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Today, I felt nostalgic about my 80286 which I had used in the 90’s to learn C, GW Basic and play games like digger, prince of persia 1. It was one of the “fastest” processors available at that time. It had an Intel 16Mhz 80286 Processor, 1 MB ram, 5.25 Inch Teac Floppy drive, 40 Mb Seagate Harddisc and a 80287 Math co-processor. It was a “decent” machine at that time.

I used it for hours to play prince of persia 1 where you play the role of a prince to rescue a princess from the evil vizier. There were limited number of packages which could run on that machine. Turbo C 2.0 from borland and Dbase 3 plus were some softwares I had used.

What are your experiences with antique machines such as the 8086, 8088 or 80286, if you had used any?

Cutting a Fine Figure: The Art of the Jigsaw Puzzle, a 1996 exhibition at the Museum of Our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts, surveyed the history of the jigsaw puzzle beginning with the first known “dissected map” from the 1760s and ending with a three-dimensional magnetic globe puzzle from 1995.

The map puzzle, a staple of childhood play, exemplifies the initial educational mission of jigsaw puzzles. Virtually every American child has tried at one time or another to assemble the puzzle map of the United States. It is relatively easy to put Florida and Texas and California into place on the edges, but making sense out of the jumble of states in the middle involves some real concentration and knowledge of the country’s geography. The idea of combining learning with play achieved general acceptance after the publication of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693. The development of the jigsaw puzzle “to facilitate the teaching of geography” was a natural outgrowth of those ideas in the eighteenth century.

John Spilsbury, a London mapmaker and the best documented of the early puzzle makers, is recognized by most scholars as having invented the jigsaw puzzle around 1762. Competing claims for possible earlier inventors (Coven & Mortier of Amsterdam around 1740 and Dumas of France around 1760) are still being debated, but there is no doubt the first jigsaw puzzles were made from engraved maps pasted onto wood and cut into pieces along political boundaries.

Spilsbury’s trade card advertised many dissected maps, including the world, five different continents, England, Scotland, Ireland, and more than a dozen other individual countries. His puzzles were so successful that competition sprang up quickly. William Darton, a prominent London publisher of children’s books, adapted the jigsaw to teaching history by issuing the “Engravings for Teaching the Elements of English History and Chronology” in 1787. Each piece depicted a king or queen with a brief description of his or her reign. The solution required putting the monarchs in their proper order.

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“Fortunately, and this is going to sound really rough, old people get older and eventually go away,” he says. Hmph!

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the average age of a gamer in Linden Labs Second Life is 33. Im 44 and in a Battlefield 2 clan that regularly kicks ass in tournaments. Ninety percent of our clan members are in their mid-to-!ate 30s, and we’re growing all the time. I work for an ISP that supplies broadband to rural communities; we’ve sold accounts to more than a few people – car salesmen, firefighters, retired factory workers, and one grandma – who all wanted high-speed Internet access simply to be able to play World of WarCraft. Mr. Pitchford said, “Older generations are out of the equation.” I agree .. if he”s referring to the Donkey Kong and Mario crowd. I forsook consoles from the start, and not because of age being an issue – but because Ive always been a PC fan.

Mr Pitchford claims the industry present scope and future motivate him. Let it motivate him on down the hall to a console.

Have you guys ever come across something that couid be described as “gamer’s block,” which I’d define as “the preoccupation with acquiring the latest top games with the intent to relive the obsession and progressing skill experienced five to 17 years ago. Just to find yourself barely getting past the opening sequence before capitulating or losing interest”?

I used to burn nights before work playing Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, flavors of Durigeons & Dragons, driving and flight sims, et cetera – and as much as I want to like the latest remakes or instances, I can’t get into them.

Here I am with disposable income and 10 new games, and I can’t decide which one to tackle – and I haven’t even finished more than 30 percent each of the last two GTA games. These are the coolest, most technically advanced, stunning games out there, and yet they lack something – unless I do

For those of you who remember, it used to be that the only place to play a decent video game was at the arcade. Back then, if you died, you didn’t start from your last save – you started from the very beginning of the game. Yet you kept putting quarters in that one one-dimensional game so that you couid finally get to the part were the alien ships were no longer a boring rectangle and instead became a cool octagon.

