Paean to PC Gaming
Obsoletion alert: These pages were written in early 2002 and have no relevance to today. They're here for posterity.
I've been wanting to put down (at least in virtual form) my thoughts and remembrances on computer gaming for a long time now. I've been at it for over two decades now, ever since the Intellivision was released. I still remember the game Microsurgeon that was released for that platform. You had to stop infections from taking hold on a person by using a variety of items. Naturally, as you progressed, the infections got harder and faster. Totally weird and totally addictive.
The next platform I happened upon was the Atari 2600. It, from memory, didn't have a lot of what you would call thought-provoking games. It had a lot of side-scrolling actioners like Pitfall. Addictive stuff, once again. A search using Google or another search engine will surely bring up a legion of sites dedicated to these hoary old consoles. Which brings me to the next point. That's precisely what the Intellivision and the Atari 2600 were; consoles. They plugged into a TV's antenna port, or used a balun connector. They didn't use a stand-alone monitor, nor did they have mice or any other type of controller apart from a gamepad or joystick. From these two consoles I graduated to the joy and wonder of the Commodore 64.
It could be argued that the Commodore 64 (referred to as the C64 from now on) was a console as well. Its primary connection method was to a television, but it could be programmed, had a keyboard, had removable and hard storage. It was a computer. As a gaming platform, it had few peers. Some of the best games ever made came out for the C64; the SSI Gold Box series such as Hillsfar or Curse of the Azure Bonds, or my personal favorite; Secret of the Silver Blades. Then there was Combat School.
No game I've ever played asked you to abuse a joystick as much as this game did. In fact, a joystick's strength was measured using this game. Defender of the Crown was the first strategy game I played. An excellent primer on how to conquer England county by county. Last Ninja was a landmark game for the C64; an action-puzzler pitting you against the minions of a warlord samurai. Once again, Google or the like can help you out in finding out a lot more about these than I'm telling here.
The C64 really got me into gaming in a major way and I can still remember painless days of playing undisputed classics like Outrun, Elite, 720, Bard's Tale 3, R-Type and Wizball. Loading games, and saving games where applicable, tested your patience. Before the 1541 series of floppy drives came out, there were only tape recorders and loading a game in this method was laborious.
Things got much better with the 1541 floppy
drives (5¼ inch, mind you). Instead of just LOAD we got LOAD
"*" ,8,1 to fire a game up. I think "$" instead of "*" was do a
directory listing, much like the Unix ls or DOS dir commands. Even
with the floppy, things weren't swift. A device called a Disk Demon
resolved that and could load most games in a few seconds. A hard
drive was an innovation that was released for Commodore computers
in general, a little while later.
One of the things lauded most often about the C64 was the gameplay with the titles. The gameplay excelled. It seemed that the developers at the time, System 3, SSI, Epyx, Ocean, et al, knew what a gamer wanted. Graphics weren't the big deal back then that they are now. In saying so, the C64 did have great graphics for its time, and great music to boot. Yet, it wasn't something that you took notice of; the gameplay was paramount and in retrospect, a game like Test Drive or Hillsfar would probably make most Pentium-era gamers laugh. I spent many a long hour solving Secret of the Silver Blades, including mapping it out on grid paper.
I can't deny it. I miss those days...I miss simple little addictions like Thing on a Spring, or fighting Brilhasti ap Tarj in Bard's Tale 3, or clearing out Kuto's Well in Pool of Radiance.
A list of key games to look out for. (Apart from those mentioned)
- Leaderboard Golf
- Parallax - check out the psychedelic opening title!
- California Games
- Summer Games
- Gauntlet - Arcade port
- Shinobi - Arcade Port