A Pain in the Whatchamacallit
By Tiny Ruisch
I’ve been thinking about buying a Minecraft gaming account. The grandson has been playing the demo and it looks like a game that I might enjoy. I mentioned to him that I might do that and of course he is in favor of me doing it. I told him that it wouldn’t make a difference because I couldn’t download it to his tablet.
That got to reminiscing about one of the things I miss about playing computer games in the old days. I miss software that didn’t have to be installed and could be run off the disk. You didn’t have to worry about how much hard drive space was available or about memory conflicts. If you went to a friends house, you just had to pop the disk in the drive and play on their computer. To some extent, we can still do that with portable programs that run off a flash drive.
I’m not much of a game player these days, but I sure miss the old Infocom games. Their advertising line was, “We put our graphics where the sun don’t shine.” That was because there was no graphics. The games were all text adventures. The puzzles were all difficult. You had to both think and imagine to play. Maybe someday I’ll make a monthly Mindbender with questions about old games.
When was the last time you plugged a joystick into your computer? It used to be that you needed a good one to play any games. Wolfenstein, Space Invaders, Pacman and the many flight simulators needed one to be playable. I still remember the last time I saw my old joystick. It was the night I blew the dust off it and brought it to the club meeting to put on the giveaway table.
Some of the best games were free from many computer magazines. They printed the code and you had to type it in for the program to run. I remember sitting for hours with my six inch ruler marking the line, tediously typing in numbers and the letters a through f. If just one digit was wrong, the software wouldn’t run and you had to spend hours troubleshooting. I used to get a lot of good games from a company called Softdisk. They were based in Shreveport and published several “Disk Magazines”. Each month, I would eagerly wait for my Loadstar disk for the Commodore 64.
With the use of emulators, you can still download and play a lot of the old games on your modern computer. If you’re interested, check out My Abandonware or The Internet Archive. The games are free, but they don’t seem quite as good as I remember them.
I still haven’t decided if I’ll try Minecraft.
Thanks for reading.