For many of us, reaching for a videogame soundtrack is fairly commonplace. Although we might take some flack for it, the best of game music over the years provides as great a listening experience as any pop-infused playlist, with some bonus nostalgia to boot. But what happens when we (perhaps unfairly) compare the soundtracks from two of the most successful franchises in gaming history? That is precisely the question at hand today on the Wringer. Can the Commodore stand against the one-sidedness of the community responses, or will he too fall in line? Find out here, and then get ready for a question for next week that will have you revisiting your AOL screen name and pulling out the old Hanson CDs. It’s the Weekly Wringer!
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My parents bought a computer for the family in 1995-1996 when computer was really expensive and first thing first we went to create a account for Internet on 56K. We went home plugged everything and configured it to connect to the Internet. At first, I used it for downloading photos and music, readings news and looking for walktrougth for games that I was stuck on. I loved to read videogames news also, chatting on msn or IRC and even for email.
The big moment that changed my perspective of the Internet as the future was when I was first playing Warcraft 2 by modem or in lan with friends(I know isn’t really Internet but stick with me). The next game I purchased was a game from the same developper named Diablo, that’s when I first start playing online on the battle.net. I was playing day and night, so much that my parents was harassing me to disconnect from Internet because they had to use the phone. That’s was a lot a fun.
At that time, I knew that on the future for gaming, for sure, would become big. Today, I don’t play much online since I lack the time for it but we can all agree that multiplayer game is a big part the Internet nowadays (social games, mutliplayer fps, mmrpg, etc).
My freshman year of college was 1995. That year is when I was really exposed to using PC’s and connecting to the internet. We had Mac’s in high school, but only used them in the library for writing papers. At college, POPmail was the big email program. It was cool to be able to keep in contact with friends from high school now that we were scattered all over the place.
Also that year, I was first introduced to LAN’s and multi-player gaming with Duke Nukem 3D and Command and Conquer. My dorm-mates and I spent countless hours killing each other, when we should have been studying. Luckily, I was able to keep my grades up for the most part!
However, the really big ah-ha moment hit me about a year later, around 96 or 97. Sometime around then I began seeing games that allowed you to connect via IP addresses. Now, I could play with (or against) a friend who lived on the other side of the dorm from me – much too far for a LAN to be practical. That’s when it dawned on me that I would eventually be able to do the same with friends across campus…or across the country.
That’s when I knew things were fundamentally different than before.
Commodore, sometimes I wonder if me adding pictures to my tales is either too intrusive or add to the flavor of my stories. Regardless, we have picture time again this week. If it’s creepy, let me know.
My mother bought our first computer in 1999 at Sam’s Club with her income tax refund. It was a purple and gray HP. It had a 56k modem. I loved it and I still miss it. It’s in that great PC repair shop in the sky.
When I was in junior high, I met the two guys who still remain my two best, oldest friends– Scott and BJ. We were all staggered by a year in school, BJ being the oldest, me in the middle and Scott the youngest. Scott is Elizabeth’s younger brother, the girl in the sax section with me from my previous tale from a galaxy far, far away.
The first time we spent the night together, Scott’s mom ordered pizza and we watched The Three Amigos. The Martin Short, Chevy Chase and Steve Martin movie. From that point on, our parents dubbed us “The Three Amigos.”
In our own immature way, we came up with the dumbest nicknames to go along with that moniker. Scott was Pablo Sanchez, international drug lord and ladies man. BJ was Poncho Gomez, mariachi singer. I was Paco Fajita, immigrant mule. It was silly, but in retrospect, it was something that defined us. We used those names on the hundreds of Friday and Saturday nights we did cosmic bowling. If we lost each other in Wal Mart, we’d use those names to summon each other over the PA. It was silly, but fun.
Anyway, I ended up picking pacofajita as my AOL username. Scott and BJ both fell in line and used them as their AOL usernames, too.
Here’s us. I think this is the night Scott graduated high school. Scott is in the black hat, I’m in the middle and BJ is on the right. http://bit.ly/WYZMKS
I thought it was cool that I could keep up with the production of Final Fantasy 8. I scoured the internet for all the information I could find about it. I could actually keep up with the development in semi-realtime. I remember keeping up with the development of FF4 & 6 and Chrono Trigger via Nintendo Power (which I didn’t have a subscription to). Then PlayStation Magazine’s demo discs for FF7. But man, the way I could keep up with FF8.
Then one afternoon everything changed. I’d only been in high school a semester, encompassing my falling on the field story from two weeks ago (still prior to Star Wars). I remember one of the message boards I kept up with online was for marching band. We’d talk about techniques and what kind of show we were all doing. It was pretty cool.
I encountered one user who changed my life completely. My best friend and the love of my life– Lindsay. Though love, not in the romantic sense. It’s different and indescribable. I’ve never experienced a friendship with anyone like I have with her. She and I know so much about each other, if we ever ran for public office, we’d really be screwed.
