GREETINGS, WARLORD!
Man I miss those games.
There are so many strategy game lovers among us.
At 31 and stuck at the same tiny nonprofit that is always teetering on the edge of going under and continuously getting hail mary passes to stay afloat year after year, I have most of the same reasons for being here, including the lack of ambition. It’s 5 minutes away and usually easy, except a few months a year when it’s really hard. The pay is hilariously bad, but the work itself is kinda cool sometimes. And I just can’t muster up the give-a-shit to try to move on.
Good luck on your own road, Grumpy. Esp. with your mom. It’s very kind of you to keep her in mind :)
OMG DUDA AND KACZYŃSKI WERE RIGHT ANTI-POLISH BIAS IS EVERYWHERE
but…
This happened to me, too (albeit with WoW). It’s called “getting old.” :)
Should clarify, it’s the combination of my first and last name, so not quite that exotic.
Thanks, yeah I see a lot of BA + (other) adverts in my area. Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic but I’d wonder if age is working against me.
I hear you, but really time goes by really fast, and before you know it you’re stuck (in reality or otherwise.) At the very least, invest in an index fund and then just leave it alone. In twenty years who knows, you might have enough F-U money to get away. :)
Thank you! My mom would probably appreciate moving away from the New England winters.:)
Nope, just pro-Prussian!
Touché ::(
I didn’t leave it on overnight but I basically did the same thing, leaving it running all evening.
I ran a league where we each paid $10. We had a draft day. Each week 2 teams would play their games head to head and I’d simulate the rest. At the end the winner took the pot. That was a pretty cool game.
secretly, I am looking at MrGrumpy and thinking Voldemort now because that combo works perfectly… also not so much a secret anymore.
I am not sure what to say about myself, I guess Ill try and start at the beginning and ramble on a bit.
I am not sure when I joined the QT3 forums, but it was about the time when the forums on a site called “The Rantings of Lum the Mad” were winding down and I think shortly there after became “Slow news day”. Anway, at that time I was looking for a new forum and somehow ended up on the QT3 forums.
At the time I was a video game developer at a company called n-space in Orlando Florida. Don’t become a game developer kids. The hours are long, the pay is low, and you have very little job security.
Eventually, I was laid off (along with my entire team) and got kind of depressed and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I stopped posting on QT3 and eventually my account was nuked for inactivity. Then when I was running out of money, I decided to get any kind of job. I also re-created my account here on QT3.
I was a very active poster, and had a lot of strong opinions about a lot of things. I spent a lot of time on both the games and P&R forums. I got a kind of a reputation here on QT3. I think opinions of me were kind of divided by people who liked me and people who really hated me. I can’t say which group had the most members, but probably the latter.
Eventually I went on a rant in the games forum, and got banned.
I was going through a lot at the time too. I had a major change in my world view and a few other things. I mellowed out a lot during that time.
Years went by and I was finally unbanned (I saw tom on Starcraft II and asked him to unban me).
Many of my favorite forum members had gone missing. The one I miss the most is Bildungsroman.
Currently, I mostly stick to the games forum, and while I read the P&R forum, I almost never post anything there.
As a gamer, I think I have grown bored of most types of games. It is mostly a, “there is nothing new under the sun” type of thing. I do have a fear, that one day Ill lose all interest in games. My interests in games revolve around exploration and building stuff. I have zero interest in anything competitive, but do love co-op multi player games. I am always looking for the next open world game, of which there are far too few.
Thanks for sharing.
Are you into the survival games at all which a number are open-world although many are not complete yet?
I am, depending on the ratio of survival vs exploration / building.
For example, is the crafting part of the game is mainly getting food, making weapons and armor, then that doesn’t interest me so much. If its building an entire base with manufacturing abilities and a lot of other, non-directly survival things, then yes, I am very interested. Also, is the world interesting to explore or is it a zombie filled hell-hole where you are just scavenging for the same few kinds of items everywhere?
I like to stay away from early access titles for several reasons. The big one is the fact that if I play an EA title and then get bored of it it, even if they add a bunch of new content / mechanics to the game, I am unlikely to want to play it again when its finally finished. I do not want to ruin / grow bored of the experience before the game is really done.
