If I were to pick my favourite realtime strategy game of the 90s than Homeworld wins by quite a wide margin, but Starcraft is up there in the top few. So I’ve been reading up on the remastered edition, due out on August 14th.

I think the aspect of Starcraft that particularly appeased was its range of three different armies, each with a different sort of sci-fi theme. The terrans are the most conventional, all about space marines, tanks and battleships. The Zerg are a swarm of horrific creatures, for little yappy bugs to big monsters, that claw at their foes, or spit spines and acid. The Protoss have sleeker, shinier war machines than the terrans, but in fact they’re so advanced they’ve gone full circle and use swords and magic powers too. Also big floating crystals, because that always says “magical technology”.

It does look a bit like warhammer40k sometimes but… there’s an old, well worn argument that I’d rather not revisit. It’s true that the Zerg look an awful lot like Tyranids. The Marines look like 40k marines too, but they at least talk more like guys from Alabama than heresy-chasing warrior monks. The plot is dark and ominous, but it’s not bleak at the level of 40k’s relentless grimdark.

For the Emperor you wanna piece of me, boy?

The game can be pretty intense due to the fast pace and the micromanagement involved, becoming at times a frantic exercise in plate-spinning. Apart from just moving your units around and attacking, you also have to manage the special powers that some of them posses. They have abilities like slowing down enemies, or shielding friends, that can only be used every few minutes. So you have to time these correctly, amidst all the chaos. Oh, and also don’t forget to pay attention to what’s going on back at base! Keep those build queues going.

That said, it’s really multiplayer that looks particularly-stressful, and I know myself well enough to have never seriously tried beyond a few LAN games. It was enormously successful though, and responsible (along with good support from Blizz) for the game’s great longevity. So clearly Blizzard did a lot right.

The single player campaign meanwhile is one step more relaxed. I made it through the Terran and Zerg missions fine, the former generally going by the subtle and cunning tactic known as “enormous formation of Siege tanks”. Set them up, watch stuff explode, hope to god the zerglings dont’ get close. I finally got stuck in the Protoss campaign when you find yourself fighting other Protoss. Those damn robot-woodlouse things kept demolishing my base. Then there’s the Brood War expansion, which I recall getting pretty tough in places.

The story is fairly standard “dark tide overwhelms civillisation” space-opera, although you do get to play as the dark tide itself. It’s helped along by a memorable cast of characters – represented as “hero” units in game. You’ve got reliable Jim Raynor, brooding Protoss templars and then Sarah Kerrigan and her awful fate. There are also some cutscenes that were rather spectacular at the time. While a bit plastic nowadays, they’ve aged better than a lot of 90s pre-rendered stuff.

Anyway, the remake offers sharper graphics, so you can enjoy seeing those battlecruisers and zerg ultralisks in greater detail. The promo site also says “comic book interludes tell the original story with a fresh coat of paint.” I wonder if those are replacing the original talking-head briefings, and\or the cutscenes. Just flicking through the list of other changes, cloud saves are moderately useful I suppose. Matchmaking and Leaderboards are features multiplayer fans will welcome.

Blizzard are also giving the original away for free, and I’m not sure if that’s good publicity for the remaster, or undermining it. You’re not getting much new beyond cosmetic ugprades, but on the other hand, £13 isn’t a lot either. I suspect plenty of fans will decide it’s a reasonable price to pay, and I’ll probably get it myself at some point.

As the second series has just come to an end, I thought it might be worth sharing a few brief thoughts about Dara O’Briain’s Go 8 Bit. I haven’t watched a games-based TV programme since the early 90s heyday of GamesMaster and Games World, and though there have been a few since then, they haven’t quite had the mainstream heft of Go 8 Bit. When the show was first announced, I was excited about seeing it, and hoped it would be a success.

However, the prospect of a new TV show based around their favoured hobby seemed to arouse a wave of pre-emptive cynicism and negativity amongst gamers, with the common consensus being that television was itself outdated, and that such an endeavour was pointless when there was so much great gaming content on YouTube. And this was in the comments section of Eurogamer, the site to which Go 8 Bit’s co-presenter Ellie Gibson contributed for many years (which you might hope would earn you a little goodwill from readers).

As Ellie put it herself: “Some of the people in the production office – I was in the office when the story went up – some of the people in the production office who haven’t worked in game journalism were quite shocked. Not offended, but kind of mystified. Like, why is there all this hate? Why have people decided they don’t like it when they haven’t even seen a trailer? And I was like, welcome to video games!”

