My favourite retro games
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This page is a list of my favourite retro games, most of which still hold
up well and are fun to play today (circa 2023) despite being over 20 or
even 30 years old.
🚧 Under construction 🚧
MS-DOS, Commodore Amiga, 486, and/or Pentium PC
- Civilization 2 & 3
- Dune 2
- Masters of Orion 2
- Sid Meier's Pirates!
- SimAnt
- SimCity 2000
- The Ancient Art of War in the Sky
- The Settlers 2
Sega Mega Drive (aka Sega Genesis)
-
Mega-Lo-Mania - has a great mechanic that rewards efficient
play
Sony PSX
The original PlayStation was not my first console, but definitely was and
still is my favourite. I cannot overstate my love of the
reverb-laden boot sound. If you are running a PSX emulator, you might notice without an official
bios the game will run without showing the proper boot screen when it
starts. Be sure to fix that. Actually, I will provide some tips and useful
links on emulating PSX in future.
Sony also made
this great 'I am the wolfman' TV advert
for the PlayStation. I remember it as an advert for PS1, but looking now
it was actually PS2. Here's the full short-film the advert came from:
Wolfman, by Tim Hope. There are
other gems
too--I do recommend
Mountain.
- Ace Combat 2
- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
-
Crash Bandicoot (the whole series) -
the first level in Crash 3 Warped
is the first thing I try to get going when setting up an emulator. That
music :chef's kiss:
- Colony Wars
- Command & Conquer & C&C Red Alert
- Destruction Derby 2
- Die Hard Trilogy
-
Final Fantasy VII - I was lucky enough to play this when it
came out. It's such a great and iconic game, though I probably perfer
the Switch version today because you can skip random battles. That said,
the graphics on the Switch version are a bit jarring, with sharp 3D on
blurry 2D backgrounds.
-
Final Fantasy Tactics - It's possible I love the soundtrack
more than the game, which I found punishingly hard. A friend sunk
serious time into this though and I was very impressed when he got Cloud
Strife in his party.
- Spyro (the whole series)
- Tekken 3
-
Theme Hospital - The game is probably better on PC, but I've
been playing the PSX port on my Vita.
- Tenchu
-
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 & 2 - Great games and showed off
the power of CDs with their soundtracks.
- Twisted Metal 2
🚧 Under construction 🚧