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Retro confessions. What are yours?

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Reply 200 of 749, by hyperrmachine

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hyperrmachine wrote on 2020-12-07, 10:57:

Another retro confession:
ICOM's MacVenture series of point-and-click adventures had better interfaces than LucasArts' early point-and-click adventures.
I really hated how you had to double-click to perform an action in Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. Deja Vu doesn't have the bad interface design of Maniac Mansion/Zak McKracken.

Also the MacVenture series is underrated?

Reply 201 of 749, by buckeye

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I never finish games. Ever. I mean to usually but I guess my attention span rivals a 2yr. old. Guess it's all about trying
out a game to check out the graphics/performance after that it's onto something else. Probably need therapy.

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Reply 202 of 749, by badmojo

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buckeye wrote on 2020-12-07, 16:52:

I never finish games. Ever. I mean to usually but I guess my attention span rivals a 2yr. old. Guess it's all about trying
out a game to check out the graphics/performance after that it's onto something else. Probably need therapy.

I'll see you in therapy. My file back-up process has improved over the years so I can at least pick up saved games and continue from where I left off but I still rarely finish a game - I've been 'playing' the same save of The Witcher 3 since it was released 😂

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Reply 203 of 749, by dr_st

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I finish some games, but not others. There are lots of games I added to my collection and never even tried to play seriously.

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Reply 204 of 749, by Cyberdyne

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There are only few games that I have finished without cheating or just given up after one or few levels. Game can not be very hard and I really have to love the game and have the time. But I hoard DOS games. And I hoard older non UNIX based operating systems and DOS shells.

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.

Reply 205 of 749, by gerry

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Cyberdyne wrote on 2020-12-08, 08:28:

There are only few games that I have finished without cheating or just given up after one or few levels.

cheat codes, especially 'god mode', often allow a greater appreciation of a game in my opinion. It's the removal of the narrow survival imperative - one can just enjoy the game mechanics, the environment etc as well as enjoy the game ending without losing endless hours being irritated trying to get to it.

the one thing it inevitably spoils is the sense of immersion of course but the experience can make going back to a non cheating style of play more enjoyable afterwards, often

Reply 206 of 749, by buckeye

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badmojo wrote on 2020-12-07, 21:55:
buckeye wrote on 2020-12-07, 16:52:

I never finish games. Ever. I mean to usually but I guess my attention span rivals a 2yr. old. Guess it's all about trying
out a game to check out the graphics/performance after that it's onto something else. Probably need therapy.

I'll see you in therapy. My file back-up process has improved over the years so I can at least pick up saved games and continue from where I left off but I still rarely finish a game - I've been 'playing' the same save of The Witcher 3 since it was released 😂

Witcher 3 is a bottomless pit, when I got the game figured I'd be like Conan the Barbarian and hack my way thru. Nope.

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Reply 207 of 749, by buckeye

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gerry wrote on 2020-12-08, 11:26:
Cyberdyne wrote on 2020-12-08, 08:28:

There are only few games that I have finished without cheating or just given up after one or few levels.

cheat codes, especially 'god mode', often allow a greater appreciation of a game in my opinion. It's the removal of the narrow survival imperative - one can just enjoy the game mechanics, the environment etc as well as enjoy the game ending without losing endless hours being irritated trying to get to it.

the one thing it inevitably spoils is the sense of immersion of course but the experience can make going back to a non cheating style of play more enjoyable afterwards, often

Love playing Quake Reforged in "god mode" and of course the cheat that releases all weapons. Wish the newer games had the cheats.

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Reply 208 of 749, by dr_st

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There are some games I always play with cheats. The most common one is enabling infinite lives / free play in games where it is possible.

When playing RTS (Warcraft / Starcraft) against the AI, I play with open map. I don't feel like "exploring", especially given that the AI in these games doesn't explore and always knows all locations from the start.