Go 8 Bit isn’t really aimed at the self-important hardcore, though, it’s a mainstream TV show for, er, people who like to watch mainstream TV shows. It takes an accessible, “games are for everyone” angle, of which I’m entirely in favour, although I must admit this position was sorely tested when they let Vernon Kay on the show (of course, his favourite game was Call of Duty – how dreadful!)

The format is a mixture of panel show and watching celebs play games. Line up regulars are the host Dara, team captains Steve McNeill and Sam Pamphilon (who originated the format) and the aforementioned Ms Gibson, who introduces each round. The two teams each welcome a celebrity guest and they face off against each other over four rounds of gaming action: a classic game, a favourite of each celebrity guest, an indie title, then a double points finale featuring some kind of novelty prop, costume or oversized controller. There are jokes, chat and gaming, and though there is a competitive moment or two, the importance of the final result isn’t taken much more seriously than it would be on any other comedy panel show.

Some challenges are more interesting to watch than others, and if one player happens to be particularly terrible at the game in question, it can get rather one-sided. Some of the celebrity guests have let themselves down on occasion, prompting the inevitable claims that some are bandwagon hopping fake gamers who have pretended to like games in order to get on a TV show. But, you know, people who like games can be bad at games. Particularly if they’re playing a particular one for the first time in years in front of a studio audience. (Also: just because the show is called Go 8 Bit, it doesn’t mean all the games have to be on 8-bit systems. It’s just the name if the show, right? They know what 8-bit is, it’s not a mistake you’ve spotted. Eight Out of Ten Cats doesn’t have any cats in it.)

It’s not perfect – as with many of these shows, not all of the pre-written autocue jokes land, and I’m not entirely sure about Ellie’s introductory monologues, either. I loved her writing on Eurogamer and wonder if she could be better served by joining in with the main action a bit more. Equally, the captains seem like they might have a bit more to offer, and they mainly have to act as a foil for their celebrity team-mates. (To an extent these criticisms are addressed by the companion DLC show, introduced at the beginning of the second series, which allows the three of them a bit more space to do their thing).

Still, I found myself looking forward to watching Go 8 Bit each week. It’s probably aimed at someone like me – I’ve heard of most of the games they play, except the indie ones (although one or two of those featured have piqued my interest), and might not be for everyone. But for the old timers who still watch television, I’d recommend checking it out, if you haven’t already.

Hi there.

We’re at the newer end of what’s permissible on this site today, with a review of the retro-flavoured indie football game from 2011, New Star Soccer 5.

2000: the year in which Silverchair said they’d make it up to us. Did they ever get around to it? I’m not sure. Whatever am I talking about? Never mind, we’re into part 5 of our history of PC Zone magazine, so let’s get on with that.

Part 5: 2000-2001 – Reality Check

At some point in this period, Zone seemed to lose its cheeky sixth-form humour. It wasn’t entirely down to the departure of Charlie Brooker, but his moving on did seem to leave the team short of something that the old Zone always had. One of Brooker’s last pieces was a final-page comment about being crap at Quake III that included the line: “you’d be surprised how easy it is to fool a desperate male virgin in a dark room, using cunning determination, a high voice and a very convincing wig.” It was an appropriate note on which to depart.

PC Zone: an incomplete and subjective history, part 5 continued »

These days remakes, updates and remasterings of old games are commonplace. A couple of particular interest to at FFG towers right now are Full Throttle, released a few months ago and Starcraft, due out in August.

This isn’t totally new, however. By the start of the 90s, developers and publishers were starting to see the attraction of renovating and re-releasing their older games. Here’s a selection of remakes all released before 2000.

Sierra Adventures

In the early 90s, Sierra went about remaking the first game in each of their five core “Quest” series of adventures. That would be King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory and Larry Quest Leisure Suit Larry.

The state each game started at, and then moved to, varied a bit. For example King’s Quest was their first adventure, and so its remake came first also, and is a step more primitive than later ones. For the most part though, graphics were upgraded from the chunky pixels and the 16 colours of EGA to higher resolution 256-colour VGA. Also, the old keyboard controls and text parsers were put aside for a fully mouse-driven interface.

I think the originals did a lot with that primitive SCI engine, creating fascinating and detailed worlds for us to explore. Still, the updated versions are a bit more accessible nowadays. Another bonus is proper soundcard sound, even if just jangly adlib music, rather than tortured PC speaker bleeps.

We have a particular fondness for Police Quest starring Sonny Bonds, our favourite gaming cop. Half the challenge is making sure you adhere to proper procedure for arresting perps or checking your car for faults, yet weirdly that becomes half the charm. The other one I’d recommend is the RPG-hybrid Quest for Glory…which I could have sworn we reviewed here! Must have gotten lost in the move to WordPress. [Edit: It is lost no more! – Rik]

Anyway you can find the lot on GOG.