Anyway, Lindsay and I quickly started talking about things other than band. We got close. I found out she lived in Massachusetts. We connected on a lot of things. We rushed home from school every day to talk to each other and hated to stop talking at dinner time.
Around that time, I really started to notice myself changing. I’m not sure if it was just the transition from junior high to high school, but I have always attributed this change to knowing Lindsay.
I’d been into video games for years, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I started to branch out in life. I got into other things, I started dressing better, I began to think and mature. I’m not sure what kind of person I’d be without Lindsay in my life. She would press me about what I wanted to do with my life, who I was and what I believed. At first, I wasn’t able to answer her questions, but it required me to take pause and really assess these things that are so central to a person. I couldn’t have done that without her.
So fast forward to college, when Lindsay and I finally met each other. Here’s us. http://i.imgur.com/YEPxp.jpg
If you’re wondering, I’m missing part of my eyebrow in that pic. I’d burnt it off in a freak grilling accident the day before we’d met. Lighter fluid flared in my face.
To that point, we’d never given a relationship any thought. But when we got together, things progressed, and we thought about it for a long time. We’d started making post-college plans. So after I graduated, I moved to Maine, where she was still in school, to act on the plan we’d made. I worked my first professional job with a newspaper up there and I was really on my own. I enjoyed my time in Maine. It was one of the best, most important times in my life. I ended up having to come back to Alabama when my grandmother died and I promised to stay near my grandpa.
Then she and I quickly realized that our friendship was too important to us to lose by a potential relationship. We both love each other dearly, still to this day talk a few times a week and wouldn’t trade what we have for the world.
Scott and BJ love her to death and want me to marry her one day. She thinks Scott and BJ are great. She and I are both deathly worried about them because Scott is in Bahrain and BJ is in Afghanistan at the moment. She and I date other people, but the both of us are upfront with potential significant others that we are important to each other. Lindsay just started dating someone and I just got out of a relationship. However, she and I have said that if neither of us were married by the time I turn 40 (she’d be three months shy of 39 at that time), we’d get married.
But that’s my story. I owe who I am today to a girl named Lindsay, and two friends who helped me come up with my online identity. I give credit to the internet for changing my life in the most profound way possible.
Sorry, man. 1 player (especially 1player) fps just isn’t really my thing. You watch all of Monster and I will totally buy an xbox and Halo though. ^^
Weirdly enough it was only very recently that I had this feeling that the internet had changed the world. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I played so much Doom and was on so many bbs’ that the internet really never registered as being so far beyond a larger extension of that, but for whatever reason it was only about 6 months ago or so.
There were alot of Ron Paul ads on youtube when he was trying to get the Republican nomination and based on the rather indirect nature of the ads alot of the community seemed to be accepting Libertarian ideals (if you don’t know it’s mostly about state’s rights, “free market”, and isolationism which the ads didn’t touch on at all.) As I’m apt to do, I was arguing with alot of people about it.
Well I made a very negative comment on a pro-libertarian video and this one guy started arguing with me. One major sticking point for me about the Libertarian party is that it attracts a very large racist element because of their emphasis on state’s rights and the negative stance they take on de-segregation because of this. Well this guy is busy calling me an idiot for thinking this, but about half way through the conversation I happen to check out his channel. He has neo-nazi insignias complete with swastikas as his background image and rabidly racist uploads and comments.
So I ask how I’m supposed to take him seriously with his neo nazi bg image? How can he argue the Libertarian party isn’t attractive to racists when he’s a racist attracted to the Libertarian party? His response was to remove his bg image and call me a liar. Eventually everyone figured out he was based on his videos and other comments and denounced him, but what really stuck with me was that I’d made a neo-nazi ashamed of his racism.
That’s one of the biggest things the internet has accomplished. We’re all just voices now. There is no skin color. There are no borders. It is really hard to be misinformed. It is nigh impossible to have such a ridiculous, backward viewpoint as skin color mattering and still be taken seriously by the community. For example the news media has been trying to induce alot of fear about Muslims and Egypt. I have alot of Egyptian friends because of an mmo I play. Pretty hard to be afraid of the people I talk to every day.
Above everything though is that I had the ability to hold this conversation in the first place. I could discuss very powerful issues with a very large and very diverse community. Everyone has a voice now and I don’t think they’ll ever accept being silenced.
Thanks to you, Commodore, I will definitely spend more quality time with the Halo franchise.
Now on to your question for this week.
