Over the long weekend I decided to start cleaning out the garage – a project, by my estimates, will take several years to complete.  I came across some old software that has been hiding in some box for … well, decades.  I found many 5 1/4” floppy disks of some old favorite games I used to play.  Recognize any?  (Many of the labels are in pretty bad condition.) First up is the original Zork.   Nothing more really needs to be said on this one. I probably put the most number of hours into this one.  This was Ultima III – not sure why I never really played the other Ultimas until much later.  StarGlider wasn’t as well known as Ultima or Zork, but I was so jazzed about this game because it was like the Star Wars arcade game – where you would fly your x-wing into the death star with the vector graphics.  Night Stalker was also on Intellivision – no, it’s not a Richard Ramirez RPG, it was kind of like a creepy Pac-Man style game. I have almost no memory of this game, Murder on the Zinderneuf.   I was big into Clue and games like “Stop Thief!” and this game was very much along those lines. Everyone who claims to be a geek knows Archon.   Archon played like Chess, but when “battling” another player by landing on their square, you’d be whisked away to a virtual battlefield.  Stronger pieces had an advantage but that’s what made it fun. I spend a great deal of time playing this one (The Ancient Art of War), too, and from what I remember I was pretty frustrated at that.   This was a really great strategy game for its time… … which was followed up by a sequel, The Ancient Art of War at Sea.  Hacker was a fun adventure game – probably the first to make you feel like a real hacker.  And saving the best for last: That’s right.  The original Flight Simulator.   The good ol’ days.

I added a new (relatively speaking, anyway) chess game to my OTB (over-the-board or face-to-face) section (found here).  I played this one a few months ago at Microsoft, however I forgot all about it until I was cleaning up some files.  The game was a G30, if I recall; I played white.  Before uploading I let Fritz 8 analyze the game to help figure out where I went wrong. Things were looking quite balanced up until move 20, where I played Rd1-d3.  Fritz's evaluation went from 0.16 (virtually balanced) to -0.47 (a half-pawn advantage for black).  At this point Fritz was looking at f4 as the strongest move (0.13) or even the more aggressive Rxd8+.  I didn't expect Bruce to capture, but he did with Rxd3, gaining the momentum (-0.44). I didn't realize how bad of a move this was at the time, but move 23. Rc1? was what did me in (Fritz places the game at -0.72).  I lost the initiative, and now I was scrambling. Up until move 29 the initiative went a tad further to Bruce, with an eval of -0.94.  At our level of play, that's not much -- it's less than a pawn advantage.  To turn that advantage into a win can be fairly difficult.  29. Kd2 followed by 32. f4? ended the game.  As soon as the exchange happened, I realized that black had a clear advantage.Bruce was a solid player -- as I went through the game, I was amazed that Fritz had not marked any of his moves as blunders!  The game was amazing even-keeled (again, for our level).  I haven't been playing much over the past couple of years, a grim reminder of that which goes unpracticed will atrophy.