Remember Heat.net, Zone.com (MSN Gaming Zone), Mplayer.com/Gamespy?
I remember it taking an hour to get everyone setup at lan parties.
An hour, lol, more like 3....
Setting up networks on Win XP was a freaking pain and when it was finally setup, everyone would be just copying porn and warez from everyone else on the network.
VR is something i'd be interested in and i'd have bought oculus rift as well.
Unfortunately ever since birth i can only see through one eye, so all of this doesnt make any difference to me.
And just like that, I realize that I have been pronouncing Warez incorrectly this entire time.
"PC gaming started with Doom, anything else is a lie"
Doom wasn't even the best game iD had made up that point.
Man, imagine being a fan of point-n-click games and never played any of those games before, then buying that package/collection. It would have to be an amazing feeling.There was one with even more games including Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures. I still have it somewhere here.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61FV1A95Q9L.jpg
BBS door games were the best. They really served as a precursor to MMOs in that they had big, persistent worlds and that multiple people could play at the same time.
Trade Wars 2002 and The Legend of the Red Dragon are probably the two biggest ones that people of the era remember.
You can still play these games, because they have been ported to the web/telnet. I dabbled for a while, but without the close community of a BBS, it loses a bit of its luster. These games would be perfect for the GAF community though, at least as a way to just get people together to play a relatively low impact social game.
If you lived in a 3rd world country, like I did, you'd know there were no games in stores and even if there was some tiny selection they'd be like 2x the average salary, so pirating was the only way. Now we have Steam summer sales
Perhaps Goblins 3.
Definitely a Coktel Vision title, they used color lookup tables just like that in many of their games.
And just like that, I realize that I have been pronouncing Warez incorrectly this entire time.
Oh man, me too. I would pronounce it like Juarez. What the fuck.
I was not a big PC gamer back at the time, but I had some games on floppy disks, like Jazz Jack Rabbit, Monkey Island, Commander Keen 4, Duke Nukem 1 and 2, Hocus Pocus, Jill of the Jungle, Biomenace, etc.
Then came PCs with CDs, and with the PC came Alunser Jr., MSFT Soccer, Syberia, "Salvaje" (was a game about you being a lyon that grew up, never knew the name in english) and a ton of demos. Battle Chess came too.
I didn't buy a ton of PC games on CDs, Civilization 2 and Might and Magic 6.
But in my first trip to the USA, I bought a disc with 1000 games included, and surprisingly it wasn't that terrible. Had a few gems inside.
Shitty packaging all around.
Oh man, I think just about everyone I knew with a PC back in the day had this installed on it.
Crunchling Adventure was so addicting.
I don't miss the old days of PC gaming at all, with the exception of my old online clan that I ran.
On my first PC (486) I spent $160 to upgrade from 4MB of RAM to 8MB to play some jet combat game. All the messing around I had to do for each game, just to get it to run.
Now, with steam and controller support for most games it is soooo much better these days. The games are more fun for the most part IMO also. I just wish someone out there would make a true successor to Wolfenstein Enemy Territory so I could run a game server for that and have a blast once again!
A liitle bit newer than the great Indy/NASCAR games of Papyrus ... but the king of all racing sims. I even bought a wheel (a very cheap one) only for this. It was the ultimate feeling of being MATURE when you're 8:
I had a Colour Computer 3 when I was a kid, exactly like this one here:
with 128K of RAM. Though to be honest, I didn't use it for much, as it was so hard to find software/ game cartridges for this, even looking at the local Radio Shack, they had next to nothing. So I never really knew how to use it. I do remember that this machine came with this massive book on how use Extended Basic, it was like the size of a phone book. But being so young I could only do so little with what the manual would show me. I also didn't have any accessories to save anything, like a tape reorder or a disk drive. I think my parents sold it in a yard sale or something.
There were some interesting home brew ports for this thing later on in its life though. Like this fan made Donkey Kong port, which uses a 512k expansion module. Really amazing how arcade perfect it looked.
