Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Utnayan said:

$59.99 for 50 hours or some shit. And at one point I had a bill for $400.00 on my first Visa card I ever had. Then I played AOL"s NWN, and that was 5 hours a month for free, and $3.95 an hour after.

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Between Yserbius and Imagination network, and AOL NWN I think most of my early paychecks were completely eaten up there. F Compuserve and it"s hourly fee too. People today don"t have a clue about the fun of 1200 and 2400 baud modems and pay by the hour online fees.

I remember Wizardy in the early 80s because my Dad who was an engineer in the Navy had just finished his 20, bought said PC, and was looking for work. After, he turned down an early job at MS since he thought computers had no future, and went into TV repair.

Bards Tale

ZZGO bitches

Bard"s Tale construction set made me an angry panda.

Lost Ranger said:

Yes I played the first Wizardry. That and Ultima 1. 1981 was a good year for RPG video games. For what it"s worth my old ass also played pong when it was still cool.

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Never ever, and I mean never could get into Ultima, none of it. Until UO and even then it was lukewarm due to my aversion to "hard core" PVP.

That and I was never a huge Garriot fan.

Wizardry was my favorite geek phase, had reams of graph paper of all 10 levels of maps, over and over and over. Thought "Trebor Sucks" was ingenious. Ya, that was the depths of my design ability back then.

I am not sure when I converted to PC gaming off the Apple, but I do remember those nasty ass tape drives and then the world changing move to floppies.

28 years, ugh. Castle Wolfenstein, the original, that would be a good game to gauge the progression of gaming wouldn"t it? Considering what the next iteration is going to look like, compared to the top down stick art of the first one.

Champions of Krynn was another one I loved. Breath taking graphics!

Holy flashback.

The beauty of the Commodore 64 tape drives.

Apple had those uber IIe floppies.

When I started in IT, my first experience coding backup software was on huge floppy drives like the smaller 5.25".

The more I see Myspace, twitter, and facebook, the more I miss the days of BBS" and Doors.

p.s. if you weren"t a fan of Ultima Underworld, you should lose street cred!

Zehn - Vhex said:

Bard"s Tale construction set made me an angry panda.

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Fuck all this graphical shit. I remember my first main PC game was Zork. I think I was the only kid in my area at 6 years old who knew how to spell "wield", and what it actually meant lol.

That was on my dad"s pc, which he eventually dumped on me in the early nineties (old tandy 1000 8086, only 640k ram I think, and two 5 1/4 floppy drives). Oh the fun that was had trying to play the old SSI gold box games on this state of the art PC. A single totally computer controlled battle took like two hours.

tinkered with wizardy/M&M but never really played much Bard"s Tale. In fact, I didn"t really do much PC gaming until I got my 486SX for xmas one year. I remember trading in my SNES and several games just to get a 4mb upgrade. Ram was crazy expensive back then. And even then, most of my gaming ended up being MUDS and BBS shit (2400 baud was dirt slow. omg)

Lost Ranger said:

Champions of Krynn was another one I loved. Breath taking graphics!

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I was ridiculously hooked on Pools of Radiance and Death Knights of Krynn. In Death Knights, on my Amiga (fuck yeah), during the opening fight a Blue Dragon breathed and the lightning bolt hit one of my guys, hit the wall behind him, bounced off, and hit the same guy again, killing him.

I believe it was my earliest instance of nerd rage.

Never touched Zork either. I couldn"t do the text stuff and enjoy it, especially not after Wizardry"s "3D" game environment.

To this day one of my favorite "story based" games was Curse of the Azure Bonds. Not sure why but I remember that game and that story being so damn cool it just worked on every level for me.

Been so many games I may miss some but until Baldurs Gate, well actually X-Com was pretty kick ass too, but Baldur"s Gate was the slam dunk of story based RPG.

Utnayan said:

An old Atari 2600 game where you would use the black and white/color switch on the console to open up the shuttle doors and release your satellite. Now THAT is a game.

