic compared to the rest, ZZT was released in or significantly later than other games on the list like Pirates! The original ZZT was really just a collection of a few levels that were distributed as shareware. The meat and potatoes of the game came from its editor and the user-created levels… which took the form of a number of different game types.

While this sort of a game ecosystem is popular now with Minecraft , Little Big Planet , and the Steam Workshop leading the charge , it was extremely niche and not often done 20 years ago. Collections of some of the best levels were made available in packages. Descent was a fairly big outlier as far as PC games went. The game puts you in the cockpit of a little ship armed with a variety of weapons, indicating that it is an arcade flying shooter.

The setting of a labyrinthine series of interplanetary mines with long and tight but twisting corridors indicates that it is more a First Person Shooter than any other kind of game. It is that combination of elements that has long made Descent and its later sequels fan favorites in the gaming community.

The original had you hunting down and destroying mining robots infected by a virus. Action took place in degrees around you, making the game both more suspenseful and more vomit-inducing. The game is currently available to play through the Internet Archive.

Developed by LucasArts, the game went on to sell over a million units and become an all-time classic of the genre. Part western and part noir, the game takes place in a near future that is far grittier and likely more realistic than other science fiction settings. You play Ben, the gruff and no-nonsense leader of the biker gang The Polecats. As the game progresses, Ben is dragged into a mess involving corporate sabotage, motorcycles, murder, and minivans.

While much of the game is standard puzzle-and-conversation-based adventure gaming, there are also moments in which you must control Ben in brutal bike fights that rely on quick reflexes more than smarts a precursor to the action sequences in Telltale games.

The Incredible Machine was a remarkably unique puzzle game when it arrived on the scene in The game required the player to construct a Rube Goldberg Machine each level out of a limited number of parts assigned to you, in order to accomplish whatever task you were given. For instance, you might be asked to pop a series of balloons fenced in by vertical pipes using only a revolver that must be triggered by a pulley , a rope, some rope, and some hamsters running in hamster wheels which in turn turn gears.

At the onset of the level, the player is able to adjust both the air pressure and gravity in order to set the level of difficulty. The game was educational in such an undercover way that to this day the game is seen more as entertainment than it is a lesson in puzzle solving, physics, causality, and what happens when a monkey on a bike really wants a banana being dangled in front of it. Currently the game is available bundled with a number of its sequels on GOG.

One of the most unique campaigns around at the time was Dark Sun , a desert world ruined by magic that was home to a number of typical high fantasy races, but also the giant bug Thri-Kreen and the slave race of the Mul, and featuring a heavy dose of psychic powers. Both games, while differing greatly in graphical style, featured a similar top-down, turn-based RPG style heavy on narrative choices and the ability to affect your final outcome by random chance and people being caught in the crossfire.

A key appeal of the game is its taut fuel system: you need the stuff both to fly and to recharge your shields, so there's a constant balance going on as it slowly runs down. In between revolutionising the first-person shooter genre with Marathon and Halo , Bungie took some time out to update the third-person beat-em-'up with this cyberpunk action romp.

Heroine Konoko stands alongside D'arci Stern from Urban Chaos as one of the great lost female protagonists of video gaming — a renegade cop with a devastating range of combat moves, an interesting back story and clothes that Everyone of a certain age recalls Britsoft favourites like Jet Set Willy, Skool Daze and Attack of the Mutant Camels, but many of the more nuanced classics are slipping from collective memory.

Created by lone coder Chris Hinsley, Pyjamarama is a platforming adventure, starring loveable everyman Wally Week who has forgotten to set his alarm clock, and must now wander the house in a somnambulist state, looking for the key to wind it up.

Like Jet Set Willy, it is filled with surreal puzzles and weird enemies, but in its detailed depiction of Wally's modest terrace home, it reveals one of the charms of early-eighties British games: they weren't always about space heroes or ludicrous anthropomorphised critters; they were sometimes about normal people worrying about everyday things. Wally is so distraught about the possibility of losing his job at the car factory, he sleep walks his way to a solution. Like the Monty Mole series, which made satirical references to the miners' strike, it says things about the country at that time.

