keep talking and nobody explodes
Short fast-paced round and then you can chill for a few minutes to get to the next one.
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I wish there was an online multiplayer version of mario kart 64. I had a lot of fun playing that when younger!
I’m a gamer, but now I’m lost in a game IRL where you have to find an emerald in Fribourg 
Also, usually more the Factorio type. Was there no treasure in Fribourg, I would be totally lost in Factorio 2
Thanks for sharing!
I won’t go through my list* as I would have to dig up and un-dust the rather delicate papyrus scrolls where the list has been recorded …
I am interested in your more detailed views on this if you’re willing to take the time and share.
I also like the Civilization games and was intrigued by your mentioning of paradox grand strategy (which I had to Google … hoping for a similar but also different approach to turn based strategy games) and then ended up watching a couple of minutes each of tutorials on how to play the ones you mention.
My initial take-away was that these all have a relatively steep learning curve (compared to, say, Civilization). Would you confirm or is this YouTube tutorial hysteria?
Looking at EU IV (Europa Universalis IV for those not in the know, like me, till today), this seems like a hand-on intro, well, maybe not intro, but rather sophisticated intro into how economics and trade and trading works? Kind of reminded me of how I like looking at markets whenever I feel like macro (views) will influence of how things develop? I mean, they do, but it’s often only visible in hindsight.
At any rate, it almost felt like work to have to play the game?
Looking at Hearts of Iron IV the intro basically sketched it out as a war game, beautiful graphics, I admit, but again somewhat on the tedious side – also given the actual world maps, as in EU IV – where I felt (just observing) that I would have to play actual history, hopefully with a better outcome?
Maybe that’s not it, but that’s kind of the vibe I got after I started to watch the “learn how to play this game in under 20 minutes” …
Lastly, Victoria III. Similar to EU IV, but maybe different time settings and more beautiful graphics, a little less market maker pressure?
I apologize in advance, as I didn’t really spend any significant time in researching these games, but just scratched the surface … but if you were willing to share your experiences and views, I’d really appreciate it.
* But for your laughs I’ll share the early entries of that list based on my currently personally still accessible RAM today:
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I think it started in the basement of a high school friend of mine in probably 1986/7 with an Apple ][, and playing an ASCII RPG (a text-based game) … on a brightly lid green (only) CRT display. This is roughly how I remember it:
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It continued possibly in a step back (hardware wise) a year or two later with a game that I cannot remember the name of but that basically displayed the torso of a person and its organs and as a player were put into the position of a doctor as the body was initially healthy and would suffer increasingly more serious health conditions (blood pressure, virus attacking, etc etc) that you had options available to treat with until the patient would finally die.
The game was written in BASIC – which would allow you to change the code, which of course I did – possibly my first foray into “testing” the security of things – and it was loaded from a cassette drive onto a computer I also don’t remember the name of that belonged to a friend of mine and that was attached to a CRTV in their guest room …
Possibly this was a Commodore, but I also don’t really remember.
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It continued with Prince of Persia on my then girlfriend’s parents computer (I also don’t remember the hardware, but in my defense, other hard- and software … ahem considerations in life seemed more important at the time …
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And finally I bought my own first computer, an i386 with a 20MB HDD and a PCI memory expansion card bring the system onboard max RAM from … hm, IIRC from whatever to 2MB or so? This is where I first played Wolfenstein 3D
and then Doom, IIRC …
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That’s it!
But wait: if you have sleeping issues, you can subscribe for a small fee to my audible/narrated full list of computer games that I have played in my life, included successful and unsuccessful several dozen hour campains of me conquering the world in Civilzation in “Settler” difficulty mode (in the premium subscription level you can see me playing these campains in the “Chieftain” difficulty level, though so far I’ve always lost …)
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From 640 kilobytes.
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Just a quick one (harhar):
Yes, the Paradox games have a pretty steep learning curve. Problem is, there is just a really basic tutorial for each game, no proper manual, a lot of ingame tooltip (or not) and sooooooo many mechanics to know of.
