Anayo's Year of the 90's Windows PC (2020) Closing Thoughts
Dec 29, 2020 9:32:45 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Dec 29, 2020 9:32:45 GMT -5
I beat 25 90’s PC games in 2020. They were:
-1) Doom
(I did not record a video of this.)
0) Duke Nukem 3D
(I did not record a video of this.)
1) Quake
2a) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (human campaign)
3) Blood
4a) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Jade Falcon Campaign
4b) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Wolf Clan Campaign
5) Shadow Warrior
6) Mechwarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy
7) Doom 2
8) Lego Island
2b) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (orc campaign)
9) Road Rash
10) Toy Story Animated Storybook
11) Half Life: Opposing Force
12) Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries
13) Quake II
(I recorded a video of this and uploaded it but YouTube flagged it as a conspiracy theory video. I appealed and they rejected my appeal on the grounds that the video went against YouTube’s community guidelines. I reuploaded it 3 months later hoping they wouldn’t notice, but they took it back down and gave my account a community guidelines strike. I wonder if they would notice if I mirrored the video left-to-right and uploaded it under the title “That Game that Comes in Between Quake I and Quake III”, but I’m unwilling to risk that.)
14) A.D.A.M. The Inside Story
15) Commander Keen Episode One: Marooned on Mars
16) Commander Keen Episode Two: The Earth Explodes!
17) Too new, don’t talk about this game until 2028.
18) Star Wars Episode One: Racer
19) Lego Rock Raiders
20) Gunman Chronicles
21) The Oregon Trail II
22) Too new, don’t talk about this game until 2028.
23) Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit
24) Too new, don't talk about this game until 2021.
25) Soldier of Fortune Gold Edition
Windows 9x and MS-DOS PC gaming has a ton of personal significance for me, likely because I had to get my Dad’s permission to play on his computer as a kid. The lack of total control over when I got to play made it seem like a special treat that wasn’t on tap all the time. I was also totally reliant on Dad to buy and install new software. This made it all the more tantalizing and memorable when he would get a shareware demo teasing the full version.
By the time the Windows XP era had arrived, I had my own PC in my room I could use whenever I wanted. That seems to have “killed the magic” for early 2000’s PC gaming. But 90’s PC gaming never lost its allure for me. During my 2018 Sega Genesis and 2019 NES gaming years, kilobytes were a useful unit of measurement for games’ file sizes. As a result, those games used finite tile sets cleverly rearranged into a gauntlet of obstacles and challenges belying the brevity of the underlying data. But the arrival of CD-ROM drives with hundreds of megabytes of space brought an unprecedented explosion of content.
For instance, I couldn’t even finish everything on my Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness disc. I beat the main human and orc campaigns but there are still two extra campaigns that went untouched. It felt like going to a restaurant for one meal only for the waiter to bring out a steak, a turkey thigh, a ham, and a fish filet all on the same plate. I got a similar feeling from Mechwarrior II’s two campaigns. Although I completed both, either campaign seemed substantial all by itself, and both on the same disk felt downright daunting. And I barely skimmed the surface of fan-made expansions, WADs, and level packs - extras that would have been totally out of the question on home consoles from back then.
This year I gamed on two different PCs. The first one had these specs:
CPU: 200 MHz Pentium I
GPU: 1 MB Trident, no 3D acceleration
RAM: 70 MB
HDD: 4 GB Compact Flash Card
The second one had these specs:
CPU: 900 MHz Pentium III
GPU: 8 MB ATI Rage
RAM: 512 MB
HDD: 4 GB Compact Flash Card + 80 GB hard drive
Gaming performance skyrocketed on the Pentium III machine. Semantically speaking they’re both “PC” but it may as well have been a next generation leap. I’ll spare you every single benchmark, but Mechwarrior Mercenaries best exemplifies how dramatic it was. On the Pentium I, I had to play at 320 x 240 resolution and severely curtailed graphics settings. But on the Pentium III it sang at 640 x 480 and all settings maxed out. The fluidity of the motion was both surreal and ineffable.
