I see there is a distinct lack of a thread dedicated to older games that are still incredibly enjoyable.

Specifically my current favorite genre, the city building series.

While there are several advanced builder games out in the market now (like the Sims games), I find there is a very strange allure to these 'Old Ones'

Since, I don't want this thread limited to just this series of games, people please feel free to add any old game you liked and think that they're still pretty brilliant and enjoyable.

I'll list all the games in the City Building series according to their release dates. Some of the older folk on here might recognize a few titles from their teenage years.

The titles in bold are the ones I currently have installed and enjoy very much.

-> Caesar [1992]
-> Caesar II [1995]
-> Caesar III [1998]
All the above are set in Ancient Rome.
-> Pharaoh [1999]
-> Expansion Pack: Queen of the Nile: Cleopatra [2000]
Ancient Egypt if someone didn't get that, lol.


-> Master of Atlantis: Zeus [2000]
-> Expansion Pack: Master of Atlantis: Poseidon [2001]

Set in Ancient Greece and Atlantis respectively. A Mix of actual History and fantasy
Currently have it on my PC. One of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. The special features of this game include summoning heroes like Hercules, Jason, Atlanta, etc. Building Temples for gods which enables lulzy gods to roam your city, etc.
The game along with the expansion pack comes to ~500 MB installation file.
The game could probably be played on an old PIII Machine easily. I even have a copy installed on my Netbook, which runs on Ubuntu.
If you do plan to install, then I strongly suggest getting the GoG file, since it'll be incredibly easier to install on the newer OS (Win 7, 8, Vista, etc)

Must-play game for everyone if you ask me.

-> Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom [2002]
Set in Ancient China.
-> Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile [2004]
-> Expansion Pack: Children of the Nile: Alexandria [2008]
From what I've seen, the city building system is different in this one apart from all the other ones.

-> Caesar IV [2006]
People should get this game just to see the cityscape. Effin beautiful cities can built on this one, since it is a full 3D Game.

Some Pics for example.

Again, please add any game to this list, that you feel is old/underrated/etc, but is still enjoyable.

If there is already a thread for this, then sorry. If that is the case, request to the mods to please move/delete this. My only excuse is that a cursory search didn't provide any thing of a similar nature.

 

Deadlocklanetary Conquest would definitely be in my top 3. I recorded a Let's Play of it last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdwv-AXNna8
It came out in 1995 or so, and I still find it to be very playable.

One of my other favorite top 3 games would be Civilization: Call to Power.

 

Played almost all of those, still play the ancient china one sometimes (since it has the most 'advanced' gameplay (didn't like Caesar IV)).

I read somewhere that they're making another one situated in the medieval era. It's also more focused on expanding cities made in a previous scenario instead of always starting over (which did get annoying after a while)

 

Yeah, they did announce that they're gonna make a Medieval Era based game a while ago. They also said that they were going back to the near 2D system like in Zeus and such.
But that was a while ago though, there's not been any news on that front. No release date, nothing.

 

Banished is a decent one that came out recently. You're basically dumped in the middle of nowhere with 10 people that you dole out jobs to and try to keep them alive as long as possible while your town grows.

 

Banished is a good one though its still a really flawed experience. A lot of your early game will be great since you will constantly be doing this balancing act of jobs to ensure everyone survives. If you aren't careful here you will just get everyone killed. Unfortunately there is a big gap for it after that initial few years of just getting by. Once you get a decent little town going things become a lot easier since you have probably figured out the triumvirate of buildings for food, clothes, and wood. At that point its just a constant expansion until the natural disasters start happening, now that's when things start getting fun and hectic again.

 

I think that problem is pretty much common in all such games.
It does become rote after a while, when you've figured out the mechanics of the game. You pretty much know where to cash in and where to rush it.
That was pretty much the reason I liked Zeus and Poseidon so much.
The idea of summoning gods and completing quests through the heroes by summoning them, added an extra excitement to me apart from city-building/survival-strategy.

