Hello everyone, hope you’re doing well. It’s been another year without much input from me so far, but I’ve finally gotten myself organised and made time to write a review. So today we’re looking at another platform game from shareware giants Apogee Software: Realms of Chaos.

Hello!

We have another double-bill for you today.

For the retrospective, there’s a look back at the original Grand Theft Auto, released in 1997 and covered here in 2004.

And, just in time for news of its removal from sale, with a ‘remastered’ version apparently around the corner, we also have a review of 2003’s instalment of the series, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

We’ve mentioned a few times that year is the 20th Anniversary of A Force for Good, the internet’s top source of classic PC gaming reviews and commentary. Turns out though, we share that milestone with another retro gaming project that we must admit is just a little more important. The 9th of this month marks two whole decades since the first release of ScummVM.

That of course is the application that allows us to play those old graphical adventures on a modern PC. It was originally built to run Lucasarts games – Monkey Island, Sam and Max and so on, hence the reference to their Scumm game engine. Since then, the team have added support for games from Sierra, the company who invented the genre and remained Lucasarts’ biggest rival, and a bunch of other publishers also.

Some folks might point out how the MS-DOS emulator DOSBox (itself almost as old) can do everything ScummVM does and more, running just about all the games from those days. Certainly it’s a marvellous piece of software. Still, I’ve always found ScummVM more user friendly. It comes with a built-in GUI, rather than requiring you to edit text files or seek out third party software. I’m also happy to skip deliberating over all of DOSBox’s myriad configuration details, like cpu cycles and rendering options. Here you just add the game directory to the list, maybe choose a graphics filter, and off you go.

It’s been ported to a few other systems, including consoles and handhelds, although I think you need to unlock them to enable homebrew software. There’s also an android port (freely available on the app store) which is the only emulator* I’ve ever had any real use for on phones and tablets. Most of the games are pointer-driven, and that survives the transition to touchpad a lot better than keyboard or gamepad controls. Doom or a platformer with on-screen buttons are godawful, and pairing up a bluetooth controller is just another peripheral to carry around. Day of the Tentacle is, however, the perfect way to pass a transatlantic flight.

Going further back, there was even a port to ye olde Windows Mobile, back in the dark ages of handhelds before iphones were invented. I mention it because I’m fairly sure ‘s how I first completed the original Monkey Island sometime in the mid-2000s.**

Nowadays if you buy your old games from gog, you’ll find adventures come bundled up with ScummVM, ready to run. They’ve been running a sale to celebrate the anniversary which ends, erm… today. Well if you do make it in time and want to revist some classics then my picks would be…. Loom, Fate of Atlantis and over on the Sierra side Conquests of Camelot. Rik meanwhile is a big fan of Blade Runner. If you’re wondering where the first two Monkey Islands are, the original versions aren’t available. Instead there are newer Special Editions with updated graphics and other improvements; these were created for windows and don’t require ScummVM.***

Meanwhile the ScummVM guys themselves have a new update, which you can read about on their site. Most significantly they’ve added support for some of those late-90s games that brought in 3D elements to the graphics, such as Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey.

So then, our thanks to the team for all their work in helping us enjoy classic adventures, and for keeping the project alive for two decades. Long may it continue.

*ScummVM isn’t actually an emulator, more like a replacement executable, but you get the idea.

**Why so long to play such an essential game? I’m not sure. I recall playing the first act over and over and never getting any further.

***both of which let you play the games in their old VGA-and-midi-music state. Still on some level it bugs me that the originals no longer exist as separate downloads.

Hi there.

While acknowledging that even the vaguest notions of topicality in these parts are by now long gone, it’s only just over a month since the last Olympics finished, so we’re only a little bit late with this review.

(Or, alternatively, we’re about 34 months early for the next one, however you want to look at it).

Here’s Beijing 2008 from Eurocom.

Inside The Big Cardboard Box is where we delve into the history of the largely defunct world of boxed PC games, with a particular emphasis on all the ones I used to own, but later gave away or sold.

So far, one of the stated aims of this series – to try and remember what on earth happened to my old games – has been fairly unsuccessful. But finally (and somewhat unexpectedly), some of what was previously thought lost has now been found, with the process of assisting my dad with a clear out of stuff from his flat unearthing around 20 or so CDs.

