the audio you hear was played through your MODEM if you didn't have a sound card. and for some reason we had an atari-style joystick that worked with this game. i dont
Holy shit, it never occurred to me that anyone would do this, but it makes perfect sense.
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Oh yeah. The audio through the modem was almost common at one time.
+1
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
y'all, remember when sound blasters were good and didn't just make your system unstable, and got supported for more than a few months
I remember sound cards being huge pains in the ass 90s and then mostly rendered obsolete by motherboards with built in sound processors starting in the 00s, does that count
built-in audio had noticeably shit sound quality until mobo manufacturers realized that was something people actually wanted, which started in the mid 00s
but there was at least a five year period before that where you kind of had to buy a sound card if you wanted to play games, and it probably had to be a sound blaster because Creative had largely driven out all their competitors in the 90's, and it would probably give you nothing but trouble because Creative has been trading on some haggard cred for about twenty years
I can't speak to how easy they were to use in like 1995 but I guess I kind of assumed that they built that market presence and brand loyalty out of something
It was a file management software for DOS that I used, and it was actually super dope. I remember being legitimately irritated when we switched to Windows and Windows File Explorer wasn't nearly as good.
I did not have XTree, but several people at my church were engineers at TI, and they had a DOS utility, I think it was just called Show, or something. It would give you a listing of all the files in the directory, color coded, and you could select/ navigate with the arrow keys, traverse directories, perform a bunch of tasks like launch exes, open text files etc.
Anyway one of them had done some work on our PC, and left it on there. Every time it launched, there was a message about how it was for TI employee use only, and it made me feel important, like a super hacker.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
One of my favourite games when I was little was Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. It was an aerial combat/flight sim game (although not a super technical flight sim). You could fly various fighters and bombers from the USAAF and German Luftwaffe.
It had early-days DRM, a code wheel, which if you lost you basically bricked your game.
I remember my dad trying to get Unreal to work on his Cyrix processor based PC. It never got past the launcher because it was missing some instructions from the standard x86 set
I had the family 286 for a while in my room. Monkey Island 1 and other Lucasarts adventure games, Lemmings, Keen, the Duke Nukems that were side scrolling platformers
My mum was the first person I knew to beat Wolf3D on the hardest difficulty. With 100% secrets. She mapped out every level on paper and went around hitting space-bar on every wall until one would open. I was terrified of the final boss until she showed me the secret room at the side with the health and ammo that you could walk back and forward over as you shot at him
She then moved on to Doom and did the same, before stopping at Descent because 3 dimensions of movement was too much
The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin
y'all, remember when sound blasters were good and didn't just make your system unstable, and got supported for more than a few months
I remember sound cards being huge pains in the ass 90s and then mostly rendered obsolete by motherboards with built in sound processors starting in the 00s, does that count
built-in audio had noticeably shit sound quality until mobo manufacturers realized that was something people actually wanted, which started in the mid 00s
but there was at least a five year period before that where you kind of had to buy a sound card if you wanted to play games, and it probably had to be a sound blaster because Creative had largely driven out all their competitors in the 90's, and it would probably give you nothing but trouble because Creative has been trading on some haggard cred for about twenty years
I can't speak to how easy they were to use in like 1995 but I guess I kind of assumed that they built that market presence and brand loyalty out of something
hahahahahaha god no
sound cards were a pain to get working in 90s too, they were just the only game in town for sound from your video games because sound hardware built-in on motherboards was super shit
+1
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Raijin QuickfootI'm your Huckleberry YOU'RE NO DAISYRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I played so much Master of Orion.
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
mostly because the back of game boxes always showed the Amiga version and they looked so good
I only ever saw Amigas in the store and they were so damned sexy.
I think the first game I ever had to track down to buy was Archon. I was probably 10 or so and spent an afternoon looking up local Waldenbooks and B. Dalton locations in the yellow pages because that was where you bought software. I'd ask "Do you carry Apple computer software?" and they'd say "yes ma'am" because I was a ten year old boy talking like a grownup so they assumed I was a woman.