Good to know. i don’t mean to grill you on your intro. I would just hate to see you lose interest, like permanently. All the survival kind of open worlds I know of right now, and like, are EA… perhaps in the future though we’ll get some rich complete ones. Survival and Open world seem to be “in” at the moment. Maybe not as much as Battle Royale… hopefully the two don’t merge too much. I get the feeling Open World in general will stay for a bit and broaden into other genres.
There are a lot of games I have on my wish list, so the interest is there. However, they are all EA, so I am staying away from them. There are some EA games I have played ( have a persistent friends who wants me to try some of them with him). I played 7 days to die. This has a lot of potential, but needs a lot of work to realise it. Unfortunately it has been in EA for a very long time and at this rate, it might be another 5 to 10 years before its done.
I enjoy 7 days to die. I forgot who the competitor is that has better graphics or something. I would prefer a game with a threat like that but maybe less of the gamey horde thing it does… like a dangerous world with risk but where you could build towns or something instead of giant forts you test against hordes that only know you’re there because they have to try and kill you every 7 days.
I was hoping Conan might have done that but… yeah it looks like they spent to much time on necklaces and not enough on the rest.
You need some RimWorld in your life. Technically it’s still in early access, but it’s been a complete game for a long time now.
DeepT your gaming interests match mine, and for a lot of the same reasons. I feel sometimes like I fall into, “been there done that,” mode with a game far too quickly. I need challenge and gameplay that stays interesting to keep me going. I could blame that on a lot of things, but it’s really not the games fault, there are some fantastic quality titles these days.
Have you played ARK:Survival Evolved? If so have you played with others in co-op? While it has a little bit of everything, it excels at having some truly unique things that have kept me engaged for quite a while so far. The taming, use and breeding of creatures that you rely on as part of your survival. It also adds challenge via caving (aka dungeons,) and later raiding (via boss battles.) You can play the game solo on your PC. You can also connect to PvP or PvE servers or entire groups of servers known as clusters. It’s all those latter things that take it from “combine the stick with the stone to make a hatchet” to something so much more and I honestly ignored it for a long time thinking the premise sounded cheesy. It’s pretty damned addictive. It isn’t a technological as something like Minecraft with the larger Feed the Beast modpacks or engineering add-ons. If you’re looking for that kind of challenge, those games are tough to come by.
Also a quick note, I remember your P&R heyday. For what it’s worth I fall into the mindset of ‘it takes all types to make a good party.’ I remember a ton of people who are no longer here and although I might not have loved everything they had to say at times, I was glad to have opinions here that made me understand and try to empathize with ideas that were not my own. I still feel that way. I have a large group of friends I hang out with and they run the spectrum of personal beliefs, opinions, and political sway.
Don’t ever be afraid to be yourself. I know that sounds cheesy, but just because you don’t think like others doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share your thoughts.
That’s totally ok. There are a couple very smart people I know here that don’t touch that area. There are plenty of other threads to spend time in.
On the games front your interests seem to be aligned with lots of the games coming out. Are you just finding there’s too much of a sameness about them? Is there maybe a milieu you find interesting that hasn’t been done yet?
I just want to tell all of you how much I am enjoying the posts to this thread. Y’all are cool folks.
I am Alexander Barrentine. I vaguely regret my handle on here and would change it if it were easy. I live in Chicago, IL (this is a lie; a month ago I moved to nearby Morton Grove). I have found a kind of stability in this place that I never knew as a child. After rambling around with my itinerant family for the first third of my life, I maintained that pattern for years after.
In the year 2000, I came to Chicago to work with Midway Games, riding an unusually business-y vector into games development. That company was struggling with the collapse of the arcade model, and it looked like I was going to lose my job less than a year in. I got very lucky a few times during that conflagration, and wound up finding a role with the Mortal Kombat team. It’s been a hell of a 17 year ride since then.
I have worked on all of the Mortal Kombat games, programming and sometimes writing, since MK5: Deadly Alliance. Along the way I have also contributed to other games in the company, such as Psi-Ops, Strangelhold, Blitz: The Leage, and Batman: Arkham City. I love programming, and I love games. It is an ongoing amazement to me that I get to do both.
