What difficulty were you playing at? I was playing on whatever the easiest setting was and didn't find the combat specifically challenging to get into or with unreal expectations, but I know plenty of folks don't like playing on lower difficulty levels. I didn't find the terrain traversal and the combat specifically divorced from each other, though I can't think of a time that they were combined in any way. I didn't feel like one was at odds with the other, at least.
Fallen Order difficulty is weird. Jedi Knight felt way too hard for me early game, and Story was so easy it was just walking through environments.
Survivor at least adds Padawan difficulty, but still feels too easy compared to Kedi Knight. I wish they just let you adjust those sliders yourself so you could turn Parry way up but still elave enemey damage up as well. Just make it how you like it.
I mean, I was still dying on Story, and that's about the only measure I have for difficulty in that manner. Like, most of the time I was spending my healing between healing spots down to one or none, so that's one of my other measures, did the game make me use the resources I have with its combat when it's a Souls-ish game. Though Fallen Order is only superficially a Souls game. It's more like an Uncharted/Tomb Raider with light Souls mechanics sprinkled throughout.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Leveling Larcin, and getting to the point where I can win at least somewhat consistently, and every win feels amazing because you actually get to mindgame people and play all sneaky-beaky spy, but he is so fucking reliant on getting lucky and finding at least a blue keycard somewhere so you can get to the briefcase first. There is so much playing Larcin teaches you about the briefcase mechanics too that you normally don't realize because it's a high pressure time with a shitload of other things to pay attention to, and most characters want to use it to ambush people.
1.) The ping timer slows waaaaay down while you're walking or standing still.
2.) The ping timer pauses while your expertise is active.
3.) The ping timer pauses while you're scanning.
So what you can do is fill up your intel, wait until the second it pings, then use his E1 to smoke bomb and run as far as possible, start walking the second your stealth wears off, and right before it pings again, start scanning and running. With a good loadout for this, you can go most of the way across the map, and have your E1 nearly back up by the time they figure out where you've gone, as well as refill your intel as you go. People start panicking when you reappear across the map, leading them into fights with each other, and then they have to limp to chase you without healing. Or just use it to bait people together so you can smoke out when they start shooting.
I loved Fallen Order. Threw it onto the hardest difficulty (Master? Grandmaster? I don't remember) and just sailed through the game with no issues. I've also got a few thousand hours into the Souls games, which helps a bit.
I was pleasantly surprised by the puzzle focus of a lot of the game, and felt the saber combat was satisfying enough that I stuck with it. I thought the story was fun enough and really enjoyed most of the characters.
My only real quibbles with it were lack of bosses and lacking enemy variety in general, but those weren't enough to really sour me on it.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Playing through metal gear rising, half these gears and ugs are shit that should have been in fallout 4, if not the institute then the brotherhood.
Fallout nv and fallout 2 had cyberdogs, ehy didnt fallout 4.
Also, this game just reminded me that TMNT 2:Secrets of the Ooze is 32 years old.
There's all kinds of weird details that make it into the gekko units such as the legs being grown with artificial muscle, coupled with a standard UGV profile in the turret.
+1
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited May 3
God I hate refighting Ice Man for chips in Mega Man Battle Network 1.
Be still. Be still! BE STILL!
*gets paralyzed by ice spike bullshit I can never avoid in time*
Yeah, I personally felt Fallen Order was the best star Wars game in a long, long while. Solid metroid-ish game, fun Star Wars story that gets what the thing is about, and while the parry timing is kinda weird, you quickly get used to it and the game is never, like, terribly demanding or anything, on normal at least.
I'd love to get Jedi Survivor but apparently it's kind of a russian roulette on whether it works on your PC or not, so I'll wait for some patches and probably play it after I get my fill of the new Zelda.
Yeah, I personally felt Fallen Order was the best star Wars game in a long, long while. Solid metroid-ish game, fun Star Wars story that gets what the thing is about, and while the parry timing is kinda weird, you quickly get used to it and the game is never, like, terribly demanding or anything, on normal at least.
I'd love to get Jedi Survivor but apparently it's kind of a russian roulette on whether it works on your PC or not, so I'll wait for some patches and probably play it after I get my fill of the new Zelda.
