It’s the Euros! And in an attempt to build excitement for the forthcoming action, the BBC has compiled a series of video highlights of memorable moments from previous tournaments. One featured match that I didn’t immediately recall was Spain’s 4-3 victory over Yugoslavia in Euro 2000, secured in dramatic circumstances with a late winner.

I have fond memories of Euro 2000, despite the fact that England were awful and failed to get out of the group. They’d needed a play-off to get past Scotland and qualify for the tournament, and scraped through despite a dreadful performance in the home leg at Wembley. Just like the fuss surrounding current England captain Wayne Rooney, there was pressure on England manager Kevin Keegan to drop Alan Shearer for being too slow, with many suggesting Andy Cole as a replacement.

Shearer: 63 caps, 30 goals; Cole: 15 caps, 1 goal.

Twice they lost leading positions, and Keegan’s insistence that England shouldn’t be written off following a narrow victory over Germany had more than a ring of his “love it” breakdown of a few years earlier. He eventually quit after a defeat to the same opponents in a World Cup qualifier, declaring that he lacked the tactical nous for the job. Still, I enjoyed the tournament, probably because as a first year undergraduate doing an arts degree, I could watch all the matches and drink a load of beer while doing so.

I became very familiar with Spain’s 2000 squad because they were my team of choice during that particular era of PES rivalry (ISS Pro Evolution 2) with my friend PG. You can develop strange relationships with teams under such circumstances: while famous names are guaranteed to start, the other members of the squad are endlessly rotated in an attempt to find the winning combination, and end up playing thousands more matches than they ever received real-life caps. During the course of an evening, a player could have gone from hero to villain and back again several times over. Having achieved legendary status in your head as a result of their exploits, though, they’d often be cruelly excised from the next game in the series, sending you scuttling to Wikipedia to find out what had happened to your fallen heroes.

Uncanny…

And so it was with some surprise that I witnessed two such players having an impact in a real-life tournament, with strikers Alfonso and Pedro Munitis both scoring in the victory over Yugoslavia. Having only ever seen them in action in ISS, I was struck by how well their real-life appearance and physical attributes had been replicated in blocky and blurry PSOne form: I recalled Alfonso as a somewhat ungainly forward with floppy long hair and big white boots, while Munitis was a small, quick and irritating (I mainly used him as a salt-in-the-wounds-type substitute, for annoying PG with a late goal when victory already seemed assured). Both were immediately recognisable in the clip.

Un…canny…

PG later revealed that he never feared either player, claiming to have more concerns about Raul and the “giant head” of Ismael Urzaiz. Despite Raul’s status as one of my squad’s star players, my assessment of his real-life counterpart as a talented but somewhat hapless player, representative of Spain’s general reputation at the time (possibly sealed by him missing a crucial late penalty in the Euro 2000 quarter final) meant that I never really held him in high regard, and I used to shove him out on the left wing. As for Urzaiz, his ISS representation wasn’t especially accurate but, revisiting the game now, the “giant head” accusations do appear to have had some foundation.

Can you spot the giant head of Urzaiz? Write in and claim your prize.

Hello!

Ok, so I went down the rabbit-hole again and decided to revisit a game we first covered a number of years ago. Fortunately, doing so also led me to a place where I could come up with some new content, too.

This year, it’s 20 years since Euro ’96. (If Baddiel and Skinner released Three Lions today, they’d be singing about 50 years of hurt). So what better way to prepare for the forthcoming Euros than by revisiting some football games from the 90s?

Here we have coverage of Sensible Soccer, Sensible World of Soccer 96-97 and Football Glory.

Hello everyone.

You’ve probably noticed Rik has recently redone a few of the first reviews he wrote for this site, 15 years ago. There’s Toonstruck, a lesser known point and click adventure, and Speedball 2 for some violent future sport with that distinctive early 90s bitmap brothers art.

Well, I’ve gone and redone one myself – I thought it was time for a fresh look at Blizzard’s early action-RPG, Diablo.

This isn’t something we plan on doing a lot more of; we don’t want to get too caught up in tinkering with old content. Speaking for myself, I don’t produce enough new content anyway. Also I like having articles dated from about 2002 here, even if my own are the slapdash writings of a callow young man, just to remind the world how long we’ve been doing this.

