/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.818687]

I missed being a PC Gamer back in the 90s. How was it back then?

[Anonymous No.818705]

Fantastic.

[Anonymous No.818712]

>>818687
Depends on what part of '90s do you mean. It's been a long decade, spanning from DOS memory frustrations to glorious Baldur's Gate scratched discs.

[Anonymous No.818718]

>>818712
>Scratched discs.
Fuck, i do not miss that.

[Anonymous No.818723]

Early, mid, or late 90s? Which would you like to hear?

I can only tell you about the late 90s/early 00s.

I made a thread about it the other night, but nobody responded. It started a bit like this:

PC gaming in the late 90s/early 00s
>Fragging bitches in Quake/Unreal
>Capturing the flag in Tribes/Tribes 2
>Fucking around in Counter-Strike vehicle maps
>Trying out HL1 mods
>Organizing games in IRC
>Reading GameSpy/Blue's News/UGO
>Listening to industrial metal/nu metal
>Watching early machinima
>Waiting hours for downloads to finish over dialup
>Playing The Sims and Simcity between Quake matches

If you want to know what gaming in the late 90s was like, just read some old articles on GameSpy.

Also, the PC was considered very different than all of the other platforms, and that pretty much every game out there was an exclusive. There weren't many casuals back then, so gaming companies appealed to the core gaming audience.

Things were a lot different. Game budgets were smaller (though not as small as indie budgets today), and a game selling 100,000 copies was considered good.

Tribes 1 only sold 200,000 copies, but was a pretty popular game back then.

Shit has grown a lot since then, but I feel like a lot of the sense of community is gone, and nobody gives a shit about the core gaming audience anymore. Either that, or the core gaming audience is casual as fuck now.

I just want a new twitch shooter.

[Anonymous No.818724]

>mfw

[Anonymous No.818732]

If 3dfx were still around, we would have better gpus

[Anonymous No.818731]

>>818723
also, you got to hear this sound every day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qWg6cgFnIU

[Anonymous No.818739]

>>818687
>How was it back then?
glorious

[Anonymous No.818752]

>>818731
Alright, I remember hearing this and I need to know.

WHAT IS MAKING THAT SOUND
WHY IS IT MAKING THAT SOUND

[Anonymous No.818753]

Beautiful, until it moved away from DOS

[Anonymous No.818761]

At this point I'm talking out my ass, as I'm only 20 and didn't really get to experience the early (or hell, the mid 90s) of PC gaming.

I started PC gaming in 1996, and didn't get to go online until 1999.

Still, I'll try and give you an idea of what early-to-mid 90s PC gaming was like, from the things that I've heard, seen, and collected.

The early 90s were an exciting time to be a PC gamer. Hardware for games was getting better on a frequent basis: VGA graphics, 386/486 processors, digitized sound cards, and 8+ MB of RAM became standard during this era. Because of this, PC games could finally move past the shitty graphics and sound of the 80s, and finally compete with the multimedia/gaming systems companies like Commodore put out (Commodore died in 1994, as the PC just became too popular and good).

PC gaming was a small industry, and most games were developed by small companies or developers working out of their basements with a few bros. The shareware distribution model became popular, where developers would release small playable sections of their games (say, the first level or episode), and ask the player to send money via mail-order to receive the full version by mail (actually, some developers had their own BBS systems that did digital distribution, as well). The two big names during this era were Apogee and Epic Megagames.

[Anonymous No.818767]

Back then we actually had games designed around the PC instead of everything being designed around consoles.

[Anonymous No.818764]

>>818761
(continued)

The mid 90s were pretty similar to the late 90s, with some of the stuff from the early-90s still going on. BBSes were still around, but most people had shifted to the internet, and as a result, the World Wide Web. Doom and Quake were insanely popular; there are lots of stories of college campuses having to block Doom and Quake traffic because it overloaded their networks. Workplaces gave their sysadmins hell, as people would play Doom and Quake all the fucking time and use up all the network resources. Fun stuff. A lot of gaming sites started to pop up at this time, as well, and Windows came into common usage.

If I'm wrong about any of this stuff, let me know.

[Anonymous No.818770]

>>818723
Here's some online player counts from the late 90s, for comparison.

[Anonymous No.818780]

>>818731
>be only 25
>feel old as fuck because there are people browsing 4chan that are too young to remember that sound

I tried out Minecraft earlier this year and ended up talking with a random 13 year old who figured that the internet had "always been around." He couldn't wrap his head around it because he's always online. I'm a part of the last generation that went through a childhood where the whole world wasn't constantly plugged in to the internet, so I can appreciate having internet.

Of course, when I was a kid we had older people telling us "TELEVISION AND VIDEO GAMES HAVEN'T ALWAYS BEEN AROUND", so whatever.

[Anonymous No.818778]

>>818761
>>818764
Don't forget gaming magazines with discs chock full of game demos.

[Anonymous No.818784]

>>818752
That's a modem. It transmits data over phone lines by using sound. That's data you are listening to. To be specific, a 56k modem handshake.

>>818778
Where do you think I got those images?

[Anonymous No.818790]

>>818784
Yeah, but the demos. How many games nowadays do even get demos at all?

[Anonymous No.818801]

>>818780
I feel pretty much the same way. I'm 20, but I got started with PC gaming real fucking early.
1996, a Cyrix 486 machine and DOS shareware. Then, an HP machine and a bunch of CDs full of pirated games.

Because of that, I was pretty young when the industry started to deteriorate and the entire culture of PC gaming shifted. Just as I was starting to appreciate it, it all got yanked out of my fucking hands by the casuals.

I watched as my favorite communities died.

I watched Gamespy come and go. When it went, it took a lot of communities with it, as they no longer could organize games.
I watched HL1DM come and disappear.
I watched Quake 3 go from 1000s of players to 100s.
I watched the Tribes community get eviscerated by the shutdown of the master servers, and the remaining community move on to Ascend (which is a much different game). I remember when Tribes 2 had 10000s of players. Now it has less than 50, on a good day.
I watched the Worms community shrink as Team 17 decided they wanted the console audience more.

I have seen site after site, community after community, shrink and ultimately die. And it hurts. There's nothing I want more than to play some Half-Life mods, Quake 2, CS 1.0 (with vehicles), Unreal Tournament, or Tribes 2 (especially with construction mod). Hell, I'd even kill to play Fallout Tactics RP again.

But those days are over, and I have a feeling that most of the people I played that stuff with have moved on to do other things with their lives, and probably turned into casuals themselves as a result.

[Anonymous No.818819]

LAN parties

[Anonymous No.818827]

You didn't miss much, OP.

[Anonymous No.818847]

[Anonymous No.818850]

>>818847
I have 90s PC gaming ads, too

[Anonymous No.818853]

>>818850

[Anonymous No.818856]

>>818853
>no nude code
Into the trash it goes

[Anonymous No.818860]

>>818723
Babyz was one of the most hardcore games ever made.

[Anonymous No.818867]

>>818853
I have no clue what it is but there is something about early Lara that gets my penisio harder than the newer ones.

[Anonymous No.818873]

>>818867
probably the huge tits

[Anonymous No.818874]

>>818867
Might it be the gigantic titties and low-cut tank top?

[Anonymous No.818892]

>>818873

back in the day, we used to fap to this

it's hard to believe

[Anonymous No.818905]

>>818892
I still do.

[Anonymous No.818913]

>>818801
>moved on to do other things with their lives, and probably turned into casuals themselves as a result
I know I have!

[Anonymous No.819012]

>>818801
>I have a feeling that most of the people I played that stuff with have moved on to do other things with their lives, and probably turned into casuals themselves as a result.

It's weird to me to think about how deep in to things I used to be with people who are just plain, normal adults now. Crazy motherfuckers in high-school who were funny and wild, but just buckled down and had to adjust to the real world.

