I finally set up my laptop as a dedicated DOS box (with Dosbox Staging) but now I have no idea what games to play. I have a generally hard time starting games and I want something low stress. The obvious answer would be to play some of the all time greats adventure games but tbh they’re almost always better on ScummVM than DOS anyway.
So uhh, how do you pick what retro games you play? I’m interested if other people have this same problem and how they deal with it.
I have this problem, and I don’t know if it’s ADHD or just age, where sometimes I play an old game and I see what it’s doing and immediately lose motivation because my brain has just simulated exactly what it’s like to play. So whenever it’s not just for research or for a video, especially when it comes to retro PC, obviously I tend to go for either for the more obscure stuff, or something that may be considered a classic but also does things, either graphically or gameplay or story wise, that are considered somewhat unique.
Also, and this is how the youtube stuff got started, I like to do archeology of my own memories. I have plenty of vague memories of games, fleeting images, and whenever I’m able to figure out what those memories belong to I seek out context by playing. For the longest time, for instance, I had this memory of a demo of a point and click adventure that was set back stage of some theater show. Only a few years ago I learned that was Flight of the Amazon Queen so I installed it and…
Well I haven’t really played it yet, but some day!
I’m thinking of looking up old Twilight CD releases and picking games from that.
God, Twilight, that brings me back. Those things made it all the way to Aruba and that’s how I first got access to photoshop
I think Twilight was how we got most of our software back then XD Impressed they made it all the way over there.
I also found this retro game wheel of fortune web app thingy but I think there’s too much junk in the listings for it to be all that useful.
If you haven’t heard of it, the current equivalent to something like Twilight may be https://www.retro-exo.com/ - a set of (quite massive) collections of retro PC games (DOS, Win3.x, win95), all pre-configured launchers (and you can combine them into one big set, if you want). If you have the storage space, that will…
Well, it’ll make the actual problem of choosing what to play much harder, come to think of it 
Yeah XD The idea of using Twilight CDs is that I’m limited to picking from stuff that’s on that CD, instead of picking from literally every retro game known to man, which is just too much for me.
A lot of the retro games I’ve played in the last few years were things I found exploring the libraries of console generations I missed out on, like the PS1.
Other times I’ve chased things that I specifically remember playing in my youth, like stuff on Windows 3.1 (Gahan Wilson’s Ultimate Haunted House is an underrated gem)
Beyond that, I’ll often just browse the new entries uploaded to myabandonware.com and see what catches my eye. That’s how I found Prey (2006) which was an absolute blast.
I’m always impressed with people playing retro games, I am not sure what it is with me but the few times I tried I just instantly get annoyed at all modern QoL features it lacks and never want to touch any of them again. I may be just too young at heart (or too ADHD). I think that the sole way I could force myself through any of them is if I was doing any level of research for them.
I have a ton of choice paralysis when choosing old games, but I usually try to play my childhood favorites, games I’ve always wanted to play but never found and games that just look weird or interesting.
Oh, that reminds I should give Orion Burger a go! :O
To be honest a lot of old games just don’t hold up. Like I tried playing Crusader No Remorse and, oh my god it’s so bad. I used to love that game as a kid but I just can’t tolerate it anymore.
But the games that still hold up are still great.
tbh it extremely depends on how well the game has aged. Some are timeless, either for reason because their design was that way and its ok to not have certain QOL stuff, or because they’re maintained well, or both. And for some it is purely nostalgic and others then are only nostalgia that disappoint today.
I frequently run into games that simply didnt held up as much and are just ass to play nowadays for a variety of reasons, QOL or simply design choices that I accepted as “given” as a kid but sure as fuck are not the objective greatness (also the reason why this entire darksouls gitgut movement is fucking ridiculous)
I recently got NOLF2 again and its just not that great as made out by its legacy. Tron 2.0 is holding up so much better in comparison.
Beyond that, I’ll often just browse the new entries uploaded to myabandonware.com and see what catches my eye. That’s how I found Prey (2006) which was an absolute blast.
Same. And PREY was amazing in its way, the authenticity of how the main char commented on the really fucked up world still is my favorite reaction from any video game char within a realworld setting that goes bad… that nasty and what the fuck really carries Prey so much further. And then it has just amazing design ideas beyond, all in one, from gravity shenanigans to portals, to the arsenal thats basically only Prey and Half-Life/Opposing Force.
Shame they had to* fuck this franchise over for trademark laws, even though the other Prey is amazingly great in its own way.
*they didnt.
I’ve been in this space a lot lately. I grew up with a strong desire to play games that had come before me. I was the youngest in my family and played a lot of their “hand-me-down” games, and I was always obsessed with the “classics” that had been before my time that I didn’t get to play. They were all of the market by the time this obsession was really strong, and it was before any used game stores were anywhere near my area (sidenote, how long have those been around? I feel like I only really started going to them in the mid-2010s). My family also was averse to buying things online due to some early Internet fear, so I had no way to get older games other than to hope that houses I visited still had them there.
Because of this, I held on to my games really tightly and still have most of my old consoles that still work. Rarely did I ever sell a game system unless I was upgrading to something that was backwards-compatible. As I grew up and emulators got more sophisticated (or easy to use; I was horrible with computers as a kid) I started finally playing a lot of the retro stuff I’d missed. When I started working, I’d save up to buy old consoles and old games. And in the last decade or so, I’ve invested my money less into individual games and more into infrastructure that lets me play a lot.
So I have a pretty giant library of playable older stuff now - so much that it essentially just looks like noise. Picking what to play is a challenge most of the time; and I’ve realized that a lot of what drew me to games when I was younger was the fact that they were what I had to work with. The video game aisle at a Toys-R-Us was a magical wonderland of possibility, but I only ever left there with one game during the rare occasions we visited. All those possibilities collapsed down to one; now I’ve got my pick of the whole aisle.
I have a lot of it backlogged - what helps me decide on something is usually getting involved with it before playing the game. For instance, I’m playing through the Gameboy SaGa (Final Fantasy Legend) games right now because a friend of mine has been talking about them for a while. I went on to watch some YouTube videos and read some GameFAQs about the series and I got really interested, and then I wanted to play.
It can be fun to just throw a dart at the board and see what game it lands on but for me that doesn’t really get me invested. I don’t like the word “hype” that much but I think getting excited about a game and thinking about it before you play it makes a difference for me. Like seeing a trailer and following updates, or even just reading about the details on the back of the box or in a strategy guide. Or hearing your friends talk about it (I just remembered that I was SO excited to play Fallout 3 when it had come out because it was the talk of the lunch table for weeks, and my imagination ran wild with it).