A social history in blocky sprites. True, the 3DO console was not a great success when it was launched as a hugely over-priced multimedia machine in And while its software library was let's say modestly populated, it boasted a few minor masterpieces.

One was this excellent two-player military sim, in which participants use their tanks, helicopters and jeeps to invade the opponent's base and capture their flag. It's sort of a cross between Advance Wars and Counter Strike, a mix of fraught action and sneaky thinking, and if it had been originally released on PC and PlayStation rather than ported over later, we'd probably still be playing sequels.

Western developers don't entirely own the open-world adventure genre. Designed by Climax director Kan Naito also responsible for the classic Shining and Landstalker RPGs , its a mission-based driving quest, in which points are earned by smashing up as much scenery and as many other road users as possible.

Renamed Felony in the West and followed by a series of inferior sequels, it is as daft, hilarious and anarchic as you'd expect from a game that rewards you for driving a bus through a cafe. Visually stunning and filled with interesting stylistic flourishes, Shiny Entertainment's real-time strategy sim pitches warring wizards against each other in an exotic fantasy landscape.

With an emphasis on close combat rather than resource macro-management, the title was at odds with genre big-hitters like Command and Conquer and Total Annihilation. But it brought in its own packed menagerie of beasts, spells and weapons and the third-person action made the warring more immediate and exciting. Although critically revered, it sold poorly and is barely credited for its technical innovations — as Kieron Gillen later lamented in his retrospective essay on the game.

Although the PlayStation One era of fighting games was dominated by the showy Tekken series, there were a few more sophisticated outliers. Acquire's ninja stealth adventure, for example, is just about the most unforgiving combat game of the era.

Players are slung into the bloody world of Feudal Japan with just a blade and a series of mission objectives. As with the Thief series, quietly sneaking about in the shadows and surprising enemies is the only way, because face-to-face fights can be ended with just one swipe of your opponent's sword.

Dark, complex and dripping in atmosphere, Tenchu was a sophisticated cult classic. A series of sequels followed but we haven't seen a new one in five years. It would come into its own on the PS4 or Xbox One. Naturally, the landscape changes in time to the music, but the key feature is that players are able to play their own CDs with the onscreen world reacting accordingly.

Much fun could be had attempting the game with musical extremes, either speed metal or ambient house, and the concept was clever enough to get the game into Moma's design collection. Vin-Ribbon's eccentric creator, Masaya Matsuura, has often spoken about a modern update — with Sony now actively pursuing offbeat PS4 projects like Hohokum, it could be his time. No one in the games industry does sleazy urban grit like Rockstar and this tie-in with the cult movie is one of the company's most under-rated titles.

Following the events of the movie, players control the eponymous street gang is it makes its way through New York City to its Coney Island home base. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto titles, there's little in the way of open-world freedom, but this is more of a straightforward brawler, with a complex fighting mechanic and rollicking two-player co-op mode.

Typically for Rockstar there is also an amazing licensed soundtrack slinging in '70s disco hits to contrast the relentless violence; the company even brought back original cast members to voice their virtual representations. According to Kotaku , a spiritual success was planned, based around the mods vs rockers battles of '60s Britain, but sadly nothing emerged.

Though successful in Europe, Sega's 8bit Master System console nose-dived in Japan and the US so this tough, multi-directional platformer has faded from memory.

When Nintendo first announced the launch of the Switch way back in March ! Having been a longtime fan of Ni. But with so many ne. Window air conditioners are a necessary evil.

Pirates cemented Sid Meier's claim to fame and stands as one the greatest combinations of role playing, strategy, resource management and action ever to have been produced. Pirates is an open ended game with a very loosely woven plot. You begin your pirate career as a slave in a sugar plantation in the Caribbean who has just bought his freedom. Your brother, sister and father have been lost in your struggles, and you are now on a quest to find them. This quest can be totally ignored; however, and you can completely dedicate yourself to pirating the seas of the Caribbean.

As captain of a ship you will have to navigate your vessels for you can build an entire fleet should you wish through treacherous waters, take advantage of favorable winds, calculate your coordinates, recruit men and manage your food supplies.

In addition to these activities, you must decide whether to pledge allegiance to one of the four nations colonizing the region, whether to betray your masters, ransack cities, search for buried treasure or even marry the daughter of a governor in order to gain title and prestige.

