In the realm of lost games, I love the Wing Commander series for PC, but as my computers improved the older games became unplayable, even with running “slowdown” software.

The one game in the series I can still play, if I fire up my PII 266, is Wing Commander: Prophecy. Prophecy, to me, has really strong game play and an interesting resolution of the story line from the previous games: your character from all previous installments is now in charge of the ship (and played by Mark Hamill) and the new player character is the son of one of the prominent characters from the first game.

And in games rediscovered: there’s now a port of Star Control 2 for Android. So while I’m sitting on the bus I can have middle school gaming flashbacks…

Maurice, you’ve hit exactly on why the column I was trying to write exploded (although I think it’ll become something interesting still). I wasn’t just writing about backwards compatibility, but also really talking about emulation AND backwards compatibility as part of the impulse to preserve worthwhile games in a playable fashion. (Updates and re-releases of older games factor in there somehow too.)

That is to say that it isn’t enough to archive a cartridge (and somehow the idea of a dusty, unused archive misses something really essential about video games), in order for a game to still exist, it has to be playable, and the structures we have to do that are more than a little fragile (or skirt the fringes of legality).

2. Moral choices in Bioshock are sophisticated for the genre (FPS), but otherwise unremarkable compared to Bioware RPGs. You can thank the modernization of console gaming which mimics that of the PC world.

I’ve played every Zelda that isn’t on a handheld, for example.

Oh, and I’m slowly making that transition from “hardcore” to “casual,” so my perspective is certainly different. I’ve played every Zelda that isn’t on a handheld, for example.

Forreal, last post. I’ve played and 100% all the GTA III series (VC, SA, and their “stories” expansions) except IV (which I own, just don’t have the time/wife does not like/kids are up most of the day), and the first Saints Row. I own Saints Row 2 and tried it for like, 5 min, but it had soul-crushing bugs. They patched it since then, but I have not gotten back to it for the same reasons as GTA IV.

I never finished GTA 1 or GTA 2 though. I was too young to understand the score multiplier and ran out of missions to do. GTA 2 was just too friggin hard once you pissed off too many gangs (inevitable, as this is a core feature of the game), who inhibited your ability to do missions. 5 star wanted level was also instant death, unlike GTA III where you can see the tanks coming.