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.

Hi there.

Following memories of DOS-based flight sims and dreadful old football games, we return to the modern era for some slow-motion shooting action in today’s review of Stranglehold.

A lot of my gaming time in the early 90s was spent on flight sims. It was an offshoot of my childhood interest in aviation. Fighter planes are awesome – they’re fast, they’re loud, they do crazy manoeuvres, they fire machineguns and rockets and make stuff explode. Of course I wanted a chance to sit in the cockpit and fly one myself. Not just by playing some arcade shoot-em-up, but rather a proper simulation that gave me full control of an aircraft.

These can be quite complex games. You have to learn the basics of controlling an aircraft, the three ways the control surfaces can make you turn in the air. There’s a bit of physics to consider; for example there are limits to how quickly you can climb, before your plain stalls and the nose drops. There’s also often a lot of information to take in, looking at little gauges, dials and maybe radar screens. Not to mention lots of buttons to push to make the flaps go down or change some setting on the heads up display.

This meant that flight sims often felt more grownup than other games. They were entertainment, but at the same time, they were Serious Business. That let me feel a bit smug and superior over my gaming peers. Flying a plane was clearly a more worthwhile pursuit than Mario jumping on turtles. I could tell myself (and almost believe) that I was fine with the beige family PC, and had no desire to own a console. This was to some extent a lie born of jealousy, and really I wished I could play Super Mario World as well as my sims. Still, my enthusiasm for the genre was very genuine.

I played plenty of historical sims, such as the Aces series from Dynamix. I relished the chance to take place in second world war dogfights, piloting the sort of classic aircraft I voraciously read books about. Sat in front of the PC I could pretend I was an old fashioned fighter ace, a champion in the fight against the luftwaffe. Swooping and diving through the skies I would shoot down countless Me-109s, strafe airfields and gallantly defend fleets of bombers.

I also liked a few sims in contemporary settings. Or I suppose what was then contemporary. These were the days of Desert storm, so the middle east was a commonly featured warzone. The technology was still that of the last days of the cold war – The F-15 was still king of the skies, the F22 a mere prototype. Stealth fighters were a marvellous new technology, like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. The US Navy still had intruders and Vikings, the RAF had the famous Harrier.

However, for all the time I spent on these games I never claimed to be particularly good at flight sims. I’d often set the flight models to more simple versions, particularly in helicopter sims which are a whole other level of complexity. I also tended to ignore entire sections of the game such as campaign modes with resource management and command of entire squadrons, which seemed far too much like hard work and staring at map screens.

Then there’s landing. I dreaded landing, which is all about dealing with the ultimate threat to an aircraft, solid ground. I suppose it’s not exactly super difficult if you practise enough, it’s just a tedious way to end a mission, a chore that requires several minutes of concentration. I don’t really my past hour’s successes to be thrown away in a fireball and a crater just because I got impatient and made too steep a descent. Most sims offered an option to just fly back to friendly skies and hit an “end mission” command, and that’s what I usually used. Yet it always felt a bit unsatisfying, like I was cheating.

As time went by, I started to drift away from a genre that was once a favourite. I think TFX did a lot to kill my interest in new sims. It looked amazing, especially with its “cinematic flyby” view mode with your Eurofighter blasting past the camera, but I didn’t have the first clue how to actually do anything apart from spin around the sky firing missles randomly. Looking back, I see people describe it as “arcadey”, which is profoundly depressing and doesn’t say much for my sim expertise.

I continued to enjoy space-sims like Freespace for a while, and that’s material for another article, another day. Sadly though the will to play real-world flight sims diminished. Perhaps there was a sense that they were now all too complicated. Flight models became ever more realistic, in other words unforgiving. Get too crazy with your manoeuvres and whoops, looks like you’re in a spin towards the ground. Controls became more extensive and elaborate, which means flipping twelve different switches trying to turn the radar on, then not understanding anything it’s telling you anyway.

Once sims had made me feel superior to other kids still playing juvenile stuff like Sonic the Hedgehog. Now my pretense at being a more elite and refined gamer was revealed to be a sham. I actually had neither the skills nor the patience to persevere with any serious sims.

By the 2000s, I’d pretty much stopped playing. I did at one point, 7 or so years ago, try to rekindle my interest by grabbing Janes USAF from my local GAME (these being the days when it had a PC section worth speaking of). I then failed the very first training mission, by crashing into another plane while taxiing to the runway. Oh and I once tried a game called Aces High:

I, uh… yeah. I can’t really explain that one.

I suppose I could go back to the genre. I could just put in some effort, do lots of training missions, read advice on reddit. Nowadays though I have less free time, and that puts me off games with steep learning curves. I don’t want to have to watch youtube videos, just to understand how to fire a missile. The prospect of doing hours of homework to get to grips with a game is neither entertainment, nor a productive use of time.

As well as giving up on flight sims, I’ve never even written much here about those ones that I played back in my youth. I guess I never felt competent enough to give a properly informed overview. Furthermore, I have little knowledge of the modern state of the genre to give any sort of frame of reference for the oldies. Still, I thought I might free myself from the need to provide any sort of objective review, and share some of my experiences of playing them.

