I'm in Japan, with just my old Thinkpad laptop, so I can't play Star Wars Galaxies. Jane has a newer Vaio portable so she can manage single player NeverWinter Nights. In situations like this, during dark nights on long trips, I turn back to DOS games. Today I was visiting the very holy Home of the Underdogs, I was going to download Master of Magic for further play. I have a lifetime favorite title MUDS on my harddrive but I felt like a change of pace.

But to further my game studies, I should be playing old games that are new to me. Games that other people have raved about, or games that are highly rated online that I've never experienced. For example, the Koei series of ancient Asian history strategy games. So I downloaded the acclaimed title, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms." DosBox allowed me to run this 1989 game in Windows XP. But I could not handle the first moment of play - "Master Lu Bu, Please Enter Orders (0-20)." A blessed game archivist has scanned the manual for this game, so it is available on HOTU also. But I don't have the patience right now to read through a 55 page PDF to understand those 20 options and their implications. So I'm back digging through the old stock of Koei games on HOTU, looking for something to download and play at 33k bps - a game with a more modern interface for a gamer with a weakened attention span.