just how much i owe dos....
So I was thinking tonite sittin around playin Commander Keen 4. Why do I play all these old ancient dos games. I personally love the graphics. The smooth play. Nowadays everything has to be in 3D with effects shaders and vertex lines, direct draw, open GL.... These games always take me back to a simpler time. Well not simple as in computers i mean dos was difficult stuff. To run COmmander Keen one would have to type CD Keen4 [enter] keen4 [enter], well that doesn't sound that hard but to these point and clickit priviligaged user-friendly types now, that shit ain't gonna fly. Now I say simple. simple in terms of life. Ah how i loved being a kid. since i didn't have many friends, now i see partly cuz i was crippled socially by this disease, part cuz i just was a little wierd, and I never had a nintendo or anything like that. Wierdly enough my dad dispised nintento and anything thereoff. He hated all video games and preached on an on how they were the devil. When I was little I wanted to be just like my dad so I tryed to understand him, but i guess the buck stops when he made me believe, yes he actually told me this and I believed it, that nintendo was japanese for idiot box. So i went around telling all my friends how dumb they were that they had an idiot box. yeah. that didn't last long and it didn't help me socially either. I would go over to there houses countless times. Playing nintendo into the wee hours of the night. I watched them play game after game, how they moved their character. They would play Super Mario Bros so smooth. Mario would move with finess, almost dancing perfectly to the rhythm of the music all why jumping, fireballing and moving through each level flawlessly. Then I would get to play. I was always luigi. I'd get to level 1-2 die start over moving sooo clumslily, die, die again. Oh jump over, aahhh die again. Man i'd think, that is a fun game. Man I wanted a nintendo. I'd come home, all red eyed from a sleep over up all night playing NES, home to my little video game console. oh the Apple IIe. It wasn't much and I didn't have many games. Hell my dad sure didn't buy me any. No sir, but his students would copy games for him, all cracked of course. So i'd go late into the night going through disks, disks that he would never touch and look at all the games. This was my little nintendo. I'd play choplifter and chrono warrier, autobahn. These games i could never talk about with my peers. While all of them were spending there candy money on the how to get to the secret warp level in level 6, i was playing choplifter and carmen sandiego. But they were fun games and I loved them. Then my dad got the IBM and it came with more games. Cracked of course. Tetris(first time i played tetris) Zany golf and outrun. man I loved that. quickly got good at outrun. Then i'd go with my dad to the computer convention. I'd rumage through the shareware where they had tons of public domain games. These were just garage start up companies that gave the games away basically, if you like the game you'd have to pay the owner for the full version. You could buy like 12 games for a buck. Man so many companies that are big today started out that way. Doom, wolfenstein, keen. al thought I bought 12 for a buck. you'd get about one or two levels. Man thats how i got into keen. Then at school i started opening my big mouth. Started saying, (now this was impossible at the time) how i had a brand new IBM PC and that it had all the nintendo games on it. so i didn't need theres. haha i even convinced my friend to make his dad buy his a IBM cuz he wanted that. haha needless to say he found the truth out quick, but, i was able to get even more games for my PC from him. Cosmo Cosmic Advcenture, Duke Nukem, heck cartooners. these were the golden years of gaming for me oh man then I somehow convinced my dad to buy me wolfensten. oh man. I was in love. BUt due to my young age, nieveity and lack of confidence in myself, and looking back ( now this was probably due to the ilnees) i was pretty dumb at things. I had to cheat to beat every game. That had always irked me. so as the years went buy i'd play the games but i either wasn't intelligent enough to beat them, Castles, civilization, etc, or i didn't have the skills or the proper gamepads to play, commander keen, duke nukem, and looking back I was really fogged up at times. I've always considered my childhood lost due to the illness. It could have been lyme but looking back more in depth, i think the day I had those silver fillings in , my mind basically started fogging so it might as well have been that, either way I never really felt like I had a proper childhood of games. Never had a nintendo or sega, slo computer, and arcade? shoot, like my parents would give me $20 dollars to go play street fighter. man I too would watch those kids play and admire just how gracefull they played. I dreamed of one day being that graceful. Well thankfully the tides have turned. I guess due to the fact that I never got to play any of those games decently I feel its something that I have to do. They also do take me back to simpler times of being a kid when there was no worries in the world, and everything was taken care of for you. Either way I vowed to myself that I would play those games properly, the way they should be played and now, that I have the means. I do plan on doing that. Has it made me into a lifetime gamer? You bet. Be a universal gamer. I enjoy playing Commander Keen just as much as Call of Duty. It makes me happy going to some of these websites, ranting and raving about their keen days. It feels good cuz back in those days kids were all about metroid and contra, not commander keen.
posted by ThaNeuroNaut @ 11:37 PM
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