Games People Play

With the year approaching its ending, I’ve found myself looking back at more than the past twelve months. For some reason, nostalgia has been hitting me harder than I’m used to.

It has been twenty years since DOOM from Id Software was released. I remember waiting for the shareware first episode to download over the glacially slow dialup connection I had through America Online.  Eager anticipation led to mild disappointment after firing up the game only to find I had to run it in a reduced box to get acceptable frame rates on my Packard Bell 486SX-25. That disappointment dissipated once actually running and gunning through the eerie atmosphere of darkened base on a moon orbiting Mars.

My first PC games were Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, Dune, and Orel Hershiser’s Strike Zone. They weren’t graphically intensive, though Dune was one of the most lovely 256 color games every put out. Having played Castle Wolfenstein 3D, I couldn’t wait to play Id’s next game.

Two decades later and I’m playing games that look like this. How things have changed!

The screen captures are from Star Trek Online with the first taken in Earth orbit and the second in the brand new area of the Dyson Sphere. Imagine a solar system sized ship with a star at its center with people living on the inner surface of the sphere and you’ll get the bigger picture. That area in the game is visually stunning and only for the level 50 Admirals to play in.

That’s my ship, a modified and modernized variant of the Defiant from Deep Space Nine. Her name is the Red Shirt since my style in the game is to run around blowing things up and getting blown up. Despite it being very wrong to increase your aggro generation if you aren’t a tank, that’s what I’ve done with the ship equipment. Hey, it’s an Escort class ship, which means I’m there to take the heat off the cruisers. Yes, I’m role playing even in ship combat.

That play style isn’t much removed from the frantic shooting and fleeing of DOOM all those years ago. The big difference is that it is now a choice, not a necessity. For my first person shooter fix, I play Borderlands 2 with an effort to hit the level 72 cap underway in Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode. More than anything else I’ve played in recent years this game reminds me of the thrill I had fighting zombie soldiers and cyberdemons back in the day.

One of these days I’ll write a more serious post on video games and how I think they’ve badly damaged the Millennial generation, but not today. Instead I’ll stick to nostalgia.

And speaking of that, here’s a live performance by the Alan Parsons Project of the song that inspired the post title:

Still a great tune decades later.