RollerCoaster Tycoon®: Deluxe
RCT Deluxe is one of those rare old gems that, no matter how much people try, has yet to have a spiritual successor fully recapture its essence or innovate in a meaningful way, and the reason for that is in the game’s fundamentally brilliant design: it’s a concise, well-balanced blend of extreme customization and structural rigidity, two seemingly-conflicting ideals that are perfectly intertwined. Coaster design, park layouts, scenery, and other aspects offer near-infinite variety, but the isometric view and deceptively simple and intuitive grid system offers a very acute precision to coaster refinement that allows a player to master the art of designing and redesigning coasters.
– Real player with 377.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Building Games.
Where to begin? RollerCoaster Tycoon is arguably the best tycoon game of all time. The game’s development was mostly credited to only one man (Chris Sawyer), and was released in 1999. There were four games that defined my childhood. The Sims, Age of Empires II, Dungeon Keeper 2, and this.
RollerCoaster Tycoon truly gives you the power to make exactly the kind of amusement park you want to build. Even in the scenarios, it largely feels like a free building game; the game does not ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. For example, instead of asking you to build a park based on nothing but rollercoasters like some games might have implemented, Rollercoaster Tycoon simply plops you down on a plot of land and basically says, “Get this many guests and have a good park rating in three years. Have fun and buh-bye!” This game should be truly applauded for being a tycoon game that is not only great fun, but never turns into a chore by forcing you into situations where you feel you’re only doing something to beat a level. It gives you an end goal, and it’s up to you, the player, to decide exactly how you’ll get there.
– Real player with 125.4 hrs in game
RollerCoaster Tycoon® 2: Triple Thrill Pack
Where I grew up, in rural eastern Ukraine, in the early 2000’s, there was no internet, no smartphones, no kfc and NO FREE PORN! There was however intel pentium…and Roller Coaster Tycoon!!. I remember spending hours, meticulously building my park from scratch, earning milions on big rides and food, attracting 6k+ guests into my park…and then torturing them, by cutting off the escape routes, flooding paths and charging $15 for toilet. And it was magical, pure joy. Even now, with the graphics definitely looking tired, it will bring you hours of very simple fun, build a ride and see how much you can charge before guests say its enough. Or starve them, then build one burger bar, put a very steep price and watch money flooding in. Or even better, build a coaster that will eventually crash, then comfort all the mourners with free black balloons…and free rides on the coaster that just has crashed! Yes, this game was always my favourite, a safe haven where I could unleash all my sadistic fantasies! And after all these years, nothing has changed, I still love to see the message ‘Robert D. has just drowned’.
– Real player with 963.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Building Games.
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 is likely my favorite game of all time.
I’ve put much more than 500 hours into it spanning my entire life and continued to play it as a non-steam game whilest it was not available on Steam. When I saw that it was, my wallet got sad, because in just a few moments my money was gone.
This is in my opinion THE best RollerCoaster video game in existance, and well for that matter in my opinion the best Tycoon game of any developer. Everything is made to a precise definity and managing your park is easy, but at the same time heavily difficult! The more you know about how to play this game, the more fun it becomes.
– Real player with 153.6 hrs in game
Darklands
An RPG from Microprose that, to my knowledge, was the only RPG Micropose ever released. And you know what? It may not have aged well, as in at all, but oh, how it puts some games to shame! Basically, one of the earliest examples, if not the earliest example, of an open-ended Role-Playing Game, you have everything you could want just about in this one package!
Character creation: Whoo, boy! This game has a very complex, but very fun and interesting, character creation system. While you only have so much to choose from for your character’s sprite, the real fun comes from choosing which skills you want each party member to have. For example, want to have a well-balanced party like the game manual suggests? Go right ahead. Want a party full of big strong warriors who are dumb as a bucket of rocks but can wear all armor and wield heavy weapons without breaking a sweat? You can do that. Maybe you want to have just one character to be an alchemist and have the rest be what would be considered in many modern RPGs as a “paladin,” nothing is going to stop you. Now, having said that, there is no “traditional class” system, it all depends on your characters attributes and skills, and you can alter them (within reason) to your liking. There is no “true” right-or-wrong party here.
– Real player with 247.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Medieval Games.
A masterpiece by MicroProse
This game is right up there, in quality and complexity, with MicroProse’s other legendary titles, such as X-COM: UFO Defense and Master of Magic/Orion. Darklands is the result of such geniuses trying their hand at an RPG.
Features:
A massive open world, in medieval Germany, with historically accurate towns, names, geography, economy, and so on. Everything is simulated in an extremely complex way, the world is very alive. The game was so complex, it actually required 5000 hours of testing, and even after that several patches were needed. The version on Steam is the latest and best one, of course.
