Stats Man

Cooper keeping his sense of humor despite having lost more games this season than in his entire life as a basketball player tells me he's a good dude. This is pure cinema - just imagine if that pass went out to Kyrie instead of Naji. Next season baby, next season! TAKE ME HOME!

@exQUIZitely Loved that game, played it heaps with my brother. Some rage quits lol!!

International Karate meets Carl Douglas. 80s gaming meets 70s music. We had it pretty good, didn't we?

@exQUIZitely Microtransactions were the death of games with soul.

The Diablo franchise will turn 30 this year. It ranks among the most successful and highest-grossing game franchises of all time. Over 100 million copies have been sold across the four main games (including expansion sets), bringing the franchise close to US$3 billion in total revenue. Diablo IV alone generated US$666 million in global sell-through revenue in its first five days after release in June 2023, making it Blizzard's fastest-selling game ever at the time. Now, here comes the real kicker: Within one year of Diablo IV's release, revenue from microtransactions had already surpassed the combined lifetime revenue of Diablo I and Diablo II. Let that sink in - not from the original sale of the game, but purely from in-game purchases, Diablo IV is dwarfing the first two entries in the series combined. Sales figures for games still matter, but mainly as an indicator of the multiplier that can be applied to in-game microtransaction revenue; that endless stream of dollars pouring into mega-corporations, powered by quick dopamine hits from microtransactions. With younger generations growing up in an essentially cashless society, the perceived value of money has declined. If you’ve never held a $100 bill (let alone earned one), it's easy to forget what it really means. It becomes just a number on a credit card bill. When in-game transactions are small (single-digit amounts) they feel like almost nothing… but in the end, they add up to billions for those who design games that are meticulously streamlined and fine-tuned to guide players toward yet another microtransaction… and another… and another. Maybe after all those cover images on the game boxes are more fitting than we know.

@exQUIZitely 6,000 games is nuts, you still have all of them?

I started trading games in the 80s (as a means to earn a few extra bucks). By trading, I actually mean legally buying and selling - not the "trading" that was more common in the 80s, for which I got busted at age 13. I went to trade fairs, second hand markets, and posted classified ads in several game magazines when I was 14. Over the years the collection grew. The basc principle was simple: Buy in bulk, haggle hard, be smart about rare games (meaning: know your shit), then sell with a profit within reasonable range. It's not rocket science but it requires patience, dedication, the courage to pick up the phone and call people - turns out being able to talk to people and sell stuff is a pretty useful life skill. I did all this almost until the end of my time at university. Then "real life" began, all the games were put into boxes and stored at my grandparents' house, roughly 6,000 games at the time, mostly C64, Amiga, Atari ST and PC games from 1980 to the early 2000s. I always dreamed of having my own place one day and a whole room dedicated as a games library. This is the room from which I now also work, surrounded by 20+ years of memories and from where I take inspiration for my posts. I sometimes just walk along the shelves and pick a game. The one in the picture is one of my all time favorites. What's your most favorite game - maybe one with some nostalgic value?

@exQUIZitely Nokia + Snake II... nostalgia overkill.

Waiting for the bus must have been so boring back in the day, right dad? Me:

@exQUIZitely Hah, that's actually quite true. GnG gives me PTST to this day, never finished it.

Rare footage of an 80s gamer finally reaching the end of Ghosts 'n Goblins, only to discover he has to play the entire game again from the beginning... one more time.

@exQUIZitely I think if you do a poll, 90% will say they didn't like the ending.

I think the ending of Monkey Island 2 has been one of the most controversial ever in gaming. If you haven't played it yet, don't read further - also, dude!? I loved the original Monkey Island and felt the same about the sequel, until the very end. Rarely, if ever, have I felt so deflated after finishing a game. To this day, I don't understand the motivation behind coming up with that ending. I'll take an educated guess and say the vast majority of players were disappointed by it (to say the least). Why make it all a dream? What would have been the downside of not turning it into a dream? As much as I admire LucasArts, there will forever be two things that I wonder about and that still bug me: 1⃣ The ending of Monkey Island 2 2⃣ Not having turned Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis into a movie

@exQUIZitely I knew those endless hours on Counter Strike were good for something!

Gamers have a better-evolved sense of spatial awareness, are better abstract thinkers, and show advantages in forward thinking/planning. Now, this doesn't apply to all gamers or all genres of games they play, but it's a scientifically studied and well-supported phenomenon. The strongest connections among those three skills (in gamers) have been found with strategy games - both turn-based and real-time strategy - and simulations (such as flight sims, racing sims, and space combat sims), as well as FPS games. This includes abilities like mental rotation (imagining how objects look when turned), spatial visualization, navigation in 3D environments, visuospatial attention, and tracking multiple objects in space. These skills are stimulated and improved over time through sims and - no surprise - FPS games. The abstract and forward-thinking skills were most heavily linked to games like Civilization or SimCity, but also to RTS games like Command & Conquer or Age of Empires, and with complex RPG/open-world titles (including MMORPGs) showing the clearest links. So, there you have it. When I was young, the older generation would say that gaming is bad for your eyes. But hey - did they know it was good for other things?

