Super Mario Bros 3 / Super Mario 64
Super Mario Bros 3 / Super Mario 64
I had an Atari 400 as a teen (paid for with my first term UNI grant- back in those impossible days we were paid to go to uni). At the time it had the best GPU (before they were called that) ever witnessed, yet sadly the vastly inferior C64 was the mega hit.
But it gave me my first experience of classic arcade gameplay, cos of its flawless scrolling, sound system and colour system. There was a dev called Synapse Software that did ORIGINAL arcade style titles, and on the Atari (and only on the Atari- the other system ports were rotten) each of their games was an instant classic for me. The games are little remembered, since their ports to systems with terrible graphic hardware (like the C64) lost every bit of their charm. The PC ports, in CGA 'colour' were particularly dreadful (tho probably sold more copies).
Games like: Shamus, Necromancer, Nautilus and Picnic Paranoia. They were particularly skilled at sprites in character set methods. Remember neither the Atari 400/800 or Amiga or C64 did hardware sprites correctly. Only when Nintendo and Sega started doing consoles were hardware sprites correctly implemented. The American problem was that basically one guy was responsible for all the graphic chip design (at Atari and Commodore), and he didn't get how arcade machines implemented sprites.
But the Atari home computers were a big hit with coders cos of their best-of-class hardware sub-systems, and games desigined first for Atari 400/800 hardware looked and felt amazing.
Couple of years later I had an Amiga (and Atari ST which did all graphics in software), but never felt the same way about games on that system.
Two Atari games really grabbed my time. M.U.L.E. is a 4-play (the Atari had 4 joystick ports) board game of rightfully legendary reknown. And 4-player RPG adventure Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves.
Dungeon Master blew my mind on the ST.
And then of course, iD's first Wolf and Doom on the PC.
Popeye
From the arcade I liked Phoenix. I used to play a C64 game called M.U.L.E all the time with my friends.
All variants of Mario Kart - one of the best franchises ever!
Quake 3 Arena, Command & Conquer: Renegade, Vectorman, Mortal Kombat.
What about DND and its numerous sequels
"I just remembered something that happened a long time ago."
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