Playing games in childhood were fearsome and terrible because of the lack of technology, convenience, and comfort.
I was born during the early 80s of the 20th century, up to now. There are nearly 40 green ones. When I started going to school, the country entered the renewal period with positive changes. One of them is people learning English, homes for children to learn English, the language that once shook the default is not for the masses.
The thick streamline book looked like he wanted to vomit.
Talking about my English study, I was in the seventh year of my life, I was good at literature, and the flute was good or every English crime I knew, but I didn’t know it, I was like “I like apple”. The advanced head is buzzing with the cards. The luck of luck, the savior of my English subject, suddenly appeared one day. No white-haired beard, pioneering leader as perverted old fathers or luring young girls raising gobies to export. Nor is the princess skirt sloppy and then swinging the wand to bring some magical items but a short shelf life. My savior has a square shape, small and pretty in the palm, was played by three players at that time affectionately identified with the name “plate of the maze”.
A “labyrinthine” disc with a “buzzing card” sound could be appearing in your head
Those who have given birth before birth will probably flap their thighs when they think of the name floppy disk 1.4MB. At that time, the mazi plate was the device for office computer work, but it was purely a tool to help install the favorite games with a genuine game. Remember somewhere around the year 96 or 97 of the 20th century, after a period of discussion with my papa. Papa finally approved me to buy the 586. The configuration of the time was as follows:
- CPU: Intel 586 (the price is probably equivalent to an i7 8700k now)
- RAM: 2MB
- Graphics card: 4MB
- HDD: 600MB
- Monitor: 14 inches CRT
In this configuration in the past, if the graphics card was 4MB, then it was called the peak of the peak about 20 years ago, guys, so about the unmatched level of this set, there’s no need to argue. At that time, the PC was something completely new. To spread computer knowledge, I was given a half-year training course by papa’s sponsor to learn all essential martial arts from MS-DOS, Windows 311, Windows 95, then Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel 95. The reason for telling you the exhausting learning process is to say that you wanted to play games in the past when you were young, but you had to be superior. Nobility by knowing all the necessary programs of Windows so that people can see, you know how to use Word to type text, compose papers for family work, not just sit on the computer and autoplay where is the game.
The classic Windows 311 childhood interface
If anyone has followed this series of articles, I will know that I have been learning English from a young age (and the family is wealthy), but understanding it all the time is not there. The turning point of learning English comes from a classic Point-and-click Adventure game, ” The Curse of the Monkey Island “. In the old days, sharing games was quite tricky (unlike searching the internet for them). The game is shared mainly via a 1.4 MB floppy disk. That’s why, in the past, developing super compression programs was like making million-dollar start-up applications. I will calculate this for you to understand easily, a game like Monkey Island has a capacity of about 2 CD ROMs (Range 600 – 800 MB at that time). The talented crack game does not know what magic tricks to use, cut in all cut scenes, it has a range of 300 – 400MB and somehow can be compressed and stuffed into a range of 7 – 10 floppy disks of 1.4 MB.
The Curse of Monkey Island needs a lot of English capital and disk space.
When playing games, often encountered two basic errors occur: One is that in 7 to 10 floppy disks, when installed on the computer, sometimes there will be a disc with a recording error, but if this stick, you must copy the disc is broken. The other is to copy all, but the compressed file sometimes has an error, oh my god, something, when it is uncompressed, the file is not complete, this error must be compressed and copied thoroughly. At that time, there was no concept of a USB drive or a portable hard drive. A floppy disk drive or a CD was the only option for file sharing. Still, it was so tight that a single CD was too expensive, and I finished copying without deleting or write anything else. In contrast, CDs can be re-written many times (super expensive), not to mention investing in a CD player is also quite difficult for many people.
When I approached the game “The Curse of the Monkey Island” in the same way as above, copy the game to the computer, install it, work, and play but had many errors and was impossible to understand. What is this game because the cut scene videos were cut off, not to mention the voice and audio were cut? However, the image of this game is super cute when it uses 2D animation images. That’s why I decided to buy 2 CDs for this game. After accumulating money, I finally bought the game at the legendary game store disc Computer and experienced the game’s full quality. But until now, the difficulty appeared because of the dense amount of text. If you are a fan of puzzle adventure games, you will understand how massive the game’s information is, and almost every item you find in the game has its role must play. The Monkey Island series’s specialty is that the words and dialog in the game are often rhyming, satirical, and sometimes used idioms that only native people know.
The original CD of the game The Curse of Monkey Island
I think maybe the Monkey Island series is one of the first series to come up with the concept of text-based combat, you’re still fighting, but the damage is based on your choice of lines, which means fighting. In “The Curse of the Monkey Island,” there is a naval section that forces you to fight. The level up is that you have several mouth fights to bounce back the opponent that these sentences are many I don’t understand when I read it. You can watch the clip under a push to understand its level of brain hacking.
At that time, the game’s information exchange was minimal, apart from a few intranet communities such as Vietnam Intelligence. There were almost no gaming forums (forums like VENO or Games for Viet appeared 1-2 years after the internet officially came to Vietnam in late 97 and early 98). As I mentioned in a few previous articles, the search for instructions for the game is minimal. One month in Saigon, you will find to buy one collection of teachings and cheat codes at Vietnam News Agency No. 116 – 118 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Q3. This book’s price is quite harsh, but sometimes there are no instructions for the game I want to play. That’s why one book that is synthesized by gamers at that time was like a treasure, and it took a lot to lend your photos. Not everyone could borrow it.
Back to playing games, this time of gaming is when I focus heavily on learning foreign languages. Think about playing a game like a war. You can mess around to complete, but do not understand your options for why it is right. To understand and play the game; ultimately, I had to look up every word so that I would have to have a dictionary nearby. This inadvertently makes the parents of the look less harsh. The first is that the image is also bright and cute. The second is to see his son all day plugging in a computer and looking up a dictionary, only if not complementing the width and width, let him play. There is no ban.
For me, playing games in the old days is the real Multiplayer Although today’s technology is modern, we can easily connect with millions of gamers around the world in the Multiplayer section, but I still have a feeling of emptiness and loneliness.
And so, after two months of practicing the game, my English is much better. At least, I learned more than 1,000 new English words. This is one of the foundations for me to choose a language career later in university. After this game, I fell in love with the puzzle adventure series and was always looking to play. I got the chance to play the Broken Sword and plowed through all of its versions, followed by Indiana Jones, Dark Earth, and many other adventure games. Thanks to that good English, later, when I played RPGs, I felt it was as normal as a carton of milk.
What are your impressions of your childhood? Please share it with me.