 

Man, this is my shit. I own all of the games in the OP apart from Caesar IV, the chinese one, and Children of the Nile.

I'm going to have to say that Pharaoh/Cleopatra are my favorite though. It was the first computer game I ever received (along with Imperium Galactica, man nostalgiaing hard. I need to find that and II), and ancient Egyptian history is something I am greatly fascinated by. It's probably the only games in the city-builder series that I tried to tactically master, with perfected housing blocks that allowed a city to sustain itself until you close the game. It's also the longest series of the ones I've played. Zeus/Poseidon may have more stories (sets of missions, in that game), but Pharaoh just kills it. Once you get to the end of the 25 or so missions, man it gets hairy. Huge population requirements so you have to have good housing blocks or you run out of map (not as bad as in Caesar III, though..), and if you choose to manage a strife city, you get hit with huge waves of invasions.

That's another perk for this game (and Caesar III for the most part), outside of the early tutorial maps, and a few mandatory missions (i.e. constructing the first capital of Egypt at Men-Nefer, or building the first pyramid in Saqqara, or, of course, building Khufu's pyramid complex on the Gizan plateau outside of Rostja.), you get to choose between a military mission or a peaceful mission. Military missions are generally shorter because they don't throw too many difficult requirements at you when you're fending off the Nubians, the Bedouins, the Sea People, or the goddamn motherfucking Hyksos and their goddamn motherfucking chariots.

Peaceful missions (somewhat of a misnomer as you can get attacked, but it will be very sporadic and not a threat), are where the game has you build grand cities (late game anyway) that are very wealthy, but many end up being even harder than military cities. Pharaoh usually requires large populations and high culture and prosperity, as well as, once you get to mid-game and beyond, vast construction projects of pyramids, or mastabas, or sun temples, or obelisks. (Military missions have some as well, usually obelisks to commemorate their victories). There's one mission where there's a huge drought and the nile river isn't flooding, where you found a city at Menat-Khufu and are basically responsible for feeding Egypt. It's a bitch. God I love this fucking game. Beating that mission is near the top on a short list of gaming achievements that leave me incredibly satisfied, and you're amply rewarded for it - from the next mission to the end of the game, you and your descendants are Ra made flesh.

Honestly, you can probably find this game and Cleopatra on the internet for like $10. I recommend it to anyone and everyone that enjoys learning about egyptian history to play it. The game is quite remarkable from a historical standpoint, it's not 100% historically accurate, but it's very high, and it hits all of the major events of the time (once you include Cleopatra, that is. Pharaoh vanilla ends at the height of the New Kingdom). If you're like me, you're going to find yourself researching while you're playing.

 

Those monuments could be a bitch to complete though. They took ages, especially if you turned the 'god help' off.

They somehow managed to make it even more annoying in the China one, where you can no longer send burial provisions yourself. The game does it automatically according to some strange algorithm, meaning you need to always have all the necessary goods to proceed instead of one at a time.

Also, can you get Pharaoh to work on win 7? It keeps 'not responding' for me.

 

What worked for me on windows 7 was running Pharaoh as an administrator and under compatibility mode for XP. I can't get Cleopatra to work on my current machine no matter what I do. And for monuments, as long as your city is well-made and won't collapse with not paying attention, just switch game speed to 100%. I'm not gonna lie though, outside of my very first playthrough (which took so fucking long heh I was so young), I just get to the point where I have all the ratings and populations above the req and have the city to a self-sustainable point, I just cheat and skip to the next level.

 

Managed to 'acquire' the GoG version, and that one works fine, even with the high res mod.
Looking at some older saved cities it seems I didn't really understand the concept of building blocks back then (way too many intersections).

Took a while to find a decent setup without intersections (because entertainment venues) but think I managed to do it:



The inner houses get up to the second level of entertainment, and the outer ones the third. No intersections, so walkers always finish the loop.

Edit: also, how the fuck do you resize pics?