What's your favourite era for video games?
Era can be defined as a console generation, a decade, one specific year, whatever you want. I’d encourage you to give a list of your favourite games from the generation of choice and why it was the best to you. Nostalgia is a totally viable reason too.
I’ll go first. For me, the 360 era is my GOAT. As someone in their 20s, I grew up with the 360 so nostalgia is definitely a big factor. But on top of that, I still feel like the games during that time were some of the best we’ve had. 2011 alone was a fantastic year, with Dark Souls, Skyrim, Portal 2 and many more great games. I was going to list out my favourite games from 2005-2013 but I love so many it would be far too long of a post.
I’d love to hear some of you talk about your favourite time period of games too, whether it’s agreeing with my choice or giving different opinions
LAN parties. I remember the first time I could connect two PC together. It was Doom, with a serial-to-serial cable. We were two players on the same fucking map. It was awesome!
Then coax cable networks with friends. We used to have two or three different networks during a LAN party since you could not disconnect the coax cable to add a player without stopping the current games. The players arrived later would plug a new network just for them, and launch a game waiting the first players to finish theirs.
Yep, we made LAN between three 5 floor houses and we have eventually 10 people in it. That was AWESOME! We are have played: Warcraft 3, cs1.6, quake 3 arena, C&C Generals/Red Alert, Diablo 2, Titan Quest, Disciples II, Heroes of might and Magic III, and freaking World of Warcraft on our private server!
Oh man that must’ve been a great time. Very jealous you got to experience that being brand new!
The Greatest Era of gaming was when I was between 12 and 22. And this is true for everyone no matter what their age is now. Between 12 and 22 I had enough time and energy to game all night and still go to school and none of life’s problems were stopping me
this has gotta be the correct answer
You know what, that’s a great answer. I think you probably hit the nail on the head
The present. I can use emulation to play all my old favorites, often for free, and there's never been such a rich plethora of indie and studio games available.
Very logical answer. What are some of your old favourites you like to emulate?
NES: River City Ransom, Crystalis, Zelda ][
SNES: Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past
GB: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Minish Cap, Tetris
DOS: The Quest for Glory series, ZZT
If you haven't played Terranigma, you should do that. It's on the level of Chrono Trigger in how good it is.
It was never released in North America, so get the PAL ROM along with the NTSC (60Hz) patch from RHDN
I did play that on emulator a decade or so ago. It's part of the same series as Illusion of Gaia, right? I don't really remember Terranigma that well, maybe it's time for a replay.
Yeah, but the stories aren't really connected; they're all standalone games.
Great choices! Some classics there for sure
Adding a separate comment to add, if you've never played it, Super Mario X was a very fun, apparently not-entirely-legal fangame made my Redigit (who went on to create Terraria). He took it down at Nintendo's demand, but you can still find a copy.
I’ll look into it, thanks for the info
Around the turn of the millennium. Games were designed for offline use and had way more immersive campaigns, were shipped by and large ready and bug-free, and so were add-on campaigns.
And since graphics were not as refined as they are now, additional efforts were placed on gameplay.
My top list (by release year):
Never had a console and don't get along with controllers whatsoever, so those are all referring to the PC versions.
Aw man that's a good list!
I've recently replayed Thief and Thief 2, they still hold up well!
Tried Gothic II, and unfortunately the controls feel very clunky today. Or maybe it's just me. But somehow third person view doesn't really work for me anymore.
I recently picked up a few of those games on my pc. Wanting to try Gothic II out soon ish, and Thief 1 & 2 as well soon
For Thief and Gothic II there are unofficial graphic mods out there that improve things massively. They basically replace the original models with those from Thief II and Gothic 3, and also fix some bugs.
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429 - that's a user made campaign for Thief, the thread also has links to all the patches and updates. The campaign is also absolutely great with overwhelmingly massive maps, but you should play the original first.
Awesome, thanks for that! Appreciate it
Gothic 1 is my all time favourite RPG. 2 is everything a sequel “should” be: bigger, some mechanics improvements without losing the core, and (with the expansion) callbacks to 1 and familiar characters. And yet it also lost some of the atmosphere. This is why 1 will always be my favourite.
