Why I decided to replay the old Fallout series and loved it

Recently Bethesda teased the gamer community with the possibility of a new Fallout game, they simply showed a "Please stand by" image and apparently left it there, still unsure if a confirmation was given or not about what was it but I dismissed the game, I simply don't like the new series and I tried all of the recent ones, it just isn't Fallout and even if heretical to some I think the last true game on the series was Fallout: Tactics.

So for the purpose of proving myself either right or wrong about how good was the series back in the day I took the task of installing the original Fallout and here I found myself in an ordeal I had not dealt with in many years. I spinned a virtual machine for Windows XP SP3 (I got legitimate licenses, leave me alone) and was successful on installing the game there, to my surprise the mouse was going all over the place with the slightest move so this was not the way to go, no matter how much I fixed and tweaked I could not get the thing to do what I wanted.

Next step was to use Wine and here is where I re-learned what a pain it was to setup, Wine is a Windows emulator for Linux, you can install programs and interact with them as you would in Windows, but you’re on Linux, and the thing does not get any less complicated from there. Turns out that every time I want to give Wine a chance it’s always a hassle to setup, installing is simple as the repositories for Debian contain the packages, but doing the whole thing, getting the setup right, making sure everything worked, it was trial and error until I managed to get the thing right and for this I took around some three hours to figure out what I was doing wrong. (Turns out I just had to leave the latest version of Wine as the default for the program to run, silly me eh?)

Once Fallout was installed I found another peculiar issue, I could run it windowed but I could not switch to other windows or things on my desktop while this window was running and I did not want to go through another hassle to figure out why this was the case, the whole reason behind this was that I wanted to record a play-through of the original game and eventually Fallout 2 and Tactics, but I could not even do something as simple as ALT+TAB to press record, eventually I figured that if I ran the thing full screen and setup the right coordinates on the recording program I would get the whole thing and this is how it will work from now on.

After this I finally met this jewel again and I have so many fond memories, everything came back to me (even things that I know I have missed so far), exiting Vault 13, finding Shady Sands, doing the radscorpion quest, figuring out that Vault 15 is a pile of rubble and your quest is going to take you a very long while to figure out and you got less than 140~ days to get to it before everyone dies on the vault, the first armor and new weapon you get (that Mad Max leather suit, because that’s not a jacket that’s the whole thing, and the SMG that has the lamest sound ever, the handgun sounds far more brutal than the poor thing and they do the same damage as far as I recall, unless of course you do burst).

Tweaking my character was also a personal no-brainer, I found that in the world of Fallout, a world that was blown to pieces by a nuclear war many years before you were even born (if memory does not fail me), you can find a ton of ammunition, way too much, so I never really bothered with melee as I could always find the ammo I needed for my weapon, I can’t wait to get the power armor and harden it, the .223 handgun (which is a nod to Blade Runner), fighting some of the weirdest and toughest bosses of the series, getting the random encounters that are very random indeed, finding meatdog (eventually, hope Ian doesn’t kill him as usual or me for that matter).

This is why I know this game is a jewel, it’s been more than fifteen years since I first found the dual-case that contained Fallout 1 and 2 for the bargain price of two dollars at a Wal-Mart, I remember installing them humongous version and my dad being furious at me for filling up the hard drive on the computer (we had a 3GB hard drive back then, imagine that!) but managing to run the game so smooth and fast it didn’t matter, so much I played both games that they skip from time to time and I think they are at the end of their life, so sad as it will be hard to find such a bargain again (unless GOG or Humble Bundle gives them away for super cheap again but I highly doubt it).

With all that being said, give it a try, enjoy it, take the time to learn probably one of the best and easiest systems for a role-playing game (because AD&D sucked in Baldurs Gate although it was an awesome game nevertheless).

Learning Ansible and Vagrant or why I really need to put myself to date

For some time, I have heard Ansible this, Vagrant that, Docker and Kubernetes, Cassandra, and a bunch of other names of applications, services (or micro-services, whatever that is), APIs and whatnot, these are all foreign to me and come surprisingly fast to me in a time when I'm trying to pick up coding again because I want to try my hand again at doing something interesting.

I have learned first that I keep doing things the wrong way as I go through the Ansible from Beginner to Pro by Michael Heap (which by the way needs some revisioning as I find some of the wording confusing as hell) when doing development and provisioning of my environment.

So let me backtrack here and explain what I’m talking about, some years ago I used to work at a company that handled auto parts for the entire country and our plans of expansion were putting a real strain on our current inventory system (something built in Access 2010) so the company needed something different, enter me as a Junior Programmer to figure things out together with my boss, we handled it the best we could but in the end we did not manage to push the project through and parted ways with the company.

From my tenure there I learned a lot about PHP, jQuery and MySQL together with Linux, but I was still lacking in many ways the knowledge I needed to do what the company needed (I was Junior anyway, but you get my drift, you want to eat the entire world). As time has gone by I have kept up with programming through different methods, either building Bash or Python scripts, a small website to keep track of something very specific or some random requirement from a friend.

About a year ago I decided to get back into the whole thing now that I have figured out how to really handle my free time and through the magic of Humble Bundle I have acquired about forty to fifty or so books (of which I have used maybe one or two, I am behind on reading but I’m doing my best to keep up) which lately include Web Development (I mentioned previously this as I was interested in the whole Static Sites thing).

For this whole purpose I wanted a server, a real rack-mounted server, which now sits on my desk (and works as a nice extension of it) that I got for cheap (thanks eBay!). At this point in time the PowerEdge 1850 has been partially upgraded (still waiting for other parts), has the highest version of ESXi it can handle (which is 4.1 update 4) and has been tested out to see how it performs and for the price I spent I can’t complain, it does a very good job and frees my laptop from the hassle of having a test environment on the same machine I use for other stuff. My problem was that I needed to handle the deployment and installation of the machines and I did not want to go through the whole damn hassle of replicating everything item by item, so I went and looked through the books I see the Ansible thing and I think, well, better give it a shot (I know I could try Docker and containers but bear with me as I struggle to figure out most of the stuff I have to get up to date with!).

So far trying Ansible and Vagrant have been as usual a very mixed bag of results, Ansible was easy to install, Vagrant not so much and it was throwing a fit due to the version of VirtualBox I had installed so I had to download everything from the respective websites and install it on my laptop, after figuring that out I got to work on some playbooks and provisioning, when I saw how it worked and what it did I was shocked, I had thought about this same idea a couple of years ago and even thought about how to do it, I knew there had to be an easy way to deploy virtual machines and then push a script or something to install all the stuff it needed before it could get to work, little did I know that such a thing existed in the form of Ansible (not dissing or ignoring Chef or Puppet, Ansible is what I have at hand and that’s what I’ll work with).

My other problem with Ansible is the way playbooks are coded, at first it felt a bit esoteric but once I understood the logic I figured out that it was more of a be very careful of how you write stuff otherwise it won’t work approach than anything else, frustrating at first but once you get the hang of it the thing seems pretty obvious what you have to do and how to do it. Also, there seems to be a considerable number of playbooks available to go through, so I’ll have to give them a check once I am done with this book and get everything setup the way I want it.

The perceived purpose of an open world and gameplay

It sometimes impresses me how far we have come in video games in regards to world building, I always assumed it was a pain and a hassle to build everything from the ground up (I remember seeing some documentary about how Doom was made and was shocked at the amount of paper they had on their desks and how everything looked like back in the day, but I always wanted to know more about it).

As games continue to grow in quality and size so does the tools that help this purpose, some worlds are huge and beautiful, filled with so many things you must spend a considerable number of hours to explore all of it, but is this the right thing to do, do we really need a world so big it takes us forever to look and some random thing in the middle of nowhere?