@exQUIZitely Kyrandia all the way baby!

Among these four legends of the 90s, which ranks highest to you, personally?

Whatever this is... it's not basketball. NBA in March has become a total joke. Being -40 in 25 minutes is nuts. A starter playing 27 minutes with 0 points and 3 TOs is crap. Grizzlies losing by 40+ points... who watches this abomination?

@exQUIZitely I'll take a bet and say most of the people who say that have played less than 5 games in their entire life.

"Computer games are not art" One of the most prominent people to say this was film critic Roger Ebert in his 2010 article "Video Games Can Never Be Art". Then there are Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, both expressing that games aren't art. Spielberg specifically said something along the lines of "the second you get the controller something turns off in the heart, and it becomes a sport," arguing games struggle to create the same deep empathy or emotional connection as films because of the interactive/sport-like element. Hideo Kojima (the game designer behind Metal Gear Solid), doesn't consider videogames art, emphasizing that "true art radiates purely from the creator without the interactive compromises games require." "The second you get the controller something turns off in the heart" - probably the line I disagree with the most. I am not saying all games are art - just like not all books or movies or paintings are qualifying to be it. But how can you look at some of these games and say they are not art? Literally just looking at them, not even playing them. How is this not art? If it touches you on an emotional level, and stimulates your creative and playful mind, lets you remember and feel things - isn't that an essential aspect and key element of art?

@exQUIZitely The sound effects of the plane are next level. For a 40 year old game it's impressive!

40 years ago today, Ace of Aces was released. It's probably a bit too old for some of the people who follow my account but it was certainly way ahead of its time back in 1986. Superb graphics, excellent sound effects and a story/gameplay that felt highly immersive - those are the things that I remember when first playing this as a kid. Not an easy game by any means but it got you hooked fast. I am not enough of a history buff to know whether the missions were somewhat realistic but I would like to believe so. The mission briefings and the "interactive" map during the game added to that feeling of authenticity. We used to turn up the volume for this one, especially for the intro and cutscene when the mission starts and the black and white picture slide show started, with the overlapping sound effects at the 0:30 mark - it still fascinates me to this day. That cutscene uses a total of six colours and it still looks absolutely incredible.

@exQUIZitely @_Investinq The timing is great... a simple copy/paste from a post a few hours before, run it through Grok to rephrase, repost. Tiwtter at its worst.

@_Investinq looks familiar... x.com/AnishA_Moonka/…

This is CRAZY. Unilever stopped reading your resume years ago. Instead, they make you play video games and it's working better than anything they've ever tried. They put 250,000 job applicants through 12 neuroscience based games before a single human ever looks at their application. The games were built by Pymetrics, a company founded by neuroscientists from Harvard and MIT. Harver acquired them in 2022. The games don't test what you know. They measure how your brain actually works, how you handle risk, how fast you adapt, how you decide under pressure. It cut their hiring time from four months to four weeks and it saved over 50,000 hours of recruiter time. JPMorgan, BCG, Accenture, Mastercard, and McDonald's all use the same platform. Now here is where it gets serious and there is hard science backing all of this. Researchers at three European universities, Liechtenstein, Rotterdam, and Münster ran 40 business students through Sid Meier's Civilization, then put them through a Fortune 500-style management assessment. Students who scored highest in the game also ranked highest in problem-solving, organization, and planning, according to a 2020 study published in the Review of Managerial Science. In 2013, scientists at Queen Mary University of London ran 72 volunteers through 40 hours of StarCraft. The StarCraft group showed a massive improvement in cognitive flexibility, your brain's ability to switch between tasks and think on the fly compared to a group that played The Sims. The statistical evidence was 40 times stronger than what chance would predict. SimCity has been used in university urban planning courses since as far back as the early 1990s, when professors began assigning it to teach systems thinking. Now step back and look at what this all means. Your resume tells an employer what you have done while a video game tells them how your brain actually operates. One is a highlight reel, the other is a live test. The gamification industry is now valued at over $43 billion globally and is projected to reach $172 billion by 2030. This market did not get that large by accident. Companies figured out that traditional hiring was broken. Cover letters measure writing skills, interviews measure charm and neither one measures whether someone can actually think. Games measure thinking and that is why corporations are quietly replacing the old system not with interviews, not with degrees but with joysticks. The Civilization study only had 40 students and that matters. But it was one piece of a much larger pattern across multiple games, multiple labs, and multiple decades of research pointing in the same direction. The resume is not dead yet but its days are numbered.

