I usually dont play two games, but I just recently acquired the Swedish localized version of Pharao from 1999 and it is quite amazing. Been looking for a year and finally found it. I just had to play it directly.

The strange thing about the game is that it has like a pentium 90 MHz or so requirement but a 300 meg of hard drive space req. On such a computer generally you had small hard drives, like I have on my socket 5 machine. I guess it is the music and sounds, there is a lot of speech which is why I like the localized version.

Living through that time though, it felt like storage space tech was lagging quite a bit behind software bloat. Unless you had megabucks to throw at it. In about '95, average Joe would be able to stretch for a 540MB drive but still you'd only be able to have 10 recent games or recent applications on it. Part of the enthusiastic takeup of CDROM in these years was the hope you could have hundreds of MB online without having to pay out the ass for HDD space... but a megabyte or two of HDD install related to the CD software soon turned into hundreds too. So in the two years you went from having your 500MB drive to affording a 2.1GB drive, you still only could get about 10 of the latest games/apps on it. So regular users frequently had multiple hard drives and even then were uninstalling and reinstalling stuff on a regular basis just to have enough room to work with. I don't think that cycle really broke until we were past about 40GB, though it began to ease off a bit early in the 10s of GB

edit: waiting for the "9GB SCSI drives existed so you're wrong! " comment, sure if you had $5000 for one of those and another $7000 for the kind of machine you could plug it into.

Yeah I remember the time of tiny hard drives. I'm actually reliving it with my Compaq prolinea only having a 850mb drive and some 2 GB limitation. Space was the reason I chose a slot 1 system for this game.

I remember the constant space hunting back in the day, and heavily fragmented hard drives because you deleted 100 megs of temporary internet files (consisting cat GIFs ofc) to fit a game.. 😀

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-10, 17:51:

edit: waiting for the "9GB SCSI drives existed so you're wrong! " comment, sure if you had $5000 for one of those and another $7000 for the kind of machine you could plug it into.

Same happens for RAM too. Loads of "128mb common in 1998" out there when the real common number's 32mb (sometimes with a marketing-pushed 64mb upgrade later into 1999-2000) - and that's at least for the US! Sometimes this possible 'proof' would be an ad/review for a Falcon Northwest system no one could buy (and also often had SCSI drives).

Still playing through Pathfinder: Kingmaker and it's still a hit and miss. I find myself going back and forth between making my peace with kingdom management stuff and hating it. The story itself is also incredibly inconsistent in terms of quality, it feels like a collab effort between a bunch of amateurs and the talent/skill levels are very uneven. The writing is all over the place. Mechanically, the game is very sound - it's the kind of game that is a power-gamer's dream; ie if you know how to game the system you can become an incredible badass but a narrativist play-through is also challenging but doable. Yet, it's very dry. The whole game is dry. It thinks it is rich, but it's not. I hear the sequel is immensely better in this regard, but this one lacks pretty much any flavor. It's like a perfectly serviceable frozen pizza, if you know what I mean.

leileilol wrote on 2022-02-10, 19:59:

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-10, 17:51:

edit: waiting for the "9GB SCSI drives existed so you're wrong! " comment, sure if you had $5000 for one of those and another $7000 for the kind of machine you could plug it into.

Same happens for RAM too. Loads of "128mb common in 1998" out there when the real common number's 32mb (sometimes with a marketing-pushed 64mb upgrade later into 1999-2000) - and that's at least for the US! Sometimes this possible 'proof' would be an ad/review for a Falcon Northwest system no one could buy (and also often had SCSI drives).

Actually, RAM was pretty cheap in 1998 and early 1999. In the summer of 1998 I upgraded from a Pentium 100 to a Pentium II 300/i740/Voodoo2. It was an INCREDIBLY expensive upgrade, and the RAM I got with it was 64MB, which was a fraction of the cost to be honest. I believe the cost of RAM / MB was around ~$1 at the time, which was waaaaaay less than what it was in 1996 (~$20/MB for the 16MB I got for my Pentium system). It was in fact so low that even my dad actually upgraded his laptop's memory for the first time that summer because it was feasible - and Laptop memory was horrendously expensive in the 90s compared to desktop stuff. RAM prices did double for a while in 1999 IIIRC due to some flooding or something in Asia, but then kept falling. More proof is that systems like the Dell XPS D266/300/333 series sold all the way back in 1997 came with 32MB RAM on board, but were sold as 64MB in H2 1998. So yeah, 32MB was not common in 1998, at least not for Pentium II systems. Maybe if you were still on Socket 7 at the time, 32MB was a good budget option, but not the go-to option anymore. 128MB was not common either, but certainly not unheard of.

EDIT: I found a good site for RAM prices: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm

Still playing Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. First impressions are mostly positive.

The graphics are very nice considering when the game was released. The main characters look decent enough and are all voiced by their respective actors from the TV show. Overall, the game really feels like an extra episode of Star Trek Voyager. Heck, it even features the full intro sequence, sans the original music.

