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The Great Operating System Games
harrymcc writes "For decades, the simple little games that come with operating systems have been some of the most-used software on the planet. Legendary geeks such as Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Andy Herzfeld have tried their hands at writing them. And yet they get no respect — or, actually, attention of any kind. Technologizer's Benj Edwards aimed to rectify that with a look at forty years' worth of bundled OS games, from 1971 Unix text-based ones to Woz's Little Brick Out to such Windows mainstays as Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Reversi." Article is an annoyingly long slide show (would it kill people to put a reasonable amount of content on pages?) but there's some fun stuff in there.
Anyone remember Hover!, a game that came on the Windows 95 disk? Good times, good times.
Living With a Nerd
Along with the classin Linux game Xbill (named after you know who)
Ah, good old solitaire. That last time I remember playing that game it was on a 386 running Windows 3.1. People still seem to love it though. 2 weeks ago I was browsing around in a pawn shop and someone was looking at a laptop computer running Vista. Was that a problem for him? Nope, but for whatever reason they couldn't find Solitaire (don't know if the link was missing or it had been removed - or if they just couldn't find it - I wasn't looking, just overheard the conversation). The customer was all sorts of pissed. "When you buy a computer it ought to AT LEAST come with Solitaire. What kind of stuff are ya'll selling in here?". Just struck me as funny. Guess he didn't know that on any Windows system even if it has been removed it can be added right back in - or that if you REALLY got desperate Solitaire is one of the most commonly available cloned games out there.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I used to stay in from Recess to play ski-free. Never did make it past that abominable snowman....
IIRC solitaire was included with windows to help people who hadnt used a computer before get used to the process of dragging & dropping and using the mouse in general.
There were so many fun little things tied into this game. Cool tricks for points. Setting trees on fire. Knocking over people. And of course, the surprise monster ending!
The Windows game "Where the hell is my file?", or wait, was that a game?
Why is this slideshow-fest in Apple? Seemed most of the slides were non-Apple.
I used to have this weird text adventure for my old 386. I think it was for Windows 3.1. It'd be all black with these words on it, it was some sort of scary cyberpunk hacking game where you had to investigate files and navigate a directory structure. There was a strange cheat left in it though (was it a beta?): if you simply instructed your character to 'win' (by running WIN.EXE), you'd win right there and then, the game would exit and take you back to Windows!
Weird, huh?
I burnt *many* hours playing Snipes on our school's Novell network.
When I first got Red Hat I spent many hours playing 'make-sound-work-in-KDE' :)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The article mentioned Hunt the Wumpus. Are you posting just to hear yourself speak? (Or read yourself... comment?)
Comment of the year
I believe that it was an influence in the epic RPG, Progress Quest. As I sat, transfixed by that progress bar, I felt like I was doing something worthwhile for my machine. Now I don't run MS any more, I kind of miss those fun times of defragging, not to mention the periodic reinstalls of everything.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
OK, it's not an OS, but Excel had a flight simulator hidden inside it. Getting into it was a pain, but popping it up on someone else's computer was as much fun as the game itself.
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
Probably not installed by default on most OSes, but it should be! First thing I install on a new machine myself.
I (as student) once argued with our university IT staff that this was essential software for any self-respecting computer science lab, and they agreed and installed it on all machines. :)
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
Simple games presented to us while the OS is booting. Kinda like in Tekken (1), where you could play a quick game of Galaga while proper game data are loaded from the CD.
Something that simple (again, Galaga-like; or, for example, clearing one screen of Frozen Bubble-like game; using as basic GFX/toolkit/etc. as possible) shouldn't burden currently available machines too much. You can either play along for dozen or so seconds it currently takes to, basically, stare at a loading screen...or ignore it, no harm done (hm, or OTOH have an option to continue, clearing few more screens ;p ). Could be fun on mobile phones, too, many recent ones have not exactly instant booting... (and I can certainly imagine Google giving such option in Android; they had Pacman in mainsite logo already)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I always enjoyed a quick round of Global Thermonuclear War. IIRC that was included with the WOPR/OS.
Some friends and I (and lots of other 6th through 12th grade students) played that on terminals connected to our school's computer in 1980. I think the computer was a PDP-8/some letter, but I don't remember which letter. It was kept in the administrative building, while the student terminal room, which had a noisy teletype-style terminal, a newer and quieter terminal whose display was dot matrix printing, and three or four monocrome CRT terminals, was in a building with classrooms and the school library.
Trek was so popular at one point that I remember all the terminals surrounded by kids, and even the teletype-ish terminal pounding out the quadrant and sector maps. My friends and I figured out a few different ways of aiming photon torpedoes perfectly. One obvious one was a calculator with trig functions (and inverse trig functions), but at least we understood the trigonometry well enough to figure out how to use the calculator to help us kill Klingons. But I also remember three of us with protractors, rulers, and graph paper, getting the angle without using a calculator. The cool thing was when other kids saw us picking off the Klingons easily (and us celebrating each perfect shot), watched us for a while to understand how we did it, and then went off and did it themselves on other terminals. Some didn't care much about math like my friends and I did, but they cared enough about destroying Klingon ships represented by the letter K that they were willing to learn the math to do it.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
When you're stuck with a console, the bsdgames package helps a lot to pass the time. There's a great version of Tetris, ports of the classic games Hunt the Wumpus, Adventure, and Trek, and some assorted puzzle games. My favorite is Boggle. Great way to spend 3 minutes while something downloads/compiles/whatever.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I see you haven't played the "PulseAudio" edition. It's like Dance, Dance Revolution, but without any dancing or music but with a lot more swearing.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I'd guess it was just a demo video to show off the multimedia bits of the OS. It's a catchy but inoffensive bit of pop, and the music video is based around an interesting gimmick, so why not use that for a demo? It's not like they were pushed for space on the '95 disc anyway, a full install of the OS itself is only around 100MB IIRC (it's been ages since I've installed it).
On a related note, I've got a Gateway 2000 system CD somewhere (well, you never know, you might want to install WfW 3.11 on something) that has a load of their TV ads on the disc as well. I think it's reasonably common for early CD-ROM releases have random stuff to fill the massive 650MB of space that CD-ROMs gave them.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
How about those games that came with QBASIC?
You know. GORILLA.BAS
I used to visit my friends to play that game... my computer only had GWBASIC.
Anyone know why exactly "Buddy Holly" was put on the disk? Seems like kind of a random video to toss on there.
One of the Windows 95 buzzwords was "Multi-Media".
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The game you're talking about was licensed from a 3rd party, and Microsoft got a bad build of it. Maxis, the software's author, released the same game as one board of several available in a package called "Full Tilt! Pinball" in 1996.
I experienced it first through the "Full Tilt!" product, and was sorely disappointed by the version included in Windows. My biggest gripe was the plunger - in the Windows build the power of the ball release wasn't proportional to the distance the plunger appeared to be pulled back. Yes, that's a petty complaint, but little details like that stand out when you've played the finished product then get handed a copy of the beta release. There are other problems, too; I think Maxis made improvements to the physics engine after licensing it to Microsoft.
If you like the version you got free from Bill Gates, then do yourself a favor and find a copy of the full release. Three boards instead of just one, with fewer bugs. You'll be glad you did.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin