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I picked this up for PC and played it for a long while. Fun game. Ended up getting CC3, playing it and downloading a Vietnam mod over the course of a few days (like 60MB) which was pretty good too. The one thing that did suck was that your infantry would cut and run if they ran out of ammo. In CC3 they'd scrounge for weapons and ammo, including enemy weapons.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Combat:_A_Bridge_Too_Far I played some multiplayer too and climbed some online ladder for a while but don't remember which version. I got CC4 via :files: later on which was decent but CC2, shortcomings and all, was probably my fave. One thing I wonder about - with so much of gaming existing basically on Steam is piracy a much smaller problem today? Going all the way back to our C64 piracy was the norm rather than the exception for myself and the people I knew. Today I'd rather just support the dev and have the convenience of Steam but I wonder if it's still rampant for people who don't want to or cannot buy the games they want to play.
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Feb 4, 2016 20:46
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SilvergunSuperman posted:My first graphics card was an ATI Rage Fury card back in the day, and holy poo poo was that thing aptly named. Mine was an ATI Rage 128 and man let me tell you I raged a good 128 times before technically downgrading it to a Voodoo 3 that actually loving worked out-of-box. Mad Monk posted:My first video card was a Voodoo Banshee, I couldn't believe the difference it made in Quake 2.  The Kins posted:Yeah, the Microsoft Golf games for Windows used the Links engine. The original Win3 Microsoft Golf is actually up there on my favorite games of all time list. I loving love that poo poo.
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Feb 4, 2016 20:56
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yup, gotta find Close Combat today. I only played the demo and it was a bit complicated for me at the time, but I think thatts my kind of game. Need to find Steel Panthers 2 as well.
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Feb 4, 2016 22:02
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The cool thing about 2400 baud was that you could watch it draw out each line of text when you were playing Trade Wars on ye Olde BBS http://i.imgur.com/lViqOVY.jpg E: linking in mobile is hard... fresh_cheese has a new favorite as of 23:55 on Feb 4, 2016 |
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Feb 4, 2016 23:53
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TotalLossBrain posted:Links was also the first golf game I ever played. My 286 was way too wimpy to play "Links 386". That game was often held up as a golden standard for what a computer game can look like. The German gaming magazines liked bringing it up frequently. I was able to play Links 386  and somehow got  of lots of different courses for it, and yes, strangely as a child I played that a lot, but probably half the time I was actually playing to enjoy the scenery - actually hitting the ball out into the rough to see what scenery was on the other side of the trees. Maybe my parents didn't take me enough places?So my graphics cards went: Hercules -> Tseng ET4000 -> S3 Trio64 -> some PCI 3D card that I got out of the trash at work that worked well with Quake II -> GeForce4 MX440. I guess I missed out on the fun phase of early 3D cards  I did always wonder what the "Rendition" version of IndyCar Racing II looked like. Now I know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV3DRebD38g - not really that amazing, maybe it would have blown my mind back in those days though?
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Feb 4, 2016 23:56
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fresh_cheese posted:The cool thing about 2400 baud was that you could watch it draw out each line of text when you were playing Trade Wars on ye Olde BBS. Broken img, but I get what you mean. I remember running a BBS at 2400 baud... I had Operation Overkill as a door game, and it had this combat system based on timing a hit on a moving bar, and once I upgraded my board to 9600 baud, it was unplayable. Between the increased speed and the compression/error correction, it was basically a crap shoot whether you'd hit the mark or not. I think there was an option to just use a random generator to determine your hit strength for those situations, but it really made the game less fun. I also remember being able to kick slower modems off multi-user BBSs by bringing them into chat and just flooding their input buffer. You'd crank up your keyboard repeat rate to something ridiculous, and hold down a key til they popped off the board. Good times.
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Feb 4, 2016 23:57
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fresh_cheese posted:The cool thing about 2400 baud was that you could watch it draw out each line of text when you were playing Trade Wars on ye Olde BBS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9ctLFYSDfQ
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Feb 4, 2016 23:58
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Sten Freak posted:I picked this up for PC and played it for a long while. Fun game. Ended up getting CC3, playing it and downloading a Vietnam mod over the course of a few days (like 60MB) which was pretty good too. The convenience of piracy comes not from getting the game, but from not paying for it. Piracy is still alive.
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Feb 5, 2016 00:32
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Dear god... I don't want to admit that I want a teletype now, but I totally do.
