rivercityrandom

I imagine part of the reason why old word processors and productivity software in the days before GUI standardization were so terse and hard to use was because of limited RAM and disk space to store help files and provide user-friendly menus, and part of it was to ensure vendor lock-in by making it so learning another piece of software would take a similarly huge investment of time and training resources. Part of it might also have been copy protection by making it so the program was useless without the 900-page manual. I love the idea of typing in the plain gray-on-blue screen of WordPerfect 5.1, but I use Google Docs these days because I don't want to figure out which of WordPerfect's bizarre non-standard control codes does underline and which one launches nukes at Russia.

It's such a pity Jack Tramiel split off Atari Games from Atari Corporation; otherwise Tengen might have been talked into making good 7800 ports of Atari arcade games instead of spending so much time trying to reverse-engineer Nintendo's lock-out chip.

The rarest games I had as a kid were Frogger II: Threeedeep and Track and Field. Both of them are 6 on AtariAge's rarity chart. I saw Pigs in Space complete in box at a thrift store once in the 90's for $1 and I am very sad I didn't pick that up.

I got all my items from him last week. Thanks!

Wow... that's a set of feelies to put all Infocom games ever to shame... Sure beats "the thing your aunt gave you but you don't know what it is."

I have PM'ed.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2014/04/28/france-claims-it-is-the-second-most-important-producer-of-video-games-in-the-world Apparently, according to a report released by the French government, France is the "second most important producer of video games in the world." As much as I love France and the French, I am struggling to find some truth in that. Just like the article says, the only major French studio is Ubisoft (and the late, departed Infogrames/Atari) and most of their hits are made in Montreal. Am I missing something here? Can anyone name a good French video game besides Rayman, or possibly Beyond Good and Evil?

I dunno, if you look at the Colecovision, NES, and Sega Master System specs side-by-side, they look quite comparable. The Sega Master System even uses the same Z80 processor and Texas Instruments graphics and sound chips as the Colecovision. If Coleco had survived the crash and had innovated in different genres of games like Nintendo and Sega did, you might have gotten third-gen quality out of them.

Seriously, how hard can it be to make a Call of Duty game? You take the same game you made last year, add a few more maps and textures, and remove more features to be purchased as DLC. I don't understand why this takes millions of dollars and hundreds of programmers.

Can I vote for the Vectrex?

I have a soft spot in my heart for Mac OS 7-9. The interface was more quirky than it was elegant; but it got out of your way so you could do stuff. But sadly, today's OSes seem more interested in thrusting eye candy (or worse, targeted advertisements) in your face than doing what an OS is supposed to do: be a go-between between your hardware and your programs. Of course, right now, I run Ubuntu, which tries to be a poor man's Mac OS X as far as eye candy is concerned, but it's relatively simple to install a new desktop environment and window manager. The freedom of choice and the lack of viruses are the main reasons why I am going the Linux route, although I do run Windows 7 on my games machine and... it's not awful. Windows 8 on the other hand, I have heard nothing but bad stories about.

Yeah, I'd say Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is more of a $39.99 lobotomy than a $39.99 brain transplant, being as it was a dumbed-down RPG created for the North American market (the Japanese title of the game is even "Final Fantasy USA"--how's that for a kick in the nuts?) I did love the music in the game though.

That ad for NES Shampoo with Mario and Peach hovering over a bathing child kind of hovers on creepiness. Were they less sensitive to things like that in the early 1990s?

I always thought the Sinclair ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000) was a beautiful-looking piece of kit, even if it only had 2 KB of RAM and using the keyboard was like programming the world's most complicated microwave oven...

After playing the awesome Ducktales Remastered, I have been going back and playing some of the Disney games on the Genesis, namely Castle of Illusion and Quackshot. Since my childhood, they've impressed me with their colorful graphics, fun gameplay, and sense of charm you just don't see in games these days.