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From 1997 until 2004, almost everything I posted on the web had to do with computer games. It's not that I finally matured in 2004 or anything so pretentious as that; I just started spending my time in different ways. It wasn't a conscious decision, it just finally happened. I'm no longer in a community where I'm called "JetFred", and I never removed all these dead links to the defunct Gone Gold site. I still play some games and I still like lists, so the actual collection is up to date, but the comments on these game pages were last updated in 2003 or 2004, which is also when I wrote the embarrassingly long drivel about game genres below. For better or for worse, this is no longer my sole obsession. I keep this here as a snapshot of this incredible distraction during those years which included the first decade of my marriage, my son's youngest years, and my first trip through graduate school.
- J French (2008) This is the place to come if you want to read the ramblings of an obsessive personality trying to explain his thought process. You have been warned. First let me dismiss the console collection with this very brief explanation: it's a diversion. When I want to plop on the floor and turn off my brain, I play something like Tony Hawk for a while. It doesn't happen often. For that reason, the console collection is haphazard and also a bigger waste of money than anything else I own. Thankfully, I acquired most of it via Best Buy gift cards from family members who seldom attempt to pick out things I would like. That's fine with me. As for the PC collection, what I own and what I play are much more deliberate. There's a system in my head, and this page is just one way that I struggle to get it out. I'll spare you most of the boring history, but it should suffice to say that I was an Atari 2600 gamer as a child and then a C-64 gamer through high school. Everyone else was already on to bigger and better computers, I was lucky to have the C-64. I've listed those games further down on this page. I still have all of the Atari 2600 cartridges (and my original, mostly functional system), and as best as I can remember, those are all the Atari games I ever owned. I had to list some of the C-64 games under traded because I can't find them. I suspect that all of the missing ones ended up staying at my childhood friend's house. His parents never moved, so I guess I should go search the place. I'm ashamed to say that I regularly played about five copied games (which I didn't list, of course) for every one C-64 game that I actually bought. At least that was the only time in my life that I copied games, not a single title in my PC collection is pirated. Anyway, I sold the C-64 (curses) and went to college, where I had no personal computer and the web was only just becoming what we are so used to today. I missed out on a lot of games from 1991-1995, and to be honest, my social life benefited from their absence. I think King's Quest was the only game I finished in college, and that was on a roommate's computer with my girlfriend at the time. I chose dating over gaming, and I wouldn't revisit gaming until after I graduated in 1995 and got married in 1996. I bought a PC in 1997 because I wanted to play Zork Nemesis and Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time. I had enjoyed a few adventures in the younger years, most notably Infocom's Wishbringer and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Activision's Mindshadow, Kayleth, and like I said, King's Quest. I had to see what Zork had become. Of course I crashed the new PC two weeks later trying to run Return to Zork in Windows 95. I had totally missed the days of boot disks and gaming in DOS, I was clueless. Live and learn. Now, like many PC gamers, I build my own PCs and can get 15-year-old games to run on them, but it took quite a bit of trial and error to get there. If it weren't for my discovery of Warcraft 2, I might have played only adventures on this newly acquired PC, but after riding the Tides of Darkness, I was soon checking out the strategy and role playing genres as well. As for action games, I had seen Doom in college and thought it was stupid, but PC Gamer convinced me to buy Half-Life, and that was my undoing. I realized that I liked games from a lot of different genres, and this whole hobby was about to get out of hand. I went through a spell where I bought the big releases indiscriminately. Stuff like SWAT 3D and Rainbow Six had no business being in my collection, but I bought them anyway because the mags said they were cool. And they were, just not to me. I took a long, hard look at the stack of games from one holiday binge or another and realized that I needed to figure out what I really liked, quickly. Joining the community at Gone Gold (which has now closed down) really helped me with this goal, and I began trading away games that I'd never liked in the first place. I've been through times when I thought about games too much, but lately I've backed off a bit to leave time for my two non-nerdy interests, running and guitar. I'd like to explain how I approach the genres in my collection. I think of games in terms of 4 kinds of gameplay elements. These are, in order from simplest to most complex, 1) arcade, 2) action, 3) strategy, and 4) role playing. In addition to these elements and the possible combinations, there are two unique approaches to gameplay: racing and adventure. More on adventure in a few minutes. First, arcade elements are the pure twitch elements, where reflexes and