Old computer game list 90s

Dark Forces can be bought on gog. Master of Orion is the first true space 4X game, and arguably still the best. Its ultra-streamlined interface, the result of exhaustive playtesting, makes it a pleasure even by modern standards, and the graphics, while dated, retain their pixel-art charm.

You can get Master of Orion on Steam or on gog. Twenty-plus years on, Thief: The Dark Project remains the definitive stealth game. Its graphics haven't aged well, but everything else has.

The sound design holds up beautifully, the gameplay can be as violent or nonviolent as you like true experts prefer "ghosting" their way through a level without even knocking guards unconscious , and creeping past moaning zombies can be an unbearably tense experience.

Add to the mix sprawling nonlinear levels, evocatively moody cutscenes, and an imaginative steampunk world, and you've got a straight-up classic. Thief and its sequels also worthwhile are available on gog. Most first-person shooters take place in realistic or futuristic environments. But Hexen takes the first-person genre to a fantasy world.

Once you choose from three classes, you will be released into a world of magic and danger, fighting your way through multiple levels before the final boss encounter.

Although the game might not look great today, there are several mods you can use to improve the graphics. With mods to improve the graphics, the game still holds up fairly well mechanically. Hexen: Beyond Heretic is available for purchase on Steam. In Civilization , once you build your spacecraft and head for the stars, your problems are over.

In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri , they've just begun. You'll have to contend with colonists of other factions, as well as the organisms of a strange and hostile world, if you want to secure your civilization's future beyond its terrestrial cradle. Many still consider Alpha Centauri the apex of the 4X strategy genre. You can buy it on gog. The second CRPG made with the now-legendary Infinity Engine, Planescape Torment released with somewhat less fanfare than its predecessor Baldur's Gate , but it has since developed a reputation as almost the platonic ideal of good RPG writing.

You play the Nameless One, a restless wanderer who is blessed or cursed? As you quest for information about your origins against the wildly imaginative backdrop of Sigil, the City of Doors, you are joined by an eccentric band of traveling companions, including a bad-tempered thief with a flicking tail and an Irish brogue, and a wisecracking floating skull.

You can get it on gog. While most real-time strategy games were limiting themselves to a 2D map, Homeworld boldly leapt into the third dimension, imagining what combat might be like in the emptiness of space, where craft can move up and down as easily as left and right. The distinctive gameplay is complemented by wonderfully atmospheric visuals and music. No other game, RTS or otherwise, feels like Homeworld. The tastefully remastered version is available on gog.

The first Star Control was a fun head-to-head space-combat game, descended from the original Space War , that had a rather perfunctory strategic wrapper. The second game was vastly more ambitious, building upon its predecessor's core to create a galaxy-spanning adventure in which you sought to free Earth from domination by the malevolent, squidlike Ur-Quan.

Almost universally beloved, Star Control II retains a place in its fans' hearts as one of the very best computer games ever made.

You can get Star Control II with the first game bundled for good measure on gog. Everyone loves a good Star Wars game, and Star Wars: TIE Fighter was one of the first on the PC, and its unique premise - putting you to work for the bad guys - made it an instant standout. It is known in the video game community as one of the best space-combat simulators ever made.

The energy system is configured so that players can't have everything running on full power at once. As a result, players must decide whether to put their energy into shields, engines, or weapons. Each has a pro and a con, so different strategies are required for different battles.

Bolstered by a well-thought-out literary backstory, Krondor featured some of the strongest writing yet seen in a videogame and an engaging tactical combat system. You can find Betrayal at Krondor on Steam and on gog. There were a lot of cyberpunk games coming out in the mid-'90s, but a lot of them were dour and pretentiously self-important.

So it's like a breath of fresh air to see one that actually has a sense of humor. Beneath a Steel Sky brings a Douglas Adams-esque tongue-in-cheek wit to its dystopian world. Its point-and-click puzzle gameplay is definitely tailored for adventure aficionados, so be prepared for a little frustration if you aren't a genre maven. An added bonus is that the game's cutscene artwork is done by Dave "Watchmen" Gibbons.

Best of all, it's totally free! The follow-up to genre-founding s space sim Elite , Frontier was a fantastically ambitious game in the s and it's still impressive. Whole solar systems including ours are rendered in real time, with orbits changing and planet surfaces accessible. Decades later, No Man's Sky created something of the same feel, but without the sense of scientific authenticity that Frontier still commands.

To the lamentation of fans , Frontier can't be purchased nowadays. Modern successor Elite Dangerous is in some ways a much better game, but in other ways, not quite the same experience. A huge, 3D, third-person open world, populated by NPCs who can be spoken with and seem to be going about their own lives. A trippy sci-fi storyline involving parallel universes, high technology, and intrigue.

A mount you can ride, enemy-infested fortresses you can approach from multiple angles, and a plethora of powerful objects to aid you in your quest. Such a melange of action gameplay, RPG mechanics, and ambitious world-building may be par for the course nowadays, with GTA and Assassin's Creed titles dominating sales charts, but in it was a breathtakingly bold experiment.

A few quirks aside, the gameplay still holds up, and there's the added bonus of one of the very best musical scores ever composed for a videogame. You can get Outcast here. If the blocky voxel graphics are too much to bear, there's also a gorgeous, albeit pricier, modern update. The result was a fascinating mixture of well-researched facts and speculative fantasy. The game unfortunately didn't do well enough to engender sequels, but it remains a beloved oddity among devotees of the genre.

You can get Darklands on Steam and gog. After Panzer General was a monster hit, the big brains at SSI decided to take the same formula and game engine, but populate it with bog-standard fantasy elements like wizards, dragons, and mounted knights. Gamers more at home with Tolkien than with histories of Operation Barbarossa could get in on the hex-map fun.

Did it work? It worked. You can get Fantasy General on gog. Jordan Mechner is best known as the creator of the Prince of Persia platformer games, but he tried his hand at the adventure genre with this cult classic set on the eve of WWI. While many games of the era tried to take advantage of CD-ROM by cramming lousy live-action cutscenes into the gameplay, The Last Express 's rotoscoped animation has aged far better. It remains an enigmatic title whose reputation greatly exceeds its disappointing commercial reception.

Photo: id Software. Photo: Microsoft. Photo: Blizzard Entertainment. Photo: Electronic Arts. Photo: Valve Corporation. Duke Nukem 3D. Photo: Gearbox. Photo: Rockstar North. Unreal Tournament. Photo: Epic. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Photo: LucasArts.

If you like Zelda , you like A Link to the Past. More than likely the best and most impactful plot of all the FF games happens here, including several of the best characters. Anyway, VI is an excellent game, probably the most objectively well made and enjoyable in the entire series. Of course, I am nothing if not objective when it comes to these things. Balance, baby. Generally, in this sort of game, different factions just mean slightly differently colored armies fighting the same way.

StarCraft is different. And yet it somehow comes together, and combined with what is still to me a genre high point in voice acting, art design, music and overall tone, StarCraft is still easily my favorite RTS game. The craziest thing about Chrono Trigger is that it might be the best thing Akira Toriyama was ever involved with. He made Dragon Ball. The good one.

Your choice. Notably based at least somewhat on Twin Peaks , Awakening is still probably the weirdest Zelda , surreal and dreamlike, a confusing sequence of non-sequiturs piled on top of one another.

Your parents have played it. Your dog knows where the warp tunnels in World are. Yes, yes it does. It sold 20 million copies, at least. Regardless of what you think about the Zelda games, this is one of titles from the 90s that irrevocably changed gaming. Anyone my age remembers exactly where they were when they first saw that intro.

It really opened your eyes to the kinds of adventures 3D gaming could bring you, riding free and unbridled across an endless open field. That being said, Ocarina does suffer a bit from what we would eventually come to know as linearity. Some of them are great ones. None of them were this one. Legendary, even. The other end of the mid-late 90s 3D Nintendo spectrum lies here, in Super Mario 64 , inarguably the first great 3D game. What it is is the purest distillation of platform gaming maybe ever.

It still handles like a dream, an incredible feat given it was developed and played exclusively for the Nintendo 64 controller, the greatest danger to the collective thumbs of pre-teens ever created. What Mario 64 tried to do was really conceptualize the allure of 3D gaming to the world. What it ended up doing was define that concept, and nearly perfect it.

To come so close on your first try is a remarkable feat, and results in one of the very best games of the s. Behold, the best platformer of all time. Or at least the most aligned with my taste. Still, there are platforms and you can jump onto them. Super Metroid is a platformer.

But why is it my favorite? The Metroid games were some of the first games to really embrace exploration as a major mechanic. There are secrets everywhere. You only have to look. Look through some of the most vibrant, colorful and interesting backdrops in the whole of gaming while fighting for your life against weird, grotesque foes on strange worlds as some of the best music in the history of the medium leads you on and on, deeper and deeper.

As much as I can reckon, Metal Gear -style storytelling has always been a thing in gaming. Sure, he sometimes designs and writes female characters with the mindset of a 13 year old boy.

Sure, his particular style is particularly resistant to the language barrier. All of that seems to not matter as much when you realize that this game — almost single handedly — pollinated popular gaming with deeper themes like the dangers of nuclear proliferation, post-traumatic stress in action heroes, the gluttony of the Military Industrial Complex, hell, even the entire concept of the meta-narrative ; all can be at least somewhat traced back here, to Shadow Moses.