[Anonymous No.819034]

>>818801
>I watched HL1DM come and disappear.
Half Life 1 Deatmatch?

[Anonymous No.819058]

>>819034
Hell yes, you know it.
HL1DM was awesome, and there were so many HL1 mods out there that were incredible.

Train Hunters was one that stuck out in my mind; it was like king of the hill but with a train as the hill.

[Anonymous No.819107]

>>818801

> team 17

To think how much I used to love those guys and Worms just to see them jew the shit out of fans. I've lost count of the times they pulled the whole, "It's like WA all over again we swear!" when marketing a new game just to abandon it after a few months.

>>819058

>hl1 mods
>hl2 mods never reached the level of content that hl1 mods produced
>there will never be a brainbread 2.0

Also I miss Wanted, the old west cowboy mod. I even joined a community site made by fans of the mod that wanted to bring Wanted back as a 2004 source mod but after about a year the updates stopped coming.

[Anonymous No.819106]

I was born in the early 90s.

I experienced the very tail end of 90s PC Gaming, and even then it was only Single Player, but it was the juiciest bits.
My first "real" PC game was Half-Life. One day, my oldest brother comes home with a box that read "Half-Life Anthology". After about an hour of installation on a sub-par Gateway, I watched him blast through aliens like no tomorrow. The next day I tried, but my six-year-old self was too scared to go past those giant worms, even with cheats on.
After that came Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition. Can't count how many hours I wasted crushing the AI. There was also a hefty dosage of Worms Armageddon with my brother thrown in the mix. I also tasted my first D&D experience with Neverwinter Nights, also something my brother picked up and never played again. Then of course were the late 90s/early 00s emergence of digital distribution networks that had gems like pic related.
Soon after I started getting my own games for the PC, like the Army Men Collection and C&C Renegade.
This year I finally built my own PC, a $1400 Enforcer rig. My brother helped me. He was the one who got me into this scene in the first place.

So yeah, PC gaming in the 90s was fuckawesome.

[Anonymous No.819124]

I was a sophomore in college when Quake III and Unreal Tournament came out, I remember a few of my neighbors in the dorm getting all excited because the "UT test" had come out (this was some kind of beta version of the game or something that the developers were using to gather data about players' hardware maybe? I don't even know) and so we all downloaded it and blasted each other and it was awesome

super-pixelated DM-Phobos is still one of the prettiest places I've ever been in a game (yes this is because of when and how I experienced it, nostalgia, and so forth)

[Anonymous No.819151]

>>819107
dude, brainbread was fucking awesome

[Anonymous No.819257]

>>819058
Good times.

I loved Team Fortress Classic and Natural Selection.

[Anonymous No.819281]

Man, I miss the old online gaming services and sites.

The Planet sites were the shit.
And Old Man Murray.

[Anonymous No.819287]

>>819281
MSN Gaming Zone

Played Rainbow Six a lot on here.

[Anonymous No.819306]

quake 2 weapons of destruction was the funnest shit of my life. I wish people still gamed that shit man it had the craziest guns, everything was super deadly

[Anonymous No.819420]

I used to play a lot of this on Kali: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMnManFre-g

[Anonymous No.819434]

>>819306
Well, I do run a Quake 2 server...

[Anonymous No.819547]

Merc Net.

If you remember playing mechwarrior2 Mercs online, you are forever my bro and I love you.

[Anonymous No.819557]

>>819547
I didn't play MW2, but MW3 was fucking boss.

[Anonymous No.819568]

>>819557
wait wait wait, is that the game where your mech could be Deconned but you could exit it before it blew up?

[Anonymous No.819576]

>>819568
You had to otherwise you died and had to restart your single player campaign.

[Anonymous No.819628]

It actually sucked a whole lot

Just think, Cumulative hardware prices have CRASHED since then. Thanks in no small part to more components being unified into singular products.

Before if you wanted a good experience with a game, you needed:
-3D accelerator
-MIDI driver
-Soundcard (yes, at one time the above and this were not unified into one card, yet)
-a good mouse (these were hard to find)
-a gamepad (no buying console gamepads, you needed to wade through the literally hundreds of gamepad options to find a good gamepad, trying to ask someone for help with this resulted in them recommending the same shitty 2-button gravis gamepad that everyone had)
-a joystick (any game that required piloting a vehicle=you needed a joystick, unless you were seriously going to memorize the special function of 64 keys on your keyboard + all the functions of the same 64 keys while holding down ctrl)
-network card (at one time, these were not integrated onto the motherboard)
-56K modem (if network card wasn't multi-purpose)

Yeah, we had Quake and Duke Nukem and Doom and it was the best, but we also were kids that had to convince our parents that spending a thousand dollars on our already fully-functional PCs was a good idea when the Super Nintendo cost a mere one hundred dollars.

It wasn't as great as people make it out to be.

You want to know when was the BEST time for PC gaming? The 80's.

[Anonymous No.819631]

>>819568
Yep.

Mechcommander did the same thing, but the difference being that you could hi-jack other people's mechs if you were crafty about it.

[Anonymous No.819652]

>>819628
I never had this problem. In the early 90s, our machine came with 8MB of RAM and a Cyrix 486DLC 33MHz processor, and we got a Sound Blaster 16 shortly thereafter. It ran DOS games pretty well.

In the late 90s, our machine was a 500MHz AMD machine, and it ran pretty much everything just fine.

Shit, I even have a Celeron 300A rig from the same era that runs the vast majority of late-90s games just fine. Sure, you can't max everything out at 1024x768, but in the day, 640x480 (or below) + software rendering worked fine.

Computers were more expensive, yes, but you didn't have to do much to make a regular store-bought PC capable of playing games.

[Anonymous No.819658]

>>819628
Add Voodoo card to that list

Games that required a Voodoo = can suck my left nut

[Anonymous No.819710]

>>818778
Those pratically became my main source of gaming years ago. My dad was always stingy when it came to computers and phones (I had dial-up until 4 years ago), meaning I had a shit computer and a shittier connection. The fact that in my country game magazines included full games was a godsend for me.

[Anonymous No.819723]

I think we usually get a kind of biased depiction of gaming in the nineties as it usually comes from people who either had the money or the zeal to really get into it much deeper than most people. As it is usually these people who create media about it like reviews, lets plays, nostalgia shows, ...
But I think this is exactly one of the things that defined gaming in the nineties:
The gradual development of the different media
The democratization of these media
The distinctions of class and attitude that ran through the userbases
The struggle to get access to things from the user's POV and to try distribute everything from the supply side

I think especially in the early nineties class distinction was still much much more important in gaming than it is now. PC gaming was really exclusive actually, I mean here in Europe in 1990 most people didn't even own a PC. The NES and to a lesser extent the Genesis were quite popular however and they were actually a kind of "blue collar family" thing at that point. But as most people didnt know wtf you did have a lot of AVGN moments there. In the middle class you had sort of this negative attitude like gaming was a thing or the devil and it would turn kids' brains into mush. You know the kind of attitude of pushy suburban moms who force classical music lessons on their kids and refuse to get that a man like Mozart would have ditched his wooden boxes with strings over a computer in a heartbeat. But it was of course harder to deny the emerging practical use of PCs and their educational value, so there. But there was a kind of reluctance to the whole thing. People generally didn't go into the culture of things, you were constantly wondering what to buy and so on, so casualdom was much more prevalent and in a way forced compared to now. You saw that in more upper class families, especially the new educational elite, people did subscribe to diskette distributed computer mags and become demoscenefags and stuff like that.

