Old School PC Gaming: Classic Games that Have Aged Well

There are some excellent games – some old enough to buy their own alcohol – that are as good today as the day they were released. You may not have heard of all of them. After all, when a game has been out for a while, people generally stop talking about it. They are still out there though, waiting patiently for someone to pick them up and play.

Unlike with consoles, a game from 1995 may work on modern PCs just fine. In this article, we are looking specifically at games that are still fun to play, ten or more years old, and are the best of their style in their series (e.g. Civilization 4 is not considered, because Civilization 5 was better; Fallout 2 is considered, because Fallout 3 and 4 looked and felt quite different). We've also considered remasters of games that fit that description. Most of these games are available relatively cheap and will offer many hours of enjoyment, even on modest hardware.

A special point of note: games have generally become more forgiving over the years, with things like autosaves and regenerating health becoming more or less standard. Expect very little of this sort of mollycoddling with these old-school games.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition

This is one of the CRPG greats. It's full of travel, discovery, NPCs and oodles of story to uncover. As with other classic CRPGs, expect plenty of written dialogue. The remaster adds support for widescreen, some content, as well as some visual enhancements over the classic.

Quake 3 Arena

If you take a modern multiplayer shooter, and boil away all the theatre, strip it of military pretensions, and speed it up a good deal, you'll find something that looks a lot like Quake 3 Arena.

It is the very soul of a competitive first-person shooter - brutal, fast, and more dependent on skill than anything else. As its name promises, it is focused on arena combat, with small to medium maps with various environmental features, damage, speed, health and armor boosts, as well as weapons. It is, my opinion, the pinnacle of the Quake series as far as multiplayer is concerned.

Did I mention it was fast-paced?

Grim Fandango Remastered

An excellent point and click adventure, remastered to look and work nicer on modern hardware.

The several hours' worth of entertaining story follows the adventures of Manuel Calavera, travel salesman to the dead. The game takes place in a loose interpretation of the underworld of Aztec mythology, seen through film-noir goggles, making for an unusual, quirky, and immensely enjoyable aesthetic. The excellent voice acting only makes it more immersive, selling the setting and characters better than the best visuals ever could.

Unusually, for a game of its era, most of the dialogue is spoken; so if you don't have the patience for reams of text, this one's for you.

Diablo 2

Built on the rich mythos of Diablo, Diablo 2 follows the story of a hero battling trough the world of Sanctuary to stop dark and terrible powers. The game gives off a macabre, tainted vibe, a good part of which can be credited to the outstanding ambient music.

The story is very good - however, little of it actually takes place during gameplay. Rather, the story is mostly told (very well) through cinematics between acts.

If you pick this one up or revisit it, do yourself a favor, and read up on the lore - it will greatly enrich your experience of the world as you play through what would otherwise feel like a generic, albeit excellently executed dungeon crawler thanks to the many me-too clones that exist of the style.

Homeworld Remastered

Homeworld is a space strategy game. Not a strategy game set in space (StarCraft), mind you. A strategy game truly in space, all three glorious dimensions of it.

The player gets to control space fleets, gather resources and fight spectacular battles in full 3d, maneuvering and commanding in all three axes. The game works - like most strategy games - on a series of counters. Ship 'x' counters ship 'y' and so on. The gameplay is very engaging, demanding a lot of attention and awareness of the positions of various vessels, current orders, capabilities, etc.

An excellent game, and a must-play for fans of strategy games. The HD remake makes it truly gorgeous, by any standards.

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

A fun game in every respect - excellent story, solid gameplay, and varied missions.

The main campaign leads players through several different views (i.e. races) and phases of an epic conflict - first dawning, then raging in the world of Azeroth.

The lore, like most Blizzard games, is deep, and adds an extra dimension to what is already a very good game.

A point of note here is that it is not exactly fast-paced - units will be engaged in combat for a comparatively long time before either perishing, or taking down their targets.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

The third game in the Splinter Cell series before it somewhat changed its playstyle, Chaos Theory does an admirable job, keeping most of the good stuff from previous games, while adding gameplay features made possible by better technology.

The player takes on the role of Sam Fisher, covert agent. Sam goes where no one else will go, and do things no one else can do - all without being detected. The game focuses heavily on stealth, sticking to the shadows and pouncing on enemies from behind, above, and underneath - or better yet, avoiding them altogether. There are some minor puzzle mechanics (i.e. 'hacking', and 'lockpicking' minigames) that, depending on your disposition, either enhance the sense of urgency, or disrupt the main gameplay.

The story is, unsurprisingly, yet delightfully, worthy of a Tom Clancy novel, with plenty of international intrigue, betrayal and plot twists.

Unlike most games on this list, this one could be mistaken for a modern game in bad light, boasting very impressive visuals for its time.

Rise of Nations Extended Edition

Rise of Nations is an empire building game, with elements of Risk, and Age of Empires. A player nurses their civilization from a nomadic tribe settling down for the first time, through the various ages, right up to the modern age. The player is in competition with AI or other players, defending, attacking or allying with various other players (AI or human) on the map, trading resources and money, with the ultimate goals of acquiring resources and territory until they have it all - or achieve other victory conditions in the game within a set number of 'turns' (i.e. real-time scenarios). The game alternates between a turn-based 'macro' game where they can choose to move armies or units around between territories, and real-time 'micro' games where the effects of their 'macro' moves are felt.

The remake mainly adds HD support, leaving the excellent core gameplay untouched.

Commandos series

This series is based on the tactical command of - you guessed it - commandos. The games are set during the Second World War, giving the player control of a handful of elite soldiers. The idea is to execute various maneuvers to attain the level's objectives while avoiding detection, or at least annihilation. The commandos themselves are quite individual, having different skillsets and specialties.

