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Old Man River Raid [Geezer Gamers] (updated OP)
bloodatonement
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Registered User regular
Grab your joysticks, modems, and your ega monitors, we're installing 20 floppies for the geezer gamer thread. We knew our sound cards settings, edited our config.sys and autoexec.bat to make boot discs to crank ever last bit of power out of our rigs so they could play our games and we played them using what ever convoluted key configuration the game devs hard coded into the game.
If you were gaming prior to 2000, this is your place to kick back and reminisce about the early days of gaming.
These were our weapons.
These were our battles
This was the war on piracy
Looking for a place to get your retro-gaming on?
Check out the Good Old Games thread
Still have your game discs laying around?
Fire 'em up in DOSBox
List of DOSBox frontends
And for you Atari 2600 kids like me: Atari Flashback
details on the different versions
Flashback2 (not +) is, IMHO, the best
If you were gaming prior to 2000, this is your place to kick back and reminisce about the early days of gaming.
These were our weapons.
These were our battles
This was the war on piracy
Looking for a place to get your retro-gaming on?
Check out the Good Old Games thread
Still have your game discs laying around?
Fire 'em up in DOSBox
List of DOSBox frontends
And for you Atari 2600 kids like me: Atari Flashback
details on the different versions
Flashback2 (not +) is, IMHO, the best
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Battledrome. First game I ever played via the "internet"; it was actually just me and my friend trying up the phone line. And the connection was so awful we couldn't even do more than fly the little remote camera probes around and ram each other.
But the game was cool as hell anyway. Hours and hours spent on putting together the right weapons and stuff. Man, those were the days. Mechwarrior 2, Mechwarrior expansion packs, Earthsiege, and just mech games in general. It was like crack for little kids... provided they had the patience to figure out how the hell to get things working and make boot disks and fix autoexec.bat a game screwed something up.
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
Electronic composer for hire.
more your speed?
Me too, the CH Flight stick.
Steam ID: Good Life
Me too, but in black.
The game that I have the most fond memories of from childhood are Alleycat, Police Quest, Starflight and Heroes Quest (IE. Quest for Glory). I remember the glory of my IBM:XT with thrilling 4 color CGA graphics.
Commodore 64 version of course. With the big clacky keyboard and the awesome multicart adapter and such to make sure it took up the entire table. Not just most of it.
Although it was because my Dad bought the Atari and the Commodore for low, low prices some years after they came out. Still, I have fond memories of Chopper Attack, Galaxian, and not being able to figure out Pitfall at all.
Amstrad CPC464 with green screen, damn I loved that thing
oh and
Spaaaaaaaceship War-lock
Much better than the Olympic Games and California Raisins games we played on actual honest-to-goodness floppy disks. Though SpaceWar was pretty great.
You know, moving pictures and colors, all that jazz. This thread is like a virtual museum to me!
I also had Atari 2600 and Intellivision. My very first console though, was this beauty;
It isn't our fault you started on such inferior footing. Be older.
Re: Atari 2600: I still have one of the old wood veneer ones, that came in the suitcase like carrying case. It's in storage with my grandparents, but last I checked it still worked and everything. Good times.
I don't know how to extract the text, otherwise I would just post that.
The funny thing is in the OP where it says if you've been gaming since 2000 this is the place for you.
In 2000 I was in the military and had been gaming for well over half my life at that point.
I think I played my first video game in 1987. Maybe 88. And even that is well after some started gaming.
I mean, I'll grant that playing Tooth Invaders on the Commodore 64, by today's standards (shit, probably even by standards of back then) could hardly even be defined as gaming, but it was a hell of a lot more fun that losing to my mom in every board game every yet again.
Anyway.
Games.
The single most consistent and reliable feature in my life of 31 years. That's not intended to sound depressing. It's nice that no matter what is going on in life, good and bad, I know I can always push a button to escape for a bit.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Back when the console wars were televised:
And I know this was for the 2600 (though I did play 2600 games on the 5200), but fuck it. Great commercial is great.
2000? Floppies?
Please. I started gaming when dad brought home a Pong unit, then went on to Space Invaders in the arcades, the Atari VCS, IntelliVision, Vectrex, etc. The C64 was my first computer (games on casette tapes!) and eventually I ended up on the PC.