In 1999 when I was a year out of high school I started spending most days with my grandpa after my grandma died. He paid me a little, for my time, and we did everything together. He bought an iMac and got service with AOL so he could keep up with the stock market. That was the first computer I had pretty much unlimited access to that was hooked up to the World Wide Web. I had my own computers, through high school, even built some, but my folks wouldn’t let me get Internet access. (I wonder why.) Anyway, my grandpa had a whole bunch of antique photographic equipment, and other things, and we got into selling stuff on eBay. He even bought me a digital camera (which I still have) so we could upload pictures more easily. Selling stuff on eBay was thrilling to me. I remember being completely awed by the realization that our stuff was available to hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people. All of a sudden, the junk in the garage was worth something. That’s when I realized the Internet was changing the world forever. Not only could I sell my grandpa and my stuff for more than we could get at the local pawn or antique shop, but I could find anything I wanted to buy as well. I fleshed out my NES and Lego collections with games and sets I’d wanted badly when they were new, but had become very hard or impossible to find locally. I’m still using eBay today, and that sense of awe at the number of potential customers remains with me to some extent.
More recently I’ve realized how the Internet is changing the business world. As owner and operator of my own small manufacturing business, the Internet is an abolute necessity for communication, advertising, marketing, research, purchasing, and the list goes on. But that’s not news to you.
The times, they are a changin’
The world would never be the same again? Or just my world?
Well, I hopped on the internet right around 1994. It wasn’t really earth shattering to me. We had AOL 3.0 for Windows 3.1. We had a 28.8 modem (I think it was) and that is the only time in my life when I filled out a full and honest profile.
I’m not saying I’m not honest on my profile. (Of course I’m a 3’4″ Mobian female hedgehog with sky blue fur and brown bangs don’tcha know? And I totally live in Station Square
Why do you ask?) but I wanted to meet people back then, and I did. Nowadays, I only fill out the bare minimum on my profiles unless it’s for a specific community.
It was through my profile that I entered a Sonic chat room community, and met one of my today- best friends. But not long after that I got a message asking me to join a Mega Man X fan club. WAS – the War Against Sigma. We communicated through message boards and a chatroom, and the chatroom is where I met -several- of my current best friends. (Roll MMManiacs, Xero947, Wolfchild6, oh God, I remember their old account names? XD)
Cain (who I would later know as Brandon, he also played Vile in the group chats), Roll (Bev, who is my best girl friend), and Arrow Swift (who I’d later grow weary of) were the leaders of said club.
Cain championed a robots-only motif, and didn’t like my friend Wolf’s genetically created anthro character being a hunter. I felt “Why not?” she already had a well established history in the club, and why wouldn’t there be human support characters interacting with the repliods?
Arrow wanted to introduce more bio-tech creations. I think she played as Gamma, a Sigma created hellspawn which had some biological properties. (Fan character of course). At the time, the idea of the DNA chips which would be mentioned in later X games hadn’t come out, so that gives another sense of time scale.
But Roll was our mediator. She was the glue that held the club together. She would interceed when there were problems. And she was super-nice. I actually regretted not talking to her more. She actually gave me a Proto Man build kit which I have to this day. She’d never met me in person so I was quite touched by that.
I mention all this because of the day that my world tilted on its axis. Roll announced she was joining the Navy!
Everyone in the club was stunned. We had little enough contact with her to begin with, but then she up and joins the Navy? WHY? Well, that’s the day the internet changed my world, because I had a friend potentially going into harms way.
Shortly after she left, the club fell into disarray, the two warring entities left in charge unable to come to any understanding. And yes, she was serving in the Navy during 9/11.
I’d say it was a stupid little club, but I made some very real and lasting friendships through it. And I consider Bev – Roll – like the sister I never had. We finally met in person in 2003. It actually took us years to stop calling each other by our club-nicknames. (Just call me Sophie
– long story short, it was the nickname my character Soprano had – continuing the musical name theme of the Mega Man games). I think I still call her Roll now and then. So that’s my story.= and I’m sticking to it.
Other things that blew my mind – Finding out there was a Sonic the Hedgehog anime that I had not seen, and finding out that Sailor Uranus and Neptune were not ‘cousins’, and finding out there were male sailor scouts who transformed into women, and finding out that Zoicite (or whoever it was) was actually a man. Playing Bejeweled.
In my first year of junior high school, I believe it for English class I had to do a research paper. At the time, my school had super archiac Apple II computers or something. In order to conduct research for the paper, I had to use the dewey decimal system cards and flip through volumes of journals by hand reading abstracts of articles skimming for articles that fit my thesis. It was a very tedious process and feel very sorry for previous generations that had to go through this process to write a paper. I had to do it only once and it was enough!
The next year, my school district upgraded most of their computers to Windows 95. With that upgrade, we also got access to academic database called JSTOR. No longer did we have to flip through journals for hours. Just type in the subject and get a listing of articles in which the majority can be easily printed out. In the case of the few articles that couldn’t be printed, it gave the exact pages and volume to manually acquire the article. What a revelation! At one point in college, I had about 5 research papers due at once, without the internet and access to academic journals electronically, I don’t know how I could have gotten through that workload. My story wasn’t gaming related but it certainly impacted my life from an academic standpoint. The impact of the internet and the ability to access (and share) inmeasurable amounts of knowledge/information in a matter of seconds is just incredible.