response time determine your success at a fairly simple task. If you distill these elements down to the barest of bare, you get racing games. In racing games, you control one object which goes as fast as possible while you try to dodge things. Therefore, racing games are the simplest, most basic games available, even more basic than pinball. The second category is action, which involves on-the-fly assessment of a threatening situation, requiring you to maximize the damage you dish out while minimizing the damage you take. This is different from arcade in that usually action games give you more choices for dealing with threats than arcade games, and success or failure isn't as absolute. Often the emphasis is more on survival than perfection. Third is strategy, in which you must make hard choices about the use of your resources to tackle a constantly evolving problem. These games offer even more options to choose from, and since good strategy games should be highly replayable, I seldom worry about "finishing" them. I should be able to come back to them again and again, and each scenario should be individually satisfying. Finally, there is role playing, which allows you to choose, create, and modify your avatar as you progress through a series of challenges. In theory, role playing games offer the most complex choices. Unlike pure strategy games, role playing games usually involve detailed settings and deeper plots, creating the context for your decisions. In my opinion, any two of these four elements can be (and have been) successfully combined to make a hybrid genre, but I don't see how three types of gameplay could be combined in equal measure. Games that try to wear that many hats either end up emphasizing one element over the others or they become a muddled mess. And arcade elements simply cannot be combined equally with role playing elements because they are at opposite ends of the spectrum of complexity. Arcade elements are defined by simplicity and artificial restrictions (to quote Scott Kurtz's Brent Sienna, "wakka-wakka-wakka-fruit"), while role playing games depend on a variety of choices. If you flip through the PC collection on this site, you'll see the 11 possible genres that we are left with if you follow my over-analysis of the whole thing. It looks something like this:
Here is where I get in trouble with the fans of some so-called subgenres like sports, flight sims, and wargames. First, all wargames are strategy games, they don't get a genre to themselves just because they strip away lots of the pretty fluff. Second, the purest flight sims aren't games at all, if realism takes precedent over gameplay balancing. Typically, to make a simulator into a game, you have to add combat and then make it fair and fun rather than realistic. Then the game becomes a "combat sim" (flight, space, mech, whatever), or in other words, an action game where your avatar is a vehicle rather than a creature. The very idea of a mech or space "sim" is laughable because there is no real behavior to simulate. For that reason, I find "combat sims" (I don't acknowledge that as a real genre) to be unnecessarily confusing attempts to convince you that your avatar's abilities are, in this action game more than in others, somehow closer to reality and plausibility. And finally, sports games are, to me, a joke. Sports ARE games, with rules that make sense for real physical participation, where opponents can be dramatically unbalanced in ability. To make electronic simulations of these games is ludicrous. Either they become arcade games where reflexes are rewarded with points or they become action-strategy hybrids where you manage a team of units and then control one unit in real time. Again, they aren't games, they are simulations of games, which is silly and absurdly contradictory. If that's not snobbish enough for you, I'll go one better. I said that the most distilled, pure arcade games are racing games, and on the opposite end of the spectrum of complexity are the role playing games. If the options available in RPGs are expanded to the greatest extent possible, you get adventure games IN THEORY. Yes, I am proposing that adventure might, depending on your perspective, be considered the most complex genre. Adventure refers to the attempt to tell a story with NO superimposed limits to the possibilities. Practically all RPGs start by defining the character traits that will actually be modeled in the game. All interactions in the game are based on those parameters. But the adventure genre allows a wider variety of approaches to problems than any other. Think about it like a novel. If I sit down to write a novel, I can write ANYTHING, I don't have to first write out rules for what will be included. Unfortunately this translates into a totally non-interactive medium. Until that day when we can turn on a holodeck program and do whatever we want, a story with that much freedom becomes the hardest to shoehorn into the limitations of practical playability. So the solutions in adventure games have to be predetermined, but they should be created in a way that rewards exploration and experimentation with reasonably satisfying (or at least amusing) outcomes. Since the developers of an adventure game are free to give you any task they can imagine, the story should give the player a clear understanding of the objectives and the available options and a real desire to overcome the obstacles. Only a few developers, like Revolution, seem to get this. The adventure genre should be the most varied genre of all, but what we end up with is a few