The open ended nature of this game would most likely be its Achilles heel if it wasn't for the fact that you age, and if you don't put a timely end to your swashbuckling antics by settling down and retiring, you will see even simple battles come to a most unfortunate end. Depending on the riches you own at the time of your retirement, you will be given a different fate -- from a beggar weeping over his lost glory, to the governor of a colonial empire.

I was surprized you don't have Pitfall listed. You type in words and your imagination replace graphics. All text game. There were 4 "families" any not played by an actual person were played by a computer that would lauch spacecraft to various planets in our solar system hoping to be the first to claim a pre-generated number of mines on various planets.

Each family had five space ships of various levels to do this with. The level of the spaceship s on earth helped influence rulings made by the council who granted mine rights. The level of the spaceship s on the other planets dictated how successful the family was at sabotaging other family's ships and switching markers in order to obtain other family's mines.

Most of the strategy involved planning when to have a ship embark for a planet some planets such as Neptune and Pluto would take a very long time to travel to and how to utilize the powers of your ships most effectively. I believe this was an Avalon Hill computer game, but can't remember for sure. I played this pc game on the school spectrum computers, from what i remember pod was a red blob thing that you had to tell what to do, for example type pod fly and it flys or pod pop and it pops, a very funny game i wish i could play it again.

Yet another best-selling Sierra series, but this time you are involved in a police department, obviously. The game that started it all! Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale etc.

Portal is an oft-overlooked adventure game. It was heavily hyped prior to its release on TV, radio and magazines about how it was going to "revolutionize" computer entertainment.

In truth, it was less a game than an interactive novel; it was a passable read but torturous to read on the slow 4-color machines of the day especially since after every chapter you had to swap disks.

Nonetheless, it was a noteworthy game because it was the first game that tried to present computer entertainment to the masses as something more than arcade slashfests. Plus, I think it was also the game that coined the term "multimedia". It was a time of darkness. While the sultan is off fighting a foreign war, his Grand Vizier Jaffar has seized the reins of power. Throughout the land, the people groan under the yoke of tyranny, and dream of better days.

You are the only obstacle between Jaffar and the throne Robbie the robot is attemptng to grow a flower. It takes up to about five minutes to grow but Robbie has to fight off the many insects and pests that want to chomp on his beloved plant. But only certain sprays will kill each type of insect. The point of the game Many of the Psygnosis games out for the Atari ST.

Barbarian, Obliterator, Baal, Chronoquest. Although they were from the later 80's, the graphics were stunning at the time. And even though Chronoquest was a text based adventure, it was still fantastic as were many text adventures. Pud Pud flies around looking for 10 puddings? He starts off with 3 hearts as lives, but Mrs Pud Pud can instantly kill him so watch out for her as he flies around the maze screen. The first game starring Wally, the hapless fat chap who want on to star in the sequel, Everyone's A Wally.

Lovely arcade adventure, with some ingenius little sub-games within. Published by Mikrogen. Apologies for double send. This game had a "3D" board which cubert or q-bert possibly used to avoid falling objects whilst attempting to change the colour of each cube by landing on it. The round thing looks like ant eater and jumps around on a pyramid type thing changing its colors. Spectrum version of Paradroid, but in 3D.

Much of the same gameplay, you had to either shoot, blast or take over the enemy robots the latter being a strategy bit. Very, very good game with a great intro tune pushing the limits of the little speaker in the Speccy. Car game that allowed players to customize both the tracks including gravity controls and the cars.

In destruction mode players had access to things such as oil slicks. Commodore computer game a rat eats a bunch of cheese similiar to a pac man style game. A C64 cartridge game where you controlled a mouse running around in a top-down maze eating cheese ala Pacman only before pacman came out.

If my memory serves me correctly this game didnt even use sprites instead relying on the C64s built in symbols to construct the maze, mice and cats. You started this game, a bum. Not sure how much money. You went back and forth through stages collecting money, jobs, etc, trying to avoid jail till you earned, I think, 2 mill. This game gave you a chance to use a rocket launcher if you picked the angle right to blow up commies and take over Russia one city at a time.

Now - they are friends! This is definitely one of the best games ever made. The scenario is from the Cold War, back in the days when the Soviet Union existed.

