A recent blog post by my good friend Josh caused me to break out in a fit of nostalgia not seen since I moaned about Christmas several weeks ago.

Games used to be really good. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed every second of Half-Life 2; it’s breaktakingly vast world, it’s surprisingly advanced graphics engine and a storyline that could floor a Hollywood screen writer, even a Jewish one. But it is all those things in combination that are required nowadays, along with a multi-million dollar budget (and an expensive graphics card).

Gone are the days when you could be just as suitably entertained by a wise-cracking, badly animated amateur pirate (although I hope to prove this wrong at pirate night in a couple of weeks time).

So, for your pleasure, here is a brief history of classic games (otherwise known as my social life from ages 9-14, and subsequently 15-17 and 19-21)…

1) Theme Park - The only game I’ve bought a new PC to run. Well, bought for me to run. I had a 386 with 2MB of graphics memory which unfortunately wasn’t enough to run the game (despite what the minimum system requirements said) so after buying me Theme Park for my birthday and me informing them it wouldn’t run, my parents also upgraded my PC to a 486 with an 8MB video card and a 256MB hard drive with a CD-ROM drive. Neat. It came on 6 floppies and took ages to install. Was it worth the wait? 100 gaming hours later and I’d say yes. Gone are the days when games still had obvious spelling mistakes…

2) The Secret of Monkey Island - It’s amazing how such a simple Disney ride has inspired endless creativity in multiple mediums. Written using the adventure game engine that produced a string of fantastic games, The Secret of Monkey Island showed you that clicking on stuff for hours really wasn’t that boring. Even the music was amazing. This was the third game in the “SCUMM” series, and instantly became a classic. It’s the most sought after game on the internet, though unfortunately still protected under ESA unlike other point-and-click classics such as Beneath a Steal Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen which you can get for free. Joey was always a much better name for a robot than a sitcom character anyway. The good news is, if you’ve got a copy, processors are so powerful now that you can play it on your phone.

3) Simon the Sorcerer – I personally preferred this to Monkey Island, mostly due to the fact that I had the CD version which said everything and there was therefore no need to read any of the badly coloured subtitles, unless I was trying to secretly play it whilst my parents were in bed. It was, at the time, the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life. It’s still up there, although having watched as much Simpsons and Scrubs as I have up until now it’s been pushed off the top spot. It’s more than worth getting hold of and playing if you haven’t though.

4) RollerCoaster Tycoon 1, 2 – Ah, full circle. Like life, and other things. I have an obsession with theme parks, specifically with rollercoasters, and the way in which they work. I remember seeing a tiny preview of RollerCoaster Tyccon in a copy of PC Zone some years ago, not long before it was due out. I crapped my pants, and so my obsession with RCT (as well) was born. I’ve spent at least twice as long playing this as whatever’s in 2nd place to it. I’ve designed more fantastic coasters than I’d ever care to admit. And yet, as true as this cycle of games itself, I find myself reinstalling RCT every few months, just so I don’t go completely insane. It’s still not occurred to me to ask Tussaud’s for a job, though.