Ah… yeah I forgot. My bad.

Looks phenomenal.

I was recently so excited to discover Fortress Forever also, which is the old TFC game. I dominated in that.

Swimming Nougat.

Did I do that right?

Well, maybe someone will start a federated group here on Lemmy. One where there are no restrictions other than typical code of conduct.

Hey, total stranger chiming in here just to say that I don’t think the issue is that OP feels like they’re owed feedback, nor that there aren’t plenty of others who want it as well; I think it’s just gotten very prohibitive on the internet where the first priority of any platform has become the legal protections, and so where once there was a flourishing free exchange of ideas on the internet where the knowledge and communication was the priority (anyone remember USENET), it has devolved into lawyers banning everything they can think of all to keep things protected, and so this budding writer can’t just easily find a place to say, “hey everyone, what do you think of this?”

If I’m wrong and have misunderstood, then I apologize.

Well I was thinking of more like late 80s early to mid 90s. Games were written by actual writers like Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Sid Meir, Raymond Feist, and people like them. I’m thinking of titles by Sierra, Apogee, Activision, Brøderbund, Sir-tech, 3DO, Infocom… you get my meaning, I trust.

If you’re gonna suggest that games like Myst, Zork, all the Quest series by Sierra, the Might & Magics and Wizardry titles - if you think those were made with the kinds of greed that we have today where it’s cheaply made junk with every deceptive money-making practice imaginable… then you may just be younger and not aware of what it was like. Those titles made money, yeah, but they put their heart and soul into the quality of the product and never expected money in the billions. And they got paid ONCE for the game from each customer. And many games gave people years worth of play. Today games popup in your face telling enticing the player to spend money, and they give the player enough progress to think they know what they need to do in order to advance, only to introduce newer currency and demand money for it. Etc etc. there are dozens of tactics to scam people out of continual payments. I don’t play any of the garbage they make today. And I feel so sorry for young people now that they don’t even know what it’s like to get immersed in a game’s creative narrative for months and they already paid for all of it one time.

It’s not a fallacy, I know there were also loser titles back then, and of course. Not everything is a hit. But games like the Krondor series which were written by an actual award winning author (Raymond E. Feist)? Find me anything like that today amongst the sea of sewage. Sorry to be so negative because I know there’s some really great stuff. It’s just afloat in a vast sea of garbage and hard to find. The app shops bury them because they’re not as profitable. Greed has become all-consuming and insatiable. It’s a cancer to the whole industry.

Yeah anyway… no survivorship bias here. I lived through those times of gaming. Fuckin paradise, it was.

It’s because the games were made with passion; the creators wanted to share their story and gameplay vision with people who will appreciate it and their hard work.

Unfortunately nowadays you really have to comb through the muck to find this kind of thing, because the world is flooded with games that were made not with passion and creativity in mind, but only greed and manipulation, and greed, and deceptive marketing, and also more greed. They don’t care if you like it, they don’t have pride in their work, they don’t give a damn about a single thing other than more and more revenue.

So I think this kind of thing does still exist, in small independent developers who make something special and creative. And I love finding those things. But the swill you have to wade through to find them… ick. I mean… the Apple App Store? One gambling app after another? The games with so many forms of currency, micro-transactions, and outright deceptive promo content… tell me, please, when did Apple become bottom-feeders?!

Makes me appreciate the old days of gaming sooo much more.

Anyone else ever play Blood?

“I want Jojo, Jojo, JOJO!!!”

Likewise!!

Wow. Ok so regarding Feist I was only ever able to get through Magician Apprentice and Master. Reading issues, not important. But I didn’t know he was really not involved. Did be base Serpent War or Rift War saga on the game? Don’t remember what was what this many years later.

I have been thinking of getting my ass in gear and setting up a retro system. I have several units just waiting to be configured it’s just other stuff always taking priority.

So would a Pentium machine let’s say either with DOS/3.11 be good or maybe Win 95. I think maybe I’ll setup one of each since I have a few units available. This way I can play some things that need one and other stuff that is better with the other. I recall Crusader: No Remorse, and Crusader: No Regret won’t run on '95 but it will reboot into DOS mode for it lol. There are quite a few other games I’m eager to play again.

Oddly I’ve found that some stuff is ok under emulation but for whatever reasons - speculatively I’d say access to hardware via real-mode drivers that the abstraction layer in NT and forward prohibits - even the best systems like VMWare and VirtualBox seem to not handle more sophisticated game engines, only the simpler stuff. I imagine maybe it can be made to work better with tweaking and supplementary tools but after all the work that requires to get it to cooperate I think just having a real system with older hardware is probably just easier and more reliable.

I want to play the graphical Zork games again, Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Those were so much fun. Nemesis was a huge departure from the Zorkverse it was probably a shelved project in need of an easily marketable title? I dunno but Activision et al did an awesome job with it. I tried it not long ago on my Linux laptop and even with tools like PlayOnLinux/WINE, the animation was far too fast and rendered it not controllable.

There’s so much more stuff I would love to dive into again. Lands of Lore, some more of the Sierra titles like King’s Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, just all their stuff. Between Sierra, Apogee, Activision, Interplay and a few others, the landscape of 1990s gaming is an absolute treasure!

Wow I have really rambled! If you made it all the way here thanks for patiently reading my verbosity.

Yeeeeah! I haven’t played these in forever but Hero’s Quest was my first Sierra adventure and holy shit was it magic. And Krondor - Raymond freakin Feist writing games!!

Both absolutely epic! Although in my case we’d be playing fast and loose with the term “youth” this was stuff I played after college but still.

I had the first NES system with the original inclusion of Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. Actually it was the first console of the line but I don’t think the very first version because I think the very first version did not have Duck Hunt or the gun. Correct me if I’m mistaken. I was a little late to the NES and by then I think they added that element to it.

But also, I didn’t buy any console after that, because once I started gaming on PC I only ever gamed on PC. Although I regret not getting into Turbo Grafx 16 because years later I found troves of the games at a flea market and the guy dug up all of the ones he had and brought them over the following few weeks. By that time I was no longer really interested in them so I was just buying and reselling them on eBay. Massive score on that load. But I wish I had just collected the whole set and gotten a unit.

Why did I start rambling? Oh yeah cuz it’s Reddit. Anyway, consoles were a nice idea but to me, once I could upgrade a graphics card and always still be able to not only play the games that I had already, but continue to be able to get newer ones… I dunno, the console concept seemed to me a money pit, because first of all, the moment it hit the shelves in stores, there were already better graphics chips being sold for PC, and also, eventually as I had predicted, it would become a console war, combined with cutting off older units whenever they pleased, as well as all the rest of the shit they’ve pulled over the years with DRM, and online requirement so they could fucking cut you off when they pleased. I opted to not even bother stepping into that racket. PC gaming for me. Especially retro PC gaming.

Ok ramble over. Just wanted to share my experiences.

I’m getting some Golden Axe & Altered Beast vibes.

Brave claims to be so anti-data mining yet they share stuff with Google. Ok at least a couple years ago when I read about the tests done that showed this, as well as some articles on an affiliation they have with Google.

I haven’t used Brave since then. It’s Firefox for me only.