Hi there.

Here’s a funny thing: I usually feel bad if we go a while without posting a review. Now I feel bad that it’s been a few reviews in a row. Basically, I just feel bad about everything all the time.

Today we’re looking at a comparatively modern adventure: A Golden Wake.

Hello there!

Football is a thing that some people like. Some other people, less so.

Here’s a review of a game called Olympic Soccer.

Hi there.

Hope you’re having a good summer. The rusty old reviewing machine cranks into life again, as we take a look at the latest in the Broken Sword series, The Serpent’s Curse.

Hi there.

It’s been quite a couple of months away from FFG, but I’m slowly getting back into the swing of writing.

Today we have a proper oldie for you: it’s 4D Sports: Boxing.

I occasionally see complaints from those involved in game development expressing irritation that those playing or reviewing their games make sweeping statements about poor design or bad coding without having the first clue about either. Even though we’re in a quiet and extremely uninfluential backwater here, I daresay we’re guilty of making such statements on occasion too. Notwithstanding the fact that criticism of the end product is valid without necessarily being a criticism of the individuals involved or the amount of effort invested, it’s easy to forget how hard it is to put something together that works, never mind something that is critically and commercially successful, on time and within budget.

Like many people, I made the mistake of thinking that playing games bestowed me with the qualities required to make one, and during a certain period in my late teens, any shareware or commercial software that advertised itself as being “user friendly”, or not requiring you to learn any kind of programming language, became of particular interest. One early example was a programme called Illuminatus, which was actually presentation software (I think), but allowed sufficient interaction to cobble together a fairly terrible choose-your-own-adventure type affair with whatever hand-drawn graphics you could muster using MS Paint. Even so, I can’t recall actually producing anything with it, just a collection of half-baked and unfinished ideas that likely included far too much adolescent humour.

Klik & Play by Europress was a more appropriate piece of software for my purposes, as it focused on the easy creation of functional games, without the need to draw your own graphics or learn much in the way of code. I’m not sure if it was actually possible to make anything good, but it certainly made the process of getting stuff to move around the screen and interact with other things very easy indeed, and as such I spent more time than is healthy beavering away on a succession of unoriginal and highly unentertaining freeware titles for Windows 3.1.

Attempt 1 certainly didn’t lack ambition: my intention was to create a space shooter with an epic storyline, inspired by the likes of Wing Commander. And, like WC creator Chris Roberts, my focus was mainly on the story and cut-scenes, with the idea to staple on some generic 2D space shooter action afterwards.

Of course, I soon realised that I had neither the artistic nor technical skill to produce anything visually appealing, or anything that even actually worked, and the whole endeavour was soon abandoned not long after I’d begun trying to draw blue flight suits over the clothing of the stock character sprites.

Normally, this would have been the point at which I’d have given up entirely. But, after scaling back my expectations somewhat, I nevertheless persisted to the extent that I managed to produce four rather basic attempts at entertainment:
 

1. One-on-One Indoor Footy

Possibly my most successful title, in that I once saw two people I didn’t know playing it on one of the school computers, this was a largely plagiarised title heavily inspired by one of the bundled games, Go for Goal! (a title sadly not included in the version of Klik & Play currently available on the Web, but a quick Google does confirm its existence).

Like many of the bundled games, Go for Goal! was largely rubbish, and without minimising the scale of my theft, I think my changes did improve it. The original had giant players lumping a ball around a small pitch with goalkeepers moving about at random – it was less a football game and more a series of random collisions. My plan involved reducing the size of the players relative to the size of the pitch, turning the green playing surface to the colour of an indoor five-a-side arena, and removing the goalkeepers (I might have fiddled around with the ball behaviour parameters a bit as well).

Add to that a cheesy title screen using an image of ex-Leeds striker Toby Yeboah, a playful homage to the EA Sports “It’s In The Game” intro that was ubiquitous in the 90s (I recorded my own voice and increased the speed a bit so I sounded like a cartoon hamster on helium), and some player commentary by Barry Davies nicked from Actua Soccer, and you had the finished product. Hey, if you wanted to play a one-on-one indoor footy match between Gianfranco Zola and Dennis Bergkamp during which shooting was banned altogether, this was your only choice.

Thanks, MobyGames!

Vault of Regret: Klik & Play continued »

The Commander Keen series were the finest platform games to come from the Apogee stable. In fact they were probably the greatest best home-grown PC platform games from the dawn of the 90s. Yeah yeah, some would say I’m not setting the highest of bars there. Still I reckon the forth and fifth games, together known as Goodbye Galaxy, were worthy challengers to the generally superior range of platformers on consoles (or the cursed Amiga).

Apart from a little-known outing on gameboy advance, the series has been dormant since 1991. So I was surprised to hear Bethesda announce a new Keen for mobile devices.

Details are a bit thin on the ground so I’ll just copy-paste from the official site:

• SAVE THE GALAXY
○ Nefarious forces threaten humanity, and only twin geniuses Billy and Billie can stop them. Grab a shipload of gadgets, cuz it’s time to kick some asteroid!
• TACTICAL MAYHEM
○ Help Billie and Billy rescue Dadmiral Keen in the solo story mode, or go helmet-to-helmet for sweet prizes and bragging rights in the real-time Battle Mode!
• GIZMOS GALORE
○ Arm yourself with an arsenal of gadgets that blast, bounce, and baffle your enemies in order to become the ultimate commander.

So I don’t really know what to expect. I assume it won’t handle like a traditional platform game, however, since they tend to be utterly crippled by godawful touchscreen controls.

