Were Early PC Games Fun To Play( Back IN) the 1990's Or A Complete Pain?

[oldgamerz]

Lets take a time machine back to the PC gaming of the Mid 1990's and voice our opinon on a lot of the games that were 3D back then. Now I want you to remember your old PC and how it used to play those games.. not today but back in the 1990's and the 00's


Hi ,I happen to be an ancient PC gamer of the 1990's. 's I grew up  only on PC games.and had not one single  tv console at my home.

 l I still love (to this day) games that worked fine with Windows back in the early 1990's like the Doom and the Duke Nukem  3D series. But when  the early 3D polygon PC games first hit the market it for PC  it was a nightmare in my opinion.  most PCs companies manufactured and sold under $5000.00 at the time were utter junk with their Choppiness.   If you were not rich enough to afford to upgrade your PC to the specs that all those early Polygon games required often most game would not work no matter how you tried

Most PC games of the 1990's stunk at least the ones I owned. however my life changed forever when I played Half Life 1 in 1999. and StarCraft in 2004.  for some reason among all the crappy games of the 1990's those were a lot different. I did love roller coaster tycoon and Simcity 3000. but all the rest were utter junk and were not even the least compatible  with windows 95 and windows 98 or even XP for instance in my luck.

my first computer that I had since it was new was a Packard Bell Pentinum 1. a computer that cost well over $1000 back in 1997 when I got it for Christmas. the game I used to play were decent Serria games like Bass Fishing, Nascar Racing, Indy Car Racing. But what upset me the most was yet no matter what PC you bought back in the day the computers would always need upgrades for the simplest things.

Nowadays you can get a gameing computer for well under $1000,00 that will play almost every single game out there, but in the 1990's you need to upgrade yearly in order to play any kind of game back then it seems.

So, what is your thoughts on playing a 1990's game on a computer made in the 1990's or early 00's?

or even if you were a console gamer back in the day and never had lag issues please tell your story here.

[indenton]

It's as if 'Lordscott' never left

[98dgreen]

It's as if 'Lordscott' never left

Lol

[bikingjahuty]

It's as if 'Lordscott' never left

hahaha glad I'm not the only one who was thinking this

But to address the thread; I didn't get my first PC until around 1998 and even then it was below average in terms of specs for the time. I remember trying to run games like Myth The Fallen Lords and Starcraft, both modern games at the time, and both ran like shit for the most part. I remember trying to play The Sims and Everquest a couple years later and while both would install and technically run, they were pretty much unplayable due to terrible onboard graphics and insufficient RAM. Sadly, most of my PC gaming at the time was either me playing games from the early 90s on my PC (Doom, Doom II, Wolfenstein, and Warcraft II) or playing newer PC games on a friend's rig who had a much better PC than me. We used to play Everquest, Starcraft, AvP, and Half life a lot at his house. Those were good times.

[darkragnorok]

It's as if 'Lordscott' never left

At the very least with OP, I can read through it without deciphering it trying to make sense of it like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nevertheless, I cant comment on this if only because I never had a PC until like age 14 in 2004. Anything involving computers for me growing up was at school either using Mavis Beacon, Mario Typing or this sound effect:   https://youtu.be/5Ogsu51Gz60?t=8s

[Nickkchilla]

It's as if 'Lordscott' never left

Seconded.

[oldgamerz]

It's as if 'Lordscott' never left

I looked him up in search, after reading this and read some of his or her posts, and no . I used to attend Retro Collect but I moved over to this site. retro collect, does not have a full database and I got fed up with that. some of the people on that site also. but mostly the database, and how little effort the admins put into the games information.  I did hear from one of the few admins of that site they wanted to be more like VGcollect and have their members contribute to the database. But all they have last time I was there was 2 admins and one moderator running everything to my knowledge. And nothing was getting done.

I tried to contribute to the database but the admin told me that he or she was still working on spare time and he denied all the research I did for him or her. the admin told me he had coding in progress and that he or she was going to redo the entire database soon. VG collect is a everything I hoped for and retro collect is just to outdated for me.

[tripredacus]

It really depends on the era. Yes there was a period of pain. This was the DOS games, and in the Windows 95/98 upgrades from DOS where it was possible to reboot into MS-DOS mode. There were definately crashing issues A LOT, as many people who played games back then will remember the DOS4GW prompt. It isn't important to know what DOS4GW is, but the reason why a lot of people remember it is because when you launched a game in DOS, if it used DOS4GW, it would do something behind the scenes. When the shell opened, it would print the DOS4GW text to the console, but you couldn't see it. You would only see this message if you either quit out of the game, or the game crashes and you returned to the prompt. A lot of people also falsely thought this was an error.