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2600 is a console that everyone had.

Get back on the Desktop computer thread, hoser.

If you want to flame, then at least break out the Intellivision.

Utnayan said:

Shuttle.

An old Atari 2600 game where you would use the black and white/color switch on the console to open up the shuttle doors and release your satellite. Now THAT is a game.

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The "newer" 2600"s didn"t have that switch did they - the black (and silver?) consoles that came out maybe around "87/"88? I vaguely remember the old wood-grained machine that my babysitter"s kids had when I 7ish or so.

Bizanich said:

I was ridiculously hooked on Pools of Radiance and Death Knights of Krynn. In Death Knights, on my Amiga (fuck yeah), during the opening fight a Blue Dragon breathed and the lightning bolt hit one of my guys, hit the wall behind him, bounced off, and hit the same guy again, killing him.

I believe it was my earliest instance of nerd rage.

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Oh damn, another one. PoR was awesome. I even bought the last one they tried to market, but was way to MMO biased to want to play a single player RPG anymore.

Come to think of it, Wizardry was the first game, and the first perma death game for me. I can remember always being prepped to reset the machine if one of your toons got whacked! Reset, recover, start over.....

I would have gone with some Infocom references (not Zork, something more obscure like Enchanter or Sorcerer perhaps) but hey, I guess Wizardry is always good. I played the hell out of a few in the series. The Bard"s Tale is an excellent selection for nostalgia though of course.

Regardless, there"s no shortage of people still lurking around here that played space invaders with the color overlays when it first hit arcades. Hell, typing games out of a magazine (in hex) into a commodore PET was my first "computer gaming" I guess. It was exciting when the lab finally got a tape drive.

I don"t really give a damn if Ng is a "gamers" gamer" or not however and I really don"t think he needs to provide credibility there. His age is a matter of record as well. We"ve had some cyclic discussions on MMO topics in the thread here but none of that is directly related to the title nor does the title"s success hinge on him being a core gamer or a marketing shill. That will be judged on its own merits when we finally see something. I can"t really see why the hell he would be doing all this if he didn"t love games though. Most retired HoF-bound ballplayers have enough cash and prestige that they don"t need the money nor the headaches.

Man intellivision was awful, 2600 was such a huge upgrade. Fuck that thumb disc thing, Id have specs of gold plastic stuck in my thumbs from having to push that thing down so hard to get it to move half the time.

Gecko said:

If you want to flame, then at least break out the Intellivision.

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I recently got the Intellivision pack on the X-box 360 to relive old times. Shark! Shark! is still great after all these years. Was playing with a friend who didn"t know my fish could eat his if I "leveled up" quicker.

Chomp chomp....

That and Snafu! .

The controls didn"t feel as smooth as the old Intellivison, but eh, what can you do.

Ngruk said:

To this day one of my favorite "story based" games was Curse of the Azure Bonds. Not sure why but I remember that game and that story being so damn cool it just worked on every level for me.

Been so many games I may miss some but until Baldurs Gate, well actually X-Com was pretty kick ass too, but Baldur"s Gate was the slam dunk of story based RPG.

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I had an issue with Curse. It was the sequel to the awesome Pools of Radiance and advertised how we could carry over our characters (awesome!).

Then we got knocked out and lost all our shit, thus more or less negating everything. Kind of annoying.

At least I knew from reading that the Drow weapons wouldn"t work in sunlight .

X-Com is perfection.

Gecko said:

2600 is a console that everyone had.

Get back on the Desktop computer thread, hoser.

If you want to flame, then at least break out the Intellivision.

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Intellivision Baseball, thumbs still hurt. My cousin and I wore out the directional pads playing 1-0 and 2-1 games all summer long.

That and Madden are pretty much the only sports games I ever got into with some zest.

Here"s one, Bird vs. Dr J? Anyone play that? I remember thinking that was just off the charts even though I was never a huge BB fan.