Helpfully for the format of these articles, most of them happen to fall into one or other of the categories covered already. Although, equally unhelpfully, in some cases neither the jewel case, nor the physical media itself, provide any clues as to whether the game was part of a compilation, a budget release, or a bone-fide full-price effort. Still, I guess half of the fun is trying to piece all of this together, right? [For you, maybe – FFG reader]

To start with, there are quite a few EA titles, and I’m pretty sure that the origins (Origin(s)!) of the copy of Pagan: Ultima VIII that was found among the discs here were as an EA Classics re-release (mid-90s, light blue packaging era). Like many of these games, this was actually my dad’s, rather than mine, although I can’t remember it being a regular fixture on the family PC at any point.

I’m less certain about Magic Carpet or Magic Carpet 2: if pressed, I’d say that the first one was the original release, and acquired as part of a buy one, get one free deal briefly offered by Electronic Arts in 1995, also including FIFA, Theme Park and System Shock (and U.S. Navy Fighters, which was the free game that we went for in the end – I think we looked at the nice graphics a few times without every really making any progress).

Theme Park was in our collection, too, but that was one of the first games that was ever bought for our PC and came a bit earlier than this offer, I think. Magic Carpet 2, though, I’m drawing a complete blank on… it was definitely released as an EA Classic, but something is telling me that it was part of a compilation of some kind. Ah, I don’t know.

But speaking of compilations, also included were two of Empire Interactive’s Award Winners collections: the Gold (Elite Plus, Jimmy White’s ‘Whirlwind’ Snooker, Sensible Soccer and Zool) and Platinum (Lemmings, Frontier: Elite II and Sid Meier’s Civilization) editions.

They were the only Award Winners compilations that I remember, but according to MobyGames there were a couple of others, including the original, non-specific-metal, Award Winners, released in 1992 (Kick Off 2, Pipe Mania, Populous and Space Ace) and 1997’s Award Winners No. 1 (Pro Pinball: The Web, Screamer, Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Final Unity).

(Also thank you to MobyGames for providing evidence that my memory of some bizarre cover art involving a man with long dreads jumping into the air with delight was an actual thing that existed).

Another compilation which certainly meets the definition of ‘random’ is Top 10 from Xplosiv, which bundled 7 Sega Saturn ports of variable quality (Panzer Dragoon, Sega Touring Car Championship, Sega Worldwide Soccer, Sonic 3D, Sonic R, Virtua Cop 2 and Virtua Fighter 2) with Combat Chess, International Cricket Captain 2000 and Pro Pinball: Timeshock! For some reason I’ve had Virtua Cop 2 and Timeshock! in my collection all these years, while the rest were left (untouched, no doubt) in a drawer at my parents’ place.

Also equally likely to have remained undisturbed was a copy of Mortal Kombat 3 bearing some markings that suggested it came from The Big 6ix. Which reminded me that the game didn’t actually run when I got it home and we had to send off for a replacement CD: it turns out this is the dodgy original, which still doesn’t work… I think I would have retained the other one for some time before ultimately committing it to either the real or metaphorical Big Cardboard Box. (I also had the original Mortal Kombat on floppy disk at some stage).

Games that my dad definitely did play: UFO: Enemy Unknown and Syndicate, which came bundled together in a twin pack as part of Telstar’s Fun and Games range. We had another of these packs, too, which put Cannon Fodder together with Beneath a Steel Sky. Curiously, three of the four discs have clear Telstar branding, while BASS looks like the original CD. There were a few others in this range, including yet another opportunity to own The 7th Guest, which was paired with Cryo’s Dune, and Alone in the Dark and Shadow of the Comet. (The wooden spoon award surely goes to the dubious combination of Bloodnet and the dreaded MegaRace). If memory serves, these weren’t mega-cheap, possibly around £30 or so, but worth it if both games were good, I guess.

Also found: Quake! I’m fairly certain that this was on the Replay label as previously discussed, although it was from the disposable yellow sleeve era, and only the jewel case remains, so I could always say that I ran out and bought it upon release because I was such a big fan (although inexplicably then lost or threw away the box and accompanying documentation).

Rescuing a copy of King’s Quest VI (which wasn’t technically necessary, since I also have it on a compilation somewhere) I was reminded of the Sierra budget series, Sierra Originals (stylised as SierraOriginals), the tag-line of which (‘Original Excitement, New Value’) was at odds with some otherwise fairly staid presentation. There’s a printed manual here, too, albeit only as part of the jewel case inlay.

I have very little memory of this or any other Sierra budget range, until the BestSeller Series of the DVD box era, which brought me copies of No-One Lives Forever and its sequel (which are still in my collection) and Stoo’s favourite complicated-looking space-based 3D RTS of the late 90s, Homeworld (which isn’t).

