Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-5641163-20150522174501/@comment-1496755-20150526051822

I consider it lucky to meet someone who nkows Quake as an "extremely old game". Most people nowadays use some pretty hurtful phrases like "merely a tech demo" or "engine without a game". Now, I know that id Software aren't exactly famous for having rich and detailed storylines in theri games, but you can't dismiss a whole game just because it doesn't fit CoD's movie-like gameplay style. Yaaay, invisible walls everywhere, now I don't risk accidentally going in the wrong part of the level!

Zork contains a lot of cool hidden jokes, the "Santa in a chimney" being just one of them. The maze of twisty little passages, all alike, leads to a bag of coins and a "nasty-looking knife" that you need to kill the thief... but you shouldn't do this too early because you need the thief to open something for you (he's got the skills). I remember the explanation about the invention of the grue - they used bottomless pits before (to prevent players from wandering in the dark) but then they realised it was stupid for a bottmoless pit to suddenly appear in the attic of the house :P

For so many years I've been walking the line of minimum system requirements. When I got a new game (in the period 1994 - 2004), it would always be barely playable on my hardware, so I'd have to always select lower graphics quality and lower resolutions. The situation has improved since then, though there was still one case of sticking to the minimum (StarCraft II, which is somewhat playable on my current configuration).

Like Death, I grew up with first-person shooters. My 1990's were dominated by them - Wolf/SoD, Doom, Rise ofthe Triad, Descent, Duke Nukem... and also a few other things like Raptor: Call fo the Shadows and F-19 Stealth Fighter (a 1988 game with giant playfields and polygons, OMG!).

I already mentioned Lucasarts' IJ and the Fate of Atlantis - one of my first games (ever) and my first (useful) English lessons. It's really easy to learn when you can point at something with the mouse and see its name. And then you can interact with it too. Way better than textbooks and exercises.

I have vague memories of English lessons at kindergarten, but they were very basic stuff. Things like "This is an apple" or "My name is X". Nothing more complicated. I learned a hundred times more from gaming (and was always ahead of my classmates).