Lucasarts sims
This trilogy of World War 2 sims ran from 1988 to 1991. Each featured a different theatre of the war, and let you fly for both sides. I missed the first one, Battlehawks 1942, based on the war in the Pacific. However, the next entry, Their Finest Hour: The Battle Of Britain was my first real flight sim. In fact it was one of the first major commercial games of any sort that I played, on our family 386 (after years of playing shareware and early 80s relics on our old amstrad 1512).

This was where I learned the fundamentals of flight, along with basic skills for combat such as deflection shooting to hit a moving target. I spent many hours patriotically shooting down Messercshmits and Heinkels over the English Channel. Stukas were the easiest target – despite their fearsome reputation as dive bombers, they were fairly defenseless against fighter planes.

Even though two decades on the 5.25″ disks within are useless to me, I’ve still got the packaging, as it was real big-box luxury. For a start you had the extensive manual, which was obligatory for a sim. Also though there was a newsletter from Lucasarts, and the box art was an actual painting! It makes the later days of DVD-style cases look a bit sad.

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe meanwhile, was set during USAF’s bombing campaign over western europe in the latter half of the war. The title refers to advanced nazi planes that used jet and rocket propulsion, which at the time were brand new technologies. Their goal was to challenge allied air superiority and break the bomber formations that were battering the third reich.

You know, I loaded Swotl up for the first time in two decades just to take a picture or two, and immediately recognised the thumping of heavy 30mm cannons.

There was certainly a thrill in piloting the worlds first fighter jet, hurtling past helpless plodding american fighters. This was followed by a sense of relief, that the Secret weapons were too few and too late to make a difference. If the Luftwaffe had possessed more of them, they could have devastated the USAF and RAF.

As well as flying fighters, both of these games let you take control of medium and heavy bombers. That had a certain novelty, as you could take control of any of the defensive gun turrets – the B17 in Swotl had 6 of them. However, I never had a clue how to actually successfully bomb something. You’re at several kilometers up and this is well before the age of guided munitions. So you try and line up the target through some sort of primitive sighting device, open a hatch and then just drop a few tons of high explosives. Good luck with that!

Microprose Sims
The stable of flight sims from Microprose was once one of the mainstays of PC gaming. Looking back, I think they somehow struck an ideal balance between realism, and accessibility. They weren’t arcadey shoot-em-ups, and certainly felt authentic. Yet also they weren’t ridiculously complicated or totally unforgiving. Reading the 200 page manual was highly recommended, but not absolutely essential just to get off the ground. If there were sims out like that today, I might just be tempted back.

I played a great deal of two of these. In F117 Stealth Fighter 2.0, I was creeping around the night skies bombing Libyan shoe factories. Or, er, hopefully something more military in nature. Stealth certainly played a major part in your operations, with gauges to show how close enemy radar was to spotting you, so you had to either pick your way around missile sites, or risk fighting your way past them. What I wasn’t doing much of was landing. I think I only ever managed a couple.

Also there was Gunship 2000, which was all about thundering around at treetop height blowing up soviet tanks. It gave you wide range of American helicopters, although I never really saw the point in dinky little scouts and always took the heavily armed Apache Gunship. I also had to play with the controls set to easy mode, which basically means the “go forward or backwards” control doesn’t affect your altitude.

Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat
“It’s a great day for flying” said Chuck’s tinny digitised voice when you loaded this up. He would also chastise you for screwing up a mission. Nowadays Dosbox’s soundblaster emulation goes all screwy and distorts the speech clips, so he just mutters some kind of garbled demonic curse.

This sim’s main selling point, aside from the celebrity endorsement, was that it spanned the three major conflicts during which Yeager served. Each of these saw a new generation of fighter aircraft. First up you have the second world war, which was all about propellers and machine-guns. Next is Korea, one of the first major conflicts where jet planes were commonly used. So everything is going about 200mph faster. Then you have Vietnam, where the planes are even speedier, but also now carrying radar and guided missiles.

The game had plenty of historically based missions, but also a custom mission builder that let you freely mix up all the available aircraft from the three eras. So of course I’d gleefully, and rather unsportingly, go chasing second world war bombers with technology two decades more advanced.

Looking Glass Studios cyberpunk first person shooter System Shock, released in 1994, spent many long years as abandonware. Then last year, Night Dive Studios came along, sorted out the legal rights, and released an enhanced version via digital distribution. It was recompiled to run natively in Windows, and featured slightly sharper graphics and greatly improved mouselook controls. There was much rejoicing from certain sections of PC gaming, fanboys like yours truly who hold up Shock as one of the classics of the 90s.

However, Night Dive have clearly decided Shock deserves a more extensive modernisation. In fact they’re going and totally remaking the game, using the Unity engine and have released a bit of pre-alpha footage to show us how its going.

