Welcome aboard!
Master Of Orion, omg!
Double <3
Well said F_rock, I was wondering if anyone was going to get a chuckle out of any of those game names.
I remember when Atari first came out and you could have your own tank battles on your television. I was in heaven. I remember I asked for an Atari for Christmas and my parents were never the type to buy an expensive present. I think it cost $139. I told them that if they didn't want to spend that much on me that was fine, just give me the cash that they were willing to spend and I'd combine it with my own savings to pay for the rest. Instead they bought me a knock off of a pong game. I returned it and used the money to get the Atari and my parents thought it was such a horrible waste of money. But I hardly ever got to play with the dang thing because I couldn't pry the controls out of my Dad's hands, once he realized what it could do. Playing my Dad with that is one of the few fond memories I have of him as he never did anything but work. He died some thirty years ago. That and staying up all night reading the book "Endurance" to him, written by Sir Earnest Shackleton. He insisted that I continue to read even when I could hardly stay awake, my voice gave out, he was near blind, and deaf in one ear and mostly deaf in the other--I practically had to shout as I read. He wouldn't let me return the book to the library afterwards. When he died I decided to keep the book in remembrance. It's way overdue by now. The point is, my two fondest memories of him are playing a game together and reading a book, not working, not going to the movies or a ballgame. It was the simplest of entertainment.
Before computer games was an industry, they had arcades with pinball machines. That naturally lead to making the first computer arcade games like Space Invaders, Asteroids and what was the nuclear war one called--something like command center. I was particularly good at space invaders. That lead to computer games eventually. First there was the Commodore 64, a computer console you could hook up to your t.v. and write programs for your own games and store them on cassette tapes. I thought I was so high tech when I learned how to program.Then there were a whole onslaught of computer games that came out, but Master of Orion hit a new mark. They did something far beyond others, combining technology trees with science, politics and economics to create a type of galactic warfare that hadn't been conceived before. Now it seems so passe, but at the time it was a stroke of brilliance. It made Atari seem as silly as Master of Orion does today.
Even now this game, CM, is ground breaking in its own ways. But it's just a small step in an evolution of gaming that will exist thirty years from now if we're around to see it. Hopefully we can influence gaming to be more a thinking man's world than a shoot em up or a pointless Goat Sim, or a brain dead, morally decrepit Grand Theft Auto XXVII. If games are to be an American legacy we leave to our future generations, let's try to influence them to be games of courage, skill, valor and mental prowess. Games that challenge all of your faculties rather than numb your mind and heart. We vote with our dollars for the direction of the future of gaming. Let's vote well. I say this game is a good vote. I voted 255 times on it and got the whole series thus far. I think it is a good choice, a good path for gaming to go down and we should reward Battlefront so they continue down that path with fervor. It's in our hands to decide if the day will come that we look back and smirk at CM because of its simpleness or whether our children will wonder why anyone would want to play a game that makes you think.
