Unfurl

New Project: A Journey Through Time

Another list to help me go through the backlog: 1987-2021: A Journey Through Time. I haven’t played much classic games in their time and I intend to fix that gap. The list contains one game from each year, starting with 1987 as apparently the oldest game I have is from that year. I picked the games according to their release date, meaning the oldest game of that particular year I haven’t played yet. I already see on the list some games which are not first in their series (e.g. Duke Nukem 3D) and I hate to play games from a series in a random order. Therefore once I stumble on such a game, I intend to play its predecessors first.

Vito

Neat idea! And I see a lot of interesting games in the list, some I really enjoyed playing myself. Games from 1987 are a bit too old for playing them myself, looking forward to your reports :)

Traqie

Nice idea, I might steal it for next year if I don’t forget about it :P

Unfurl

Haha, feel free :) not too late to start it this year too!

sallachim

I thought of doing something similar, but then noticed couple of SIerra’s adventure games collection from 80s (each 5-7 games if I remember correctly), and got scared of hunting pixels. I still lie to myself that I’ll do it one day, but I never feel like actually doing it. :/
Anyway, good luck.

Edit: Just noticed you actually did pick Police Quest Collection for this challenge and have 6h in. How is it?

Unfurl

Thanks! Hunting pixels sucks indeed. I’m actually done with Police Quest 1 and moving on to the second one in the collection. The first one has VGA version which I’ve played, with decent graphics, so just a nice P&C game once you get used to the controls and stuff. The second one, as I see now, didn’t have such an update so you gotta type commands & the pixels are all around, but it’s not the worst one from what I’ve seen. I’m playing in a small window though so it isn’t outstretched throughout my monitor to make my head hurt :D I probably wouldn’t have will to play through it if not for the guides (yeah I suck at guessing commands). I’m looking forward to the story though and 3rd and 4th games, if I manage to beat this.

sallachim

Oooh, you reminded me of command guessing. I’ve tried that in Space Quest Collection, and it was fun at first, the feeling of exploring your freedom, and most of the words I had come up with, devs prepared themselves for them, so kudos to them. I’m not sure if I remember correctly, but I think at one point the game started making fun of me for doing pointless things, maybe something like commanding “Examine the floor” and getting a response like “This is just a floor. Why are you so intent at examining it?”. :D
Thanks for your reply. It sort of alleviated my fears (with the idea of just using guides whenever I need help :p)

About small window - why not search for some kind of window magnifier, or try (in Windows at least) alt + enter?

Unfurl

Damn why didn’t I think of trying out dumb commands? :D I have now finished the game and wish I’ve tried some. I only noticed that responses to my typos were pretty sassy :D
Well I’m glad I’ve encouraged you - as for myself, I’m done with the second game already and now am really happy I didn’t drop it just because the controls and graphics are not what we’re used to these days - it was really fun.

I didn’t even think about using any means to magnify the window. Now that I think about it, I should have :D thanks for the tip, I’ll try that on another one :)

EvilBlackSheep

That’s a really cool idea, good luck with the project. You had me go back to lorenzo’s tool and look what I had on steam from those older stuff, and surprisingly not as much as I thought (even though remakes/remasters don’t always show up “correctly”). I’d totally pick this up if I hadn’t started revisiting my childhood console games recently.

Unfurl

Well maybe next year :)
I’ve also noticed issue with the remasters/remakes, same with collections and where only “complete edition” is available on Steam rather than original game + DLCs/expansions separately. I’ll try to make do with what it is, I have way too huge of a backlog to worry much about it, although it breaks “immersion” into the project a bit (I was now supposed to play 1988 game, but will be playing Police Quest 3 released in 1991, since it’s part of Police Quest Collection stamped with date 1987…)

Cece09

Came to this after seeing your report my latest one is I have no mouth and I must scream. Then its broken sword 2 and resident evil 5. broken sword is understandable since the original was updated but resident evil 5 before number 4? Number 4 is the only one that wasn’t updated!
I don’t have many games under 2010 either which is where guess what Broken sword 1 is, in 2010

Unfurl

Ah, I hate these type of dates on games…Like EvilBlackSheep mentioned above, various remakes/remasters screw up the dates :(