Man did they shit up the HoMM games after 3.

4 was an ugly mess from the days where developers insisted on making the jump from sprites to 3D no matter how bad it looked. Having heroes as units also made the whole creature aspect useless.

5's campaign was terrible. Painful Warcraft 3 story, AI that never attacked, and overdoing neutral monsters to the point where you spent 95% of the game fighting them instead of other players. Multiplayer was broken, virtually non-functional.

6, I swear the whole thing started out as a Facebook game. Loading screens featured the Windows 7 swirly. Every screen was loaded with a dozen social media tie ins. Cities were reduced to a tiny postage stamp sized grainy picture (that looked like something out of the early FMV days) of just the town hall, no joy of seeing cities growing with new buildings. Hero development became needlessly complicated. You were forced to reload battles if you lost even a single creature (forcing every hero to take the heal spells) because every mission was designed to periodically spawn enemy armies (not based on enemy town production) that could only be defeated if you gathered and retained every possible creature.


Fuck they fucked that series up. The whole appeal was a simple, aesthetically pleasing strategy game and they made it complicated and ugly.

You are dumb if you don't think college kids playing n64s isn't a thing. If there's any trend towards playing newer games on console over PC, it's because consoles tend to wear out and break down, and you can emulate the older stuff on your computer or smartphone anyway.

optical disc based consoles really do wear out absurdly fast (except those first generation PS1 consoles, those things are fantastic). Cartridge based systems seem to last forever though, except that connector in the original NES but that's an fix with no soldering.

Honestly, I'm always surprised how much old PC stuff still gets played because I've always found it harder to get a lot of 90s Windows software to run than it is to find or emulate a console.

You know about DOSBox, right? It doesn't work for everything, but it's a great first step.

My uncle will never give up the PS1 he has taking space in a box in his basement, the bastard.

I think people just *say* that because they've got their nostalgia glasses on. They forget about the MOUNTAINS AND MOUNTAINS of crap shovelware that got foisted onto us back in the day.

I truly believe that because the industry is so much larger today, the perception exists that there's a lot more shitty games because studios have truckloads of cash to over-hype everything and when something is crap... the fact that it's crap is much higher profile than it used to be.

Hotseat Starcon3 melee is still extremely fun. If you have a friend over and a DOS emulator, play it.

As for shovelware, I was proud of it. Some of it was genuinely good. I was on one of those 5.25" "game clubs" mailing lists that they had in the 80's. There was this one text adventure designer that compiled basic plaintext files into Infocom style adventure games, and all you had to do was enter the script in. I spent hundreds of hours playing with it, and it cost about .

I had a PC when all my friends were kneedeep in their first Nintendos, and while I felt kind of excluded, I could do things like save games in complex, unique states, which allowed for actual strategy games to be played. This gave me a sense of accomplishment and intellectual superiority over my peers.

Baleen and I are text adventure memories buddies.

I go one further and still have a kneejerk fondness for ASCII roguelikes. Although lately I'm really into Dwarf Fortress, it's pretty much just because Adventure Mode is the ultimate ASCII roguelike on a cosmic level. I still warmly and fondly remember spending HOURS on Kingdom of Kroz and Mystery. I've seriously, to the point of trying to save up money to do so, thought about getting an ASCII smiley tattoo, which is one of two possible tattoos I've considered (the other being the 47th Problem of Euclid, and they might wind up as duel wrist totem things). This is an enormous thing for me, because due to my phobic terrors of blood and permanence, this would be an amazing step for me.

I still play Nethack.
You turned me on to Dwarf Fortress but it is so fucking impossible that I can't get the swing of it. I'm just phoning it in and waiting for Starbound to come out.

I just checked: I still have mine in a sleeve next to Rainbow Six and Tie Fighter. Good times.

I busted out an old boardgame recently that I hadn't played in forever and found a notepad we had used for score keeping.

It was the notepad that came with Warcraft 1 o_O