And of course they're up to no good. In fact, a nuclear attack on the good old US of A is imminent. Your task? To stop the attacks by destroying all Soviet launch sites and finally lead an assault on the Soviet Defense Center. Here is a link to a page dedicated to it. An awesome C64 game where you assumed the identity of John Rambo. You started out at a crashed helicopter and had to make your way around killing vietcong left and right with your bow and arrows.

Spectrum 48K game. You're a magician turned into a frog, and have to make your way through levels of dungeons filled with magical nasties. You can take on magicians in a strategy battle using and collecting runes that make you more powerful. Similar to Quazitron, and just as enjoyable. But its 2D, and unexplored sections of levels remain dark.

Softalk readers' Most Popular Program of I dont know when this came out but I remember playing it when I was 5 Primer for school, had a lot of minigames. I dont remember much else. Incredible for C64 game that was well ahaed of its time. Synopsis: The Soviet Union, under severe pressure after destruction of one of their biggest oil refineries, must secure a new source of oil, and to do that, they must disable the West And the only way NATO can prevent that from happening is to reinforce their forces with convoys from the US and other countries.

You are in command of one of the US attack submarines. You must hold the ocean against the Soviet navy at all costs, or the land battle will go badly. Part submarine simulator, part dynamic campaign, and part WW3 simulation, Red Storm Rising is an amazing look at modern warfare.

Maybe not the first computer adventure game based on an sf novel but it was one of the most famous during the 80's even if the company putting it out Tellarium wasn't. Follows Arthur C. Clarke's novel pretty closely. For floppys back then that translates into still less than 1 meg. But a lotta adventure plus two action type games that actually get incorporated into the story mostly involving landing the ship on RAMA.

Came out for AppleII and Commodore Land your spaceship on alien worlds to rescue downed pilots and gather space junk. By Activision for the C Back when realtime 3D meant SubLogic's flight simulator in wireframe, at 1 one! The premise: Land on the planet Fractalus and rescue downed pilots.

But don't be too quick to let that humanoid form running towards you into your ship; it might be an enemy Jaggi in disguise and when that thing pops up on to your screen for the first time, you will jump. You fly a helicopter and send tanks and jeeps and vans to destroy an enemy base. In-between the bases are automatic machine guns and little buildings with exploding balloons tethered to them.

You have to fly your helicopter and assist the ground forces across to take over the other base. Graphic adventure with a real noir quality. You played as "Blade" who was investigating an Asian mob boss intent on destroying the city.

SSI released this post-nuke game. Loot cities, find gang members, rule entire towns, all while finding the scientists working on the cure to a mysterious disease. You could do things like visit Disneyland or California's wine country but not without consequences. Came out with a sequel - Roadwar Europe. Just makes it into the 's. It's WW2 and you play the superhero Rocket Ranger.

Your mission: to stop Hitler and his evil cohorts from global domination. The game play was a combination of strategy and arcade action and revolved around placing spies in different countries to discover Nazi secret plans, and then flying there for a bit of biffo. It had a definite boys-own feel about it, like shooting down a zepplin to save a defecting German rocket scientist and his Best bit: if you lost the Nazi flag was unfurled down the front of the Whitehouse!!

Early 'rasslin game had surprisingly good play and alot of moves. You could be a hillbilly, a leather dude, a blonde dude, a masked dude or a punk dude. A "game" for the old Apple 2e's we had in grade school-You controlled a little orange raccoon named Rocky and helped him to attach a variety of components together to make a machine to solve a problem.

The game itself was pretty simple, but if you beat the game you got to go to a room with a large amount of components to make your own Rube Goldberg-esque machines. A Amstrad game by Amsoft Software, the object of the game was to find your way around a underground maze of scelingtons, vampires, bats, mummies, bugs, ghosts e. I used to play this on an Adam computer. There were 2 different parts of it. One part you had to serve root beer to customers as they appeared and disappeared along the bar.

Every certain amount of levels this dude who looked like the hamburgler would pop up and shake 4 out of 5 cans of root beer and switch them all around. You had to pick out the one he didn't shake. You were in control of a turret in the middle of the screen that started with it's gun pointed straight up. If a paratrooper landed he walked over to your turret and stood there.

