LinustheBold: Aye, many a time. I think the first one that goes into the history books was with the original SimCity back in 1989 or so. I did not yet have a computer at home, but I was shopping for one pretty seriously, and I ended up with a copy of SimCity before I bought a PC - a ridiculous sale? a gift? Something like that, I don't recall.
I was temping at the time for the commercial division of a large, institutionally-evil bank. My department was pretty laid back, and my desktop was a telecom-enabled fast 286 (the new 386 boxes which were just starting to appear were balky, and most of our workstations were still AT&T 6300s). I asked my boss if I could install SimCity, and the department heads wanted to see it too, so I got it running and played it at lunch and sometimes after five, if I felt like hanging around for a bit.
This is the old release that came with paper DRM: after install, at game start, it asked you to match a symbol that was obtained from a grid chart included with the game. The chart was printed with blue ink on maroon paper, to foil copy machines. You couldn't play without the proper code.
Right after I started playing, I decided I'd stay after hours to get going for a bit. There were often people working until all hours on our floor, so it wasn't that unusual to have someone hunched over their computer after dark. I got my city going, and then the citizens started complaining about this or that, and I got to fixing, and so on and so on and so on. When I abruptly realized that I had been there for a very long time, it was close to 3 a.m.
Ah, the days.
Hehe that sounds brilliant. It's just an altogether different vibe isn't it: to play in an office after hours. My dad worked at AEC (or NECSA) nowadays and I went with him a couple of times when I was very little. While he was working in the lab, I would be jamming F117(or perhaps F19) on his office computer.
I also remember those strange codes that came with games. The TMNT game ported from the nes had several pages worth of codes (5ish characters) arranges in rows and columns. At startup you were prompted to enter for example the code in row AB and column 13. At least I think it was TMNT - might have been something else like police quest. F117's copy protection was an top down image of an aircraft which you had to identify. Wasn't a very good copy protection though since after a while I started to learn the shapes: I could identify the F14 tomcat, the F18 fulcrum, the F15 eagle, and some sort of awac radar plane. Sometimes the copy protection was very bad as in this one game, Alladin I think, I found a folder with copy protection files in it which I simply deleted. The game then simply skipped over the copy protection at startup.
PMIK: You don't need to get a PS1 or PS2. A number of classic games can be bought on the PS store for the PS3 (That's how I've got access to the original Metal Gear Solid through the "Metal Gear Legacy collection". This also includes high resolution versions of the PS2 games (MGS2 and MGS3)
I've also read that the PS4 is planning to have a service where you can stream PS1, 2 and 3 games directly, but I'm not sure exactly how that will work.
Also, the heat is not too bad in Sydney, mostly in Adelaide and Melbourne, so Its not really bothering me at all :)
Oh? That's brilliant news thanks :) Then I can also catchup on Red Dead Redemption which, verrrrrry annoyingly, never came to pc...
Glad your not exposed to the 40+ degree mark :) Today the heatwave broke here with some nice and refreshing light showers so now all is well again :P