Each Paradox game is set in a different time frame and has a different focus. All of them have at least a basic military, population happiness, trade and diplomatic mechanic (but which are really different from game to game). Main difference is that the games are not intended to be balanced, you start with a (mostly pretty accurate) representation of the world at a time X with a nation of your chosing which can be a great, mid or minor power. Through different mechanics you play pretty historical or just do some crazy stuff (become a faschist Britain in World War 2 or colonize Africa as Sweden for instance, try to survive as Luxemburg in WW2, be the only colonizer in the world as Spain in EU4 etc.)
Crusader Kings is set in the Middle Age, is rather focused on role playing and you can breed and extend your family. But when your caracters dies, you have to accept that your territory is split up between your heirs, as well as managing the relations between you, your liege (if you have) and your vassals.
Europa Universalis is set in the Renaissance (just before the fall of Constantinople) and the entry into Modern times. Its focus is on trade of specific goods, exploration, colonisation and expansion. It is more like a classic expansion game where you try to be the biggest nation. But you can also start as an African nation and just try to keep that stupid Europeans out of Africa, or try to survive as the Aztecs (super difficult, never tried). Its focus is more on Armies as a bloc, expansion, diplomacy.
Victoria III is totally different. You play as a nation and it is more a socio-economic simulator. You try to manage population happiness by class, try to set up basic laws to advance societal change. At the same time industrialisation of the country (or not) is the main topic. Rise of communism. You have to balance goods production (overproduction decrease prices of a certain good, but that means less profit for a certain industry which means layoffs). Expensive goods means good profits, but population is unhappy because they cannot afford. You can play a whole playtrhough without any war changing your border, especially europe is pretty fixed (except unification of Germany and Italy etc.). I personnaly love it, expecially balancing the different interest groups.
HOI 4 is more a wargame with its focus on logistics. Produce the material you need to keep your armies running. Try to navigate Stalins Paranoia without loosing too many good generals, take care that your tanks are not bugged down in the russian winter. Here it is all about handling your divisions and making sure that they are well supplied. A little bit of politics, but basically you choose in which direction you want to go.
In all 3 games, you are just thrown in and basically it is try it out. and after 100s of hours you figure out that in the submenu there is still a button you never activated, or that this mechanic was totally unknown to you.
Totally different beast then the CIV games.
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Thank you!
I almost forgot: enough for everyone.
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That reminded me, I have a distant cousin who was always a bit on the weird side. When we were playing games he was making games, and that’s back in the stone age of the early 90s so he was around 10-12 years old at the time. Something about computers just clicked with him. He’d altered the code of Space Invaders to make the aliens look like other things, even added bosses and other things that were out of this world at the time. I have an uncle who’s not technical but he was, and still is, very smart. He had foresight of what computers would become way back in the 80s Greece. He used to say “this guy will go far”. Sadly he didn’t go far. Even though he got in Greece’s most prestigious university to study electrical engineering with computer science he fell in the brain rot that’s university student politics and went nowhere. He’s a minor academic now which is not a bad thing, but it’s a lot less than what he could have been if he took his natural talent to somewhere like the US, especially at that time.
On games, they’ve given me more than they took, for sure. My parents, father especially, hated that I got hooked on games early on, even though it was him who let me poke around his ancient (cutting edge at the time) Apple Macinstosh. Specifically it was a game called ICEMAN (now I see it’s called Codename: ICEMAN - Wikipedia) that I liked to play. I never got anywhere, naturally, but there was a turning point: once an English teacher remarked to my mother that I said something in surprisingly accurate English, she asked me where I learnt that, and I told her “From playing a computer game”. That eased the pressure off some
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Reminds me of an episode when I was about 7 years old, and just enabled the original Command & Conquer on my family’s PC. I knew that there was a trick with manipulating some text file (‘rules.ini’). However I did not understand alot of it, and endet up editing the readme.txt, where i changed the technology levels for some units. I was ever frustrated that it did not have any effect 
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Did you unlock blood in SNES Mortal Kombat? Could you be the bosses in Street Fighter? Could you resurrect General Leo in FF3 and Aerith in FF7? These have (had) kept gamers up for ages 
There was a well-known hack in several games where if you found the rules file and found a line saying something like “armor = 1” and changed it to “armor = 0” everything became instakillable.
There was a guild in WoW who, after being bored of running a specific instance too many times edited out a wall in the game files which enabled them to skip most of the dungeon. They were quickly banned by Blizzard
We all play games, at times, I think.