– Real player with 41.9 hrs in game
RollerCoaster Tycoon® Classic
so i dont often do reviews but i felt like this warrented one cause many probably are wondering should i pick this up?
and not many reviews go in depth and i have boughten the rct 1 and 2 on steam and used open rtc so i am in fair place to compare considering i played more time on rct 1 and 2 on disc then steam then id like to admit and i did drop full price tag on this game no sales anyways…
hmm where to start
differences
first off as another reviewer said this is like rct2 with rct1 shoved into it with some variences,
– Real player with 150.0 hrs in game
The Perfect Release for Roller Coaster Tycoon Nostalgia
This game is almost everything you could ask for in a Roller Coaster Tycoon game paying homage to the classics. With some minor updates from the developers it could really be everything that everyone is asking for!
I Highly Recommend this game for those who love Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, however, there needs to be some clarification before you purchase.
PROS
– Real player with 53.9 hrs in game
Tropico Reloaded
One of the greatest political simulators of all time. The only thing the remakes do better is adding vehicles, tropicans have a real hard time walking the length of larger islands. Still runs excellent on modern machines.
Why is Tropico one of the greatest simulators of all time?
1. Clear factions that know what they want - people follow factions to varying degrees, factions have measurements of how you are doing based on their own criteria. Communists like housing and income equality, capitalists like industry, religious people like cathedrals and a robust clergy etc. In theory you can make all the factions happy, but if you actually manage do that, turn up your difficulty.
– Real player with 149.8 hrs in game
The original Tropico is still good, but not quite as good as the later ones. Tropico 2, on the other hand, is still the only game that lets you run a pirate island and is very much worth playing.
Tropico 1 is still quite enjoyable, but if you’ve played 3 and onwards you’ll miss the cars as it takes Tropicans forever to get anywhere on foot. This tends to cause food supply problems on large islands even with plenty of farms and wharves and markets. There’s also the same problem that’s been present in every game until Tropico 4’s Modern Times expansion of any housing with decent quality taking enormous amounts of real estate for the tiny number of people it houses. On the bright side, the excessively goofy style of the later games is absent here.
– Real player with 78.8 hrs in game
SimCity™ 4 Deluxe Edition
Ever thought you could make a better city? Pah, I could be a better Mayor; well now you can! SimCity 4 is just that and offers this opportunity and lets you sit in the chair titled “mayor”. I’ve definitely clocked up more hours in the days I installed this on ME and XP.
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition is another one of those games that has been created by EA… EA? Not again you say - except this time.. EA has really created a game and has polished it up to its standards. SC4 is one of the older prequels to ‘Societies’ and the 2013 SimCity relaunch; released after Sim City 3000, it showed off superb graphic capabilities at the time and invented new ways to enjoy building a simulated city, where you play as the city’s major, managing the: finances, housing stock, roads, ports, resident satisfaction, transit, and employment.
– Real player with 567.8 hrs in game
Ah, SimCity 4, the best, in my opinion, of all of the SimCity games. The graphics are dated, being that this was released around fifteen years ago, but don’t let that deter you. Play times depend on how much you enjoy city building games. I myself have spent 2-4 hours today playing it.
The U-Drive-It mode is pretty cool, as it lets you drive through your transportation system with a variety of vehicles, but can get annoying over time with the other cars.
The regions are a nice addition, as you can have cities depend on each other, plus some of the regions come in the shape of several real-life cities, albeit with no structures. In the same vein, importing and exporting cities & regions are useful. If you have a sprawling metropolis and want to share it with the world, you can! Have a police state with stations on every corner? You now can show it to your friends and family!
– Real player with 325.6 hrs in game
Hitman: Codename 47
Hitman: Codename 47 is the game that started a whole franchise and presented one of games' most recognizable characters: Agent 47. This game has great ideas impaired by technical limitations, both from the technology of the time and the budget, but counters it by having fun gameplay and a flawless story.
It is amazing how intelligent games were back then, detailing storylines and interesting characters displayed with an easy-to-follow presentation. At the beginning of every mission you go to a briefing where you learn about your target and the details surrounding the hit you are going to perform. This is presented all in text and all you have to do is read it. One of the most interesting aspects of the game is the video of the target filmed by an ICA agent - which gives us an idea of how organized the Agency is.
– Real player with 50.9 hrs in game
Codename 47 is certainly an interesting nut to crack. I’m playing the Hitman series for the first time and doing it in order, so I can’t compare to later games in the series yet, but I think this game is an experience worth having, even if it’s not something I’d say everyone should rush out and buy.
The game’s best and worst feature is that you can’t save. In some levels, the more medium-sized ones that are more along the lines of “here’s the level, here’s your weapons, kill this target”, this can make for a very tense, suspenseful stealth experience and you can find yourself resorting to some interesting tactics to just try and survive a minute longer, but as the levels get longer and longer, and as you experience levels that have certain things to be done in a specific order, it becomes incredibly tedious and frustrating. It definitely comes from the 80’s school of game design that wants you to die over and over again until you get it exactly right, so think Cuphead if some of the levels took 3 times as long to master and you’re on the right track for this game’s difficulty. You do get two “lives” but the enemy’s suspicion of you doesn’t reset so you’re still in a bad spot if you died.
