Nostalgia: The games we loved (...some of them)

A couple of nights ago we were out for drinks with friends and after the usual alcoholic beverages, while relaxed, we started talking about games that we loved. After some time into the discussion I realized that not one of the games mentioned was not among the ones that you find into today's shelves. We got nostalgic about games that offered pure fun when games was not a multi-billion dollar industry. These games where about atmosphere, gameplay, story and challenge, without requiring a 5-hundred-dollar graphics card and the game boxes were made out of paper and were coming with much more than a 4 pages manual. I will try to mention as many as I can remember from the ones we mentioned without any particular order:

Daggerfall (1996)
The biggest, baddest, hardest RPG ever made. A friend spend two years playing itwithout following the main story and he has still not finished. A gem coming to us from 1996. The second game on the elder scrolls series, before Oblivion, before morrowind. Let me just say that in its world morrowind was but a small island on the map.Yea...that big.


Loom (1990)
One of the first Lucas Arts advenure games. A fairytale were riddles are solved with music and fantasy has no limits. It was rather small compared to games of its age but yet it was extremely enjoyable. Highly recommended.


Gabriel Knight Series(1993,1995,1999)
My personal favorite sierra adventure series. Mystery, supernatural and horror coming from the Jane Jensen's mind. Carefully woven stories mixing historical facts with myths ensure of excellent atmosphere and challenging riddles. Gabriel Knight, the shadow hunter, is solving mysteries keeps the worlds safe from evils. Me favorite is the second one, The Beast Within, were he hunts werewolves in old castles in Germany.


Albion (1995)
This 1995 RPG managed to combine technology with magic to create a unique atmosphere and gameplay. It was played, both, in 3rd and 1st person perspective. It had a big extra terestrial game world full of dungeons and puzzles featuring a deep storyline.


Defender of the crown (1986)
My favourite strategy game on my 8086 computer. When it first came out for the amiga everyone was looking at its gorgeous graphics with the mouth open, drooling. Create your army, save damsels, take part in sword fights and sieges to save England from the evil Normands. I must admit that I still play this game with the same enthusiasm as I did when I was a kid.


Lords of Midnight (1984)
In my opinion the best game Sectrum ZX had to offer. A mix of adventure strategy and RPG in the biggest world 48 Kilobytes of memory could hold. Fantastic atmosphere and challenging game play ensure hours of fun. The original game box included a book containing the manual, a
small story to get you into the game and the map of the world which was essential in order to plan your campaign. If you want to enjoy this you can still can using the fatastic and faithful port Icemark did for Dos using dosbox. I still have not managed to beat the game...but I will some day.

Spectrum ZX -The greatest home computer of all time

Ok, I admit it. I love my old Spectrum ZX it is the greatest home computer ever made. Maybe its 48 Kilobytes of memory is nothing compared to todays computers but in its day it was a spectacular machine. Throughout the 80's it was the king of home computing (some might say it was Commodore 64 but who cares? Our speccy was king). Thousands of published games including adventures, platformers, puzzles and action flicks kept many awake in front of their TVs or monitors playing. Classic games like Manic Miner, Elite and Lords of Midnight created a stream of followers.

Most of Spectrum computers used tapes as their input/output device. Some of the later models used disks but you could connect them to a tape recorder to play your old software. In order to get a game running you had to load the tape, press play and wait until the speccy loaded all the data from the tape on its memory. This could take from a couple of minutes to a quarter of an hour, so stop moaning about the loading time of your computer. In order to save the progress in a game you had to take the game tape out put on a blank one and press record and I do not need to say how you loaded a saved game. The original spectrum ZX (yes the one with the rubber keys) did not have its own tape recorder and you had to hook it up to an external one. Later models such as the ZX Specrum +2 had build in recorders. There was no monitor per se. You would connect the spectrum on to the TV (much like todays consoles) and that was you monitor. It was much like BYODKM(bring your own display keyboard monitor) computers today, even though the keyboard was on the computer case and there was no mouse and you had to bring your own tape recorder...hmm, well not much like, but you had to bring your own stuff as well.


From time to time, when I get nostalgic (or retro crazy), I like to take my old spectrum out of its box, plug it on the TV and play. I do not care about the 15 colors or the beeping sounds because the games had a more real feeling than today and they were pure gameplay. Reading line upon line on “The Hobbit”, trying to get into the barrel to escape from the elve's prison you had to use your imagination. Playing lords of midnight gathering your armies in its huge map (an excellent technical achievement in its time) trying to defeat the dark lord its more exciting than any of today's RTS. Ok, enough. I got carried away. You get the point.

Further on Spectrum ZX:
World of Spectrum- Game roms, documents, reviews an more
Spectrum ZX on Wikipedia