Despite that, it’s still a great game, and many people’s favourite. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
I really hope you enjoy Thief 1/2! The two are some of my top games of all time and the second one is after 25 years still the best pure stealth game.
As was already said, do make sure to install TFix or T2Fix (depending on the game) to get widescreen/high resolution renderer and just modern hardware support in general.
The era of SCUMM. Point and click adventures were awesome. Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Glory series, Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis.
How is Monkey Island missing from the list? Those games were the peak of SCUMM.
I know, I did try playing them with dosbox years later but I didn't know anyone that had them to borrow the discs so I hadn't played them back in the day like all the ones I named.
Scummvm is much better than the old native interpreter. And the Amiga versions are obviously better than dos though any one should work.
The Scumm Bar®
Hell yea, Indy Atlantis is absolute peak... then again so is most of lucasarts point&click adventure games.
Man I wish the teased sequel for atlantis was actually made :/
The 90s era of gaming, extending to the early 2000s. SNES, Genesis, PC Engine, N64, PS1, PS2, GameCube.
It was the era before the Internet and video gaming became extremely linked. The sheer number of classics that still hold up today, even compared to modern games, are very numerous.
There’s lots of late 90’s-early 2000’s answers here. You’re definitely not alone in that thought
Add one more here. Some of the greatest games came out in that period.
I made before a list of the top 10 games that impacted me the most and a large part are from that period. In no particular order:
The best thing about this reply is that literally none of those games are on my list, since I haven't played any of them (except for a Flash clone of Worms as a kid). That just goes to show the sheer amount of quality gaming that there was.
My list is moreso comprised of console games. In no particular order, and includes some later indie games:
I didn't have any consoles, so couldn't play a lot of those games. But on PC (and on 8-bit computer before that), I played hundreds of games. There were no copyright laws in my country when I was a kid and my dad got everything he could get his hands on. In the 8-bit era he collected over 40 cassette tapes (8-10 games on each). Then when we got the PC there were boxes and boxes of floppy disks (I remember Need for Speed was on over 30 disks). Then CDs came out and I remember one CD that had 200 games on it. And as my dad collected, I tried every single one of them.
I made that top 10 list years ago from some silly Facebook game that was going around at the time. The hardest part was picking just 10. My initial list had about 70 games on it.
Emulation is magical. It's how I discovered most of these games.
Yeah, I remember when I first got ZSNES and suddenly I had access hundreds of games I wasn't able to play before. Played through Super Mario RPG, spent so much time in Harvest Moon, and finally played the first Final Fantasy games and Legend of Zelda.
ZSNES was also how I got into emulation for the first time. Ended up using SNES9x more, though.
Could not play master of orion II
Played birth of the federation before i even heard of master of orion and it ruined it lol
I'm guessing a lot of people grew up in the late 90s to early 2000s, so it's largely nostalgia.
It's not just that. 2023 was a very good year for gaming, right? A lot of the heavy hitters last year were from long-running series. Look and see how many of those series had either their genesis or consensus fan favorite entries in that time period.
Not only that, Steam, Unreal Engine, e-sports, the mainstreaming of game mods, and even AAA development itself all trace back to innovations from that time. Historically, it's a massively important time period for video games.
As is the late 70s and early 80s with arcades, or the start of home consoles, or high fidelity 3d gaming in the 2010s (Xbox 360 and on, Nintendo Switch). Or my particular favorite, the rise of Linux gaming starting in 2013 (Steam for Linux launch) to the release of the Steam Deck.
So why is the late 90s and early 2000s so highly represented here vs those other eras? I think it's because of nostalgia, that's around the time when the likely demographic of Lemmy would be getting into games (i.e. they're old enough to remember the Internet before the last 10-ish years and be mad enough to leave Reddit, but not so old that they're interested in such things).
So that's my hypothesis as to why that era is so popular in this thread.
I loved the PS2 era of gaming a lot. This may be a controversial take, but the PS2 era did not last long enough.
Everything about the aesthetics of the games that the PS2 produced were excellent. In my opinion, this is the point when low fidelity and high quality assets overlapped just enough to make games more comprehensible to their players. That enabled a lot of innovation that the PS3/360 era handled entirely differently. Forget an era, the PS2 is the last part of an entire age of gaming that delineates what I’m referring to.