Dune 2000
I don’t know if Dune 2 was literally the first ever realtime strategy game. It is however generally regarded as establishing a template for the genre that later games would follow. You build a base, send out trucks to gather some sort of resource, churn out lots of little tanks, go destroy your enemy’s base.

In 1998 Westwood updated it using the technology behind its successors, Command and Conquer and Red Alert. This brought sharper graphics, although I’m actually unsure if looks any more attractive as a result. Every map is still a brown desert, and you’ve lost that nostalgic 320×200 VGA charm.

On the other hand, Dune 2000 does have an improved interface that lets you give orders to multiple units at once. When there are Ordos raiders banging on your front door you don’t really want to be clicking a tank, giving orders, clicking another, giving orders, and so on.

Also this was the heyday of FMV cutscenes, featuring live actors, a feature that Westwood had wholly embraced with Command and Conquer. For Dune 2000, our moderately-famous “hey, it’s that guy!” guest star was John Rhys Davis. Write in the comments with your favourite role from his lengthy career (I vote Gimli from Lord of the Rings).

Sadly neither original nor update can be bought anywhere currently.

F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0
This may be blurring the lines between remake and sequel. I wanted to include F-117A because it’s actually the third iteration of the original idea. Also it’s relevant to my interest in military aviation.

In the 80s the USAF was widely believed to be working on a fighter jet that could evade enemy radar. Being a top secret project virtually nothing was known about it, so aviation enthusiasts came up with their own speculation. The designation F-19 was a sensible guess, based on the fact that fighter numbers are sequential, and the F-18 and F-20 already existed. A model kit company, Testor, came up with a design that took a few cues from the SR-71 but was entirely guesswork.

Hypothetical stealth fghter

Testors’ concept looked streamlined, hi-tech and deadly. It seemed to perfectly match the the idea of an undetectable jet, slipping through the night sky with to rain destruction on the unsuspecting soviets. It would form the basis for the F-19’s appearance in toys, cartoons and computer games. It also featured in Tom Clancy’s novel, Red Storm Rising.

So we start with Project Stealth Fighter, released by Microprose was for Commodore 64 and Spectrum. This was the first ever flight sim to feature a stealth aircraft.

In 1988 the game was re-titled F-19 Stealth Fighter, and updated for 16-bit systems – Atari ST, Amiga and of course MS DOS PC. I think Rik played this one.

However around the end of the decade, the US government revealed their actual stealth fighter to the public . Designated F-117, it didn’t look anything like the previous speculation.  Rather than being sleek and aerodynamic it was weirdly angular, its facets and hard edges designed to deflect away radar waves.

Actual stealth fighter

Even if the F-117 was not the most elegant thing ever to take to the air, Microprose were in the business of authentic flight sims. So this was a good time to update their game, switching out Tom Clancy fiction for the real warplane. They also took the opportunity to upgrade to VGA, the major generational shift in PC gaming at the time. The resulting game was titled Stealth Fighter 2.0, and this was what I played myself back in the early 90s.

If you’re interested in playing these sims, F-19 is on steam, and F117A on GOG.

Super Mario All-Stars

Released for the Super Nintendo in 1993, this bundle of games included updated versions of the first three super mario games, originally seen on the NES. The graphics were upgraded to 16-bit standards, with fancy features like backgrounds and parallax scrolling. This put them on a par with the SNES-native Super Mario World. They were also given savegame features, particularly valuable for the sprawling Super Mario 3.

The fourth game in the bundle was an updated version of the original Japanese Super Mario 2, under the name Lost Levels. This was very similar to the first SMB, but a lot harder. It was a totally different game to the one we knew as SMB2 in the west, which was some non-mario game reworked to include moustachioed plumbers and big mushrooms.

All-Stars isn’t available for Virtual Console on any Nintendo console (the NES originals are though), and it’s been omitted from the lineup on the forthcoming SNES Classic. So to play it legimately, your options are to find either the original SNES cartridge, or the disc version released on Wii in 2010.

Part 4 of our history of PC Zone, and we’re into 1998: past the peak of the 90s, but still, to my mind, a vaguely optimistic time. Okay, so Britpop was dead and Be Here Now was rubbish, but we still lived in hope that England might win the World Cup and The Phantom Menace might be quite good. This was also the time when I bought PC Zone most regularly: around the time of the redesign, the cover price was slashed by a whole £2 to £2.99, which was possibly a factor (whatever horrifying and potentially unethical changes to working conditions enabled this switch were of no concern to me).

