🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 6 Jul 2017 17:34:12 +0000 (UTC), rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
(Ross Ridge) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson  <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>As I said, back in the day I imaged most of my disks. I did this
>>partly because I was worried about the medium's longevity, but mostly
>>so I could save space; all those floppy games fit on a single CD-ROM
>>(it was around the time that same necessity forced me to lose all
>>those awesome game boxes too).
>
>I've mostly relied on the fact that I never uninstall games unless I need
>to make room for something else, and it's been a very long time since I've
>needed to do that.  So my current PC has every MS-DOS I ever installed
>on it and on all of it's previous incarnations going back to 1999.
>There was was no need to uninstall any MS-DOS games because they're
>so small.  (I mean why uninstall Might & Magic I?  It's only 600k or so.)

See, that's a big difference between you and me. I uninstall games
/all/ the time. Finished with a game? Off it goes. No lingering about
on the hard-drive for my games; I want that space back. It's not even
that I necessarily /need/ the space - I currently have 500GB free on
the games hard-drive alone - but I just don't like unused programs
sitting on my system. This is an old habit learned from my DOS - and
pre-DOS - days when disk-space was at a premium, and I've never
bothered to unlearn it. I remember that when I got Ultima VII - which
weighed in at a whopping 22MB! -  I had to uninstall almost all my
other games and half my applications just to get enough disk space.
That sort of lesson sticks with a person ;-)

There are some games that escape these purges. Skyrim (and Oblivion
before it) stuck around for years, although even they eventually were
removed too. Oblivion actually survived three seperate computer
upgrades. Eurotruck Simulator 2 has been on disk for at least three
years, and Left4Dead has stayed where it is since I first installed it
in 2008. The DOSBox games tend to survive for years as well, largely
because they take up almost no space (although I'm already feeling a
bit antsy about some of the recent additions; I don't think Fate of
Atlantis, Orion Conspiracy and Whiplash will be with us for long ;-)

>>Best thing about Dragon Wars, btw? Automap. 
>
>Yah, that's the one big problem with going back the older dungeon crawlers
>like Might and Magic I, no automap.  If I were replaying it today, I'd
>probably just cheat and use maps from the Internet.  (Even back in the
>day after I completely mapped out a level in the Bard's Tale games I'd
>use a program I wrote to print out a map of the level generated from
>game's data files.)

The worst was the games that spun you around to purposefully disorient
you. It was such obvious padding and absolutely no fun. It didn't help
that the games had such short draw distance (three tiles for Bards
Tale, MM1 and Dragon Wars) and the limited graphics capabilities of
the time meant that all the dungeons were a maze of twisty corridors,
all alike. Given the memory limitations, it's understandable that the
earliest games didn't come with an automap, but it baffles me that
later titles - even modern titles! - don't include this basic feature.
I've never met /anyone/ who really enjoyed the mazes or the
requirement to hand-draw the maps to get through these sorts of games.