JRock3x8

imho (single player) halo has perfected the right combination of blowing stuff up and pace that delivers pulse pounding thrills time after time. COD is too fast, ME is too slow. multiplayer I think all of those games are ridiculous but that's a whole different topic.

yah I'm sorry but that just doesn't matter to me at all. it's still go into a room, shoot a bunch of dudes, rinse and repeat. If there are other gameplay options, the game doesn't do a good enough job of presenting them. I know full well what a "landmark game" ME2 is considered but the whole experience feels flat to me. If that makes me an ignorant gamer, then so be it.

trying to play space quest 2 on my ipad and failing playing Civ 1 on my ipad but can't save games :( also playing Reign of Thunder beta (mechassault 3) playing mass effect 2 (not sure what everyone is jumping up and down about, seems like a pretty generic action game to me) playing NFS The Run - when did "Easy" become damn impossible? Ugh.

so I got SQ1 running on my iPad no sweat but couldn't get any of the other ones to work. SQ2 said it wasn't installed so I took the installed copy from my PC and dropped into DOSPad and then it wouldn't load. Any ideas? PS : Off topic, but Civilization (original) on iPad is pure magic... figured it out - type "sierra" and enjoy

Another thing that I love is that the parser is a bit strict. You may need to type something a certain way which forces my son to think of words that are like what he just typed but not exactly the same. He is struggling with it a little bit but it's so interesting to him that he stays with it.

Looking forward to it. I use the same handle over there.

speaking of mechwarrior, that gets relaunched as a free to play game this year (mwomercs.com) along with like THIRTEEN OTHER MECH GAMES - it's crazy. So I risked marital strife by dropping $300 on a quad core system last week. :)

I'm going to support your argument by going off topic again. :) Another one of my favorite video game franchises is Mechwarrior. Mechwarrior at its core is COMPLETELY Incomprehensible. It's so complicated you need like 5 spreadsheets to keep track of all the numbers. But that's what makes it great. Rewind to 2002 when MechAssault came out (which I loved for different reasons) - that game took away A LOT of what made Mechwarrior great. I think that pirhana is getting back to the incomprehensible side of the ledger with their new game due out sometime this summer. My point is that point and click adventure games have their place and can be great but ultimately it subtracts from the formula that you and I know and love as space quest.

Funny. I never ever got into or so much as looked at a Kings Quest game. I played space quest 1, 3, half of 4 and police quest 1, 2 and maybe 3. Can't remember. Soon after I moved into sports sims. There was a crazy hockey game that let you play season after season and your players skills would actually progress depending on how well you played which back then was kind of crazy. And then of course there was front page sports football. But we're way off topic here. :) Sadly, the PC "driver game" is what drove me to consoles in 2003. I got so sick of my PC games crashing all the time.

The thing about mice is that people who learned how to use computers before mice hate them and people who learned how to use computers after them don't understand how to use a PC without one. I see it both ways although when it comes to hardcore work time in excel I touch my mouse as little as possible. As far as typing skills go, it was most definitely online chats that did it for me. I knew a guy in high school who eventually went to go work for both yahoo and google who wrote this chat software that was really great. Made some lifelong friends on that thing.

Space Quest was not my first computer game but it was the first game I fell in love with. The last two weeks with all of the interviews and commentaries I revisited that part of my youth a little bit. I watched one of the play throughs on youtube with my 7 year old son watching over my shoulder. I was amazed at how excited he was about it considering the pretty awful graphics compared to what he is used to. So I got a copy of the game and installed it on a spare XP laptop we had (installing that game on modern machines is quite an adventure in its own right, thank you whoever built those modern installers...). I soon realized that this wasn't just entertainment for him but also education. The only games he has ever played only involve a Wii motion controller or maybe a PS3 or 360 gamepad where everything is more or less intuitive. Now all of a sudden all of that is stripped away. Moving the character is still fairly intuitive but now everything the character has to do requires thought, spelling and typing from him, skills he doesn't really have mastered yet. On top of that, the early part of SQ1 is timed, so he needs to learn to do those things quickly. I'm so thrilled that not only do I get to share a part of my childhood with my son but that he also gets to learn valuable skills that he needs for life in the process.