When enough landed they would form a human pyramid kind of like what cheerleaders or gymnists do and jump on your turret destroying it. As the game advanced the plane flew faster and if they flew low fast it was hard to get the paratroopers. Great game. Spectrum game where you were a pith-helmeted adventurer wandering round the jungle trying to find the 4 parts to an amulet to allow you out of the exit. This was the first in the series that included Underwurlde also very good and Knight Lore.

Sabeteur came out on the Amstrad. You had to run around killing guards and eventually plant a bomb, then escape I could never get that part. You could get weapons and stuff from boxes round the place, and of course you were a ninja, so killing guards wasn't so hard.

Dogs were the worst bit Great early computer chess game! We've come a long way, baby!!! These were five games for the Commodore Vic 20? They were all in text form, and everything that was given was needed no red herrings. I don't remember the fifth. They were great fun! Another game by seirra in which you have to do a bunch of things like all other seirra games, but in this one you are searching for elvis!

Great game for some mindless fun. Agent vs. You'd travel from town to town on train, and go to info booths in town capitals to see where the Fuzz had spread, and were given projected forecasts of its spread. To win, you had to defeat the Fuzz TV by having crystals and running into it.

Always a good stragetgy to let some citizens take your crystals to help you in your goal. Truly an early eighties classic, and you really needed to know your US geography. You're a serpent in a maze with computer serpents also.

You started from Spain, like Columbis, and discovered the New World. You could trade with the natives or you could fight them into submission. The point of the game was to find the fabled Cities. I think the quickest I ever finished it was in 'only' a week. It also came with a world creator that would draw a new world to explore.

It was revolutionary at the time with it's stereo sound and paralax scrolling! Simply amazing for a home computer game! Yes it is tough to play, but still was great and sold very well. It really showcased what the Amiga was capable of. It was in black and white, and soooooo simple.

You basically played air hockey against different aliens with varying degrees of difficulty. I had this game on my first computer ever! Great for early SID music lovers of the time. All music 3 voices would be visually dispayed on a keyboard, note by note, while the song played.

You could get songs inputed from others, or take the long and arduous route of putting them in yourself. A definite classic displaying the full capabilities of the SID chip. I use to play this game on a friend's Amiga back in the mids, you were controlling a USN sub in the Pacific during WWII, hunting for japanese surface ships, pretty cool.

Very detailed, vast game. My friend and I once tried to sail from the Phillipines to Hawaii, but only made it to Midway. You could either be a helicopter or a tank on the ground, and could select 2 player mode with one joystick controlling the helicopter and the other controlling the tank.

Totally addictive on my C64! The classic game that started the whole SIMS franchise. A major time waster. In this game you flew a spaceship through a cave. You had to make it through the cave with less than "hits". The cave was filled with guns and rocket launchers that you either had to destroy or avoid. There were also force fields that you could blow up or go through very fast. It was a really cool game but I don't think I ever got past the third level.

Very simple floor plan game, smileyface characters, searching for a murderer and clues. This game was a ever growing colored snake in bad graphics. The game could be played for two players, alone or againgst the IntelliVision game console.

The game was a real time-spender. Today, this game still exists in all the newer Nokia cellular phones It originated in Also the most annoying game music EVER!!! Stomping sneakers and other creatures requires varying techniques. Detective games where you got to drive with the space bar! Basically, the game features a little tank at the bottom of the screen which you control, and you shoot at the various little aliens at the top of the screen.

The aliens moved in different circular paterns across the screen, making it a little more entertaining than Space Invaders. The Space Quest series, one of the better Sierra games, stars the janitor who loves to take naps in the broom closet Roger Wilco. As his ship is taken over by hostile aliens, he must find a way to save his home planet, barter with a slimy old alien, and keep his skin intact while keeping his cool.

Another series from Sierra, where a couple of interstellar punks in their little ship have to save the galaxy repeatedly from an evil mastermind and according to the box,his "evil cartridge software company"!

A space adventure game for the c64 on 4 discs if I remember right. You start off on a little cargo ship with no weapons and no direction, until you navigate from planet to planet completing missions along the way until you uncover a plot to destroy a planet which you must save It was good 2b moderator!!