I later upgraded the Pentium III’s GPU to:
GPU: 16 MB ATI Rage Pro
This sped up performance on a few titles that ran like slideshows on the 8 MB card and caused a handful of other nonworking titles to spring to life. The 16 MB card’s visuals blew away anything on the Playstation or Nintendo 64, competing with contemporary arcade titles and even approaching early Dreamcast or Playstation 2 levels of fidelity.
It was also fascinating to see game engines evolve in such a short span of time. As a kid I could perceive that Quake had top notch graphics, but it didn’t fully appreciate the achievement of transforming Doom’s height-agnostic 2.5D world into truly three dimensional x-y-z space. The feat of multi-story stages or peeking through holes in the floor to shoot enemies in the basement seems downright next gen. Most stunning of all was that Quake ran entirely in software with an enviable frame rate. Even competing polygon games such as Descent performed nowhere near as well as Quake. It makes my head spin to think that Quake did all this without a 3D card.
It was interesting to see how 3D cards started out as an optional accessory to boost game performance. Then by the end of the decade many games wouldn’t run without them. A few of my year 2000 titles still had software mode (such as Half Life Opposing Force or Soldier of Fortune). However, 1999’s Star Wars Episode One Racing and Lego Rock Raiders listed a 3D card as a bare minimum requirement. Today there’s no such thing as gaming without a GPU.
Things also weren’t as “plug and play” back then. I had a handful of cases where I fought tooth and nail to get something to work, such as a sound card, then finally it would work, but I had no idea why. One time I my drivers had a total meltdown, forcing me to reinstall Windows from scratch. 3D cards’ standards were all over the place, too. Today, it would be out of the question for a game to not run on a major brand-name graphics card. I’ve only had that happen when trying to play low-spec Steam games on Intel integrated graphics or something like that. But 20+ years ago, it was commonplace for a major AAA game to just not support your state-of-the-art 3D card. For instance, I tried running Alien vs. Predator on my 8 MB card, but it kept me out with the message, “4 MB minimum required video ram not detected.” It worked after upgrading to the 16 MB card, but other titles such as Need for Speed 3 still wouldn’t work outside of software mode. Apparently NFS3 only supports 3DFX cards.
I think the only way to ensure all your games would work in hardware mode would be to get a powerful 3DFX card, the apparent de facto standard back then. But 3DFX cards are still rather costly on eBay. As to why prices are so high, I have a theory, namely that after Nvidia acquired 3DFX, they nuked 3DFX drivers moving forward, which is why my other 32 MB GeForce AGP card should theoretically be able to dominate all my Windows 9x games, but in practice it can’t run any of them. Worse yet, it’s too underpowered to run newer games well, so if my theory holds true, that 32 MB card is almost useless thanks to planned obsolescence. (Thanks Nvidia!)
My first category of games i beat in 2020 were titles I already completed as a kid but wanted to experience again, such as A.D.A.M. the Inside Story, Lego Island, and The Oregon Trail II. Some of these barely qualify as games and are more akin to an instructional video tapes or similar media that went extinct once everyone had high speed Internet in their homes. They don’t play anything like Sega or Nintendo games, either. One of them (A.D.A.M. the Inside Story) doesn't even appear to have ever been uploaded to YouTube until I did it myself!
The second category was games I got to play when I was younger but never beat, such as Quake, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Star Wars Episode One Racing, and Lego Rock Raiders. I was apprehensive that some of these wouldn’t have aged well, but they were a blast to play, and it meant a lot to me to finally have closure on them.
The third category was completely new titles I never experienced before, such as Road Rash, Need for Speed 3, Half Life Opposing Force, Warcraft II, and most importantly Mechwarrior 2. I got completely lost in Mechwarrior 2, completing the entire series and even beating two entires more than once. This series was my number one favorite for 2020 and may well be on rotation every few years.
I love the gleeful cheesiness pervading everything. All the 3D CGI introductory animations have the youthful naivety of a high school kid making animations on his computer. By modern standards everything looks so stiff, sterile, and awkward, like shambling plastic action figures hovering around in a vacuum. But it’s all so earnest. It’s not clear where 90’s ’tude came from or where it disappeared to, but it’s hilarious to see it today.
