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Quantum of Phallus posted:Fair play to the IT guys who've never had a drive break.
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Jan 26, 2016 02:27
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Buttcoin purse posted:Cool, a disk that's probably hardly been used, I'll peel the label off that and format it. but first gotta put some duct or electrical tape just right so that the disk is outta read-only mode
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Jan 26, 2016 02:33
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Remember using a hole-punch to magically make single-sided 5.25" floppies into double-sided floppies?
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Jan 26, 2016 02:38
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Remember using a hole-punch to magically make single-sided 5.25" floppies into double-sided floppies? Yes. Yes I do. I probably still have some in the garage in the C64 box. Feedback Agency posted:Also, Battlezone. I spent so much time playing this game and it's sequel it isn't funny. I didn't hate BZ2 as much as some, but I still far preferred 1. Probably one of the most underrated games I can think of.
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Jan 26, 2016 03:09
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WebDog posted:Let us not forget IBM's infamous Deskstar - or Death Star as it became known - where the magnetic coating would flake off platters owing to an engineering oversight from increasing the size of the platters from 2.5" to 3.5".  If anyone was wondering what the carnage and chaos looked like. On the other hand, every single Hitachi Travelstar hard drive I've ever owned has been knock-on-wood reliable. Can't say the same for WD - I had a couple of 320GB laptop drives go tits up on me.
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Jan 26, 2016 03:10
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Generally, hard drives either fail within two years, or they keep going for decades.
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Jan 26, 2016 05:24
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I'm on PC #3 in the last 13 years and I've never had a drive fail e- actually PC #4 but the one I just replaced is fine, just hopelessly outdated
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Jan 26, 2016 05:28
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Tubesock Holocaust posted:
Holy poo poo, that's both cool and awful. quote:On the other hand, every single Hitachi Travelstar hard drive I've ever owned has been knock-on-wood reliable. Can't say the same for WD - I had a couple of 320GB laptop drives go tits up on me. Noooo my storage server is full of WD Reds and my desktop big storage drive is a WD Black 
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Jan 26, 2016 05:29
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Thanks for the tip on the Battlezone download. I had the demo way back in the day, think I got it off a game I borrowed from my cousin. I though it was the best thing ever which wasn't an uncommon with demos when you're a kid with no spending money. Speaking of my cousin, when LGR did his Top 17 Worst PC Games of all Time video 5 years ago when I first started watching him I was pretty amused to discover three of games that my cousin owned. Streets of Sim City, Test Drive Offroad, and Extreme Paintbrawl 2 (LGR has the first one but they both suck).
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Jan 26, 2016 05:40
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ymgve posted:Generally, hard drives either fail within two years, or they keep going for decades. Laptop hard drives are significantly more likely to fail in that timeframe. If desktop drives make it that long then they do frequently just keep chugging along. I generally retire my HDDs once they start showing signs of wear (usually before there are any noticeable symptoms), and have one drive in my secondary desktop that I probably should swap out on this basis, but most of my HDDs have easily lasted more than 5 years and just keep going.
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Jan 26, 2016 05:42
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One of the hard drives that starting making GBS threads the bed was the one in the first computer I bought myself, a 2007 MacBook Pro. I bought a hybrid drive to replace it a couple years ago but didn't have the little tiny torx bits to get at it so I haven't yet. Now that regular SSDs are so cheap I could just put one of those in there but I'd have this unused hybrid drive that isn't good for anything laying around. The optical drive pretty much acted up from the beginning but I was lazy and didn't do the warranty on it. I'm thinking about putting a Blu-Ray drive in there to spite Steve Jobs.
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Jan 26, 2016 05:46
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Optical drives die on me way more than hard drives. Seems like any optical drive I don't use for a year or two becomes totally useless, just spins up and down over and over.
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Jan 26, 2016 05:51
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Pham Nuwen posted:Optical drives die on me way more than hard drives. Seems like any optical drive I don't use for a year or two becomes totally useless, just spins up and down over and over. I would not be surprised if I went to the landfill in my bumfuck little town, dug out my 20 year old Windows 95 computer from under a foot of old burned garbage, and removed the CD-ROM drive to find it perfectly functional. Every hard drive I've ever owned on the other hand broke no matter how many blood sacrifices I would offer them. My last laptop went through two of them in four years. I replaced the dying second drive shortly before selling the computer just a year ago. Never give Toshiba money.
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Jan 26, 2016 06:01
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This is a weird one, but I remember back in the day there were racing games that came with plastic model kits, what the gently caress were they called?
