Gamers?

[parametric]

Any Bikers out there <Saul> will love this - so deliciously kitch . . .

Interesting to see Mark Hamill in the cast . . . .

Also the "Corley Motorcycles" mentioned can scarcely hide WHAT make is being talked about

GREAT Music




Chris

[shelly0624]

My sons would play computer games and I really enjoyed watching them play sometimes. I had so much work to do that I didn't give myself that luxury, but it would have been a great way to relax. The one I really got into was Grim Fandango. I loved the Day of the Dead theme with the film noir setting and style. I liked the story line, the puzzles, and I never saw that end coming! A bit bizarre...but fun.

[Saul]

Any Bikers out there <Saul> will love this - so deliciously kitch . . .

Interesting to see Mark Hamill in the cast . . . .

Also the "Corley Motorcycles" mentioned can scarcely hide WHAT make is being talked about

GREAT Music




Chris

Yes I remember Full Throttle. Always reminded me of the Ogri character created by Paul Sample in 1972 for Bike magazine

[Saul]

My sons would play computer games and I really enjoyed watching them play sometimes. I had so much work to do that I didn't give myself that luxury, but it would have been a great way to relax. The one I really got into was Grim Fandango. I loved the Day of the Dead theme with the film noir setting and style. I liked the story line, the puzzles, and I never saw that end coming! A bit bizarre...but fun.

I played this a lot but I don't think I ever finished it. Grim Fandango was a masterpiece of theme, puzzles, characters and music.

The remastered addition is currently on Steam for just £2.74/$3.50 and is available for PC, Mac and Steam Deck. I just bought it

[Rat Lady]

Oh you bet we all need a reminder course on using the resources efficiently.

Spectrum Next is a very nice machine, I got it on the second kickstarter campaign which more or less coincided with Covid and it took three years to complete! It's a combination of modern and retro, you can load games from SD card, wifi (!) or even cassette tapes if you fancy that. And the hardware is updated too, though you can still run it as a plain old speccy if you wish.

But it's all about nostalgia so I barely use it once a year (along with my real vintage home computer collection).

Nostalgia is huge for me. It's why I would rather eat the ass end of a rabid skunk than play one of those flashback systems. I much prefer fighting my NES for an hour and a half just to get 5 minutes of game time than play one of those monstrosities for 2 hours. I can't stand emulators of any kind, not just those flashback vomit inducers.

I also drive an 87 Iroc with T-tops. But that car I dreamed about for 35 years before I got her. I even named her Dream.

I haven't gamed for several days as I've been sicker than hell for a while now. But I'm obviously on the mend as I'm on the computer. So here's hoping I'm clear in VERY NEAR FUTURE.

[sonic2000gr]

Nostalgia is huge for me. It's why I would rather eat the ass end of a rabid skunk than play one of those flashback systems.

I still think you would really like the Spectrum Next (if you were a Spectrum fan at least). It is not an emulation (does contain an FPGA, but it is the actual hardware that's recreated in it). You can connect all original peripherals of the ZX Spectrum (including microdrives and tape deck if you would like to load traditionally).
The whole packaging and experience is that of an 80s machine, along with a hefty BASIC manual. And it does have a new (Next) personality in it, it's not just the old Spectrum machines. It is really what the Spectrum would have become had they continued developing it.

Of course I have the original models as well, along with quite a few other systems. I used to do 'retrosummer week' every year, where I would take each one out and play / program it a bit. But haven't done much in recent years unfortunately.

[Rat Lady]

Nostalgia is huge for me. It's why I would rather eat the ass end of a rabid skunk than play one of those flashback systems.

I still think you would really like the Spectrum Next (if you were a Spectrum fan at least). It is not an emulation (does contain an FPGA, but it is the actual hardware that's recreated in it). You can connect all original peripherals of the ZX Spectrum (including microdrives and tape deck if you would like to load traditionally).
The whole packaging and experience is that of an 80s machine, along with a hefty BASIC manual. And it does have a new (Next) personality in it, it's not just the old Spectrum machines. It is really what the Spectrum would have become had they continued developing it.

Of course I have the original models as well, along with quite a few other systems. I used to do 'retrosummer week' every year, where I would take each one out and play / program it a bit. But haven't done much in recent years unfortunately.

