1995 I turned 21, 3rd year at university which I spend a lot in the computer room playing Frontier Elite First Encounters
It had interesting story lines to uncover next to the as always addictive trading game, working up to the big ships. Seamless landing and take off from planets never got old and thanks to time compression, just sitting on planets watching the sky change as in a time lapse video was magical. Also parking a ship in orbit, then accelerating time to see it circling around while all the planets move was amazing.
It had some funny glitches, auto pilot wasn't very smart and you could end up chasing a moon indefinitely as auto pilot just pointed the ship at the target, not on an interception course. And of course fighting in space with Newtonian physics just doesn't work. Realistic space fights have nothing to do with dog fighting and basically came down to pointing a beam laser at a target while they literally shoot by due to the speed difference.
But it was very cool to fly around space and to planets with real physics, using time compression instead of FTL, Supercruise or other physics breaking 'solutions' to enable space dog fighting. Of course hyper space jumps between solar systems were still in the game as the distances and theory of relativity are just too damn inconvenient to have any sort of interstellar travel without.
1995 also saw the start of the hugely popular Command & Conquer series.
The silly cut scenes is what made it so memorable, but that came with Red Alert in 1996 which pushed C&C to cult status.
I guess similar to Warcraft which become popular this year with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.
1995 also birthed the Heroes of Might and Magic (spinoff) series, Civilization style turn based fantasy
1995 saw another amazing strategy game appearing with 1830
It was a faithful recreation of 1830 the board game, which is my all time favorite. I've played 1830 so much that no one wanted to play against me anymore. Naturally the game didn't stand a chance at the highest difficulty setting lol. I know all the moves in that game like a chess player. The limited inventory of tiles also being a part of the strategy. The PC game was so accurate we used it a couple times as an extra player or for keeping track of the money while playing the board game together. The PC getting an extra seat at the table to do all the menial counting tasks.
I actually didn't 'discover' this game until a few years later when I started making a PC version myself with a friend. We had the database all set up for 1830 and its sequels, board layouts and everything programmed in and were starting to work on the actual step by step game play. Then I saw it on the store shelves lol. It was only the first game (not the sequels) but was definitely discouraged from working on. The decision whether to continue was pre-empted by HDD failure, lost a ton including all my source code for 1830 :/
Adventure games kept going strong this year with Full Throttle
The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery
Phantasmagoria
The Journey Man Project 2: Buried in time
A great time travel adventure
and Discworld!!!
I loved this series. As a huge Terry Pratchet fan these adventures nailed the world building and humor. Discworld II released in '96 and Discworld Noir in '99, all great. Actually there was text adventure before these on the Spectrum, The colour of magic in 1986. I never played it.
Worms was a favorite back at home, My dad, sister and I played it every time we were all home
Just the perfect hot seat multiplayer game. I have played it with my kids as well, it's still just as fun!
Yet what made me turn my head and put Playstation on my mind was Wipeout
I didn't by a Playstation until a few years later, but it made get Wipeout for PC and instantly fell in love with the series. I won't vote for it yet because 2097 is my absolute favorite of the series thanks to the music track. I do hope PSVR2 gets a Wipeout version as well since the PSVR1 version was awesome.
However since 1995 is the actual year Descent released at retail, that gets my vote. It's one of my most replayed games. Yet it's a very hard choice between Descent and Frontier: First Encounters. Descent gets the nod as it has never crashed on my while I ran into a progression breaking repeating hard crash in First Encounters and was never able to complete one of the story lines I got invested in.
