Eight classic PC game re-releases you’ll want to play
Atari has re-released eight classic PC games this week with the team at GOG, which is featuring them this week in an Atari Publisher sale (March 19–25 at gog.com).
The titles include Hardball! and Hardball II, Gunship and Gunship 2000, Flight of the Intruder, Lightspeed, Weird Dreams, and Zapper: One Wicked Cricket! The new releases bring back some truly formative PC games from the 80s and 90s that helped establish genres and launch some impressive careers in the industry.
The 1980s Microprose releases of Hardball! and Hardball II have been combined into a single release. This is the first time, to our knowledge, these best-selling baseball simulation games have been available in a digital storefront. A mix of deep simulation, accurate sounds and settings of professional baseball, and accessible gameplay made the games incredibly popular. Hardball! was the first game that gave players the granular control of a managerial sim and control of the pitchers, fielders, batters and baserunners.
More than any early baseball game, Hardball! was the precursor to modern baseball games that let you manage your team and get involved in the action. Members of the Hardball series team went on to form the nucleus of the teams behind EAs FIFA, NHL and NBA franchises.
The 80s releases of the Apache helicopter games Gunship and Gunship 2000 contributed to Microprose’s reputation as the foremost aviation combat simulation studio in the industry. These are games that garnered numerous 100 out of 100 contemporary review scores, and set the standard for all that followed. As oen reviewer noted “It’s very easy to bandy around phrases like ‘a great reason to own a PC’ and ‘the best flight sim ever’, only to have the accolade made redundant a month later when something better comes on to the market. For this reason I’ll simply say that I have yet to play a better flight simulator and I doubt if I’ll come across another of this calibre in the next year at least.”
Spectrum Holobyte also had an important aviation combat simulator release in 1990, Flight of the Intruder. With most aviation games focused on jet fighters, the studio chose to create a deep sim based on a new breed of long range, super-sonic fighter-bombers. Flight of the Intruder puts players in charge of Grumman A-6 Intruders and McDonnell Douglas F-4B/J Phantoms during the Vietnam War, in what a contemporary reviewer called “a tour de force in simulation programming.”
Spectrum Holobyte’s early 90s release Stunt Driver combined a hybrid racing-demolition derby style game that puts you behind the wheel of a 1966 Shelby Mustang 350 and asks you to be “speed-burning stunt driver smashing your friends off the track.” Stunt Driver managed to combine the fast-paced fun of an arcade racer with the granular controls of more modern racing simulators, complete with a track editor and replays from cameras you can hand-place around the track. (Coming to GOG soon!)
The 1990 release of Lightspeed saw Microprose take its success with action sims aka RPGs (Pirates!, Covert Action) into space. Players are tasked with recolonizing the human race after an ecological catastrophe on earth. There’s enough space exploration, natural resource harvesting, and negotiating with aliens (even combat if negotiating fails) to keep your gaming mind at work.
Weird Dreams may stand out for some in this group of games as … weird. Reviewers called it absorbing, innovative, hard, unexpectedly addictive, striking, unusual, surreal and intentionally weird. Well, mission accomplished. Word Dreams is a third-person game with action and puzzle elements. You need to escape your own subconscious by finding four orbs that are trapped within mini-games. Be prepared to do things you have never done before in a game, including feeding a wasp cotton candy, beating up hopping totem poles with fish, and an encounter with a baked chicken in a haunted house.
The new game drop rounds up with an early 2000s title, Zapper: One Wicket Cricket! Released on PC, console and handheld, the fondly-remembered early puzzle-injected platformer featured a charming cricket and a cast of insect allies and adversaries across six 3D worlds and 20 levels. As one reviewer put it, “Finding a quality puzzle-action game that not only is good, but also great is even rarer. Zapper flaunts its plot, action, design, gameplay, graphics, soundtrack, and replayability.”
