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.

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.