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Feb 5, 2016 00:38
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Buttcoin purse posted:I was able to play Links 386 I missed out on a lot of as a kid. Either BBS's weren't a thing where I grew up in the early 90's, or - more likely - I just wasn't aware of them. My piracy was a rather complicated multi-step process: 1. Find out who has games at all (I was not social at all) 2. Figure out some pretext of talking to these guys 3. Figure out a way to do the file transfer and copy any paper DRM bullshit 4. Hope to god the disk isn't broken (it usually was) 5. Better hope it's a good game. I got so tired of that process that I started buying my own games fairly early on. Granted, I'd buy only 2-4 per year, but I made drat sure they were games I wanted to play for a long time. Edit: It really didn't help that all my friends and relatives had C-64's, Amigas, Segas, and Nintendos. I was the only schmuck with a PC, and a lovely one at that. TotalLossBrain has a new favorite as of 01:04 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 00:49
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loving  at his bookmark
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Feb 5, 2016 00:53
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PRESIDENT GOKU posted:The convenience of piracy comes not from getting the game, but from not paying for it. Piracy is still alive. But it makes more sense that where there's a will the software is being cracked.
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Feb 5, 2016 00:58
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Mak0rz posted:The original Win3 Microsoft Golf is actually up there on my favorite games of all time list. I loving love that poo poo. That came out in summer of 1992. I did the program icon for it as one of my first "projects" as a Microsoft employee. That was a weird time. We UX designers had two computers, a 386 running Win 3.1 and a Mac Quadra for doing design work. We didn't have Photoshop, instead we used Electronic Arts Studio 32. I am also responsible for why the default chart colors in Excel are (were?) purple, light gray, dark teal, etc. In the 4 bit color days any images in Office apps had to use the Windows 16 color palette. Those were the best looking colors you could get through dithering.
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Feb 5, 2016 00:58
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I'd say piracy nowadays is easier than it ever was. Back then with no internet we had to get our pirated software off of friends, coworkers, relatives... including all the viruses you could fit on these disks. Granted, back then these would only make the computer act weird or delete a disk, not send your bank account credentials to chinese/russian mobsters.
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Feb 5, 2016 00:59
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Police Automaton posted:I'd say piracy nowadays is easier than it ever was. Back then with no internet we had to get our pirated software off of friends, coworkers, relatives... including all the viruses you could fit on these disks. Granted, back then these would only make the computer act weird or delete a disk, not send your bank account credentials to chinese/russian mobsters. I caught "Yankee Doodle Dandee" off some pirated game in ~1994. It coerced the PC speaker to play the song, something like once an hour. My dad was 'very concerned' about this virus.
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Feb 5, 2016 01:03
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Sten Freak posted:Yeah I get that. I guess I thought online purchases were harder to crack and/or play multiplayer without unique IDs or something something. Edit: A no-cd crack turned out to be a pretty stubborn piece of malware one time. Casimir Radon has a new favorite as of 01:14 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 01:12
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Yes we're all mature adults now. We can even afford all the virtual hats, super mario beercoasters and pretend spaceships we want.TotalLossBrain posted:I caught "Yankee Doodle Dandee" off some pirated game in ~1994. It coerced the PC speaker to play the song, something like once an hour. My dad was 'very concerned' about this virus. There was one dude on youtube who obsessively had all kinds of videos of viruses and their effects and function. It was quite entertaining but I can't find it for the life of me. If you sometimes trawl through old disks or download some image of some old game from the internet you'll still find the occasional virus, far more common than one should think. It's always good to have a virus scanner for that (an old one of course, the new ones know nothing about these, why should they)
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Feb 5, 2016 01:22
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Keith Atherton posted:That came out in summer of 1992. I did the program icon for it as one of my first "projects" as a Microsoft employee. Did you know the guy that narrated this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij7aZC8t9d0
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Feb 5, 2016 01:34
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TotalLossBrain posted:I missed out on a lot of Back in the heyday of my Apple II days, the way I and most pirates operated was by actually mailing a printed list of what you had to someone. You usually got their addresses from Computist magazine or something similar in their personals section. They'd send back a package of blank disks, your list with checkmarks next to the stuff they wanted, and THEIR list. You'd copy and label stuff for them, send back their disks, a bunch of blanks, and THEIR list check marked. Rinse and repeat til you had ALL THE GAMES. I didn't even use a modem til I got my first IBM compatible many years later. Amazingly, I never got burned--Always got my disks back and they always worked. At my peak, I probably had 200 disks full of games and programs. I was never at a loss for something to play on my crappy little Laser 128. Edit: Were there actually any Apple II viruses? I don't think I ever saw one. Bout the only thing that would often happen is someone would hex-edit game credits, or the pirate group intro to include their own hacker names or something. Hell, I even made a few intro/boot screens for our 2-man pirate "gang" to steal cracking credit from whoever actually cracked the version of a game I'd get. What a tool I was. woodch has a new favorite as of 01:53 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 01:45
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Mak0rz posted:Did you know the guy that narrated this video? Nope! This was the first one published by MS, it was developed by Access so I never knew anyone who actually worked on the game
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Feb 5, 2016 01:59
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Wicker Man posted:Did anyone else play this other bike game and focus solely on loving up the other racers? Road Rash is one of my favorite games of all time, and if you liked it, it's worth checking out Road Redemption on Steam, a spiritual sequel that's still in Early Access, but is very far along and frequently updated.
