Played the arcade game back in the day.
I got the same song and dance about NROTC scholarships at the same time period.
Miiiight be true. I was on the 7th fleet flagship the Blue Ridge. All we did was port hop, so the longest I ever spent at sea was 12 days. We once spent a month in Australia, and we frequently went to Hong Kong, Thailand, and The Philippines. We even hit Shanghai once in 88 or 89. I didn’t care for the Navy, and when my time was up during Desert Shield, I got the F out.
I was on a sister boat, by chance. The LaSalle, 6th fleet flagship. We did that same port hopping, just all around the Mediterranean. It’s nice working for an schmoozing Admiral.
Jeeze. Get a room you guys.
Which is why VR works best (or imo only works) when you are strapped into the cockpit of a fighter jet or helicopter!
Lol, change the thread title to QT3 VFW Hall.
TRIGGERED
I felt the same way in 94. Six and out.
This gave me a needed laugh today. I went to a VFW Hall once. Bad hardees formica tables and Miller lite. I never went back.
You know we’d get a discount on beers there right? If you guys join us, I’m buying rounds.
Not a veteran (but hats off to you guys), was just kidding around, but I volunteered at a charity function once that took place at a hall and you described it well.
Yeah, I thought I was gonna get mugged or rolled. And it was in a small town!
Hi, my name is Jean-François. I’m Canadian and, as you can probably tell from my name, French is my first language, so please excuse any gallicisms that sneak in. I live in the province of Québec, right across the river from Ottawa.
My main interests and hobbies include history, politics, literature, videogames and boardgames, cooking and tennis.
I did two law degrees in university, but skipped the bar and did a masters in legal translation instead of becoming a lawyer. I then spent around five years as a translator for the federal government, working mostly on translating decisions from the various federal-level courts. Four years ago, I followed my interest in legislative drafting and joined the the federal Justice department, on the team that is responsible for reviewing all federal bills and proposed regulations. Half of the work is basically copy editing the French or English version (French in my case) and the other half is making sure that both versions are equivalent.
I found this community after reading a few of Tom’s reviews and coming to this forum to follow the comments threads. The one thing that struck me was Tom’s reaction to typos and factual errors. It makes me happy to see someone thank people for pointing out mistakes instead of making up excuses or dismissing them.
I joined the forums at the end of 2016, but have only started posting regularly in the last few months.
My favorite genres are strategy, tactics, rpgs and card-based games, but there are very few genres where I haven’t found at least one great game.
As for the games that “made me”, here are the main ones.
King’s quest 5 This game, along with the Québec-dubbed version of The Simpsons, is what helped me become bilingual, eventually leading me to my career in the translation field. My grasp of English was limited and my parents quickly tired of being pestered to translate every other sentence, so they bought me a French-English dictionary. Over a few months, that allowed me to play the game mostly on my own, with only the occasional help needed. Many puzzles were really unfair and I only finished it years later with the help of a walkthrough, but I loved the mix of various fantasy environments and the game had a huge effect on my language skills.
Red Baron This is THE game of my childhood. Just the manual was amazing. I say manual, but it was a history of the Great War and of the birth of aviation as well as a treatise on the physics of flight all in one. I threw out most of my game boxes and manuals years ago, but my beat-up Red Baron manual is one of the very few things I kept. I must have read it through dozens of time on my long school bus rides. Reading about Immelmann, von Richtofen, Guynemer, Bishop and all the other aces and the flying alongside or against them was a magical feeling. The whole character-progression system was amazing : getting medals and promotions, getting shot down and rotting in a p.o.w. camp, moving to different squadrons and eventually getting to customize your own plane. I still remember how proud I was when I reached 82 victories with one of my pilots.
Warlords This was the start of my love for turn-based strategy and tactics games. Even almost 30 years later, I still think of the map of Illuria with its 80 cities (and I’m not alone in that, I have found a fan-made version of that map for pretty much every fantasy strategy/wargame I have played since). I can remember the city, close to the Orcs of Kor starting location, that produced wolf-riders a turn faster than usual, the joy of flying around the map with a hero stack full of dragons and other flying units, the despair of having my best hero slain by a demon while exploring a ruin. I played a lot of Warlords 2 and even more of Warlords 3 DLR - both better games in every aspect - but I will always look back fondly on the first game.
Lords of the Realm The first empire-building game I played. I really liked the mix of castle building, province management and conquest. It’s also the first game I can remember that had different personalities for your AI opponents. The Knight was an annoying and aggressive enemy, so he was usually my first target, but he managed his lands like a drunken teenager, so whatever county you captured from him was useless for a long time. On the other hand, it really paid off to capture a province from the Bishop or the Countess. I liked the sequel well enough, but I felt it went too far in the RTS direction and simplified the management and castle-building aspects too much.
Welcome, Jean-François! Your comment made me think of just how awesome some of those early game manuals were. Especially the ones that had a lot of historical background and added flavor beyond, “these are the keys you need to know.” I have none of mine left anymore, but sure wish I did.
I truly pine for the manuals of yester-year. While I was never big on flightsims, I do recall RPG manuals studded with spells and feat lists and add-on notes about beasties you’d find in the wild or NPCs you might find in the cities. . .
I also had a love of history spurred by the excellent Age of Empires manuals which had these awesome primers on every civilization in the game.
And man, the voluminous backstory and Samwise art at the back of early Blizzard manuals. . .
I miss that :(
I’ve already lamented the loss of Microprose in a few threads here, but this manual came to mind. I’m sure some of the other guys in the flight sim thread might remember this one.
When your manual is an actual binder … you win.
And Armando, just for you:
I spent more time with the BG2 manual than the actual game, I suspect. And I remember seeing that Falcon binder insanity in Software Etc ages ago. Wasn’t it visible as part of how the game was packaged?
It was, and I think it appealed to the bigger/better/more aspect of gamers shopping for something new. Falcon 4.0 was crushingly hard so that manual was very needed. Hell, the life of the game itself would make a good documentary.
Source code was leaked, internet programmers and modders took over, and to this day, playing Falcon is still a thing. BMS really took it to another level.
My favorite manual was the one for Neverwinter Nights. It might as well have been a 3E Player’s Handbook.
I have the Baldurs Gate manuals and maps. I sued to love browsing them after a session. Now I never even bother checking the official online manuals, if I can’t figure it out I just ask someone on a forum. I have played games where I totally miss some controls because I refuse to look at an online .pdf manual.