alt Hacker NewsPirates! is a fantastic game. What I find fascinating is that some games like Diablo, Dunes II or Doom spawned a whole genera, while other fantastic games could not find a worthy successor. I'm thinking about Syndicate, Lemmings, Defender of the Crown or North & South (god the laughs!), and many others.
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Syndicate on MS-DOS is the only game I know of to look good with 16 colors on VGA 640x480. The other one would be Gods by Bitmap Brothers also 16 colors but on 320x200 resolution. Great examples of limitations driving amazing outcomes.
Also, nothing quite like the Black & White games has matched what the originals offered.
I recall playing the hell out of the original Xcom game
Not sure if there's anything quite like Sacrifice, which to be fair was an interesting blend rather than a wholly unique game play like dune 2.
I've been waiting for a successor to Aerobiz: Supersonic. I've played about every airline management sim since then, and nothing scratches the itch.
One Must Fall 2097. Whilst it did get a sequel back in 2003 (Battlegrounds), it was a disaster that couldn't capture the charm of the OG.
And whilst there are many games in the fighting genre, there's never been any other game like OMF.
Is there another game like Syndicate or Lemmings out there? Seriously, I have been itching to scratch that old itch...
Wow, you just tickled a whole bunch of nostalgia centers in my brain.
Pirates! was a gift from my wife years ago, and I kind disappeared for a couple of weeks. The dancing was tedious though :-)
North & South is part of a long tradition of Strategic Map plus Tactical Battle wargames that culminated in the all encompassing Total War series.
Mike Diskett, the lead designer of Syndicate Wars, tried to do a Syndicate remake-ish thang called Satellite Reign recently; it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO. Shame: the conceptual foundation seems disproportionately more urgently pertinent for mass-comprehension today.
Agreed. Such great games!
Was really hopeful https://www.pcworld.com/article/457418/black-annex-is-the-be... would come out. Followed it since the guy posted about it on SomethingAwful a long time ago. No idea what's up with it or him today.
Very much Syndicate vibes
Sid Meier himself warned about the difficulty of trying to design games tat are multiple games at once, as basically everything in the list other than Lemmings is). His whole "one good game is better than two great ones" argument, as it's difficult to get a good balance of fun for any given player. If someone likes, say, the strategy elements of North & South, but not the battles, or they feel like they want more of one game but they have to do the other, there's some tension there. So you have to make the games be just fun enough, and change just often enough. A really hard problem.
And this is why it's relatively unlikely to find worthy successors: Making the whole be as good as the sum of its parts is hard enough. Getting to be as good as Pirates, or the best Cinemaware games, where the whole was significantly better than all of the games in isolation, is aiming foolishly high. Which is why, say, the xcom remakes are such a wonder, because they manage to both change the original two minigames underneath, improving them substantially, all while still being balanced.