-1) Doom
(I did not record a video of this.)
0) Duke Nukem 3D
(I did not record a video of this.)
1) Quake
2a) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (human campaign)
3) Blood
4a) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Jade Falcon Campaign
4b) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Wolf Clan Campaign
5) Shadow Warrior
6) Mechwarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy
7) Doom 2
8) Lego Island
2b) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (orc campaign)
9) Road Rash
10) Toy Story Animated Storybook
11) Half Life: Opposing Force
12) Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries
13) Quake II
(I recorded a video of this and uploaded it but YouTube flagged it as a conspiracy theory video. I appealed and they rejected my appeal on the grounds that the video went against YouTube’s community guidelines. I reuploaded it 3 months later hoping they wouldn’t notice, but they took it back down and gave my account a community guidelines strike. I wonder if they would notice if I mirrored the video left-to-right and uploaded it under the title “That Game that Comes in Between Quake I and Quake III”, but I’m unwilling to risk that.)
14) A.D.A.M. The Inside Story
15) Commander Keen Episode One: Marooned on Mars
16) Commander Keen Episode Two: The Earth Explodes!
17) Too new, don’t talk about this game until 2028.
18) Star Wars Episode One: Racer
19) Lego Rock Raiders
20) Gunman Chronicles
21) The Oregon Trail II
22) Too new, don’t talk about this game until 2028.
23) Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit
24) Too new, don't talk about this game until 2021.
25) Soldier of Fortune Gold Edition
Windows 9x and MS-DOS PC gaming has a ton of personal significance for me, likely because I had to get my Dad’s permission to play on his computer as a kid. The lack of total control over when I got to play made it seem like a special treat that wasn’t on tap all the time. I was also totally reliant on Dad to buy and install new software. This made it all the more tantalizing and memorable when he would get a shareware demo teasing the full version.
By the time the Windows XP era had arrived, I had my own PC in my room I could use whenever I wanted. That seems to have “killed the magic” for early 2000’s PC gaming. But 90’s PC gaming never lost its allure for me. During my 2018 Sega Genesis and 2019 NES gaming years, kilobytes were a useful unit of measurement for games’ file sizes. As a result, those games used finite tile sets cleverly rearranged into a gauntlet of obstacles and challenges belying the brevity of the underlying data. But the arrival of CD-ROM drives with hundreds of megabytes of space brought an unprecedented explosion of content.
For instance, I couldn’t even finish everything on my Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness disc. I beat the main human and orc campaigns but there are still two extra campaigns that went untouched. It felt like going to a restaurant for one meal only for the waiter to bring out a steak, a turkey thigh, a ham, and a fish filet all on the same plate. I got a similar feeling from Mechwarrior II’s two campaigns. Although I completed both, either campaign seemed substantial all by itself, and both on the same disk felt downright daunting. And I barely skimmed the surface of fan-made expansions, WADs, and level packs - extras that would have been totally out of the question on home consoles from back then.
This year I gamed on two different PCs. The first one had these specs:
CPU: 200 MHz Pentium I
GPU: 1 MB Trident, no 3D acceleration
RAM: 70 MB
HDD: 4 GB Compact Flash Card
The second one had these specs:
CPU: 900 MHz Pentium III
GPU: 8 MB ATI Rage
RAM: 512 MB
HDD: 4 GB Compact Flash Card + 80 GB hard drive
Gaming performance skyrocketed on the Pentium III machine. Semantically speaking they’re both “PC” but it may as well have been a next generation leap. I’ll spare you every single benchmark, but Mechwarrior Mercenaries best exemplifies how dramatic it was. On the Pentium I, I had to play at 320 x 240 resolution and severely curtailed graphics settings. But on the Pentium III it sang at 640 x 480 and all settings maxed out. The fluidity of the motion was both surreal and ineffable.
