The 'good old days',.......... the days of Windows crashes, IRQ conflicts, bad drivers, buggy games expensive internet. I wouldn't wish those days on anyone. Sure the games had charm but most haven't aged that well although I would content with downloading dosbox and playing through Tie Fighter.
Fond memories!
Ah the glory days when being a PC gamer required an esoteric knowledge of your hardware, and the size of the drivers for your various cards so you could juggle what was loaded on a per game basis, a time when being an avid PC gamer meant you had a box full of boot discs labelled by which games they let you run.
(and some had foot notes like "if you erase this disc I will kill you" on the Ultima 8 boot disc*)
I think there is an element of rose tinted specs for PC gaming in the "old days", but it was also new to us and the big, well known games relied very heavily on gameplay as graphics were not great.
I've been clearing out some of the old PC game boxes and there are some I just can't bring myself to throw away due to the memories, things like the original floppy disc version of UFO (X-com), Warcraft 2 (one of my first CD-rom games) which was bought from a little game shop in Milton Keynes after watching the someone play it on the in store PC (IIRC they used to let you pay to play on it by the hour), Wing Commander, Privateer (with the speech pack).
The box art on the old games was often something special, and I really miss the days when you got the likes of the System Shock, UFO and UO artwork, they were really nice to look at on the shelves.
These days I think some of the Indie games have given me the closest feeling in terms of gaming to what I used to experience in the old days, things like Ark, Terreria, and Subnautica for example are/were to my mind more fun than most of the big AAA titles, I think in part because games development costs so much now that the big publishers tend to want to stick to big franchises that they know they can sell well to young teens and gamers with a short attention span who will buy a 20 hour game every week or two.
I would love to see a modern Mechwarrior 2 remake (especially if they include Merc's and netmech), as that was awe inspiring (another one I've still got the box for
), and I can imagine what they could do to the world and game with modern technology, however the sequels were all disappointing as they did away with so many of it's best bits for a more arcade experience (mechwarrior online was fun, but the matchmaker was awful, and I hate playing with random idiots, about 4 of us were playing it heavily for a while before the bugs/matchmeker/random idiots annoyed us too much).
I can imagine what could be done with modern usb game controllers, as Steel Battallion on the Xbox had an awesome control set (if very big and complicated), but something like Mechwarrior 2 using the capabilities of a Logitech G13 pad combined with a half decent flight stick would be incredible.
Having said all that, probably my fondest memories of PC gaming are from games I played with friends, things like Ultima Online back in the early 00's when Europa was extremely busy and I was lucky enough to join the Veterans of Finstemore, then moved to the sub guild "TAV"
Or CS/Team Fortress with the old QRGR clan as a part time member (early Iseries lans used to get 20-30 of us, about 10 core members and odds and friends who may have been in other clans but the only member of that clan to go).
*For some reason I remember that as being possibly the hardest game to get running,
I used to keep a notepad (and text file on on a disc) with notes on the config.sys and autoexac.bat files, what combinations gave the best free memory using himen.sys etc.
