My PC game nostalgia post. [part 1]


This is pretty much every game I played before I got my Sega Genesis… with the exception of all the awesome games I played at friend’s houses and on floppys. [Number Munchers, Boa, Oregon Trail, Wolfenstein 3D, Odell Lake etc. etc.] Actually it’s probably more like 70%, but it hits the high notes.



Now I’m not going to talk about each and every one of these, or even list them. This is more of a photo-post than anything.



What I do want to write about is just how drastically games have changed since my nostalgic days of pouring over in-box manuals and sleuthing through Prodigy entries. A lot has changed indeed. Check out this diddy from Police Quest SWAT. A quasi puzzle-adventure with action elements that forced you to read this [and know it] before attempting to even unsheathe the almighty sniper rifle.




I’m not sure where she is, but I’m guessing I wasn’t shy about cracking open that Fodor’s tome to find out. I always remembered loving these kind of things. Laying out the map in QfGII actually felt like laying out a map. Writing in the Myst journal was helpful. I have about 10 pages filled with my childish scrawling.

Perhaps this is from an age when designers adhered to more realistic conventions. Trying to simulate the actual feeling of being a detective with stacks of papers at your desk. Ultimately, the fun wins out over reality. Maybe it’s just the dusty nostalgia inside, but I yearn from tactile relationships outside the digital space. I remember some Sierra games were packed with “secret cards” that allowed you to peer into their information with some cardboard surrounding a strip of red plastic wrap. Now, I look back and it was perhaps an early type of DRM, not dissimilar to what some bands [Radiohead, NIN etc.] are trying to do with selling premium versions of their albums.

I’m not sure I want stuff like this in my games today, it might feel out of place. But I am pretty sure I crave the kind of dedication some of these games took. As a youth I wrapped my world around Trial by Fire. My brother and I had planning sessions on how our characters would be setup and brainstorm how to get the fire elemental out of that damn hallway. ::sigh::

Another birthday, another year further from the wonder years.

02/1

INFO

3

COMMENTS

02/2

Justin

I remember going to a friend’s house one cold January night, circa 2008. We opened all the windows in the house, bundled in jackets and loaded Big Game hunter on some P1 <100MHz machine. It took nearly an hour to track our first deer, and right as we got a shot off the machine froze.

He got away easily, but we will meet again one day.

Justin

ps – get healthy, don’t die of dysentery

02/2

Jason

In my life really has been only a few games that the moment I saw them I knew I had to play them, unfortunately that was a long time ago. Those game for the record are wolfenstein and simcity. They really were life changers. I can also remember the first time I played doom with sound I don’t mean the pc speaker sound which just awful but over at my friends place on his p66. I didn’t have a sound card on my 486 dx100 and his computer would stutter if you turn the sound on but it was worth it. Oh man many memories the first time someone showed me how to play doom with the mouse, dos version of aol, baby bounce and math baster on the tandy 1000(8086) watching my dad upgrade the ram on that sucker to 640k, buying 8 megs of ram for the 486, spending too much time on bbs playing legend of the red dragon. I could really keep going on, zmodem, my first parallel port cd burner, autoexec.bat config.sys smartsdrive, blah….

02/9

torncanvas

Maybe what you’re really wishing for is a time when you could devote more of your life to playing games. I know that lies at the core of what _I_ am pining for. Indie games these days are pretty freaking sweet, and you could find some of the more hardcore ones and plan strategies for those and get really into them…assuming you “have the time.” :P

NOT REQUIRED