I used to go to stores and ask to try the game I wanted. Many times 
I tend to play games that are a decade or more old so hardware is no problem.
Ironically, I now have a 3090 Ti but have not played a single game on it. I bought it just for AI purposes.
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Yeah, right.
Thatās totally what 12- to 18-year-old me would have told my parents to get financing. It was all for homework, a highschool job in an engineering firm doing CAD, for academic purposes. 
Only thing that actually was an investment was a early CD burner, that paid for itself by, ahem, peddling distributing safety copies of games on the playground.
Also, does this meme fit in here? 
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Ditto. I had a CD burner back in 1995 - it was one where you had to put the CDās into a caddy and feed it into the drive. I went to university the next year and it saw a lot of use
1X writing speeds and Iām guessing there was not much buffer there so buffer underruns were a thing to be feared when media was quite expensive!
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Same here ! The thing paid itself back quite quickly! 
Mine was a 4x burner (got it sometime in ā96 or ā97)
If you canāt sport at least a GB200 Blackwell you shouldnāt even be posting here.
(you buying a GB200 would also help my NVidia position)*
* Ok, I donāt have an NVidia position. But NVidia is a bubble** anyways.
** Bubble, noun; meaning: Iām not invested in that asset that went up a lot.
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A friend of mine had one that IIRC was 0.5x and you couldnāt even switch off the light on the room or it will lose data somehow.
I was firmly in the AMD camp and so had never bought a Nvidia card until a few years ago. I still refuse to support Jensenās antics so have never bought new, but I doff my hat to him, he created a monopoly and in the end I had to buy.
In the last 2 years, I went from 0 Nvidia GPUs to owning 13 of them now. Even the 2nd hand market has gone insane. Some of the GPUs I bought increased in value more than Nvidia this year! Now it seems every half-baked piece of crap (including defunct mining cards) are being snapped up if it can be cajouled into performing some AI tasks.
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I donāt even remember. I recall the best selling product was a bundle of a car racing game where you run over pedestrians and a popular soccer gameās ā98 version. So this must have been well in the late 90s. Or is it 1990s, now?
Some may call these junk. Me, I called them treasures business opportunities. Didnāt even play those games, but thatās what the purely male, teenaged customer base asked for 
.
Today, I would be among the first to intervene to keep that filth out of childrenās hands. In retrospective quite some lessons learned about business and as close to being entrepreneurial as Iāll get 
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yeah, that was Carmageddon ! According to Wikipedia it has been released in 1997 so we are spot on 
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These are the games that I really love(d) in no particular order:
- Transport Fever 2
- Going Medieval
- Helldivers 2
- Ghostrunner 1 & 2
- Chorus
- Factorio
- Assetto Corsa Competizione
- Any of the Crash Bandicoot ones
- Minecraft
- Aragami
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Iāve never played Secret of Mana, yet, but it was mentioned to me. One of many games on the to do list.
The other day, I stumbled across the sound track, part of which sounded strangely familiar. Could that have been played in some department stores when the SFC / SNES used to be on display as a demo? Or featured somewhere else?
No idea re the soundtrack. Secret of Mana is a great little game. Doesnāt stand toe to toe with Final Fantasy 3, or Chrono Trigger in terms of story and gameplay depth, but thereās some magic to it, itās just a very well-made JRPG.
Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken Densetsu 3), which one could only play emulated and patched for English, or if they read Japanese and had the Japanese cartridge, as it was never translated, is a MUCH better game.
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Loved every bit of your post, but particularly this:
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As long as the work get done well and on time nobody bats an eyelid
In my experience, itās quite an underrated, overlooked achievement to get up to 50 people, at least some of which struggle with generally accepted social behavior to get organized and work towards a common goal
That sound track is a weird deja-vu. I canāt stand the graphics of most JRPGs, so the 16-bit ones are a neat way around that. My Japanese reading is rather basic and I tend to rely on subtitles. Thanks for the hint, another title added to the to-do list
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Totally, as a gamer whoās spent countless hours playing WoW, and a lot of it raiding, I bow to raid leaders/loot master. Having seen how hard it is at times to get 4-5 people to work well as a team, in a paid work environment, as you said managing to get 40-odd kids to work together like a well-oiled machine, in an online environment to boot, is very hireable in my opinion.
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Did anyone else go through a phase of buying games on steam and never playing them? It took me a while to realise that I would never have the time to play these games until I stopped buying them!
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Damn you!
I just bought CTR and Spyro bundle (āfor my nephews when they visit meā) and NFS Heat (to revive my NFS III: Hot Pursuit days); for my PS4 which sat in its shelf for 2 years now.
(All for 25 CHF so still mustachian of course)
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Monkey Island I and II, pure nostalgia. At least started 1, but surely will never make it to 2 until retirement
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