Maniac Mansion (C64)
Edna. 'Nuff said. Also: The entire intro sequence, hell that was spooky. Also: Even more considering the game's age and rough edges that Edison mansion sure feels a lot more like a real place than the collection of screens, random objects in many "me too" games that followed. Did you ever try to ring the doorbell a second, third, fourth time while Weird Ed was on his way down the stairs? Grabbed the cheese from the fridge early in the game? That's how tricky (and funny) games were designed in 1987, folks. Well, occasionally.
Summer Games/World Games/California Games/And so on (Epyx, C64)
Playing it together with like a dozen people on various occasions. Hot-seat hot-shit easy-to-pick-up multiplayer party action (or HHETPUMPAs, as they have it), and that was almost two decades before Wii, Eye Toy and Sing Star were more than a blink in their creators' eyes.
Tetris (Gameboy)
The fact that this shipped with Nintendo's Gameboy made this all the more unforgettable. Humming along to the tunes, arranging blocks and keeping an eye on the battery power level at once, gameplay moments hardly got any more involving than that.
Tomb Raider 2 (Windows)
This may sound a little odd to some who missed that era, but this was the first game I fired up on my brand new Voodoo graphics card. Those were like the shits. And oh, bliss: Instead of struggling to deliver half-way solid framerates in subpar resolutions, and let's not forget textures that looked like Lego bricks when walking up close, the game ran totally smoth in high resolutions, and the Lego bricks were done for.
Thief, Demo (Windows)
Firing that up not knowing what to expect was perhaps the last true completely-knocks-me-out-of-my-pants moment I've had when playing a game. Gaming hasn't gone any further than this still. I think the second page of
this review explains it better than I ever could.
There's countless more but that's all for now.