Gameplay has been a bit of a mixed bag so far. The introductory mission on the (holodeck) Borg cube was great. They really nailed the ominous atmosphere of those vessels. But once the main plot starts, it quickly devolved into "Enemies are beaming in all around us! Keep lasering them for two minutes until they stop!". I'm hoping that this gameplay mechanic won't carry over to the remaining missions, because that would be really dull.

Lastly, while the main characters from the TV show are well written, the newly introduced members of your team are not so great. I really disliked how the heavy weapons guy was presented like your average high school dudebro who constantly jokes around and keeps picking on that one technician. And all of that during a dangerous mission aboard an unknown ship full of hostile aliens. It felt out of character for a member of an "elite team" of Starfleet officers.

leileilol wrote on 2022-02-10, 19:59:

Same happens for RAM too. Loads of "128mb common in 1998" out there when the real common number's 32mb (sometimes with a marketing-pushed 64mb upgrade later into 1999-2000) - and that's at least for the US! Sometimes this possible 'proof' would be an ad/review for a Falcon Northwest system no one could buy (and also often had SCSI drives).

I definitively agree that 128 MB RAM wasn't common in 1998. But I don't think 64 MB was too far fetched for someone who bought a new PC at the time. Here's an ad for some Alienware computers from Computer Gaming World #170 (page 287) published in September of 1998.

The most affordable PC from that ad (1899 USD) had 64 MB RAM while their absolute high-end machine (3699USD) had 128 MB.

64 Mbyte was a lot from what I can remember, 128 was extreme and 256 was absolutely absurd.

Hehe that high end machine was soon to be obsolete with the dual voodoo 2 s in comparison to a GeForce 256. Well spent money! 😀

Avernum: Escape from the Pit

I am now 10 hours in. My characters are level 4 and I'm still very much in the beginning of the game. By now I'm pretty comfortable with the interface, and my previous criticism still stands: for a game (re)made in 2011, navigating the interface is surprisingly primitive. You cannot jump at all between different screens. If you open a character's inventory screen and want to view any other screen, such as the world map or your journal, you must first exit the inventory screen by either clicking a button in the lower right corner of the window or by hitting ESC. Fortunately, that's about where my major complaints for this game end. I've been playing at Normal difficulty for a bit now, after starting on Casual. Casual was way too easy. Almost zero damage taken in any combat. Normal is still on the easy side, but with just enough challenge that I may keep it there. I also mentioned earlier that I bumped the resolution down from 1920x1080 to 1600x900. I've now bumped it down even more to 1366x768. It just looks better IMO (other than the non-native resolution blur). Size-wise, the characters and world fit the screen perfectly at this resolution on my 23" monitor.

I'm really loving the way combat was designed in this game. Turn-based, grid-based. I love that you can switch between melee and ranged attacks anytime, without penalty (you still can't use a ranged attack on an adjacent enemy, which I agree with). I love that any character can use just about any weapon. Weapons are skills based, so you can have your mage use a bow or sword, they'll just be bad at it (unless you spend your level-up points on them instead of magic). This really opens up combat options. If you're out of spell points (or just don't want to waste them), but don't want to pass on your mage/priest's turn, they can still give melee or missile attacks a shot. Buffing spells are well-implemented and really add to the turn-based strategy. I've read that this game does not lend itself well to characters who specialize in the bow, but so far I have been quite happy with my Archer. I don't consider him to be unfairly under-powered, as the criticism claims. Maybe as the game progresses and my characters become more powerful, that criticism will become more valid?

The quests are very well laid out and easy to follow. None of this reading between the lines or having no idea where to go. As soon as you get a quest, it shows up on your world map, so you know exactly where you need to go to work on it.

One other thing I like about this game is certain skills are shared between your party. So if a lock requires your TOOL USE skill to be 5, and your four characters have TOOL USE skills of 2, 1, 1, and 1, then your party can pick that lock. The basic premise is your party communicates and combines their knowledge to help each other out. I really like that concept. Plus, it allows you more flexibility when leveling up. You don't have to focus one character on lock-picking at the expense of other skills.

Speaking of leveling up, this is also well done, if a bit "lite". I do enjoy a longer process of deciding which points to add to stats, skills and traits. Avernum really streamlines it. Each character adds 1 point to a stat, 2 points to skills, and every even level (2, 4, 6, etc), a point to a trait. It only takes a few minutes to level up your four party members.

I can definitely see myself playing more Spiderweb Software RPGs down the road...

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-02-12, 06:46:

I definitively agree that 128 MB RAM wasn't common in 1998. But I don't think 64 MB was too far fetched for someone who bought a […]
Show full quote

leileilol wrote on 2022-02-10, 19:59:

Same happens for RAM too. Loads of "128mb common in 1998" out there when the real common number's 32mb (sometimes with a marketing-pushed 64mb upgrade later into 1999-2000) - and that's at least for the US! Sometimes this possible 'proof' would be an ad/review for a Falcon Northwest system no one could buy (and also often had SCSI drives).