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Jan 26, 2016 06:01
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WebDog posted:Let us not forget IBM's infamous Deskstar - or Death Star as it became known - where the magnetic coating would flake off platters owing to an engineering oversight from increasing the size of the platters from 2.5" to 3.5". Oh poo poo, did Hitachi fix that (for the 3.5" desktop drives)?  I already replaced the drive (with WD) because the Hitachi was too small, but I figured it was probably still a decent drive to put into another machine (because it wasn't Seagate).
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Jan 26, 2016 06:11
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Around 2001, we were trying to network out apartment that was made of two floors. Getting ethernet wire to run all the way around was lovely, but I could hit everyone on the first floor. It was the upstairs people I couldn't get. One of my best friends worked at the college IT department and they recently upgraded all the labs from BNC to ethernet. So.. they had a ton of BNC cables. We had BNC wires hanging out of the windows, going to the second floor, hitting the two pcs up there, and then running down the stairs to my room where my box was running 24/7 proxying everyone on my DSL. That stuff was heavy duty. Hung outside the window during winter and none of it stiffened or lost signal. (this was before wireless being affordable.. or even existing. Forget hah)
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Jan 26, 2016 06:17
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EVIR Gibson posted:Around 2001, we were trying to network out apartment that was made of two floors. Getting ethernet wire to run all the way around was lovely, but I could hit everyone on the first floor. It was the upstairs people I couldn't get. Right about that same timeframe, my neighbor and I networked our places together so we could play games against each other and also share an Internet connection. (I had a DSL, still fairly rare at the time.) I made a huge ethernet cable, ran it out the upstairs window, between the buildings like a clothesline, and in his window. It worked great. Never got struck by lightning or anything.
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Jan 26, 2016 06:36
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Powered Descent posted:Right about that same timeframe, my neighbor and I networked our places together so we could play games against each other and also share an Internet connection. (I had a DSL, still fairly rare at the time.) My roommate and our friend on the other end of the dorm floor used to run a 200 foot CAT-5 cable down the hallway to get extra low pings for games. Our school had a really good network and being on the same floor they were probably only a single switch away anyway.
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Jan 26, 2016 06:51
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Pham Nuwen posted:Optical drives die on me way more than hard drives. Seems like any optical drive I don't use for a year or two becomes totally useless, just spins up and down over and over. We had a brownout a month or so ago, and the DVD drive got fried somehow, but the rest of the PC is perfectly functional. Not really sure how that happened, as whatever fried it would've had to pass through the rest of the major components to get to the DVD drive.
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Jan 26, 2016 07:01
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Code Jockey posted:Noooo my storage server is full of WD Reds and my desktop big storage drive is a WD Black Nerd chat: Everything WD has made in the last five years has been pretty solid in my experience, I really love the WD Red series for their almost silent operation and use them everywhere now. I think I have almost 20 of them in total and they all still work. (one of them produced some bad blocks last year but it seems to have remapped them and subsequent ZFS scrubs didn't report errors) I have a bunch of old dead WD Greens though, as well as a bunch of dead Seagate LP drives. Some series are just junk. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/ is a good read that should make Seagate owners really nervous!
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Jan 26, 2016 08:20
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Remember using a hole-punch to magically make single-sided 5.25" floppies into double-sided floppies? I was doing that regularly with 3.5" floppies, never with 5.25" ones.
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Jan 26, 2016 11:09
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Casimir Radon posted:Speaking of my cousin, when LGR did his Top 17 Worst PC Games of all Time video 5 years ago when I first started watching him I was pretty amused to discover three of games that my cousin owned. Streets of Sim City, Test Drive Offroad, and Extreme Paintbrawl 2 (LGR has the first one but they both suck). Awww, Streets of Sim City is bad? I actually bookmarked it when someone mentioned it earlier, because I remembered seeing ads for it and thinking it would be awesome to drive around in my city. I watched the video though and it looks pretty buggy. I've seen (not played myself) The Sims, though, so I guess whenever Maxis make stuff that is actually 3D rather than just using an isometric view they mess it up?
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Jan 26, 2016 12:00
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error1 posted:Nerd chat: Everything WD has made in the last five years has been pretty solid in my experience, I really love the WD Red series for their almost silent operation and use them everywhere now. I had a friend who bought a WD Green, it died after 2 months. He bought another one, it died after two months. He bought a third, died again. He then swore off desktop computers and bought a crappy Lenovo laptop. The fact that the Green series was just plain bad never crossed his mind.