The PS2 was a huge turning point in what games were and could be in 3D. Prior to this, many games were abstract and the characters were a lump of polygons. With the PS2, this began to change. So we began to get games that our minds had to do a lot of interpreting but could see reality through. Nowadays, I’d argue that your mind does less interpreting and so the resulting picture has glaring inaccuracies.
It also helped that ps2 was primarily played on CRTs or at least plasma which helped the picture look better in plenty of scenes than a PS3. Not to mention the color palette of games after the PS2 turned to muck.
PS2 coincided with a lot of good handhelds too. Nintendo DS is a strong contender for best handheld ever, IMO.
Oh absolutely, I was going to reference the Gameboy Advance that I grew up on as a part of this phase. Unfortunately, I don’t think those handhelds even got their time in the light that they could’ve had. It seems like they’ve had a long legacy but the DS and GameBoy came and went in but two generations of consoles.
I mean imagine what we could do with a gameboy today. Or imagine how we could easily transform a modern phone into a DS form factor. We’re talking now about running a modern resident evil game in the palm of your hand. Insane power really.
All this is largely due to the mobile play stores having no competition or curation. Our mobile games absolutely suck now. There are gems, sure, but otherwise I hate phone gaming despite my phone being my most used device.
I think you’re absolutely correct though, the DS is the best handheld. Slim, powerful enough, very interactive, and a great game library. I highly recommend buying one and modding it, you won’t regret it.
My first console was an original GameBoy and I probably got the most hours of use out of it compared to any other console. Despite the horrific backlight (lack thereof) and small screen. I love handheld gaming in general. Still play my 3DS all the time.
I realize I'm biased having experienced this era at my most influential (as another user easily defined it as ages 12 - 22), but this was definitely it for me. I only had a Gameboy before I finally had a PS2. The big mascot character games of this console were formative for me. Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper. Kingdom Hearts and Shadow of the Colossus were everything to me. Tons of other huge titles made this generation.
But it's the weird little games that I think about fondly. Katamari became a franchise, but it was just a funny novel idea when it dropped on the PS2. Kya: Dark Lineage, an adventure/fighting game absolutely packed with fun ideas from a studio that just made racing games prior. Magic Pengel - basically DIY Pokemon - was pretty much everything I wanted in a game. Even Eye Toy, which completely sucked and barely worked, offered a new way to play games.
Things were just different then. I think it was maybe the last time we thought of games by their budgets. Most titles were what we would maybe call AA these days, something that almost doesn't exist anymore. Where indie games didn't exist yet, but small studios were prolific. For me, any game that let you run around as a fairly detailed 3D character in a cool setting was magic to me in a way the flat, pixelated worlds on my GBC never were. The worlds in my PS2 were believable.
For PC I'd say 1999-2010 was absolutely amazing time to be a gamer. PC parts were dirt cheap, you could overclock the hell out of your hardware, and micro-transactions and pay-to-win didn't exist.
Micro-transactions and pay-to-win are reason enough, those are some of the worst things to come to video games
I think the handheld era is my favorite, it basically ended with the 3DS, but it is the DS which I really can't put down, I am playing for the first time Chrono Trigger on it, and it is my Jump Ultimate Stars machine (Wimmfi), also have some other bangers as well, but I'll bore you if I citate them all.
But hey, don't get me wrong, the current handheld era is good too, we have the Switch, The Steam Deck and a plethora of good quality Chinese handhelds.
Probably the period of '95 thought to '05. Mostly because they were the days of local multiplayer with friends and also the jump in technology made things even more interesting.
Combined we had all the 4 player games on the N64. So Goldeneye, SSB, F-Zero, Mario Kart, Snowboard Kids, DK Racing, Perfect Dark, WCW vs NWO and more.
That must’ve been a great time for sure. I’m jealous I didn’t get to be a teenager through it! That would’ve been a blast
Local multiplayer--especially couch co-op--is a lost art. I definitely miss it.
It's still there but with family instead friends now. My kids won't get the same experience though which is sad.
The Commodore Amiga in its prime was one of the coolest times to be a teenaged gamer. Though NES was a hell of a thing at its time too.