This is going to be a really short answer from me. The moment when I thought that the internet was going to be huge, is when I started playing on Blizzard’s first rendition of their Battle.Net system with Warcraft 2. It was an experience that I don’t think we will ever be able to duplicate. This was a mother of a jump in how we game and communicate while doing so. This also stemmed the first of the competitive strategic gaming that we now see with games such as League of Legends. Which is a huge development in and of itself that stemmed from this development.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Short and Sweet.
The first moment that really blew me away was my first time using altavista. Up until that point, I used the internet to trade fake celebrity nude pictures on AOL or flame people on Prodigy message boards in a Playstation vs 3DO contest. Of course everyone knows that the 3DO is the superior machine with its awesome single controller port feature. Anyway, I had to write a biography on Jackie Robinson for my history class. While in my typing class, the teacher recommended I use the altavista search engine. He explained to me that Prodigy and AOL kept people within an internal world, but using Netscape would allow better access to the web. I would be able to navigate the internet by directly typing in an address or by using a search engine like altavista or webcrawler. Simply typing in anything I could think up into the search bar would pull up related content from the internet. Let the era of light plagiarism and loose citations begin.
A more recent discovery was that of adultswim.com streaming their shows. I think they started doing this around 2005. Up until then, they had clips and other marginally interesting material. Then they allowed anyone to see whole episodes without any ads and they would put the shows up on Fridays before they would air on tv Sunday nights. Television networks would eventually copy this idea (less user friendly and with annoying ads that crashed the browser). Eventually Hulu presented many tv shows with minimal ad breaks and a stable service (CBS.com still crashes and gets stuck in ad loops). Today users consume entertainment on their own time whether it is live broadcasts, DVR (or other recordings even VCR still), on-Demand, internet streaming, or by purchasing downloads legally (no torrents because COTGW users are always lawful). I give credit to adultswim for popularizing television content accessed through the internet.
I think this community is fairly anti-FPS except goldeneye and Half Life, thus I could see why Halo doesn’t have many fans. It really is a good soundtrack though.
Anyway, this may sound cliche, but I would say the first time I heard the dial up noise and later that night knocked my brother off the net by picking up the phone. I was still relatively young (I was 8 years old when we got our first internet connection in 1995), and I didn’t know exactly what was the big deal.
A few days later I remember logging in myself to the internet, and just seeing various website. Extremely primitive websites by today’s standards (hell, primitive by 2002′s standards). But it was amazing to see just another person’s thoughts from all over the country right there in my living room. I didn’t think it would become this big (did anybody really think that?), but I knew something cool was in the works, and was hooked immediately.
One of the earliest memories I have of being online and probably the first that really set me back was playing Red Alert 2 online. I’d played with friends at a number of lan parties so playing multiplayer with people I’d never met wasn’t all that new to me. It was really cool to play online with people from around the county. Then one day I started a match with someone and asked where he was from. He responded with “WA.” I asked if he meant Washington State, which was where I myself lived at the time and thought it was really cool if he was somewhat nearby. Then he replied “Western Australia.” That was the moment that hit me. I realized I was playing a video game with someone on the other side of the planet, and would have had no idea otherwise if I hadn’t asked since we both spoke English. I also had to think about the idea afterwards that anyone I played with online could be from absolutely anywhere, and that was awesome.
My moment for realizing that the internet had changed the world forever was actually before I even got to use it. Back when I lived in Scotland, my dad was the network administrator for a company. It was the same company that he’d worked at since he was 16. He started off as an apprentice sheet metal worker, worked his way up to journeyman sheet metal worker, then the day the company got computers in, my dad walked over and asked what they were. On the strength of his curiosity he became one of the first people working there to be alowed to start using CAD (and eventually Auto-CAD) to design the things the sheet metal workers made, everything from filing cabinets to the frames for flight simulators and tanks. He taught himself some rudimentary programming for DOS and in BASIC, he taught himself how to fix computers, so my home was always filled with various PC’s he brought home to fix that he let me play with. When the company networked all their computer together, he taught himself how to do that, and so the company made him their network administrator.
So I grew up hearing my dad talk about his work, watched him fix all the PC’s he brought home, heard all about the mid-nineties internet, but it didn’t sink in until about 1997 when he took me to work with him one day. I went into his office and saw his PC with it’s 3 monitor set up, and watched him work all day. Much of his work required the use of the search engines of the day so he could learn how to fix one problem or another (remember, he was entirely self-taught.) That’s when it sunk in that the internet had changed things. I knew that when I was in secondary school studying for my O-levels I would be using the internet instead of encyclopedias (I ended up emigrating to America 3 years before I would have taken my O-levels.)
Accidental double-post.
Yep, sorry I was born in 94′ so I was just a wee’babe when the internet was fresh and new.
I will tell you this, my first experiance of an MMO/Interactive Forum (is that a thing?) was Habbo Hotel and how ashamed I am of that, oh yes.