I have a stronger memory of various Sierra collections, including a Police Quest box-set of the late 90s, which bundled together the relatively lightweight adventures of Sonny Bonds with the slightly more grisly and serious later instalments. The one I had was called Police Quest: Collection Series and featured the first, FMV-heavy, SWAT game as well as the more traditional point and clickers.

(The original incarnation of the Cupboard of Shame involved giving away unwanted titles to anyone willing to pay postage: I sent my PQ Collection to the States, awaited payment, and cursed myself for my naivety when it did not immediately arrive – although, to be fair, after a few reminders (and passing months), the recipient did eventually get in touch and pay up).

Among the sundry other bits and bobs which I thought I should take were a couple of MicroProse titles, Grand Prix 3 and X-Com: Apocalypse. (I’m not sure why, as my thoughts on F1 games have been recorded fairly recently, and I think Apocalypse was deemed baffling and over-complicated even by those who had played the previous UFO/X-Com games).

Anyway, even though neither bore its markings, I was reminded of MicroProse’s 90s budget range, Powerplus, which had a fairly distinctive presentation of a plain white box with the game artwork only visible through the text of its title. (I’m sure there’s a proper name for that. Is there? Well, you can see what I mean below).

And there we have it – a few more gaps filled in, and hopefully a prompt for some more memories to return: I’m pretty sure that decisions like who got the copy of Quake and the carving up of the Xplosiv compilation will have happened around the time I moved out of the family home once and for all, so perhaps further specifics of what was in the Big Box of 2002 will come to mind.

If not, we’ll probably just rake over the history of another budget range or something. Excited? You will be.

—

NB: All box scans sourced from MobyGames.

The EA advert was taken from Issue 26 (May 1995) of PC Zone, scans of each and every issue of which can be found at Pix’s Origin Adventures.

Welcome again to Discussion: [indie game] (spoilers!), a series in which we discuss an indie game, with spoilers.

Today’s game is The Suicide of Rachel Foster (developed by One O One Games and published by Daedalic Entertainment in 2020), in which you play as Nicole Wilson, a young woman returning, after the death of her parents, to an abandoned hotel that was once her childhood home.

It’s a place that brings back unpleasant memories for Nicole, whose family life was torn apart following revelations of her father Leonard’s affair with a teenage girl, the eponymous Rachel, who was later found to have taken her own life.

Normally at this point I’d drop a teaser trailer here and offer generic encouragement to spend time with the game before proceeding. However, unlike in most of the games we’ve covered thus far, the serious topics within, and how they’re handled here, are cause for some concern.

If you think you know what you’re getting into from the name of the game and the brief synopsis above, be warned: you’re not. It makes some rather alarming decisions at various points, particularly towards the end, and it’s a hard one to recommend as a result of some of its missteps. So some caution is advised, especially as the trailer makes it look quite good.

Ok? Now here’s your ***FINAL SPOILER WARNING*** for the discussion below.

Discussion: The Suicide of Rachel Foster (spoilers!) continued »

Hi there.

It’s a twin-helping of 90s racing action for you today, all in the name of the site’s 20th anniversary.

For the retrospective, we’re going back for another look at The Need for Speed, which we first reviewed here long ago.

And for the new piece, we finally get around to producing a write-up of the sequel, with a review of Need for Speed II: Special Edition (that’s the special edition of Need for Speed II, not an extremely crap subtitle for the game).

Hello!

Apologies for the somewhat sporadic content in recent months, even by our standards. However, a return to our usual pattern of semi-regular updates should follow.

Despite this review coming a little later than planned, I’m pleased to confirm that we can round off our coverage of the Mass Effect trilogy with this write-up of the third game.

I’m sure there are lots of worthy games released in the last 10 years or so that have escaped my attention, but I was pleased to have the opportunity to belatedly catch up with this series.

Anyway: here’s our review of Mass Effect 3.

Inside The Big Cardboard Box is where we delve into the history of the largely defunct world of boxed PC games, with a particular emphasis on all the ones I used to own, but later gave away or sold.

Sold Out was the budget range that heralded a new era of decent PC games at even lower prices. And, just as The White Label had previously captured the imagination by releasing the once-mega-expensive £70 FMV game The 7th Guest at the £10-15 mark, Sold Out did the same by including it among their first few releases in 1997. Even though, by that point, the gloss of the FMV adventure had begun to fade somewhat, it still sent a message that Sold Out wasn’t going to be about bargain basement rubbish.