(brought to our attention by RPS)

Looks like they’re keeping the original level geometry. The level of detailing has been greatly improved – see those pipes along the maintenance corridors, and we have modern fancy lighting and texturing. Still, it’s all based around those square-cross-section corridors. I can see that being divisive, since gamers might not see the point on piling details on such old fashioned, blocky geometry. Or they might find it still feels suitably claustrophobic, like something out of Aliens. I’m more in the latter camp right now.

One highlight of the vid is that chamber with the windows. In the original game at this point, you just see pixel stars scrolling past. So okay, space, but you quickly move on. Now we see Saturn, half in shadow from the distant sun, moving across as the station rotates. That’s rather more impressive, the sort of thing that prompts you stop to look at for a moment and consider your situation. You’re utterly isolated, a zillion miles from earth. It’s a good example of adding something to the game’s atmosphere, without having to really change anything fundamental.

I’m less keen on the lack of music. An interview with polygon states they are ” Changing up the classic chiptune soundtrack to something a bit more subtle”. I realise strong melodies as you play are a bit out of fashion nowadays, but the old tunes really helped set the scene. They were moody, haunting, ideal for wandering an abandoned station filled with murderous cyborgs.

It’s very early days yet, of course. Here are some things I am pondering!
-how will this handle Cyberspace? A lot of players found these sections, where you float around in wireframe tunnels, to be disorienting and irritating.
-Shock, being of the old school, isn’t the sort of game to put pointers onscreen telling you exactly where to go next. Information isn’t super hard to find, but you do have to search a bit and pay attention to instructions and clues. I wonder if any concessions will be made to modern gaming.
-Energy weapons could do with some sort of boost; it always seemed preferable to save batteries for cyber upgrades and stick to regular guns.
-I hope the rocket boots remain, even if they served basically no purpose other than to fling you into a wall.

A couple of years back I talked about the Morrowind Overhaul, a huge bundle package of graphics upgrades for the third Elder Scrolls title. That’s one way to modernise an RPG that’s now over a decade old. Another approach is to recreate all of its content as a total conversion for one of its own sequels.

And thus, as I was reminded recently in a post on RPS we have: skywind. You’re playing Skyrim, but you’re back in Morrowind, complete with crabshell towns, spiky purple ruined temples, and… maybe Cliff racers. Oh god. I guess if this is to be properly authentic they have to bring back Cliff Racers.

I can see a few of advantages to going down this route. I’m not a graphics wizard but as great as the Overhaul looked, I imagine you can get even more impressive and convincing results using a modern engine, rather than just sticking sharper textures and more foliage into an outdated one.

Apart from the graphics, Skyrim is also a product of steady refinement towards more slick and user-friendly gameplay rules and mechanic. I won’t miss the old Morrowind combat with its invisible dice-rolls, leading to lots of frustrating flailing at bandits at early levels. In modern Elder Scrolls, if it looks like you hit that bandit, you actually did.

Modern fast-travel systems are appreciated too. Morrowind used to make you walk to your boat (or giant bug-taxi), or use teleport systems with limited options for destinations, and many remote locations could only be reached on foot. Now you only have to walk anywhere the first time; subsequent trips can be done instantly with a click of a mouse on the map. While I feel like I lose Serious RPG Fan points for admitting it, that’s kind of a relief. These games are time consuming enough that I don’t want to be forced to repeat any journeys.

I might miss the old spell-making system though. It gave great freedom to tinker, experiment and produce spells to your specifications, mixing various spell effects, strengths and durations. You could do a straight fireball, you could balance fire damage with more subtle “weakness to fire” effects, you could do slow damage over time instead of all the power hitting in one go, you could mix in some lightning too.

It also let you produce ridiculous, pointless or just plain broken effects but that was part of the charm. If you really wanted to paralyse yourself, or make your enenemies harder to hit with chameleon spell, or boost the agility of mudcrabs then sure. Morrowind wouldn’t try to stop your madness. Nowadays though you just have a set of premade spells, and I do feel something has been lost in the process of streamlining.

Looking at other matters, I guess they’ll be keeping skill perks, ie that tree of options for boosts to each of your abilties, which makes raising skills like Alchemy a bit more interesting than just slowly climbing numbers. I wonder if they’ll bring back skills that have been lost over iterations of Elder Scrolls, like Medium Armour or individual weapon types. I don’t really know how much freedom they have to alter the basics!

Anyway Skywind is currently in a closed alpha. Given my huge backlog of unplayed games, and limited gaming time, I’m not sure I can really justify returning to Morrowind Yet Again anyway. But if I get a chance to try this I’ll post again with my thoughts.

And so we come to the end of this anniversary series of articles. We’ve gone from a glossy video-laden epic, to a flawed movie spin-off, via whatever football or racing games happened to be cheap that week.

In the last piece, it all got slightly serious as I talked a bit about Deus Ex and how it helped me when I wasn’t having a great time health-wise. That theme sort of continues here. (And, sorry Sid Meier fans, there isn’t a lot about the game itself).

Hope you’ve enjoyed this series. We might have more anniversary things planned, but if not, there’ll certainly be some more reviews of old games at some point.

When I played…Covert Action continued »