To mind comes Elite Dangerous, a game where the space in which the player can move is absolutely huge, some new features were added with time but the game (cost rather) never hooked me enough and I tried it with the official stick and thruster which made for an even more realistic experience, I was not hooked because I felt there was nothing to do in the world aside from going around all over the place fulfilling some demand in order to get money and upgrade your ship, sure, the space battles were very good but that was it for me.

Same thing for other games that seem to be trying to share this idea of a procedural generated world that can give the player an immersive experience, No Mans' Sky was a huge example of this and so was Sea of Thieves, sure you have these massive worlds or lands to explore but for what purpose if what you find in them is one of the following scenarios:

• Generic mob or scenario which becomes repetitive way too fast, there is a pattern to find here and it soon shows that there is little inspiration behind it
• Empty scenario with some “great landscape”, sure it’s cool to see some cool eye candy from time to time but if you are paying 50/60+ USD for the game you better get more than some nice background, some commentary by the characters, a random event (I keep thinking about those very odd events you would get in Fallout and Fallout 2), something to fill up that void you suddenly feel when reaching that point
• Unfinished idea/area which was to be worked before/during/after release and never got pushed past an idea, sure, sometimes you can make something out of whatever was lacking and build a nice placeholder (which may never go away) but at least it’s not so obvious to the eye
• It so happens that time or resources run out to finish all these great ideas that could have been an awesome game, therefore keeping the scope of development into a realistic arena is the best way to finish the product and then keep building over it (just like Paradox Interactive does with Europa Universalis 4 or Crusaders Kings II, just look at all the DLCs available for each game!).
• On the above, a DLC can be a great way to bring something that was too far on the original development cycle to the player at a “reasonable” cost, but a DLC is in no way compensating for whatever is lacking from what was originally planned, if the game was sold as having a specific feature and then it’s being sold to the player because of X/Y reason this is just bad, plain and simple, there are hundreds of examples available nowadays regarding this situation.

Also to add another very valid point here, you don’t need to have the best graphics or eye candy for your game to work, just look at Mount and Blade, it still supported DirectX 7 when it came out and was nothing too impressive graphically but the gameplay was incredible, same thing for Hotline Miami, it was not the greatest thing to look at but once you got hooked you were set and done, I have dropped countless hours on Hotline Miami 1 and 2 to get better times, Banished was a game that while not very fascinating graphics wise had a very challenging gameplay with some interesting procedural generation, not always the map was the fairest but if you knew how to squeeze every inch you could make it work (specially in the smallest mountain scenario that could earn you an achievement if you survived more than 20 years), Depraved, a city building game during the Old West, is a game I would have never expected to see and I really want to play the game even in its crude alpha state because it's something I never thought would look so interesting, Factorio is another game that is very weird, I discovered it by accident while watching Arumba in one of his playthroughs and became fascinated by the game, soon after I got friends hooked up and we were doing LAN parties (yes, we still do these in 2018) in which four or five of us will work our way through some very hard scenarios, but both of my personal favorites and challenges (which one of my friends was so shocked to see that he called me an absolute nerd when he is already one of the biggest nerds I know) Dwarf Fortress (no mods, no nothing, just the pure raw game as it is) and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

Figure this out, the last two games I mentioned have no real graphics but letters which symbolize something (that something you may need to “examine” to figure out what it is) while in other instances it is a bit obvious what it is, there’s a lot of reading, some very hard learning curves that will see you die almost immediately for the first twenty times and then, then you will figure something out, then you will get to understand the mad world surrounding you, when you can make those very first steps without reading a guide you know you’re done for, you have gone too far down the rabbit hole.

Figuring out Node.JS with Debian, a never ending journey

Many years ago I decided to switch over to Linux as my personal OS, in particular because I did not feel like buying a computer every so often and also because I did not have the money to upgrade to a considerably new machine (nowadays I still don't have the spare money to do that but from time to time I find parts that I either use to upgrade what I have or store them to build something better).

