Classic Games and the new Flight Simulator

I was the first person in Mexico to have an Amiga computer back in '84, and spent countless hours playing Electronic Arts' F/A-18 Interceptor flight simulator. 20 years ago the graphics and the sound (I had a Hi-Fi surround stero hooked to it) were incredible. Since I have tried a number of flight simulators but have not yet found that was as enjoyable as the F/A-18 on the Amiga. That's probably why it is still number 84 in the list of the Best Games of all time.

Well today I leartned about the forthcoming Flight Simulator X from FSInsider.com which is optimized for Vista leveraging WIndows Presentation Foundation. The screenshots speak for themselves - the photorealism is unbelievable. Sometimes I wish game developers focused less on graphics and whizbang effects and spent more time bringing back the playability of some of the old games.

This past weekend I got the Commodore 64 Direct-to-TV joystick  from a local shop. It comes with 30 classic games including Pit-Stop, Jump Man junior and World Karate Championship.(You will find a the complete list of all the games in the Wikipedia.) It also includes Summer Games, which I never was a fan of, but I remember very well because the graphics and music were breaktrhoughs at the time. Remember we are talking about a 1 Mhz computer with 64Kb Ram (38,911 bytes available for programs). 

After playing with a couple of games I found Mission Impossible, and I got hooked. At 2 AM last night after my fourth attempt to solve the puzzle and save the world I decided it was time for bed. At that time my wife was still reading in bed and decided it was a good time to do some online shopping for our daughter's coming birthday so we spent the next hour on DisneyStore.com. An hour I could have used to save the world...