There was some of that, much later on, but mainly as a by-product of there being something of everything, once the label really picked up momentum. And the journey of The 7th Guest to this new lower price point, via an initial budget release, arguably established a pattern that ultimately impacted the success and longevity of the mid-range budget labels, as their main market – people who liked a bargain – figured that they could always wait for a further reduction.

The other impact was the trade-off people were prepared to make for low prices: no-frills presentation, with a box that was empty except for a disc which held a copy of the manual as well as the game.

Sold Out straddled the big box and DVD case eras, with early releases coming in a full size box containing a cardboard CD sleeve. The 7th Guest aside, they were perhaps a little long in the tooth to really set pulses racing: early 90s DOS titles like Dune, Lure of the Temptress, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Goal! Still, a bargain is a bargain [is it? – a reader], and I still have my copies of the last two somewhere.

But, as things progressed, a mixture of newer and more high-profile titles secured the label’s place in the market. Squad shooter Spec Ops made a fairly swift transition from full price down to £5, while 90s classics like Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider were also soon added to the range.

Such was the prolific nature of the label during the 00s, tracking its history in detail, and plucking out memorable titles – or ones I used to own at least, which is part of the motivation in raking through these release histories – seems like an overwhelming task. There’s a list on MobyGames, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it somehow doesn’t seem complete, without necessarily being able to name a single specific game that’s missing.

At times, it seemed as if every half-decent title that had a chance of selling would end up on Sold Out after a couple of years, and new games were constantly being added. This was the era, of course, when boxed PC games were still sold in high-street shops (and high-street shops were still things that existed), and the likes of GAME would offer a ‘Buy two, get one free’ type deal, with three Sold Out titles for £10.

Most of the time there’d usually be two games in the deal that you actually wanted, but with a third effectively free, you could end up (as with modern bundle key sellers like Fanatical) taking a punt on something that you would likely be terrible at or ultimately would end up not playing. Still, I do remember a good few lunch hours and shopping trips in the 00s involving at least a few minutes each time agonising over a potential bargain.

All of this was despite the fact that at one time Sold Out offered the same 3 for £10 deal via mail order and free postage, with the full range available, rather than whatever your local branch had on the shelves. Plus, anyone getting rid of any unwanted Sold Out games would do so for even cheaper on eBay, or via CeX, further increasing opportunities for the bargain hunter.

I don’t think I tended to get rid of too many Sold Out titles, as the packaging could always be discarded and the disc retained in a wallet. But there were so many ins and outs – lunch hour purchases from GAME or CeX on the one hand, and guilt-ridden Cupboard of Shame clear-outs on the other – that it’s really hard to say for certain. Looking at my CD wallet now, I’m as baffled by the selection as I am by the list on MobyGames: it doesn’t seem quite right, but I can’t explain why.

There is clear evidence on FFG of some kind of mini-purge in 2012, although it looks as if my attempts to sell my copies of Anachronox (sorry Stoo), Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare and Prisoner of War were unsuccessful, although I don’t have them now, though, so assume they went to the local charity shop instead. (There’s also evidence on this site of me finding a Sold Out game in the house that I had no recollection of ever buying.)

I’m fairly sure that Desperados and Commandos 2 were once part of my collection (the first Commandos game was another popular early release that quickly made its way to the label): if I remember rightly, one slightly unwelcome feature of the brand as time wore on was the addition of a rather clunky Sold Out installer menu which would sometimes get in the way of the original setup files, and I have a vague memory of this not agreeing with 64-bit Windows. Either way, rock-hard 2D strategy games were probably a bad idea in the first place.

Double packs were a brief addition to the range: Carmageddon 2/Carmageddon: TDR 2000 is one I still have in the collection, while I have some (possibly erroneous) recollection of owning a bundle of the first two Broken Sword games at one point. And genuine rubbish was fairly rare: I don’t know that the Army Men games were ever particularly well received, and there were a few tycoon and management type games that snuck on there, but otherwise it was a range that did what it said on the tin: good games at bargain prices.

Ultimately, the challenge of competing with Steam and digital distribution in general proved to be a bit too difficult, especially when combined with those facing the high street and wider world at the end of the 00s. I would still pick up Sold Out boxes occasionally, and another one that’s still on my shelves, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, was one of the last releases to hit the label, according to that MobyGames list.