I played around with many Linux Distros (ranging from Fedora and Ubuntu to Debian and Mandriva) but ended up landing on Debian 5, to my luck Debian 6 was released a few days after I switched over to Linux and I could finally get some of the issues out of the way for some basic stuff that I needed back then (namely Dropbox), from there on I have worked with Linux at home for what would now be 7 years but I had played with the idea of working around with Linux since 2004 during which I found it quite complicated (I believe it was Mandrake that I was trying back then and eventually Slackware but neither seemed compelling to me).

From time to time I keep finding the odd Linux error which has a solution somewhere on the internet, in other instances I am confused and must work on compiling something to make either an old package work or some obscure program run on my machine.

Another thing I have learned during my tenure with Linux has been web programming (PHP and MySQL) and some scripting with Python mostly but also some Bash, these have helped me a lot on previous jobs and I have come to notice that knowing these I could put them into more practical use than whatever my work is requiring of me, such as getting a small website up and running to have presence on the internet aside from the blogs and YouTube account I currently handle, by chance I found some Web Programming books on Humble Bundle and a book caught my attention immediately, Working with Static Sites by Raymond Camden and Brian Rinaldi. If memory does not fail me static sites are a thing of the past, but I was very intrigued on trying this out and I have not been disappointed so far as my curiosity with Node.JS, ReactJS and other modern languages continues to intrigue and elude me (as I do not currently hold a position which requires me coding all the time I am not up to date with much of the things web related).

I found a problem when starting some of the tests, I decided to install Node directly from a repository and when updating or installing new packages through npm it would not work, intrigued as to why I would need sudo all the time I started looking around and found that this was an issue in how npm was handling everything and that nvm was the solution for my problem.

After downloading the latest version of nvm and easily installing it I proceeded to update npm to the latest version (npm install -g npm <-- This intrigues me, the fact that there is no command to directly update npm amuses me), finally installed harp (which was throwing a fit about a bunch of stuff not working and node-sass not installing because using sudo would break it and not using sudo would tell me there was an error during the process).

After I had done this I noticed it would not work, intrigued I checked one of my virtual machines, repeated the latest steps and got it to work without an issue, went back to my machine and remembered that I had installed through a repository so I removed it manually from the sources.list file and removed the package, with this I could finally get harp to work and show me the initial website from the default template.

The clash of reality and gaming, the never ending controversy

A common issue that has been debated for years and will probably continue to be debated for many more is the thin line that separates our reality and what video games present to us, the issue has been brought up many times during the 90s and 2000s, to this day it is still something that hits the news every once in a while but not as frequent as those years. The controversy brought us the ESRB in the United States and other methods of rating to prevent younger audiences from experience a reality they are not ready to handle (although this is debatable, thinking back I can see Americas Army and other games as a good recruitment tool).

One of the earliest memories I have about the controversy would be Doom itself, an ultra-violent game which was corrupting a generation, it was the existence of Doom what brought the ESRB to existence in the first place yet it was not the first of its kind, Wolfenstein 3D was there before Doom and was around the same level of nasty than Doom, the difference was that in one you were fighting Nazis after being captured during World War II (or infiltrated the stronghold, at this point I can't really remember and I'm not googling that) and Hitler in the end (who melts into a gelatinous blob after you kill him) and in the other one you are fighting all kinds of demons straight from Hell in order to stop an invasion on a giant multi-corporate military base on one of the moons of Mars.

If we read in between the lines there is a triggering effect due to a religious involvement more than Americans doing the right thing and killing Nazis (thinking about this, metal was struck continuously by people who believed they were the tool of the devil and so was Dungeons and Dragons, these people really need to find something better to do with their free time than trying to use these as scapegoats of their boring life).

While one of the biggest controversies surrounding video games could be related to Doom and the Columbine High School Massacre and the incident in Brazil when a man went into a movie theater and started shooting people a la Duke Nukem (I remember both from back in the day in the news) other causes could be found as to why things were happening, even today the Columbine incident continues to be studied and new points of view brought into this matter, video games do not necessarily make people break, it can help them in their fantasies and even put some of their behavior to rest inside isolated halls of madness, but can a video game really turn someone into a murdered, a serial killer or something even worst?