I later upgraded the Pentium III’s GPU to:
GPU: 16 MB ATI Rage Pro
This sped up performance on a few titles that ran like slideshows on the 8 MB card and caused a handful of other nonworking titles to spring to life. The 16 MB card’s visuals blew away anything on the Playstation or Nintendo 64, competing with contemporary arcade titles and even approaching early Dreamcast or Playstation 2 levels of fidelity.
It was also fascinating to see game engines evolve in such a short span of time. As a kid I could perceive that Quake had top notch graphics, but it didn’t fully appreciate the achievement of transforming Doom’s height-agnostic 2.5D world into truly three dimensional x-y-z space. The feat of multi-story stages or peeking through holes in the floor to shoot enemies in the basement seems downright next gen. Most stunning of all was that Quake ran entirely in software with an enviable frame rate. Even competing polygon games such as Descent performed nowhere near as well as Quake. It makes my head spin to think that Quake did all this without a 3D card.
It was interesting to see how 3D cards started out as an optional accessory to boost game performance. Then by the end of the decade many games wouldn’t run without them. A few of my year 2000 titles still had software mode (such as Half Life Opposing Force or Soldier of Fortune). However, 1999’s Star Wars Episode One Racing and Lego Rock Raiders listed a 3D card as a bare minimum requirement. Today there’s no such thing as gaming without a GPU.
Things also weren’t as “plug and play” back then. I had a handful of cases where I fought tooth and nail to get something to work, such as a sound card, then finally it would work, but I had no idea why. One time I my drivers had a total meltdown, forcing me to reinstall Windows from scratch. 3D cards’ standards were all over the place, too. Today, it would be out of the question for a game to not run on a major brand-name graphics card. I’ve only had that happen when trying to play low-spec Steam games on Intel integrated graphics or something like that. But 20+ years ago, it was commonplace for a major AAA game to just not support your state-of-the-art 3D card. For instance, I tried running Alien vs. Predator on my 8 MB card, but it kept me out with the message, “4 MB minimum required video ram not detected.” It worked after upgrading to the 16 MB card, but other titles such as Need for Speed 3 still wouldn’t work outside of software mode. Apparently NFS3 only supports 3DFX cards.
I think the only way to ensure all your games would work in hardware mode would be to get a powerful 3DFX card, the apparent de facto standard back then. But 3DFX cards are still rather costly on eBay. As to why prices are so high, I have a theory, namely that after Nvidia acquired 3DFX, they nuked 3DFX drivers moving forward, which is why my other 32 MB GeForce AGP card should theoretically be able to dominate all my Windows 9x games, but in practice it can’t run any of them. Worse yet, it’s too underpowered to run newer games well, so if my theory holds true, that 32 MB card is almost useless thanks to planned obsolescence. (Thanks Nvidia!)
My first category of games i beat in 2020 were titles I already completed as a kid but wanted to experience again, such as A.D.A.M. the Inside Story, Lego Island, and The Oregon Trail II. Some of these barely qualify as games and are more akin to an instructional video tapes or similar media that went extinct once everyone had high speed Internet in their homes. They don’t play anything like Sega or Nintendo games, either. One of them (A.D.A.M. the Inside Story) doesn't even appear to have ever been uploaded to YouTube until I did it myself!
The second category was games I got to play when I was younger but never beat, such as Quake, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Star Wars Episode One Racing, and Lego Rock Raiders. I was apprehensive that some of these wouldn’t have aged well, but they were a blast to play, and it meant a lot to me to finally have closure on them.
The third category was completely new titles I never experienced before, such as Road Rash, Need for Speed 3, Half Life Opposing Force, Warcraft II, and most importantly Mechwarrior 2. I got completely lost in Mechwarrior 2, completing the entire series and even beating two entires more than once. This series was my number one favorite for 2020 and may well be on rotation every few years.
I love the gleeful cheesiness pervading everything. All the 3D CGI introductory animations have the youthful naivety of a high school kid making animations on his computer. By modern standards everything looks so stiff, sterile, and awkward, like shambling plastic action figures hovering around in a vacuum. But it’s all so earnest. It’s not clear where 90’s ’tude came from or where it disappeared to, but it’s hilarious to see it today.