The Sold Out name was just part of Mastertronic, who also offered other higher-priced lines including a ‘PC Gamer Presents’ (boo) range, which bizarrely included games that the magazine hadn’t even rated that highly. Once the Sold Out series was retired, the name was repurposed, and exists now as a standard publishing label, with no budget aspirations or mention of their prior history.

Probably more than any other budget label, many of my reviews on FFG have been from Sold Out re-releases, and I was grateful, both as a teenager and through my 20s, for access to a cheap source of a wide variety of games in the 90s and 00s. And arguably flooding the market with re-badged copies of so many games has helped from a preservation point of view, too.

Unfortunately, though, when it comes to trying to remember which Sold Out games I owned and got rid of (and preferably whether any of them were in that big cardboard box from 2002) – I’m none the wiser and, if anything, more confused than ever. Dammit!

—

NB: All scans sourced from MobyGames.

It’s the Euros! The final! And England are in it!

As usual, the real football created a hankering for some virtual football, and so, in time-honoured tradition, I dug out whatever modern-ish football games I bought last time there was a tournament on and failed terribly at them.

I’m not sure when exactly I went from being the (self-declared) Pro Evo master to the kind of person who sticks it on the middle difficulty setting and still finds the whole thing bafflingly slow and fiddly.

(But I think some time around this point might have been where it all started to go wrong).

Anyway, ahead of the Euro 2020(1) final, it seems like a good time to take a brief look a bit further back at the history of European Championship tie-in games.
 

European Championship 1992

Goooooal! (etc.)

While it’s altogether a less significant affair than the World Cup, it’s still a surprise that the first game based on the European Championship didn’t come out until 1992.

Not that it has much in the way of official licensing, or indeed any frills at all. The roster of teams doesn’t match the real tournament, and there are no player names.

As we shall see, tournament-based games tend to be based on an existing release, a reasonable strategy given their limited shelf life. I thought this unheralded oldie might be an exception, but apparently it too is effectively an update of an older game, Tecmo World Cup.

A side-scrolling arcade title, the PC in 1992 wasn’t perhaps its natural home, and your correspondent’s periodic attempts to play it for review have, to this point, always been abandoned at an early stage.
 

Euro 96

I couldn’t play this one for long without unearthing historic Actua Soccer rage.

With the tournament in England, it made sense for the official game to be provided by an English studio, Sheffield based Gremlin Interactive, who had recently stood up to the might of the big-budget FIFA series with the critically-acclaimed Actua Soccer.

Euro 96 was less well received, however, and was the subject of some confusing to-ing and fro-ing from PC Zone, who secured an exclusive review and gave it a lukewarm score, only to issue an addendum and apology to readers, explaining that it was based on unfinished code, and that a new review, based on the finished game, would follow.

When it did, the game received exactly the same score as before, with the review reiterating all of its original criticisms.

Zone were fans of the original Actua Soccer though, while the position of this humble site is that it is one of the worst old footy games we’ve covered over the years. As such, we’ve not been in a rush to catch up with this one.
 

EA takes over (Euro 2000-2008)

Euro 2004

Electronic Arts finally got their grubby hands on the license in 2000, and began producing tie-ins that were broadly in line with their previous FIFA game.

The early part of the decade was a low period for the FIFA series, however, with EA’s football games lagging behind Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer.

EA’s games did introduce the qualifying campaigns into their games, extending their lifespan, and allowing fans of nations that hadn’t qualified to get their team into the tournament.

In general though, footy in the mid-00s meant Pro Evo, and its superiority on the pitch proved more than enough to make up for the lack of official frippery.

By the time of Euro 2008, FIFA on the Xbox 360/PS3 was actually getting better, but PC owners got a converted and mildly-polished version of the inferior PS2 version instead.
 

Hello DLC (2012-)

PES 2016/Euro 2016 (official press shot as I only have this on 360!)

For a period, whenever gamers bemoaned the fact that tournament licenses were an excuse for the likes of EA to charge full price for essentially the same game as their last one, the suggestion of cut-price data discs was occasionally made as an alternative.

Eventually, this came to pass in the form of the modern equivalent, DLC. For the first time, in 2012, FIFA 12 owners could purchase a content pack for the summer tournament and no standalone title was released. (Although they did revert to a separate game for the 2014 World Cup).

From 2016, the rights switched to Konami and Pro Evo/PES, although the DLC idea persisted, with the additional content provided for free to existing owners of the game.

Your correspondent played this 2016 edition most recently, managing to successfully recreate the ignominy of the real-life England team at that tournament by losing 2-1 to Iceland in the knockout stages.