So guys. Who loves video games and what platforms do you play on?
I love to play FPS RPGs like Starfield, which is a science fiction game that takes place in space where you can visit countless dead planets, fight in battles, ship battles, kill pirates, and take on hostile aliens similar to Ridley Scott’s Xenomorph.
Back in the day I was mad for COD, playing online a lot on a PS3, and then PS4, now I play Dangerous Elite, I first played it in 1984 believe it or not, it’s designed primarily for PC users, and they have now stopped developing the game for consoles, which is a shame as you need the third party sites using info from other users, but it’s still playable.
It sooths my nerves to blow shit up, the game is pretty geeky, and very complicated when you start, takes a lot of game time to understand what it can do, but that’s a lot, and you literally have an entire universe to play in, as it maps our known universe and is therefore vast.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, my go to bought game was Comanche Gold 3. Which ran well on what was then my beefy Athlon box.
Trouble is, getting it to contine running on ever newer versions of Windows has been an uphill struggle, and I think Windows 11 has finally killed it. Despite installing the dependencies the game needs, it still dies with the dreaded 0xC0000007 error.
If anyone knows how to get this working on Windows 11, this will make me happy. As I now have a 12 core box with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD with a CinemaScope display, I want to see what the game is like on this system, especially as it has a nice, resonant sound system to amplify the artillery. 
I don’t. There are a number of reasons:
Yes, I’m aware that this answer puts me in danger of being classified as a GOM (grumpy old man), but I’m fine with that 
I could say similar things, except that I have never even tried gaming. It just has never appealed to me. I kind of like the concept of world-building simulations like No Man’s Sky, and in an ideal world where I was retired, I might try something like that, I suppose.
As a software developer (line-of-business software and services) I find that sufficiently absorbing that it serves as my happy place. I’m very lucky that way.
As I write this, my wife and I have taken a couple of days off in the mountains and spend our time walking, and recovering from walking, which involves surfing the net back at the hotel. I can’t access the systems I need to do work because the hole in my client’s firewall is for my home IP. And part of what’s relaxing about this is being away from the dogs and our son and other mundane household responsibilities. Also I get caught up in reading political and technical articles I don’t have time for ordinarily.
Waddup gamer! I’m glad to hear people are loving Starfield, I might have to try it myself. Bethesda does make the best games after all 
I love idSoftware games like Quake and DOOM but I’ve also fallen in love with many other titles like
God of War
Dead Space
World of Warcraft
Diablo
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
Slay The Spire
The Elder Scrolls
Blood
Bioshock
Dusk
Fallout
And many, many more. If anyone wants to play games, I’m HPBruvcraft on Xbox and Davelabyrinth on Steam
I don’t game, and never have. It just has never interested me. When I first got interested in computers, I got hooked on programming them, and it never occurred to me to write games. My first programs were orbital calculations and the like. Then I got into operating systems and systems software. That took up all of my time and even if I’d had the inclination to game, I didn’t have the time.
Lol yeah that’s me. A lot of people seem to want to start out / learn via gaming. My grandson some years back wanted to learn programming and to him that meant writing a game. Well, I figured, if you want to really master something, teach it, so I found a 2D gaming engine and we created a pong-like game together and he thought I was some kind of software god.
But I found it to be a bit of a snore-fest. I guess I need a connection to solving a real-world problem instead of building a pretend world or physics engine.
My son almost flunked out of college one semester because he stopped going to classes and spent all day gaming. He finally saw the light and got his act together just in time.
I’m retired now, and can pick and choose to do anything I want. I’m currently working on developing control firmware for AC motors. I have no deadlines and the ability to work on the project (or not) whenever I want.
I was going to retire but was fortunate to fall into a situation where I can get paid to do anything I want, mostly on my own schedule, so I’ve been running with it. The client has this vague (to me) Built It And They Will Come ethos, and the owner makes a lot of $ in real estate which I think is what is actually funding me and fueling their seemingly endless patience with the slow progress (seeing their sales people and admin staff function is like watching paint dry – honestly it’s not me, the services are up and running and ready to be scaled).
They also are doing this tap dance where they are building a system that will compete with some of their strategic partners, so they are building it for small businesses that their partners are too short-sighted to care about and won’t notice. At some point when they reach critical mass they can come out of stealth mode and go for bigger accounts and it won’t matter if they frighten or offend the competitor / partners. Or that’s the stated plan anyway.
Anyway, they pay me to build it, to make it better than the 3 or 4 other companies in the world doing the same thing, they pay me a good rate and mostly leave me alone. It is as close as you can get to working passion projects in retirement without actually retiring and while still getting paid.
