Comment on Great games you would recommend from before 1990?
Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 1 week agoHard to say which genres I like most, but I like games which present a good story & atmosphere or do interesting things mechanically. Besides sport games I play nearly everything.
Games which I really enjoyed: Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Planescape: Torment, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Return of the Obra Dinn, Zelda: Twilight Princess, What Remains of Edith Finch, Pyre, HalfLife & Portal series
Shihali@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Sounds like point and click adventures might be your jam? Check out the Macventures (which had NES ports, although some of the ports go past your cutoff date): Deja Vu, Shadowgate, Uninvited.
Point and click adventures were a very popular genre at the time, although they had a well-earned reputation for difficulty and illogic. Someone who knows more about them could give you more specific advice.
I played a lot of JRPGs, and it’s hard to recommend JRPGs of the period. They’re rather different from both their 90s descendants and their late 80s WRPG contemporaries, and you look like you would much prefer 90s JRPGs. The 80s have two phases: the antique JRPGs focused on exploring the world with a simple plot, and the pre-classic JRPGs with a much heavier focus on plot not yet accompanied by much skill at storytelling or pacing. The best of the antique JRPGs is Dragon Quest 3/Dragon Warrior 3 (1988). It’s a little complex to just jump into, so if you bounce off the complexity I would retreat to Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior (1986). If Dragon Warrior’s grinding weren’t so slow, it would be easy to recommend as a tutorial game to anyone trying to get into JRPGs.
If you’ll take a game from 1990 on the nose, Dragon Quest 4/Dragon Warrior 4 is the most polished pre-classic JRPG in your time range. If not, Phantasy Star 2 (1989). But these games are hard to recommend nowadays to someone with modern tastes because they’re not as polished as Dragon Quest 3 and don’t have a 1990s-sized storage device for better storytelling and writing. The one thing I’ll say for Phantasy Star 2’s writing is that it has the guts to go places that games even now rarely go.