> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.

When I rented SimEarth as a kid, it didn't come with a manual and absolutely nothing in the game made any sense to me. :(

I tried renting it a few times, in hope that I'd eventually figure it out. I never did, though.