Galactic Domination

Probably the first computer strategy game to really eat chunks of my time was Empire. Of course, I also liked the building aspects of Sim City. So when I ran across Civilization for the first time, I was hooked.

Civ was the prototypical "4X" turn-based strategy game, where the X's stand for "EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate". Trying various strategies was endless entertainment for me.

The one that really got me hooked, though, was Master of Orion, which added the fun of designing the starships for your fleet for maximum micromanaging nerdalicious fun.

How tickled was I to get it loaded and up and running on my clamshell iBook last week?

Pretty darn tickled, let me tell you.

Let me conquer this galaxy and then I'll give you a retro book report!

"...television tuned to a dead channel..."

I stumbled across a neat (and very comprehensive) review of the game Neuromancer, which I have fond memories of playing with a friend at his apartment in Athens, Georgia, back when a 286 with EGA graphics was still a pretty decent gaming rig.

Go and check it out!

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All those Redbox kiosks have been fossilized.

Further proof that if something has a CPU and a screen, someone's rigged it to play Doom...

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom.

As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks.

In case you think I'm kidding, here's a dude playing Doom on an old Kodak point & shoot camera.

Digital Fossils

In a Telegram conversation, I remarked that the 7" Kindle Fire tablets that Amazon is selling for the price of dinner for two at Applebee's would have been props on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Marko replied "If the Fire had existed when TNG was still running, it would have been the most powerful computing device on the planet by a fair margin. Weird to think about."

He's not wrong, either.

I remember back in the days of dialup and BBSes, call it 1990 or so, one of the rotating sig lines in my SLMR (Silly Little Mail Reader) file was "And you may tell yourself 'This is not my one gig drive'."

My boyfriend at the time had a 386DX 33 with an HDD that was so huge that it had to be partitioned into virtual drives. Like eighty whole megabites or something like that!

Coincidentally, the SD card slot on my computer right now is occupied by a 64GB card from an old Nikon D7100. Each 24 megapixel RAW image file takes up over 30MB. 

My wristwatch has higher screen resolution than a Sega Genesis.

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Time Capsule

Check out this Best Buy sales circular from 1996!

Remember when games for your PC came in a box and didn't require an internet connection to play? Good times.

(It was a good thing, too, because it'd take forever to download a couple CD-ROM's worth of data at 28.8 kbps...)

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I bow to the master.

I've got a few older handheld video games: A Gameboy and a Game Gear and a Game Boy Advance, but this is the best shrine to old handhelds I've seen. And they're all mounted with velcro so he can take them down and play them.

Now I'm all nostalgic for my old Tomy Hit & Missile...

Handhelds again...

The experiment with the Gameboy Advance was annoying.

The games I tried were remarkably sophisticated for a handheld console, considering that my previous handheld experiences had been limited to the Game Boy and Sega Game Gear. Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed retained at least the flavor of the PC version, and Eye of the Beholder was pretty much identical to the classic SSI PC games; unsurprising considering that the Game Boy Advance probably had roughly the same wheaties as the 286 on which I first experienced the classic "Gold Box" AD&D computer games.

The fatal flaw of the GBA was the unlit LCD screen, which really cut down on the places where I could really enjoy it. It quickly began gathering dust...

It's calling to me.

I have an Apple IIc, complete with the bitty little green screen Apple monitor, that I accidentally won in an eBay auction.

Lately I've had this bad urge to hit the web and see if I could scare up some games for it. It'd be neat to play Castle Wolfenstein, Wizardry, or F-15 Strike Eagle in the old school original.

Speaking of handheld games...

I had this one when I was maybe ten or eleven that I traded away from a neighborhood kid. You controlled this missile launcher at the bottom of the screen with a knob that moved it left and right and a button that sent your missile shooting straight up towards the top of the screen.

Enemy aircraft crossed from left to right at different speeds and altitudes. When it died, I cracked it open and was fascinated to see that it was entirely electromechanical: Each flight level of aircraft was a filmstrip that scrolled in a continuous loop. Your missile ran on a vertical track; the "reload" time was how long it took to get the little backlit plastic missile back down to the bottom of the screen.

Given all the monkey motion going on inside that little plastic case, it's a wonder that it survived as long as it did in my hands.

Fossil-ish...

I like supporting local retailers, and there's a little joint called The Game Station that I try to stop by once a month or so, even if it's just to take advantage of their 3-for-$20 DVD wall.

Every time I'm in there, I glance in the case full of handhelds, just to see what's new, since I've been planning on adding to my feeble handheld collection for some time now. (Currently I only have the original Game Boy and the Sega Game Gear.) Yesterday, I noticed that they had a couple of Game Boy Advance units for, like $16 each, and a copy of Eye of the Beholder for $8. Heck, that's almost free! And for an old-school D&D geek like myself, that's a nearly irresistible combination.

Let's see how this thing works...

Constant craving...

During a recent long car ride with a friend, we got to talking about old video games, reminiscing about favorites from the previous decade like Privateer, Aces of the Pacific, Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe, Full Throttle, and Gabriel Knight.

Man, I need to set up a 486 running DOS so I can get all those old CDs down from the attic...

Desperate.

I've got productivity software out the yinyang for old Macs and all the communications widgets I can handle, but I'm desperate to find some games that will work on 680x0 machines and/or early PPC Macs.

Got any? Let's make a deal: tamslick A T aol D O T com.

Atari!

Spent the day playing Galaga on the 7800. More later.

Bill Cosby's computer.

I got lost in the wilds of cyberspace the other night and somehow stumbled across a TI-99 fanboy site. A TI-99/4A was the first computer I ever bought, at a garage sale back in '83, for the princely sum of $150. (My first car, bought only two years later, cost me $650.)

Anyhow, I had totally forgotten about the game "Microsurgeon" until I saw those screen shots. Oh, lordy, the hours I whiled away wandering through the circulatory system of mister digital patient, zapping blood clots and bacteria...

A package has arrived...

...full of fun and games and goodies. A Sega Master System and a Sega Genesis. An Atari 7800. A GameCube. (Although it's form factor appeals to me, it's not super fossil-y. Yet.)

I've managed to get an extra TeeWee for the museum. A space cleared off on a table to get stuff set up...

Now to set the dial on the Wayback Machine to 1986, when Kurt Cobain was just barely old enough to buy a shotgun, Def Leppard were still employed, and 256 was a lot of colors.

Mortal Kombat!!!1!!!one!

Just found the Mortal Kombat II cartridge for my Sega Game Gear in the bottom of a box full of old software docs while cleaning up around the crib.

There goes my productivity for the day.

Trivial Pursuit:

The original SimCity, one of the seminal computer games of the late '80s and the Sim that launched Maxis, will fit over 1200 times onto the 2 CD's that SimCity 4 takes up.

If you're an original SimCity fan, by the way, you don't need a whole computer to play it anymore; it's available for the Palm OS.