[Anonymous No.819760]

>>819723
Continuing my sociological rant a bit

I think the inertia of the whole system was very defining up until like the very late nineties when eternal septemper began to happen. You know the slow pace of everything trickling down, the lack of communication and education on all things computer, the in hindsight hilariously naieve notions people had of it, ... Nowadays when something comes out it appears almost everywhere instantly, but back then this was a very new economical paradigm. You were, especially as a kid (and games were largely seen as a thing for kids) stuck with what you got, you were handed your toys and that was that. Some things were collectible, especially things that could be copied of course, and that was all part of the fun. You would trade stuff with other kids. You had things like the shareware community and the mailed diskette computer mags I mentioned before, I have some fond memories of those even though I was never part of this community. In those scenes the distinction between user and producer became very negligable and this lead to this kind of creative feel to everything it churned out (kinda like 4chan in the good ol days). But you always felt like you were forced to lurk eternally as these were of course rather exclusive communities. As a PC gamer you would play games over and over forever and ever but you usually learn much more reading a single wiki or even faq about them than in all those years. It's like when you played an RTS single player campaign and then you play it online and you realise how much you suck. Never underestimate the importance of the internet. I dont know, somehow gaming back then felt much more like picking up a random book out of a shelf and reading it. It's hard to explain.
Anyways I think the whole retro gaming nostalgia craze thing has more to do with catching up than with actually reliving things. You find there were so many cool things you didn't get to play or even know about.

Also, arcade games.

[Anonymous No.820070]

Civilization and Civilization II both came out during the 90's and were both mind-blowing

the first couple of Warcrafts were pretty fun too

[Anonymous No.820080]

I guess I would have been introduced to pornographic text adventures during the 90s. A far cry from your modern Flash-based porn games. Not as many terrible RPG elements, more terrible adventure-game puzzles. Less walls of text, more spelling errors. Less furries.

[Anonymous No.820082]

I guess I would have been introduced to pornographic text adventures during the 90s. A far cry from your modern Flash-based porn games. Not as many terrible RPG elements, more terrible adventure-game puzzles. Less walls of text, more spelling errors. Less furries, more Star Trek characters.

[Anonymous No.820124]

>>819760
>Anyways I think the whole retro gaming nostalgia craze thing has more to do with catching up than with actually reliving things. You find there were so many cool things you didn't get to play or even know about.
This is actually true, from what I've seen.

[Anonymous No.820130]

>>819107
>there will never be a brainbread 2.0
then what is this? http://www.moddb.com/mods/brainbread-source

[Anonymous No.820134]

>>818770
>Hours upon hours on Zone
>Playing Jedi Knight
>Playing Xwing vs. Tie Fighter
>Playing Mechwarrior 3
>Sort of half-assing Warcraft 2 because the matchmaking they used was awful and this was waaaaay before Warcraft 2 b.net edition and I was totally unware of Kalli (or whatever that match making service was)

I miss those days man.

[Anonymous No.820315]

>>818687
In short you missed ACTUAL PC GAMING. Back then PC gaming was more then just console gaming in higher resolution, and the platform had some actual exclusives that are not MMO(f2p/p2w), strategy, low budget, no budget indies, Eastern European games.

[Anonymous No.820318]

Dude, you could piss in a toilet and regain health. Gaming has never been better.

[Anonymous No.820324]

>>819287
Holy shit Zone. I used to play the shit out of midtown madness on there. The music is burned into my brain. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjMuWXiMnZo

[Anonymous No.820350]

>>819628
>BEST time for PC gaming? The 80's.
LOL
PC was trash in the 80s. it was horrible for gaming, unlike C64 and Amiga.
Best time for PC gaming is 1995-2000.

[Anonymous No.820360]

>>820350
We need to distinguish between IBM compatibles and other personal computers.
It sucked in the early CGA times and it's main advantage in the EGA era was the common use of hard drives. But around 1990 when VGA and sound cards became standard it overtook the comptetition except for the FM Towns.
95 it had monopolized the market since Commodore died and Apple had given up on games. It also marked the switch from DOS to Windows as the primary gaming OS due to the addition of DirectX.

[Anonymous No.820365]

Team Fortress Classic was the game to end all games. Everyone played, it seemed almost endless, and it had great replayability. It was so much god damned fun. Multiplayer-only games were still sort of an experiment back then, but this game hit it on the nose. As the years passed, TFC fell into obsucirity. Valve sort of ignored it and it became a cluster fuck where people just played medic and conc-jumped. If you play TF2 today, look at how much Valve pays attention to it. Look at how solid the community is. The fact that the game is supported so much by it's developers is why the game has made it so long. Back then companies released a game, patched it once or twice, or a dozen times, and then they just forgot about it.

Counter-Strike was going through beta after beta. I atribute counter-strike to the downfall of decent gaming. Half-Life had very low requirements, so any idiot with his mom's eMachine or Gateway could play it. It was the rise of casuals to me.

Mplayer was the best online service for matchmaking. For crying out loud you could talk with a microphone! And it worked well over 33.6kbps, too! Voice over online gaming was great, but it just degenerated into people saying 'shut the fuck up' and calling each other faggot.

[Anonymous No.820456]

>>818731
I got too, but not didn't have to. ATM0

[Anonymous No.820461]

>>820365
Remember when TF2 was supposed to look like this?

[Anonymous No.820476]

>>819628
That's misleading as fuck.
You didn't need a network card mostly unless you were setting up LAN, which is a whole different ballgame than your typical experience . If you were playing online, you only needed a modem. Modems would not lead to a 'good' experience, but we all played them because fuck, multiplayer. LANs were often relegated to universities and businesses for most people for quite some time.
A lot of mice were competent. Really good mice are a late 90s early 2000s thing.
A gamepad was easy enough to find and you could just grab a default gravis, it was useful on some older games, not all of them. You could largely get away without having one if you weren't all over platformers.
You didn't need a 3D accelerator for some time, you could have gone until roughly 98/99 without one really and it wouldn't be a bad experience, just not 'as good.'

[Anonymous No.820485]

>>820365
man, I remember playing TFC

hung out a lot on HERSELF's server
sniped with 250+ ping

fun times

[Anonymous No.820497]

sometimes you'd be calling your friend via modem game in red alert and his dad would pick up the phone.

>hearing his fathers voice through my PC speaker

[Anonymous No.820505]

>>820365
Not everyone played it, some people were staying in better pastures with weapons factory. Others were playing the original TF still. Plenty of others were playing non TF based mods and whatnot have you in various other games.
TFC had it's own community going definitely, but it wasn't all encompassing.

> If you play TF2 today, look at how much Valve pays attention to it.
Exactly, not at all. Make a new hat, throw in some jerky weapons, laugh at the balance being fucked up and bugs never getting fix.
The only attention they throw at is a poor update that adds useless shit unrelated to playing the fucking game so morons will buy the game for all the 'free' DLC.

>Counter-Strike was going through beta after beta. I atribute counter-strike to the downfall of decent gaming.
Rightfully so, and yet you still don't recognize how TF2 maintenance ethics are similar to how little valve cared about CS and left it buggy as fuck for years. Then did the same with source, even left in a devastating well known bug where invisible players could jump on a server and micspam the shit out of everyone, and they never fucking fixed it it's been years and it absolutely drops server participation.

[Anonymous No.820506]

Industry moved in leaps and bounds in that decade.

Imagine playing MMORPGS on dialup modems and be charged by the minute of gameplay.

[Anonymous No.820512]

>>820461
>Remember when TF2 was supposed to look like this?

I remember those early screen shots in PC Gamer magazine and was so pumped.

Speaking of PC gamer, do you remember the 90's cd-rom demo discs (with the coconut monkey mascot)?

[Anonymous No.820518]

>>820134
Kali didn't have 'matchmaking' but it more or less worked out perfectly for matches because cases' ladder ran on Kali and ladder matches typically sort themselves out. Everyone's initial rounds will of course be rather muddled, but more everyone plays the more it matches and when you jump into a ladder system you pretty much start getting where you need to be quickly. It's not great for absolute rankings typically, but it is good for setting up relatively decent matches.

