Quoting: PenglingOh man, I know exactly where you're coming from with this. Mine lived in a slightly freaky place that had this incredibly creepy MASSIVE under-stairs cupboard which in spite of its size had zero lighting and didn't let much in even when the door was open, and I've been reminded of that by various games containing such settings...

Heheh... staying overnight at Granny's, the creeks and groans of the old house. Dark, cubby hole closets and storage spaces. The mysterious boarder (Clive... all I knew) that rents a room upstairs, quiet as a mouse, except for the stairs creaking when he comes home, at any strange hour.

This game is WASD controls, and left and right mouse. Click and drag to open a drawer or something, click to pick something up and read or examine it, right click to put it back or pick it up (some things like notes or game objects the game keeps when you dismiss). There's no finger gymnastics or button mashing crap for pimple wizards or anything.

Quoting: GroganHeheh... staying overnight at Granny's, the creeks and groans of the old house. Dark, cubby hole closets and storage spaces. The mysterious boarder (Clive... all I knew) that rents a room upstairs, quiet as a mouse, except for the stairs creaking when he comes home, at any strange hour.

Hey, at least it wasn't Granny's Garden!

Quoting: GroganThis game is WASD controls, and left and right mouse. Click and drag to open a drawer or something, click to pick something up and read or examine it, right click to put it back or pick it up (some things like notes or game objects the game keeps when you dismiss). There's no finger gymnastics or button mashing crap for pimple wizards or anything.

I'll give it a look - though being first-person it's likely to give me terrible motion-sickness, unless played in very short bursts on a handheld. This is still an improvement over years gone by, where I just couldn't play first-person stuff at all, though.

Quoting: PenglingGranny's Garden Video

Heheh... I hated computers back then. I don't know, I guess it was 1982 or so when I was first exposed to annoying devices that did silly things I could do more easily with a pen and paper lol

Arcades were about pinball machines for me, Donkey Kong and similar cabineted electronic games were annoying to me. I didn't mind a few things like Asteroids, or even some space invader type games (e.g. Galaga) but to me at the time those games were like "You're not actually doing anything, it's just stupid blips on a screen"

In fact all computers were to me was "type this shit and print it" until the 90's when they started to get more sophisticated.

Quoting: GroganHeheh... staying overnight at Granny's

Oh no what have you done???

Quoting: PenglingHey, at least it wasn't Granny's Garden!

You got Pengling to mention Grannys Garden.... RUN AND HIDE!!!!!....... EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!!!!

I've played a bit of Deleveled which is, again, harder than it looks with only left/right/use/restart controls. Especially if you want to get a star. You control two boxes at the same time. The world is split into the upper part where gravity pushes downwards and the lower part where gravity pushes upwards. If the boxes are at the same horizontal position and one (or both) fall from a height down to the middle the other one bounces up to the same height. If you hit an obstacle this bouncing potential is reduced to the height of the obstacle. Then there are spikes, holes and switches (need to activate one at the top and one at the bottom at the same time) that toggle the exits (both top and bottom have to be reached at the same time). Sometimes you have to keep the bouncing boxes aligned and sometimes you have to use the obstacles to separate them which means that you lose the ability to bounce.

And three levels of Lego Star Wars 3: Clone Wars which is a typical Lego Star Wars game – think doing something while a huge number of spawning enemies shoot at you so it would be better to constantly deflect the shots with the lightsaber but you can't since you have to do something else at the time.

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderOh no what have you done???

You got Pengling to mention Grannys Garden.... RUN AND HIDE!!!!!....... EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!!!!

I am an innocent newcomer. I know nothing about such perils :-)

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderGenuine question..... What are your thoughts on the art style in SF6???

Street Fighter IV's art style grew on me over time but SF5 & SF6, I'm just not feeling. While the game is good it reminds me too much of KOF in too many aspects. SF6 is a fine game to play for free but not to come out of pocket for.

