Rubénerd!

I wasn't born when the DEC PDP-8 computer came out and was only a few months old when the Commodore 128D did with it's Zilog Z80 awesomeness, so the earliest nostalgic computer memories I have are of our old DOS machine from the early 90s. As I've said here many times before we ran DOS with PowerMenu and originally Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, then Windows 3.1.

In my spare time for the last couple of years I've been collecting legitimate copies of some of the software we used to have on that 486SX tower so I could recreate it in some form of virtual machine on my MacBook Pro or FreeBSD machines for silly, irrelevant, nostalgic purposes. So far I've found DOSBox has been the easiest, lightest and most portable solution to use, even if it is a little slower. I consider slower a feature though, makes it feel more authentic :).

In the same manner as our original DOS machine we dubbed the "Melbourne Computer" because my dad's job had us living there at the time we bought it, I have DOSBox set up to load PowerMenu upon booting, with our DOS apps available from the menus and Windows configured to launch if we want it. At the time this meant we didn't have too much of our precious 4.0MiB of RAM being used by Windows when we only wanted to run DOS apps like XTreeGold or WordPerfect, and games like Commander Keen, Lemmings and SimCity Classic! I was born in the 1980s, but I grew up in the 90s :).

Anyway I had a point for this post, but I long since lost sight of it and rambled on for a few paragraphs about silly nostalgia. Perhaps I'll get back to what I was supposed to be posting about some other time.

What's a better use for a 64bit FreeBSD 7.2 Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 desktop with 6.0GiB of Kingston Low Latency RAM? Commander Keen in DOSBox of course!

I dare you to come up with something more productive.

Sending birthday wishes to Tetris which turns 25 today. It's two years older than I am!

I was born slightly too late to have been a part of this amazing early computer game revolution, but that's not to say I didn't partake of many early DOS games on our IBM machines, then our 486SX clone. While I always have a special place in my heart for Commander Keen as the greatest game of all time I used to rush home from school excited to play, we did have a DOS clone of Tetris too.

What strikes me about Tetris (and to a certain extend Commander Keen) was the design and premise were so beautifully elegant they didn't need flashy 3D graphics to become immersive, addictive and a real pleasure to play. The people who developed games like this were geniuses, plain and simple.

Aside from the Sim City and The Sims franchises, I don't really play many games any more. In fact my current obsession is still Bejeweled on my iTelephone because it's simple, addictive and fun. More games need to be made like Tetris!

This evening I was clued into a post submitted earlier this week on Flickr by exxtrooper which lists 101 valuable things we've learned from video games! You really should read all of them yourself if you have the time, but these are my personal favourites :).

• Medicine became obsolete in the year 2004, when doctors noticed that hiding behind a wall caused human health to regenerate to 100%.
• Eating stuff found on the floor is good for you – your parents were wrong.
• Enemies, rather than approach you directly, behave like Michael Flatley (of Riverdance fame) on a conveyor belt.
• It’s surprising just how useful martial arts are on the modern battlefield.
• When you get shot, you don’t feel any pain, nor does it affect your aim. However, it does cause your vision to turn red for a couple of seconds.
• If you’re stuck in life and don’t know what to do, simply attempt to use every single item in your possession on your obstacle. If none of them work, go back the way you came. You’ve clearly missed something.
• You can jump twice your own height, but water will kill you instantly.
• In medieval times, women regularly fought in wars, wearing armor that afforded them equal protection to suits of plate mail worn by men, despite only covering about 3 inches of skin.
• Many, if not all, problems can be solved with a Holy Hand Grenade.
• Music spontaneously plays whenever you do anything exciting.
• You can travel anywhere instantly, as long as you’ve been there before.
• Women who are experienced mercenaries and can carry multiple heavy weapons do not look like Bulgarian discus throwers, but are lithe, slim, and have very large breasts.
• Being shot in the face is only a minor inconvenience, but going into an area you are not supposed to will result in instant death.
• Frogs die in water.

Screenshot from Commander Keen One

For what it's worth, my favourite games after all these years are still Lemmings (the version for DOS), SimCity (before version 4), Worms 2 (hence the Holy Hand Grenade reference!) and of course Commander Keen episodes one, two and three. Commander Keen is without a doubt the greatest game of all time. And don't you ever let anyone ever tell you otherwise!