Why not visit the forum? I'm sure someone has already compiled a list of links to these games, and may more, that are loads of fun. :D
I played theses games back in the day and although I agree that we should not be feeding the AAA Monster I think that there is a middle ground. There are games from game devs that are not exploitative. I have a lot of love for games like Insurgency and Day of Infamy, also ArmA series. Not every game is a money grab. Some are open to the community for modding and are priced fairly.
But back to the old games I played a lot of the Hobbit on the Spectrum and the original Elite consumed a great many hours of my time back in the 80ās
I like how the best looking games in this video have rudimentary spite graphics at best. I used to play a lot of different text adventures in various different Linux CLIās. I have never tried Dwarf Fortress or Net.Hack.
Not sure what free or open source games I would add to this list?
The Dark Mod is one that I use to sink quite a bit of time into:
http://www.thedarkmod.com/main/
The Dark Mod is essentially a free (but not Open Source) recreation of the original Thief games, that is built on the Doom 3 engine. It also has a good number of user made campaigns.
Iām gonna have to go with ālo-fi relative to where graphics are todayā and pick Age of Empires II for this list. I played that on Pentium IIIs at school all the time. I own the HD edition and play it when I need nostalgia.
Racing to build Wonders were always fun.
Evony Age 1 is my crackā¦err before botters ran it over completely. Must not playā¦ have to stay away.
Kingdom of Loathing is pretty good. I am not even sure why I like it. I just do.
Both Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm DDA are always present on my computer.
Another favourite is UnReal World
http://www.unrealworld.fi/urw_whatis.html
Itās a combination of rpg and a survival simulation set in a Low-fi Ironage Finland.
If you like games such as Cataclysm or Donāt Starve give it a go.
A more modern (but not hardware demanding) roguelike worth a mention is NEO Scavenger
C&C RA2 bois
Always end up back at
OpenRA is a great way to play the original Red Alert in modern PCās, it downloads the majority of the assets from red Alert from the freeware EA release.
I love Runescape, and Empire Earth 2
For the traditional dungeon roguelike, there is Rogue Fable II on Kongregate:
For a slightly different Roguelike, the Streets of Rogue demo is pretty fun:
For discussion on the games mentioned in the video:
I find Nethack pretty interesting, but Iām not sure if I should go with Nethack, a slight derivative, or something else (eg SlashāEM). I donāt really want text mode, so the graphics/tileset is pretty important of a choice, too (unfortunately I disliked a few of the tilesets Iāve seen). At least within whatās available via Arch repos or the AUR. Although maybe Rogue Fable II fits this interest enough for me.
Would be nice with an RPG not entirely combat/dungeon oriented, too (as in something Fallout or Oblivion-esque). Not sure about the specifics of Cataclysm DDA (or config options), but I donāt really want āhardcore modeā gameplay with micromanaging resources. Although Iām not sure whatās going on with how you tell where enemies are in DDA, but trying to figure it out by looking makes me angry.
Slightly off-topic,
Most likely will be something with a rework of something like FNVās skill system, but condensed skills, skill interaction, and no āmagic statsā (for instance, damage improvements will mostly come when repairing weapon that youāre skilled with using rather than simply from skill improvement, especially ranged weapons).
TTS (higher immersion+no need for reading, but still easily extendable or generateable) is a fun idea for a game focused on robot characters, too. Although Iām not sure how well voice variance would work. Having as much control as you do with digital instruments (like in LMMS) would be nice.
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ā¦although I donāt have the skill to do it or even energy to start learning soon. Sort of waiting for beginner Nim tutorials (I donāt want to have to learn Python in-depth just to use it as a ālearning bridgeā) and for Godot 3.0 to reach stable.
So many gamesā¦ but this one came to mind first:
Theme Hospital
Iām just not into textbased / ASCII style games. Pixelart is the baseline minimum for me. Guess I am just not a real nerd. 
That being said, may I recommend point & click adventures for episode two? With ScummVM 2.0 just released, a couple LucasArts ones have been remastered like Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island I & II, Grim Fandangoā¦ Then there is Thimbleweed Park, which is combining the old school gameplay with overhauled pixel-art visuals and proper voice acting. Also fan made stuff like Broken Sword 2.5 and Zak McKracken 2 is worth a look.
A friend told me about a game a while back called Stone Soup:
https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm
It has both a console version and a sprite version, plus itās open source.
I havenāt played it myself, but it might be worth a look at if youāre into the genre.
Always been more into metroidvanias than roguelikes, so my recommendation is Cave Story. Itās been ported to everything from Linux to Gameboy Advanced to TI Calculators. Great gameplay, great soundtrack, good story with multiple endings. All done by one guy and free. http://www.cavestory.org/download/cave-story.php
Same here. It looks like I need to be terminal wizard to enjoy those games. And thanks for making me feel young as i have never heard or played any of the showed games.
My favourite Anti-AAA game is Dust Elysian Tale.
Cave Story is an impressive Japanese developed indie game. If anyone likes the Metroidvania styled games, this is one of the best ones. It is hard though, and has a few bullet hell moments. The boss rush at the end gets me every time. It is a quintessential indie game.
Unrelated from this, another suggestion I have is Death Rally from 1996:
This is the first game that Remedy Entertainment ever developed (Max Payne, Alan Wake, and developed some of the earliest 3DMark benchmarks) and is a top down racer with some minor 3D polygon elects. Remedy made this game freeware back in 2010, but because Duke Nukem is a playable character in this game, they had to remove it from their website thanks to GearBox. But the entire game is still available as freeware on modDB, and runs on modern Windows OSās. Probably not to hard to run in WINE.
Iām not sure but did the RTS evolve from Rougelike games?
Star Trek Armada II is Command & Conquer in 2.5D space.
Start in a map covered in The fog of war. Explore, colonize, build and prepare your fleet for when you find out which planet the bad guys are on.
I still have the CD and itās on my PC now. I like how I can zoom out to command the fleet and zoom in to see welders building my next ship. Even though the graphics are simple, when you zoom out and a star ship becomes an icon in a fleet, it works.
Itās also really good at multiplayer when each person is a difference species.
Human, Klingon, Species 8472, Borg, etc.