I can think of the whole controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto, back in the day it was so frequent to see Jack Thompson fuming about the series and other video games that there was a rumor going around (maybe it was confirmed, I can't find the note) that Rockstar had paid Thompson to keep making an issue about the thing for even bigger promotion of the series, even bad publicity can turn out to be good publicity. Did it win anything to Jack Thompson? Not sure, maybe there was a satisfaction of making an issue about the whole thing but it surely did not affect the video games he put pressure on. Which makes me wonder, why didn't he raise an issue with the video game Hatred?

Hatred on its own became highly polemic, it was a video game that got a ton of hype (again from bad publicity) about controlling a person who was going on a genocidal rampage to destroy the world (which I think you can somehow achieve), there were mentions of national socialism, racism, that there was a hidden agenda with the developer team, in the end Valve did not flinch on saying they would not remove the game because they were all in with freedom of speech, this was a controversial move as Gabe Newell had previously removed other video games/mods on Steam for maybe similar reasons (again, this depends on perspective).

What happened in the end? Not much apparently, Hatred came out, the game was not what it had been made to be and the whole issue died considerably fast, the game still stands in the Steam store for a discount price (because after the initial craze for the game I can imagine sales would not get any higher than that).

All in all, gaming will be surrounded in controversy for many reasons like the ones mentioned above or the issue in China where gaming is being treated nowadays as an addiction and people are being sent to rehab camps so they can stop playing until they die, not sure about the numbers but world wide there have been plenty of cases which have happened for several reasons, there is a reason why there is a warning about not moving for more than a specific amount of time, to stop playing so long and to start moving, this is for the players safety and not just because it has to be added to the game/console warnings.

Overhyping and other things that can kill video games

Making something look greater than it is seems to be a common human thing, we want it to be greater than what it looks like, the video game industry has gone through some very interesting PR disasters but making X, Y, Z video game look like the greatest ever (it may well be a great video game) but in the long run there is something either moving into the wrong direction or simply not working as it was promoted, this goes beyond Kickstarter Campaigns that got funded and the final item was not delivered or if it was the product is not to par (Mighty No. 9), this is about video games being killed through bad publishing just because the company wants to make a profit on it, video games can look crude and have a great story/mechanics (and possibly vice versa or mix and match any way you can imagine) that will make it work out (Hotline Miami) to the point a fanatical player base will come out of it, probably the most dangerous type of fan base available, with a fanatical player base comes the risk of high expectations and a potential disaster when what they want is not delivered. We are also not including into this matter the toxicity of a player base (thinking about the Battlefield and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare X franchises but not being reserved only to FPS).

The problem with delivering something that is not what the players want is not always related to the developers, in most cases it has nothing to do with them, there is money involved, there are people with little to no understanding on the matter that wish to capitalize, there are sales, PR, investors, management, people outside of the direct development cycle that can make some really bad decisions as there is a speculation on what is potentially “best for players” or “this is what they really want”. This line of thought can kill a games, franchises and companies.

Spore was a highly hyped game that ended up not living to expectations, it was something alright but not what we had been sold on; Fable was a game that through word of mouth I got to try out and people overexaggerated the whole thing (but thinking about it this is also the fault of Peter Molineux who is known for doing this more often than not); SimCity (the last one to come out through Maxis) pretty much crashed and burned since day one with players being unable to join the game (some time later between a couple of friends we tried the game and found it so lacking that we dropped the case in maybe a month or two at the most); Star Wars Battlefront 2 died because of micro-transactions, period, greed will not get you far when you make it too obvious; Age of Conan did not accomplish what it was set to do (kill World of Warcraft); John Romero was going to make us his bitch with Daikatana and look where that went, good night sweet prince; Duke Nukem Forever took fifteen years to finally show up in a time where it was no longer relevant after going through so many hands and losing total focus on whatever it should have delivered.

