[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Family Quizagon Night
November 24th, 2014 by Benj Edwards
“Whoa…what’s in these brownies, Grandma?â€
Thanksgiving is almost upon us again, so it’s time to gather around your home PC for a game of…Quizagon?
Yes, Quizagon. A game I’ve never played, nor will I for the foreseeable future. It looks like a hexagon-themed family trivia game, which is not my bag, man. But what a great photo.
Instead, I’m going to host a The Seven Cities of Gold marathon on an Atari 800XL with my brother. We plan on exploring a completely new continent while interacting vigorously with the natives. Meanwhile, my brothers- and sisters-in-law will be playing Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed on my dedicated gaming PC that is hooked to the flat-screen living room TV. It’s a great kart game to play on Steam with four Xbox 360 controllers that’s easy to set up and jump into. Fun times shall be had by all.
By the way, I first used this amusing scan in a 2009 Thanksgiving-related slideshow I did for Technologizer (hoping I’m not repeating it on VC&G). If you’re in the mood, here’s some other Thanksgiving-related material from the VC&G archives.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you have any family video gaming planned for this Thanksgiving? If so, what are you going to play?
November 25th, 2014 at 4:09 pm
All my cousins are “too old” for gaming now. In Thanksgivings past, we used to have marathon sessions of Mario Kart Wii. But when I have some free time to myself, I’ll be dedicating every minute to Ristar for the Sega Genesis as is personal Thanksgiving tradition. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 1996, I found it in the bargain bin at Funcoland for $5. I didn’t get a chance to play it until the next day, but I LOVED IT as soon as I loaded the first level. No need for next-gen consoles (yet) for me, I had platforming nirvana! Ever since then, I make sure to play at least the first level of Ristar every Thanksgiving, the whole game if time allows.
November 25th, 2014 at 11:29 pm
I recommend Mario Party, Mario Kart and Need for Speed games.
November 26th, 2014 at 11:16 am
That’s an awesome story, technotreegrass. I love gaming traditions. My brother and I had a tradition for years to play Doom around Christmas. That’s because I got it for the Jaguar for Xmas 1994 and we spent the rest of the year (a week) playing it non-stop while listening to my then-new Beatles CDs. Good times.
November 29th, 2014 at 7:56 pm
I played Doom a lot on a 486 back in the 90s, I never liked the console versions of it, most of them felt inferior compared to the PC version (wich is okay considering their limited hardware specs), except maybe for Doom64 for N64 wich was actually kinda good.
P.S.-Please write an article about Gary Kildall and CP/M. Thanx.
December 1st, 2014 at 1:12 pm
The PC version of Doom is the definitive version, indeed. The only problem is that we only had one computer capable of playing Doom with any decent framerate in 1994 — our family’s 486 (33 MHz?) with 4MB of RAM. That game pushed the limits so much that it needed nearly all of that 4 MB to work, so I had to boot the computer with a stripped-down DOS on a floppy just to run it. Even then, it didn’t play that well, and I’m not sure if I had enough RAM left to load the sound card drivers. I think I wrote about this story somewhere else, but I’m not sure where at the moment.
I really love Doom 64, by the way. The analog control is wonderful, and I love how it’s not a straight-up port but a re-interpretation. I got that for Christmas in 1997, I believe.
December 2nd, 2014 at 10:49 pm
Yes, Doom pushed the limits of hardware in the mid 90s to get a decent framerate.
My 486 specs back then:
CPU 486DX2 80 mhz
RAM 12 MB (4+8)
It came with only 4 MB of Ram wich was pretty standard back then so I bought an extra 8 MB stick, I was advised not to mix different sizes but I went ahead anyway and it worked fine.
To free some memory u had to use a memory manager or memmaker to have enough memory under 640 kb, set DOS High, and tweak Config.sys and Autoexec.bat to run some games.
That 486DX2 ran Doom well and I was also able to run Quake with low resolution.
The CPU was fanless (it had a fan for the Power Supply of course) but I never had overheating problems of any kind, I hated later Pentium models that were prone to overheat, back then we didn’t need them and now I get a chuckle everytime I see how people are “rediscovering” the “new” fanless computers these days. 🙂