This is the joystick I remember.
too new?
Fuck, I used to play that game all the time at my aunt's house. She only had like 4 or 6 other games and this one was one of my favorites.
Shit yes, TAC-2 represent! I was actually going to post that the second I saw this thread.
EDIT: I fail at image linking. Sigh. This new-fangled internets...
Oh, and one of the more depressing memories i have (in retrospect) is playing the Tie Fighter demo, on a laptop, using a trackball. It actually went surprisingly well, but...only relatively.
I can't find my CH Flightstick, but I turned up my Sidewinder 3d Pro this morning. Why don't they *make* these games any more?
Goodreads
SF&F Reviews blog
My buddy and I spent countless hours on this game. We actually played it co-op style and had player 2 try and fight the ninja as well to help out Bruce. Man, so many good times with that game.
Steam Profile: miserium
Diablo 3 profile: miserium
PA Rocksmith League
Get off my lawn, you little brats.
I have never felt older in my life than the day about ten years ago when I was in a local computer shop and overheard two teenagers rooting about in a bin of old 8-bit cassette tapes:
A: "What are these?"
B: "They used to put programs on tapes."
A: "How'd they do that, then?"
EVERYBODY WANTS TO SIT IN THE BIG CHAIR, MEG!
Then I moved on to PCs and warcraft/warcraft 2, and the original command and conquer, which obviously was the greatest thing ever.
Anyone else spend too many hours dodging (and failing to dodge) the ground?
Sopwith was another favourite of mine.
Steam
you kids that had the tubes to turn too when you got stuck dont know how good you had it.... seriously never beat any of these games, but they were in the bargin bin frequently enough my dad got me 2 of them....
/so much rage
And if you didn't play the shit out of Oregon Trail on the school's Apple ]['s at recess, you may be in the wrong thread. ;P (I kid)
Played it on the mainframe at my mother's workplace when she let me visit. So many good times.
Ugh yes. Spent ages in Flightmare. The original release of Sid Meier's Pirates! as well.
There's one old old old-ass game that I can never remember the name of, even with extensive Mobygames-ing. It was a top-down ASCII deal, but it wasn't a Roguelike. You had to run around this huge castle as one of those little
I just can't remember the name of it. I want to say it had a name similar to The Crimson Crown, but that's not it.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Were you thinking of ZZT? ASCII heavy, but not sure it's what you're thinking of. It was another one that I spent hours on (and learned my basic object oriented stuff from!).
Steam
Also, in the late 80s, we finally got a computer. It wasn't a PC, though! It was one of these:
Underneath it sat a massive external hard drive. Capacity: 60 megabytes!
I loved this thing, especially compared to my friends' PCs. Sure, it was only black and white, but the sound was so much better than anything my friends had. My favorite games on the Mac were Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle:
I used my Mac throughout high school to type up school papers and stuff like that. I didn't get a PC until 1995, which was near the end of my senior year. It came with a 2400 baud modem, but we quickly upgraded to a 14.4. I used to call local BBSes on that thing.
Actually, that reminds me of my first experience with a modem, which was before I even got the Atari 2600. My dad worked for Bell Laboratories and I remember him occasionally bringing home something he called "the terminal" which looked like a fancy typewriter. All input and output was printed on sheets of paper. It had an analog modem, so he would pick up the phone, dial a number, and place the receiver itself onto the modem's pads. He taught me a few commands to type onto that thing, mainly for games. I remember that hangman was one of them. I wasted a lot of paper on that thing! I could also type the word "maze" and it would print a random maze that I could try to solve later.
My Backloggery
Nope, not Castle Wolfenstein. It was pure ANSI (and not ASCII like I originally thought). Wasn't ZZT either, since what I was thinking of was in black and white. But it used the same kind of ANSI characters that ZZT did. Googling for ANSI DOS games is annoying as shit too, since everything is for ANSI Dude, which is most certainly not the game I'm thinking of.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I started gaming in like '83/84 with an Atari 2600 (thus the River Raid reference in the thread title). I said prior to 2000 just to include as many folks as possible and because it's a fairly good transition point between older 2D or boxy 3D games with dial-up connections and newer slicker 3d games broadband connections.
Also, I updated the OP to include more 80s gaming.
Steam ID: Good Life