Later I read an article about how crazy advanced the Amiga was in comparison to other computers at the time, and this was reinforced by the fact that the Amiga version of the game played the sound of a thunderclap at the opening screen, and that the size of the program for creating the thunderclap was greater than the size of the entire game on the Apple II. No reference to the file size required to compress digital audio, just "the program is WAY bigger!"
I played so much Scorched Earth during computer science class in high school. I think I learned more about finding hidden files than actual programming. Our teacher would hide or delete games we put on the lab computers and it would escalate. The game was great with all of the weird options enabled, like rubberband walls. Just launch a nuke and hope for the best.
mostly because the back of game boxes always showed the Amiga version and they looked so good
I only ever saw Amigas in the store and they were so damned sexy.
I think the first game I ever had to track down to buy was Archon. I was probably 10 or so and spent an afternoon looking up local Waldenbooks and B. Dalton locations in the yellow pages because that was where you bought software. I'd ask "Do you carry Apple computer software?" and they'd say "yes ma'am" because I was a ten year old boy talking like a grownup so they assumed I was a woman.
Later I read an article about how crazy advanced the Amiga was in comparison to other computers at the time, and this was reinforced by the fact that the Amiga version of the game played the sound of a thunderclap at the opening screen, and that the size of the program for creating the thunderclap was greater than the size of the entire game on the Apple II. No reference to the file size required to compress digital audio, just "the program is WAY bigger!"
I mean, bigger is better, right?
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
I played so much Scorched Earth during computer science class in high school. I think I learned more about finding hidden files than actual programming. Our teacher would hide or delete games we put on the lab computers and it would escalate. The game was great with all of the weird options enabled, like rubberband walls. Just launch a nuke and hope for the best.
Oh man, the memories of going in and editing game files. My friend and I played Crush, Crumble, and Chomp! on a classroom computer in 5th grade. Many of the files were in BASIC, so we opened them up and made changes to give ourselves more credits for the make-your-own-monster option. It broke things spectacularly, and inspired probably the first private joke I can remember having with a friend where we would ask the other "How thick is your hide?"
who else here was forced to learn how to use DOS, and deal with DOS's shitty memory management bullshit, and come to grips with the fact that Windows 3.1/95/98 were all just programs running on top of DOS, by trying to get PC games to run in the 90s
+18
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
who else here was forced to learn how to use DOS, and deal with DOS's shitty memory management bullshit, and come to grips with the fact that Windows 3.1/95/98 were all just programs running on top of DOS, by trying to get PC games to run in the 90s
Learning all that stuff was the reason I was a Mac-hater as a young man. PCs were frustrating and unknowable to most people, but you couldn't really screw things up if you didn't know what you were doing at a DOS prompt. By contrast, the Macs in our computer lab were totally user-friendly, and as a result generally 50% of them were useless because you could almost brick an early Mac just by blindly clicking in the wrong places.
I played so much Scorched Earth during computer science class in high school. I think I learned more about finding hidden files than actual programming. Our teacher would hide or delete games we put on the lab computers and it would escalate. The game was great with all of the weird options enabled, like rubberband walls. Just launch a nuke and hope for the best.
One of the score settings gave enough cash for kills you could set it on like, 8 opponents, and fire a MIRV straight up and kill most everything, including yourself, and just buy 3 more MIRVs for the next round.
I once played it on a computer with the turbo disabled, and I used that weapon that does an energy explosion centered on youself and consumes batteries. I put in max batteries and it took what felt like 15 minutes to render and animate the explosion. You could follow each line of pixels with your finger as it spiraled around the edge of it.
My earliest gaming memory is DOS Adventure, me my brother and my dad, just pounding our heads against the wall text adventure style until we finally figured out releasing our canary would distract the dragon into trying to eat it and falling off a cliff.
