I miss the golden days of wargames and sims

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I remember when the old hexbased wargames and stuff were big. When there were multiple flight simulators to choose from. I was very young at the time, and while I lacked the understanding of how to play those things completely accurately, I was fascinated by all the details and stuff modeled. I think it was Close Combat that really drew me in. The games actually made sense, like they mimicked the stuff I read in the history books. It was great, no more silly health bar. Now I had to actually using tactics and such to approach and kill the Tiger tanks and stuff.

Flight sims were great, too. So much more interesting trying to work out how to use avionics and radar, instead of just shooting things a few times and watching them blow up. I sort of see them as the kind of games that don't need endless identical releases of, but it makes me a little sad to see so few of these types of games any more.

It's like the only thing keeping them going and getting any releases at all are the hardcore simmer niche groups or the guys with a big interest in military history. Makes me a bit worried, too, that eventually these games might die out all together. I don't mind decades old graphics or things like that, if the game models the battles or aircraft accurately, but I suppose now that gaming is very much mainstream, a lot of people probably do.

I miss the golden days of adventure games =/

Adventure games are cool. I never played too many of them, but my favourite is probably Blade Runner. That game was amazing, and I think it's like one of the only game adaptations of a movie that actually turned out like a great game. Broken Sword is another one that sticks in my mind. I like the Sam and Max games, as well.

I loved the old Lucas Arts adventure games. Not to mention Space Quest 3 4 5 and 6

It's not all doom n gloom. The providers of those old wargames simply arn't in the mainstream anymore but there are some more recent examples of games which have broken out of the niche market.

Take Battlefront's Combat Mission Series (minus the recent shockforce game) it punched far and above its weight into mainstream gaming. the CMBO, CMBB and CMAK games all look obsolete and clunky by modern graphic FPS games but in terms of gameplay they were fantasticly simple to use yet had a lot of complicated maths going on under the surface.

Paradox Interactive have done quite well with their real time strategy games based off the Europa Universalis engine.

4X strategy wise you have one guy who programmed space empires 1-5 and the 4th game is still a fantastic and highly popular pbem game despite its totally obsolete 16 bit graphics. So easy to modify and customise

Matrix Games still carries on the close combat series. They are currently updating and releasing close combat with a series of improvements over the originals. They also publish tons of niche wargames such as Crown of glory

AGEOD have done some really good in depth strategic wargames around the americain civil war and indepedence.

Lock On was quite a good modern flight simulator. Based on the IL-2 Sturmovik flight sim which could be as complex or arcade like as you wanted.