I used to have a friend who had an NES that I’d play sometimes. Good times. I never played an Amiga though; but I am aware of its existence
I'll break from the mould and say early 80s to early 90s, where we got:
That era really defined what video games are, and built the framework for how we talk about games today.
I miss the Amiga 500 in that list. ;)
2004-2014. That captures the great tail end of the sixth generation of consoles and the golden days of the seventh
You make a great argument. That’s basically my choice just with a couple extra years of great games so yeah, definitely. Hard to disagree
My first machine was a ZX Spectrum.
I love the 8 bit games I grew up with but I'm not stuck in that timeframe. I appreciate that I can still play all my old games and the new ones.
I just wish I had more time to enjoy them.
Excluding the 8 bit games, the games where I spent more time are: Doom, Half-life, Portal, Bioshock Infinite, Skyrim.
If I had to choose one, it would be Doom. Such a simple game, so much brainless fun, so many great mods.
I still regularly play the original Doom on my PC. A couple years ago a friend and I found an RTX mod for it that we played a ton. I still play that all the time
Try the Brutal Doom mod if you haven't already for an added dose of violence and gore. Combine it with mods like Eviternity for huge new maps and enemies. Enjoy!
I’ll take a look, thanks!
Okay, below the "=" is my previous answer but I admit it was against the spirit of the post so let me think. I choose the years from the launch of EverQuest to Shadows of Luclin. I consider EverQuest to be the greatest MMO ever made. So my answer is 1999-2002.
To this day I STILL play servers locked at the 2002 version of EverQuest. It's very populated. That should tell you something.
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Got my first console in 89. First PC in 99.
My choice is current year, because it encompasses every year before and the amount of emulator projects is greater than it's ever been.
I can make any system from history with a Saturday of effort.
Plus all the indie games that capture the retro feel. Idk, gaming is in a great spot if you don't bother with big studios.
Is that a lame answer? O well, it's sincere.
Lame? Not really. Cheating? Maybe a little bit but yeah, if we were to go by access to the history of gaming then "current year" always wins.
Yeah, my choice is basically, "all of em" lol.
I like to cheese what can I say.
But idk, no other era had that. Sure we had emulators in 2005, 2010, but nothing like the selection of today.
Nothing wrong with that.
The ability to play all that old stuff is a thing of beauty and seems to be getting stronger, both in practice and as a general concept within the industry, with each passing year. It's great!
I knew I’d get one saying that but honestly it’s the most logical choice and I respect it. I guess in a way that’s probably everyone’s choice
Okay, I thought about it and edited my post with a version in line with the spirit of your question :-)
I like your updated answer! I’m surprised and impressed EverQuest is still populated. That’s awesome. I had a couple friends from college who would play it, and that wasn’t too long ago for me
EQ Live is still populated. But the version I play is called p99, it's a free to play passion project by former players who took the source and run their own custom servers.
The most popular custom servers just happen to be the ones locked at 2002.
pQuarm is the new kid on the block. A server that will lock at PoP.
How beginner friendly is it? I’ve never played it before but free to play passion project sounds awesome
The community is the best of any MMO I've ever played. If people find out you are new, it's not guaranteed, but likely benefactors will find gear to donate to you. Largely because the game is HARD. It's old school MMO. No hand holding. Press the wrong button and attack your own city guard. Hail the wrong demigod and they kill you for bothering them. Dying is often a huge deal (not at first). All that said, difficulty like that breeds community, and the community is like no other game that exists.
DM me and I'll either be a guide for you or direct you to some friends of mine who can recommend starter guilds and such for you. I know quite a few players on p99Green and pQuarm.
I appreciate all the help! I’ve got a few other games to finish up atm but when I find the time to delve into it I’ll send you a DM
'96 to 2014 or so fucking ruled.
Though it's much more heavily concentrated in the 1997-2003 range.
Any particular favourites in the 97-03 range?
Too many to name individually... I played pretty much everything at that time. Ultima Online, Quake 2, everything on the Build engine (Duke3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior, etc), GoldenEye, Ocarina of Time, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid... Shit, I think most of the franchises that continue to exist today started in that period or have some of the biggest hits from then, like FF7, 8 and 9.