As mentioned a few times, Scorched Earth. Loved turning everything to Max Explosions, Max Bounce, etc and just firing off a Death's Head and seeing who survived.
.
God I loved scorched earth, never truly had a successor to it, Worms is fun but never was truly Scorched ( Scorched 3D was ok)
I played a ton of heroes quest back in the old DOS days, before Sierra got sued and had to change it to quest for glory. I was too young țo know anything about what i was doing so i didn't really ever get anywhere but i still feel this was somehow foundational.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
the audio you hear was played through your MODEM if you didn't have a sound card. and for some reason we had an atari-style joystick that worked with this game. i dont
Holy shit, it never occurred to me that anyone would do this, but it makes perfect sense.
Hah! We played a ton of that game on our Tandy 2000 when I was a kid. To this day, "Looks like he...hit the tree, Jim" and "Ooh, can't be too happy about that one" are part of the family lexicon.
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
My dad's work had this Apple Mac employees could book and take home for the weekend in the mid-80's, so that was the first computer I encountered. All I remember playing was a small Doctor Who game where you'd try and make Daleks crash into to each other while they were chasing you (Google informs me this was Daleks!).
My first actual computer was an Amiga, when I was about 7, and my first game for it was Marble Madness. It was quickly joined by an ever increasing raft of games; Test Drive, Faerie Tale Adventure, Defender of the Crown, Bubble Bobble,
Turrican, Lemmings, Pirates! Gold, Speedball 1 & 2, Battle Squadron, Silkworm, Emerald Mine, Sim City, Double Dragon 2 and dozens more over the next few years. It was the first place I encountered the early LucasArts adventure games, and I came within a hair of getting X-Com (or UFO: Enemy Unknown) on the Amiga,
too, which would have really changed my forum history if I wasn't in the transitional period to our first PC system at the time. It was a good platform that was the formational system of my childhood,
so I have a strong soft spot for the Amiga; it still amazes me that to this day I still have never encountered joysticks as solid and good as was available for the Amiga 3 decades ago.
The first PC we had was a 386 with 20meg hdd. I must have I can't remember the precise first game we had on the system - possibly Space Hulk? - but Ultima VII and Wing Commander 2 were about the time the PC supplanted the Amiga as the primary gaming machine, while Wolfenstein and Commander Keen introduced me to shareware. I remember playing Doom in a tiny 2x3" screen so that the frame rate was playable; a few months later we upgraded to a 486 and I could finally see the game in its full glory.
Anyway, my nostalgia is deep and abiding, and I appreciate this thread.
I was born in 91 so I had an nes and most Nintendo and Sega and Sony systems that followed. We had an Atari at my grandparents house but I never used it when the nes was right there
And then earliest PC games I played were the Lucasfilm games adventure games that were good
It helped to have parents on the younger side that thought video games and technology were cool re: just having everything
Daebunz on
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
who else here was forced to learn how to use DOS, and deal with DOS's shitty memory management bullshit, and come to grips with the fact that Windows 3.1/95/98 were all just programs running on top of DOS, by trying to get PC games to run in the 90s
it's so nice that these days when I get the urge to play Quest for Glory, all I have to do is install DOSBox and mount a few virtual drives
I liked playing adventure game son my brother's PC, but he didn't like me playing when he wasn't around so he would disable the CD-ROM drive whenever he stopped using it.
I remember going to the library to look up how to re-enable it in DOS and for months I would type in the command and play Full Throttle.
Learning dos on my own was such a thing. We had a Machintosh SE before we ever had a PC, and I used to play shuffle puck 3000, Dark Tower, Art of War. All these great B&W games.
who else here was forced to learn how to use DOS, and deal with DOS's shitty memory management bullshit, and come to grips with the fact that Windows 3.1/95/98 were all just programs running on top of DOS, by trying to get PC games to run in the 90s
Yep. I had games that I had to run from DOS, but if I loaded into Windows and then opened DOS they failed. BUT if I pressed some key combination after the bios and before Windows loaded I could get a DOS prompt, and the game would run.