C64 game where you had to navigate a flying taxicab around a series of platforms to pick up and drop off fares top earn money and points. A fun waste of time. An alien-like creature uses various pulleys, lifts and levers to deliver pizza to his impatient friends.

This is the only computer game I remember in any detail. I forget what computer system it was made for, I know that it was a cartridge and the monitor was the TV screen that you hooked up to the computer. The character was a spring, and using the arrow buttons he had to defeat all the levels, avoiding the enemies. I remeber it well, as my dad played it more than I did, almost to an obsession-like status. To this day, if Springster is mentioned, he reminds us all that he beat the game had to get to level 50 then back down again?

How do you operate a super-modified James Bond style car equipped with smoke screens, oil slicks, machine guns and missles armed with only a single button joystick? Plug in a second joystick, use your big toe on the button and cycle weapons by pressing the space bar! This is an old apple game from 's.

You were a spy a hat and two feet. Black vs White! The MAD Magazine duo trying to get the secret docs and fly away while setting booby traps to foil their opponent. Squeek was a little pink ball of fluff that had to turn all the blue tiles on each level to pink by running over them.

Lots and lots of levels at least 50 that got progressively harder with slippery ice tiles and various opponents trying to stop him. Great game, wish I knew where to find it.

Still think about it after more than a decade! Those were the very first 4X space games for the 8-bit computers! I couldn't believe now, how a tiny speck of dot representing a plasma torpedo blinking closer and closer, chasing my own ship could create such tension and terror back then. CB I was the tactical portion, with individual ships jockeying for position to fire against the weakest enemy's shields while CB II was the strategic, planets and systems combat.

Gamers would spend hours designing ships with shields for different facing with different strengths, placing different weapon systems with different ranges covering different arcs! I remembered a rear-firing torpedo with a tight firing arc used to be an extremely nasty surprise for your enemy who thought he just blast through your weakest rear shields and coming in for the kill.

First baseball game that played the national anthem, had a strange isometric view from the first base side, forced you to choose a reliever at the 7th inning heat or knuckler? In it you took control of a very Star Trekkish-like ship in an advanced simulation for the time.

Your goal was to defend the starbases in your quadrant against the Zylon invaders. The Zylons attacked with fleets of up to 4 ships in each sector. You had to hunt them down and kill them before they could surround your starbases. This game was pretty well unsurpassed until Elite was released. The C64 version of the classic arcade. No vector graphics though; everything was raster e. That, along with the one button joystick made shooting those Tie Fighters increasingly difficult, but with practice you got pretty good at it.

All that was missing was the digitized voices of Obi-wan "may the force be with you" and Darth Vader's "I have you now," and of course Luke's "I've lost R2. In Stellar 7, you drive the Raven, the most advanced Terran fighting vehicle. You are up against Gir Draxon and his evil Arcturan army. You will go from star system to star system, fighting his forces. When the enemys have been destroyed, a mothership flies overhead and beams down the Guardian of the star system, a giant enemy ship.

When you reach the Arcturus star system, you will fight Gir Draxon! This game is played from a first person view looking out from the cockpit of the Raven. It is in true polygonal 3D. I had this one one my Apple IIe. It was an educational game for kids, or so it was advertised if I recall correctly. I remember shooting down floating objects and trying to navigate the Stickybear in his hot air balloon up out of the screen, dodging things trying to hit him. I'm reaching way back here But it was fun for kids!

A real fun game which was made in You could buy cars from the 30's to the 60's. Then you fix the junker up and race it against other racers in the game for money and even their car. The object of the game is to race "The King" and get his car. It was moderately easy but the sequel to it is much better and harder. Basketball, soccer, baseball. You picked a team from a collection of derelicts that resembles today's kids: hats sideways, pants too large, etc Basketball took place in Harlem with graffiti everywhere.

You played soccer in the streets with cars. Baseball was in an empty lot with things like garbage cans for bases, etc Every kid in 5th grade who had this thought he was a porno god. First, you create your own track or select one of the ones that comes with the program. Then you pick a car, then an opponent, then your opponent's car unless you picked the clock. Then, you race around the track after answering a question about the manual unless you ran the ST.