But anyway, I wanted to share an opinion or two on the previous question you posed – apologies as I’m new to these video’s so I didn’t get a chance to submit my opinion last time
I’ve always loved Halo since the CE days and frankly its been the same for Final Fantasy, Obviously due to when I was born its resonable to assume I grew up with Final Fantasy 7 which I did and I could probably hum every track to you without error. I think I was born in just the right time to have a good enough nostalgia for both and as such I think they both have fantastic music that should both be listened to.
Just to let you know about Halo 4′s music (assuming you’ve not played it yet, don’t worry no spoilers) I would recommend listening to what I consider to be the best track in the game, “117″ which, obviously, is Chief’s theme; its not O’donnell but its bloody good and even has a couple nods to the Halo 3 OST as well.
Lookin’ forward to the next video
Red Mage wins because he got to talk about the Dewey Decimal System.
I really started using the internet off and on around 1997. The time that I really came to realize how the world would never quite be the same was when I joined a forum in 2000 and began to see the well-spring of ideas, creativity and political debate from all corners of the world meeting at a single place.
The vast array of information aided by primitive video, audio and other cues matured the communication technology that started on BBSes or IRC into a form that was accessible to so many people. It was a bit of an eye-opener to meet 12 year olds and 60 year olds in an area that doesn’t distinguish between your name, age or appearance but rather by the quality of your speech and ideas.
With permanent webpages becoming accessible via Geocities or other services, the world would never quite be the same as just about ANYONE could make their voice heard over the great cyber world.
That’s a tough one. When I first discovered it (I was probably around 4 or 5) I thought it was this cool thing where we can play games with other people in different places and to me it was just another gadget. I didn’t really see how world changing it was until I started frequenting youtube. It was a way for me to sort of connect with people from anywhere that had similar interests as me in a more public environment so to speak. I made a channel, I made videos of things I liked, and I made friends on there that shared those interests. That was the moment when I knew just how world changing it was.
First off, Yoshi is a nickname that I happened to pickup a few months ago at a previous job, one guy I worked with started to call me Yoshi all the time because I reminded him of yoshi somehow, and the name just kinda stuck with me. I happen to be a retro gaming collector mainly collecting NES games (I’m at 220+ out of 758 total licensed games) and I hope one day to have them all, minus a few like NWC carts and stadium events, since I can’t justify spending THOUSANDS of dollars on a video game. I collect for all systems other then current gen systems for the most part. (You can thank Roo and his 16-bit gems series for me even finding this website in the first place!)
As far as this weeks question goes, I was born in ’91 and the first computer my family got was around ’97. It was a purple and grey Sony Viao. At first I just used it to play whatever games we had for it at the time. My family didn’t get internet till around ’98 or ’99 and we just had a 56k modem. I remember using the internet back then to look up cheats and guides for whatever games I couldn’t figure out and also playing primitave flash games which took 10-15 minutes just to load at the time, but again I had to share it with my brothers and parents, so I didn’t get to spend much time on it.
Anyway, the time I somewhat realized the internet was going to change the world, but was still not able to fully comprehend how much of an impact it would have was the first time I used a DSL connection and was able to load webpages in a flash, stream videos and music as well as download whatever I wanted. This was also around the time I found AOL instant messenger, and yahoo messenger and was able to talk to anyone around the world and also go into chatrooms.
The moment when I fully realized that the internet had in fact changed the world was just a few years ago, when I got a computer of my own when I was in high school, and was free to do whatever I pleased with it. Which, happened to be around the time I got into playing Final Fantasy XI really heavily, and proceeded to become somewhat of a social outcast in my high school due to my obsession with the game and that ended up as my social outlet so to speak. I was playing with people from all around the world and as amazing as that was, It had a fair share of drawbacks as well. Anyone that has played it knows that it is NEAR IMPOSSIBLE to accomplish anything in that game without help from other people in the game, and made it incredibly hard to put the game down when you finally found the help because you wanted to get this fancy armor or whatever you were trying to do. After wasting years of my life into the game, it drove me back to playing and collecting retro games, simply because I can put them down and walk away when more important matters arise, and it is incredible to be able to have and play all the games I wish I had when I was a kid now that I’ve grown up.
Moving on, It’s not just the internet that has changed the world, but computers and technology in general. Everywhere you go now more and more things are computerized, hell most of us carry around what are more or less miniture handheld computers in our pockets now, and are able to access the internet to stream music on the go, watch videos wherever we please and so on. We live in a world where communication is easier then ever before. When I was a kid all you had was either mailing a letter, or calling them and talking to someone over the phone, as to now, you can call them, text them, email them, webcam with them etc etc. But the real question is, is technology’s hold on us our downfall? What would most of us do if we lost the internet and all of today’s technology? Would we know what to do with ourselves if that happened?
