Olden Times

by Jon Sullivan - 2020-02-06 - Stories

I was playing the old DOS version of the game Master of Orion last night, and thinking of how it used to be the main reason people came to this site.

By the late 90s the game was nearly impossible to find. And since it had come out before the Internet was really a thing there were no handy online strategy guides or walkthroughs like you have now. Worse, the game had a theft security feature where you had to look up something in the paper guide that came with the game. Without it the game wasn't playable, and most people didn't have it. So I just blatantly broke the law and posted everything here. It made the site pretty popular.

These days you can just buy it on Steam, which is how I play it now. They have everything I used to, as well as a great forum for discussing the game. So I see no reason to bring back that page. But it does bring to mind some of the other pages I had that brought in massive traffic.

The Diet Coke page was huge. As a long time fan of that delicious beverage, I tried to have links to every resource I could find. Articles, images, products, collectibles, etc. But pretty quickly I got dragged into the world of the crazy bastards who would later become anti-vax lunatics. Back then their theory was that Big Chemical had conspired with every hospital, lab, and regulatory agency to hide the "fact" that Diet Coke caused brain cancer.

While taunting such morons was fun for a while, they eventually wear you down with relentless and bottomless stupid. So I won't be bringing that page back.

My Ireland vacation page brought in lots of traffic. I suspect mainly due to my site being the only place online that mentioned some of the small towns and archaeological sites. Remember this was before Google. So even if there was a web page, search engines were really bad. They would come for the Diet Coke virtual rumble, and stay for the cool Ireland trip.

I still need to finish my posts on the 2018 Ireland trip. I'll likely make a page for that when I'm done.

Recipes were popular. Since I predated food blogs. But these days the food blogs are way better than anything I'll be doing. So I'm not too motivated to make that a thing here again.

So quiet here now, compared to the 100k+ views a day past. I'm cool with that.

Buy prints

Mike McKay

2020-02-06 13:21:56 : I loved MOO... haven't played it in nearly 2 decades now... Does it hold up well going back to it? And, are they really selling it for $30 on Steam? Seems a bit pricey for an old title. Wait, was looking at the 'New' MOO. $6 is much more reasonable for the old title.

Jon Sullivan

2020-02-06 13:48:26 : I feel like it still entertains as much as it used to. The thing I like most about it in 2020 is that it's more pure big strategy, and less gently tweaking 20 spreadsheet columns strategy. It runs in a tiny window, but you can adjust that in the config file. I highly advise digging into the Steam forum for the game to get the good config tweaks. I also reduce my mouse DPI rate for it.

Rex Bellator

2020-05-05 18:11:04 : Hey Jon, for what it's worth your old page was a treasure trove of good information. I've been getting back into MOO myself after watching a Sulla playthrough on Impossible (I'm an average difficulty player myself). I came sniffing around for old FAQs or strategies on ship building only to find the old url coming up dead; thankfully WaybackMachine has archives of your site so I was able to print out the FAQs listed there.

Good to see you're still playing Moo! :)

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