Another big pain of the mid 90s was sound card compatibility. The old process was you ran a setup program to select your soundcard, and the main problem was that a lot of people did not have the cards that the game supported. There were always options for Roland, AWE32, Soundblaster, Gravis, Adlib, Soundblaster compatible, etc. If you didn't have one of the cards specifically named in the sound setup, then you had to do a guess and test. Not only that, you needed to set other settings like IRQ and what not. It was common that some games had auto-detect, but most of the time this either didn't work (no/incorrect sound) or it would freeze the computer.

Upgrades were an interesting thing. The speed difference going between 2X and 4X and then 8X CD-ROM drives was amazing. Another thing that changed the game experience was upgrading a sound card to one with more voices. You would know if you had this issue because some sounds wouldn't play, or the sound would become garbled or worse when you tried to pass more voices through the card than it supported.

Games crashing and sound card issues are the ones I remember the most. The games themselves were fine. Games made specifically for Windows ended up being more reliable than the ones that ran in DOS.

[badATchaos]

Granted I was still fairly young in the 90s, but my experiences were pretty good for the most part. I remember a couple of times where I picked up a game and it simply wouldn't work because the game required a sound card to play. Today this isn't an issue at all, as pretty much all motherboards have some kind of sound chipset on-board. There was another instance where my computer just simply didn't meet the minimum requirements to play so it wouldn't launch. That kind of thing still happens today, but at the time when I was like... ten, I didn't understand what was going on fully so I was kind of bummed.

[fogboundturtle]

 I used to spend my days optmized config.sys and autoexec.bat to have enough high memory to load certain games. I was making a living out of doing this.

[Warmsignal]

We had a Macintosh something or another and it couldn't handle anything worthwhile. Later on we had a Presario and it was also pretty lame. A lot of DOS games just wouldn't run correctly, and the newer games it struggled to play with choppy frame rates, like the very first Lego PC game. It seems like PCs in the 90s had obsolete hardware right out of the box, and as you say, unless you were willing to fork over thousands of dollars, you weren't going to get a PC that could play games very well. Not to mention if you installed maybe 3 or 4 substantial games on your PC, that HDD was full. Unlike today, where you can have a decent enough PC for well under a grand and you have nearly infinite disc space.

[guilty0fbeing]

I had no issue with PC games back in the day, even on a basic computer. I wish I could play Dark Earth again. I have so much nostalgia for it, but I would have no idea how to play it these days.

[thewelshman]

My first PC was given to my by my brother in 1999. It had a Pentium I processor, with a 4GB graphics card, 32mb of RAM and a 4GB HD. I was so proud when I upgraded it with a Voodoo 3-3000 Graphics card, a 128MB stick of RAM, and a 10GB HD. All of this in order to play EverQuest easier. He also a download of Fallout II that I used as my buffer game when I needed a break from EQ. Before I had that PC, I played on my friend's PC, which was mostly Warcraft II, and Diablo. I also played a racing game on my Aunt's PC that ran Windows 3.1 called MegaRace. To anyone who ever played that game, I still hate Lance Boyle a little bit.

I never really had access to PC games until my 20s when PCs got cheaper to build, and the internet was more accessible. Of course, I owe that PC my life since it started me down the path of I.T.

[badATchaos]

I also remember having a 1992 machitosh. I believe it had OS7, but I could be wrong. I played a lot of Chess Master 2000 on there. It also had backwards compatibility with Apple 2 software, on which I played the original Oregon Trail. I always had a hard time as a kid trying to figure out how to get it into that mode. I would just keep popping the diskette in and out until it booted the software. Retrospectively I'm not certain what I was doing wrong as that very machine works fine today.

[bikingjahuty]

I also remember having a 1992 machitosh. I believe it had OS7, but I could be wrong. I played a lot of Chess Master 2000 on there. It also had backwards compatibility with Apple 2 software, on which I played the original Oregon Trail. I always had a hard time as a kid trying to figure out how to get it into that mode. I would just keep popping the diskette in and out until it booted the software. Retrospectively I'm not certain what I was doing wrong as that very machine works fine today.

My elementary school had Apple II PCs until I was in about 3rd grade. Played a ton of Oregon Trail on those. I actually installed an Apple II plugin in Firefox and was playing it via my browser several months ago. Still a pretty fun game!