For me, half of the enjoyment is putting the cart in the slot. It takes me back to a simpler time when I didn't have to worry about bank loans, car insurance, power bills, and all that kind of crap. When I play Blaster Master on my NES, I still listen to, don't laugh, NKOTB while I play. I'm in the hunt for a Walkman and boom box from the 80's as mine got stolen so I can't listen to my cassettes until they're replaced. And I'm 100% unwilling to buy any modern crap. Sure I have CD's and an MP3 player, but it's just not the same. Like I said, my car is a 1987. Nostalgia, and going back as much as I can to the greatest decade ever, the 80's, means more to me than my limited vocabulary can express.

[sonic2000gr]

For me, half of the enjoyment is putting the cart in the slot. It takes me back to a simpler time when I didn't have to worry about bank loans, car insurance, power bills, and all that kind of crap. When I play Blaster Master on my NES, I still listen to, don't laugh, NKOTB while I play. I'm in the hunt for a Walkman and boom box from the 80's as mine got stolen so I can't listen to my cassettes until they're replaced. And I'm 100% unwilling to buy any modern crap. Sure I have CD's and an MP3 player, but it's just not the same. Like I said, my car is a 1987. Nostalgia, and going back as much as I can to the greatest decade ever, the 80's, means more to me than my limited vocabulary can express.

I know exactly what you mean. You need things to get you into that time bubble, to a simpler time with no anxiety and a world which you could mostly understand (I find this increasingly difficult with all that's going on the last few years).
Hopefully playing my synth and piano (though not vintage themselves) usually takes me back to my student years back in 89 when I also started playing. And it mostly empties my mind from other thoughts.

I also still have many of the cassette tapes I've had as a kid. I sometimes listen to them. A few years back I bought and refurbished a HiFi tape deck. I also have a NOS walkman from the good old days. And my minidiscs from the late 90s, some of them containing radio recordings of incredible radio broadcasts we had back then.

When I take my first computer out of storage, I usually load (from tape) my first programs. These take me even further back to 1984...

[Yash]

Started with Game & Watch as a kid, single screen ones then Nintendo's double-screen Donkey-Kong.

Arcade Games: Centipede, Defender, Donkey-Kong, Space Invaders, Pac-man, Xevious, Moon Cresta, etc...

Atari 2600 after that: Pole Position, Space Invaders, Ms Pac-Man, Combat and more. Arcade at home. No Basic Programming cartridge was finding its way to me, so had to wait years until...

... an Oric Atmos (48k, 4 colours). Taught myself BASIC and Assembly on it. The manual is fantastic, one of the best ever. Finished 'L'Aigle d'Or'
on it. Spooky Mansion, Rat Splat, Mr. Wimpy, The Hobbit with colours filling line by line as you watched... Typing Hex listings for games from magazine... Few games, even rarer computer: all of my school friends had a C64, a cousin had a Sinclair, another friend a C16 until...

... I registered for a computer course, aced the exam, and the prize for 1st was a Commodore 64. Thus the game swapping with friends: Karateka, The Last Ninja, Green Beret, Ghosts n' Goblins, Kentilla, etc... More BASIC programming, until...

... Amiga A500. A gaming powerhouse with HAM mode. Kick Off 2, Lotus Esprit Turbo, Lemmings, The Pawn, Eye of the Beholder, and many more. Hacking Lattice C to a single Diskette so that it compiled faster, had to wait for a MIDI interface and then used Music-X, Bars and Pipes Pro, sometimes Octamed. Fun times.

PS1: Tekken 2, Wipeout, Crash Bandicoot, Twisted Metal, Gran Turismo, and so many more great games on that platform.

PC in the meantime, also graduated as a Systems Engineer. The original Far Cry and Baldur's Gate, Doom, Tomb Raider, Bomberman/Dyna Blaster in LAN.

Many years later, a second-hand PS3 with great games like the Ninja Gaiden series, God of War, more Tekken, Modern Warfare 2 I think.

PS4 and PS4 Pro after that: Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, Battlefield IV, Tekken again, Ratchet and Clank, FIFA, Gran Turismo, Warframe, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tomb Raider series, Uncharted series, Spider-man, Batman series, The Witcher III - Wild Hunt,...

