Hello there.

From boldly going where no-one has gone before, I’m back on more familiar territory today, with the fourth game in the Broken Sword series: The Angel of Death.

Hello everyone. We’re quite fond of our discussion pieces; they prompt us to try games we might not have otherwise noticed, they let us bounce ideas off each other and they also remind us is an amusing manner that we’re frequently actually pretty bad at videogames. Even though we spend a lot of time playing videogames. And we are, here, writing on a blog about videogames.

So here’s our latest offering: Star Trek: Away Team.

Last week budget specialists Mastertronic announced they were moving away from the physical, retail market to focus on digital distribution. Essentially, this means the end of a number of boxed budget lines, including one of my own favourites, Sold Out.

I guess such a move is hardly surprising in the world of Steam and GOG megasales, and the bare bones, disc-only nature of the Sold Out releases mean that they don’t even have any appeal to collectors of boxed games who tend to want the original packaging, manual etc. (Incidentally, I remember the Replay line of budget games just having a yellow sleeve over the original packaging which you could remove and discard, and then pretend you paid full price, but I think they gave up on this after a while).

It is rather sad though for the generation of UK gamers who fondly recall impetuously taking advantage of the ongoing 3 for £10 deals (usually there was only one or two that you actually wanted, and you’d take a punt on something else to round out the deal). If the shop you were in didn’t have what you wanted, you could get the same deal ordering from Mastertronic direct.

It was great, particularly for the young, the hard-up, and the cheapskate – or anyone saddled with old technology, for whatever reason – for whom it gave an opportunity to sample ageing greats or unfairly-ignored games. Even as Sold Out titles were themselves discontinued, their re-release ensured a plentiful supply of second hand copies that could be snapped up on eBay for a reasonable price.

Going back further than that, of course, Mastertronic were masters of the 8-bit budget scene, offering games at a £1.99 price point, some of which were remarkably good despite never having been released previously (budget games weren’t always just old games for cheap, you know).

Are indie games the new budget games? What does the future hold for physical media? Who knows? Not me. All I want to offer now is a hearty thanks and farewell to the boxed budget title – it’s certainly given me a lot of gaming over the years – as well as the best of luck to the guys at Mastertronic themselves.

Ok, so here I am shamelessly copying Stoo and looking back at some of my favourite game intros. I might just put a break in for those of you on the front page though, so all these embedded videos don’t slow down the site… *picks up hammer and chisel*
Favourite game intros: part deux continued »

Hi there!

You may have noticed that there’s a major international sporting event taking place at the moment. [Yes – the Commonwealth Games – FFG Reader]. Of course, it’s the World Cup of Football! Who will win? It’s so exciting!

With a review that’s as up-to-date and relevant as this mysteriously reduced-to-clear limited-edition bottle of Budweiser, here’s International Superstar Soccer 3.

(P.S: I don’t see what’s so ‘limited edition’ about putting beer into a tin shaped like a bottle. All the metallic taste of a tin, at the increased price of a bottled beer!)

A well crafted introduction captures your attention, and entices you to dive in and enjoy more of the experience on offer. Maybe it starts an alluring story with characters you want to see more of. It might give you an idea of action you can take control of, or inspire you to go on quest, or take control of an empire. Or maybe it just looks and sounds awesome.

Go back 20-odd years and an intro usually meant some kind of VGA sequence with midi music. Later, full motion video became popular, built out of pre-rendered 3D graphics and sometimes the use of live actors. In those days it was generally understood that these kinds of intro would be more visually impressive than the rest of the game, given the limitations of the sprites or boxy polygons that might make up in-game graphics.

In more recent years, though, game engines have increased in sophistication. So it’s more often the case that a game’s own graphics can be used to create a realistic and cinematic sequence, without the need for something created separately. The in-engine approach has in turn made it more popular to incorporate the intro into opening playable section of the game, rather than it being a purely passive experience.

This isn’t a list of Greatest Intros Ever because I don’t pretend to have widespread enough experience, and besides titles like that are rather clickbaity. Rather, this is just a few of my personal favourites in PC Gaming.

UFO – Enemy Unknown – 1994

This one is immediately eye-catching, drawn as a series of colourful, animated, comic book panels. Dynamic and action-packed, it’s not exactly representative of the tense, cautious turn-based game to which it’s attached. Still it’s one of my favourites of its day, and it does at least show us what in general terms UFO is all about – aliens terrorise the population, X-Com agents swing into action to save the day.

Half-Life – 1998

A defining example of a great introduction that is incorporated into beginning of the playable game itself. We begin with the start of another day at work for Gordon Freeman. He travels through the Black Mesa research complex on a monorail, listens to announcements, gets grumbled at by superiors, finds his gear and shows up at the lab.

It might seem rather mundane, but it’s doing vital work in setting the scene. When suddenly something goes horribly wrong with the experiment, we’re already immersed in Gordon’s world, and ready to try and get him out of the ensuing crisis.

