What Are The Best Retro Games Ever Made?

Are you an enthusiast of retro games? Would you like to know what the best retro games ever made are? Then this piece of information is for you, because I have gathered some of the most remarkable retro games ever made in here.

Some retro games are still very popular to this day and were even adapted to mobile devices, and some of them are not popular anymore and were forgotten in the retro classics archive. However, some of the forgotten games don’t really deserve to be forgotten because they are truly awesome, so I will make sure to introduce not only the games that are still popular today.

Here are some of the best retro games ever made:

Frogger – Frogger is a 1981 arcade games developed by Konami. The idea of the game is to direct frogs to their homes one by one by crossing a busy road and navigating a river full of hazards. The Frogger coin-op is an early example of a game with more than one CPU, and it was definitely the first game of its type.

Space Invaders – Space Invaders is an arcade video game developed by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was released in 1978 and was originally manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan. Later on, it was licensed for production in the United States by a different company. Space Invaders is one of the earliest shooting games that were ever released, and the mission in the game is to defeat waves of aliens with a laser cannon and score as high as possible. This game was a huge success in its time and it formed the basis of the entire shooting genre.

Star Wars – Star Wars was released in 1983 by Atari Inc. It was highly popular back in time and is still considered a cult game and has many loyal fans all around the world. The game is a first person space simulator that simulates the attack on the Death Star from the film Star Wars (which was released in 1977). The game is composed of 3D color vector graphics and it was developed during the Golden Age of Arcade Games. It is considered the fourth most popular game of all time according to the readers of “Killer List of Videogames”. Star Wars is one of the old classical video games that are very big and popular even nowadays, after more than two decades.

There are many amazing retro games that should belong in the list of the best retro games ever made, but since I couldn’t list them all, the three that are mentioned above definitely represent this category very well.

Should Games Skip Cutscenes Altogether?

Videogames as a medium for storytelling have often taken cues from movies, and the clearest example of this is the use of cutscenes. Pac-Man is quite often said to be the first game that used cutscenes rather than transitioning directly from level to level with no intermission. After the player beats each stage, it would play a short vignette depicting simple scenes of Pac-Man and ghosts chasing each other.

Whilst these little scenes are quite obviously a long way from how modern cutscenes are used in games, the core concept is the same.

The game takes away control of the character from the player for a sequence to introduce some sort of new information. The duration of these sequences can vary widely – Konami’s Metal Gear Solid series is infamous for having lengthy cutscenes, with Metal Gear Solid 4 clocking it at more than eight hours of cutscenes – and can be used for a wide variety of purposes.

They are used to introduce characters, develop established ones, provide backstory, atmosphere, dialogue and more.

However, despite their ubiquity in modern big budget games, cutscenes are not necessarily the best way to tell a story in a game. There have been many highly acclaimed games that used few cutscenes, instead preferring to allow the player to control the character throughout the whole game.

Half-Life 2 by Valve Software is currently the all time highest scoring game for PC on review aggregation site Metacritic, and it only has one cutscene at each end. Control is rarely taken away from the player for more than a few moments – excepting an on rails sequence towards the end – and much of the background information that would be shown in a cutscene elsewhere is instead shown through scripted events or background details in the environment.

But are Half-Life 2’s unskippable, scripted sequences that different from cutscenes? After all, the player often cannot progress until other characters finish their assigned actions and dialogue – so why not just use traditional cutscenes and be done with it? To get truly unique experiences, we mustfirst look at what makes video gaming unique as a medium for storytelling. Unlike film, where the viewer has no control over the action, or traditional tabletop games, where players actions have very little in the way of visual outcomes, video games provide an unique opportunity to merge interactivity and storytelling. Games like Gone Home, Dear Esther and other games in the so called ‘walking simulator’ genre have been lauded as great examples of the sort of storytelling that can be unique to games.

However, to some gamers, these games are presenting an entirely different problem – although they rarely take control away from the player, they also offer very little in the way of gameplay themselves. Indeed, Dear Esther has no way the player can affect the world around them – the only action that can be taken is to walk along a predetermined path to the end of the game. There is no way to ‘lose,’ no interaction with the environment, just what amounts to a scenic tour with some overlaid narration. So, despite the lack of cutscenes in the game, the almost complete lack of player control and interaction in the first place means that there is little to differentiate it from an admittedly quite protracted cutscene.

As video games are currently exist, there seems to exist a sort of dichotomy between traditional storytelling and gameplay. For a game to tell a story to a player, there must be some degree of limitation in what the player can do – either a temporary one in the form of a cutscene or scripted sequence, or by limiting the players actions for the course of the game. Perhaps future games will be able to integrate a great deal of player interaction with compelling storytelling. But that won’t be accomplished by taking the players control away and forcing them to watch a short movie instead of letting them play the game.