Hello everyone.

Regular readers – if they, indeed, exist – will know that in recent years I’ve stuck quite closely to my comfort areas: namely, old football and racing games. Occasionally, I do get the taste for something a bit different, although often my attempts are thwarted by my own ineptitude and/or lack of patience.

Anyway, I’ve dipped my toe into the shallow end of the RPG water with a review of Space Siege.

Via RPS:

Blizzard On Vanilla WoW Servers

I’ve occasionally considered talking about World of Warcraft here; it was released in the tail end of 2004 which does makes it older than some of the other games we’ve reviewed. It felt a bit wrong to speak of it as an actual old game, though, given how much it’s evolved over the years. Expansions have brought new places to explore, new character classes and races, new dungeons and raids. Character class mechanics are constantly changing, re-balancing, and abilities come and go. The character graphics have received a substantial upgrade. New features like automated group-matching for dungeons add convenience.

Even the old world, where the original pre-expansion game took place, was comprehensively overhauled in 2010. A giant dragon tried to break the planet, you see. So running around the Barrens or the Wetlands is rather different to how it was a decade ago. The quests are all new, you meet different people, new castles and outposts have sprung up and old towns lie abandoned . Sometimes even the layout of the land itself changed.

Also, a lot of content that used to be aimed at max-level characters still exists but becomes irrelevant when new expansions are released. Once upon a time players at level 70 would raid Tempest Keep or Black Temple, for shiny rewards. Now there is no point; we all charge right past it, and past level 70. The monsters of those raids stand around forlornly, forgotten. We only care about raids aimed at the current max level.

WoW players are as prone to nostalgia as anyone else, and sometimes miss the Warcraft they used to play. So some clever folks have managed to set up servers running older versions of the game, some going back to the days before any expansions. No panda-people, no Cataclysm, no modern easy-mode levelling. Your level cap is 60 and you (or, er, your Dwarvern Paladin) will sweat blood and tears getting there, dammit!

So I guess this is where WoW does start to intersect with our interests here. I can totally understand the pull of returning to Wow as it used to be. I wasn’t around for the first days, what we now refer to as Vanilla, but I did sign up at the start of the first expansion, sometime early 2007. So I have my own memories of the Old World in its original state, and also Outland. I spent several weeks in the Barrens, fighting those damn quillboar and waiting for the Alliance to trash the crossroads yet again. I ran around the dungeons of Uldaman with a group who only vaguely knew what they were doing until an experienced warrior tank kindly showed us what to do. I loved exploring Azshara, with its bleak empty coastlands, before an expansion turned it into goddamn Goblin city.

The game was in many ways far more of a chore back then; endless running back and forth long distances on foot just to complete “collect 12 badger arses” quests, the difficulty in finding groups for dungeons, the difficulty accessing half-decent gear if you weren’t in a raiding guild. The hunter pet-training mechanics were especially tedious.

Yet we old-timers look back fondly on those days. Some say servers had more of a sense of community, back before they all got merged, and group-finders removed the need to socialise. Some also say you had to earn your success more back then, without epic purple lootz getting handed out like candy. Personally I thought the world of Azeroth was larger, more mysterious, before we could fly or leap to any city through a convenient portal. Plus, well, there’s always nostalgia. A hearkening back to those days when you first started WoW, to good times had with friends in you guild, and probably to when you were a more carefree twenty-something.

I’ve often thought I’d like to play on a classic server. How far I’d get though, I couldn’t say. Maybe I’d make it all the way to level 60, 70, 80, wherever they decided to freeze WoW in time? Maybe I’d join a guild of friendly, dedicated people and have great adventures raiding Karazan? Or maybe I’d run out of steam somewhere around level 32, release what a slog I have ahead of me, and realise god dammit I spent enough of my life on this game already! Seriously I could have churned out so many more retro-reviews between 2007 and 2013 if I’d never played WoW. I am not going back to that. No chance.

Anyways, what I failed to mention so far, but you’d know if you read that link at the start, is that is that these retro-servers are totally unofficial. So Blizzard doesn’t especially approve, and sometimes deploys lawyers (on griffon-back, from its shining citadel in Stormwind city) to shut them down. The obvious answer seems to be for Blizz to run some classic servers itself, but they apparently cite a bunch of technical difficulties. I’m surprised it’s that much work to install some old software on a bunch of servers, but maybe the tricky bit is making it all talk to the modern battle.net infrastructure.