Most missions will involve combining the abilities of the forces at your disposal to formulate and execute a plan to achieve that mission's objectives.

The game is quite unforgiving of sloppiness in planning or execution - which only adds to the sense of achievement in finally beating a mission.

The Secret of Monkey Island 1 & 2: Special Edition PC

Another recently-revived old game, this is a classic point-and click adventure, following the exploits of wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood. The game is set in the Caribbean, during the 17th century pirate boom, although various anachronistic objects are present.

The dialogue and plotline are good, and the game doesn't take itself too seriously, adding to the entertainment value greatly.

The remaster adds gorgeous high-definition art, while leaving the gameplay and dialogue untouched. There's even an option to 'go retro', allowing a player to switch the graphics back to their original state.

Planescape: Torment

Planescape follows the journey of the 'Nameless One', an immortal with amnesia, looking to recover memories of his past. The gameplay is classic CRPG - plenty of rich dialogue, and colorful characters, and a driving story, slowly discovered, with the running themes of self-discovery and redemption - unusually philosophical for a game, regardless of age and genre.

Half-Life / Black Mesa

To be clear, Half-Life and Black Mesa are separate, yet similar games. Half-Life is the original game, with Black Mesa being the free fan-made remake, editing out some parts of the original and altering others, but maintaining the 'feel' of the game nonetheless.

Half-Life places the player in the shoes of the verbally challenged Dr. Gordon Freeman, theoretical physicist, newly assigned to a top secret research facility in the New Mexico desert.

The gameplay is largely FPS, with some puzzle elements, with new enemies, environmental challenges, and environments at every turn.

Fallout 1 & 2

Fallout probably needs no introduction - it is a series set in a post-nuclear wasteland in various American states. The player takes control of a character tasked with saving their people (a theme shared by most Fallout games), exploring a world resettled by the descendants of the few survivors of nuclear devastation, who have founded fledgling cities and towns, and ramshackle, often brutal communities based on whatever balance of power they happened to settle into.

The game is as much about the what-ifs of such societies as it is about the player's progression through them. As with RPGs, the player gains experience and skills, meets various characters and influences the fate of the wasteland and its inhabitants as they choose various courses of action or inaction.

Fallout is another family of games that don't take themselves altogether too seriously, often breaking the 'fourth wall' for the sake of jokes or references to pop culture.

A special point of note regarding the early Fallout games is the rich, vivid and sometimes amusingly flat descriptions of various objects in the environment and inventory items 'examined' by the player. These contribute a good deal to the sense of personality attached to the player, being one of the only means of communication between the character themselves and the player controlling them - an internal monologue of sorts.

Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour

An excellent strategy game, set in the near future, with three distinct factions vying for power in a global war. Players can take on the roles of the USA (conventional warfare), China (nuclear, swarm), or the GLA (ambush, guerilla) through three separate campaigns, with excellent gameplay throughout.

Being set in the near future, it features conventional weapons such as tanks and footsoldiers, as well as more futuristic weapons like microwave tanks, and lasers. The world the game sells is believable, yet larger-than-life enough to be great fun.

The game includes several innovations in strategic gameplay, including offscreen strikes, and a full-blown aerial dimension to strategy, implemented more gracefully than most other strategy games featuring aircraft.

Gothic 1 & 2

This is a fully open world 3d RPG set in a low fantasy world. The player takes on the role of a hero with no information, other than to deliver a letter. This is a refreshing departure from games that task a player with saving the world right off the bat, and allows for a much more organic discovery of story - in pieces, from various sources, and sometimes incomplete, to be filled in by discovery, cajoling, and exploration. Like Fallout, Gothic looks at a lawless land, and the societies that emerge.

The combat system is - initially - intentionally terrible - the player character doesn't know how to handle weapons, and this shows in their fighting style. That said, the control scheme is not exactly intuitive, and without a tutorial, is difficult to understand for the first time. It's worth learning though, and handles better as the player character gets better at handling weapons.

This one's a must-play for RPG fans.

Workaround - Edit the video resolution in Gothic.ini using notepad. Create a copy of gothic.ini and name it gothic_1.ini. Create a .txt file and put the following in there:

"cd [path to folder containing gothic.ini]
Del gothic.ini
Copy gothic_1.ini gothic.ini
Gothic.exe"

Save the .txt file with a .bat extension (save as.... .bat). Create a shortcut to this BAT file on the desktop, and use it to launch Gothic. Optional - change the icon of the shortcut to the gothic icon by right-clicking and editing its properties.

MechCommander 1 & 2

Mechcommander is based on the idea of mech warfare - giant walking robots that carry sizeable armaments.

The game is fairly straightforward - you have command of your fleet of mechs. You can customize this fleet based on mechs you buy, or salvage during missions.

You start out with a handful of pilots, whose skills and specializations develop over the course of the game, depending on how you choose to deploy them.

The mechs themselves have a great degree of customizability - you could load a mech to only carry long range missiles, and pilot it with a long-range weapons specialist, to make for an effective artillery piece, for instance.

The story is mildly interesting, with extremely cheesy cutscenes, and some interesting events taking place.

The main selling point though, is outstandingly executed mech combat in a squad-based tactical setting.

Age of Empires 2 HD

Age of Empires is a classic strategy game - you start out with a village, and build your empire from there, building structures, researching upgrades, doing battle and progressing through the ages.

The campaigns are fun, but where this game really shines is in multiplayer, where you can customize a ruleset for play with friends.

The revamp adds some minor content, and more importantly, support for HD displays, opening up a whole lot more visible map than the original.

Game Over

This list represents some of the best games that were released ten or more years ago. Go ahead and try them out! Not every game that deserves to be on this list has been included, likely because we weren't aware of them. If you know of something we've missed, feel free to share it in the comments.