The emphasis on gadgets fits with the theme of Keen being a child genius; in the original games he built his own spacecraft and blaster gun. Putting my cynical hat on though, and knowing how mobile games work, I assume you’ll have to spend lots of real money, to buy fake money, to buy the best gizmos.

There’s also a rather slick promotional video that basically looks like a trailer for a kids cartoon series. It’s a million miles away from the EGA graphics of my childhood. My need for nostalgia was however partially sated when I noticed some familiar enemies – the doglike Vorticons and the signature dopefish.

I guess I’m neither super excited nor particularly angry about this. Enough nods to the old games may tempt me to give it a try. What I do demand to know, however, is when we are getting the long awaited BIO MENACE remake???

Some dull site trivia for you: the early incarnations of FFG didn’t have a dedicated sport section. Although we’d resolved to make sure we found space for a review of Puma World Football, it was buried rather incongruously among either the action or simulation titles. This was down to me more than anything else, and I distinctly remember my colleague asking if there were any other old football games worth adding. Not really, I replied, most of them haven’t aged that well and aren’t worth revisiting.

Ha! Well clearly I changed my tune on that at some point, or the second bit of it at least, given that we now have a reasonable selection of reviews spanning the 90s and 00s. And, given that football is a never-ending competition to find out not only who is the best but also to rank all of those others who are not the best, it seems appropriate to do the same with these games. So today we unveil the FFG Football League: our attempt to put all the football games we’ve reviewed into some kind of order.

Isn’t this just a thinly-disguised listicle, I hear you ask? Well, no, actually, and I’ll thank you not to be so bloody rude. Instead of working from the bottom up, spreading the list across multiple posts in order to dangle the carrot of the best games for as long as possible in an attempt to build to some kind of climax, we’re presenting a league table, starting at number 1. Just as with real football, it’s immediately obvious who will be at the top, followed by one or two surprises a bit lower down, and then a large mass of entries of roughly similar quality scrapping it out for the honour of being slightly less bad than those around them – and a meaningless final position.

So here’s how it works: football is a game of stats, and the table doesn’t lie, Gary, so rankings will in the first instance be determined by the score awarded in the original review. After that, games that achieved the same score will be ranked according to the subjective whims of FFG’s chief sports reporter, responsible for coverage of all of these games, albeit in a random and haphazard fashion, over the years. Extracts from, and links to, these dusty screeds will of course be provided.

All of the games covered thus far will be included, and this of course means two divisions, Geoff. This will also be updated as we increase our coverage, so the table is subject to change, including the possibility of relegation for those few lurking at the bottom. [Ooh – exciting! – FFG reader].

And finally, controversy and endlessly futile debate are all part of the fun of the beautiful game, Clive, so in the event that you’re one of this site’s seven readers who actually likes football, feel free to make use of our own version of a phone-in line by leaving a comment below.

The FFG Football League continued »

There’s a lot of interest right now in mini retro consoles. Pre-loaded with classic games, these handy devices sate our appetite for nostalgia with zero technical skills or configuration required. The latest one I’ve stumbled across, repeatedly appearing in my Facebook feed (thanks to some arcane algorithm) is the Pixel Gamer, which boasts over “9000 games” for 30+ systems.

So rather than an official recreation of a specific console (like the NES mini), we’re obviously into the realm of legally dubious 3rd party emulation boxes. I imagine there are stacks of devices like this coming out of China, but the people behind this one appear to be based in the Netherlands.

Looking at the Game List, we have all the big name consoles and handhelds from the 8 and 16 bit eras. Also the N64, Playstation and MAME. Home computers are represented with the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and Amiga. No Spectrum, which slightly surprises me as I thought it was known in Europe? No MS DOS either, boo.

Regular price tag is 225 euros, which seems rather steep. Yeah it has a billion games. How many of them are you going to find time to play? However it’s currently on sale for a more reasonable 125, and for all I know this is one of those situations where the full price is never actually applied.

Anyway from the layout of the USB ports I immediately guessed what hardware this is based on, and digging into the website confirmed my suspicions: it’s a Raspberry Pi. That’s the tiny linux computer, conceived as an educational tool and beloved by hobbyists due to its size, low price tag and myriad potential uses.

So you might ask, why not just get a Pi and set it up for retro gaming yourself? A regular Pi costs just £35. Furthermore you don’t need to get deep into the inner workings of linux, or install multiple software packages. You can get Retropi which combines a graphical front end with numerous emulators all in one package.

We might counter, you still have to go trawling dodgy websites to find the roms. Also even with Retropi, I imagine a bit of tinkering is still inevitable. (the one time I tried, admittedly several years back, I couldn’t get any audio output). Some folks simply don’t want to get involved with that, and prefer a totally plug-and-play option.

So basically, do you want to triple the cost to have someone set up a Pi for you? I’m not tempted myself; I have mini Nintendos for authenticity and convenience, since those are the systems of most interest to me (apart from PC gaming of course). Also I have Pi for a technical project, ready to turn into a living room dosbox device. Still I guess if you want access to a wealth of old games at the touch of a button, this could be a justifiable purchase.

Erm, except just to reiterate the “legally dubious” bit. Aren’t Nintendo fairly keen about protecting their intellectual properties these days? So if this appeals maybe grab one before the lawyers get to it.

Hello and welcome.

Some years have passed since we last covered Grand Theft Auto on this site. Today we have a write-up of the third instalment in the series – hope you like it.

Hello there.

We’re going back to the 90s for some football action today, with a review of FIFA 2000.