I fell in love with Tom’s writing early on, well before this website existed. I lurked in the forums for years before signing up to get into arguments with Bill Dungsroman and Chet. Tom warned me at the time. I should have listened.
My gaming history reaches back to the arcades, Pac Man, Space Invaders and the like. The games that have most defined me would be
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Ultima VI - History has decided IV is more important, but to me VI was the great love of my life. It was so much more mechanically open, you could really explore and make that game your own. I came to know it so well, what I was doing would now be called speed running.
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Soul Calibur - What a magnificent refinement of the fighting game formula! It has the perfect balance of accommodating the button mashers, making them feel powerful, and scaling up to those who master the systems. It did not birth my love for fighting games (that would be Street Fighter 2), but it gave them a form that showed me how they can be great for everyone, not just the professionals. That is what I have been trying to bring to the MK games ever since.
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World of Warcraft - Online co-operative games have always been an important source of social interaction for me, and none more than WoW. I played from launch, following a bunch of coworkers who dove in during the beta. Ironically, I didn’t discover what was good about it until I bailed on them and joined with the server’s social tapestry. In time I became a guild leader, raid leader, found friends, found lovers, and eventually flamed out. I no longer play, but I will always treasure my time there.
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Disgaea - A tactical combat game that is more about letting you play with systems than simulating a real-world experience. The outlandish systems coordinate to make a complex and outrageous tapestry of combat options. The game then mates them with a terrain system that contributes more to the feel of each fight than any other strategy game. This thing is a daffy masterpiece, and I love it to pieces.
In the last couple years, I have found myself watching games be played (streaming) more than playing them myself. I can’t explain why, but in many ways I find it more rewarding. This is something I would like to understand better.
I’m Carl. June 13, 2002 is what my profile says, but I think I may have been here before that as well. I’d guess I first read about this forum in Computer Gaming World. It’s been a long time, anyway.
“copeknight” comes from my initial email address back in the '90s. Long story shorter, at the education building (RIP) at the University of Wisconsin–Superior there was a room called the COPE Center that served as a hang-out spot for education majors with a small computer lab, faculty and student mailboxes, and some book collections. I hung out there all the time and worked there my last year of school. Those were the greatest years of my life. We ended up giving each other medieval-esque titles for reasons that are now forgotten. The grad assistant in charge was the Maiden. I was the Knight. So: copeknight. It’s become my go-to gamertag on any service that allows one, so go and add me on Xbox Live, PSN, and Steam.
I always loved games, but no one else in my family did. It was like pulling teeth to get anyone to play a boardgame with me. My grandmother who passed before I was born, though, had loved games, and my aunt had a small collection of boardgames from the '50s and '60s that I relished every opportunity to play. She also worked as an educator in the Dept. of Corrections. They got computers (Apple IIs). Each teacher was to take one home on a weekend to get comfortable with it. She never got comfortable with it, but I did. That was the very early 1980s, and it was my first experience with the educational games of MECC, notably The Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, and Lemonade. It was the start of my love affair with games because now I didn’t need anyone to play with me.
Dates are very fuzzy for me about when stuff happened. But a year oh so later my dad bought me a used Atari 2600 with a half-dozen or so games. A few years later I got a TI-99/4A for my birthday. I got it just as TI was leaving the industry basically. I also had an Atari 5200 and an Atari 800XL. It wasn’t until I got a Commodore 64, though, that things took off for me. That was followed with an Atari 520ST and 1040ST. As I’ve mentioned before, the ST remains my favorite system of all time. I loved it sooooo much. When the bottom dropped out on the ST game market in the US, I got an Amiga 500 and later an Amiga 3000. I love the Amiga too. Around 1996, I got my first Windows PC. Ugh. But, what are you going to do? I mostly avoided consoles after the 5200. Console games were of little interest to me. It wasn’t until the PS2 came out that I started getting into them. Now I have most systems because, I’m sure, I remember that pain as an ST and Amiga owner of not being able to play games that I wanted to!