[Anonymous No.820531]

>>818687
better than consoles

wait it still holds true

[Anonymous No.820538]

>>820350
Honestly, I would say 1995-2006.

2006 seemed to be the year that a lot of the 90s PC games started dying off. You could still find a lot of Quake, Unreal, Tribes, HL1, and other games in 2006. In 2007, it just started going downhill for some reason.

You can hardly find shit now, because all of the master servers are gone and the players have moved onto other things.

[Anonymous No.820620]

>>818723
>unreal tournament
>opposing force

ma nigga

[Anonymous No.820624]

>>819281
>plant sites

Oh the memories.

[Anonymous No.820630]

>>820365
EXCUSE ME

I AM IN NEED OF MEDICAL ATT ---- BOOM

[Anonymous No.820669]

>>820538
>all of the master servers are gone
QuakeWorld is still up after over 15 years.

[Anonymous No.820673]

>>818731

That was.....ages ago

[Anonymous No.820683]

A mixture of frustration, anguish, annoyance, and fun

The biggest problem was that for the majority of the 90's computer stuff was all over the damn place and nothing was really homogenized or constant

It was also really fucking expensive and required a fair bit of programming skill and general technological competence to get things to work together properly; this goes both for the software and hardware side of things

[Anonymous No.820687]

>>820350
80s Gaming was fine for it's time. It was a comparable and more so in many respects than consoles.
PC gaming was decent around 1990-2000. And it was mostly a downslope despite improving tech, a downslope doesn't mean all games sucked, just on average.

>>820538
For playing some of the games, it could extend further than 2000, but for actual game production/library it's pretty much went to shit about 2000. With a very tiny speckling of decent games after that point.
Here's a graph with PC and gaming in general.
Consoles keep the middle of the general pretty good.
While this is gaming in general, The quality of gaming more or less trended in a similar fashion, but with a higher slope in the 80s.

[Anonymous No.820697]

>>820669
Which is hilarious because it had less players there for a while than Quake 3 which lost it's masters servers already.
I believe Q2 also has it's master server up.
No idea why they had such an issue with Q3s. They probably decided to just say fuck it some time ago when they wanted people to play Quake Live instead of Q3, which is a complete fucking dick move because QL was nearly worse in every fashion.

[Anonymous No.820713]

>>820687
I think you're wrong, PC gaming was in a really good state until at least 2005.

I mean, everything going to shit in 2000? Are you crazy?

>Thief 2
>Deus Ex
>Diablo II
>UT2004
>BF1942
>BF2
>Baldur's Gate II
>IL-2 Sturmovik
>HL2
>Max Payne
>Operation Flashpoint
>Arcanum
>Tribes 2
>NWN
>Morrowind
>Red Faction
>CoD 1
>SWAT 4

And the list goes on and on and on. Sure, the release of the Xbox 1 and the popularity of Halo did start to move some developers' attentions away from the PC, but that didn't start until 2001 and was not in full effect until much, much later.

[Anonymous No.820723]

>>820713
No, I'm objective. And most of those games listed are also bad to mediocre and two of them were good and great.

[Anonymous No.820738]

>>820723

>And most of those games listed are also bad to mediocre and two of them were good and great.

1/10, dude. Way too obvious.

[Anonymous No.820741]

>>820723

4/10

guaranteed replies

[Anonymous No.820739]

>>820723
I'd give a pass to IL-2
I can't really say shit about it because I'm not really a flight sim and I it wouldn't be possible to for me to judge it for two reasons, I bothered to get around to playing despite the fact that I do own a copy of it used still in it's re-shrink wrap and because I don't play flight sims I'm not adequately experienced enough to discuss them.

[Anonymous No.820745]

>>820738
Go back to /v/ if you're going to start that shit you asshole.

[Anonymous No.820754]

>>818867
Uncanny valley. It's why hand drawn porn look better than 3d rendered porn

[Anonymous No.820764]

> Thread about 90's PC-Gaming
> Everyone only talks about FPSs

[Anonymous No.820778]

>>820764
FPS was king, but there were all kinds of amazing games coming out in all genres.

RTS was another personal favorite of mine.

[Anonymous No.820783]

>>820778
This game was fucking crazy and not an FPS.

[Anonymous No.820815]

>>820783
>This game was fucking crazy and not an FPS.
5/6th of the time is was not an FPS. The rest it was a third person action adventure or fighting game. Mostly the former and the did the fighting and FPS parts relatively poorly.
It was an interesting game it was fairly clumsy though. It had a lot of unused potential. I never did sit through all the bowie concerts, they too could have been better.

[Anonymous No.820839]

>>818731
>>818780
>I used to work for a telephone company
>we still had quite a few customers on dial-up
>mon visage quand I had to troubleshoot dial-up connections with 50-80 year olds who only have one trunk line to use for telephone calls and dial-up, and they're still running Windows 95

[Anonymous No.820869]

>>820506
>The game was originally offered for $6.00 per hour in 1992 via CompuServe

That's fucking insane.

[Anonymous No.820889]

All nighters playing legacy Blizzard games.

[Anonymous No.820891]

>>820506
That was less common. You could get dialup in 92-93 with unlimited monthly and there were free or cheaper alternatives.
Shit you could play a first person hack and slash, Shadows of Yserbius in 1991 with dialup to INN and drop and join with other players in your group on the fly.
Muds were around and cheaper.
Compuserve was overpriced in it's day.

[Anonymous No.820912]

>>819106
>This year I finally built my own PC
And now you play Skyrim.

[Anonymous No.820946]

>>820697

Pretty much anyone that bothered with Quake 3 used OSP and later CPMA. I'm assuming master servers were just for the original game so they weren't exactly filled with people, I assume.

[Anonymous No.820949]

>>818723
Why not play come play quake 3 cpma anon?

Or warsow? You can't be that interested in twitch shooters if you don't play them anon

[Anonymous No.820952]

>>820949
I play Quake 2, mostly.

[Anonymous No.820968]

>>820949

Notthatguybut I'm totally down for some CPM. Haven't played it in like 2 years, but I shot some bots earlier and I wasn't too horrible.

[Anonymous No.820969]

>>819106
Digital distribution for the games market was pretty much entirely after 2000.

[Anonymous No.820983]

>>820697
because vq3 was phased out by CPMA CQ3

in fact CPMA has been getting more players recently from QL and I think in about a year most people will have switched to CPMA in time for reborn to come out.

[Anonymous No.820989]

>>820949
Alright. Tell me how to get into CPMA Q3. I have stock Quake III installed. Is it just a mod I need to get, or are there different master servers, or what?

[Anonymous No.820996]

>>820989

playmorepromode.org seems to be the official site nowadays.

[Anonymous No.821002]

>>820968
are you in yorop? check http://www.bosstour.co.uk/ for weekly cups and shit at the weekend, plenty of new players have been joining from QL for our lowskill cups.

We're pretty much seperate from the IRC cpma community, but we still obviously hang out there and play pick ups.

I think those two communites alone has around 100+ active/200 semi active players.

And that goes for anyone else too, get off QL and play Q3 for free

[Anonymous No.821006]

>>820983
That's irrelevent to the master servers, likewise people still play vq3.

[Anonymous No.821008]

>>820989
use this

quake.net.pl/downloads/pro-installer-2-0/download

all you need to do is point it to your pak0.pk3 and choose what you want to install, I reccomend everything

Make sure you change the drive path too, it defaults to E: or something stupid

[Anonymous No.821010]

>>821006
Yeah I thought so.

Yeah, I really like VQ3, I don't know why people don't play it instead of ql

[Anonymous No.821018]

>>821002

Thanks. Not sure I'd be considered low-skill with all the hours I've spent on quake in general.. but then again... could be fun.

[Anonymous No.821021]

>>821018
If you're not sure of your skill, you're most likely low skilled, or rather at least no better than decent to good range. Good to Great players know it because they wreck shit in no uncertain fashion. Also your logic is unsound, the amount of time you spend does not determine anything, how well you progress in time does.Some of the best Quake players have had significantly less time than older players and still are far far better.

[Anonymous No.821023]

>>821018
Have you played cpm before?

I played a year of ql and was pretty good at duelling, i've played 8 months of cpm and i'm still low+

I think the only advantage you'll have is if you're a quakeworld player. Anyway, you'll have someone to duel even if you're the worlds best on a particular map!

[Anonymous No.821072]

>>818853
I remember that there was a way on the playstation to make her nude. With one of those "game genie" kinda things.

[Anonymous No.821341]

In the 90s, there were rock stars among game developers. Read one of the big articles about the rise and fall of John Romero if you haven't; or go through several of these articles ( http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.1/totb/ ) and try to imagine a high-ranking employee at one of the most successful of today's development companies talking like that in public.... Today, mainstream gaming seems to be mainly about big, bland corporations, except in the indie world, where there are some relatively colorful designer/programmer stars like Notch.

[Anonymous No.821374]

The biggest difference is that there was more time then. These days, there's usually not enough time for Klax, whereas in the 90's there was time for Klax.

[Anonymous No.821395]

>>821374
I dunno. klax seems to disagree with you.

[Anonymous No.821487]

>>821341
Well, I think it has to do with PC gaming becoming more mainstream.

Back in the 90s, PC gaming really wasn't mainstream, as the average person just played games on consoles. PC gaming (and computer stuff in general) was a bit more underground, and not something that was really very accepted in the general public.

In short, PC gaming used to be a niche interest, and it is now part of the mainstream.

[Anonymous No.821498]

>>820996
Yeah, I tried this, and all of the servers were passworded and in Europe or Russia.

I'll stick with Quake II.

[New Hampshire No.821529]

>>818723
>>Waiting hours for downloads to finish over dialup
>not mail-ordering dics from a warez web site

[Anonymous No.821545]

>>821529
nah, my dad had a friend at work who gave us these wonderful CDs full of 90s warez

all kinds of applications and games

also RealMedia files of the first few seasons of South Park

[Anonymous No.821562]

>>819281
>400 mhz
>Beautiful times

[Anonymous No.821761]

I hopped on when I found Quake at Toys 'R Us for PC. Oddly enough, I got the game a day after it came out without knowing it.

[Anonymous No.821763]

Nobody I knew played PC. Not until Unreal Tournament came out that someone plugged a USB and copied the game into the library computers.

[Anonymous No.821775]

>>818723
>casuals this casuals that
/v/ plz go

[Anonymous No.821783]

>>818860
hell yeah, and remember how HARDCORE LinksLS 2000 was? man, fucking casuals playing their wiis

[Anonymous No.822138]

>>821562
>400mhz
>not getting a 300mhz Celeron a and overclocking it to 450mhz on air for thirty dollars and which beats out a 450PII.

[Anonymous No.822145]

>>820512
Yeah and I think they even included Quake and Half-Life mods on the discs. I know Coconut Monkey would show up as an easter egg in some of those mods.

>>820624
Those sites are now all dead including all the hosted sites. ;_;

btw, /vr/, I still have my retail Half-Life CD. I had Blue Shift, and Opposing Force but I don't know where they went. I remember getting Blue Shift at CompUSA, and they had OpFor on display at the end of an aisle.

[Anonymous No.822150]

>>822145
S-should I call the tip line? I could really use some tips for Half-Life. (´･ω･`)

[Anonymous No.822509]

>>822150
holy shit, $0.95 a minute
and I bet they would try to get you to stay on the line for as long as possible, too

[Anonymous No.822521]

>>822150
Holy shit a help line

[Anonymous No.822565]

>>820512

Damn, I'd forgotten all about coconut monkey. I used to buy PC Gamer's religiously back in the early-mid 90s. Good times

[Anonymous No.822573]

>>822138
Had a 333 at 412mhz myself, because I had a shit motherboard. Having said that, I still have that system and it still works fine, so fuck it... money well spent.

Can't help but love Mendocino.

[Anonymous No.822748]

>>820713
To me, good PC gaming ended in 2007

[Anonymous No.822761]

>>818723
>Trying out HL1 mods
That was a looooooong ride.
There were SO MUCH of them, everywhere, and a lot of them were really really good, and even those which weren't made a fun ride.
By far the best modding community that ever existed. I miss WON

[Anonymous No.822801]

PC gaming between 1995-2000 was simply... Orgasmic. I'm always afraid that it's nostalgia that is messsing with my head, that the era just happened to coincide with my early development years (10-15 years) when I had the most time to dedicate to this hobby.

Hopefully it was truly a golden age where gaming was not yet a vast business and creativity was fresh and eager to make use of a new exciting medium...

Here's to PC gaming!

[Anonymous No.823413]

>>822761
I feel quit the opposite, there were so few in relative completion and a good portion of them weren't any good. So the amount of mods were actually fairly limited if you were actually looking for a mod to... play.
WON was better than steam

[Anonymous No.823429]

>>822801
>I'm always afraid that it's nostalgia that is messsing with my head,
It partially is, the other half is novelty, that era was in decline but produced two major factors that 'blew people away' multiplayer games on the internet and 3d cards. Also digital audio was pretty much becoming the standard. So the production 'quality' shot up for sound and graphics and networkability but the variation of games and quality of gameplay and bugginess went up. They trended towards technical catastrophes rather than good playable games. While that was the time of somewhat clunky 3D on the consoles, the PCs got clunky and copious amounts of instability, patching became commonplace and not just like oh we fixed a few niche bugs but we fucking released damn near unplayable games.
There were still good games. But if you go through lists of games from that era, you start to find well there's a shitload less of them than you think that are actually decent or playable. Seriously, ignore the very dominant players and try to find decent games and you'll come across an increasing amount of poor games.

[Anonymous No.824125]

I never played 90s PC games before recently, but after downloading a Doom sourceport, I can't get enough.

Speaking of sourceports, is there anywhere where I can get the Quake files easily? I'm about to download DarkPlaces, if that helps.

[Anonymous No.824549]

>>824125
Yep.

http://nquake.com/ - QuakeWorld
http://q2s.tastyspleen.net/ - Quake II Starter

Quake 3, you gotta buy or pirate and do all of the source port shit manually.

[Anonymous No.824561]

>>822801
I only started playing 90s pc games a few years ago. It's the best shit the industry has ever produced.

[Anonymous No.824571]

Does anybody remember the game "homeworld"?

[Anonymous No.824675]

>>824549
Okay, I got Quakeworld set up, but whenever I let go of the mouse button when firing a weapon other then the Single Shotgun, it takes me back to the SS while the words "No weapon" appear in the event feed. Is there a way to fix this?

[Anonymous No.824679]

>>824571
/v/ loves that game. I got it at a goodwill a few days ago for $2. Can't beat that mission where you first meet the alien trader ship thing

[Anonymous No.824707]

>>824549
ioquake3 does the Quake3 install automatically so you don't have to do all that.

[Anonymous No.824736]

>>823413
in no particular order, retail quality goldsrc mods:
Zombie Panic!
Brainbread
The Wastes
Natural Selection
Snow War
The Battlegrounds
Sven Co-op
Resident Evil: Cold Blood
Jaykin Bacon Source
The Specialists
Vampire Slayer
Firearms
The Ship
Pirates, Vikings, Knights
Farmer's Adventure
Wanted!
They Hunger

And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head

[Anonymous No.824779]

>>824736
People still do HL1 mods.

[Anonymous No.824784]

>>820512
I remember this, and that secret underground hideout theme discs before that had. I used to love the elevator.

[Anonymous No.824790]

>>824779
only Natural Selection and Sven still have a solid playerbase, and NS is very nearly dead.

