I took a very interesting journey a few weekends ago.  The journey started with Minecraft and ended in 1999.  Trust me, you will never reason it out so let me take you step by step:

After the Minecraft article by Brad, I decided to check this whole Minecraft thing out.  I absolutely fell in love with it.  I played the single player version and hosted a multiplayer server to play along with a few of my friends.  I started following the creator (Notch) on Twitter to read about the current and upcoming updates.  One of his tweets (or was it a re-tweet) was about another indie game called War for the Overworld.  I clicked the link to check it out.

War for the Overworld is an in development game that is attempting to clone the old Bullfrog classic Dungeon Keeper.  This got me very excited.  I remembered playing and loving that game.  Dungeon Keeper was the first to successfully reverse course on the dungeon crawl games.  You build and protect the dungeon from the heroes.  Great game.  Great execution.  Completely loved it.  Dungeon Keeper 2 followed and was even better.  I can remember having to bribe people to play multiplayer against me – I was just too good.  There were other games that tried to go in the same direction, but none could ever stack up to DK (or DK2).  Having been out of the hardcore gaming scene for a while, I decided to do a little search for any modern games similar to Dungeon Keeper.  I found one.  It’s called Dungeons.

At first glance, Dungeons is beautiful.  It also contains a beautiful promise to fill the Dungeon Keeper void.  Unfortunately, the beauty is only skin deep.  While the game looks good, the controls and gameplay mechanics are very lacking.  There are some similarities to Dungeon Keeper; however, there are also some game killing differences.  Sure, you still build a dungeon, and you still defeat the heroes – but that’s really were the similarities begin and end (although some of the characters look strangely familiar).  In order to expand you dungeon, you need to kill the heroes, but you don’t want to kill them right away.  You want to keep the Heroes exploring and gaining experience before you kill them.  To make matters even worse, you have no control over you own minions.   To sum it up, take the worse part of Dungeon Keeper and the worse part of the Sims, combine them together, and you have Dungeons.  I was so disappointed that I did what I should have done in the first place – went back to 1999.

It took a good bit of tweaking to get it to work on Windows 7, but I did get Dungeon Keeper 2 up and running.  It is as glorious as I remember it.  My six year old watched me play it and got very interested as well.  I then installed it on his computer (a much easier tasking being Windows XP), so he could play it for himself (and leave me alone).  Now I’m thinking multiplayer.  Sure, it’s no fun to beat up on someone 27 years younger … or is it?

So there you have.  Minecraft to 1999 (the year Dungeon Keeper 2 came out).

Anyone old school favorites you want to brag about?