[jkoudys]

Only us olds really appreciate how groundbreaking Commander Keen was. The NES or Game Boy, with its graphics organized into tiles and layers, could give an extremely smooth experience for a certain kind of game. PC games in the pre-gpu era were extremely limited. Especially since researching and discussing development was much slower, too. The whole history of gaming could've gone very differently if adaptive tile refresh were the standard used early by everyone.

[karim79]

I couldn't agree with this comment more. If my memory serves me correctly, the next step up for me, in terms of being blown away, was when my dad gave me a Sound Blaster card (the very first one released, which was 8 bits, from Creative Labs as they were called back in the day). I hooked up a couple of really crappy analog speakers to the 286SX with an EGA card and monitor. That was the first time I experienced non BEEP BOP crappy sound on a PC.

...There were those games from Access Software which touted their Realsound tech, or whatever it was called. The Sound Blaster was, for me, the beginning of a newfound respect for PC hardware; I was no longer jealous of my friends who had their Amigas. I really miss the awe and wonder of those days. The days where every seemingly minor advancement actually served as a huge leap in terms of the experiential qualities of games. These days people whine about ray-tracing performance and having to play stuff at < 120FPS. I get it - I just really miss the "before times". Like the first time seeing an image rendered in full 256 colour VGA. </end oldtimer rant>