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After I clicked into your link and saw the game box cover
and then the corresponding screenshot
I again felt reminded of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom – how are these even the same game …?
Wolfenstein 3D box cover:
Doom box cover:
I for one am always dead serious.
Especially on this forum.
I mean, we had box covers showing something and ingame we got 3 pixels stuck together and had to fill it out with our brains, fostering imagination and creativity.
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Some of my friends keep pestering form time to time about that time I made a friend running mk3.exe twice on his pc. The first time it deleted some sys file (ms-dos times…). The second time, as a scientist, I thought we should try again to be sure the culprit was mortal kombat’s exe. And it was.
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I could name several games you could spend hundreds of hours on, mostly strategy and RPG’s. Most of those have been mentioned in here.
I’m adding some honorable nostalgic mentions and some mustachian ideas:
- flight games. My first game at a friend’s 386 was LHX. Loved the X-Wing series later on, where I picked up a free copy of a modern version last year, I think. Not the same without a joystick, though (and being 30 years older). Also remember stuff like Wing Commander, Comanche.
edit: Box
- Some indy games, like Into the Breach or Prison architect. Well, Minecraft might have been in here, too?
Other games I remember not for being particularly great in retrospective, but since they required hardware upgrades. Hard sell on the parents. By accident, those where Lucas Arts games, too. I think it was Rebel Assault that required a CD-Rom. Or Dark Forces that required a whopping 8mb of RAM.
Talking about 640kb and 3 pixel, once you need a break from proper PC-gaming:
- Retro hand-helds! You can get some Gameboy look-a-like (with color display, imagine that) for below 50 bucks which comes with thousand of SNES, Gameboy etc. games up to PS1 on one of those little SD cards.
- A last gen console. You can get e.g. a PS4 for less than 100 bucks and your library might happen to have lot of games for that. These action-adventures are not my type of game, but I’m not the only person in the household. Some titles like the Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima are quite fun and look quite amazing if you are not used to the very latest high-end graphics, or enjoy looking at maps or lists of items in games
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Well, sky’s the limit, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve always gotten a new PC around every 5-6 years and it’s always been a huge improvement from the older one. But I have friends who absolutely cannot play anything unless it’s on the absolute ultra max settings, with a few comically large screens, desks that looks like a spaceship, fancy chair, headphones idiots wear at the gym OVER their hoods etc.
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Just wanted to say this. It absolutely can be, but doesn’t have to.
Especially if you stay a few years behind and don’t have any social pressure. I did play WoW, as well. That wasn’t a drag on the hardware, but eventually on my social life and studies. Good times, but even better I left that behind after a server 1st on Illidian in Burning Crusade.
The last high-end (-ish) GPU I got (a GTX 770) lasted for almost 10 years. Only upgraded 2 years ago to eventually play RDR 2 and Cyberpunk 2077, both of which were on sale. Another big title, GTA V, was free some 4 years ago.
These were all fun, but so can be some emulated 8- or 16-bit classics or open-source games.
Getting older and having to pay myself, I prefer to splurge on desk, office chair and lights
And then keep telling myself and my spouse that any gaming related purchase is paid for by some previous side bets on NVDA, CDR and ATVI:D
Oh, and carefully introducing the kids to an emulated Tetris or Super Mario helps to hone the fine motor skills. 
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I have actually seen both the good and the bad with my kids. On one hand they get really creative with Minecraft Creative mode but on the other I’ve seem them get stressed to crying wreck levels when there are enemies coming towards them like in Yoshi’s Island or even Tetris, so I stopped that fast. They like Mario Kart too.
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Little Fail-story from my youth
After going through the C&C-frenzie, technology moved on and the next big thing coming up was Earth 2150. OMG I craved for it. Some day I went to the local shopping mall, into the magazines sections, and located a specific gaming magazine that included a CD (Demos, Patches, you remeber…) that featured the DEMO OF EARTH 2150!!!
So I got in, pretended to read through the magazine while sneakily extracting that CD. I felt horrible leaving the store with the CD in my pocket, but i NEEDED to play this Game!
Back at home, full of excitement, I realized that my family’s PC (Pentium 1 166MHz) was just not enough to run that game.
I felt so miserable 
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