Trust me, I used to run a group dedicated to organizing pub games for goldsrc/source mods

[Anonymous No.825274]

>>824736
Pretty much all of those sucked. So, I have idea what the fuck your using the word quality for. I suppose your standard of quality is, 'if it has zombies I suck it's dick.'

[Anonymous No.825309]

anyone else play this gem?

[Anonymous No.825319]

>>825274
i see your problem.
you don't like things that are good.
you probably belong in /co/ or /a/.

[Anonymous No.825326]

>>825319
I see your problem.
you don't like things that are good.
you probably belong in /v/ or /vg/.
Enjoy your xbone retard.

[Anonymous No.825335]

>>825274
>I don't like it so it sucks
>ad hominem
>it's dick
>it's
kthxbai

[Anonymous No.825342]

>>825335
>it sucks therefore I must hate it
>strawman
>kthxbai
Get back to /v/ you fucking troll.

[Anonymous No.825642]

>>825309
I think I played it. I wonder what happened to all my old games.

[Anonymous No.825724]

>>820912
>I finally build my own PC for dedicated PC gaming this past January
>Intention was to move away from consoles since they're pretty much just underpowered PCs now
>All I play are emulated platformers
>Don't have time to put down any time in newer games
>Don't have time to put down time for classic RPGs
>$700 NES used for one or two quick levels for 30 minutes or so at night

[Anonymous No.826428]

>>818687
Cheaper.

[Anonymous No.826429]

>>825724
>$700 NES
What

[Anonymous No.826446]

>>826429
He means he spent $700 on an emulation box (his computer)

[Anonymous No.826521]

My PC gaming days were (and still are) all about emulation. PC games in my eyes were generally Doom clones, point and click, whatever was in my games folder and OOH WOW 3D ENJOY IT but that last one applied to every gaming system. But speaking of the games folder, i did play the fuck out of Chip's Challenge

[Anonymous No.826526]

>>822150
I called that number just now. Not in service as usual. Also should point out i love doing that, just to see if some other company obtained that number just for shits and giggles

[Anonymous No.826554]

>still waiting for a decent fast paced shooter

Tribes Assend filled the void for a 6 months..but I've been waiting so long..

[Anonymous No.826565]

>>826554
Rise of the triad.

[Anonymous No.827437]

I'd say that there was variety during the 90s, but there weren't any "focused" markets back then as far as games were concerned.
Boxed PC stuff in the 90s usually were whatever sold well during the 80s (Strategy and then RTS, PnC, simulations and other stuff that traditionally didn't move the screen much). FPSs started out completely by snail mail and digital transfers. A few other common genres you'd encounter were console ports and FMVs. Back when having a CD-ROM meant you had a "multimedia PC", the FMVs were pack-ins with the computer you bought. Windows was nearly entirely a domain of solitaires and puzzles, educational junk, shockwave games and whatever until FPSs started to be Windows-based late in the decade.

During the mid-90s, you had to manually select your MIDI and wavetable drivers. You also sometimes selected your mouse driver. README.??? files sometimes came with a README.EXE or README.COM. You remembered things like "VESA", "DOS extender" and "protected mode" because they flashed up on the screen before the game switched graphics modes. Networked gaming meant IPX/SPX.

The FPS completely rocked the mainstream for no less reason than because of politicians Streisanding the whole thing IMHO. The news covered Doom among the other ones for weeks, bringing it all the publicity it would ever need. After that a lot of things were FPSs for a while even when it didn't make any sense. Excel 95 had a FPS for an easter egg. Ah yes, during this decade easter eggs in productivity software were impressive. Near the end of the 90s you can add NES emulators. NESticle was the emulator everybody used, it had testicles and a severed hand for a cursor. Instead of MMOs you had MUDs, MOOs and MUCKs, it was very niche stuff though and were probably full of nothing but Furries.

Nobody actually knew what were the good games at the time so everyone played the same 3 games the whole decade, whichever games those were.

[Anonymous No.827458]

>>818801
>Team 17
Well you have to thank them for giving the source code of WA/WWP to Deadcode and Cybershadow.
Thanks to that the game is still alive as ever and I can't complain.

>>819058
HL1 was the comfiest game when it comes to mods, there were so many and a lot of them so good and original. All those nights expended on testing mods, fuck nostalgia is kicking in.
For some reason the games made on that engine always felt good and clear, I don't know why maybe it's just me.

[Anonymous No.827463]

>>818718
you missed having games your freinds never heard of.
And you missed the good ol' counterstrike days.

[Anonymous No.827472]

>>818892
Laura Crotch!

[Anonymous No.827474]

>>825309
That game was special. I loved it. I remember touching the checkpoints above that coliseum building by driving against the wall because of how buggy they were placed.

[Anonymous No.827586]

All I played on PC in the 90s was Command & Conquer, then later Rollercoaster Tycoon.. Spent the rest of my time on SNES/N64/PS1

I missed Quake 3, but now I play Quake Live. Just wish the genre would come back and people would stop trying to make FPS games for the xbox and playstation. It doesn't work

[Anonymous No.827602]

>>827458
Does anyone play Earth Special Forces anymore?

[Anonymous No.827605]

>>827586
>All I played on PC in the 90s was Command & Conquer, then later Rollercoaster Tycoon.. Spent the rest of my time on SNES/N64/PS1
This but i played Unreal, Theme Hospital and Age of Empires alot too

[Anonymous No.827619]

[Anonymous No.827703]

>>827619
have a slightly newer version

[Anonymous No.827713]

I gamed primarily on consoles into the N64/PS era.

For me the highlight of PC gaming was mid-late nineties into the early 2000's. So many great titles and definitely an era where I put an unhealthy amount of time into gaming.

Now that I am a bit older I play on every platform, but I manage to play even less.

[Anonymous No.827718]

>>827703
half of the games with the bigger image havent been relevant in any form

[Anonymous No.827753]

>>827718
agreed, but I didn't make it

[Anonymous No.827772]

It was good, my bro and I would switch back between PC, SNES, N64 and PS1 all throughout the decade.

It was especially fun to play Hexen, Quake on pc while my bro was playing them on the N64.

[Anonymous No.827802]

>>818687
>How was it back then?
Free map/mission packs (DLC), shareware, tons of innovation through modding communities, demos for every game, etc. It was a great time for me to be a PC gamer, especially being a whore for FPS games.

93-99 were the best years of gaming history in my opinion (really to 04, but not /vr/ related). But it's hard for me to remove my nostalgia goggles, so my opinion on it is pretty biased.

[Anonymous No.827808]

>>818731
I feel old..that sound, oh man that sound.

[Anonymous No.827810]

>>827808

I just muted it in the modem options. You can also change the tone of it with some modems to sound like a low pitched thundering type of noise.

Why people left it on that obnoxious default noise I will never know.

[Anonymous No.827817]

>>827810
Ignorance I assume. That's my excuse at least; I didn't know it could be changed back then.

[Anonymous No.827819]

This is it. This is all you need to play to know PC gaming in the 90's gaming because it is not only a classic, but the last of a genre. The last good game from a major studio in the genre while also being the definitive and essentially ultimate game from said genre.

You're welcome.

[Anonymous No.827824]

>>827819
I've been a PC gamer since the late 80's and still haven't gotten around to this game.

[Anonymous No.827835]

>>820461
Yes. Hard to belive it looks like it is now.

[Anonymous No.827838]

>>827824
That's because it sold about as well as a bag of shit for some reason. Probably because it didn't seem feasible to have a 3D adventure game and it also was a bit silly to play a game with a linear path when you could blow the fuck out of people in S:T.

[Anonymous No.827847]

>>818856

[Anonymous No.827857]

>>826526
I called the old Nintendo help hotline from the game Who Framed Rodger Rabbit (NES)

Its now a sex hotline, no joke

[Anonymous No.827860]

>>827857

Does Jessica answer?