Part 4: 1998-99 – Sick Notes

While Zone’s look had evolved over the years, 1998 seemed like the first time it had undergone such a thorough redesign, with the iconic corner logo being replaced by a fairly generic-looking A-Team style stencil effort. For the first time since the very early years, there was a Meet The Team feature, in which the various writers were asked the same question (usually related to a cover game or feature) as well as declaring which games were on their hard drive. What’s On Your Hard Drive? was also another new regular feature, in which the inhabitants of a particular town or city were quizzed about their current gaming habits.

Even though the accompanying pictures often indicated that the feature had involved little more than hanging around the local branch of GAME or Electronics Boutique, I took it as a sign that games were becoming less of a niche hobby and more of a thing that the person in the street might indulge in. Like it or not, the popularity of the PlayStation probably had something to do with it, and perhaps in acknowledgement of this, Zone briefly ran a feature, PlayStation Zone (later Console Zone) which covered the latest developments in the world of the small grey box, including coverage of the PSX emulator Bleem! (eventually shut down by Sony). For a short while, the What’s On Your Hard Drive feature was also accompanied by a feature about the state of games in the same town/city, usually involving an interview of some kind with the managers of local gaming stores.

PC Zone: an incomplete and subjective history, part 4 continued »

After the success of the Nes Classic Edition, Nintendo are giving the Super Nintendo the same treatment. The SNES classic edition will look like a miniature version of the much loved 16 bit console, and come loaded with 21 games.

That’s less than the NES Classic’s 30, but a lot of those were rather basic arcade games from 1984, the sort of thing I played for about 10 minutes. Most of what we have here is more substantial:

– Contra III: The Alien Wars
– Donkey Kong Country
– EarthBound
– Final Fantasy III
– F-ZERO
– Kirby Super Star
– Kirby’s Dream Course
– The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
– Mega Man X
– Secret of Mana
– Star Fox
– Star Fox 2
– Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
– Super Castlevania IV
– Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts
– Super Mario Kart
– Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
– Super Mario World
– Super Metroid
– Super Punch-Out!!
– Yoshi’s Island

I’m particularly glad to see Yoshi’s Island included. It came late in the 16 bit era, and so was a bit overlooked, but it’s a wonderfully charming and inventive platformer.

I guess this also means I’ll make *another* start on Final Fantasy 3, after giving up on the GBA, android and steam versions. I don’t know why I keep trying, I did actually finish the SNES original years ago. I think I’m trying to make it up to Square for playing a pirated ROM.

The surprise entry here is Star Fox 2, which was never previously released. Apparently instead of the linear levels of the original, you can freely move around a map screen and pick your battles. This isn’t a series I have much personal attachment to (the PC had X-wing by this point), but still, it’s great that Nintendo are finally making it available.

Biggest disappointment meanwhile is probably the lack of Chrono Trigger, one of the SNES greatest RPGs. Not a dealbreaker but Magus, Chrono and Frog will be missed.

The NES Classic was unfortunately difficult to find, with Nintendo totally failing to make enough of them to meet demand. Some gamers were pushed to go to scalpers on ebay, who charged twice or more the retail price. Then Nintendo went and cancelled production. It looks like this one will also only be manufactured for a few months, from september to the end of 2017. Nintendo are promising to make more units than they did with the NES classic, but I’m still preparing to watch amazon like a hawk

The RRP is higher this time at $80, although it also includes two controllers, so you’ll be ready to lose to your wife at Mario Kart, out of the box. Or maybe that’s just me.

Oh and one final thing. You might recall the original SNES had two different appearances. North America getting one version and us Europeans the other, along with Japan. I’m happy to say Nintendo will be repeating this for the classic. I always thought our version looked a bit better with that smooth, slightly curved upper surface and coloured buttons.

We’re onto part 3 of our history of PC Zone (part 1, part 2) and it’s getting to the point in the 90s where one of those nostalgic TV documentaries about Cool Britannia (which I would try – but fail – to resist watching) might focus its attention: Britpop, Euro ’96, Tony Blair and the Spice Girls. So, what was going on in the world of British PC games coverage (the subject of precisely zero nostalgic TV documentaries) around this time?

Part 3: 1996-98 – Cruelty Zoo

The Quake issue (Zone 43, October 1996) was John Davison’s last, with deputy Jeremy Wells taking over. Wells continued in roughly the same vein as Davison (and maintained the tradition of long-haired 90s Zone editors), although his love for football and, in particular, Championship Manager was a distinguishing feature of his tenure. Towards the end of his time as editor, Wells paid tribute to the addictive qualities of the series in a feature called The Cult of Championship Manager, which featured a variety of men old enough to know better telling tales of how the game got them into trouble (“When I finally went downstairs, Janet’s parents had left and she was throwing stuff around the kitchen…It was over. And I lost the final.”)

