There are already people who grew up on Halo 1, who feels nostalgic when they see that game.
I feel nostalgic when I see SimCity 2000 and D/Generation.
I still remember those days when I watched my bro play D/Gen. Yea I watched him play because my reflexes have never been as fast as his. He was the one who went all the way to the last floor of the building but died before we could find the final boss.
D/Generation was a kind-of-3D puzzle/RPG/arcade game that required me to deliver a package to some dude 10 floors above where I arrived. Apparently the entire building was taken over by genetically engineered monsters that have escaped from wherever they were held. The building's automatic defense system had also gone rogue, killing everything that moved.
So the game was all about dodging the defenses and monsters and rescuing hiding survivors and killing the monsters when possible. And we gave up when we didn't save before going through quite a bit (can't remember how much we completed after the last save) and finally reaching the final floor... and died.
Speaking of nostalgic games, I also remember the first console I had was the Game Boy. Nothing much to speak of, really. The best games were probably some card and mahjong games.
Then came Game Gear. Despite the horrendous amounts of batteries it devoured, it had the best games we had ever played. Fortunately we had the power cord for it so batteries were needed only when we were travelling.
The most memorable games must have been Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden. Now Ninja Gaiden is a famous game series, but back then I didn't even know the game by its English name.
Shinobi was our favourite game, probably because its gameplay was the most unique. We didn't really understand the story, but what we gathered from playing was that the Red Ninja had to save his 4 fellow Ninjas and enter Neo City.
Each Ninja was different:
Red Ninja attacked with a simple katana slash and his Ninjitsu was an earthquake that destroys obstacles and kills everyone on the screen.
Pink Ninja threw bombs as the normal attack and could walk on ceilings. (See the puzzle element?) His ninjitsu was a lousy flash that stunned enemies.
Yellow Ninja attacked with a ball-lightning-like thing that could charge up by holding the attack buttons (found it useful only when max) and could walk on water. His ninjitsu was temporary invulnerability. This was the worst ninja in the game, in our opinion. Only useful thing was his ability to walk on water, which was required in some parts of the game.
Blue Ninja was our favourite ninja. His attack was the chain that could kill enemies and could hook onto certain stuff so that he could swing like Tarzan across giant gaps. His ninjitsu turned him into this whirlwind that killed anything it touched and could fly. Basically this was the ninja who could get to almost anywhere and kill everything while it moved.
Green Ninja was the ninja we usually left to the last to get because it really couldn't do much. It flings shurikens at enemies and could double-jump. His ninjitsu was to make himself explode, which was a more powerful version of Red's earthquake. The catch was that it costed 1 life (when we ran out of lives, Game Over).
This is a small bit of my childhood, I guess. While everyone else was watching Sesame Street, we were killing ninjas.
I know this is obvious, but the guy who played it in the video had either lost his touch or just suck. I remember when we played this part of the game, our flawlessness could be taken for granted. On the other hand, we were pretty fanatical about it... Even the music, in my mind it was associated with "EASY".
I always thought the last boss of the Woodland stage was weird. I mean, a giant floating face?
At many parts of these videos, I feel like I'm watching myself play because it was exactly like the way we used to play it.
From 2:18 onwards, I can honestly say that I've never gone past this level before. Everything from that point on was new to me when I watched it.
If you thought that game was easy, you were very wrong. It took an incredibly long time to figure out where to go, which ninja to use at which part and which doors to enter. With the limited number of lives the player had, mistakes meant huge frustration, especially at Neo City. Also, there is no save option in this game, so if we had to stop to do homework/eat, we had to shut it down. Lots of missed opportunities there.
Ninja Gaiden! Not as interesting as Shinobi, really an inferior game. Didn't help that when I was playing this game I had no idea what those English words meant. Nothing in the game helped me understand the plot either but slicing up ninjas is, nevertheless, fun.
The most memorable part was Stage 3, where he climbs between 2 skyscrapers. It was the most exciting part of the game. Now that I'm watching this, it looks rather insane. Those half-naked guys who try to throw kicks at you in that scenario just makes no sense whatsoever.
We may have beaten the final boss. Can't remember. All its 3 forms are familiar to me, but I don't remember the ending. That doesn't mean I never finished it because even if I had beaten the game I wouldn't have understood what it was saying in the ending scene.
Too bad the guy who recorded the 5th stage didn't want to record the ending, and he is the only one to record this part.
Never did buy the sequels of those games even though they made more for Game Gear. We had no idea where to buy them nor did we know of their existence.
Computers came next. I remember my first computer, an IPC computer with 4MB RAM, which my late father gave my bro and I (we shared) when I managed to get good results for the Streaming Exam (Higher Mother Tongue, LOL I never knew what I was getting into until it was too late T.T).
One of the first games to catch our attention was D/Generation. SimFarm was next, then SimCity 2000 and Colonization.
Couldn't find a video of the entire game, but that's probably because it was too long. Anyway this guy looked like he was playing this game for the first time. By the way those red balls are the A/Generations. You can see how they attack, and they are the easiest to defeat.
The B/Generations were blue cylinders that bounce around like the A/Generations, except when they attacked, they moved faster than the A/Generations and stomped you into a pancake.
The scariest was the C/Generations. They would appear as one of the inanimate objects like a vase or a locker, but when you get close they turn into a black humanoid who runs and beheads you. Worse is that they're immune to lasers that kill the A and B/Generations, so the only way to kill them was to lure them into those pink plasma barriers that bounce around.
That was insanely hard because not only could you not pause to wait for the right timing, but the C/Generation could also run faster than you. Actually you could throw a Grenade to kill it, but Grenades were rare and had to be saved for other situations.
The D/Generation was the final boss which I've never seen. I do not know how it ends and what the D/Generation really was.
Colonization was the next big thing, but I believe I have discussed this game before. Back in those days it took so many tries to figure out what structures did what and we had no idea what to do to win. We didn't understand most of the words, so we didn't even know what the objective was at all.
I tried the game a few years ago and finished it within half an hour.
You play as one of the kingdoms that colonized the Americas, to do as they did. The English had more people willing to migrate to the colonies, the French could convert the natives more effectively who help them in their colonies, the Spanish received much more loot when they sack the cities of the natives and the Dutch could sell more goods to their homeland without inducing a raise in taxes.
I've always played as the Dutch. I didn't need more people and I didn't hate the natives. All I did was exploit the Aztec and Inca people by trading my beads for their silver (no gold in the game, strangely enough), then reselling all my silver to the Netherlands. Making a fortune this way, I built a huge army with only 1 or 2 colonies. This made my territories easy to defend and manage, yet didn't make me suck the way it does in the Civilization games.
That was how I beat the game in my most recent try.
They've remade this game as a mod for Civilization IV last year. This is the trailer.
Gameplay was not too different from the original Civilization IV, but the theme was all Colonization.
Gameplay demo in this link.
There were other games in my collection, but I'll get on to those next time.
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