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Jan 26, 2016 12:41
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I had two of the death stars, I only heard about that design error after the first one failed. Didn't wait for the second one to fail. (They're one of many good examples why RAID 1 isn't backup even if you discount software failures. Imagine having two of them in a RAID 1 array) I have a WD Green which I used for about 4, maybe 5 years. Just recently mothballed it because I just didn't need it anymore. That's why all of this outside of something like the death star is anecdotal at best.
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Jan 26, 2016 12:50
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Code Jockey posted:Holy poo poo, that's both cool and awful. I'm running a 1TB WD Blue on the desktop. Those drives are just fine (except the Greens, apparently). It just seems that every 2.5" laptop drive made by WD lives a very short life under my care. 6 months tops. Haven't had any luck with the big Seagate drives, but the 2.5" Momentus XT I bought a couple of years back still runs like a champ. Bloody Hedgehog posted:We had a brownout a month or so ago, and the DVD drive got fried somehow, but the rest of the PC is perfectly functional. Not really sure how that happened, as whatever fried it would've had to pass through the rest of the major components to get to the DVD drive. I had a lightning strike take out my internet modem/router, onboard LAN and PSU, all while leaving the rest of the PC intact. A new PSU and a PCI Intel ethernet card later and all was well. Speaking of computer relics, telephone jacks on your laptop so you can dial up some sweet, sweet 56k. My Elitebook's probably one of the last laptops that offered one. 90s Solo Cup has a new favorite as of 13:28 on Jan 26, 2016 |
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Jan 26, 2016 13:18
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Run a burn in program on any new hard drive you buy. If it doesn't fail after a day of burn in it'll most likely last for many years.
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Jan 26, 2016 13:25
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Tubesock Holocaust posted:Speaking of computer relics, telephone jacks on your laptop so you can dial up some sweet, sweet 56k. My Elitebook's probably one of the last laptops that offered one. Brand new business line laptops such as Dell Latitudes or Lenovo T-series Thinkpads offer them, but usually you have to actively select them, otherwise you will just get a little cover over the port and an empty socket on the motherboard.
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Jan 26, 2016 14:30
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The first hard drive replacement in my old laptop was under warranty so it was another garbage Toshiba drive. When it came to getting the second replacement I asked a buddy "Seagate or WD" and without skipping a beat he practically shouted "Western Digital!" I built a computer ten years ago with a Samsung hard drive and it's still chilling at my parent's house and works fine, which is interesting because any piece of technology left in their care usually ends up mysteriously broken in a matter of months.
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Jan 26, 2016 14:42
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Germstore posted:Run a burn in program on any new hard drive you buy. If it doesn't fail after a day of burn in it'll most likely last for many years. Is there a Windows one you recommend? I just bougbought an 8tb Seagate for $140 and now I'm terrified.
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Jan 26, 2016 14:53
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Melmac posted:Is there a Windows one you recommend? I just bougbought an 8tb Seagate for $140 and now I'm terrified. I don't, I've had the same HDDs for like five years and have only bought SSDs recently.
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Jan 26, 2016 15:34
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Buttcoin purse posted:Awww, Streets of Sim City is bad? I actually bookmarked it when someone mentioned it earlier, because I remembered seeing ads for it and thinking it would be awesome to drive around in my city. I watched the video though and it looks pretty buggy. I've seen (not played myself) The Sims, though, so I guess whenever Maxis make stuff that is actually 3D rather than just using an isometric view they mess it up? I don't know how Streets of Sim City got on the list and Sim Copter didn't! I played the hell out of both. Streets of Sim City is more like Sim Copter 2.0 - the game engine is exactly the same- but with way less bugs. Sim Copter was AWESOMELY buggy. I think this was much of the appeal to me - it was amusing. I still love seeing games glitch out - but no game could do it like Sim Copter. I was especially shocked when the hundreds of kissing speedo dudes came out, and usually crashed the computer when it happened
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Jan 26, 2016 15:41
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Sim Copter was great if you wanted to hear Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries on repeat for hours. I remember once playing the demo and trying to walk into a phonebooth and the idiot player character just sort of bugged out and warped to the top of it. He was stuck there because trying to walk over a seven inch drop (let alone a seven foot phonebooth) caused him to freeze in panic and make mumbled scared sounds.
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Jan 26, 2016 15:59
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error1 posted:Nerd chat: Everything WD has made in the last five years has been pretty solid in my experience, I really love the WD Red series for their almost silent operation and use them everywhere now. Counterpoint: I had a WD external drive (MyNetbook or something like that), basically a very slow NAS. It died after about one year, giving me about 1 hour warning. The only other drive I've had quit in the past decade was also a WD, but I am not sure how old it was. quote:I don't know how Streets of Sim City got on the list and Sim Copter didn't! I played the poo poo out of SimCopter, too. In hindsight it really wasn't that great, but something about it kept pulling me back in.