They do mention turning off a bunch of the modern conveniences that speed up levelling, such as heirloom gear (fancy swords and armour you obtain on one character, then pass to another newbie hero that you create). So you’d take longer to reach max level, monsters would be tougher, you’d have to do more quests and search harder for gear. I guess that’s a compromise worth considering.

Hello.

For the second time this month, I’ve gone back to revisit a game that I already covered a while ago, in an attempt to provide a slightly more insightful review.

I don’t think I’m going to make a habit of this. It was fun to go back and play the games again – but there are many more out there, and if I keep picking at the old content we probably won’t get much new stuff.

Anyway, today’s reheated write-up is of Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe.

Good evening.

Today we have another one of those street-racing games for you, a sequel to one we covered a while ago (and quite liked). It’s Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights.

Hi there.

For reasons of maintaining my own sanity and preventing the trickle of new content from me slowing to an occasional drip, I don’t tend to make a habit of re-visiting old reviews and tinkering with them. However, I’ve temporarily abandoned my it-is-what-it-is approach in an attempt to fix one or two of my oldest write-ups.

I’m not going to keep the originals on the site anywhere because, well, what would be the point of rewriting them in the first place. But in an attempt to avoid my own newspost paralysis, I’ll borrow Stoo’s original intro for this first one. Here’s a point-and-clicker from the latter days of the genre’s 90s heyday, starring everyone’s favourite ex-Klingon, Christopher Lloyd: it’s Toonstruck.

Those who remember previous iterations of FFG may recall that our list of reviews used to come with a brief introduction. I thought it was quite a good feature, but by God did it cause me some trouble. After tapping out a review with relative ease, the prospect of coming up with some kind of pithy summary caused significant dithering, until it seemed as if I’d spent as long thinking about that as I did writing the piece itself. So I’m also sort of glad it’s gone, although I still have the same problems with accompanying text for newsposts and social media – there isn’t much deviation from “Hello, today’s review is this.” These days, thank goodness, I can at least put in a screenshot of the title screen.

Perhaps we should return to the very early days of the site, pre-Wordpress, pre-CMS, when I had to send my reviews to Stoo to upload, and he’d come up with all of that on my behalf. I was reminded of this after I posted the last of the When I Played features, and he described it on Twitter as a piece about the therapeutic effects of writing about old games, which was both entirely correct and something I never would have come up with myself. It also got me thinking.

I find there’s something reassuring about the world of games, the fact that it all just exists: ticking away and churning out new titles faster than any one person could ever keep up with. These days, I still follow it all, without having much sense of what’s going on. But I’m still interested. One day, I might get around to some of the things everyone’s talking about now.

Hotline Miami: Not as new as I thought.

You’re not hardcore, unless you live hardcore continued »

It’s strange how our feelings about the passing of time can be inconsistent. See, I’ve pretty much come to terms with Doom being released over twenty years ago. While I still greatly enjoy playing the game, it’s clearly the product of a bygone age, as much a part of the mid 90s as britpop and the X-men cartoon. It was released during a chapter of my life that has long since ended.

Oblivion’s 10th anniversary has now arrived, and those ten years are harder to accept than Doom’s twenty-two. Oblivion is somehow still registered in my brain under the “modern games” category. Has it really been an entire decade since I first played Elder Scrolls number four? I think there’s some part of me that anchored itself in about 2011 and refused to accept any further progress into this decade. Is this a bad sign I’m still clinging to my 20s? Surely not, sir, I have a mortgage! I’m married! The mannerisms of young people on the internet frequently baffle me!

Anyway since we humans place fairly arbitrary significance on round numbers, it’s a good time time to look back and reflect. Compared to its predecessor Morrowind and sequel Skyrim, Oblivion is sadly my least favourite of the trio.

I think partially because the world, and the core story to the game, were both a bit bland. Morrowind had that slightly alien feel to it, with the mushroom towers, bizarre wildlife and the concrete minarets of Dwarvern ruins. It only became more fascinating as I  delved into the history of the land, and learned more about quarelling demigods, disappeared civilisations, and the prophecies I was supposedly fulfilling.