I can’t say the exact year, maybe in 1996 or 1997 when i was like 6 or 7 years old. We were in the house of some friends of my grandmother (i cant remember exactly who they were), but i clearly remember the daughter of that family, watching a big screen of an old white PC. Of course that was not weird, because of the work of my mother we had a computer as well; also the daughter was an adult maybe 18 or 19 years old, so she was probably working or something. But there was something diferent, the mother of the girl was speaking with my grandmother, and i was there listening. She told to my grandma, that her daughter wanted a computer with internet for birthday instead of a big party or something, and i was like: what the fuck is the internet? why she wanted that?. They talked a lot about the internet but i cant remember exactly what. But what i remember is the mother of that girl asking her if she was chating with the same Canadian boy. I was surprised, how can she chat with a canadian boy only using a computer? we are in Mexico, how can she communicate to Canada!
Then they show us the chat room and explain it to us. They show us the browser and how in that chat page people around the world chat with each other. I thought it was cool, if you move to another country or state you can chat with your family but i did not think much about it.
In my house we didn´t get internet until 1998 or 1999 with a phone company. Boy that was a cool year! my new neighbors had internet and their son Fernando about 3 years older than me was downloading music from Napster!! That was the shock moment when i realised that the internet is a serious shit. Then Fernando teach me how to use his computer, napster, etc. and later that year i get my first computer and internet. Even though i did not use the internet a lot, i just downloaded some music and i get bored after a few weeks, instead i used my computer to play warcraft 2 offline, because i didnt know how to play online.
In 1999 America online came to Mexico i think, and that was the moment when i truly enjoy the internet because there was this special browser for kids, full of games and cool stuff. I remember the first flash animations, i also downloaded a lot of games and played a lot in the browser too. For example i never had a Sega Genesis but thanks to the internet somehow a friend and i downloaded a Genesis emulator and i spend hours playing sonic and shining force, back in those days.
Maybe im wrong in the dates because my memory is not that good. Also in Mexico the private internet a.k.a internet for normal people and not just universities and goverment, came late, like in 1995 or 1996.
Sorry for my english.
And thanks for the welcome!!!
I must say that I watched Commodore and then went immediately to the comments and started reading and realized that I was really lucky to see the internet in the early days. It all start when I was 5 or 6 and I just couldn’t get enough technology as I was already playing on the intellivision with my brother and reading science fiction books with the rest of my free time. I think it was safe to say that my parents knew that I was a nerd. It only got worse when my Dad brought home the company ”portable” computer. The free time that I was using to read science fiction books quickly changed to programming simple games in BASIC (no pun intended) for myself and my parents to amuse themselves.
The tool that I used was my dad’s “portable” computer, given to him by the company he worked for. The main purpose was to allow him to work from home while major projects were going on but I was able to use it when he didn’t need it. Let me first start out by describing the “portable” computer. I use the term “portable” in the loosest sense of the word as it was a 30 pound paper weight (Google IBM 5100 series computer). This beast came with 1200 baud stand-alone modem which added another 5 pounds of weight and took on a good day 10 minutes to start up. I remember asking my dad what this machine allowed him to do and he explained it to me in a way I still remember to this day “I Use the phone to call into a great big room far away where a bigger computer sits (later explained to me as a Main-Frame) and to tell that bigger computer what it needs to be doing.” My mind was racing as with the possibilities of what this larger computer looked like and it captivated me to no end. This portable computer became a family staple. When I was home sick from school, which was very frequent thanks to allergies, I was able to watch my dad as he worked. He joined coworkers in work “forums” and very basic chat-room, think of a predecessor to IRC. I few times my dad would allow me to talk to his co-workers who were in completely different cities, which completely blew my mind. I still get goose bumps to this day thinking about those conversations. I think that by the time I was 8 or 9 I knew that my life was going to be vastly different from my parents.
My dad worked with for a local cable company as one of the main designers of their main-Frame system (Bonus points if you know what they look like) and I was able to go to work with him on a few occasions to see this system in action. I think is a big reason why I still work in the technology and communications industry to this day. I started building computers when I was 10 – 14.4 modems were the top of line, 286 processors had just hit their prime, It was a glorious day to be into computers. In fact I still have a fully-functional 486 Dell home computer sitting in my basement and a handful of old 8080 and 8086 processors.
I usedta trade music on Napster back before they closed it down. Obscure shiz that back before the interwebz you hadto get outta the import section of stores like Boogie records. The ease of finding access to things I hadn’t heard since like I was 14 was a revelation to me.
First time I ever saw content on the BBC’s website that was censored from a US news broadcast. HUUUGE. The revolt in Mexico (1994-2000) that was never reported by the US mainstream media even though extensive military aid (and even actual military intervention in some cases) was given to the Mexican government by the US and US allies such as Britain, Japan and Israel. And at one time Mexico City itself was virtually under seige. Later footage of dead soldiers brought back from Iraq in the early days of the war.
