Just as with books, movies, plays etc the past holds a treasure trove of amazing experiences. Unless you have a lot more free time than I do it’s unlikely you’ve played anywhere near the majority of the classics. Let’s get out those pink sunnies and compare notes on some of our favourite releases.

I’ve recently been going back in time a little on the retro pi and looking at console games I never had.

  • I have to say Chrono Trigger blew me away with it’s stunning art, puzzles with surprisingly little moon logic, and beautiful music.

  • Mario golf on the SNES is very simple but for tired evenings cuddling on the couch it’s been a winner in our household.

  • The n64 Zelda games are surprisingly great too although that awkward period of 3d had some unusual controls. Even the gameboy ones are a blast although the water temple in oracle of ages it a bit frustrating.

  • Heroes of might and magic 2 and 3 hold a special place in my heart and I can still dump hours into skirmishing with those (32167 for when hom2 gets too frustrating amiright?)

  • I loved neverwinter knights as a kid but recently tried to check it out again and just… idk the magic wasn’t there. I think now I’d rather just play some actual ttrpgs instead of sprawling CRPGs

PS1 is a mystery box to me so I’d love to hear some recommendations from that old thing. All I ever played on it was time crisis at my mates house (which was and is soooo coool, RIP lightguns).

What about you folks? What games hold a special place in your heart? or what have you checked out for the first time recently and found it’s actually pretty good?

  • I always loved Symphony since the first time I played it but I watched a video of I think IGA himself giving some gameplay commentary on the Double Fine YouTube channel and that made me fall in love with it all the harder. So many things are in that game on a whim, for just the silliest and most frivolous reasons. Like, there’s one room with a comically large number of parallax scrolling layers and he mentions that they had recently made a game for a different console that didn’t support parallax scrolling layers and that was really frustrating so they went ahead and did this room to make up for it. He says there are so many save file icons because they just said anyone working on the game can submit save file icon ideas and expected to only get a few, then unexpectedly got loads and decided to just use all of them.

    It’s a game where everybody involved was seemingly just having fun with it and you just never see that in games of its profile and it’s magical for that.