What was retro gaming like in these countries?Like, for example, was it mostly real consoles and games and not clones and bootlegs, did you guys prefer Street Fighter like the UK/America or KoF like Spain/Portugal/South America, etc?
>>12277360I think gaming was generally the same in Western/Northern Europe from the 90s onwards. People played on (real) consoles and PCs. Southern Europe liked Sega even more. Eastern Europe was much more into PC gaming.
>>12277360Did people in Finland play Heroes of Might and Magic because all the Slavs did?
It was comfy
Mostly home computers and PC.Consoles were far less popular here compared to America and Japan
>>12277515We played HoMM yes. No not because slavs did.
>>12277360For the "Ne" part I can say they tended to have everything available. Belgium and The Netherlands at the time tended to share markets with France and Germany so whatever popped up there also appeared here. For example my family NES was an RGB/SCART model bought as regular stock from a large toy retailer.You probably know about the MSX being surprisingly popular due to Philips picking it up, but even outside of that you had random American and Japanese computers on shelves in the 80s. They obviously didn't make too much waves outside of the usual suspects in Europe and the USA (MSX notwithstanding). In the mid-late 90s there was an extra push for computer literacy so a few companies around my place added computers to the tradeable items (for saved up hours), suddenly every family had a decent multimedia PC.For consoles you have the early Nintendo tale of European woe (bad distribution) to thank for some early Sega popularity, but it's not as rabbid as the UK. The Gameboy was important for Nintendo's brand here and from that point onwards you could generally find every mainstream system get decent market share. Most people I know weren't as loyal to brands in that timeframe either, they hopped from system to system.As for bootlegs, all I really remember are bootleg games (from Turkey) and seeing cloneboys (Supervision, Mega Duck) on shelves but I never met anyone who owned them. Do see them pop-up for auction occasionally. Decent amount of Pong machines as well which tend to be clones by default.
>>12277360I'm from BelgiumSNK was a big thing for me, I played KoF like crazy and Fatal Fury etc... but SF2 and Tekken were a big thing also.
Just the usual
atleast in norway n64 was popular like in america and the nes was very popular aswell, but snes days were mostly amigas as far as i remember, like people that grew up on nes bought pc later on, but honestly computers was most popular until the playstation days, i think the 50hz pal crap stunted popularity to some extent as many games ran like crap
feels like dutch people have pretty awful taste in videogames, at least in my experience, don't think they ever had any real arcade culture or anything like that eitherweirder is that despite the netherlands being fairly crucial for europe's internet infrastructure the internet itself is fucking trash and on par with the UK's awful networkeven now when genetic dead-end shithole countries like poland have a bunch of game developers the netherlands has what, guerilla?
>>12278184Dutch Devs made that football Hooligans RTS a while back and got in trouble for encouraging hooliganism
>>12278184You have indie companies that pop up and disappear when they fumble their momentum, large studios for hire (Abstraction Games, Behaviour Rotterdam/Codeglue, Engine Software, Nixxes and Streamline studios), gimmick studios (Sokpop's continuous gamejam comes to mind). Triump studios slots into the "still doing Age of Wonders" category. BlackMill games had success with their WW1 games. I'm purposefully not mentioning mobile games, but apparently we've got a few succesful slop factories. I'd say it's not that different to Poland despite them having twice the population (likely subsidies too). Poles are also more in your face about it, they'll tell you a game is Polish whereas people have to find out by seeing the credits (assuming they even realize the names are Dutch) or looking up the dev. Age of Wonders is a great example as most people will assume it's slavic/russian made.Never had any issue with the internet personally. Can count on 1 hand how many times it went out in my lifetime and I'll have fingers left. Not the fastest in the world, but 200/160+ Mb/s median (broadband/mobile) is nothing to complain about considering the legacy infrastructure. I do remember some 12 people hamlets having speeds measured in Kb/s with terrible stability before 4/5g internet became common. I can't speak for larger cities, but who'd want to live in one. Personally the ISPs did decently for me, but family members have had pretty bad run-ins when it comes to repairs (they moved to said hamlet).
>>12277360In Finland you were either a computer gamer or pic
>>12277360Benelux is just a dude wearing a russian hat.
>>12277360Cold
Finland had the curious phenomenon of the "cave flying" games which were basically couch multiplayer Gravitar clones. The fad was started by TurboRaketti on Amiga, but became even more popular on DOS.
>>12277864>so a few companies around my place added computers to the tradeable items (for saved up hours)What does this mean?
>>12279567You can save uphouts through working overtime. You can use these to take time off or have them paid out. Paying them out regularly will see them taxed extra hard, so one way around it was using them as internal currency. For the company it was preferable to more time off and it was cheaper for the employee than buying it regularly. A sort of company store, but not as scammy and optional.
