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ScuzzBlog: Diaries November 2018

Entry 19th November 2018: Post 01: Stars - Life before the Console


Stars - Life before the console

Twas July 1996 when I finally kicked the Amiga habit. I had been 
struggling justifying keeping the Amiga as my main machine given 
the lack of Internet and CD player. The 1200 was still very special 
to me and didn't lose its place in here for a while longer, but I 
was getting so frustrated not being able to play the latest games 
and enjoying content on CD.

So I purchased a Windows 95 machine from Colossus which was a Pentium 
120 with a 1GB hard drive and cost me over £2000. Which, surprise 
surprise, I still have fully functioning. In truth the computer was 
both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for the joy of the internet 
and a curse for not being able still play games. Windows, in those 
days ... was still functioning as a DOS based OS. So to play Duke 
Nukem you had to go through a whole bag of customising in DOS to 
make the game work.

The computer was just not suited to auto install yet and so whenever 
I purchased any game or software there was always the possibility 
it would not work. More often than not.

I soon got very tired of the games situation with the PC and after 
having one very unsuccessful experience trying to play Tomb Raider 
I gave up. I decided to buy a PlayStation and the rest is history. 
I didn't again venture onto the gaming scene with a PC until 2008 
with World of Warcraft... which I am still playing and was playing 
just five minutes ago.

I did have one minor success with gaming on the PC and that was 
with a game called Stars. The game was a bit like Elite except you 
didn't actually fly the ships. I played Eve Online for a bit and 
was very much reminded of this game.

Having had my recent session with the PS1 I was drawn to the game 
yet again when I reflected on why I went over to the PlayStation 
in the first place. So I dragged out an old AMD Duron running Windows 
98 [ lovingly known as Fern ] and proceeded to install the game. 
Man did that bring some memories back. Long winter weekends in my 
room not even noticing it had gotten dark. It really was very 
absorbing. I soon got back into the hang of things.  Happy times.

I have captured the tutorial here with some pics to show the basic 
format. It is difficult to explain the depth to which this game 
sinks, but trust me once you start exploring and building up your 
ships and resources it gets very complicated. The joy for me back 
then was it actually worked on the Win95 machine.

I include also some snapshots of the AMD Duron machine. I don't
want to be accused of ignoring the PC Windows based systems. I don't 
need to ever bad mouth Microsoft, their systems do a pretty good 
job of doing that without my help. I have any number of old redundant 
PCs that are dull as soup so finding one to run this game wasn't 
that hard. I also include a few images from Tomb Raider.. the actual 
boxed game that I bought that refused to work on the Windows 95 
machine. I recall the opening scene with the tinted glasses of Lara
as being the first time I had ever actually had the pleasure. Seemed 
to be all I did for months after getting the PS1.

Happy days.. all of them. I shouldn't be that hard on the PC. I have 
spent way more time with Windows than anything else both at work 
and at home. So must be doing something right.

You can watch a video review ..  H E R E 

Stars


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Last updated 19th November 2018

Chandraise Kingdom

Keep the Faith
scuzzscink 2018