The region we saw in Oblivion, the imperial homeland of Cyrodil, was certainly prettier than Morrowind. In fact looking at screenshots I’m reminded just how vibrant and lush its wildernesses were. The issue is, it’s all very generic, a land of standard-issue forests and castles. There’s not a lot that’s particularly memorable here, it’s made up of elements common to many other fantasy worlds I’ve visited in gaming. Then for a story they dropped in something forgettable stuff about the last emperor and demon invasions. The portals to Oblivion do add some excitement and a change of scenery but they show up a bit late,  and I didn’t really care why they were happening anyway.

Okay, that is really lovely.

Then there’s the scaling of enemies to match your own level. I get why they had to try something like this, a common complaint in Morrowind was how unchallenged you might feel at higher levels. Yet the implementation in Oblivion was far too heavy handed. Perhaps the most egregious example was common bandits becoming mighty warriors kitted out in powerful weapons and armour that’s meant to be rare and priceless. It’s a bit like bank robbers carrying anti-tank missiles. You’d think they’d just sell the stuff and retire. Or move onto higher stakes conquests than banditry, at least.

I’ve always thought that in an RPG, at high level, you should sometimes run into foes that you can squash with contemptuous ease. That’s the whole point of leveling up to become a legendary hero. Of course a game should still be providing challenges for you at this stage – mighty dragons or demons or whatever.  Still you should also go back to that quest to clear out a cave full of goblins, one you couldn’t do at level 5, and happily obliterate them.

Yet in Oblivion, I’d retreat from a dungeon full of  skeletons that dominated me at low level, come back many days later, and find some other undead supermonster. It was was just as difficult to kill now as the skeletons were previously. I was, in relative terms, no more powerful than I was when I started the game.

I’d also heard stories of people who leveled up by raising non-combat skills – then found to their dismay they’d hit the trigger for the world to start spawning new more powerful monsters that they weren’t equipped to handle. The relatively manageable wolves of before were replaced with giant bears. You could argue that a good RPG should have moments of panicked fleeing from overwhelming foes, sure, but that really shouldn’t occur just because you got good at alchemy and bartering.

I suppose Bethesda have a bit of a challenge in balancing an open-world game against the basic expectations of an RPG. We’re meant to be able to go roaming any direction, from the start, and that means opportunities for newbie characters must be all around,  not just in a designated little “starter zone”. There must be foes and quests to challenge us at high level too, but these shouldn’t be totally blocking the newbies from exploring, or making too many dungeons and quests impossible. Oblivion’s approach then was to have everything around you reconfigure according to your level, throughout the game.  In doing so took away most of your sense of progression.

Skyrim seemed to make the required compromises a little more successfully. There is still some scaling going on, but, a Giant is the same Giant whatever level you are. Higher levels might mean higher grades of bandit, but there are limits on their power so they’re not carrying ridiculous exotic weaponry. Also I understand it, dungeons have a designated level range, with the level fixed based on the first time you visit. So some dungeons are accessible for your level 5 wimp; others will be too dangerous, but you can come back for them later.

Skyrim still doesn’t find that perfect balance of progression and challenge; I didn’t find much of anything could threaten me at high levels. Still, there are other improvements on Oblivion. Even if it still wasn’t quite as weirdly unique as Morrowind, I found it more compelling a place to explore than Oblivion, and the “Norsemen vs Romans” conflict added flavour. It also had some stand out features like the Dragon attacks that were utterly spectacular, unlike any “random monster encounter” I’d ever seen in an RPG.

Also you can shout at bandits to blast them off cliffs, and that will never stop being hilarious.

Before I sign off let’s bear in mind I am comparing it to games that I’ve dearly loved. To Oblivion’s credit it got some things right. It grealty improved the combat mechanics from Morrowind, whilst keeping a full set of character stats, unlike Skyrim’s heavy simplification. Also, the Shivering Isles expansion seems specifically aimed at those who missed Morrowind’s otherworldliness.

So I certainly sank several dozen hours into it, and had some good times adventuring in Cyrodil. I can’t deny though, that regarding anything Bethesda has done post 2000, this is the game I’m least tempted to replay.