Simulators are one of the earliest PC game genres, and remain compelling experiences to this day, even if they're not as popular as they used to be.

I like all kinds of combat flight sims; the MS Combat Flight Simulator from 1998 was something special, and I've had some similar fun in IL-2 Sturmovik. The newest civil air sims are pretty great too, I'll pop on a podcast and make a flight. They're particularly cool in VR.

I've also found the MechWarrior games to be fun, but I've only played 2 and 5. I got to play a bit of Steel Battalion with the full crazy controller at a con a few years back, and that's got to be a lot of fun once you really know what you're doing.

So what's your favorite sim?

I've been slowly working through Kurosawa's movies, and I thought this could be an interesting discussion since there are so many of them.

I just finished Yojimbo, and it was fantastic. It pulls you into the story of a ronin who comes to town where two rival gangs are feuding, and he plays both sides off of each other. I really enjoyed how the relationship between the tavern owner and the ronin developed through the movie.

I think my favorite that I've seen is Seven Samurai. Even though it's been copied to death for other movies, this is still the best version. Kikuchiyo is such a compelling character, and Kambei is great to watch as the leader who you hope can rise to the occasion.

I've also seen Ran (which I loved as an adaptation of King Lear) and The Hidden Fortress (which I loved as an adaptation of Star Wars [jk]).

Which should I watch next? I'd like to get into something set in contemporary times, so maybe Rashomon?

Obligitory "I have to use it for my job," so let's commiserate.

It's the worst program in all of the Office Suite. MS wrote the goddamn OS and email client, but for some reason if I have two instances open for two different inboxes and try to pull one up on the taskbar, the wrong instance will pull up every single time without fail.

My runner-up complaint is how when I use the search bar, sometimes it'll forget what I'm doing and when I hit enter it'll open some email instead of executing the search.

Every update makes it worse, so what drives you crazy?

In the tech sense- what is your favorite way that someone has used systems in unintended ways to do something cool?

I like the one where a guy used a wiimote for head tracking.

I've been getting back into the classic Close Combat games, and they're some of my very favorite of the wargame genre.

I'm curious what retrogaming's favorites are. I'm not too particular on what constitutes a "wargame," it could be anything from Final Fantasy Tactics to Steel Panthers.

To throw a couple more out, I really enjoyed Rome: Total War for the 4x strategy and the Combat Mission games for their simulation systems as well.

I've been playing some games through ScummVM, and there's a cool feature that lets you load the game using whichever graphics mode the software originally supported. It also lets you use shaders to simulate a CRT, because these bare pixels were never meant to be seen with human eyes. I thought it was fun to compare the art from the different versions.

The posted image is from the EGA version

Here is the CGA:

And Here is Hercules(Amber):

The Entangled Worlds mod is so well done that once you're in the game it feels like the engine was designed to support multiplayer.

One interesting aspect is that when one of the players dies they turn into an enemy with all of the same inventory; the other players must kill them to revive.

Even if you never got into Noita, it's a lot of fun to play it with friends.

I'm a fan of braunschweiger on butter crackers. Top-tier snack food.

My favorite overall is probably Bridge Crew, because there's nothing better than cruising around in the OG NCC-1701 Enterprise with your pals.

I also liked Elite Force when it came out, because it was crazy to see the 3D Trek environments even though they're unimpressive by today's standards. It even got me to watch Voyager.