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Feb 5, 2016 02:09
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woodch posted:Back in the heyday of my Apple II days, the way I and most pirates operated was by actually mailing a printed list of what you had to someone. You usually got their addresses from Computist magazine or something similar in their personals section. They'd send back a package of blank disks, your list with checkmarks next to the stuff they wanted, and THEIR list. You'd copy and label stuff for them, send back their disks, a bunch of blanks, and THEIR list check marked. Rinse and repeat til you had ALL THE GAMES. I didn't even use a modem til I got my first IBM compatible many years later. Amazingly, I never got burned--Always got my disks back and they always worked. Here in germany we had a rather infamous lawyer (named Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth) posing as a teenage girl (often named Tanya) looking for people to swap games with in magazine classifieds now and then. The entire thing was a trap he could earn money with because he exploited a certain ugliness of how german law works. (Abmahnung - in short and for example, parties just observing a criminal act can hire a lawyer, have sort of something like an C&D letter sent and demand being reinbruised to cover the fees. A lawyer though doesn't need a client to do this and can basically earn money by finding people breaking the law and sending letters telling them to cut it out - I'm not a lawyer and can't explain it better either, it is a bit more complicated than that) This caused the police to show up at doorsteps with search warrants, not too unusual now but then in a time where people didn't really consider piracy a crime quite shocking to many. He made a lot of money doing this and sticking parents of teenagers with huge bills, guy was an absolute sleaze but also quite charismatic in a pedantic kind of way. He had a certain love/hate relationship with the local cracker scene and one particular group, and would even show up to scene parties as sort of invited celebrity. A few years ago he bit off a bit more than he could chew when his practices finally caught up with him and he was supposed to go to jail for fraud. He ended up killing himself after sending several goodbye-letters, even to several people inside the cracking scene from back then.
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Feb 5, 2016 02:11
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https://youtu.be/Sg43AkD1z64
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Feb 5, 2016 02:18
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Police Automaton posted:Here in germany we had a rather infamous lawyer (named Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth) posing as a teenage girl (often named Tanya) looking for people to swap games with in magazine classifieds now and then. The entire thing was a trap he could earn money with because he exploited a certain ugliness of how german law works. (Abmahnung - in short and for example, parties just observing a criminal act can hire a lawyer, have sort of something like an C&D letter sent and demand being reinbruised to cover the fees. A lawyer though doesn't need a client to do this and can basically earn money by finding people breaking the law and sending letters telling them to cut it out - I'm not a lawyer and can't explain it better either, it is a bit more complicated than that) This caused the police to show up at doorsteps with search warrants, not too unusual now but then in a time where people didn't really consider piracy a crime quite shocking to many. He made a lot of money doing this and sticking parents of teenagers with huge bills, guy was an absolute sleaze but also quite charismatic in a pedantic kind of way. He had a certain love/hate relationship with the local cracker scene and one particular group, and would even show up to scene parties as sort of invited celebrity. Hah, I remember that guy. He was quite literally the boogeyman of the German computer scene back then. His name would show up frequently in the letters to the editor section in gaming magazines. I didn't realize he'd killed himself.