To Snake. To Kojima. Metal Gear Solid did not invent the stealth genre, Thief did, but MGS is still fun and strange and full to the brim of that specific Kojima-style detail and quirk that I still enjoyed the last time I played it in What I will do is try and write out some of the stupid, brilliant things this game does.

I love the sound design of the monsters, the little behavioral ticks that set them apart. Some enemies are slower, with projectile attacks, which a smart player can use to their advantage. I love how complex — almost needlessly so— the maps can be, sometimes making playing with a friend a necessity.

This, like Halo after it, is vastly improved in co-op play. Similarly, the strong design of the enemies, guns, and levels make the original DOOM games at least slightly systemic. You can predict what each individual component of the game is going to do, but not how they will mesh together Halo, especially the first few games, is particularly adept at this.

I love the music. Dear God, the music. Mostly, I love the half-serious vibe of these games. Fan mods of DOOM and its sequel were sometimes far too self-serious.

The original games understand that the best way to make fighting demons from Hell fun is to treat it like an Evil Dead movie, bright and colorful and at least partly dumb as shit.

These games caused no small amount of hand-wringing in the press and among stuffy parents, but anyone who actually played DOOM understood that these games are not meant to be anything resembling a realistic portrayal of anything. Besides, who deserves to get shot in the face more than literal demons? There are other Final Fantasy games with better characters than this. There are other Final Fantasy games with more coherent stories.

There are other Final Fantasy games with tighter battle systems. Part is that it was my first one, the first one that I ever beat. What I worry about with the upcoming Ps4 remake is that contemporary sensibilities will deem a lot of the weirdest interludes in FF7 unnecessary.

I mean all the off-kilter camera angles. Everything to do with Don Corneo, from his goons trying to bang cross-dressed Cloud to Aerith and Tifa threatening to smash his genitals. The Play. Pretty much everything else to do with the Gold Saucer.

The parade at Junon. All of it. So in that way, at least, FF7 is very much a part of its era, singularly and unapologetically It is. The entire first act in Midgar is probably the single strongest section in RPG history. The rest of the first disc plays like a really excellent and weird TV show, with brief sections focused on the backstory of everyone in the party. Sephiroth is a great villain. It has great music. Mixed-Up Mother Goose didn't have a ton of replay value; the point was to sort out all of the nursery rhymes that had gotten "mixed up" and put them back in order, so after you did that once, your work there was done.

However, the world in which the game existed was so delightful that I played it over and over again as a small child. Many other people seem to remember these games fondly, though, so I think they deserve an inclusion here. Like many educational games, 's Treasure Mountain — a creation of The Learning Company, like the Reader Rabbit series — involved solving riddles that led you to keys that unlocked each successive level.

You also collected treasure as you went, returning it to the chest at the top of the titular mountain once you got there.

A prize was awarded for depositing the treasure back into the chest. Treasure Mountain and Treasure Cove both focused on general reading comprehension and basic math skills; however, other entries in the Super Solvers series tackled more specialized skill sets, including deductive reasoning and logic.

The Castle of Dr. Brain , was a step up from a lot of the other puzzle-solving games out there; they were geared toward slightly older kids, so there was more to each puzzle than simply picking a matching shape or selecting the next number in a sequence. Sierra merged with another educational game company, Bright Star Technology , following the release of The Island of Dr. Brain; the franchise was then handed over to a team from Bright Star, which might explain why 's The Lost Mind of Dr.

Brain and 's The Time Warp of Dr. Brain were so different from the first two entries in the series. The games followed siblings Jake and Jennifer Eagle as they solved mysteries throughout first their hometown, then in London — not unlike a modernized, digital version of Encyclopedia Brown.

If you were a pint-size fan of whodunnits, this was the game for you; it helped you learn how to piece together different pieces of information until a complete picture emerged. Ah, yes: Oregon Trail, the game responsible for countless cases of dysentery, many drownings of oxen who tried and failed to ford the river, and a plethora of memes.

For anyone who grew up playing it, it's the gift that keeps on giving. Speaking of people who grew up playing it, perhaps an unexpectedly large swathe of the population falls into this category. Originally developed in and launched by MECC in , roughly 20 versions of the game have been released since then — the most of which, believe it or not, arrived in as a handheld game similar to the Tiger Electronics games a lot of '80s kids grew up playing.

Ostensibly, it taught kids what it was like to travel the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon in ; practically speaking, though, it mostly taught us about frustration. Putt-Putt Travels Through Time could solely be responsible for your history knowledge today.