As a kid, my very favorite toys were the Fisher Price Little People play sets and various similar ones like Tree Tots and Weebles. I played with them for hundreds of hours and long after it was socially acceptable to do so. You know how some guys build huge model train sets in their basements? If I ever had a large enough basement, I’d still be very tempted to do that but set up all of those playsets instead. I’m not a creative person, but I played with those toys creatively. I had a city complete with a TV station, various businesses, and frequent disasters. In many ways, The Sims scratched a similar itch to that, but not enough.
As for important games in my development, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about those while pondering this thread. In rough chronological order, here they are beyond those I’ve already mentioned.
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Gun Fighter or Outlaws. First arcade game, can’t remember which version it was. It was at (I think) the Chef 'n Jeff restaurant in Forest Lake.
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Pac-Man. It was the machine that replaced #1, possibly when the C’nJ became a Hardees.
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Colonial Conquest (SSI). I played this first on the C-64, but it was even better on the ST with mouse support and, even better, watching conquered countries fill up with your national color. It was my favorite game for most of the 1980s.
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Rails West!, President Elect, and Cartels & Cutthroats (SSI). I loved these text-based business simulators. They’re the sorts of games I wish were still around. Luckily, the 1988 Edition of President Elect had an ST port which made it run at a much better speed than the slooowness of the C64 original.
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Seven Cities of Gold (EA). I loved Electronic Arts in the '80s (until I got an ST). This was my favorite game of theirs probably. I loved the exploration aspect. There was a thrill in it that hasn’t been equalled for me, even in Civ.
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Pirates! (MicroProse). It was prettiest on the Amiga, but I probably played the most of the C64 original. And original it was; it felt like a breath of fresh air unconstrained by genre or previous games.
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Ultima IV (Origin). Ultima IV isn’t my favorite RPG of the era, and I never did well at the game, but as foundational games goes, it is really strong. Even today, I hesitate when I see random loot strewn around town for fear that the moral system of Ultima originated.
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Empire (Interstel). The sense of exploration in Seven Cities was here, too. So was the sense of building that I loved.
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Red Lightning & Stellar Crusade (SSI). Wargames are a genre that I like, but have never been good at. These were unique in that I finished them both successfully.
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Roadwar 2000 & Phantasie (SSI). I loved both of them. I wish both were still series today.
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Manhunter: New York (Sierra). I enjoyed most of the Sierra games I played, and I would consider Space Quest III and King’s Quest IV favorites as well, but this abortive series had a campy horror/sci-fi quality that I really enjoyed. Also, I’ll always love Sierra for being basically the last US publisher who supported the ST.
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SimCity (Maxis) & Gold of the Americas (SSG). These were the games I first bought my Amiga for. They eventually did show up for the ST, so, had I known that was going to happen, I might not have gotten an Amiga as soon as I did.
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Hero’s Quest (Quest for Glory) I (Sierra). A tour de force on the Amiga, a fun combination of adventure and RPG.
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Railroad Tycoon (MicroProse). Building things is fun.
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Civilization (MicroProse). Ditto. Civilization is what toppled Colonial Conquest from my favorite spot. Civ II was my personal highlight of the series, but the original seemed revolutionary to me. Sid Meier took elements from Empire and Railroad Tycoon (and others) and made some remarkably new, fresh, and engaging from it.
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Champions of Krynn (SSI). I played the heck out of the Gold Box games, but Champions of Krynn was my favorite, perhaps because Dragon Lance>Forgotten Realms.
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Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday (SSI). This was basically Gold Box in space, but, still, it was awesome. (So were the TSR novels that the plot was based on, at least to my adolescent brain.) Why aren’t there more science fiction RPGs???
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Master of Orion (MicroProse). As with Civ, II was my favorite in the series, but the original seemed revolutionary.
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Europa Universalis (Paradox). This is the blend of Civ and Colonial Conquest I always wanted. For me, sadly, III and especially IV grew too complex for my enjoyment, but I loved my time with the first two, and felt there was so much potential towards becoming my favorite game.
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Final Fantasy X (Square). I didn’t grow up with Nintendo or Sega, so the charms of JRPGs were lost on me. Then I played FFX. I never finished it (pretty typical for me), but I loved my time with it. Parts of it reminded me of Phantasie and other early SSI games. It made me much more willing to explore console games.