I liked playing adventure game son my brother's PC, but he didn't like me playing when he wasn't around so he would disable the CD-ROM drive whenever he stopped using it.
I remember going to the library to look up how to re-enable it in DOS and for months I would type in the command and play Full Throttle.
Learning dos on my own was such a thing. We had a Machintosh SE before we ever had a PC, and I used to play shuffle puck 3000, Dark Tower, Art of War. All these great B&W games.
Man, Dark Tower was amazing. I never owned a Mac at home but I remember playing it on display computers in stores.
Later I got it when it was ported to PC but it felt sloppy and wasn't at all the same. The old B&W Mac graphics may have lacked color but damn were they crisp and smooth.
Some weird part of me still wants a new Ultima game. It would absolutely not be the same, buy 8 and 9 were both such turds that I want a proper ending.
Or at least give me the true ending to Ultima IX where all Skara Brae rocketed off into space like a Yes album cover.
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
I don't think it's weird, I grew up on the series and I agree.
That said, yeah, they pretty much pooped the bed so hard with Ultima IX that there wouldn't really be any recovering from it.
I actually never finished it. It was so horribly optimized that it didn't matter if you went back with an exponentially more powerful PC years later - it just runs like shit.
The best takeaway was some of the music. We used one of the tracks for our wedding!
I never finished IX. Well, I guess I never finished any of them? I sure spent a lot of time playing 6-8, though.
Serpent Isle was just... such a cool setting. Although I never actually progressed much in the story and instead just cheated around and teleported to different spots in the world. I found the weird island full of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders that way. That was... strange, to be sure.
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Drake ChambersLay out my formal shorts.Registered Userregular
I remember that I couldn't run Quake because I didn't have a floating point processor. I could run basically everything else, but not Quake, because it needed something really specific.
To this day, when someone brings up Quake I think "I can't run that".
I used a Cyrix 6x86 that had some shit FPU performance. My dad was an IBM engineer so the computer was basically free if I sent in notes once in a while about performance in certain games.
Quake was not a good experience. Thinking back on it, that's probably a bit reason for why I was so into Duke3D.
This was my favorite DOS game and if it isn't also your favorite DOS game, you probably did not own it:
HOMM owns
I played it recently and the gameplay still holds up real well
HOMM 1 - 3 are some great games
As are the older Might & Magic games. I've got a particular soft spot for World of Xeen. Especially the CD version that had amazingly bad voice acting in it.
+5
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valhalla13013 Dark Shield Perceives the GodsRegistered Userregular
edited January 2019
This thread title speaks to me. For lo, my first gaming system was a Pong game. And when I say a Pong game, I mean a Pong game system. And all it played was Pong. Maybe 1978 or 1979.
Then we moved to Atari 2600, then a Commodore 128, then my dad's PC, and NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo and so forth. After I sold my SNES, because I never played it, I didn't own a system until the Sony Playstation.
This was my favorite DOS game and if it isn't also your favorite DOS game, you probably did not own it:
HOMM owns
I played it recently and the gameplay still holds up real well
HOMM 1 - 3 are some great games
As are the older Might & Magic games. I've got a particular soft spot for World of Xeen. Especially the CD version that had amazingly bad voice acting in it.
I have multiple thousands of hours sunk into HOMM3, it likely significantly dwarfs the playtimes I have on any other game.
Posts
mostly because the back of game boxes always showed the Amiga version and they looked so good
Holy shit, it never occurred to me that anyone would do this, but it makes perfect sense.
built-in audio had noticeably shit sound quality until mobo manufacturers realized that was something people actually wanted, which started in the mid 00s
but there was at least a five year period before that where you kind of had to buy a sound card if you wanted to play games, and it probably had to be a sound blaster because Creative had largely driven out all their competitors in the 90's, and it would probably give you nothing but trouble because Creative has been trading on some haggard cred for about twenty years
I can't speak to how easy they were to use in like 1995 but I guess I kind of assumed that they built that market presence and brand loyalty out of something
I did not have XTree, but several people at my church were engineers at TI, and they had a DOS utility, I think it was just called Show, or something. It would give you a listing of all the files in the directory, color coded, and you could select/ navigate with the arrow keys, traverse directories, perform a bunch of tasks like launch exes, open text files etc.
