i think i still have Encarta 95 somewhere, love those massive banks of information before wiki showed up


Shit really did hit the fan in last 20 years, damn technology is going to fast

So true. Touch typing in general was pretty dicey back then. The computer lab teacher always yelled at us to keep our fingers on the home keys. Which would've been all good and well if my classmates and I could reach the other keys from that position with our stubby little kid hands.

One other thing that was major during the 90s (late 90s mostly I think), was the shift towards games that utilized 3D-acceleration, ie. a separate gpu in your PC that fitted into an agp slot (some of the early ones might have been for the pci slot). The difference that made to games was insane. Suddenly the framerate seemed to jump through the roof, and everything looked so incredibly smooth. My first gpu was an 8mb voodoo 2, and I'll never forget the awesome games that came with the card:
Ultimate Race Pro
Forsaken
Incoming
and the best one,
G-Police
At school we used to talk about how incredibly awesome it would be to own a Riva Tnt 2 card, with a whopping 32 megs of ram!!

I mentioned earlier that I was a console kid, but the feeling of opening up a brand new game is something I could definitely relate to.

Adorable! Ladies and gentlemen, witness children on the internet. Aren't they cute?
[Their] Anger at anger is some pretty awesome hypocrisy.

That part of computer lab was the worst. Thankfully it was only one week .

They definitely weren't as pervasive. Games were more a creative medium that happened to be able to generate money rather than the other way around. Granted, publishers basically for the most part owned the industry, but it was still a far better relationship than exists now. At least then, there was a chance of something unique also generating a livable income, where, now? Good luck if you go indie and the rest of the industry abuses people's drive to be creative (I've heard stories of people in San Francisco paying $1750 a month for a 1-bedroom apartment they never saw since they worked 100-hour weeks. Red Storm told me they capped hours at 60 after one long-term "crunch" of 100-hour weeks on a project caused the whole team to quit after. The pay for that? Pathetic for the skill level and time commitment required). ! Now, tools and information are commonplace and free (in the second image I posted earlier, each of those copies of Watcom C++ cost $300, Visual C++ 6.0 $500, and don't even ask what I paid for 3D Studio Max), but at the cost of a largely soulless industry. I left the game industry for exactly this reason.

Which one had the little Davinci flying machine mini game? That was the best part of Computer classes. Oh and going home to watch Earthworm Jim afterwards :-)

da vincis flying machine game i dont remeber but there was a mind maze quiz game. Damn earthworm jim was so awesome back then, for reason unknown

I feel between 95 to 2005 was the best golden age of gaming. I've been a gamer since the 80s when space quest and Zork started out. Loved those games and as PC underdog gaming industry was growing. I felt Game companies build PC games for PC gamers. After 2005 Those golden era vanished. Micro transactions. DLC over expansions. Mutliplaform crap. I feel Publishers have destroyed PC gaming. They're trying to merge it all into one soup. I do miss the wonders that a new games offer. Most of the games made today are crap.

I mostly had shareware stuff, particularly Apogee (I/my parents never bought into Epic Megagames for whatever reason... maybe because their stuff was more demanding on a system compared to what my PC could run? I don't recall for sure.) The only BIG release I had at the time that it was a big thing was Myst, which I didn't think that much of. I also had Master of Orion and some crappy edutainment games (Secret Island of Dr. Quandary, for one -- you know a game's "educational" when one of their puns is based around a wrong idea of how you pronounce "pterodactyl"!). One of my computers also came with a game sampler CD, from which I mainly recall playing D/Generation and Might & Magic II (the latter of which I was quite fascinated with for quite a while, but ultimately I got to the very end and couldn't figure out what response it wanted for the code message, even though I'd cracked the cypher, so I didn't finish it) For someone who was primarily playing on PC at the time, I missed out on most of the big-name stuff until after the fact.

People like to gripe about boot disks when it comes to running DOS games on the original hardware, but they weren't/aren't as bad as all that IMO. Floppy disks do kind of suck though (tendency to go dead just out of age or other random cause, especially after this many years). Fortunately, a lot of major releases of the floppy era got re-releases on CDs, although you sometimes have to sleuth out that stuff like "Interplay 10 Year Anniversary Collection" have the games in question.

As I've probably mentioned on these forums before, one of my biggest regrets in gaming was giving all my Apogee registered floppies to my nephew, who subsequently threw them out. Damn it.

Ooh--Apogee vs. Epic Megagames is a hard one. Duke Nukem was definitely fun, but EM's Jazz Jackrabbit was great, too. I'd probably have to go with Jazz on this one, but it's a touch choice.