I definitively agree that 128 MB RAM wasn't common in 1998. But I don't think 64 MB was too far fetched for someone who bought a new PC at the time. Here's an ad for some Alienware computers from Computer Gaming World #170 (page 287) published in September of 1998.

cgw_170.jpg

The most affordable PC from that ad (1899 USD) had 64 MB RAM while their absolute high-end machine (3699USD) had 128 MB.

Heh, Alienware, Falcon Northwest's closest competitor at the time.... before they were mass produced Dell junk.

edit: okay in face of objections, 90% mass produced Dell junk. Dell could use their clout to do better things at the top end, but they also cheapened the name by putting it on "accessible" i.e. cost reduced models which you can bet made the majority of shipping volume. But as always in computers, cars, TVs just about anything these days, just because it's got the name on it doesn't mean every particular model is the best there is.

Have been playing a whole lot of Virtual Pool lately...

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-12, 15:05:

...before they were mass produced Dell junk.

Wont derail this thread, but that is a ridiculous blanket statement if I ever saw one. I can't speak for their desktops as I don't use them, but over the last decade they have produced some seriously solid gaming laptops that not many could compete with. I owned their beast M18x SLI model back in 2011 and it was, by far, one of the best gaming laptop builds I have ever come across to this day. As with any company that builds a thing, it depends.

edit: ( ＾◡＾)っ ♡

I just randomly tried to login to the Eden PSOBB private server, and it worked.

So, I guess I'm playing PSO again. I haven't touched this account since making it in 2013, I'm surprised it's still there.

Nearly there dinging 40 on FO on NGS since the cap was just raised this week...

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-02-12, 06:46:

The most affordable PC from that ad (1899 USD) had 64 MB RAM while their absolute high-end machine (3699USD) had 128 MB.

Don't want to touch on this derail much but notice those prices don't include the $325-$1050 monitors! Alienware's always been a luxury brand too. They also expect you to get that horrible $295 speaker chair that's not comfortable nor compatible with all derrieres.

leileilol wrote on 2022-02-13, 06:31:

Don't want to touch on this derail much but notice those prices don't include the $325-$1050 monitors!

Fair enough. So here's an ad from CGW #171 (October 1998, very last page):

It shows a reasonably high-end Dell PC with 128 MB RAM for 2299 USD, including a monitor. And on the page just prior to that, Dell offers a mid range 1699 USD machine with 64 MB RAM, which includes a monitor as well.

All I'm saying is, if someone bought a new mid to high end PC in late 1998, they would likely have 64 MB RAM, and possibly even 128 MB, if they shelled out some extra cash. Those prices weren't exactly outrageous.

Does anybody remember the Pro Ball Mod for quake 3 ? found the m0d but having trouble locating a map pack

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-02-13, 07:00:

It shows a reasonably high-end Dell PC with 128 MB RAM for 2299 USD,

Have you noticed the same Dell ad a month later (Nov 1998) dropped that down to 64mb while at the same price? The measly Rage Pro was bumped up to a measly RIVA128ZX along with the 50mhz bump and more 3GB space. The TNT was already out by this point and the Rage128 was just around the corner. As-is, this box would struggle with Unreal (patched and all) and look rather ugly going into the Q3Test-flushes-everything era of mid-1999.

most OEM P2s skimp on graphics anyway. 1997 had more of them with PCX2s than Voodoos

Still playing both tie fighter and Pharaoh.

Tie fighter is very cool and still holds up. I remember that there was a difficulty bump somewhere but at maybe mission 7 or so it is still quite easy. I mostly fail mission because I don't pay attention during the breifing and destroy the wrong ships..

Pharaoh is as I remember it, it is kind of buggy and the walker system is somewhat frustrating. I read some build guides this time around and it is much more fun if you have a good layout.

leileilol wrote on 2022-02-13, 09:02:

Have you noticed the same Dell ad a month later (Nov 1998) dropped that down to 64mb while at the same price? The measly Rage Pro was bumped up to a measly RIVA128ZX along with the 50mhz bump and more 3GB space.

And yet on the page just above that, Dell offered the slightly older 400 MHz model with 128 MB RAM for 2199 USD.

What they considered more eye catching at the time (CPU power vs. RAM) was up to their marketing department. But it doesn't change the fact that 64 MB was becoming the norm and that you could get a 128 MB system for a fairly reasonable price by late 1998.

I have a Packard Bell Chrom@ 9750 laptop from 2000 that comes with 128 MB of RAM. Standard configuration.

It came with Windows ME.

Same deal with a previous HP Omnibook XE-3 GC. Edit: Actually, this one came with 64 MB of RAM.