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Jan 26, 2016 17:41
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TotalLossBrain posted:I played the poo poo out of SimCopter, too. In hindsight it really wasn't that great, but something about it kept pulling me back in. I played a ton of Gunship 2000. I think I still have a working copy around here somewhere, actually. It runs pretty well in dosbox with a little bit of settings fiddling. You would do a campaign as a single pilot, getting promotions and decorations depending on how you did in missions, an eventually get a squad of four other helicopters you could order around to do secondary objectives and poo poo. They were pretty useless though and seemed to crash/get shot down or just get lost all the time. One time I was flying a helicopter with retractable landing gear, and I forgot to put it back out before landing. The screen turned red before fading to black like you do when you crash, and I got a Purple Heart for my fuckup.
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Jan 26, 2016 20:14
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I remember playing Gunship 2000 on my first computer. It would do voice through PC speaker. I tried using that feature once, but the game would completely stop before warbling out "ENEMY SPOTTED" or something. Game was a blast though, Kiowas owned
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Jan 26, 2016 20:31
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:I remember playing Gunship 2000 on my first computer. It would do voice through PC speaker. I tried using that feature once, but the game would completely stop before warbling out "ENEMY SPOTTED" or something. Game was a blast though, Kiowas owned TARGET LEFT. INCOMING! WE'RE HIT! *fade to black*
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Jan 26, 2016 20:57
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I know of two games that played a voice sample through the PC speaker, The Games: Winter Challenge (False start!) and F15 Strike Eagle II (Nice shot!). Both would pause as the sample was played. Cutting edge back in the day.
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Jan 26, 2016 20:59
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stubblyhead posted:I played a ton of Gunship 2000. I think I still have a working copy around here somewhere, actually. It runs pretty well in dosbox with a little bit of settings fiddling. You would do a campaign as a single pilot, getting promotions and decorations depending on how you did in missions, an eventually get a squad of four other helicopters you could order around to do secondary objectives and poo poo. They were pretty useless though and seemed to crash/get shot down or just get lost all the time. One time I was flying a helicopter with retractable landing gear, and I forgot to put it back out before landing. The screen turned red before fading to black like you do when you crash, and I got a Purple Heart for my fuckup. I have spent many hundreds of hours on GS2000. It was the first game I ever really got into. I even bought the Islands & Ice expansion, even though it wasn't that great. I started out on the easiest settings but eventually got around to flying with all helper options disabled and on full difficulty. Still probably one of my top 2 sims I have ever played. All my play-throughs ended either in Brigadier General or eternal 2nd Lt. Another good post-mission screen was when you got shot down and then rescued. He sits all sad in the locker room after that. Remember how you could click on the screen of one of the computers on the main screen and it would bring up different poo poo? I have played a few helicopter sims since then but none were as good as GS2000. It's probably just nostalgia for my first 'serious' game. Apache was also excellent. The same publisher put out Hind, which was also good but I had a harder time with it due to the lovely Russian instrumentation. Longbow was okay. Comanche looked pretty but was terrible all around from a simulation perspective. VV I just played it for a long-rear end time. I didn't have access to a large variety of games and GS was by far the best one. I really wanted to play Ultima 7 pt 1 or 2, but my computer couldn't handle it. Also, I used a CH Flightstick with separate throttle controller. TotalLossBrain has a new favorite as of 23:23 on Jan 26, 2016 |
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Jan 26, 2016 22:57
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TotalLossBrain posted:I have spent many hundreds of hours on GS2000. It was the first game I ever really got into. You were much better at the game than I was I think. I could do OK handling weapons and counter-measures myself and some of the more basic flight stuff, but the few times I tried everything on full manual I'm pretty sure I crashed as soon as I tried making a turn. Doing everything with the keyboard probably didn't help matters. I would usually get to Major or so before moving on to something else. I also didn't realize that using a less badass helicopter with fewer weapons resulted in higher scores, and thus faster promotions. I hosed around with the Islands and Ice stuff a little bit too, but never really got into it. I much preferred blowing up Serbs and Iraqis. gently caress that compass interference in Antarctica too, that was some bullshi.t
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Jan 26, 2016 23:18
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TotalLossBrain posted:Apache was also excellent. The same publisher put out Hind, which was also good but I had a harder time with it due to the lovely Russian instrumentation. Oh man, Hind was the best sim ever.  I never got tired of napalm bombing Afghan villages and mowing down little polygon Taliban fighters  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUAiBfKJjmg
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