This era was probably Zone’s phase of peak blokeishness, with letters to the editor either praising or criticising this aspect of the magazine. In truth, as we mentioned earlier, it was largely adverts for games, rather than reviews or other content, that were the main source of controversy. This was the era of Jo Guest’s notorious ad for Battlecruiser 3000AD, which was toned down (a bit) in some publications by the addition of some pants for Ms Guest. Zone published the pant-less version, earning it praise from one correspondent (“Who would dare to put the ad for Battlecruiser 3000AD on their back cover without drawing stupid knickers on the poor girl?”)

Some months later, another advert – this time an S&M themed one promoting Destruction Derby 2 – went down less well with a reader, and Charlie Brooker (for some reason in charge of responding to letters that month) found himself agreeing, describing marketing types as “a bunch of gutless, soulless, hollow-eyed blockheads who assume that every gamesplayer in the country is a drooling, Pavlovian sexual inadequate…If I could have my way, I’d like to strand the lot of them together on a remote desert island. Ideally it would be completely devoid of all foliage or animal life, so they would eventually all be forced to hunt, kill, and then eat each other in order to survive”.

PC Zone: an incomplete and subjective history, part 3 continued »

If you’re a gamer of a certain age, you may fondly remember saturday afternoons playing Gods, the platform game from Bitmap brothers, on your Amiga, Atari ST or 386 PC.

I am of that certain age but never made much progress. Apparently the game is pretty damn difficult, with four sprawling levels and a dose of puzzle solving. I do at least remember the intro theme. With its breakbeats and sampled speech, it was one of those tracks that sounded a bit like something you might actually hear on the radio, albeit rendered in that fuzzy soundblaster-pro sort of way. Probably sounded a bit better on Amiga.

Anyway, Riot Robot have gotten together with Mike Montgomery, one of the founders of original developers Bitmap Brothers, to bring us a remastered version:

The graphics are now 3D-based, but also a bit generic. There was something very distinctive about the artwork in Bitmap Brothers games, that has been lost in the transition. On the other hand at least we get smooth animation, something that tends to be neglected in these remasterings of old 2D games (see: Monkey Island).

According go the promotional blurb you also get the original game, apparently with a smoother framerate. This might be one of those remakes that doesn’t add much, but some fans might want just to have a legit copy that runs with a minimum of fuss.

It should be coming soon to Steam. Also to iOS and android where, as usual for platform games, I expect the touchscreen controls will be godawful.

Welcome to part 2 of our history of PC Zone (part 1 here, if you missed it). This time, we’re into the mid-90s, and what many consider the era of peak Zone. This is around the time that I started reading, too (my first issue was Zone 24, March 1995, with Dark Forces on the cover). Right, let’s get on with it, shall we?

Part 2: 1994-96 – The Editor’s Ten Inches

John Davison took over as editor in 1994, with his first issue being Zone 20 (November 1994). By this point, familiar names such as Jeremy Wells, Charlie Brooker and Warren Chrismas were also appearing in the mag. (Some years ago I became aware that Warren Chrismas was studying a course at the university where I work. Upon hearing his name I exclaimed out loud (to a gathering of extremely bemused colleagues), “Is that the Warren Chrismas who used to write for PC Zone in the 90s?” thus outing myself as an Extremely Cool Dude. Needless to say, they didn’t know who he or what PC Zone was, despite my lengthy explanation name-dropping Brooker (by this time writing for the Guardian) and detailing Warren’s stint as a technical advice columnist in the late 90s).

Looking back at Zone’s earliest issues, you can see that the transition from a fairly conventional PC games mag to the PC Zone many came to know and love began in the era of Davison, which heralded a slightly more laddish, confrontational tone, particularly in the letters section. Po-faced complaints about Mr Cursor were a fairly regular occurrence, with one correspondent (Wordprocessor, Zone 25) deriding him as a “Timmy Mallet [sic] wannabe”.

“It is obliquely gratifying to learn,” continued Mr Graham Stokes of Wiltshire, “that if all else fails it is still possible to eke out a living as a writer on a subject about which you know nothing.” In response, Davison appeared exasperated by the number of people who just didn’t ‘get’ Mr Cursor but still got cross enough about it to write in.

PC Zone: an incomplete and subjective history, part 2 continued »