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Feb 5, 2016 03:15
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TotalLossBrain posted:I didn't realize he'd killed himself. Yeah, dude tried to auction off the domain of a german newspaper (TAZ) after having it seized for the TAZ allegedly not paying for one of his "Abmahn"-letters which wasn't even true and which he knew wasn't true. He first got six months, appealed, and then managed to get  Edit: Found the virus channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqbkm47qBxDj-P3lI9voIAw (and this is not advertising, I don't know the guy and I'm certainly not the guy either, I don't speak english that well) Police Automaton has a new favorite as of 03:55 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 03:35
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wait there are guns in germany?
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Feb 5, 2016 03:57
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max4me posted:wait there are guns in germany? Yes you just aren't allowed to carry them around on you for no reason
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Feb 5, 2016 04:01
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Police Automaton posted:Yes you just aren't allowed to carry them around on you for no reason hosed up if true
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Feb 5, 2016 04:04
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Wicker Man posted:Did anyone else play this other bike game and focus solely on loving up the other racers? Wintermutant posted:Road Rash is one of my favorite games of all time, and if you liked it, it's worth checking out Road Redemption on Steam, a spiritual sequel that's still in Early Access, but is very far along and frequently updated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyno4Ugo8t4
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Feb 5, 2016 08:48
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woodch posted:The same company (Access Software?) made a blatant N.A.R.C. ripoff that I forget the name of off hand, but it was fun. I loved playing NARC at the arcades, but hated feeding it quarters, so this was a great way to play it for free. Crime Wave! LGR has the best video on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSWse50GEX8
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Feb 5, 2016 09:57
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All the BBS talk reminds me:
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Feb 5, 2016 11:59
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Seth is an rear end in a top hat name and therefore real appropriate for a bard
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Feb 5, 2016 12:00
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Jennie? Jennie Garth? Describe her.
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Feb 5, 2016 12:06
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Howard Beale posted:Jennie? Jennie Garth? Describe her. Blonde and snobby-looking.
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Feb 5, 2016 12:13
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Police Automaton posted:Yeah, dude tried to auction off the domain of a german newspaper (TAZ) after having it seized for the TAZ allegedly not paying for one of his "Abmahn"-letters which wasn't even true and which he knew wasn't true. He first got six months, appealed, and then managed to get Virus talk -- Archive.org have just now launched a museum of malware where you can see various DOS malware in action: https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum
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Feb 5, 2016 12:14
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fresh_cheese posted:Dear god... I'd love to get a teletype machine. I've never seen one for sale around me. I collect old business machines, I have an automatic change machine, a bunch of adding machines, Comptometers, a Burroughs direct adder that I use every day, check writers, the list goes on. Old equipment is so fun to work with. It helps you understand computing so much better by it being so slow. You can see the operations like a typewriter.
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Feb 5, 2016 12:26
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Keith Atherton posted:That came out in summer of 1992. I did the program icon for it as one of my first "projects" as a Microsoft employee.  Do you have any other MS design stories? They were never exactly the hippest company, but a lot of stuff from the 3.1 and 95 era has just kind of stuck with me, for some reason. Casimir Radon posted:I stay the hell away from it these days, of course I'm an adult with a job now, and it's more convenient than ever to buy something and start playing. Back when I did a lot of the more modern games wanted you to do some dubious stuff to make the cracks work. Police Automaton posted:If you sometimes trawl through old disks or download some image of some old game from the internet you'll still find the occasional virus, far more common than one should think. It's always good to have a virus scanner for that (an old one of course, the new ones know nothing about these, why should they)   Somehow I think that counter might have gotten a little distorted over the years... John Xerox posted:Virus talk -- Archive.org have just now launched a museum of malware where you can see various DOS malware in action: https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnedOWfPKT0
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Feb 5, 2016 13:26
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Played this for hours and crashed into the WTC before it was cool.
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Feb 5, 2016 13:51
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The Kins posted:Oh, cool! I loved old 16-color icons when I was but a wee Win 3.1 user. Win 3.11 icons are still my favourites, aesthetics-wise. So bright, yet very uniform.
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Feb 5, 2016 14:14
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woodch posted:I also remember being able to kick slower modems off multi-user BBSs by bringing them into chat and just flooding their input buffer. You'd crank up your keyboard repeat rate to something ridiculous, and hold down a key til they popped off the board. Good times. Then even before that, you could get someone disconnected from a system like Diversi-DIAL if they had call waiting just by calling their number, letting it ring once, and then quickly calling the chat system to steal their line. WescottF1 has a new favorite as of 15:17 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 15:11
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