HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
This thread is great.
The popularity of PC gaming seems to have exploded over the past few years. A lot of gamers may not be well aware with history of the platform beyond the major titles. The purpose of this thread is to discuss how PC gaming has changed over time. Feel free to post anecdotes, freeware games or whatever may be relevant.
To start us off, look at this bad boy. This is the shareware era experience right here.
These things were everywhere. Take special notice of the mediocre console style games that they're advertising on the cover. Those were everywhere too. Made Epic and Apogee's greats seem all the more impressive after playing a few of these.
Hey, hey. Skunny Kart is kind of mediocre, but Jazz Jackrabbit is good, Hugo's Nitemare 3D and Sango Fighters decent, and Raptor fantastic... there were indeed lots of discs like that, but that one actually chose some good games for the cover pictures!The popularity of PC gaming seems to have exploded over the past few years. A lot of gamers may not be well aware with history of the platform beyond the major titles. The purpose of this thread is to discuss how PC gaming has changed over time. Feel free to post anecdotes, freeware games or whatever may be relevant.
To start us off, look at this bad boy. This is the shareware era experience right here.
These things were everywhere. Take special notice of the mediocre console style games that they're advertising on the cover. Those were everywhere too. Made Epic and Apogee's greats seem all the more impressive after playing a few of these.
He has an amazing collection, and I watch the videos, but as a huge Blizzard RTS fan from about '95 until the mid '00s, I can't say I agree with his tastes in games a lot... and I've never cared for the Sims games one bit either, while he's a big fan. SimCity, yes (mostly the original and the incomparable classic SC2k, which is the best "Sim" game ever). The Sims, no.I assume most in this topic follow Lazy Game Reviews? Probably the best retro-PC review source around.
I think a lot of people feel this way, yes. And it is a reasonable, and surely at least somewhat accurate, idea; people surely do think more highly of the kinds of games they grew up playing.Also, Lemon Amiga and Lemon 64 are excellent resources for those looking to get into retro commodore gaming. Both tie into the Amiga Magazine Rack project to scan and archive of-the-time reviews for many micro-computer games.
I love that more and more people are looking back at this segment and era of gaming, as retro console gaming is huge. PCs and especially commodore machines (and especially the european centric micro computers like ZX Spectrum or Amstrad CPC) really get the shaft when people talk about the history of gaming, when they were huge deals.
I have a theory about the time game players growing up in influencing their tastes such that they form a baseline of features that must be present for them to enjoy games. It explains why, for example, many NES/SMS players have trouble going back to atari games, or why SNES/Genesis gamers may have trouble exploring 8-bit libraries, and so forth. Obviously many exceptions, but a general rule.
Asked before but asking again. I've had this booklet since forever; does anyone know what game it's for?
games sometimes had unorthodox and really cool magazine ads back in the 80s/90s.
I liked it more in 90s than now. It actually owned the games back then, the boxes were so much more awesome too.
I mean...look at this beauty:
THey don't make them like this anymore
Still, today is a great time to be a pc gamer. Maybe not 90s-like level of great, but still wesome. Steam, for all it's DRM, helped a lot to restore pc gaming after the dark ages of 2001-2004. It's not the only thing that did, but it played a huge part and loosing some of the old stuff was a worthy trade off
Remember Heat.net, Zone.com (MSN Gaming Zone), Mplayer.com/Gamespy?
I don't miss the pre-Steam PC gaming at all.
Remember Heat.net, Zone.com (MSN Gaming Zone), Mplayer.com/Gamespy?
Oh man, I think just about everyone I knew with a PC back in the day had this installed on it.
I also had some fond memories with this game here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFqmzVhsgcU&feature=player_detailpage#t=55
The best part of that time period was the wild west feeling that PCs had of the time. By 1992, the big players in the console industry were already pretty much established. Joe Schmoe down the street couldn't make a Sega Genesis game and start selling it... but you could do that with PC (and everything I've read about the heyday of the Amiga scene tells me it was the same way). That freedom and openess of the software community lead to a lot of great stuff. Sure, it's likely that 99% of all software put out for the Amiga and pre-windows 95 DOS was probably garbage, but that's because there were hundreds of thousands of titles put out. Far, far more than the average console output. If even .1% of all titles released on these platforms were worth playing, you'd wind up with an enormous number of games to play. And usually, they were quite different from what you'd find anywhere else.
That feeling is a big reason why I say we're living through another golden age. Thanks to the advent of VR, and the ways PC is leading that revolution, the days of feeling like the world has reset and fortunes are there for the taking are back again. We're about to see a lot of very experimental, very cool stuff coming out.
I have all the original packing and manuals for all the Fallouts and infinity Engine games. I always liked the binder manuals.
This was the gold standard. Mine are in better shape than this one.
Asked before but asking again. I've had this booklet since forever; does anyone know what game it's for?
Depends on how well you can rewrite autoexec.bat and config.sys.
Remember magazine demo discs? I came across these in a drawer the other day actually.
The fun part about these days was not playing the game, but was getting the game to run.
Someone told me that there's a button you can use to speed past that damn yeti. I think it was F or spacebar? Can't remember. I should try it sometime.
Definitely a Coktel Vision title, they used color lookup tables just like that in many of their games.
Asked before but asking again. I've had this booklet since forever; does anyone know what game it's for?
i don't miss having the wait for fileplanet whenever a new patch for a game was out.
My pre-steam PC gaming experience involved fiddling with things like this
Just to launch the game. I don't miss it.
Oh wow, that brings back some memories.
I don't even need to post what this is. You already know. The greatest video card ever.
http://i.imgur.com/N9Cq9dQ.jpg[IMG][/QUOTE]
I had this. Was stupid expensive but worth every cent. I remember it almost melted and died trying to run Doom 3 at decent settings though.
never did finish I have no mouth... that old PC crapped out before I could and the disc went missing.