I know we live in a culture of instant gratification, but the more I have to strain my rational and creative faculties to beat a level, the more satisfied I am with the result. And 1 personaily play all my games on hard mode – not because I want to show how coo! I am, but because I want to keep playing the really good games for many years to come. I still have games on my hard drive from over five years ago. While some you cruise through the best games of all time, just to say you finished them, people like me are still blissfully anticipating the thought of playing them.

I found it quite interesting that so many of the leaders in game design feel the same way about things.

I am surprised [by] the complaint of standardizing PC hardware. I wasn’t aware of a massive problem in this area. Granted, I have noticed compatibility complaints before, but nothing on a large enough scale that would generate a complaint from game designers. I didn’t know such a problem existed: I assumed that the hardware was standard enough across all manufacturers that such a problem would rarely be found, and if il were, it would be the fault of the manufacturer’s drivers and not the game designer.

I’m also surprised [by] the complaint about the price of games. Graphic design elements being more complex I can understand, but the complaint about the budgets surprised me. I thought It was the developers who were pushing for the bigger budgets.

The proposed method of fixing the budget problem was disappointing to me. Like the developers, I too notice very few games that are in the “in-between” market, where they are neither big-budget nor nearly free. The thing is, I don’t want games to sacrifice graphics for gameplay; rather, I want the gameplay to match the graphics quality. It s frustrating for me to see “pretty” games pass me by because I’m forced to play dated-looking games to get a good story I fear that perhaps by limiting graphics quality to allow more focus on gameplay, the developers wdl be killing that which they are trying to save, just with a different method. Granted, a good story does a lot more for me than pretty graphics, but I don’t think anyone can honestly state that graphics aren’t important to a game these days

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend of late. More and more games and movies are featuring an extremely scary concept. Namely, Zombie Little Girls. I wonder if the people coming out with these titles actually have tittle girls as their own kids. I know how scared I am when my little one wanders into the computer room and asks me to play…with dolls’. Very frightening can hardly sleep at night.

Please ask the publishers to tone down the little girls. I need my sleep.

My most recent purchases – Battlefield 2142, Dark Messiah, and Neverwinter Nights 2 – were released long before they were ready; at best, they were partially polished beta versions, but they were nowhere near ready for release.

I’m one of those guys who keeps all his old games handy because I like to replay them often; MechCommander Gold is one that comes to mind immediately Because of this desire to stroil down memory lane so often, I sometimes have to scour the Internet to look for patches I forgot to store properly and lost. As I crawl the Web, chasing one dead link after another, I frequently think, “If theyd made it right the first time, I wouldn’t have this problem.”

1 agree with Jeff’s refrigerator analogy – I feel that greed has superseded common sense, and the world has somehow become apathetic in regards to quality software creation. Software developers have fooied us into believing that it’s perfectly acceptable for tiiem to produce sloppy, substandard products.

Their mantra being: “We’ll fix it with a patch” That is a horrible mentality to have, and I know that its not necessary When I bought Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, i was treated to fully playable, bugless games that ran flawlessly on my decent machine. The trade-off was wait time. Yes, I had to wait an extra year for Doom 3, but it was well worth it I applaud id and Valve for their adherence to a higher set of morals

Lets say your driving along, in your new Mustang! You park in the parking lot of your favorite restaurant. Go in, get your favorite dish. After a tasty meal, AND…DUHN DUHN. YOUR F*”‘ing car is gone. You call the cops (Or po po is i like to call them.) they find the guy who stole your car. Then the po po arests you, and the theif. Now if you think thats stupid, thats the SAME logic EA uses for C&C3.

If someone DC s (Disconnects), not only does tie get a DC on his record. But you do too! ! need you guys to help me understand this logic PLEASE, Now im sure ANYTH!NG against EA. Is like a no no because EA is probaly like the Mafia to you guys they might try to buy out your magazine, or somthing. Kinda like poor old Westwood, who got bought out by EA.

The line “Before the reign of baklava, Leonidas dined on Xerxes” is about as historically accurate as George Washington skipping a silver dollar across the Potomac. And I thought you actually had to have a degree to work for your mag. Baklava is a Turkish dish. It has about as much to do with Greece as Nancy Pelosi [does with] supporting the U.S. troops. White the Greeks have tried to claim it as their own, along with many other things, it is pretty well documented that baklava is Turkish.