I've never been a hardcore pc gamer. I also wouldn't call myself a casual gamer, in the candy crush phone games demographic either. In fact, I consider myself a realism junkie...I like complex and engrossing games, but I end up not having time and/or getting sidetracked.
I also tend to play one game at a time. I watch streamers on twitch, and see them go from game to game to game. I'm impressed that they can manage to not only be good at a variety of games, but can interact with chat, and be entertaining.
In general, with one or two exceptions, I gravitate toward simulators. I am old enough to have a bunch of board games, replete with counters and gameboards laden with hexagons for movement. Games like Midway, AirForce/Dauntless, Third Reich, we used to play all of these and more in high school and college. I also did the obligatory role playing games. Unfortunately, when I joined the military, then got married, had kids, and started adulting, all of my gaming buddies pretty much did the same. So I didn't really have anyone to game with.
Then the personal computer came along in the early 80s, and along with them, the advent of the computer game. I remember we got an Atari console with Pong in the mid 70s, but I bored with that rather quickly. There were also games on the mainframe at the university, where I played the old Star Trek, with the 10x10 grid, in high school and college.
In later years, I moved on to Gato (yes, I have always had a thing for submarines), early Microsoft flight simulator, and a few others. Two sims, however, were absolute favorites at the time.. The first was Harpoon, a naval combat sim. I had the miniatures rules books since its release in 1987, but a couple of years later, got my grubby paws on the pc version, and was completely taken by it. A buddy in the Army and I shared a ZIP drive with the game on it, and would take turns on breaks to go out and use the pc in the front office when we were on mid shift.
The next sim that captured my imagination was one called Tracon. This one does not involve blowing anything up. Instead, you are an air traffic controller, controlling a sector of airspace, and managing take-offs, landings, and hand-offs to other sectors, while guiding aircraft safely through your sector. Difficulty can be tuned by adjusting weather, pilot quality (not acknowledging instructions, acknowledging but not doing, and the like), and the number of aircraft through the sector in an adjustable amount of time.
I have played a few first person shooters, Doom, Quake, Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior, etc, but didn't take to it like I did the sims. I also played flight sims like Falcon 3 and Falcon 4, but since I run linux or FreeBSD, games have to run in wine or dosbox. Most combat flight sims do not. I did really enjoy StarCraft at the time, and still have it on my laptop, though I rarely play. The last 5 years or so, as I have mentioned in an earlier blog post, I have been playing Cold Waters, a Cold War era submarine game/sim, and then I played Kerbal Space Program, which is a game/sim in which you learn to build rockets, get to space, learn to orbit, get to the moons, and other planets, even go interstellar. It is an open world game, which means that you can do things at your own pace. Since I grew up in the shadow of Apollo, this game tickled that happy spot in my soul where 8 year old me's dreams lived.
So I wanted to share a few observations I've made about computer games and the industry over the years. Programmers created sims like Tracon and Harpoon nearly 40 years ago. And sims like this are very captivating. It is easy to become engrossed in them. Tracon shipped with CGA graphics and is only 400KB. Harpoon was 16MB with EGA graphics.
Meanwhile, let's take a look at modern AAA games. Released in 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 weighs in at 170GB, so 10625 times as large as Harpoon. Yes, the graphics are night and day better in RDR2 than Tracon or Harpoon, one would say, almost photo-realistic. The early access release of Battlefield 6, which was released in May, 2025 is 80GB so far, 5000 times as large as Harpoon. And yet I find gameplay more immersive in the older games, possibly because of my penchant for simulators, but more likely because they seem better programmed and less dependent on "eye candy" to get the point across. To me, the difference is similar to that of watching a movie to reading a book. I always say "the book was better" (my daughter and son-in-law got me a t-shirt that says that), because it turns out my imagination is a far better palette than the silver screen, and seeing a movie after reading the book annoys me, because the picture my mind's eye drew is usually radically different than what is on screen. And worse, the studios today are spending ridiculous amounts of money to create these games. In researching this article, I saw one game (Battlefield 6?) where the studion had spent $250 million to produce it. You know something? Star Wars cost somewhere around $11 million to produce. And at the time, they were literally inventing the special effects technology. And what do studios get for their quarter billion dollars? Copious amounts of eye candy, but underneath a scripted puzzle game. Like watching an interactive movie.
A recent trend that the game industry has started is "early access" programs, in which they sell copies of the (unfinished, and in many cases, plain broken) game to customers for the cost of a AAA game. Another term for early access is "beta" if you are lucky, and "alpha" if you're not. So you end up forking out $60 to $80 for a game, that you know is going to be, at best, buggy, and at worst, unplayable, and hoping for the goodwill of the studio to follow through to completion of the title.
A perfect example of this was Kerbal Space Program 2. It was released in early access February, 2023. I believe the cost was $70, and in the initial releases, there were multiple problems, including:
* Rocket launches, even on relatively beefy hardware, e.g. an nvidia rtx3060ti, were what I started calling "almost, but not quite a slideshow." I saw streamers do a launch and wind up getting 4 frames per second.
* There were many problems with the program, including not being able to leave the vehicle assembly building to go to the launchpad, and the terrain impinging into the launchpad.
* They had a very long list of new features that they promised. but they never managed to reach parity with KSP1. Missing features like science mode (which was eventually added), career mode (which was not), and none of the new features ever came to fruition, like multiplayer, interstellar, colonization, etc.
They had 3 or 4 code drops, but then in June 2024, they took the money and ran, leaving a lot of unhappy, $70 lighter in the wallet, beta testers with an incomplete game. What's worse, at the time of this writing, they are still selling it for $50 on Steam.
For me, I will stick with my simulators, herding aircraft, managing fleets, shooting torpedoes, or flinging little green men into space, unless something compelling comes out, I can't see anything on the horizon that particularly interests me, especially with the cynicism of of the game studios.