Are games entertainment, technology or art?

This is derived from a work we read in class once about History, is History Art or Science? While this is highly debatable, and we never truly reached an agreement on what exactly History in the 21st century is it inspired me to write about the current state of video games, what are they, entertainment and a time drainer, a great experiment on pushing and testing technology to the breaking point (and there are plenty of examples here) or is it art, a new field in which we can express ourselves without limit?

Games as Entertainment for Generations:

It is true that games are entertainment but they can be informative and educational while keeping us hooked, the earliest memory I have of such a game would be Super Solvers Math Adventure in which I had to learn how to do proper math in order to progress through the game, truth be told I learned and enjoyed the game, Oregon Trail is another good example but I only found it later during my adult life and I can understand why those who played have fond memories of it (also why the dysentery part). On the other hand we can find games that will suck us in for days, weeks or months, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen where some of the earliest examples I can think of which I would play at computer lab back in 1994, our professor was a hell of a cool guy to have those games installed but on the other hand putting us through such an experience during 2nd grade really made an impact on me, even today when I play the original Doom or Doom II back I still feel anxious when opening doors or going through dark areas, this effect has lasted for more than 24 years!

I could keep dropping names here, everything from the original NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, PlayStation, XBOX and PC throughout the 90s and 2000s, some I am not as fond of and I could care less about such as most Nintendo games, my nostalgia has not driven me back that hard so that I want to play those games, I would probably enjoy them no doubt as Nintendo had some quality stuff back in the day but not enough to drive me back to either find the console and the original games or get an emulator to play them again. Entertainment, in my opinion, is something that sucks your time, gives you fond memories, makes you return for more and even years later you find yourself sitting back on your favorite chair and giving it a try, even passing it on to future generations,

Games as the Technology pusher:

Some games have really pushed technology to evolve rapidly to keep up with demand, hardware can hardly cope with the ever-growing needs of software, while this could be blamed on bad programming practices or bloated code this can also be blamed on ambition to provide a better product (and this is valid). Notable examples that come to mind would be Doom III (the specs back in the day shocked us, the video and RAM requirements demanded a monster of a machine which if curiosity strikes the mind was a single core Pentium 4 1.5GHz processor, between 256 to 512MB of RAM and a video card with 64MB of RAM). The next big jump came in the form of Crysis, even today it's still a joke between gamers to say, "but can it run Crysis?" to which most modern systems should say yes, yes I can run it, but, back in the day the question on everyone's head was "who has 2GB of RAM on their machine, a dual-core? Wow, you need a video card with 512MB of RAM, what?". These specs required you not only to upgrade your hardware but, in most cases, it was also demanding that you upgraded your operating system (when Crysis era the migration to Windows Vista had started after having Windows XP in the wild for some 6 or 7 years, this was a weird time thinking about it). Personally, I have never changed computers to play games of the current generation, I wait a couple of years to get some cheap hardware and pump it up as high as I can to get the most out of it, be it desktop or laptop, as I don't feel the need to change computers or upgrade every year, better do it every three to five years.

Games as a method of expression and possibly the ultimate type of Art:

Video games have pushed technology so that they can push something new (or at least that's what I would like to think) to us, better storytelling, quality cutscenes, from linear to multiple endings/options (which have shown great results such as Chrono Trigger and horrendous backlash such as Mass Effect 3), presenting worlds that at one point could have only been shown in a table-top environment (Dungeons and Dragons or Shadowrun), but reality also tells us that great visuals and music that brings us deep down into this world through the avatar designated by the developers will not always result in a great experience, throwing more money at it does not always fix the issue, sometimes it's a matter of taste, a strong player base and reaching expectations (which is not always the case, you can't satisfy everyone but checking the opinion/commentary of your player base through social media could, potentially, maybe, save your product from falling through the cracks and end up unnoticed).

Video games have been part of my life since my very early years, for whatever reason my dad had an Atari with a printer, I remember this because I at one point remember bringing some type of homework or piece to school when I was in elementary, this was way back in 1993 probably. 