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Reply 209 of 749, by Namrok

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It's funny cheating came up. When I was a kid, I played games almost exclusively with cheats. In fact, whether a game had cheats was a huge factor in whether I'd even get it. Started with game genie on the NES, and ended when I started going to LAN parties and you obviously couldn't cheat in multiplayer. After that I always beat games legit.

So it was enormously fascinating, in my recent retro play time, experiencing these old games again that I only ever beat with cheats. Quake was legit about constant spatial awareness, resource management and survival. All I remember as a kid was gibbing everything with the rocket launcher and trying to find all the secrets. Without cheats, the rocket launcher was of sparing use, especially since so many enemies close in on you, and secrets are a lot more difficult to find without noclip.

StarCraft as well. With cheats, I just turtled until I reached pop cap with the strongest unit available to me, and then methodically uncovered the entire map. Air units were always preferable, no matter how weak they were, because they moved quicker and with fewer restrictions. Also, weakness doesn't matter with cheats turned on. Without cheats, I would literally limp across the finish line of a few missions, severely resource constrained, battered by the AI's superior use of special abilities like PSI storm, plague or stasis. Exploring, securing additional resources, and trying to build up a force while fending off opportunistic attacks was extremely engaging.

I don't regret cheating as a kid. I definitely did not have the patience or skill to finish most of those games. But I'm glad as an adult I can go back and beat them legit, experiencing them as they were meant to be experienced.

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Reply 210 of 749, by Bruninho

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I don’t regret using cheats to be able to finish some kind of games when I was a kid. It was just a way to kill some time and have fun. The only games I did not want to (cheat), were the sports games like Football and Racing. These games I always played by the rules.

Games like the ones from lucasarts with a play through/walkthrough, I always had to cheat some times.

I never had to cheat with SpyCraft, after all it was a game released circa 1996 when internet wasn’t an addiction like it is today and I never thought about searching for clues there. I struggled for months to finish that game. When I revisited the game last year, I did it in 24 straight hours non stop.

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Reply 211 of 749, by sf78

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Depends on the game, but stealth games (Thief, Dishonored etc. ) I play legit. In shooters it's always god mode as I don't suffer from OCD and don't like repeating same things over and over just to learn the game mechanics and whatnot. I mostly enjoy the atmosphere and plot more than the actual playing part as I want to see the how the game ends.

Reply 212 of 749, by UCyborg

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I think I damaged my motherboard's ethernet card a while ago by accidentally plugging in PS/2 keyboard while PC was on, I was tired and not thinking straight at the time. I didn't notice right away because I usually connect through phone's USB tethering function, which wirelessly connects to cable modem. Sometimes I plugged my PC to the laptop's ethernet port, which is bridged with a wireless card, to have PC directly in the home network without another NAT point in a way. That's the best I can have given the lack of cable setup in this house.

I assume the incident with PS/2 keyboard caused it, though I'd be more certain if I tried connecting with cable earlier, 100% certain instead of 99,9% certain at least. Now nothing happens if I try to use the cable to connect. There's AI NET 2 utility in BIOS for diagnosing cable issues, it shows constant status "Open" for pair 7-8 and pair 4-5 alternates between "Open" and "Failed". The correct status is "Normal". What's interesting, it shows cable length even for pair 7-8. I wonder if it's juts software bug or that part of circuitry works partially, if that even makes sense.

I'm kinda pissed I damaged good hardware that way. My first computer and I screw it up like that after 11 years. I don't suppose that can be fixed. Sure, a replacement card is cheap, but it's not the same. Computer's not very old, but PS/2 ports strike me as pretty retro. The motherboard also allows to connect floppy disk drive and has LPT and COM interfaces. I did notice that combo PS/2 ports seem common even on modern motherboards.

I dug out an old 10/100 ethernet card from the basement that used to be installed in previous family computer - SMC EZ Card 10/100 (SMC1255TX). It doesn't work on any current Windows version that I use, though it works on Linux. Even SMC EOL download page doesn't list it, only a later SMC1255TX-1, for which I was able to find more recent driver from 2014, but it can't work with the the older model.

