I just saw on Facebook that Sega are celebrating the 20th birthday of Sonic the Hedgehog this year. Oh, how the time flies. Back in college, me and my housemates used to play this, EA Hockey, and Madden football, almost non-stop … during our final exams!
Flashbacks! When I was still in secondary school I was hooked on Microprose simulators. The F-19 (what we all used to think the name of the eventual F-117 was before it was revealed) Stealth Fighter was my drug of choice, followed by a lot of M1 Tank Platoon (“Heat Up!”). I blasted a lot of commies back then. And I just couldn’t get away from them during my Leaving Cert exams.
What I loved about those Microprose games was the level of detail. The gaming strategy and how you moved your platoons was based on real American doctrine for fighting an invading Soviet force in central Europe – a rolling defence, a probing attack, distract, hit them with Apaches and Warthogs, smoke them out, and penetrate the rear guard. You can see the gunners view in the above. You could use the keyboard (I had an Atari 520 ST-FM back then) or the mouse to use any of those controls that you can see. Laser targeting was down? Estimate the range instead, plug it in, aim the gun, and fire. The manuals were works of art; there was so much to learn from them you would return over and over to pick up on some extra detail that would improve your play. I still remember what Chobham and reactive armours are.
F-19 Stealth Fighter had the same level of detail. I spent so many hours sneaking through Soviet radar installations, strategically downing AWACS with a Phoenix from long range, avoiding SAMs, and blowing up submarine bases with a laser guided weapon, before heading home to some Norwegian airbase. Detected by the enemy? Ouch: you failed the mission. It was the Cold War after all.
In first year in college, we had one small room of PCs. Obviously IT services banned all forms of games on college machines. But me and a good friend used to sneak this one into that lab and play a sneaky game or two.
Look at how crude those graphics are! Basic, but the games were amazing.
Then it was onto college and the Sega Megadrive. That’s where John Madden got his hooks into me.
This game taught me about the NFL. I would play it non-stop for weeks when given the opportunity. I got to the point where I would use the then-pitiful New England Patriots against the Pro-Bowl squads. There were some nail biting finishes that would grab the attention of NFL Film’s Steve Sabol, I tell ya!
EA hockey was a great head-to-head game in the house, winner stays on! I don’t know who figured it out, but we found that there was a sweet spot on the ice in the lower third where if you spinned the player a certain way, you could nearly always score a slapshot goal. That kind of ruined the game for us after a while. But I guarantee you that there was lots of shouting until then 
After third year I had 6 months of work experience and I bought my first PC (a Gateway 486 DX2 running DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11) to enable me to work on my 4th year project. My team developed [yes, I was a dev back then] a modular encrypted messaging system using Visual C++ 2.0 which came on 20+ floppies. Can you imagine installing that thing? Can you imagine how freaked I was the day the hard disk crashed towards the end of our project and I had to reinstall everything? Luckily I had backups of the code.
Having a PC meant I stepped up the graphics quality. Once again I was back to Microprose … this time in the form of F1.
It was addiction time once again. This time it wasn’t all about detail in manuals or huge amounts of learning. It was about “realism”. It was rumoured that Jacques Villeneuve used this game to learn the F1 tracks when he left Indycart. Me and my flatmate at the time played this thing so much that we knew every track on the F1 circuit, the gears that the drivers needed to be in, and the breaking points. We knew where to overtake. Both of us had a PC and we used a pair of daisy chained serial cables to connect our two PCs which were in different rooms. That way we raced head-to-head without being able to see what each other was doing. That was fun.
After college there were lots of games. I played Madden on the PC and then a PS2 made its way into the house. That was traded in when the shoebox XBox arrived. Madden was played on both of those consoles. The Xbox360 arrived but I never bought Madden for it … I’ve always been afraid of spending too much time playing it instead of meeting various deadlines outside of work in the last few years. On the PC I played lots of games like the Rainbow 6 series, Rome:Total War, and Rise of Nations. Rise of Nations got played a lot in one job when we were being made redundant … a lab network and a private network made its way to many desks Nukes away!
Now, I have Empire:Total War on the laptop (via Steam), UFC Undisputed on the Xbox 360, and the Kinect Sports game. Modern racing games I usually find boring and difficult to control. I liked Colin McCrae on the PC when using a steering wheel. There was a PC game where you drove around Chicago like a loonie getting chased by cops that was a good laugh. And I like the idea of some test drive game that is a free demo on the Xbox360. The run-amok first person shooters I find boring too. Halo and Gears of War are OK because there is only one-way-through but I hate the puzzle levels and I usually tire of them … I’m playing to relax and get away from the usual brain-strain of the day world. But you know what, I just wish someone would pick up the Microprose rights and get me a successor to M1-A1 Tank Platoon (a later sequel to the above which was pretty good) and maybe an F-22 Raptor game. I can then break out that big ol’ joystick (kids, a joystick is a game controller that looks like an airplane controller. We used to play games on them before console controllers were invented) that’s been gathering dust for a long, long time.