Any kind of game
EDIT: changed from suggested to mentioned and made the title more clear
Powder by Jeff lait. I think you can get it at a website called zincland or something?
It’s an old school roguelike that absolutely slaps, though its gotten significantly harder to play since the wiki stopped being hosted
I was just playing Powder a few weeks ago! My friend and I used to play on a work laptop during slow periods, and I got nostalgic for it.
Had some good fun with unidentified ring of polymorph, don’t remember that from 2010.
Escape Velocity Nova
That game is the shit. It’s even easy to play on Windows now, which was very much not the case back in the day.
There was an old card game I learned around 2003ish called Spite & Malice, involving 2 full decks of cards for 2 players. Was just a ton of fun, but it’s faded from memory and the ruleset I found online once didn’t match the one I played.
Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters
The original creators are doing a follow-up!
After the lackluster “sequels” (Star Control 3 and Star Control: Origins) that were made largely without the original developers input, I had pretty much given up the franchise for dead till now.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pistolshrimp/free-stars-children-of-infinity
For those of you not in the know, you can get Star Control 2 for free on Steam and see what the pinnacle of DOS adventure gaming was all about :D
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2645580/Free_Stars_The_UrQuan_Masters/
I don’t know about favorite, but a game I remember playing ball in the Nintendo, super Nintendo days was a game called Another World. Never met another person who has played it except one of it irl friends. Wikipedia claims it’s one of the best video games ever made, oddly.
Kind of a platformer, kind of a puzzler, very surreal.
Absolutely loved this Another World (Out of This World in the US)! It looked like nothing else, had cut scenes, even a little load time (not common on a SNES). Early polygon look before Star Fox came out even.
Out of This World! No wonder the name looked weird to me. I had to look it up because it’s been so long I forgot the name!
Legretto
I was introduced to the game by an Austrian woman I dated in my 20s and 25 years later remains at the top of my list of party games.
Ligretto is a card game for two to twelve players. The game in its current form was designed by Michael Michaels and published in 1988 by the German company Rosengarten Spiele. Since 2000 the game has been published by Schmidt-Spiele of Berlin, Germany. - Wikipedia>
That game looks pretty similar to a game I know as “Racing Demons”, played with regular playing cards
The cards take a beating and before Amazon existed it was much harder to get replacements. We tried regular playing cards, but that only works if every deck has different backs for scoring purposes. I think there was another issue in practice, but that was the main frustration.
I tend to play it at my friends’ New Year holiday, which is a context where we have like, 12 different decks of playing cards to pick from, which helped with that scoring issue. Regarding the cards taking a beating, that scans with my experience — there was a sort of communal pool of cards and games during the holiday, so it was fuzzy about who owned what, there were a couple of sets of playing cards that weren’t meant to be used to play racing demons (they did seem pretty fancy).
I seem to recall that an issue we faced somewhat (even with a pretty large diversity of playing cards styles) was that some styles were harder to read than others (such as due to stylised card designs, or low contrast colour etc.). We had 3-4 decks that were equally easy to read, yet visually distinct enough for scoring, so we were good most of the time. If there were more than 4 at the table, it’d start getting trickier and people would have to start using decks that were harder to read (I.e. decks like this. We tended to rotate the decks each game, so if there were awkward decks in play, it wasn’t the same person using it each time at least. I wonder if the other issue you describe with playing cards is this contrast/readability problem that arises when having to find cards with different backs.
There was this officially licensed Star Trek tabletop starship battle game that I got to play a couple times in the eighties and no one seems to remember it but me. Wish I could find a copy. I remember it being a blast.
I could rattle off a whole list of TRS-80 Model I/III or Apple ][ games that no one has ever heard of, but I’ll spare you.
I’m pretty sure I played a couple rounds with a friend of mine some 25 years ago.
Mainly remember it because I had not really watched any st back then, and the weapons and propulsion etc were all a bit confusing
Did each player get sort of an octagonal board with the starship in the center used to track ship orientation and shield strength?
Ahhh I think I recognize that. It was used by the Star Trek TTRPG as well. I didn’t realize it had a standalone version.
The game I’m thinking of focused more on 1-on-1 fights, and it was set in the Star Trek II/III movie era.
Sounds like an old Palm Pilot game I used to play.
World in Conflict is one I don’t see talked about. Squad based military RTS.
Multiplayer on that was so fun. Guessing how the enemy was moving in order to time how you call ordinance on them was my favorite part
World in conflict is so much fun. That form of control dating back from the ground control series feel so good.
I never see Cultist Simulator recommended but it’s one of my favorites. It really captures the idea of studying the esoteric arts, and has a surprising amount of world building given how simple the presentation is.
Cultist simulator made me depressed. I simply cannot play it.
So if I’m not counting close friends recommending games to me as “mentioned on the internet” probably Crystal Project, according to Steam. Otherwise, we’d need to go back to things that I was told about by family members way back in the day that I both like and haven’t seen mentioned online since, which is trickier. Thief The Dark Project, possibly?
If you haven’t played Thief: The Dark Project I recommend it and its sequels. Don’t play Thief (no subtitle) though, it’s AAA garbage.