It's on EA's subscription service if you want to drop $15 to check it out and see if it does work.
Playing through metal gear rising, half these gears and ugs are shit that should have been in fallout 4, if not the institute then the brotherhood.
Fallout nv and fallout 2 had cyberdogs, ehy didnt fallout 4.
Also, this game just reminded me that TMNT 2:Secrets of the Ooze is 32 years old.
If Back to the Future was released this year, Marty would go back to 1993.
At least today we can finally say:
"No Ray Tracing!? That's like a baby's toy!"
( < . . .
+7
Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
1993 wasnt even a good 90s year, it was still in that 80s hangover period; the 90s started getting going once internet and pc gaming started booming /hottake
Apparently, on a press event for Redfall, Harvey Smith straight up said that his next project is going to be a single player immersive sim. That reads to me like, yes, they were tasked with doing a "mainstream co op shooter", not pitching it themselves, and that it was probably a miserable experience
Playing through metal gear rising, half these gears and ugs are shit that should have been in fallout 4, if not the institute then the brotherhood.
Fallout nv and fallout 2 had cyberdogs, ehy didnt fallout 4.
Also, this game just reminded me that TMNT 2:Secrets of the Ooze is 32 years old.
There's all kinds of weird details that make it into the gekko units such as the legs being grown with artificial muscle, coupled with a standard UGV profile in the turret.
It's funny all the media I had seen about fighting, finally getting into the fight she isn't as fan servicsy as I thought she'd be.
1993 wasnt even a good 90s year, it was still in that 80s hangover period; the 90s started getting going once internet and pc gaming started booming /hottake
1993 was the year I got my 486 PC, and with it stuff like X-Wing, Car and Driver, Monkey Island 2, Space Hulk, and at the end of the year Doom came along. It was a pretty good year for PC games and a portent of better years to come in that regard.
1993 wasnt even a good 90s year, it was still in that 80s hangover period; the 90s started getting going once internet and pc gaming started booming /hottake
1993 was the year I got my 486 PC, and with it stuff like X-Wing, Car and Driver, Monkey Island 2, Space Hulk, and at the end of the year Doom came along. It was a pretty good year for PC games and a portent of better years to come in that regard.
Also, Master of Orion.
There really wasn't a bad year for gaming in the '90s. That decade in PC gaming started with Wing Commander and ended with Counterstrike.
All three of those games remain gold standards in their genres, that everything gets compared against.
There will definitely be a ham-fisted joke about America Online floppy disks in the movie somewhere.
+6
Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
Doom technically was released in 1993, but only nerdy tech bros downloaded it; PC gaming IMO didn't start booming until later in the decade when you had Half Life, Diablo, Starcraft, etc., which is when PC gaming went much more mainstream
Yeah as much as I want to credit Diablo and Starcraft and Warcraft II, the game I've never played, Half-Life, is probably more responsible for PC gaming becoming mainstream than anything else at that time.
Doom technically was released in 1993, but only nerdy tech bros downloaded it; PC gaming IMO didn't start booming until later in the decade when you had Half Life, Diablo, Starcraft, etc., which is when PC gaming went much more mainstream
Doom, in shareware form, was on magazine cover discs as soon as it hit which is how I first played it - I soon after got a boxed copy of the full game at a computer show I went to. That was also available mail-order IIRC. Updates for the game also showed up on cover discs, as did hundreds upon hundreds of WADs.
I didn't get online until 1999 and Doom was easily accessible without being a downloady techbro! I'll cop to the nerd part, though
I do agree that '97-'98 was more when PC gaming was getting bigger but the path laid by Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, C&C, and many others over the preceding few years was instrumental to their success.
Doom technically was released in 1993, but only nerdy tech bros downloaded it; PC gaming IMO didn't start booming until later in the decade when you had Half Life, Diablo, Starcraft, etc., which is when PC gaming went much more mainstream
King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Command Keen and lots of other games were released earlier than Doom. I'll give you that the PCs those games were played on were probably in an office somewhere rather than a home. But I played lots of PC games before Doom.
God, I learned networking because I wanted to play Duke Nukem 3D, Diablo, and Starcraft with friends and family.
