I agree with you RM, I have Myst Uru: Ages beyond Myst and Myst III: Exile. This is a beautiful game that was way ahead of it’s time, and well worth the money I spent on it. It's also still very playable, despite the realism of some of today’s newer games such as Crysis, COD 4 and Medal of Honor: Airborne (to name just a few), though they are not quite in the same genre as Myst.
I'm really impressed with the space flight simulator. If there's anything with planets and satellite imagery of earth and I'm into it. There's upgraded to higher definition imagery of all of the major planets and a separate upgrade for Earth.
Here's the site for Orbiter:
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
and here's the intro to the site:
Quote:
"ORBITER is a free flight simulator that goes beyond the confines of Earth's atmosphere. Launch the Space Shuttle from Kennedy Space Center to deploy a satellite, rendezvous with the International Space Station or take the futuristic Delta-glider for a tour through the solar system - the choice is yours.
But make no mistake - ORBITER is not a space shooter. The emphasis is firmly on realism, and the learning curve can be steep. Be prepared to invest some time and effort to brush up on your orbital mechanics background. Good starting points are JPL's Basics of Space Flight, and R. Braeunig's Rocket & Space Technology.
For discussion with other Orbiter users, have a look at the Orbiter forum. More information and resources for users and developers can be found under the Orbiter Wikipedia entry and the OrbiterWiki site, both maintained by the Orbiter community"
I'll certainly devote some time to this and may report back with some screen captures when I have the time.
It's game time now :)
Damn! (I hope that's acceptable?) I wish I'd missed this link until later as just this minute I've taken delivery of five more games ‘old and relatively new’ that were on special offer so I couldn't resist. I only ordered them early morning yesterday - Armed Assault Queens Gambit {expansion pack to Armed Assault}, which is a little annoying as I bought the original Armed Assault after pre-ordering it and paying the release price of the equivalent of $60, now less than a year later you can get the original game and the expansion pack that I've just got for ~$35. The other games include one of my old favorites Hidden and Dangerous II, (I only had the demo) Red Ocean which had been reduced from over $60 to less than $10, and the Blitzkrieg anthology that includes the original Blitzgrieg and three expansion packs for $10 as well as last summers talk of the gaming fraternity, Medal of Honor: Airborne. But until I've checked out these games that funkymom has revealed I won’t touch them because once I get focused on something I can't stop, lol. These prices are brilliant when you look at the price of most of the arcade games that are offered over on the game giveaway site.
I still can’t understand why arcade games don’t reduce in price after a certain period when the initial rush to get the new release has died down. A lot of the arcade games I have that cost $19.95 or $19.99 three four years ago still cost the same, whereas every shop bought game that’s released on disc invariably comes down in price shortly after it’s release apart from some of the blockbusters such as COD4 and Bioshock that may take upwards of a year to reduce, but reduce they will. Medal of Honor cost the equivalent of over $65 when it was released last summer 2007, now it costs $36 less than six months after it's release.
I think the online software distributors are taking us for fools. Take Alawar for example. Okay they have been very generous throught the giveaway project (thanks for this project), but if you look at just one of their policies with respect to marketing their games they are real rip off merchants. For example, you can still buy Hyperbolloid the complete edition plus several expansion sets which will cost you quite a lot of money (I actually (and foolishly) bought all the expansions up to the Xmas 2006 expansion; I spent a total of over $170. They have now released Hyperballoid Golden pack that includes all their expansion packs plus an extra pack for $19.95, but they do not market it on their own site, only via other distributors. So their loyal fan are still buying individual expansion packs, not realizing that the golden version costs about $5 more than one single expansion pack or the same as a mega pack. The great thing is, if you have the complete game you can take the expansion pack DAT files from the demo of the golden pack and put them in the original game and have all the expansion packs for free.
To the moderators if you think the last part of the last paragraph is a little naughty please feel free to delete it.