[Anonymous No.827861]

>>827810
I know, but i left it on for some reason, i dont know why

[Anonymous No.827865]

>>827860
Close, let me look it up and i will give it to you

[Anonymous No.827869]

>>827865
8002323324

i think you add the 1- in the beggining, im not sure

[Anonymous No.827906]

>>818801
1996 my father gave me one of the best presents in my live
his old 133mhz pc with a "turbo" button (overclocking it to 166mhz)!
oh my god, my face melted when i discovered this beauty in my room...(thats why i'm so fuckin ugly today)
but now i was able to play games without asking him "am i allowed to play on your pc?"
all this games...
all this nights...
all this time...
all this actual FUN i had while playing...

[Anonymous No.827924]

>>818687

It was shitty menus and installation wizards with random screens of the game (a tower in AoE instead of a king or a knight or something like that)

[Anonymous No.827943]

>>827703
What's that blue 'g' in 2006?

[Anonymous No.827951]

>>827869
... VR should do a running gag for this, we should all keep tabs on operating help line numbers and then phone them up and, regardless of what they are now, start demanding hints regarding the game.

[Anonymous No.828006]

>>827943

Garry's Mod, a sandbox game that uses the source engine and various props imported from Valve games to let you build stuff and mess around with physics

[Anonymous No.828054]

>>828006
I know Garry's mod, but the logo wasn't familiar. Thanks though.

[Anonymous No.828093]

Quicksaves, lots of quicksaves. Cheats.

And LAN parties.

[Anonymous No.829218]

>>818731
You also got to hear this ever day

"GET OFF THE INTERNET. I'M EXPECTING AN IMPORTANT PHONE CALL."

[Anonymous No.829664]

>No mention of all those 90s flight sims
>Flight Unlimited 2
>Janes USAF
>MSFS 95 and 98
>Janes F15
>Janes ATF, USNF
>Pro Pilot
>Fly!
>X-plane 5

And after all that I still never bothered getting a pilots licence.

[Anonymous No.829976]

Thank you so much guys! This thread has been a well walked trip down memory lane. I so miss the early days of pc gaming and sometimes wish for those glory days to return.

[Anonymous No.830020]

Software advanced faster than the hardware, especially during the early 90's where the.Really annoying.

There was no obnoxious hivemind mentality among PC gamers, like we have it today with the retarded "master race" folks.The gamers had an open eye to every genre unlike these days where a person will only play a handful of genres.While adventure games reached their height and death, pretty much every genre was alive.

The PC actually offered a unique experience compared to consoles unlike these days where gaming in general is homogenized

Huge amounts of novelty.

LAN parties every weekend, Tekken 3 during breaks.

[Anonymous No.830035]

>PC gaming was still largely a neckbeard thing
>the target audience were dudes who looked like Comic Book Guy and had a poster of Captain Kirk in their bedroom
>the first half of the decade was dominated by DOS games running in VGA 320x200 mode
>the second half by Windows 95 games running in 640x480
>sound cards and CD-ROMs were new and exciting
>Windows 3.1 had a lot of games, but they usually weren't that good
>often kiddie eduware or glorified multimedia demos like Myst
>crappy AVI/Quicktime movies and WAV sfx were a hallmark of Windows games
>setting up DOS games was a bitch
>spend hours adjusting CONFIG.SYS
>Doom/Quake revolutionized gaming (if you're into FPS, which I'm not)

[Anonymous No.830081]

>>827819
Retarded hyperbole. Grim Fandango is a funny and well-written game, but a sub-par adventure game nevertheless. Monkey 2 was the high point, and furthermore this one definitely wasn't the "last of a genre" for fuck's sake.

[Anonymous No.830086]

>>829976
>90s
>early days of PC gaming
You're 10-15 years off

[Anonymous No.830203]

You missed the best flight simulator games ever created

[Anonymous No.830248]

>>830203
Dude, fuck yeah! Used to play that on a 133MHz Pentium with 16MB's of RAM and a 1.5GB HDD.

[Anonymous No.830354]

>>830081
Not true. And it was the last of a genre. Money Island 2 was really good, up there. I really like Full Throttle, too. That being said, after Grim Fandango's extremely disappointing sales, LucasArts only made one more game after that it was nowhere near the level of quality that the other games they had made has.

Monkey Island 4 was a travesty.

[Anonymous No.830401]

the best thing is that pc games used to experiment very much
they weren't restricted to mostly platformers

pc gaming in those days was to games what progressive rock is to music

[Anonymous No.832160]

>>819557
that game...

pretty much my childhood right there, and I wasn't even any good at it back then

[Anonymous No.832194]

>>820538

This. I can't think of any 07+ PC games that consumed me as much as the AOE or CS series. AOE3 was shit though.

[Anonymous No.832205]

>>824736
Just wanna add:
The Opera
Science and Industry

>not retail quality, totally fucked up and awesome
Rocket Crowbar

[Anonymous No.832231]

>>819107
>Wanted

I like you.

[Anonymous No.832248]

why has no one mentioned this?

[Anonymous No.832415]

I've been gaming since C64 and late '90s and early '00s are the high point of gaming for me. The '90s proper are great, but this period is fantastic. Off the top of my head:

Grim Fandango
Sacrifice
NOLF 1/2
Half Life
System Shock 2
Startopia
Dungeon Keeper 1/2
Planescape: Torment
Fallout 1/2
Quake 3
Rainbow Six
SWAT 3
Worms Armageddon

And many more.

This period retained the innovative spirit of the '90s and also refined old formulas to perfection. All the technology pouring out of everywhere also allowed for things previously impossible. These are the last moments before big companies got a proper grip of what their target audience is and how to cater to them. Once games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Halo got popular, it was all downhill from there on. CoD/MoH popularized the whack-a-mole cinematic shooter, Halo popularized the gamepad shooter. Then Doom 3 and HL2 come along and introduce "photo-realism", making a lot of jaws drop, including people who otherwise never cared about video games. Combine all that with the rapid popularization of the internet and the fact that even your little sister wanted a PC and you quickly realize how the "gamer" has quickly transformed from a niche group and into your everyday normal person.

[Anonymous No.833204]

>>819723
>I think especially in the early nineties class distinction was still much much more important in gaming than it is now. PC gaming was really exclusive actually, I mean here in Europe in 1990 most people didn't even own a PC.
I grew up in the countryside in Finland, and computers were not uncommon around 1990. My older brother had a C64, his friends had C64s, a friend of mine had a C64, our school had a PC, another friend had a PC, and me and yet another friend had Amiga 500s later on. I also got a hand-me-down IBM 286 from a relative (which was mostly useless though).

>>820365
>Multiplayer-only games were still sort of an experiment back then.
TFC was a HL mod, though. The original TF for Quake was likewise multiplayer only.

[Anonymous No.833212]

>>832415
>Grim Fandango
>NOLF 1/2
>Half-Life
YES, FUCKING YES.

[Anonymous No.833229]

>>832205
>The Opera
>Science and Industry
Haven't heard those names in a long time. I remember playing Opera, Specialists and Action HL, but they've somewhat blurred together since then, and I can't clearly remember which was which.

Science and Industry was pretty cool, from what I remember.

Frontline Force is another forgotten mod.

[Anonymous No.833284]

>>830035
>PC gaming was still largely a neckbeard thing
>the target audience were dudes who looked like Comic Book Guy and had a poster of Captain Kirk in their bedroom
Yeah. I don't know how it was elsewhere, but Finnish computer magazines in the 80s and 90s were seriously nerdy (when nerds still existed), and had sections and articles about pen and paper role-playing, scifi, comic books, and whatever the hell they felt like talking about. Our foremost gaming magazine didn't even cover consoles (not like there was anything wrong with them, but video games weren't yet totally homogenized, and it was ok to focus on just computer games).