successes and a whole lot of attempts to clone those successes by reverse engineering. Myst works, therefore if I put together some puzzles (very basic gameplay) with some pretty pictures (no contribution to gameplay at all), I should get a good adventure game. Wrong, you get a thin copy of an adventure game, one assembled from the outside in rather than designed from the inside out. Role playing games give the illusion of complexity because the player has many choices, but to make the games work, there tend to be only a few real types of obstacles (an enemy to kill or escape from, an item to find). In adventure games the obstacles can be pretty much anything imaginable, but to work as a game, the player's options are usually simplified down to one real solution. Ironically, this means that RPGs and adventure games, the two genres that deal with the most possibilities, end up appealing to very different gameplay tastes. I love games with good plots, but I seldom finish RPGs because I feel like I'm having to work too hard to see what happens next. Many gamers have the exact same complaint about adventures, that it is too hard to know what to do to push the story along. It all comes down to where you like the fundamental element of discovery to lie. You can accept the limitations of a ruleset and be intrigued by the possibilities of who your avatar can become, or you can relish the suspense of an unpredictable series of events at the expense of player freedom. If you want to win the Nobel Prize in Gaming, figure out how to do both and I'll see you on the holodeck. For now, I don't consider adventure games with role playing elements to be hybrids. Role playing elements can be a way of presenting options in the adventure genre. Based on the way I've presented the gaming genres, I feel that creating an excellent adventure game must be the biggest challenge a developer can tackle, so adventures interest me most of all. About half of my collection is adventures, and unlike other genres, I allow both good and bad adventures into my collection out of curiosity. I almost always have an adventure game on the serious playlist, but I also acquire them much faster than I can play them. It's true that I finished very few of the old adventure games back in the days of middle school and high school, but back then I was perhaps even worse about jumping from game to game than I am now. Plus, I didn't have that much money when I was a kid, even for a kid. The oldest PC adventures are in my collection only because I rounded them up more recently. As for the others, I find the strategy genre to be very interesting, but there is no way I could give every strategy game I own enough playtime. I don't even try, I just like to have available the ones that appeal to me the most. On the other hand, I do play action and role playing games with intentions of actually finishing them, but unlike the adventures, once I start an action game or RPG, I'm really bad about leaving the game half-done. I would also like to make it very clear that multiplayer components have absolutely no influence on the way I rank games. You're looking at a guy who quit fencing in college because it required other humans to fence with. As for my compulsion to collect complete series, well just know that for every game I own, I also have every prequel, sequel, and expansion that I know of, at least up to around 2004. In 2004, I started letting things get a little backed up while I spent the money on a backlist of DVDs instead, but I'm still keeping track of what is out there. Now for some final thoughts on how I choose to list the games. I like box art and so I've used boxshots, in spite of the sputtering page loading even on fast connections. I don't have all of these boxes, but if I've displayed a special edition or an import cover, it's because that's the version of the game that I have. I've listed bundled games separately in almost all cases because I'm interested in displaying how many releases are represented, not how many individual purchases I've made. Finally, many thanks to Gedd, for his work for a while on an outstanding sales database for Gone Gold, and for all the brainstorming sessions via email.
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I'm including three more lists below. The first list is of the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 games that I have, which means I can actually find the cartridge or the original floppies. I've also tacked on the short list of web games that I've actually paid to register, and a top ten list of the fairly rare adventures games that I would probably pick up if I ran across them somewhere. The second list is of all the games that I have owned but subsequently gave away or traded. I have actually traded away far more titles than that if you include multiple copies of a game or titles that I repurchased later. The third list is of the complete PC game series that I have managed to acquire. I have every game in every series in the PC game collection (again, only counting releases through about 2004 for now). Note: If a game has an expansion released as a separate product, it's a series. Thanks for reading. And if you read all that, you're nuttier than I am. - JetFred
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Atari 2600
The Activision Decathalon |
Commodore 64
Bop 'n Wrestle |
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Registered games - web distribution
21st Jigsaw Top 10 fairly rare adventures I don't have
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (Legend)