I think most eras were decent. I'm especially keen on everything post 8-bit, but pre-"everything is a monetized DLC; fuck you pay me" era.
for me there was a peak in the late 90s. Ocarina of Time and Half Life in 1998 alone.
It's an overlap between the back end of the fourth gen (aka 16-bit) era for consoles and then a full pivot to PC gaming in the years after. I really didn't like the move to early 3D on consoles with their abysmal framerates and load times. I felt then (and still think today) it was a generation too early.
Marking the starting point is easy: 1994. An insane year for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Mega Man X, and Super Metroid all came out in North America that year. That run continued on the SNES until Yoshi's Island in 1996. I did pick up a PlayStation but I wasn't thrilled with it. There are some personal favorites from this time, too, but they still had the sprite art I was desperately missing: games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden, Symphony of the Night, Xenogears.
I'd been a PC gamer for a while, but I started moving more towards the platform with Blizzard's ascendancy with Warcraft II in 1995 and Diablo in 1996. I'd finally get a dedicated GPU in 1998, and what a year for it: Half-Life, Thief: The Dark Project, Unreal, Tribes, Freespace. The less-demanding games of the year were no slouches either: Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2. With a similarly impressive console lineup, it's no surprise many consider 1998 the best year ever for video games.
The endpoint is harder to pin down. Maybe the death of the space sim genre with Freespace 2 in late 1999, or Blizzard's last landmark game before the MMO era, Diablo II in mid-2000. At the very latest, a new era for me definitely began with the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001, where I shifted mostly to PC + handheld platforms, where I'm still at today.
That was a great read. As someone born within that timeframe I didn’t really live through it much, so I don’t have much experience with it, but I like to get a glimpse at what it was like through comments like yours!
'95-'05 with the advent of 3d gaming
Definitely a pivotal moment in gaming for sure
I've been working my way through Atari 2600 games right now, they have over 500 to choose from!
There’s some great games for that. My friend’s dad had one we used to play on as kids, and always had a great time. Got any favourite games?
Probably fifth and sixth gens (PSX-PS2 era), for three reasons:
Do you have any favourite games from those console gens? My first console was an original Xbox but moved on to the 360 very quickly so I don’t know too many games from then, especially not on the PlayStation
Couple of disclaimers to start with: I'm primarily a PC player, even most of the console games I played happened via emulation so I'll drop stuff from both. I'm also really fond of games willing to try something different, even if they end up mediocre or bad - these ain't GOTY material.
With that out of the way, here's a short list of titles I really enjoyed:
* I haven't played all of the GitS games to back that up.
Metal Wolf Chaos sounds hilarious in concept. Will definitely have to check it out. I also own Gothic I & II and want to play them sometime. How do they hold up? I’m not too picky on graphics, but overly janky can be unfun sometimes for the modern gamer
Yeah, Metal Wolf is a cheesy action movie filtered through Japanese lens. It's crazy, stupid and unintentionally hilarious.
As for Gothics, I think they hold up really well as long as you can overcome a few things:
I think some of those points might sound more serious than they really are but should make for a good primer anyway. There's a lot to like about those games (even compared to another titan of that time, Morrowind) so I hope you have fun!
I appreciate the help. When I decide to check them out I’ll be coming back to this comment. Thanks!
In terms of consoles, I got the most enjoyment out of Super Nintendo. I think that's in part because my kids were still young at the time and we played a lot of coop mode games on it before they got older and their tastes started diverging from mine.
It was the golden age of platformers I guess, and the focus was still solidly on game mechanics over production. I especially liked Bomberman. The gameplay was just perfect the way the challenge scaled naturally even as you got upgrades or added a 2nd player. Literally a blast!
I’ve got a lot of fond memories playing DK Country on the SNES with my dad. Good times
Early-mid 90s.
The latter years of the NES, the entirety of the 16-bit console era (SNES/Megadrive ["Genesis"]), the golden age of PC adventure games & the dawn of multimedia (CD-ROM based games & talkies).
Just before the release of Doom, where FPS took over; and the PSX/N64, where (bad) 3D was teh hotness; is where it's at for me – likely why I love my MiSTer FPGA so much.
I loved my 3DS. I mostly played Pokémon on it but played other games on it too. I never took advantage of street pass but agree it was a great concept