Top 5 classic games that blew our minds
At TriForce Tokens we love games. We live, breath and sleep games. Quite often we find ourselves chatting about our favourite games from the past, so we thought it would be interesting to share our top 5 that changed our worlds. This wasn’t an easy list to compile, we all have so many games we have fallen in love with throughout our lives. To be fair we could have listed 100…
Age of Empires
This has to be one of our all time favourite strategy games. There was nothing more satisfying than swarming your enemies bases with hundreds of troops. Or if you are sadistic like Jake our General Manager, who wipes out his enemies base but leaves the town centre to watch them struggle.
Collectively the TriForce Tokens team must have spent months if not years playing Age of Empires. The strategy game that allowed you to escape realism through playing a commander like role throughout the ages. You could build, create and destroy with the simple click of your mouse. Gathering resources could sometimes be an issue, especially when you were at war, trying to rebuild troops, ships or siege weapons. Trying to find that balance between building enough villagers to troops, in order to gather resources, but enough to crush any opponent that threatened your kingdoms existence, was a challenge, but also meant every game was different.
This has to be one of our all time favourites. Most of us grew up playing this strategy game, leading us on to enjoying many others titles that the industry created. Command and Conquer, Age of Mythology etc.
Goldeneye 007
Whether you or a friend had a Nintendo 64, Goldeneye 007 was one of those go-to games. This first person shooting took up many hours of our childhoods. The ability to wield duel pistols, just says it all. If that wasn’t good enough for you, you played as the all time greatest British MI5 spy, completing top secret missions to save the world.
Jake Ashby, General Manager says: “I remember playing this with my friend Jamie. We always used to race to get the golden gun first, then play hide and seek in the toilets. I always used to **** myself when it came to guessing which toilet stall he was in.”
Goldeneye definitely set the stage for first person shooters to come. The relatively fast past, go in guns blazing shooter set the tone for the future first person shooters; TimeSplitters (also an awesome game! Duel wielded weapons).
The Nintendo 64 alone, was one of the all time greatest consoles ever made. The games that it came with, Super Mario 64, Smash Bros, Mario Party… some of the all time best games. The younger generations will never understand the excitement and frustration of these consoles. Having to ‘Blow into the cartridges to get them to work again’.
Quake
Quake set the tone for violent first person games. To be honest, looking back at it, I’m surprised my dad would let me play such a game! This violent first person shooter would allow you to blow up and dismember your enemies. Although the graphics were extremely poor, Quakes developers did an amazing job of making the game extremely bloody and gory.
This game helped build and break friendships. I remember our entire school having Quake 3 on a memory stick, playing it across a local server during IT classes. The Railgun was always the favoured and go-to weapon, due to it’s ridiculous amount of damage, killing players in one hit. It’s a game that we believe will never die, I could play it right now and still enjoy it.
It’s extremely dark visuals and deep scary music helped create this games dark and eerie feel. Its non-reloading shotgun also made you feel like a bad ass, as you pumped lead into your enemies, blowing them into little pieces.
Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto is by far one of the all time greatest games. Still to this day with GTA5, it is one of the most played and most grossing games out there. The original GTA was so popular due to be able to do the things in life that you knew were wrong and unjust. Stealing cars, mowing down pedestrians, shooting at and killing people, running from the law and generally just causing chaos.
GTA allowed you to escape reality and blow off some steam. It also gave you that option to let out your evil side, within a controlled environment. If you had a bad day at work and felt like murdering someone, punching someone you dislike repeatedly in the face, or running them over, GTA allowed you to release those feelings in a safe environment. An environment that wouldn’t get you in trouble with the law, well the real law that is.
An interesting fact for you; GTA was first named Race n’ Chase, there was a small accident within the coding that caused the police within the game to drive like maniacs. Players loved the idea of the cops relentlessly chasing you down, hence why to this day all GTA’s contain such fearless police forces. The name Race n’ Chase was already taken by a toy manufacturer, so Grand Theft Auto was born.
GTA had to be in our top 5. What’s not to love? The game has revolutionised the industry and continues to do so. Rockstar games have produced some outstanding titles that prove their capabilities, such as Red Dead Redemption with many more to come.
EverQuest 2
Perhaps one of the least known compared to others in this list, is EverQuest 2. This was a very popular MMORPG not too long ago, although has since died out.
What was so cool about this? It combined everything from individual quests, party raids and full on crafting. It had its own entire ecosystem and even ways that players could earn money by selling their in game platinum. In fact you could even purchase items in the game off the in-game market, then re-sell at a higher rate when there was less supply.
The PVP was probably the strongest point about the game however, with many MMORPG’s not getting it quite right, it would be great if such a game was to be released again.
That covers our list of top 5 games that blew our minds. You might not agree with this list but it’s difficult to chose from the 100’s of historic titles that redefined gaming. Hopefully though it may have even sparked some interest in dusting off that old N64 or CD-ROM and reliving those nostalgic moments again.