Last edited by UCyborg on 2020-12-13, 16:12. Edited 1 time in total.
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Reply 214 of 749, by Peter Swinkels

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Hmmm, I think Visual Basic 6.0 and anything before is a godawful mess of an outdated programming language and should be phased out as asap where still in use. Also I think most mid to late 90s games are ugly as sin. Some guy on Youtube had this video about retro stuff blabbing about how great Duke Nukem 3D was... My opinion? Not only is the game utterly infantile, the sound is terrible, especially considering it was made in 1997. And the low-res graphics desperately trying to look realistic make me want to gauge my eyes out. And people complaining about modern software should be forced to do their work on a Windows 9x machine. (BWAHAHA.)

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Reply 215 of 749, by Joseph_Joestar

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Peter Swinkels wrote on 2020-12-13, 12:16:

Some guy on Youtube had this video about retro stuff blabbing about how great Duke Nukem 3D was... My opinion? Not only is the game utterly infantile, the sound is terrible, especially considering it was made in 1997. And the low-res graphics desperately trying to look realistic make me want to gauge my eyes out.

Duke3D came out in early '96 actually. The graphics are ok if you play at 640x480 or higher. But yeah, it's way too pixelated at 320x200 which is how most people without a Pentium CPU played it at the time.

Agreed about the sound effects. They really should have used something better than 11 kHz samples. The music is great though, especially on a SC-55 or when using a soundfont that mimics it.

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Reply 217 of 749, by Zup

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Peter Swinkels wrote on 2020-12-13, 12:16:

Some guy on Youtube had this video about retro stuff blabbing about how great Duke Nukem 3D was... My opinion? Not only is the game utterly infantile, the sound is terrible, especially considering it was made in 1997. And the low-res graphics desperately trying to look realistic make me want to gauge my eyes out.

Maybe infantile, but it was all a teenager wanted/needed. It still can be played and enjoyed, but the jokes seems dated.

BTW, recently I used a Pentium III laptop to play and make captures at every resolution supported from 320x200 to 1600x1200. The game had a "sweet spot" (I don't remember if it was 640x480 or 800x600) where the textures are very good (below that resolution, they seems blocky; going above there are little to no improvement). I repeated that with other build games, and the results were about the same (I found a sweet spot on every game), but Redneck Rampage and Blood best resolutions were higher.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2020-12-13, 12:16:

And people complaining about modern software should be forced to do their work on a Windows 9x machine. (BWAHAHA.)

I'd give them an old school notebook with a portable monochrome printer. Just keep on mind that most people complaining about modern software don't want IT people to bugfix an issue or to teach them how it works. They want someone else to do their job.

Going back to polemic mode...
Although every GTA was revolutionary on some way (specially GTA III), and I enjoyed playing GTA and GTA London... I find that GTA games are quickly boring. Most missions forces you to repeat the same chores and the game starts to feel like a daily job. That applies to any GTA 2 to GTA V (although I guess that GTA is excluded mainly because my memories are hazy).

About that, I think that Saints Row 2 is a better gang game that any GTA, and Saints Row: The Third is a better GTA than any GTA.

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Reply 218 of 749, by Peter Swinkels

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Hmmm, I thought Quake looked pretty poor too. Same for a The Magic Schoolbus game for Win 3.11. Some parts looked okay while in other cases the graphics looked grainy and discolored.

Funnily enough there are several more primitive games that look and sound fine imho such as Commander Keen 3-6. Heck, Alley Cat from 1983 still holds up okay to me. It seems that as long as whoever did the graphics didn’t try aim for as real as possible things stand the test of time better. It makes me wonder how I will view todays games that look great to me now in a decade or so. Just as ugly as some 90s games I just mentioned?

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