My favourite retro games

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This page is a list of my favourite retro games, some 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 neat mechanic to reward 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. Fun fact: neither the boot logo or boot sounds are static assets. 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.

It's interesting on writing this list that for many of these games, what came to mind most was how good their sound track is. The PSX took full advantage of the CD format for audio. Keep in mind you could pop a lot of these discs in a regular CD player and listen to them.

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. The best 2D game on PSX. The voice acting was panned, but I've always loved it--it just adds to the campy gothic Meatloaf vibe. But enough talk, have at you!
• 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 - My favourite racing game backed by metal tunes.
• Die Hard Trilogy - again, the soundtrack.
• 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 title screen music more than the game, which I found punishingly hard. A friend sunk serious time into this though and I was very impressed when he unlocked Cloud Strife as a secret character.
• Spyro (the whole series looks great)
• 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 2
• Twisted Metal 2 - My all time favourite game. I have played it a lot. Great OST, I recommend tracks 1 (Intro), 2 (LA), 4 (Paris), and 8 (Holland) to understand the vibe of the game.

🚧 Under construction 🚧