Quoting: PenglingBeetle PCE Fast

Does the Fast variant preserve battery power or is there a different reason?

Quoting: GroganHeheh... I hated computers back then. I don't know, I guess it was 1982 or so when I was first exposed to annoying devices that did silly things I could do more easily with a pen and paper lol

Ahh, you're a bit older than me (I'm the same age as the Bomberman series, so, soon to turn 40) - I've never known a world without computers in it!

Quoting: GroganArcades were about pinball machines for me, Donkey Kong and similar cabineted electronic games were annoying to me. I didn't mind a few things like Asteroids, or even some space invader type games (e.g. Galaga) but to me at the time those games were like "You're not actually doing anything, it's just stupid blips on a screen"

You won't be surprised to learn that it's somewhat the reverse for me! There were slightly less pinball machines in arcades by the time I got to ever go to any, but I've always had more-or-less equal love for both (as is probably evident from my ridiculous quest to reach the ending of Alien Crush!). And I love Donkey Kong*, Asteroids (one of my all-time favourites), Pac-Man (my first video game hero, and the reason maze-chase is one of my all-time favourite genres - how often do you see maze-chase fans in 2023? ) and so on.

*Nintendo licensed a company called Falcon to distribute Donkey Kong in various places, on different hardware and under the name of "Crazy Kong Part II", and Falcon famously breached this agreement and sold it in other countries as well. I actually find Crazy Kong Part II slightly more interesting than the original game, as Falcon altered some of the stages a bit, adding extra challenge by putting things like extra holes in the girders for unwary players to fall through. (If you're familiar with the differences between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, it's sort of like that, but less extensive.)

Quoting: GroganIn fact all computers were to me was "type this shit and print it" until the 90's when they started to get more sophisticated.

Here in the UK, 8-bit microcomputers were the dominant force in video gaming for a long time, so it was pretty commonplace for homes to have them in the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s*. I got started with a Commodore 64 C in 1990.

*This didn't just decline for market reasons in the end, but also because in the front half of the late 1990s, school computing lessons were basically handed over to teaching dependency on Microsoft software, whereas prior to that even the tech-fearing schools (like mine) were teaching computing in a more multi-disciplinary way that taught pupils how to transfer skills between very different types of computing environment (at the very least there was usually a mix of the BBC Micro and Acorn Archimedes, along with a few other things peppered in), and of course we'd all experience different machines when visiting friends as well.

There's an interesting Twitter post about how this looked in May of 1992, here - as you can see, the Commodore 64 was top of the heap at that point, whereas elsewhere it was the Nintendo Entertainment System that dominated (this particular console hit about 4% marketshare at its heights in the UK).

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderYou got Pengling to mention Grannys Garden.... RUN AND HIDE!!!!!....... EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!!!!

Quoting: GroganI am an innocent newcomer. I know nothing about such perils :-)

Hahahahaha! Ok, ok, I'll bite.

Granny's Garden (which, like myself and Bomberman, is also turning 40 this year) was a watershed moment for the use of computers in education over here - it was THE software that proved it was worthwhile, to the point that even the teachers who were scared of their jobs being replaced by computers (I'm sure everybody knew a teacher or two back then who could've been replaced by a BBC Micro, and the BBC Micro would've done a better job ) would at least make use of that game in their lessons - and the teachers' manual was written in humourous and non-technical terms in order to encourage this.

Even though it has several elements that would now be recognised as bad game-design (we didn't think of it that way at the time because everything was still so very experimental, but The Land of Mystery is particularly awful for this, and also includes a puzzle that they really should've play-tested more with the target audience because it's far too difficult for most infant-school-aged kids), it's very fondly remembered by Brits of a certain age, and I'm only half-joking when I say that the Witch, who will send you home at once, is seen as an iconic survival-horror antagonist.

It was several years old by the time I was introduced to it, and the original BBC Micro version remained in use up and down the country well into the 1990s. It was also modernised in the 2000s and both versions are still sold directly by the original developers today (though the BBC Micro version is sold only as an emulated package these days).

