Re: Dial-up modems (Re: FREE GAME: Spirit of the Mouse)

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, 12 Oct 2024 02:17:50 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

Speaking of action games, what games did you play over dial-up? For me,
Duke3D, DOOM, Heretic, BattleZone, MotoRacer, Diablo, Warcraft, Quake, etc.

If you mean direct connect (as opposed to dial-up Internet), then
pretty much Doom. I think we tried Falcon 3.0 (or some flight sim?)
and Wing Commander Armada, and a few others here and there (thinking
back, I remember Witchhaven briefly entertained us) but mainly I
remember playing a lot of Doom.

Nah, that's like direct serial connection. I remember parallel cable
could be used for DOOM back in 1994! It actually worked, but slow. I
tried to find it but https://archive.org/details/cdrom_201511 is
temporarily down. :(.

(Also, on occasion, BBS Door games and MUDs)

(Also also, table-top RPGs via chat ;-)

Although, once the Internet / TCP-IP took off and became the primary
method of interconnect, it was an entirely different story. Quake,
Quake II, Diablo, Tribes, Unreal Tournament, Mechwarrior II, Need for
Speed (in its various iterations but I've particularly fond memories
of Porsche Unleashed) and a host more games. During the late 90s and
early 2000s, if a game I bought had a multiplayer component, I at
least _tried_ it.

But that modem... it definitely affected the experience. Especially
after other players started getting faster cable/DSL connections while
I remained one of the laggards on POTS.* 200ms+ ping-times were the
usual for dial-up, but when playing against 5ms cable-internet
bastards, you really felt the difference ;-)

I eventually soured on multiplayer gaming, partly because the gameplay
no longer appealed to me (for a huge variety of reasons), and a lot
because of the changing culture

   [e.g. the advent of the potty-mouthed ten-year old]

but the less-than-stellar experience of playing on dial-up definitely
influenced me too. By the time I eventually upgraded to DSL, I had
been broken of the habit. It's not that I don't play multiplayer games
at all anymore... but it's an incidental "let's see what it's like" or
a "hey Bob, just for the fun of it let's play GTA5 Online for a night"
rather than a lifestyle thing like it used to be.

 -----------         
* yes, pedants, I'm well aware that DSL is on POTS** too
** Plain Old telephone Service, in case you didn't know. Analog
signals sent over copper wire. As opposed to fiber or internet over
cable TV

;)
--
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