Monday, April 16, 2018

Dinosaur Gamer and Proud

I saw another of those memes today ... and you could say it's kinda triggered me if I allow myself to use that phrase.

(It's overused as a phrase, people use it like I've done there to say it has provoked a vigorous reaction when triggered should really be "It brings a traumatic incident back to reality for me". Nothing in games is traumatic.)

I won't post the meme because it uses (a rather mild but anyway) swear word and it's one of those all bluster, no justification thing anyway but here goes. What does it say ? What question is it asking ? Do you recognise yourself in the type of gamer under :

New School : Fortnite, PUBG, Clash of Clans, Far Cry 5, Overwatch
(Do you even know what they are ! I do and I have no intention of playing any of them - muahaha)

Old School : Modern Warfare 2 (call it a COD please, it's a COD), League of Legends, Angry Birds, Black Ops 2, Bioshock Infinite.
Same again, I have no intention of playing any of those again except for maybe going into Bioshock Infinite. I actually own that one (it was a gift). For the others, LoL is far too toxic and it plus MW2 and BO2 are both sub par shooters that depend more on licence than quality.

Ancient Gamer : Halo 3, Gears of War, COD4, Fallout 3, Portal.
I avoided Halo (because it seemed like a cheap clone of most sci fi shooters), I played the first Call of Duty. And Fallout 1 and 2. I own Portal but have never played it (it came with the Half Life 2 Orange Box).

Nope. My gaming dates back far longer than these. I am ...
Dinosaur Gamer and Proud.

(Picture is courtesy of a DeviantArt artist, here is a link to their Deviantart site. I thought that pic was amazing.)

Where other gamers play things like Far Cry 5 now, I grew up on Doom. And Doom 2. And Quake. And yes, we had the odd deathmatch of Doom over the house LAN while I was a student. Running Novell Netware ... IN DOS ! With the whole thing of managing the memory through the Config.Sys and Autoexec.bat.

Mind you, those were understandable, unlike the extreme vaguaries of Windows 10 these days. Software as a Service doesn't work particularly well. Just give me a stable foundation, yes make it secure ... but don't change the fundamentals of device management on a whim because you then just break the applications that run on top of that.

Yes. While the racing people play games like Burnout, NFS Payback, F1 2025, Dirty Rallyer, Project Cars, Gran Turismo 16v or the others, I cut my teeth on Need For Speed Hot Pursuit. The first one in 1998. With a joystick as a controller. And then there was a quick look at the precursor to the F1 games, the original Geoff Crammond's Microprose Grand Prix. And ... as further evidence of being a Dinosaur Fossil, I cut my teeth on Revs. This was on the BBC micro. OFF TAPE !

Here is some gameplay footage of Revs. GLORIOUS ISN'T IT !
Quite.

I can't think of shooter games on the BBC. The first I was really aware of was Wolfenstein 3D on the PC. I skipped that one for Doom. There is such a thing as too much nostalgia, some of those early games were junk.

Talking of junk, I played Football Manager .... when it was first Football Manager ! This was on the BBC again. Sports Interactive later came out with Championship Manager which was excellent in its 1993 and CM2 versions. CM3 was garbage and it wasn't playable again for years. Probably not until it turned into Football Manager again after licence issues.

There's another thing. Dinosaur gamers didn't have patch support. A game either worked properly on day one ... or it was buggy as hell, people found out and it joined the ET game in landfill. I think I was around when ET came out, it was definitely a film that I saw with my dad and brother. That comment needs a pic.
Miss 'em. Love 'em.

When it comes to flight simulators, I need to look at these again. There's something to coaxing an aircraft through the sky and OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO CRASH LAND that you don't get in a space game. Well, unless it's Elite Dangerous and a high gravity planetary landing and then it's the opening scenes to the Serenity movie again.

I keep looking at X-Plane and Flight Sim and looking backwards, there was the Typhoon sim. Nice flight model, nice visuals for the time, everything else was garbage. Falcon 4 though, that was incredible. Faithful flight model and equipment modelling plus an incredible living campaign and map. Great stuff. I also enjoyed Falcon 3 and ... Fossil alert ...

More Youtube footage, this time of a game called Aviator. And apart from the monochrome wireframe graphics, modern flight sims share a lot with this one. Well. They share a heritage like we share a heritage with ameoba.
You can do it !

Where was I. Hmm. Getting distracted by my dinner which is now rapidly cooling. Oops.

I'm a big strategy gaming person too. Before Stellaris there was a cluster of other games that didn't really stick with me. Because ... there was the forerunner. And the forerunner to that. I'm talkin' about Moo. Master of Orion and Master of Orion 2. (We don't talk about the third game).
That's what I'm talking about. (Stellaris looks much better and I really should properly check out SoaSE and AI War).

I played the original Shogun Total War ! And it was a good game too, albeit with a few oddities in its logic. (Routing troops were very dangerous supermen, you didn't get in their way).

I am a veteran of Civ 1. Version 1 ! And then there is Elite, Frontier Elite 2 and now Elite Dangerous. With a side excursion into X-Beyond the Frontier too (I'm thinking about checking out their newer games too because Elite Dangerous isn't really making me want to play it more).

Elite brings me to one last one. I missed XWing but jumped into PC gaming with Tie Fighter. And then later with X Wing vs Tie Fighter, a multiplayer game well before its time. I think we were still using dial up modems then but it was one of the first and very well sorted too.

A very last one and this is hopefully an actual screenshot I'm about to find :
Vanilla WoW and proud.

Be Dinosaur. Be Proud.
I'm so proud I got the t-shirt. (And my bedroom light is very yellow apparently).

One very last thing, it's a great friend's birthday today. Here is a song :

Happy birthday to you;
Happy birthday to you;
Happy birthday fellow dinosaur;
Happy birthday to you.
And that'll be me running after the person who that song is for sees it.

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