We know the drill.
Whenever it's Fathers Day, I need to celebrate for my Father REUBEN MARTINEZ.
Rather than share a ton of photos ad-nauseum, I like to tell you all about a little PC Game that me and my father used to play on the family's computer in the late 90s and early 2000s.
This game I'm referring to is:
This is an arcade style SHOOTING GAME that I referred to as
THE ORIGINAL CRYSIS of 1998.
Why? You'll find out more as you read this post.
Anyhow......
How did I end up with this game?
It was included with our first computer:
A Compaq Presario 5477 Desktop Computer from 1999.
13GB WD Caviar Hard Drive
"HOW'S A GAME LIKE INCOMING INCLUDED WITH YOUR LATE 90s PC?"
It was normal for OEM companies like COMPAQ to include a myriad of software from the likes because them OEM Companies know that People often would prefer to use Computers as game machines so including games like this is a good way to get gamers on their side as well as use them games to benchmark certain specs like Integrated Graphics, Partnerships with GPU Companies like 3dfx, etc.
And INCOMING was no exception.
That was how I was able to attain my very first TRUE PC GAME.
Because as mentioned in the past, my parents limited my PC Game Collection to EDUTAINMENT TITLES instead of real games like UNREAL TOURNAMENT, Half-Life, etc.
I guess the idea is that my parents would not want to expose me to the horrors of shooting up dudes or Head-Crab Zombies due to how impressionable of a toddler I was back in 1999.
Remember how I said INCOMING was the original CRYSIS from the late 90s?
My memories of my toddler years are fuzzy at best, even with photographic evidence.... but I do vaguely remember who frustrating it was for both me and my dad trying to get this game to run on both our COMPAQ PRESARIO & later our VOBIS HIGHSCREEN.
Because we didn't get inside the system, because we both thought that PCs were as closed of an architecture as an iMac, we couldn't upgrade the CPU, nor install a GPU.
We often would try to get the game started up but it often threw up errors and refused to execute, or it would crash the computer, etc.
And on the times we did get INCOMING actually running on the computer, the thing was a buggy mess and would lag but still be playable.
(How buggy? I don't remember other than the in-game sky being pitch-black.)
If things had been different, had my father known at the time that PCs were an open architecture, we would have swapped out that 500mhz Celeron for a 850mhz PENTIUM III Cartridge and of course installed a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card.
(I have to say Celeron & Pentium since our COMPAQ was an Intel Machine.)
Instead, whenever I'm not around or I'm inside my bedroom watching Disney Movies on VHS, my father often preferred to use our computers for serious business
The sad irony is that both me and my Dad often got frustrated whenever INCOMING refused to run on the computers we had access to back in the day,
And now I can just run the game fine on STEAM or GOG via
my 16-Core AMD RYZEN 9 9950x3D MAVERICK FALCON 7900RT Build.
(Barring a few CPU Upgrades and some software to fix some graphical glitches.)
And here's proof:
So to you REUBEN, Happy Fathers Day. And I hope you're happy that after all those years I'm finally able to get this game running on my own hardware without too many hassles.
(PS, I also got this game running well on my MSI Laptop in 2022 and my 2023 Maverick Warhawk Ryzen 9 5900x build.)
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