Anyway one of them had done some work on our PC, and left it on there. Every time it launched, there was a message about how it was for TI employee use only, and it made me feel important, like a super hacker.
Street Rod OWNED.
It had early-days DRM, a code wheel, which if you lost you basically bricked your game.
I had the family 286 for a while in my room. Monkey Island 1 and other Lucasarts adventure games, Lemmings, Keen, the Duke Nukems that were side scrolling platformers
My mum was the first person I knew to beat Wolf3D on the hardest difficulty. With 100% secrets. She mapped out every level on paper and went around hitting space-bar on every wall until one would open. I was terrified of the final boss until she showed me the secret room at the side with the health and ammo that you could walk back and forward over as you shot at him
She then moved on to Doom and did the same, before stopping at Descent because 3 dimensions of movement was too much
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_Socrates
My parents would never get me a Nintendo or Sega, but did get this because it waa educational. It was not however very fun.
hahahahahaha god no
sound cards were a pain to get working in 90s too, they were just the only game in town for sound from your video games because sound hardware built-in on motherboards was super shit
I only ever saw Amigas in the store and they were so damned sexy.
I think the first game I ever had to track down to buy was Archon. I was probably 10 or so and spent an afternoon looking up local Waldenbooks and B. Dalton locations in the yellow pages because that was where you bought software. I'd ask "Do you carry Apple computer software?" and they'd say "yes ma'am" because I was a ten year old boy talking like a grownup so they assumed I was a woman.
Later I read an article about how crazy advanced the Amiga was in comparison to other computers at the time, and this was reinforced by the fact that the Amiga version of the game played the sound of a thunderclap at the opening screen, and that the size of the program for creating the thunderclap was greater than the size of the entire game on the Apple II. No reference to the file size required to compress digital audio, just "the program is WAY bigger!"
I mean, bigger is better, right?
Oh man, the memories of going in and editing game files. My friend and I played Crush, Crumble, and Chomp! on a classroom computer in 5th grade. Many of the files were in BASIC, so we opened them up and made changes to give ourselves more credits for the make-your-own-monster option. It broke things spectacularly, and inspired probably the first private joke I can remember having with a friend where we would ask the other "How thick is your hide?"
Learning all that stuff was the reason I was a Mac-hater as a young man. PCs were frustrating and unknowable to most people, but you couldn't really screw things up if you didn't know what you were doing at a DOS prompt. By contrast, the Macs in our computer lab were totally user-friendly, and as a result generally 50% of them were useless because you could almost brick an early Mac just by blindly clicking in the wrong places.
One of the score settings gave enough cash for kills you could set it on like, 8 opponents, and fire a MIRV straight up and kill most everything, including yourself, and just buy 3 more MIRVs for the next round.
I once played it on a computer with the turbo disabled, and I used that weapon that does an energy explosion centered on youself and consumes batteries. I put in max batteries and it took what felt like 15 minutes to render and animate the explosion. You could follow each line of pixels with your finger as it spiraled around the edge of it.
God I loved scorched earth, never truly had a successor to it, Worms is fun but never was truly Scorched ( Scorched 3D was ok)
Hah! We played a ton of that game on our Tandy 2000 when I was a kid. To this day, "Looks like he...hit the tree, Jim" and "Ooh, can't be too happy about that one" are part of the family lexicon.