Now on PS5, and although I do have a PC with an NVIDIA RTX2080 and some PC Games, I far prefer playing with the DualSense controller on PS5 (I also have it playable with the PC Games): Ghost of Tsushima upgraded, Cyberpunk 2077 (just finished), Demon's Souls (another masterpiece before getting Elden Ring), Ratchet & Clank, Spider-man: Miles Morales, Battlefield 1 and V, Infamous: Second Son, Astro's Playroom, Gran Turismo Sport, Overcooked, Metro Exodus, Fall Guys, Apex Legends upgraded, Tekken, etc...

A good thing my wife is a gamer too. She finished all the Tomb Raiders, the Spider-man series, the Uncharted series and Ghost of Tsushima.

Looking forward to finishing Demon's Souls, Ghost of Tsushima and then will get Elden Ring. Never buy games new, I can wait years to get them. There are few that really interest me. I would like to get Days Gone and perhaps Space Marines, God of War Ragnarok, the next Ghost of Tsushima, the latest Star Wars as it's made by Respawn (Titanfall 2, Apex Legends). AAA games aren't very interesting: they're very formulaic and buggy these days.

I have less time to play but still am a gamer, and probably always will be.

[Saul]

That is an interesting timeline of games and machines through the decades Yash

These days I use both the Mac and PC for gaming. Never got into consoles and controllers although I have owned a fair few over the years. I prefer the finer control of mouse and keyboard, although perhaps controllers have improved over the past few years?

Like you my wife is also a gamer so there is never an issue in that regard

I buy all my games on Steam when there is a sale on. So they cost next to nothing The only one not through Steam is World Of Warcraft. The new expansion is due to drop next month and the pre-patch is live next week. My only real complaint about WOW is the graphics. It really needs a complete reworking to bring it up to today's standards. Some areas are better now but in general it all still looks a bit too cartoon like for me.

[Yash]

That is an interesting timeline of games and machines through the decades Yash

These days I use both the Mac and PC for gaming.

Like you my wife is also a gamer so there is never an issue in that regard

I buy all my games on Steam when there is a sale on. So they cost next to nothing The only one not through Steam is World Of Warcraft.

Hey, thanks Saul.

The Mac reminds me I also played on Mac briefly: Poker - mostly MTTs and Sit n' Go's. Nowadays the Mac is mostly used for the studio although it's quite old. It's quite stable though. I still play Poker but on PC and mostly cash games these days. We'll see if I get reach the next level in Poker, but that requires deeper study, coaching even. I will probably head back to MTTs one day.

I get second-hand PS4 and PS5 games in physical format for around CAD 10-15. I definitely don't need to spend $60+ for a game. When I'm done with the games, I usually re-sell them, so my overall spending on one game in the end is really small.

For PC, I got notifications from a Discord channel when free games are available on Epic Games Store. I got Death Stranding like that, and Guardians of the Galaxy and several others. I am reluctant to buy PC Games ever since they were changed so that you can't re-sell them.

Having a wife who also plays is a real bonus: we can play two-player games too Overcooked is dangerous though: probably the only time we ever get into disputes

I did play Warcraft quite a lot on PC. Before that, Dune on PC.

I prefer single-player campaigns but ever since Battle Royale games made a big splash, they seem to have become rarer. RPGs and Open World games are great. I had a great time with The Witcher III and am looking forward to the next installments. Cyberpunk 2077 was a very nice ride and I'm glad I waited until all the flaws had been fixed, otherwise I would have despised the game.

Ghost of Tsushima is a must, especially now that it is also on PC so if you prefer playing there with Keys and Mouse, it's available. It's a stunning game, really well designed. It takes inspiration from the Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War games as well as Witcher III, some Assassin's Creed, but the saying goes 'The best Assassin's Creed game is... Ghost of Tsushima!'. Sucker Punch, the developer, is one to watch. There is a movie planned, directed by the John Wick director, and they most probably are working on Ghost of Tsushima 2 as well.

Normally, I'd go for Gran Turismo 7 on PS5, but I don't see a large difference in graphics and feel from the videos compared to the one I have which is GT Sport on PS5.

The cool things about PS5: all your games on PS4 still play, sometimes they also have a free upgrade for PS5. DualSense is amazing: haptic feedback and so on...

Haven't tried a VR headset yet, but probably will one day - quite expensive for PS5 though. There are more affordable alternatives on PC, second-hand even.