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Pinball FX (Zen). I love pinball, but am not good at it. I’ve played various pinball games from the days of Atari Pinball on the 2600 and EA’s Pinball Construction Set on the C64. But I’ve played far more time with the Pinball FX games than anything else. Today, I know I can pick up a game and not have to think for a few minutes, and that’s what I need.
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Dragon Age: Inquisition (EA). I know this game has lots of critics. But, for me, it was the first RPG I’ve finished since some of SSI’s Gold Box games. Critics say it’s too linear, but that’s what I needed.
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Skyrim (Bethesda). The opposite of linearity, and I’ve never come close to finishing and have restarted several times. But I’ve usually had lots of fun with it, which is good since I keep rebuying it (Xbox 360, Xbox One, Steam, Switch).
There are lots of other favorite games I have or games I have good memories of. You’ll notice that list is very heavy on '80s/'90s titles. It’s not that I think those games were better than modern ones–in many cases their interfaces and some unfriendly design choices would make me think twice about replaying them–but I had so much more time to play them, that they’ve made more of an impact on me, I think.
Random other important titles to me: Tass Times in Tonetown, PSI-5 Trading Company, Killed Until Dead, Law of the West, Rings of Zilfin, Lords of Conquest, Adventure Construction Set, MULE, Racing Destruction Set, Master of Magic, Entrepreneur/The Corporate Machine, Capitalism/Capitalism Plus/Capitalism II, Rails Across America, 1830, Earl Weaver Baseball, High Heat Baseball, TV Sports Basketball, Epyx’s Games series, Fallout 3 & 4, Neuromancer, Keef the Thief, King of Chicago, Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon, Gold Rush!, Mini Metro, Panzer General, Prime Time, Project Space Station, Balance of Power, and AutoDuel.
Let’s see. I’m single and never married, no children. That’s probably in part because I’m super shy, not just in person but also online. If you look at my post count over the past decade-plus, it’s pretty sparse, for example.
I’m originally from Minnesota, spent a good chunk of my adulthood in Kansas, and am now in North Dakota. I’m happy to be back north because I love cold weather, and I hated Kansas’s summers. I’ve spent my professional career in education. I taught elementary school for 4 years, middle school for 5 years, high school for 6 years, and am finishing my 6th year teaching college. There have been good and bad things about each of those levels, and I’m not sure what my professional future will hold and what I really want to do with my life. If I could live my life over, I would have made a few different choices and gone for a PhD in history nearly immediately, and I would have made different undergraduate choices (shockingly attending a small public liberal arts college does not give one lots of choices in upper division history courses or lots of foreign language options, but, at the time, I thought I wanted to spend my life teaching elementary school).
I also own too many books and comic books. (Not too many for me, but too many for whenever I decide to move.) My favorite authors of all time include Roger Zelazny, Terry Pratchett, Robert Heinlein, Connie Willis, and Lois McMaster Bujold. I also have a handful of children’s and young adult authors I cherish from my teaching days (Chris Crutcher, John Green, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Robert Cormier, and John Green).
As far as comics go, I’m so nerdy that nerds don’t like me. In other words, I have almost no interest in superhero comics. For me, the apex of comics are the Duck comics of Carl Barks, and, later, Don Rosa. I was lucky that in my adolescence Gladstone Publishing got the Disney license, so I could learn about Barks and be introduced to Rosa.
Finally, TV>movies. The greatest TV show of all time is and will always be Santa Barbara. I still dream about that show. Sometimes it’s still on the air, sometimes I’m on it, sometimes I discover unaired episodes. Those are good dreams. In some other universe, Zelazny’s Amber is real and, in yet another one, I’m a proud Capwell. Other shows I repeatedly re-watch: Better Off Ted, Happy Endings, 30 Rock, Cheers, Fawlty Towers, Futurama, Don’t Trust the B in Apt. 23, Welcome to Sweden. Other all-time favorites: Happy Days, Ally McBeal, Another World, The O.C., Crime Story, and SCTV. Ones I hope I can watch more of (fingers crossed for a few of these): American Housewife, Speechless, The Goldbergs, The Good Place, AP Bio.