That was how we were "trained" as children not to accept marijuana from strangers, it was either a poster or a textbook in our Health class (do they even still, have Health as topic of education?) Never accept a loosely wrapped and roughly rolled cigarette from a stranger, was the sage advice our elders offered us... of course once we smoked some it was a great joke to call it such..
I think Ultima V is still the peak CRPG for me personally. Old graphics and tech aside, that was a game changer, and still holds up. IV was really close, but V was the first Ultima I owned (got it for my birthday in 88) and it will always have that WOW factor to me. I used to go to this summer school program for G.A.T.E. kids (anybody remember that shit?) in the 80s at Cal State San Bernardino, we had computer classes and stuff where they taught us how to use Appleworks and stuff like that (teacher let me bring a box of floppies in and gave me tons of stuff haha). One kid brought in his Ultima IV to play one day, just reading the description of the game on the back of the box I knew this was my shit (didn't know what D&D was yet really). Then my buddy brought in his giant Ultima II the next day and his had the cloth map inside. OMG that was it. Just like that stupid Mike Tyson's Punch Out code, I can pretty much run through the first 5 Ultimas by memory still. 6 is pretty close too. I don't even need to talk to the townspeople in IV or V to get the mantras or words of power. But I couldn't remember to stop for cat food on the way home from work yesterday go figure.
i still love 8 & 16 bit graphics, they are great. I love Batocera, cause its like a time machine that lets you own all the 8 & 16 bit games on all the platforms on a single usb thumb drive, that will boot on almost any computer turning it into a gaming console. I have every Atari game from that era, just a few clicks away on the old controller. same for Amiga, etc. I have boxes of floppy discs, and one little usb stick holds more data, its amazing and a helluva lot easier on the old back. I usually use an I5 Hp laptop to run Batocera on, it doesn't have any graphic card, just intel gfx, it will run everything up to Playstation 2, which works fine for me..
That's honestly not crazy, because it's true. Well, I don't know about your TV, but for sure devices like Alexa listen.. other things do too, and then you get ads. Also searching for stuff, typing stuff, etc.. that gets "listened" to by your os/browser/search engine and this information is used for advertising to you. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, this is just fact.
Gorillas.bas and nibbles.bas Damn, those were the times, you had to execute MSDOS Qbasic first in order to run those.
A rip off? No way! How could "Great Giana Sisters" be a rip off of "Super Mario Brothers"? Yeah, it was a little to close for Nintendos taste so they sued the studio and all copies had to be destroyed. Needless to say that anyone with a Commodore 64 or an Amiga had an illegal copy of that game.
I bought a refurbished steamdeck just for batocera. There are ready made 1tb sd card images out there with all the games one could imagine. all I had to do was flash it and boot from it. the one I use even came with decent CRT emulation, something that is quite important IMHO.
Errr all we did as teenagers was exactly the opposite, seek older strangers who were smoking joints in the parks to spare us a gram or two hahaha... Definitely among the the greatest, top 10 for me too. When they make an edition like that nowadays, they charge you with an absurd amount of money for it and still the writing leaves something to be desired in most recent ones. With that said, i am surprised with the level of excellence some modern games have reached. Like the Divinity Series from Belgian Larian Studios who also made the brand new Baldur's Gate 3 which might very well be the best D&D game of all times, although it bares more resemblance to the latest Divinity games than the original Baldur's Gate, but that's not bad at all really. With a score of 96/100 on Metacritic (from a total of 119 reviews!) it has surpassed everything old and new. I 've only played it a little (not much time for gaming) and it is a winner really. Great D&D experience for the patient gamers. Other great D&D games to look out for, if you haven't already, are Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny, by crpg God himself hehe, Chris Avellone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Avellone#Video_games Cheers
Dang thats awesome you have still that stuff! I wish I still had my Teddy Ruxpin LOL and my blanket too
