I enjoyed going arcade to play games, but not much for home computer.

The first arcade game I played was brick-breaking in 1979. A friend of mine took me to play breaking bricks. Aftre that I spent a fortune playing at arcades. Brick-breaking is repackaged as x-boing for Linux users thesedays.

Then came space invader. During 79-80, I used up most of my allowances to master space invader. After several months, I could play for several hours with one coin and then let someone keep playing it as I had to go to bathroom and to eat.

Galaga came next. I didn't put as much energy as space-invader, but mastered quickly from the tips from space-invader masters. It was easy to impress girls how long I could play with a coin. Most couldn't do more than several minutes.

In arcade, I usually play shoot and kill game. I don't care about the story and scores at all; just keep shooting at targets, which makes me concentrate and relieves stress from the study. With a little of practice for the new shoot and kill game, I could play around 30 minutes with a coin only.

First computer game I mastered was Tetris. To learn Tetris from arcade, I would have needed to invest quite a lot of coins. Luckily for me, there was also computer game version of Tetris, thus saving me lots of coins. When I'd mastered all the steps, I occasionally went to arcade to play Tetris and show off how good I was.

In early 90s, Wolfenstein appeared, and then Doom!. Since the introduction of Doom, I seldom go to the arcade for playing. With Logitech's 3-D mouse for Windows 3.1, I could freely roam around the castle to navigate and shoot. Logitech stopped production of 3-D mouse for Windows 95 and I'm missing that.

Descent and some other flight simulators are my kind of games. Flight simulators are not as wild as Doom, nor as boring as Tetris.

I haven't played much computer-based games, such as SimCity, Myst, Wing Commander, War Craft and so on.

As low-end PC and modem get faster and cheaper, I play MUD occasionally to test the speed of the networked system. I still don't have the patience of waiting MUD through my modem.

For the past two years, I got very much interested in Virtual Reality and do graphics programming to build up virtual world and try to navigate around my own virtual space. Coding is boring, but I can build up my dream world, and that is more fun for me thesedays than any other games someone made for playing. (4-8-97)