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TRADED PC
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3D Ultra Pinball: Creep Night Aquanox Black and White Black and White: Creature Isle Blair Witch Volume 1: Rustin Parr Blair Witch Volume 2: The Legend of Coffin Rock Blair Witch Volume 3: The Elly Kedward Tale Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time Caesar 3 Celtic Kings Clue: Murder at Boddy Mansion Comanche 4 Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty Commandos 2: Men of Courage Conquest: Frontier Wars Corporate Machine Crimson Skies Deadly Dozen Delta Force Delta Force: Land Warrior Descent 2 Descent 3 Descent Freespace: The Great War Descent Freespace: Silent Threat Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive Diggles: The Myth of Fenris Divine Divinity Dragon's Lair Dune 2000 Earth 2150 Echelon Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard Empire of the Ants Enemy Infestation Europa 1400 The Guild Europa Universalis Europa Universalis 2 Evil Islands: Curse of the Lost Soul Evolva Exile: Escape from the Pit Exile 2: Crystal Souls Exile 3: Ruined World Flying Heroes Force 21 Freespace 2 Galactic Civilizations Gangsters: Organized Crime Gangsters 2: Vendetta Gothic Green Berets Hard Truck 2 Hard Truck: 18 Wheels of Steel Heavy Gear 2 High Heat 2002 The Hive Konung: Legend of the North Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny Lemmings Links: The Challenge of Golf Lords of the Realm 2 Magic Carpet 2: The Netherworlds Martian Gothic: Unification Metal Gear Solid Microsoft Train Simulator Midtown Madness 2 |
Mig Alley Might and Magic Millennium Edition Might and Magic 6: Mandate of Heaven Mind Rover: Europa Project Moonbase Commander Mortyr (2093 - 1944) NASCAR Legends NASCAR Racing 2 NASCAR Racing 2002 Season The Nations Need for Speed: Underground Odium Odyssey: The Search for Ulysses Physicus Prisoner of War Rage of Mages 2: Necromancer Return to Castle Wolfenstein Robert E. Lee: Civil War General Shadow Man Shogun: Total War Shogun: Total War Mongol Invasion Sid Meier's Gettysburg! SimCopter The Sims Soul Reaver 2 Space Bunnies Must Die! Spearhead Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the Way Speed Busters: American Highways Spider-Man: The Movie Star Control Star Control 2 Star Trek: Bridge Commander Star Trek: Klingon Academy Star Trek: Klingon Honor Guard Star Wars: Rebel Assault 2 The Hidden Empire Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire Star Wars: Starfighter Stratosphere: Conquest of the Skies Stonekeep Sudden Strike SWAT 3D: Close Quarters Battle Tachyon: The Fringe Test Drive 5 Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Eagle Watch Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Tomb Raider Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 Trainz Traitors Gate Turok 2: Seeds of Evil Ultima Collection Ultimate Ride Ultimate Ride Disney Coaster Unreal Tournament War Wind Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War Warrior Kings Whiplash Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Wild Metal Country Williams Pinball Classics Wing Commander: Privateer Worms Armageddon X: Beyond the Frontier Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal Zeus: Master of Olympus |
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Playstation
Broken Sword: Smoking Mirror Dreamcast
Armada Xbox
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance Playstation 2
Castlevania: Lament of Innocence Game Boy Advance
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars Commodore 64
Caveman Ugh-lympics
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PC SERIES |
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Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Age of Empires / Mythology Age of Wonders Aliens vs Predator Alone in the Dark Atlantis Baldur's Gate Bard's Tale Battle Chess Battle Isle Battlezone Broken Sword Cameron Files Castles Command and Conquer / Red Alert / Renegade / Generals Crusader Crystal Key Dark Fall Deus Ex Diablo Die By the Sword Dirt Track Racing Disciples Discworld Doom Dracula Dungeon Keeper Dungeon Siege Egypt Enchanter Etherlords Fallout F.E.A.R. Flashback / Fade to Black Frederik Pohl's Gateway Freedom Force Gabriel Knight Half-Life Heretic Heroes of Might and Magic Homeworld Icewind Dale Incoming Jagged Alliance Journeyman Project JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Kingdom King's Quest Kohan Laura Bow The Legend of Kyrandia Leisure Suit Larry Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes Magic and Mayhem Majesty Maniac Mansion Master of Orion M.A.X. Max Payne MDK Monkey Island Monty Python Myst / Uru Mysterious Journey Myth Need for Speed Neverwinter Nights No One Lives Forever Oddworld Painkiller Phantasmagoria Pilgrim Planetfall Pompeii Pro Pinball Quake Quest for Glory Railroad Tycoon Red Faction The Residents Riddle of the Sphinx Ring Rise of Nations Rollcage RollerCoaster Tycoon Rune Sam & Max Sea Dogs Serious Sam Seven Kingdoms Shivers Sid Meier's Civilization / Alpha Centauri SimCity SiN Space Quest Star Trek 25th Anniversary / Judgment Rites Star Trek Armada Star Trek Elite Force Star Wars Dark Forces / Jedi Knight Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds Star Wars X-Wing Starcraft Stronghold Syberia System Shock Tex Murphy Theme Park Thief Total Annihilation / Total Annihilation Kingdoms Transport Tycoon / Locomotion Tropico Twinsen's Adventure Ultima Underworld Unreal Warcraft Warlords Warlords Battlecry X-Com Zoo Tycoon Zork
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