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Follow those links for more of my comments on them. And there is an interesting one, which had been on the way, but which is now canceled: which I describe in my Duality page. I have a taxonomy of such games in my Game-Engine Taxonomy page; it's interesting to see how various features have evolved over time.
Back in the 1980's, I would often play a Star Trek game on Cornell's mainframes and minis -- one would travel around the Galaxy and kill Klingons and Romulans as one goes. Its display of the Galaxy, stars, and planets was all ASCII-art, and *very* schematic, and one has to enter commands for moving and firing weapons by typing them in -- one had to work out which direction to move and fire, for starters -- and one never got any nice graphical display of the results. And I'd have to type in the commands for displaying how the Enterprise is doing and what's around it -- and do so repeatedly. There was a version that used VT100 escape codes to continuously update the display in GUI fashion, but it was not smart enough to update only the changed stuff, and it was eventually banished from the department VAX because of its being such a CPU hog (or more likely, I/O-request hog).
I'd also play what were separately labeled "video games" -- computer games with dedicated computers and video displays that worked in real time -- but which lived in video-game arcades, and often still do. One of my favorites was "Battlezone", where you are in a tank and you try to kill other tanks. It was all rendered with wireframe graphics (just the edges of everything), but it had very nice tank-engine and gun and explosion sounds. I have a copy of it on my Macintosh, courtesy of Microsoft, in its "Microsoft Arcade" package, but it is defective in some ways -- in the original, the engine could rev up, while in the MA version, it was always at constant throttle. I've also liked "Spy Hunter", where one drives a car past a lot of enemy cars that are out to get you -- and if one hits an innocent car or motorcycle, one won't accumulate points for a little bit.
But now, however, I have more-than-equivalent CPU power -- and a dedicated and much-higher-resolution display -- courtesy of my home Macintosh and the ones at work. And I can see -- and hear -- my enemies dying before my eyes rendered in full-scale video and audio. True, the graphics is still often very cheesy in some ways, but it's usually a lot less cheesy than arcade versions of years past. Instead of constant-size sprites (foreground objects), the sprites can be variable-size (smaller angular/on-screen size at a greater distance). And the backgrounds can get a lot more complicated. And even more recently, the surfaces can look smooth instead of pixelated, and the characters can be 3D models instead of sprites.
And that machine can run the Macintosh version of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, which creates fake arcade-game machines in one's computer. This has also given me the pleasure of reliving those old videogames, though I'm not happy about having to use pirated copies of the arcade machines' ROM's, which is where the arcade-machine game programs reside. I phrase my comment in this way because the makers of these old machines are reluctant to sell copies of their old ROM's, despite those machines often having been out of production for years.
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