Forming close long term personal relationships on Samurai of Legends, my first txt based mmorpg, and being part of one of the most fun, dynamic, smart, progressive, tolerant, and hilarious globe spanning ol communities I’ve ever come into contact w/ for four years of onlines and online slave auctions, official and unofficial wars, clan crashes, War Room banter and games. It was an introduction to a new world. Times change. That special mix of lunatic people and tolerant but competent admin. changed. The game changed. The community changed. Into something I didn’t really care to be a part of or mind leaving anymore. Thus is life, ol and irl. Tempus fugit. Still. Haven’t played in two years and still talk to about a handful of my friends from there occasionally on email and FB.
Playing Conquer Online during and after the Egyptian revolution (my server has a large proportion of Egyptian players) was a chance to see the real truth beyond the headlines and the propaganda and all the censorship. To see the human level. A friend of mine lost his girlfriend during it. None of them are muslim fundamentalists FTR. Just regular people. None of them are heroes or saints either. Plenty are a holes that need pked multiple times on a daily basis on general principle and some are laid back, cool peoples just like here. Sometimes I get random mails telling me I suck because my flag is US, but as a Mingo Iroquois I tell em if they want to hate on the US gov’t. they need to get in line. And for all the race war BC’s (broadcasts), there are just as many cross cultural love fests.
hi i am trying to sell 2 nintnedo wii us and all the profits will go to charity. half goes to toys for tots the other goes to a sick 13 yr old i know who is undergoing cancer treatment.
i am trying to find the most profitable way to re sell them
EBAY? raffle tickets? call up radio stations and websites?
i went to 2 diffrent stores i paid my deposit and i want ALL PROFITS to go to charity
i will have the systems in my hand tomrrow
now i need help to raise money for charity
please give me any tips or advice
do a motha fawkin barrel roll everybody
I realized the world would never be the same after I started using facebook and I could talk to people all over the world. Also the ability to create online friendships with people playing the same online game. And just the ability to send emails and instant messaging software I feel is one of the biggest things to happen ever and has made the world an extremly small place.
Been out of the loop, but it’s always nice to be right at home here at COTGW, keep up the good work!
The moment I realised the world changed, is when dial up appeared in my home, and internet accessible in High school before 05, the door opened with people to converse, which I enjoyed because I was rather quiet in my youth, it all started when a friend from a technology class in another district that I meet and we hit off, suggested to try a online game named Secrets of Mirage, for myself I was more into console then, but long story short communites are something else, and late nights on dial up are just disgusting when you think high speed today.
SoM is no more today, but the community has tried it’s best to stay active, and without Nemesis’s hard work, Sinarius would cease to exist, I welcome all to visit, we all support it’s return to create a fun experience for all! Screenshots are in General Discussion, link is http://www.generaljapery.net/sinarius/forum/index.php.
And I advise everyone to keep the Magnemite Coil going! Thanks to the GTS, Pokemon is indeed a gem, and it’s so much fun to meet so many people!
Apologies for more but since learning this technique I started my own Join Avenue community called FortuneAVE on Facebook, I’m trying as hard as I can to please the fans so stop by, I’m trying to give away all my years of prized pokemon!
Thank you, and have a great day!
I didn’t. I grew up with the internet and it felt like an everyday thing. Never saw it develop to a new ‘wow’ point at all either.. ..
Oh lordy, Conquer Online – I played that from 2006 to like.. 2008 and on and off between bigger MMO’s since, What a game indeed and now its getting the 3.0 update and it looks like TQ have got someone competent in charge because they are actually acknowledging the problems with the game, its fantastic.
I have a soft spot for Conquer because it was my first official MMO, I played Habbo first but lets face it thats essentially an interactive forum if anything.
Oh and sadly the Egyption community really buggered the game for me and my friends and everyone else I feel, I’ve got nothing agienst Eqyptions but the ones who play Conquer seem to be despicibly asshole-ish.
Ah well. lets hope 3.0 gets them away, as they seem to be changing it away from pay to win.
I’ve quit multiple times for six month stretches, then I’ll get bored w/ whatever else I’m doing, log in, and get sucked back in.
Most txt based mmos (except Urban Dead) are glorified forums boards, but I still love em anyway. My first experiences w/ ol gaming were these kindof games.
I think TQ are reaaaally trying to fix the imbalances in the game, keep it relevant for non bulkers, and get rid of the bots. Auto aim is just gone nao. Haven’t even seen an aimbotter in years. Noobs today don’t even know what one looks like and call everyone who pwns them at FB an aimbot. Farm bots are a work in progress, but it’s work the company is taking VERY seriously now. The addition of chi has done a lot towards levelling the playing field for non donators. I have a friend who has killed a full +12, 2 sckt, (they are only full 1 sckt.) because he haz some seriously killer chi.
I have Egyptians I’m friends w/, and I have Egyptians I kos. Depends on the person. Most of the Egyptians I’ve met who are especially jerky are also mega bulkers. Most people who would drop that kindof money on an FTP are gonna be your wannabe ethug a hole type. Just like rl, a lot of rich people are real jack offs. The botters annoy me moar. Like it takes some kindof special skill or intelligence to google COG. And why pay a mo. fee to COG, when you won’t donate to support the game?