Learning something from older videogames

The older I become the more interesting older video games become to me, the newer ones have something enticing too but as I have come to focus on a specific type of games or maybe I am just part of a demographic who want something either more detailed that has way too many ramifications to be humanly possible to follow through with any of them.

A recent example of something that got my attention again was Railroad Tycoon and this by mere chance when going back through some games I’m selling on eBay, Railroad Tycoon was one of those games that I bought somewhere in the mid to late 90’s back when I was in elementary, I bought that purple players choice box from Microprose at KB Toy Liquidators (rest in peace, such a great place and so many fond memories and games!) that I would have not obtained through any other means and going to the store was also another mere chance, finding the game on a discount bin for about a dollar together with Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom of the Opera, X-COM: Terror from the Deep and some other Microprose good games from back in the day.

I tried the game and found it to be a little too complicated because English is not my first language and back then I was still learning, I did get to enjoy it quite a bit but never got through with the game as I have in recent times.

My latest playthrough with this game taught me that mechanics found in Railroad Tycoon 3 and Sid Meier’s Railroads! were already present in the original Railroad Tycoon and RRT 3 polished to what could have possibly been the best it could get too (or maybe I’m wrong here, I think Railway Empire could be a true successor to the Railroad games).

From replaying RRT I noticed that not only my grasp of English is better (after some 20 years it should be as I have been working mostly for American companies) but my understanding of the mechanics was derived purely from experience from figuring out other games that followed other mechanics so it was easier to go from more complex games to simpler ones (not that this is always the case but this is how I see it from this point in time).

Reading the manual obviously gave me much more insight that experience alone could have thought me and in a much shorter time span, playing the game in investor mode, dispatcher mode and complex economy surely made for a more interesting game, but I have yet to play with cutthroat AI but so far, I have learned the following things from my experience playing the game:

1. Micro management can be a total pain in the ass when you start expanding too much way early in the game, while I had more than 2.5 million in the bank by 1866 in the East Coast (where is the Civil War, eh?) I did not have an effortless way to handle the 20+ locomotives that I had at the time and station wise I had around 15 or 16 at the time with more on their way but the madness that was becoming of this was not making for an easy game.

2. My administration of the lines (express and local) was not working as I had intended, passenger/mail trains were getting stuck waiting for freight trains to move through the signals and I was losing valuable money (not that I really needed it, but if you are selling such a service you should deliver, maybe I’m just roleplaying here).

3. I had to build a sort of logistical map to figure out what was going out anymore, the complexity of said map (in paper, because I could for the life of me not figure how to put this in a computer at the time because I wanted something simple) was such that I truly understand why such precision was needed in real life when moving trains around, one bad move and a collision could happen or trains could get out of their time tables and money is lost, you get the gist out of it.

4. My logistical nightmare eventually taught me that dropping certain materials at certain stations (just like in later versions of RRT) that were being used as a central to haul resources to other stations was the best way to go, mixed trains could potentially solve the issue at the time and later with faster trains I could continue to push for better centralization.

5. I had always improved stations to get more profit, but I had never truly understood the purpose of the other buildings such as the switchyard, the pen, goods storage, etc. Now with that in mind I could push to centralize even more things and then move them elsewhere and keep the system rolling, shorter hauls were better in my mind at this point and in a way, it worked better as it would clog the system less than with the 20+ trains running around although this would be done at a slower pace.

6. I had invested way too much brain power into the whole thing and I was freaking out for not being able to have a better logistical system and then I figured out that I’m just a guy in his 30s who’s investing too much time in a videogame that is meant for people to relax while playing with trains.
   