I only had one other PC-owning friend I could do that with, and we'd been doing it since the Atari ST days. So we continued with our existing method and used a null-modem cable when one of us carted our PC to the other's house.*
I remember hearing stories of rather long examples of said cables being threaded out of and into windows so neighbouring people could get their game on.
* - later I'd do similarly with a PlayStation owning friend and the system link cable for that. My first foray into actually using ethernet and hubs etc. for hooking gaming machines together for some LAN gaming was the original Xbox! Weird to think now how short the timeframe was that covered all of those machines.
Doom technically was released in 1993, but only nerdy tech bros downloaded it; PC gaming IMO didn't start booming until later in the decade when you had Half Life, Diablo, Starcraft, etc., which is when PC gaming went much more mainstream
Doom, in shareware form, was on magazine cover discs as soon as it hit which is how I first played it - I soon after got a boxed copy of the full game at a computer show I went to. That was also available mail-order IIRC. Updates for the game also showed up on cover discs, as did hundreds upon hundreds of WADs.
I didn't get online until 1999 and Doom was easily accessible without being a downloady techbro! I'll cop to the nerd part, though
I do agree that '97-'98 was more when PC gaming was getting bigger but the path laid by Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, C&C, and many others over the preceding few years was instrumental to their success.
in '93 it was released online only at first in December, but yeah most people didn't even have internet then and that's what I meant by 1993 not being the boom year for PC gaming of the 90s
At midnight on December 10, 1993, after working for 30 straight hours, the development team at id uploaded the first episode of the game to the Internet, letting interested players distribute it for them. So many users were connected to the first FTP server that they planned to upload the game to, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, that even after the network administrator increased the number of connections while on the phone with Wilbur, id was unable to connect, leaving network admin no choice but to kick all other users off to allow id to successfully upload the game. When the upload finished thirty minutes later, 10,000 people attempted to download the game at once, crashing the university's network
God, I learned networking because I wanted to play Duke Nukem 3D, Diablo, and Starcraft with friends and family.
I memorized like rote how to connect two computers with a crossover cable, set up IP, netmask and gateway, and pray to the $DEITY for the connection to work.
It wasn't until much later that I learned just what the hell the numbers meant, Mason.
( < . . .
+3
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
I envy anyone who got to play Fallout 1 and 2 when they first came out.
Wouldn't slowly start to realize the wonders of western RPGs until Dragon Age Origins. I was always a console kid.
Yeah. Should also note that shareware was a big thing before the internet was around. I had wolfenstein 3d as a 10 year old kid.
But yeah PC gaming didn’t start with Doom by any means. It was one of the first games to really pierce the mainstream conciousness, but there was a ton of stuff prior. All the sierra games pretty much and most of the lucasarts games, all the single player ultimas that mattered,ultima underworld, wing commander and privateer, star control 2, wolfenstein 3d, simcity, railroad tycoon, civilization, etc.
These weren’t horribly obscure games that only the cutting edge tech nerds had, these were games you could get at walmart and that I and my friends were playing at home or sneaking into the computer lab as 10 and 11 year olds.
I think Zavian's post was pointed at when PC gaming went mainstream and not when it existed.
I mean, I was playing PC games from the ripe age of 3 years old (for reference, we're talking 1986). Oregon Trail, Chess, Star Trek Apple Trek (which was ridiculously good btw), Moon Patrol, Lemonade Stand, and then some dungeon crawler but I couldn't tell you which one. But I also wouldn't call any of those games mainstream, there were no other kids at school, until I think maybe when I was in the 8th grade, who played PC games, and by then it was Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. If it wasn't on their Playstation or N64 it didn't exist.
I think Zavian's post was pointed at when PC gaming went mainstream and not when it existed.
I mean, I was playing PC games from the ripe age of 3 years old. Oregon Trail, Chess, Star Trek (which was ridiculously good btw), Moon Patrol, Lemonade Stand, and then some dungeon crawler but I couldn't tell you which one. But I also wouldn't call any of those games mainstream, there were no other kids at school, until I think maybe when I was in the 8th grade, who played PC games, and by then it was Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. If it wasn't on their Playstation or N64 it didn't exist.
a lot of it also IMO has to do with Windows and PCs coming down in price during the 90s too in terms of PC gaming becoming more common, along with AOL and dial-up internet becoming more available
I envy anyone who got to play Fallout 1 and 2 when they first came out.