My first actual computer was an Amiga, when I was about 7, and my first game for it was Marble Madness. It was quickly joined by an ever increasing raft of games; Test Drive, Faerie Tale Adventure, Defender of the Crown, Bubble Bobble,
Turrican, Lemmings, Pirates! Gold, Speedball 1 & 2, Battle Squadron, Silkworm, Emerald Mine, Sim City, Double Dragon 2 and dozens more over the next few years. It was the first place I encountered the early LucasArts adventure games, and I came within a hair of getting X-Com (or UFO: Enemy Unknown) on the Amiga,
too, which would have really changed my forum history if I wasn't in the transitional period to our first PC system at the time. It was a good platform that was the formational system of my childhood,
so I have a strong soft spot for the Amiga; it still amazes me that to this day I still have never encountered joysticks as solid and good as was available for the Amiga 3 decades ago.
The first PC we had was a 386 with 20meg hdd. I must have I can't remember the precise first game we had on the system - possibly Space Hulk? - but Ultima VII and Wing Commander 2 were about the time the PC supplanted the Amiga as the primary gaming machine, while Wolfenstein and Commander Keen introduced me to shareware. I remember playing Doom in a tiny 2x3" screen so that the frame rate was playable; a few months later we upgraded to a 486 and I could finally see the game in its full glory.
Anyway, my nostalgia is deep and abiding, and I appreciate this thread.
And then earliest PC games I played were the Lucasfilm games adventure games that were good
It helped to have parents on the younger side that thought video games and technology were cool re: just having everything
it's so nice that these days when I get the urge to play Quest for Glory, all I have to do is install DOSBox and mount a few virtual drives
I remember going to the library to look up how to re-enable it in DOS and for months I would type in the command and play Full Throttle.
Learning dos on my own was such a thing. We had a Machintosh SE before we ever had a PC, and I used to play shuffle puck 3000, Dark Tower, Art of War. All these great B&W games.
Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
Yep. I had games that I had to run from DOS, but if I loaded into Windows and then opened DOS they failed. BUT if I pressed some key combination after the bios and before Windows loaded I could get a DOS prompt, and the game would run.
This is how I had to play Doom.
Man, Dark Tower was amazing. I never owned a Mac at home but I remember playing it on display computers in stores.
Later I got it when it was ported to PC but it felt sloppy and wasn't at all the same. The old B&W Mac graphics may have lacked color but damn were they crisp and smooth.
Or at least give me the true ending to Ultima IX where all Skara Brae rocketed off into space like a Yes album cover.
That said, yeah, they pretty much pooped the bed so hard with Ultima IX that there wouldn't really be any recovering from it.
I actually never finished it. It was so horribly optimized that it didn't matter if you went back with an exponentially more powerful PC years later - it just runs like shit.
The best takeaway was some of the music. We used one of the tracks for our wedding!
Serpent Isle was just... such a cool setting. Although I never actually progressed much in the story and instead just cheated around and teleported to different spots in the world. I found the weird island full of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders that way. That was... strange, to be sure.
Is that virtuous?
I used a Cyrix 6x86 that had some shit FPU performance. My dad was an IBM engineer so the computer was basically free if I sent in notes once in a while about performance in certain games.
Quake was not a good experience. Thinking back on it, that's probably a bit reason for why I was so into Duke3D.
HOMM owns
I played it recently and the gameplay still holds up real well
HOMM 1 - 3 are some great games
As are the older Might & Magic games. I've got a particular soft spot for World of Xeen. Especially the CD version that had amazingly bad voice acting in it.
Then we moved to Atari 2600, then a Commodore 128, then my dad's PC, and NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo and so forth. After I sold my SNES, because I never played it, I didn't own a system until the Sony Playstation.
Hooray it’s the 25th Anniversary DVD collection from the Myst Kickstarter!
Oh no I accidentally touched one of the pict-*bbbbbzhhhhhhhtttchchchch*
I have multiple thousands of hours sunk into HOMM3, it likely significantly dwarfs the playtimes I have on any other game.
Well, let us know how the fucking levers work when you get back