Game Mechanics, an opinion

There has been a considerable shift in games throughout the years, nowadays I mostly focus on city building and grand strategy games, there are some first person shooters (I miss Ghost Recon [Racoon]: Phantoms even with all the damn Pay-to-Win) that have driven me back but nothing else that really catches my attention. One of the things that I believe everyone who has been playing for a while will notice is that there has been a real polish in some genres which favor end-user experience more than true mechanics or true playability, that is that you enjoy the game so much that you can replay it again (FPS have something that even though people hate on them they keep buying the next game, so that is that). Fine tuning mechanics is essential for great game-play, especially when doing online competitive gaming, so there are some cases that I can think of in which they were both a blessing and a curse, below are some points with considerations about the subject:

• The polishing and eventual simplification of mechanics makes the game flow faster and I would assume that in some way or form this also helps code work smoother and cause less bloat when performing some of the calculations (I can only imagine what goes behind the Crusader Kings II or Europa Universalis IV background). On the other hand this can feel as something valuable being lost in the process, while this is debatable it depends how big the change is and I can think of some considerable changes in gaming that brought so much commotion about a set of simple changes:
  
  • e.g.: Some of the Starcraft patches back in the day like patch 1.08, in which Zealots got their numbers moved around from 80 shield and HP to 60 shield and 100 HP, while this was not the only drastic change, on this same patch would see the cost of Battle Cruisers go from 8 to 6 supply which is a massive change also. Back with this patch the community of Starcraft went up in flames and was split up with the decision, this and other balancing efforts in the future would continue to provoke this behavior but this is expected when a community this large finds new ways to play the game and take advantages of the buffing or nerfing of whichever mechanic is/was broken/fixed.
    
  • e.g.: Civilization III combat, one of the main complaints about what was a great game (personal opinion) was that the combat mechanics were broken as hell, a barbarian warrior (the earliest type of unit in the game) with only two/three blocks of life could defeat a late age tank with five blocks of life, how this worked (or not worked) was a true mystery at times which drove players mad, the problem about having this little barbarian going around tearing your improvements up was that wasting tanks during what could be a tense period of the game meant risking it maybe twice of thrice to get that nuisance off your yard (yes, I lost three tanks once to a barbarian). Civilization IV did not suffer from these issues and they also fixed the problem with Saltpeter being a very rare mineral, if you did not have the expansions to bring in Guerilla fighters to the fray you were truly out of the contest with your peers or stronger opponents.
    
• Players may also not fully understand the reasoning behind some of the changes (or developers either do not wish to put too much on the table or are just bad at it, take your pick, not dissing anyone though) performed on the game mechanics. While balancing is mostly the reason to do this it is not the same to test it in a closed environment with a couple of players than test it on the wild (this is why some games will give you the option to beta test their new patches so that you can report on whatever bugs or issues you may find, even broken mechanics). While some balancing is performed due to exploits in the code (which is unavoidable) there is also the fact that some players will also find a way to break the current balance by performing X, Y, Z action to do so (not an exploit, more like number crunching and some hard thinking, for reference look at all the changes that World of Warcraft has gone through since Vanilla)
  
• Sometimes mechanics just don't work as intended or simply don't pickup as expected and this happens because the final product is not what was intended or the player base has a different understanding of what the whole thing is/was about, at times this is not the fault of either party as things change and these are no longer relevant in the game and either disappear or are changed for a different mechanic.
  
• New mechanics “are” (this is a very broad word) required with new improvements to the original game/expansion/DLC (does anyone do real expansions anymore or are we just calling them DLCs now?), again these mechanics can be broken as all hell or may not have a counter-mechanic to balance them, sometimes this is intended and inevitable so that the player must make their time due, not necessarily talking about time running out but some other factor that can either end the current game drastically or reduce the possibilities of the player enjoying the game, this leads me to the following point.
  
• The fact that the player always wins a game does not a fun game make, something that I like about Paradox games is the fact that I can make a stupid decision and feel the consequences rolling over immediately and for the next hundred years as other nations swallow me up, characters die, planets are burnt to a crisp and I find myself asking “What did I do wrong and how could I have avoided this?”. This in turn has made me stop caring about reloading a game when this happens, I just let it roll and see what is the end result of what actions I have taken as with real life you cannot take it back.