I remember trying to read the books, inspired by the game, and not being able to get through them. I’d like to think that I recognized the sexism, at whatever-teen I was at the time, but I doubt that.

I suspect they’re not very well written? There were so many poorly-written fantasy books around in the eighties; my buddy and I referred to them collectively as “Cheap Tolkien Knock-offs”.

“Any good?”, I’d ask. “Nah. CTK,” he’d reply. Sometimes I’d read them anyway, but not unless everything else was checked out of the library.

Every Star Wars fan owes it to themselves to play Knights of the Old Republic, at least once. And if you play it once, you’ll want to play it through again, as a different character class. And if you play it twice, you’ll want to play it through again, as a dark-side Jedi. And if you play it thrice, you may be tempted to play it through again, as a Droid.

It’s a wonderful story, that feels like Star Wars (which, for those of us older Star Wars fans, who at the time were suffering through the cumulative disappointments of the prequel trilogy, became our salving solace), with plots and settings and characters and ships and light-sabers and action and betrayals that were (and still are) as rich as any of the movies or shows.

The people who run the franchise keep teasing canonicity, so play it soon, so you’ll gasp like we do when Darth Revan makes an appearance.

I’m going to go waaay back to a gem of a '90s CRPG: Betrayal at Krondor.

The main quest-line was engaging, the combat was cool, and the puzzle boxes were fun, but I remember being blown away by the size of the world. You could wander for literally hours, exploring new terrain, and discovering additional characters and bonus quest-lines. Its world was expansive and immersive, and it felt alive, like nothing else playable on a 386sx ever had been before.

The next time I felt that sense of aliveness - but better - in a video game was about a decade later, when I took my first Wyvern ride in World of Warcraft, and realized that everything I was seeing below me was really happening. This wasn’t a teleport: if you saw someone fighting something down below you, it was because another player was really fighting something down there. Mind-blowing!

Is it possible to set custom key-bindings yet? I loved Thunderbird ten years ago, and kept using it until the (kinda-janky, community-maintained) keyboard-binding extension broke. I have too many years of muscle-memory invested in my email flow to change that, but otherwise I’d love to come back to Thunderbird.