None of this will prevent me from pulling the plug the minute I feel it’s costing me too much in my personal life or health or anything like that. But for right now, it’s in the sweet spot.
i play minecraft with the kids from my family
The original elite? Have lots of memories playing that. And the two sequels.
Been a long while since I’ve played, and I haven’t given Elite Dangerous a chance myself.
I’m currently into Final Fantasy 14, and Minecraft; but I’ve played a wide variety of games in my time.
Used to play this with grandchildren, it’s very addictive, or at least I found it so, It was funny to see the children’s personalities in the way they played, the eldest getting and making stuff to give to grandpa in the game, his brother making an axe to hit me over the head with…ah happy days.
I played it when it first came out in 1984, it was the software companies name then Frontier Elite, must have been their first game maybe? I bought a copy for the PS4 a few years back. No time to game now, work is insane at the moment.
In my 40+ years of working in Silicon Valley as an engineer, I’ve seen lots of changes. Of the 10 companies I worked for during my career 8 of them are either gone completely or have been subsumed by other companies and have ceased to exist in their original form. I was always fearful of a company going broke or being laid off, primarily because I hated job searching. I was always successful in finding a new job after a company self-destructed, but it was always a stressful time for me.
I first started considering retirement a little over a year ago when I turned 64 and thought I wasn’t quite ready for it yet. The industry was once again undergoing massive change as a result of the rise of AI and jobs were both becoming scarce and hard to find. I told myself that I wouldn’t retire then, but would take some of the stress away by not worrying about being laid off or my company going kaput–if that happened, I’d just retire at that point and call it a career.
It was nice working that final year without worrying about the stress of losing my job due to the economy, AI, or whatever. At the beginning of this year, however, I was still following a 40+ hour schedule, and I thought to myself “Why?” That, combined with the imminent start of the second Trump regime, made me reexamine my priorities and I figured that now was the time to retire and get it over with. I gave my company six months notice and spent that time restructuring my investments to make them as Trump-proof as possible.
My last day at work was in mid-June and we almost immediately left on a five week vacation in Europe. The primary purpose of the vacation was to keep my mind off of retirement and any second guessing my decision as the trip would keep me occupied. That worked, although as a Californian used to low humidity summers, the heat and humidity of summer in Italy was an unpleasant reminder that perhaps I should have waited until the autumn.
I’ve been retired three months now and don’t regret the decision.
It’s a fair question, and the answer in my case is that we have a disabled adult child in our household. We have enough assets for my wife and I to get to end-of-life, but not enough to really give our son a fighting chance without us. Also in the mix, as you suggest, is the economic and political mayhem of the Trump regime. When he was re-elected, a comfortable retirement nest egg suddenly felt more questionable.
Since I am having an absolute blast doing this work, it seems like a no-brainer to continue as long as I can. We also both took social security payments starting this January, even though I had planned to wait until I was maximum retirement age (70? 70.5? I forget now) and my wife was a few months short of full retirement age (66 years 9 months in her case). That feels like a smart decision … we will get payments until the system collapses, at least.
My wife and I took two days off and went to the mountains this past weekend, and we’re making a point to do stuff like that, so that me working doesn’t completely consume me, and caring for our son doesn’t consume us both.
Having a disabled child certainly makes your situation more complicated than mine. Looks like you’re currently in a work situation you’re having fun with, and that’s important. Good luck.
Thanks, and enjoy your retirement! I love the way you went about it – the immediate vacation abroad is just what you ought to do if you are subject to buyer’s remorse or otherwise second guessing yourself, and/or need a chance to decompress from the daily work mindset and refocus from it. The whole point of retirement is to reclaim your personal time and energy and redirect it to the things you’d have rather done if you didn’t HAVE to work. A salary after all is just a bribe to get you to do things you’d rather not do, on behalf of some random “other”.
Best wishes and good luck on your journey
I don’t anymore but I did once, I used to play Wing Commander, Strike Commander & Privateer as well as early Wolfenstein/Doom versions, Heretic and so on although I did play both Force Unleashed games on xBox and Avatar. Basically I prefer older games to the newer ones and, with the exception of local networked games (BZFlag was great fun), I pretty much despise massive online stuff.
That said, I’m still waiting for Chris Roberts to launch Squadron 42 as it basically seems like Wing Commander or Privateer with better graphics.
UK Atheist
(Everything ahead is either exaggerated or portrayed jokingly!) I love Deltarune. Almost to an unhealthy degree. Every second of my life is taken up by this stupid game!! If I’m not playing it, I’m thinking about it, and that usually comes with talking about it, too. As soon as I get home from any events, I go straight to my TV and watch theories about the game, or I play it myself.
And Tenna. Oh, Tenna… Not much else needs to be said.
I love Deltarune.
Oh, and Hollow Knight’s cool too, I guess.