I think it's because nowadays it is the GPU that is the bottleneck for the majority of games coming out. I've got games that only use 15% of my CPU but max out my GPU completely for example, like The Witcher 3. I'm running on a 30" 2560x1600 display, and have 2 24" 1920x1200 displays, one on each side. Most games I play on the 30" display favouring the native resolution or whatever a given game's maximum resolution is. Some games I may drop the resolution down to 1920x1200 to increase the frame rate if it isn't good enough.

My PC will be 3 years old in February 2016 but it runs just as fast and smooth right now for all of my apps and games as it did when I bought it. In fact, I now run 5 to 8 virtual machines almost all the time in the background and never notice they're there consuming a small bit of resources.

So for my current situation at least I don't plan to upgrade the system itself until it actually is a bottleneck for enough games and other software for an upgrade to be worthwhile. The GPU is the largest bottleneck though, but only for a couple of games that I can work around well enough for now. When there are a good number of other new titles out there that I want to play which wont run worth a hill of beans on my current GPU (Radeon HD7850 2GB) then I'll consider a new GPU, mind you I doubt that will happen for another 1-3 years likely as I'm happy with what I have now.


Only because I don't want to catch consolitis though, so at least I have a good reason. :) Honestly though, I own a lot of gaming input hardware including a Saitek X52 Pro flight control system with the separate rudder pedals, a NaturalPoint TrackIR 4 Pro head tracker, a Logitech G27 racing wheel system, a Logitech G600 20 button mouse, and two Logitech game pads, one of them is the older wireless Rumblepad 2, and a newer wired model I forget the number of (might be F310 or something like that).

I bought the gamepads because some games were truly made and are played best on a game pad IMHO. If I'm going to play old 8-bit Nintendo games, or any other old emulated console games from a long time ago they almost always feel best on a gamepad to me and the keyboard feels clunky. Likewise if I were playing a more modern game that had similar feel to the games from back then, such as most platform games, then I'd probably go for the gamepad too. I also use the gamepad for Mortal Kombat type games and a very selective but small number of other games.

For most other games including all FPS or TPP shooters or other game types that use FPS/TPP engines, including RPGs, puzzle games like The Ball, etc. I prefer the age old tried and true keyboard and mouse combination. In fact if anything I prefer it 10 times more than I did 10 years ago because the 20 button Logitech G600 mouse is so programmably awesome that I can't imagine not using it. I could never play such games on a gamepad because I'd lose a tonne of single-button controls I have now as well as loss of controlability and immersion. I also prefer the keyboard and mouse for RTS games, point and click games and a varitety of other genres.

In the end, I'm not opposed to any type of input controller outright, but rather I'm a fan of using whichever controller I own that I personally believe gives me the best control over the game in question. Someone else might feel a different controller works best for them and that's great for us both to have an option to choose, it's one of the things that makes the PC so awesome is that level of choice.


I am a bit of a gaming dinosaur, but I'm not a crusty one per se although I do try to keep the neighbourhood kids off my lawn with a liberal sprinkling of thumbtacks from time to time. I have a lot of fun with my games, but that's largely because I have so many options at my disposal for how to install/configure and play them in a way that I personally prefer.

What I think is a far worse problem is the people who think that there should only be one way to do something and everyone should be forced to use it, or people who think that everything should change all the time and "evolve" even if it works perfectly fine the way it is already. I'm all for new things happening, but not so big on things being changed just for the sake of change and without anyone having any option otherwise, especially if it is easy to provide options and it usually is.

Fortunately though with PC gaming, we usually do have all of these options and even if games slack off with their options, our modern input hardware comes with an impressive arsenal of programmability that allow it to be used in ways games don't expect. I can make my modern input hardware work on ancient DOS games that don't even know what this hardware is thanks to keyboard and mouse emulation built into my programmable input hardware's software for example, but I can do similar things for modern games too. For example, I played The Witcher 3 purely with my favourite input hardware for that type of game - keyboard and mouse. It was clear after a while that the game was largely designed for gamepads though, as the keyboard and mouse setup was definitely not optimal for this. While many gamers complained about that, I simply reprogrammed my mouse using the Logitech Gaming Software so that I could cast each of the sign spells using a single mouse button press on the side of my mouse. Problem solved! And I was able to enjoy the shit out of that awesome game. At the same time, anyone who prefers to use a gamepad could enjoy that until the cows come home too.

Win-win if you ask me. Whether the options are built into games or provided by addon software, as long as it's there everyone can have their cake and eat it too so to speak. :)

My thoughts on PC gaming in the 90s

So many awesome games but so little money.
Many of my favorite PC games came out in the 90s and many more of my favorite PC games series stared then as well

Late era DOS gaming was pretty great. Games were incredible unique from each other. Every title you bought was a real adventure. Most major stores had bargain bins full of really quality PC games at the time also. Then windows 95 showed up and slowly eroded the DOS market away. It was that time period were the "Doom clones" saturated the market and space sims faded into obscurity.