I’m excited to see 3.0. No moar soul shackle sounds like a helluva good idea to me. Nerfing OP class skills = Win. They’ve always been pretty good about giving non bulkers enough content to keep them playing. I’m interested to see HOW MUCH 3.0 levels the playing field between bulkers and non bulkers.
Well, not that any of you are paying attention, but it’s time for a bit of a confession: I am an under-developed geek/nerd. Or rather, a completely different nerdhood usurped the stage for the formative years of what would’ve been my normal geekdom; I found music at age 12 and never looked back, or at least, not until much later. My NES, and PC games too, gathered dust while I dove headfirst into centuries of music written by people far away who were so different than me, but so very similar. Suffice it to say, everything, including the webz, became a tool to me, used as a means to my musical ends, and relegated to mere utilitarian appreciation by me, if any appreciation at all…hmmm mostly. I still had my moments.
It should now make sense when I say that until recently, I didn’t care much whether the net was changing the world–I just changed with it, used it, and enjoyed its benefits. (I salute and give thanks to all who created it and are still creating and maintaining it.) It meant I could listen to my Mahler symphonies more easily, learn about music/art history to my heart’s content, chat with friends on AIM, play multiplayer stuff like warcraft and counterstrike (though I only ever did that by LAN), and I’m sure, do many other wonderful things. Only I was too focused until recently to notice that regular people were being given an amazing gift that a few had managed to hoard for themselves previously: the ability to be heard.
Especially with the advent of the Ron Paul Revolution or whatever you want to call it, it started to make sense to me that people’s instincts toward freedom (which itself can be dangerous or good) did not have to go through the wringer
of society in order to get to a point where a company would broadcast them. Hence, said people/opinions weren’t tempered/transformed by, and into, more corporate-controlled or government-controlled or group-controlled or even self-conscious philosophies. They remain so wild out there on a WWW frontier. Pretty effin cool. Stick it to the man and such.
To me halo is the atmosphere . A slow camera panoramic along with the long oohs and ahhs of the soundtrack. However the only memorable moments of the music of Halo for ME , are during cinematic moments or entrances to chapters. On the other hand there is Final Fantasy has more memorable music moments to ME throughout the whole game.
Forgive me if you disagree but my personal favorite Final Fantasy is 9 . Probably because of the nostalgia of it being my first Playstation game, the amount of discs, the artwork and the storytelling crushed my adolescent mind . But Final Fantasy 9′s music held me close and interested in the story throughout the entire game. Halo only grabbed me with it’s music for brief moments.
I consider myself a veteran in both categories here and hands down in my book Final Fantasy wins , not only based on my experiences with FF9 but others such as FF3 and even FFtactics.
Thank you for the wonderful conversations Commodore . Good debating to you all.
My family first got a computer around 99′, it was mostly for business reasons. Then we got the internet . I was a little young for this and don’t remember the exact year.
I knew it was amazing right away because I could find information when i wanted to … after a short wait (cue dial up tone) . If it was looking up codes for Playstation or crazy videos (that came later) etc. internet goodness. I found myself glued to the screen of a computer playing floppy disk game and internet games for hours. I wanted to know the ins and outs of the computer, luckily my father is somewhat of a tech.
Me and him would have long talks, not very complicated because I was only six or seven at the time but detailed about computers and he would show me the new things he found on the internet that allowed you to communicate with people about things you’re nerdy about . Such as this website, and from that point on the internet was worth the loading waits to see all the amazing things people were sharing about games.
With a bit of research i found exactly what I was looking for. On really, really underground cheat code websites they had a forum. I wish to the day I could remember the names of them so that I could reminisce. This was a place for gamers to show secrets they had found or just tell crazy gaming stories by themselves or with their buddies. I often found myself hitting the pause button to find out how to get past what was stumping me and getting lost for hours reading about secrets of games with pictures and stories of hilarious glitches someone found .
The most memorable story I remember was most likely fiction as I look back but blew my mind . It starts out with Final Fantasy 9 a game i had been playing at the time. He said as he enters the black mage village his game crashes and goes to his memory card save file after a few unsuccessful loads. He went to delete it but this time it has a last changed date of about 15 minutes ago. He of course is confused but does not mind as redoing something has low appeal in a game like Final Fantasy. As he returns he is put about 10 minuets of play away from the village. When he enters this time he is encountered by the last boss Ozma . Claims that he beats the boss at this point in the game. I was foolish and naive at that age . Afterwords he said that a completely black sprite followed him everywhere . This struck fear in my young mind and I prayed something like that would happen in my game.
To the day I am consistently looking up stories from gamers , not how to get past something as much since I have aged and watching people play games which is another nostalgic thing for me . So thank god for the internet for the frightening, entertaining and informational gaming content!