The Internet had a free-wheeling hobbyist feel to it as well.

[Anonymous No.833643]

>>819723
>>819760

Here in Serbia, PC gaming was the thing. There were a few NES's and Sega's'ss's around, but for the majority, it was PC. Parents were unwilling to spend on gaming, so those that did game did it on PCs of their parents. The gaming press was also strictly PC oriented.

Another factor is that console gaming was looked down upon as somewhat juvenile. Kids were uninterested in anthro animals and Italian plumbers and preferred Sega for Mortal Kombat. Can't say that I ever considered 3mature5u games particularly not-juvenile, but I'm glad the whole Nintendo thing never took off here because I find all of those games incredibly annoying, from Zelda to Sonic. The generic childish nintendo vibe they got going on is really alien to me and I'm glad my childhood was one of exposure to a plethora of varied aesthetics instead.

Gaming really exploded with Playstation and the rise of Playstation clubs. When I say "club" I actually mean pay2play places, not enthusiast parties. Pro Evolution Soccer was hugely popular and pretty much the whole point of those places. People also played Twisted Metal, Need for Speed and whatnot, but PES was the thing. It remained the thing until Counter Strike that single-handedly inspired hundreds of LAN clubs into existence. That's when gaming finally really became the thing for a normalfag. Warcraft 3 was the next big thing and by the time DOTA became popular, it pushed even CS to the side.

So there you have it. Consoles had little fertile ground to grow. Kind of ironic given how expensive PCs are in comparison.

[Anonymous No.834474]

>>833643
you learn something new every day

[Anonymous No.834627]

>>833229
>Opera, Specialists and Action HL
i remember Opera being really buggy and shitty compared to the other two. I think AHL probably came first. I remember in the map with the gas station there was an easter egg hidden deep below one of the buildings.
Also, my dad was a member of the AHL forums in its early days. His likeness was even made into a player model in one of the early versions of the mod before it got taken off in one of the public releases. I remember coming upon AHL burned onto a CD, a while back but idk where it is now. Maybe his playermodel is on there.

[Anonymous No.834687]

Can somebody tell me why Half Life 1 was that special? There were full 3D shooters before that and you also didn't have the physics weapons which made 2 so popular.

[Anonymous No.834794]

>>834687
Because it had an awesome modding community and platform.

[Anonymous No.834924]

>>834687
story integrated into the game. great map design. great human AI. First game of a dev team. Anti hero protagonist was new in a shooter.

[Anonymous No.834949]

>>834794
When HL came out it was already seen as something special and innovative. Long before the first mods were made.

[Anonymous No.835029]

>>834687
Game logic DLLs. This allowed for mods so fucking great that anything before it looked just like simple skin changes and weapon stats modifications.

[Anonymous No.835060]

>>834687

Several reasons. Primarily innovation. Yeah, Half Life didn't do anything *literally* new, but it did these things so well and above the competition that it might as well be considered a whole new league:

- Animation. Fantastic character animation, tons of well animated scripted events, this was the first real cinematic shooter. It's hard to explain what a mindfuck this game was when it came out.

- Gritty, realistic vibe. Few games managed to nail this so well. Neutral color palette, loud and raw audio, minimal UI, plausible storyline unbroken by cutscenes -- the game just felt very realistic. In a way, even more than games like Rainbow Six that went out of their way to be realistic. It's not just the looks, it's the how the engine handled collision detection. It's difficult to explain, it just felt incredibly good.

- AI and gameplay. Half Life took the best of Quake and combined it with a new peekaboo "realistic" hitscan shooter vibe. You had your interestic alien enemies who employed unique moves and strategies and then you had your marines whose AI was something completely mindblowing. It was incredibly simple once you open the editor and figure out how it works, but they managed to incorporate that simplicity to incredibly impressive results. Half Life 2, in comparison, was a huge disappointment in terms of gameplay. Vast majority of enemies were lethargic, slow hitscan ragdolls -- and no matter how smart they are under the hood, they were simply too slow to present much of a challenge. Doesn't help that Combine is 90% of the things you kill throughout the game. Goodbye the gritty survival vibe of the original, enter a gimmicky open sky theme park. I did like EP2 though.

It's very much a had-to-have-been-there thing. You could say the same about HL2, but HL2 bores me to tears today while HL1 is still amazing. Black Mesa: Source managed to recreate the appeal of the original pretty damn well.

[Anonymous No.835302]

>>834949

I genuinely enjoyed the vanilla Half-Life deathmatch. I never got into Counter Strike.

[Anonymous No.835329]

>>830086

Give him a break. The 90s were certainly a golden age where several genres hit their pinnacles, most notably adventure gaming of course. I remember being so blown away by Monkey Island 3's graphics.

[Anonymous No.835338]

>>835329

Too bad about the end.

And I wish the two remakes look better. They wanted to stick close to the originals so as to not upset any puzzles, but eh, didn't turn out looking that good.

At least we got voices though. That's enough for me.

[Anonymous No.835350]

>>835338

Yeah... MI2 probably fared better out of the two special editions but that's mostly because it was a better game to begin with. I had forgotten just how frustrating and monotonous figuring out all of the insult sword fighting responses is in the original.

[Anonymous No.835692]

>>830035
>VGA 320x200
>320x200
>VGA
VGA is 640x480

[Anonymous No.835724]

>>835692

Stop posting.

[Anonymous No.835735]

>>835724
stop being wrong

[Anonymous No.835760]

>>835692
VGA's three main modes are 320x200x256, 640x480x16, and 640x480x256

[Anonymous No.835834]

>>833643
>I'm glad the whole Nintendo thing never took off here because I find all of those games incredibly annoying, from Zelda to Sonic. The generic childish nintendo vibe they got going on is really alien to me and I'm glad my childhood was one of exposure to a plethora of varied aesthetics instead.
It's 2013, and you still think NES and SNES games were nothing but Mario and Zelda? Have you ever heard of Metroid? Do you know what third party games are?

>>835029
Quake had a mod where you controlled tanks and helicopters, a sidescroller mod, an open world RPG mod, and sophisticated bots. It also had Team Fortress, of course.

It's Quake where modding really took off, and it's Doom that looked primitive by comparison.

>>835060
>This was the first real cinematic shooter. It's hard to explain what a mindfuck this game was when it came out.
Yes, though I think in hindsight it had little more than novelty value. It's really boring to play now, because the same formula has been done better by so many other games.

[Anonymous No.836091]

>>835029
>Game logic DLLs.
Quake 2 preceeded it in that. It's a shame no one ever took advantage of Quake 2's ability to link servers. I recall they contemplated discussed it for dynamically linking them and I think they had code partially available for it but never went through with it.
Though you could hack up your mod to do that through the DLL and you could integrate rudimentary web browsers or http sources if you wanted. Potentially, you could have had large maps with a bunch of servers where people ran around and jumped through various server worlds and shit but no one really does that. It'd be interesting to see some sort of p2p player data/transfer portals in a gigantic web of connected servers with different shit going on and perhaps semi-persistant stats that follow you around for sessions and stored locally.
I think there was 'interest' in doing more VR based ideas that Carmack is kind of getting re-vitalized for 3D displays and partial motion control. Obviously it's for shits and giggles because no one really needs that kind of shit, it's not really 'practical.' Once upon a time people might have suggested it as a 'business application' kind of thing but that's what webcams and voip are for and they do what they're meant to do pretty much perfectly. There's few niche markets that need your physical being there.

[Anonymous No.836668]

>>818867
Oddly enough I was never turned on to lLaura and merely found the serialization of her to be amusing. I did try to look for nude pic of her just for the heck of it

>>818892
That is so inaccurate! She needs a bigger bush and armpit hair.

>>821072
There never was a nude code, it was fake.