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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....
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?
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)
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.
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
Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
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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
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.