Wouldn't slowly start to realize the wonders of western RPGs until Dragon Age Origins. I was always a console kid.
I tried to play through DA:O twice. I found it so aggressively generic and bland, I didn't make it
Speaking as someone who also bounced off it multiple times, I eventually came back to it and really played the hell out of it and really enjoyed it. I wish I could remember just what flipped a switch for me that made it enjoyable. I think I just had an itch for something really dark? I dunno.
I don't know that I really recommend it now in the sea of CRPG's, plus DA2 and DA3 are probably more fun and action-y.
Doom technically was released in 1993, but only nerdy tech bros downloaded it; PC gaming IMO didn't start booming until later in the decade when you had Half Life, Diablo, Starcraft, etc., which is when PC gaming went much more mainstream
Doom, in shareware form, was on magazine cover discs as soon as it hit which is how I first played it - I soon after got a boxed copy of the full game at a computer show I went to. That was also available mail-order IIRC. Updates for the game also showed up on cover discs, as did hundreds upon hundreds of WADs.
I didn't get online until 1999 and Doom was easily accessible without being a downloady techbro! I'll cop to the nerd part, though
I do agree that '97-'98 was more when PC gaming was getting bigger but the path laid by Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, C&C, and many others over the preceding few years was instrumental to their success.
in '93 it was released online only at first in December, but yeah most people didn't even have internet then and that's what I meant by 1993 not being the boom year for PC gaming of the 90s
At midnight on December 10, 1993, after working for 30 straight hours, the development team at id uploaded the first episode of the game to the Internet, letting interested players distribute it for them. So many users were connected to the first FTP server that they planned to upload the game to, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, that even after the network administrator increased the number of connections while on the phone with Wilbur, id was unable to connect, leaving network admin no choice but to kick all other users off to allow id to successfully upload the game. When the upload finished thirty minutes later, 10,000 people attempted to download the game at once, crashing the university's network
I never claimed it was the boom year, or anything to do with internet; just that it was the year I personally moved to an "IBM-compatible" PC after about a decade or so with various other computers, and that it was a year with some good games. (Edit: and that it was a sign of even better years to come.)
I think Zavian's post was pointed at when PC gaming went mainstream and not when it existed.
I mean, I was playing PC games from the ripe age of 3 years old (for reference, we're talking 1986). Oregon Trail, Chess, Star Trek Apple Trek (which was ridiculously good btw), Moon Patrol, Lemonade Stand, and then some dungeon crawler but I couldn't tell you which one. But I also wouldn't call any of those games mainstream, there were no other kids at school, until I think maybe when I was in the 8th grade, who played PC games, and by then it was Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. If it wasn't on their Playstation or N64 it didn't exist.
I don’t know, I feel like the middle school years are just when people start playing pc games in general, that probably has more to do with kids starting to play it at those ages than the games just popping into the mainstream.
Again I came along a couple of years earlier and pretty much everyone knew what wolfenstein 3d was, and I had friends who played more arcadey flight/space sims like microproses F15 series or wing commander. Doom hit hard but it wasn’t out of nowhere.
I think Zavian's post was pointed at when PC gaming went mainstream and not when it existed.
I mean, I was playing PC games from the ripe age of 3 years old. Oregon Trail, Chess, Star Trek (which was ridiculously good btw), Moon Patrol, Lemonade Stand, and then some dungeon crawler but I couldn't tell you which one. But I also wouldn't call any of those games mainstream, there were no other kids at school, until I think maybe when I was in the 8th grade, who played PC games, and by then it was Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. If it wasn't on their Playstation or N64 it didn't exist.
a lot of it also IMO has to do with Windows and PCs coming down in price during the 90s too in terms of PC gaming becoming more common, along with AOL and dial-up internet becoming more available
Very much this, too. I was able to put together a "gaming PC" for like $200 in the 90's and it was more than enough to play Duke Nukem, Starcraft, Diablo, etc.
The more I think about it, the more my video game childhood seems weirder to me. I had an NES, and no other system, until I was maybe 19? Then I finally got a PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360, used Dreamcast, and then tried catching up on all the shit everyone else had been playing for the past 2 decades that I had missed out on.
Posts
For the empire
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I mean, I was still dying on Story, and that's about the only measure I have for difficulty in that manner. Like, most of the time I was spending my healing between healing spots down to one or none, so that's one of my other measures, did the game make me use the resources I have with its combat when it's a Souls-ish game. Though Fallen Order is only superficially a Souls game. It's more like an Uncharted/Tomb Raider with light Souls mechanics sprinkled throughout.
Fallout nv and fallout 2 had cyberdogs, ehy didnt fallout 4.
Also, this game just reminded me that TMNT 2:Secrets of the Ooze is 32 years old.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Leveling Larcin, and getting to the point where I can win at least somewhat consistently, and every win feels amazing because you actually get to mindgame people and play all sneaky-beaky spy, but he is so fucking reliant on getting lucky and finding at least a blue keycard somewhere so you can get to the briefcase first. There is so much playing Larcin teaches you about the briefcase mechanics too that you normally don't realize because it's a high pressure time with a shitload of other things to pay attention to, and most characters want to use it to ambush people.
1.) The ping timer slows waaaaay down while you're walking or standing still.
2.) The ping timer pauses while your expertise is active.
3.) The ping timer pauses while you're scanning.
So what you can do is fill up your intel, wait until the second it pings, then use his E1 to smoke bomb and run as far as possible, start walking the second your stealth wears off, and right before it pings again, start scanning and running. With a good loadout for this, you can go most of the way across the map, and have your E1 nearly back up by the time they figure out where you've gone, as well as refill your intel as you go. People start panicking when you reappear across the map, leading them into fights with each other, and then they have to limp to chase you without healing. Or just use it to bait people together so you can smoke out when they start shooting.
I was pleasantly surprised by the puzzle focus of a lot of the game, and felt the saber combat was satisfying enough that I stuck with it. I thought the story was fun enough and really enjoyed most of the characters.
My only real quibbles with it were lack of bosses and lacking enemy variety in general, but those weren't enough to really sour me on it.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
If Back to the Future was released this year, Marty would go back to 1993.
Legends of Runeterra: MNCdover #moc
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
Twitch Page
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
There's all kinds of weird details that make it into the gekko units such as the legs being grown with artificial muscle, coupled with a standard UGV profile in the turret.
Be still. Be still! BE STILL!
*gets paralyzed by ice spike bullshit I can never avoid in time*
FUCK.
I'd love to get Jedi Survivor but apparently it's kind of a russian roulette on whether it works on your PC or not, so I'll wait for some patches and probably play it after I get my fill of the new Zelda.
Someone ban this sociopath.
It's on EA's subscription service if you want to drop $15 to check it out and see if it does work.
At least today we can finally say:
"No Ray Tracing!? That's like a baby's toy!"
It's funny all the media I had seen about fighting, finally getting into the fight she isn't as fan servicsy as I thought she'd be.
Runs closer to bayonetta rather than quiet
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
1993 was the year I got my 486 PC, and with it stuff like X-Wing, Car and Driver, Monkey Island 2, Space Hulk, and at the end of the year Doom came along. It was a pretty good year for PC games and a portent of better years to come in that regard.
Steam | XBL
I predict a fps version of the idea someday. Maybe same studio, running the streets past beavermen, lizardladies, and whatever races they've added.
Revengence first
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Also, Master of Orion.
There really wasn't a bad year for gaming in the '90s. That decade in PC gaming started with Wing Commander and ended with Counterstrike.
All three of those games remain gold standards in their genres, that everything gets compared against.
When Marty reaches the past, instead of Mr. Sandman, the background music would be Enter Sandman.
Doom, in shareware form, was on magazine cover discs as soon as it hit which is how I first played it - I soon after got a boxed copy of the full game at a computer show I went to. That was also available mail-order IIRC. Updates for the game also showed up on cover discs, as did hundreds upon hundreds of WADs.
