Four games that inspired me.
The first two are a bit obscure, but were my first exposure to interactive fiction and 3D gaming. The number on the second one is not frames per second. It might be seconds per frame.
The second two were inspirations mostly in terms of what their world implied rather than how well they executed on the premise.
@natecull wow, what is that one with the green wireframe hallways called? it brings up a really vivid sense impression and i'm almost sure i can remember it in blue lcd monochrome on a zenith laptop with a pacman ghost rushing at me too fast to avoid because the cpu was way faster than it'd been written for and there wasn't a turbo button to slow it down, but maybe i am confusing two different games...
@brennen I think I know the one you mean, though! A PC '3D Pacman' game.
I remember it being really, really hard because you never knew where the ghosts were.
@natecull yeah, that's totally it. i found it in a GAMES directory that came with my dad's work machine in about 1987.
other highlights: an unplayably fast version of q*bert, an unplayably fast version of defender, a roulette implementation, some card games i didn't understand, and an incredibly primitive version of softporn that blew my tiny mind even though it mostly didn't work.
@brennen I don't understand how humans even played regular Defender. That was one heck of a tough game.
I remember writing a Microsoft Compiled BASIC game circa 1987 loosely influenced by Choplifter and Scramble - it scrolled a (very minimal) ground and had about four software sprites, because that was all I could get to work with a 4.77 Mhz processor.
Then we got a 286 with Turbo button and whoops, the entire game was unplayably fast. :(
Disk lost to time, now. Probably just as well.
@brennen It's RATRUN on Commodore Pet, from CURSOR Magazine. 1979. Character line graphics for the win!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk0iuJ4DgQE