Betrayal at Krondor (PC)

“I need to take a step back in time and try most of these. Growing up I seem to have missed a few big ones...only one of the 5 of you picked I actually played, which is Quake.

I actually own Ultima Online...new and still sealed in wrapper. I won it in at one of the ctrl-alt-del lan parties a couple years ago...but figured it's one of those games that was amazing for its time, but just wouldn't translate over the years.”

“@colliny2k Krondor is now freely downloadable (legally) online somewhere. I tried it out again and it is impressive, but it does show its age quite a bit. If you can get past that, its pretty damn good still.

Baldur's Gate is still freaking amazing. Another great one (maybe even better?) is Planescape.

I'm not sure how well UO has translated. Its still maintained and they just released another content pack, so that's pretty cool. They also have a 3d-hybrid client that I think is supposed to work pretty well.

And FFII is still well worth playing.

One thing I've noticed about older games is that they are actually hard! New games step you through simple tutorials, have tons of carebear stages and easy monsters. Everything is also intutitive and well explained. Older games (for better or worse) don't have this and aren't as welcoming to new users always.

I'm playing Fallout 1/2 right now and DAMN, those are 100x harder than Fallout 3. Fallout 3 I didn't die until I was out of the vault and ran into a super mutant while all I had was a crappy rifle. Fallout 1, there's a good chance of dying on your first monster. ”

“Quake blew me away. I ran it on a very low end PC, slow LAN and it still looked great.”

“Man, some RPG madness in there. I keep trying to put together my top 5 but that is a small list :)”

“@a2nt Yea, I remember that it was the de-facto lan party game because it could run on nearly anything unless you had a 386SX or 286.

I also remember when Sony came out with their first netbook like computers in 1996 dreaming about getting a tiny computer to run Quake on and travel. ”

“@ChangeAgent Yea its definitely RPG heavy, but I was really thinking about what influenced me. I've been really happy to see a lot of newer games incorporate RPG elements (levels, skills, etc) even if they aren't RPGs.

I had an NES/SNES and C64 when I was a kid, but never got as much into the newer systems until recently. I missed the N64/Playstation thing and was entirely PC then. Zelda 1 was influential on my imagination more than anything else, but not as much for story, depth or gameplay.

Other things that were big for me were Nethack, Braid, 7th Guest and early Sierra games.

I'm REALLY enjoying playing through the new Monkey Island game too. I <3 Steam. ”

“Baldur's Gate = teh awesome. Can you say 'Butt Kicking for Goodness'?

I'm glad you also included Betrayal at Krondor. One of the best RPG's of the 90's, but mostly forgotten. Great game. They tried to make a sequel but forgot about everything that made the first one so good...”