– Real player with 38.8 hrs in game
BQM - BlockQuest Maker-
BQM is a surprisingly fun game with an interesting way of creating and sharing your own levels!
BQM is an isometric dungeon crawler with puzzle and combat elements. You can start right off playing the official levels which are there mainly to get you used to the mechanics of the game…. but the meet and potatos of this little gem is the vast ammount of user made levels which make up most of the game. An internet connection is required to play levels, but this is hardly an issue as you can mess around with the level editor and play or own content offline.
– Real player with 90.9 hrs in game
I really enjoy speed running this game, it’s a lot of fun. It scratches my itch for a Zelda-like Super Mario Maker style game. If that sounds interesting to you, then I recommend it. I don’t have any major dislikes about the game, you can even filter by language if you want to.
The console editions do feature some DLC, which isn’t featured on Steam. So I do recommend you examine the other editions if you own a supported console, and are interested in the DLC.
– Real player with 24.7 hrs in game
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is the second game in the franchise and helped to establish many of the core aesthetics of the series. Addressing the biggest complaints about the first one, Silent Assassin is a solid and worthy sucessor. Controls are more solid and responsive, with better aiming, and wider options for the player to tackle the missions; and everything is bigger and better. The main new feature is the creation of the famous rating system, were the highest rank is Silent Assassin.
The briefing is now narrated by Diana, creating one of the most recognizable features in the Hitman series, which you can hear while watching the mission video (the first one, in St. Petersburg Stakeout, is glitched though, as it cannot transition to the second part of the video). Locations are more alive, more populated with NPCs and with more indirect approaches. The map is now more useful, showing real time positions of NPCs and critical elements like elevators and ICA caches. Albeit still mostly linear, Hitman 2: SA tries its best to give the player different options of approach and has more signature kills, with the most famous being the killing of Hayamoto Jr. with a badly prepared Fugu fish.
– Real player with 110.0 hrs in game
Codename 47 was a success, a success that needed a sequel. And what do the good sequels do? Fix what’s broken, evolve what’s working. And Silent Assassin does that…kinda. Unfortunately, not always right. The overall structure of the game remained the same - you have a map where you need to do something, preferably unnoticed, and then, usually, leave the area. But how you do it is slightly different. First of all, and that is important for more… kind, i guess, players like me, - you can knock out enemies with a chloroform instead of killing them. This also means, that now you can knock out innocent people in the area and use their clothes almost without any consequences. Almost, because knocked out people do regain consciousness (quicker on higher difficulty), and because there is a new meter. Yes, starting with this game there is a “suspicion” meter in play. And it’s rather stupid, unfortunately. When you are seen by enemy/guard-type characters, their “suspicion” goes up. It’s universal for the map and it can only be slightly changed by what you are wearing at the moment. But it didn’t work as well as in later installments, with lots of smaller “if"s in play, where enemy/guard character could truly be described as “suspicious” and not “crazy and paranoid” and willing to shoot a hotel visitor just because he made a wrong turn (and yes, this can happen). What’s also sad, is that the infamous jungle chapters from Codename 47, are here as well, only now you’re in snowy Japan. Why would developers want to leave this kind of section in the game is still something i don’t understand. But it’s a solid game. Not yet as refined as Contracts and Blood Money, but not as raw and hardcore-ish as Codename 47. Definitely worth the play. P.S. Jesper Kyd’s music is amazing as always. P.P.S. You can now save in the game, if that put you off in Codename 47. Amount of saves depends on the difficulty level. P.P.P.S. The game is ridiculous to play if you speak russian. Russian stereotypes in this game are amazingly funny. Game even starts with a very harsh russian profanity, it’s the first thing you hear when you start the game.
– Real player with 78.2 hrs in game
Ghost Master®
In Ghost Master, you command an army of ghosts and are trusted with completing an array of different objectives.
The story takes place in Gravenville, a town where a lot of paranormal activity takes place, after a group of teenagers summons you – the Ghost Master.
Before entering a haunting, you must choose which ghosts you take with you. You can pick anyone you want, but sometimes, especially when you are trying a level for the first time, it is better to press “Recommended” which will pick the best available ghosts in your army for said level.
– Real player with 45.0 hrs in game
I’ve been a huge fan of this game since I first picked it up from our company store while I was working at Sierra Online. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with it and the style of game was never my thing, but I was completely hooked after completing the first level. It was simple to learn from that first tutorial-like level that gave you enough room to play around with things on your own, as well as including other ghosts to unlock.
I loved being able to play the game however I wanted to for the most part, although there are times when you are better off using specific ghosts and / or buying specific skills for them. You’re never really penalized for doing that, though, since you can pretty much complete all of the levels with the ghosts' base-level powers, even if you don’t unlock any newer ghosts on your own.
– Real player with 24.2 hrs in game