I didn't get online until 1999 and Doom was easily accessible without being a downloady techbro! I'll cop to the nerd part, though
I do agree that '97-'98 was more when PC gaming was getting bigger but the path laid by Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, C&C, and many others over the preceding few years was instrumental to their success.
Steam | XBL
King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Command Keen and lots of other games were released earlier than Doom. I'll give you that the PCs those games were played on were probably in an office somewhere rather than a home. But I played lots of PC games before Doom.
I only had one other PC-owning friend I could do that with, and we'd been doing it since the Atari ST days. So we continued with our existing method and used a null-modem cable when one of us carted our PC to the other's house.*
I remember hearing stories of rather long examples of said cables being threaded out of and into windows so neighbouring people could get their game on.
* - later I'd do similarly with a PlayStation owning friend and the system link cable for that. My first foray into actually using ethernet and hubs etc. for hooking gaming machines together for some LAN gaming was the original Xbox! Weird to think now how short the timeframe was that covered all of those machines.
Steam | XBL
in '93 it was released online only at first in December, but yeah most people didn't even have internet then and that's what I meant by 1993 not being the boom year for PC gaming of the 90s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Release
I memorized like rote how to connect two computers with a crossover cable, set up IP, netmask and gateway, and pray to the $DEITY for the connection to work.
It wasn't until much later that I learned just what the hell the numbers meant, Mason.
Wouldn't slowly start to realize the wonders of western RPGs until Dragon Age Origins. I was always a console kid.
But yeah PC gaming didn’t start with Doom by any means. It was one of the first games to really pierce the mainstream conciousness, but there was a ton of stuff prior. All the sierra games pretty much and most of the lucasarts games, all the single player ultimas that mattered,ultima underworld, wing commander and privateer, star control 2, wolfenstein 3d, simcity, railroad tycoon, civilization, etc.
These weren’t horribly obscure games that only the cutting edge tech nerds had, these were games you could get at walmart and that I and my friends were playing at home or sneaking into the computer lab as 10 and 11 year olds.
I mean, I was playing PC games from the ripe age of 3 years old (for reference, we're talking 1986). Oregon Trail, Chess, Star Trek Apple Trek (which was ridiculously good btw), Moon Patrol, Lemonade Stand, and then some dungeon crawler but I couldn't tell you which one. But I also wouldn't call any of those games mainstream, there were no other kids at school, until I think maybe when I was in the 8th grade, who played PC games, and by then it was Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. If it wasn't on their Playstation or N64 it didn't exist.
I tried to play through DA:O twice. I found it so aggressively generic and bland, I didn't make it
a lot of it also IMO has to do with Windows and PCs coming down in price during the 90s too in terms of PC gaming becoming more common, along with AOL and dial-up internet becoming more available
Speaking as someone who also bounced off it multiple times, I eventually came back to it and really played the hell out of it and really enjoyed it. I wish I could remember just what flipped a switch for me that made it enjoyable. I think I just had an itch for something really dark? I dunno.
I don't know that I really recommend it now in the sea of CRPG's, plus DA2 and DA3 are probably more fun and action-y.
I never claimed it was the boom year, or anything to do with internet; just that it was the year I personally moved to an "IBM-compatible" PC after about a decade or so with various other computers, and that it was a year with some good games. (Edit: and that it was a sign of even better years to come.)
Steam | XBL
I don’t know, I feel like the middle school years are just when people start playing pc games in general, that probably has more to do with kids starting to play it at those ages than the games just popping into the mainstream.
Again I came along a couple of years earlier and pretty much everyone knew what wolfenstein 3d was, and I had friends who played more arcadey flight/space sims like microproses F15 series or wing commander. Doom hit hard but it wasn’t out of nowhere.
Very much this, too. I was able to put together a "gaming PC" for like $200 in the 90's and it was more than enough to play Duke Nukem, Starcraft, Diablo, etc.
The more I think about it, the more my video game childhood seems weirder to me. I had an NES, and no other system, until I was maybe 19? Then I finally got a PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360, used Dreamcast, and then tried catching up on all the shit everyone else had been playing for the past 2 decades that I had missed out on.