Quoting: KlaasDoes the Fast variant preserve battery power or is there a different reason?

Probably, but it's just the default in the custom firmware I'm using, so I stuck with it because it works well.

Last edited by Pengling on 20 June 2023 at 1:13 am UTC

Quoting: PenglingAhh, you're a bit older than me (I'm the same age as the Bomberman series, so, soon to turn 40) - I've never known a world without computers in it!

I'm 58, but I've always been a dinosaur, resisting new things, doing things the old way when everyone else is doing something else etc. A teenage dinosaur even.

When I was a kid, arcades were all pinball machines and back then they had clickety clack digit counters. There might have been a foosball table, or one of those smaller billiards tables that take quarters etc. About the only "electronic" games were bloop bloop bloop TV tennis (that used to ruin your TV's phosphors lol). I guess I was probably 16 or so when those first electronic cabinet games started showing up in arcades. Space Invaders was the first I saw.

Asteroids though, that was a cool game. Here, it was a sit down table top screen. I got pissed off and smashed the glass on one though (I was a savage back then lol). The guy who ran the place (not the amusements co. that actually owned the machines) "didn't see" who did it :-)

When I started high school, they had one computer. They called it Ike, and it was the size of a small room, and was programmed with Hollerith interface cards. It was stupid. (and I remember people dropping their stacks of computer cards all over the place and spending their time putting them in order again rofl! No way was I taking THAT class)

Some years later, I went back to finish high school and they had Apple II computers, which also bit the weenie as far as I was concerned.

My father's pharmacy switched over to using computers in the dispensary. My parents got one at home. I think it was DOS 3.0 back then. They had Word Perfect and I learned to use it to type resumes and stuff.

I took an old hand-me-down with me when I started a college program some years later. I hated that stupid Windows, but it was a multi-OS network boot environment at that school and I could avoid it. I could just use the Unix shell which I was a little familiar with (I did for pine, tin, lynx, gopher) or just start in DOS 5 for Word Perfect. The DOS 6.22 load was for Windows 3.11, it didn't have the DOS WP.

You couldn't pry my old style scientific calculator from my stiff dead hands either, while other students were using those fancy pants programmable graphing calculators with equation-like input.

Got a fuss ass Chemistry prof that was actually a computer consultant, so he cared more about the fancy computer presentation than the actual content (prick... he was a body filling a seat). So I had to start using Windows. By the time I got one at home, it was Windows 95.

It consumed me. Soon, it was enough of all that other bollocks, computers now lol

I set up Slackware 3.something a year or so later, just to have some familiar Unix commands again. A friend on IRC chat sent me the files through DCC, it was only 50 megs or so of packages. I didn't do "X Windows", I didn't need some ugly Windows replacement (and screenshots I'd seen of X Windows were all ugly grey, with terrible looking text and widgets etc.). I dialed up with Slackware's PPP scripts (pppsetup and ppp-go) and used command line IRC and stuff.

By 2000 I was using Linux for everything but MCSE studies (oh yeah, I'm a Microsoft Certified Solitaire Engineer, by the way lol) and tinkering with it. My first GUI Linux distro was "Corel Linux" (I bought it at a bookstore). I had to learn to compile a kernel if I wanted my parallel port zip drive working.

From there I went to Mandrake 7.0. What a wonderful distribution that was. Didn't like Mandrake 7.2 as much, so I settled in with Slackware 7 and used Slack for many years.

Around 2007 I started to get into Windows games, as Epic shafted us for Unreal Tournament 3 on Linux. and I had forum friends playing Call of Duty. It exploded from there and I was dependent on Windows again for games.

Now it's customized Arch for my gaming setup, and a very personal "from scratch" system for more serious stuff.

I've babbled too much here, but that's my computer story. I spend a lot of time playing games at night now :-)

Last edited by Grogan on 20 June 2023 at 5:26 am UTC