@exQUIZitely My brother and I played this into dust. What a blast from the past man, thanks!

How do you take one of humanity's oldest games - a game long stigmatized as difficult to learn, even harder to master, and mostly played by introverted nerds - and turn it into a fun, hugely successful computer game for the masses? Enter Battle Chess. Yes, you still had to know (or learn) the rules to actually play. But let's be honest: it's far more enjoyable to learn while playing - and even losing - when you watch your queen dramatically devoured by an enemy rook, or your king comically flattened under its fist. Each encounter had its own animation, beautifully done. Obviously, there's no hard data on how many kids and teens in the 80s and early 90s first got hooked on chess thanks to this wonderful game. But I know I was one of them. Battle Chess sparked my interest, led me to join a chess club in 1989, play in a few tournaments (I never won), and still enjoy the game today. I'd like to believe I wasn't the only one. I often feel that pre-2000 games had a bigger positive impact on us than many modern (mobile) games do on kids today. I'm not claiming all current games are worthless - far from it - but I'll stand firm on this hill: older titles sometimes delivered real educational value without players ever feeling like they were being "taught" something. Battle Chess was exactly that kind of game.

@exQUIZitely One of the most iconic menus ever, hands down.

Game menus had a different vibe back then. I miss this style. The modern minimalistic design feels bland, and it's lacking soul. I am sure a lot of research goes into AB testing and optimization, but I will always prefer this...

@exQUIZitely I can see the free AOL CD in my mailbox to this day...

Funny thing is, I didn't mind waiting. It was a known and accepted part of being online back then. I was just fascinated by the whole concept of the Internet, of being connected to - in theory - everyone out there. The number of attempts didn't matter, nor did the speed. I remember watching pages load line by line. It was great to see what people (not bots, an AI, or massive corporations) had created out there, including the cringe-worthy websites. I distinctly remember a fan project called Nevernights. It was a turn-based RPG, but you had to send your turn by email to the GM. He would then manually enter the data and draw the updated map (with each player's position) for around 200 players, a monumentous task. Fights were done separately and could last several days since you could only send in one turn per day (move, attack, use item, etc.). It was one of the best experiences of early Internet wonder, painstakingly slow and requiring a lot of patience and dedication - and it was glorious! Finding fansites about things that interested you, all of a sudden being able to connect with people from the other side of the planet who happened to also like your favorite sports team or games you grew up with. Sending emails the same way you would write a letter - not with emojis and a 2-liner, but real and long messages. I could go on, but everyone who's experienced early stage Internet knows it anyway. It was slow, sometimes weird, buggy, full of flashing banners and little GIFs - but it was also a wonderful world. It felt much more innocent, playful, open and harmless. I am sure it had its dark corners early on, but it wasn't the behemoth that is today, being so entrenched in our every day lives. It was an escape from real life for a little while... now it feels like we are living in a world where we escape the Internet for a while by going outside, back into the real world.

@exQUIZitely That game was pure agony omg

Job interview: "So, would you say you handle stressful situations well?" Me:

@exQUIZitely Is this the same announcer that did NBA Jam?

"And this game is underway!" NFL Blitz (1997, Midway) is an arcade football game for the ages and a spiritual successor to NBA Jam's epic over-the-top style. Fast-paced, 7-on-7 gameplay, ultra-short 2-minute quarters, and no penalties or referees - allowing brutal hits, late tackles (Speedball 2 says hello!), and wild animations like piles of players or taunts. You could pick from official NFL teams and call simple plays. It's pure, no-rules fun emphasizing speed, violence, and spectacle over realism. Which ultimately made it a total blast to play!

@exQUIZitely It was like opening a portal to a new world. The waiting part was simply the price you paid - a small price for what lay ahead.

@exQUIZitely For me it was Populous I think in 1989 or 1990?

If you're a gamer of a certain age, you'll remember what a null-modem was. For anyone too young: nothing to see here :) The term "null-modem" is a bit misleading, since it was a direct serial cable connection for two-player multiplayer, without needing actual modems. The first commercial game to use this was TeleChess from 1984. Published by Brainworks for the Apple II, this two-player chess game explicitly supported null-modem serial cable connections between two nearby computers. That was another thing about the null modem option - you had to be physically very close together, I think the cables weren't longer than a meter at best. Later examples built on this concept: Modem Wars (1988), Battle Chess (1988), Stunt Car Racer (1989), and -the one most will remember - Populous (1989) were among the first to popularize it. Do you remember your first null modem game? Mine was Populous at a friend's house. I brought over my Amiga, we connected the two computers via the cable, and voilà, it worked. Seriously an awesome experience back then!