I've tried other text editors but can't believe I didn't discover Notepad++ until recently. I really like NoteTab Standard for organizing things that need chapters, but Notepad++ is great for typing one-off stuff like reviews I don't need/want to take too many notes on--it even tracks the # of bytes a file is, and so forth, which is nice when I don't want to bloat a piece of writing too much.

I'd actually heard of Notepad++ before but assumed it was too much like Notepad for some reason. But it's not. After trying a pile of other text editors geared towards HTML coding and such (which I bet some people here might find useful) it took me about fifteen minutes to realize that I'd found something I wanted and probably should've done so years ago.

So what finally made me take the plunge? I got sick of Windows 7's Wordpad asking if I wanted to save a text file as text, because it might lose all the formatting I never put in anyway. I could kill this in XP or even Vista by closing and reopening.

Can't give any non-windows recommendations, but it's great to find a freeware that -works-.

The too-short Wizard's Crown series from Strategic Simulations, Inc. had a simple solution: quick combat where the computer ran everything and flashed text of your party's health every second. It left time for the actual story and exploration.

I was able to game early chess computers pretty easily by locking up the pawns and then watching them flail. That made me feel smart. Othello was the computer's revenge.

Sequels usually promise a bigger world, more spells, more detailed combat, and so forth, but when it comes to the previous game's narrative faults, they don't say much. Ultima V (U5) isn't just shinier; it makes a complaint about its predecessor the focus of the plot. Many people thought U4 micromanaged how the player gained and kept virtue. So the villain in U5 is a quasi-theocratic dictator, Blackthorn, who has deposed Lord British since U4 with the help of nebulous spirits called the S...

Before Ultima IV (U4,) people took being the good guy on faith. Maybe you'd get your butt kicked if you robbed a shopkeeper or attacked a townsman, but generally it was you against skeletons and goblins and the like. It was great fun, but Ultima III took things too far. The best strategy was to kill druids in one town until you were strong enough to kill guards in another town with a huge treasure vault. Then you could go kill a computer. Technically, the game was a strong achievement, and it so...

Q*Bert's Qubes(QQ) certainly has a niche market--people who figured how to tread water in the toughest levels of Q*Bert. It's the arcade equivalent of a Rubik's Cube, and it's certainly one every action puzzler fan should see, even if it isn't much to look at.

For a month or two, Superstar Ice Hockey (SIH) pushed my buttons perfectly. I could win regularly--two seasons in an afternoon--but it'd never be too obvious I had it in the bag. Game time was a relative concept that went quicker when fewer players were in the puck's third of the rink. With three goals max per game and four-game seasons, playoff possibilities were on a knife-edge until the final game. In real life, my team would have been the most negative, boring, dislikable bunch you co...

Shortly after my friend Aric pasted me in GBA Basketball Two-on-Two on his Apple IIgs--retribution for all the RPGs I'd solved--I found the IIe version cheap at Babbage's. I felt frugal--it probably didn't have all the extras, like the crowd that disappeared as it became doubtful I would avoid getting doubled up. But it had two-on-two play, which had to be a step up from the wonderful One on One, and the back-of-box blurbs seemed comparable, if the in-game pictures didn't. Jealousy...

"Adjust tint til blue field is green." That's the opening screen of Championship Baseball (CB,) with "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" blaring. I never bothered. Blue grass is just one of the things that aren't true to life in CB but are probably more fun. With only so much disk space, only the most exciting bits of baseball survive. You draft your own team complete with abilities that don't matter except for batting. You get to name everyone: eight fielders, three starting pitchers, two utility me...

The heck with Jumpman fighting Donkey Kong for a woman--I'll take Domino Man's balding, emotional protagonist fighting society for his art. All the poor guy wants to do is build up domino chains in a city block, a golf course, and a construction zone, but the people and animals around keep knocking down his work. A frumpy washerwoman, a drunk on a golf cart, various construction workers--and time itself, in the form of a clock that walks, err, clockwise around the screen--conspire to keep...

Few early video games had a story, but Super Basketball musters half of one: win a series of increasingly improbable sixty-second comebacks against a junior high team (78-70) up to the world champions (114-70.) It's more keep-away or Capture the Flag, and that's probably kept it fresh while more realistic early attempts at basketball have gone flat. It's even better now with emulation, which bypasses the annoying controls so you can enjoy the absurdity.