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Never forget that…

Umm, the Mens 100M Freestyle set a record during the 2000 Olympics that maybe none of you have heard about. But it’s an IMPORTANT RECORD for Equatorial Guinea!  Yes, Equatorial Guinea, the sub-sahran African country known for despotic regimes, mud huts, and a little bit of recent-found oil.  But one asset they have is in [somehow] olympic [barely] swimmer Eric Moussambani, a.k.a. “Eric the Eel”.

It’s a bit of an old vid, but in case you have not seen it… Just watch this RECORD HEAT.  LOL!  *slap* *slap* *slapslap* *slap*

Gotta love him for being out there.  He probably beat MY best time

I bet you didn’t know that…

Sadly, this is all too common.  Remember, the earth is FLAT, you infidels.

Once again, Jesus shows himself. Not in a piece of toast, or the bark of a tree.  This time, he shows himself through the better half of Fido:

A few years ago I fiddled with DOSBox, a DOS emulator for the modern operating system.  It lets you run just about any old DOS program on your PC, and allows you to control the clock speed to simulate those ancient 286-like speeds. (warning, this is a gamer-geek post - so if this bores you… you may want to just move along…)

Well, I recently downloaded the newest version (0.72, currently), as well as DOSShell, a simple “explorer-like” front-end to make it simpler for you to run games from your file system.  In the past, I always had trouble getting games to run, and gave up pretty quickly… nostalgia isn’t worth that much to me.

But these two latest versions worked PERFECTLY from the start, so I spent some time looking for “abandonware” copies of my favorite old games.  And I found a few ;)  In fact… ANYTHING you can think of can be found out there, as most of the old early-nineties stuff is largely considered abandoned, and people are throwing the binaries around for free.

So here are the five old games I found which, combined, are likely responsible for significant point-loss in my College GPA, pounds of muscle atrophy, and significant hours of retinal degradation.  All these are screenshots I took of the title screens in my own DOSBox sessions.

Alone in the Dark

This game CREEPED ME THE F*** OUT back in the day. And now I’m not sure why.  Though the nostalgia factor is quite high with this game, the cheeseball graphics just don’t hold the sway they used to.  It’s H.P. Lovecraft inspired storyline was well written, and totally creepy.  An interesting bit of trivia:  this is the FIRST GAME to use live 3D characters and animation cut scenes.

OO-Topos

OLD SCHOOL. Released in 1987, I first played this game on my PC Jr. when it was new.  And sadly, my 36-year-old ass solved more of this game in 1 hour then my 16-year-old ass did in a whole year.  As a command-interpreter based adventure game, this was my favorite kind of game.  The fairly lame CGA graphics render this barely above ZORK, but it’s still fun, and actually pretty tough.  I ended my gaming being killed by a Grix.  So I got that going for me.

Deathtrack

I spent my entire freshman year of college playing this game on my new 386.  This game SET THE BAR for racing shooters.  Yes, I said “racing shooters”.  You build your car, outfit it with armor, engines, missiles, battering rams, mines, caltrops, and you blow the shit out of other race cars.  And you still have to drive well to win.  It was totally fun, and I had a total moment of nostalgia.  I can actually still remember the tracks, and drive them pretty well.  I kept getting blown up by missiles though.  :\

Stunts

AWESOME GAME, and if they have ever made another like it… tell me where.  This also burned many many hours for me, as well as my dorm buddies.  (My PC was the official gaming PC of the floor as it was the fastest one at it’s blazing 16mhz).  This was a racing game using modern (late eighties) race cars on custom tracks.  The trick was, the tracks were loaded with obstacles such as drawbridge jumps, loop-de-loops, corkscrews, elevated track sections, and the like.  The best part about this game was that you get to make you own tracks.  We would make tracks for each other, and then all try to beat each other’s times.  It was awesome, and STILL IS.  I raced a few, and it still totally rocks, holding up well despite the weak graphics.

Eye of the Beholder

If it’s any indication of how many grade points were lost in my first few years of college, this is yet another game that sucked me into a zombie-like catatonia for many, many, many hours.  This HAS to take top prize for hours lost, only second to X-Com, UFO Attack (later in college, and not listed here… couldn’t find it online).  This is a typical AD&D game, and was the first one with excellent VGA graphics, and real-time combat.  It was next to impossible as you had no map to go by, and the maps are VERY complex.  Plus, the graphics are such that every two feet of the map look the same, so vertigo abounds.  But the AD&D gameplay is good enough that I actually got sucked in to this game LAST NIGHT for about four hours, and didn’t want to quit.  Still a great game, and fun to play.

That’s it… hope you enjoyed this walk through PC-Gaming memory lane.