My parents also had an Tandy 1000. I think it may have been an SL or TX, I forget. But I do remember playing stuff like Willy Beamish, Thexder, Monkey Island, and even Leisure Suit Larry on that.
I never did get to play the Indy car sequels, but the original Indy 500 did impress me when I was young. Even though it ran at like 10FPS on my friends parents PC , the replays were still amazing. I do remember owning NASCAR Racing, though I had no idea that this was made by the same developer.
I still remember playing this game fondly with my dad off and on, since we only had one copy we had to share it.
It had so much going for it, and yet no one I knew really played it or heard of it. This was before I started frequenting any online forums, though.
I had a Colour Computer 3 when I was a kid, exactly like this one here:
with 128K of RAM. Though to be honest, I didn't use it for much, as it was so hard to find software/ game cartridges for this, even looking at the local Radio Shack, they had next to nothing. So I never really knew how to use it. I do remember that this machine came with this massive book on how use Extended Basic, it was like the size of a phone book. But being so young I could only do so little with what the manual would show me. I also didn't have any accessories to save anything, like a tape reorder or a disk drive. I think my parents sold it in a yard sale or something.
There were some interesting home brew ports for this thing later on in its life though. Like this fan made Donkey Kong port, which uses a 512k expansion module. Really amazing how arcade perfect it looked.
My parents also had an Tandy 1000. I think it may have been an SL or TX, I forget. But I do remember playing stuff like Willy Beamish, Thexder, Monkey Island, and even Leisure Suit Larry on that.
The 1993 sequel was awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9mH9yyZ7cM
NASCAR too, I only thought the Tracks are kind of Boring But that comes with NASCAR ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaxU9-UNFic (Dat Rock Music Intro)
I'm sure everybody remembers when PC games used to have tons of screenshots on the back of the box from like every version of the game (except CGA dos lol). That is the entire reason I am familiar with the Tandy, because I used to stare at those screenshots for hours. Usually, the Amiga screenshots looked miles better than anything else, but the Tandy Screenshots were normally so good as well.
In retrospect, that was pretty terrible false advertising lol.
The different versions of Street Fighter 2 for DOS and Windows come to mind. I remember drooling at how arcade perfect they looked from the back of the box images in computer stores.
Well. Shit.
Is that a space in "Remain" ??
The glory days of PC Magazine full games.
And other gems like
Wing Commander 5
Settlers 2
Anno 1602
Mechcommander 2
Outcast
*sigh* PC gaming was never dead.
Reminds me of the awesome copy protection for Delphine Software's "Future Wars":
Asked before but asking again. I've had this booklet since forever; does anyone know what game it's for?
All DID sims were incredible, with Total Air War being the pinnacle of their workSuper EF2000 and Flying Corps remain the best games I ever had, content-wise at least
All of this! Up to my father having a "luggable". He donated it to a friend that ran a little computer museum. I went there once. It had the luggable with a sign on it that said 'don't touch really old'. Then I felt really old.that feeling the day Sierra released Betrayal at Krondor for free and I had to download 12MB over dialup
not being able to correctly answer the trivia questions for Leisure Suit Larry to unlock the adult content
the general use of decoder rings or manual page codes as a form of copy protection
editing autoexec.bat and config.sys
editing IRQs
this:
playing commander keen on my father's "portable pc" (note to babies: portable pcs are what existed before laptops, and they were basically 40-50LB boxes with tiny screens and handles on them so they were easier to carry)
gorilla.bas
sky roads
having to choose between the ega versions of games, which ran faster, and the vga versions of games, which looked better
HahahaI had Contra. Back of the box:
Oooh, ahhh. Boot up the game:
Well. Shit.
I remember their other slogan, something like "The only simulator more accurate than this is still classified" (not sure if the wording is accurate here, I'm translating it from old Italian magazines).All DID sims were incredible, with Total Air War being the pinnacle of their work
As they said back them "There are only two kind of simulators: those made by DID and everythin else"