I'd also like a better NVIDIA card one day, but more for running AI than games, although getting real-time advanced Ray-tracing / Path-tracing is quite astonishing. When I was studying Computer Science, rendering a single 3D frame with Ray Tracing was a multi-hour if not multi-day affair, offloaded to a mainframe computer hosted somewhere else

[Rat Lady]

I was never much into PC games, but some of the exclusives have made their way into my life. The main one being Hatred at the moment. Some people say the senseless violence in the game is the kind of thing that that inspires mass murderers. While that is what happens in the game, which is also the point of the game, that's not why I play it. When I get into a state that I'm beyond pissed off, I boot up the game. It lets me get my anger and frustration out and no one in real life (myself included) gets hurt. Sure, there's a lot of pixel people lying dead in the pixel street they live on, but it's therapeutic for me. I also find the game fun.

As for the good old stuff, I have Atari 2600, NES, SNES, N64, PS1-PS5, Xbox-Xbox Series X & S (Xbox belongs to the wife). I'm not a big fan of Xbox. I never have been. But I have an Xbox One simply for the game Tell Me Why. But once I discovered that the game was available on PC and I'm still able to use a controller as opposed to keyboard and mouse if I so choose, the Xbox got put up and opened up some space on my desk.

With my PlayStation systems, I honestly play games from every system with the exception of PS2. For reasons I won't get into, I missed the entire PS2 era. So I don't have anything to say there. But with PS1, I fell in love with Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night (SOTN), and Final Fantasy 8 (FF8). I still play the both of them, but some other PS1 games were Bushido Blade and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. I wasn't the biggest fan of Soul Reaver, but Bushido Blade was a lot of fun.

When I got my PS3 though I pretty much retired my PS1 console, because I no longer had to search through literally 20 memory cards trying to find the right one for the game I wanted to play. And before you ask, I did write the games on the memory cards. But as much as I rummaged through them, the ink wore off them lightning fast. So that was a lost cause. The PS3 with its internal memory cards was a life saver. But the greatest two games on PS3 were Dante's Inferno and God Of War: Chains Of Olympus. I know GoW: Chains was originally on PSP, but after it was ported to the PS3, I snatched it up. It is the GoW title that got me into the series. Dante's Inferno was later made an Xbox exclusive, so I'm glad I got it when it was still available to buy for PlayStation.

With the SNES and N64 I was almost exclusively playing the Zelda games. With A Link To The Past I know literally know everything about the game with one exception. I can even tell you which bee is the correct one to get. The one thing I don't know is rather obscure. I know how to get to Chris Houlihan's room. Not hard in the least. The thing I don't know is who the hell Chris Houlihan is. I've searched it online, but all I can find is speculation and rumors. There is one thing that almost broke me of my love for the Zelda series. That is the ROM-hacks that came out. I tried playing Goddess Of Wisdom for a while. Don't get me started. Six years in and I have only made it to the third temple. The damn game is so hard that even a professional, or creator of the game could never make it through. The game is CRUELLY difficult. The stress and rage that it causes you while playing can easily cause you to have an aneurysm. It is simply not worth playing if you value your health. And Goddess supposedly isn't even the hardest one of the ROM-hacks.That one is supposedly Parallel Worlds. I quit playing them years ago, but I do still possess them. Yet they're not the only games I own that I will not play due to rage quitting and extreme stress from playing.

With the new stuff (PS5) I almost exclusively play RDR2. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of RDR2 but still don't know half of what the game has to offer.


With my personal library of the systems I actually play, I have over 2000 games. Again, that's just the systems I actually play. I have 130 DDL's on my Switch alone. I'm attaching a zipped folder that should contain my game library, rather than posting it, as it's a super long list. I hope it works right. If it doesn't I'll just post my library normal like.

You guys have talked a bit about writing BASIC. I looked at that and was lost immediately. When I was a teenager (not quite ancient history) I used davesite.com to teach myself HTML. Now I know HTML inside-out, upside-down, and backwards. I can make a really decent website on that alone. For an amateur that is.

And there are a few games for PS4 that aren't compatible with the PS5. They are DWVR, Afro Samurai 2: Revenge of Kuma, TT Isle of Man Ride On The Edge, Just Deal With It, Shadow Complex Remastered, Robinson: The Journey, We Sing, Hitman Go: Definitive Edition, Shadwen, and Joe's Diner.

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