Related to my earlier-mentioned plundering of the CSIPGA archives,
here's what were we talking about here in CSIPGA 20 years ago today.
This is a selection of subject headers from January 2006.*
[Comments in brackets are mine]
----------------------------
* NFS: Most Wanted. How do skip the intro and load a game?
[Remember when every game and its cousin forced you to
endure a non-skippable five-minute intro and logos? This
sort of post was almost a FAQ, except it the solution
varied for each game]
* What's really been killing PC gaming?
[The mid-2000s were a rough time for PCs. Everybody was
predicting the death of the platform.]
* Stargate SG-1 Cancelled
[Talking about the MMO, not the TV show]
* Quake Wars preview
[Oddly, the very game we were just discussing in
another post just the other day. What are the odds?]
* What for you, are the best things about PC action gaming?
[Sort of related to the 'death of PC gaming' above.
Also, an early prototype to the CRAP polls, perhaps?]
* Call of Duty 2 on a 1.2Ghz GF4Go?
[Sometimes we even discussed actual games! This
one reflected the 'fun' technical aspects of
getting a game to run well on underpowered
hardware, which isn't too common a thread these
days... though whether that is because we all run
over-powered threadrippers, or because games are
just friendlier to underpowered hardware, who's
to say?]
* PC Games 2006
[A sort of 'games coming out in 2006 that you're
excited about; we /still/ have similar topics
here every January. The more things change...]
* Just finished F.E.A.R.
[I told you we talked about actual games sometimes]
* Whoa... classic Doom!
[Hey, this was my post! Twenty years ago, I was
still excited about original Doom]
* Resident Evil 4 coming to PC
[Back when ports of best-selling games weren't
guaranteed on PC.]
* Crashday demo... it uses SecuROM
[A major area of discussion during this era of
CSIPGA was DRM; SecuROM, Steam, etc. It got
overpowering sometimes.]
* uninstalling Rainbow 6 LockDown demo
[Before Steam made downloading and installing
games and demos so easy, it was often a crapshoot
trying to get games on --and off-- your PC.]
* PC is shrinking
[Again with the 'death of the PC'. But it's
understandable; the PS2 and XBox were at the
height of their popularity (and the newly
released PS5 and XBox360 were looking to be
just as popular), and PC game shelves in
retail stores were shrinking. Steam would
eventually by PC gamings saviour... but at
the time it had yet to prove itself and its
controversial online activations were
quite worrisome to many.]
----------------------------
It amuses me to see how so many topics of that era we're /still/
repeating today. Some issues, of course, aren't so frequent.
Interestingly, even in 2006 maybe only a quarter of the traffic of the
group was about specific games. Which depending on how you look at it,
is either more or less than we have now. (Most of the 'talking about
specific games' nowadays revolves around the various free games, and
doesn't really get into too much depth about the selected titles).
What can I say; I get a nostalgic kick reading these old articles.
----------------------------
* sourced from here if you want to see the specific articles mentioned
(and more! I just picked a few). GoogleGroup search sucks, but it's
still better than any alternative. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action/search?q=after%3A2005-12-01%20before%3A2006-01-31
Shouldn't you be playing games? ;)
On Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:38:54 -0000 (UTC), ant@zimage.comANT (Ant)
wrote:
Shouldn't you be playing games? ;)
I wrote this while receiving fluid injections to help me recover from
the non-stop 84-hour gaming session I played yesterday. I'll be back
to gaming as soon as they're done.
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