The Gelatiman has decided to count down his top 10 of all time and there is going to be some controversy as he shows his age. Anyway, here is the first part counting down from 10 through to 6, more to follow..
Gelatiman’s Top 10 PC Games of All Time.
10). Wolfenstein 3D – 1992
The game that kicked off the First Person Shooter revolution, and made me believe my PC was a bit more capable than a good Commander Keen rig! Wolf 3D taught me to strafe, shoot, and search for hidden passages all at once. Watch out for those blue machine gunner dudes! Graphics-wise she was a thing of beauty. Groundbreaking pixelated sprites would scale to give the impression of a closer object. A nice colour palette gave the game a cartoony but pleasant look.
Wolf 3d also gave me a reason to crank up my 16 bit ISA Sound Blaster with beautiful war-era musical scores with some impressive (but slightly daleky) voices. A classic.
9). DOOM – 1993
Something happened to me when DOOM came out. I went from being a fairly happy-go-lucky 15 year to a nervous jittery wreck. At the time this game was utterly terrifying. The dark lighting, the demons that would come out of nowhere, the screams, even just seeing the word “DOOM” in uppercase makes me recall this special but spooky time!
Another FPS yes, and perhaps the spiritual successor to Wolf 3d – but with some added realism. Monsters could shoot at you from atop ledges. Plasma bursts would seemingly illuminate a room. Conserve ammo whatever you do or some big hairy orange giant eyeball demon will pull your pants down. A classic, pumping heavy metal soundtrack added real urgency to the game. Alas, my 2MB of RAM could not contain the beast that is DOOM, and I had to beg my parents to buy me another 2MB; just so I could run it. That was all fine and good but with a 386 SX-25 and a half megabyte graphics card I was limited to running the game in pretty much the smallest window in low detail mode. Who cared though – I had DOOM!
8).Eye of the Beholder – 1991
A friend of mine introduced me to Eye of The Beholder.That same friend introduced me to Barbarian on the Commodore 64, Golden Axe in the arcade and Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. You might say he sounded like a violent fellow but that couldn’t be further from the truth. He was a trailblazer in the world of hack and slash games. Eye of The Beholder was a hack and slash – if you wanted it to be. Your party could be made up of magic or bow users if you wanted.
The game was at its heart a RPG, and was bought to us by TSR and Strategic Simulations INC. It carried the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons certification, without the stigma of the board game.
Some of the puzzles were real brain teasers – I recall one room I entered only to find myself trapped. It literally took me 2 weeks to get out. The room required me to walk around it in a certain pattern and through walls to be able to come out the other side. Forget intuition here!
The game wasn’t turn based which meant combat was pretty exciting, and meant a fair bit of juggling weapons and spells between characters, get your timing wrong and POW! – the skull and crossbones would appear in the fallen characters portrait and he or she would be no more – that’s unless you carried a cleric in your party with resurrect skills.
7). Dune 2 – 1992
The Godfather of resource management and real time strategy! Pick a House – the noble Atreidies, The Insidious Ordos or the evil Harkonnen, bring your troops to Dune, fire up some Harvesters and mine Spice Melange whilst laying waste to every other
gosh darn race on the planet! I have no idea what happened to the Fremen – I thought you helped them out in Dune 1 so why they don’t make a presence here is beyond me!
Anyway Dune 1 was a completely different game, and excellent in its own right. The step into unknown territory with this game format must have been unnerving for the publishers – but boy did they pull it off. Remember this is the precursor to Starcraft, Warcraft, Command and Conquer, any other top down RTS you can think of.
Its old now, a bit daggy, but unlike the movie I still love it. Nothing like taking a bunch of rocket launchers up the side of the map and startling the surprisingly good AI.
6). The Elder Scrolls 3 –Morrowind – 2002
Morrowind introduced me to the world of Sandbox RPGs and the feeling of freedom in a game. Nothing about the game felt linear. Decisions had lasting effects and everything had to be carefully considered before making any rash judgments. Yes it was fun to launch fireballs at the innocents in the township, but the games Darwin mechanism would step in and make sure you paid for it one way or another!
The character creation and RPG elements were deep, and the combat was gritty and fun. Honestly the game is not that different to Skyrim, that’s how much they got right with this game. But in some ways this game was better. The music was moodier, and something about those purple moonlit starry skies – WOW, if this is Tamriel then I would love to visit; minus the homicidal maniacs of course.
Stay tuned for part 2 where we count down the Top 5..