Thief – the Dark Project -1998

Moody and atmospheric, this one features some great hand-drawn artwork at a time when others might have used pre-rendered CGI. It introduces us to Garrett’s city and shows him going about a typical heist, and also gives some brief glimpses of the supernatural forces at work. So it sets the tone for the game in a highly effective manner.

Cannon Fodder – 1993

Photos of the developers in uniforms, presented as the cast of a war movie, along with a cheerful song about war and killing. This doesn’t remotely tell us what to expect of the gameplay, but it does set up Cannon Fodder’s irreverent satire on the brutal meat-grinder that is warfare.

(I’m cheating slightly here, that’s the Amiga intro. The PC version, iirc, lacked the vocals).

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis – 1992

An early example of the in-game, interactive approach to an intro. You have to solve a basic puzzle to get from one room to the next, and with each new room some credits are displayed. The interface is simplified from that of the main game, making this a gentle but intriguing beginning to the adventure.

This month’s Retro Gamer had a piece on the old arcade game RoadBlasters, and its many home ports, and since it always was a bit of an old favourite of mine, I was inspired to give it another go.

But first, I was moved to revisit another, similar, title, also mentioned in passing in the RG piece. Overlander was a home computer rival to RoadBlasters, based around similar themes of fuel scarcity and, well, the combination of driving, avoiding death, and blasting other road users to pieces. Retro Gamer reckons that, “A lot of computer owners prefer this to the home ports of RoadBlasters, and it’s easy to see why…consider it to be the thinking man’s RoadBlasters.”

Hmm…well, that’s not how I remember it at the time, although the Atari ST version of RoadBlasters wasn’t really the best. Overlander was one of a number of games that came bundled with the family ST. I loved that pack of free games, because many of the included titles were the type that we never would have owned otherwise, with my parents favouring more critically-acclaimed and worthy efforts, such as graphic adventures, that the whole family could enjoy.

The main things I remember about Overlander are that a) it was pretty unforgiving and b) at various points you actually needed to conserve fuel by driving a bit more slowly (at least until you could buy the converter that made fuel more efficient). Revisiting it now, I don’t seem any better equipped to deal with the difficulty, to the extent that I haven’t even been able to verify whether my memories of the fuel conservation necessity are correct or not. It’s definitely not a patch on RoadBlasters though.

I first played RoadBlasters on the Amstrad CPC and, by the standard of most 8-bit coin-op conversions, it was pretty good. My favourite version, though, was the Atari Lynx port, which was super-smooth, lightning fast, and generally pretty awesome (a fact acknowledged by the RG article). I think it was possibly my favourite Lynx game, in fact, but although I still have my old Lynx 2 somewhere, I wasn’t about to go digging around for it and dusting it off. By all accounts the MegaDrive version is the best (exluding the arcade original of course) and thanks to the power of emulation (and, er, those places on the internet where you can find the things you might need to make emulation useful and fun) I’ve been wasting a few evenings chasing green and red fuel blobs and blasting those pesky motorbikes off the road. And crashing. And running out of fuel.

A long time ago I thought about hunting down a copy of Midway’s Arcade Treasures so this seems like the perfect excuse. And it has Spy Hunter too!

Good day.

As the festival of football continues in Brazil, we bring you coverage of a game that’s as terrible as England’s performances: Actua Soccer.

I don’t know about you, but I thought the Steam summer sale was a bit of a bust this year. In a way, of course, I’m glad, because it means I wasn’t too tempted to add yet more titles to the backlog, although I’ve long since fallen off the ‘no new games in 2014’ wagon.

One title I did pick up was Gone Home, which was one of the most talked-about games of last year – although, being an out-of-touch old so-and-so, I didn’t really pay much attention to that talk at the time.

For once, such ignorance probably did me a favour, seeing as you’re probably best off approaching Gone Home while knowing virtually nothing about it. I’m not about to ruin it for you now, either, other than to say that I really did enjoy it a lot.

All you really need to know is that it’s an adventure with plenty of exploration but virtually no puzzles, and it’s fairly short (2-3 hours max I reckon) – so if such things bother you, make sure you acquire it at an acceptable price point.

Any further explanation is pretty redundant. The mechanics will be obvious to anyone who’s ever played a game (and even those who haven’t), while uncovering the story in little pieces – from the very start – is pretty much the whole point.

(I should point out that such secrecy is advised not because there’s anything mind-bendingly shocking to uncover here, more that the uncovering itself is such a fundamental part of the game that to say anything beforehand is to spoil a rather large proportion of the overall experience.)

Having finished the game and taken some time to look at the reviews, the general consensus seems to be that Gone Home is a triumph, a touching and original title that also represents a refreshing counterpoint to the macho nonsense that makes up the majority of the gaming world. I’d go along with that.

Best of all, though, it’s set in the 90s. What more could you ask for?

Hello.

It’s time for the World Cup. A time when people who don’t like football get bored by the constant talk of football, and everyone else gets bored by the people who like to go on about how much they don’t like football.

Anyway, in a vaguely topical update, we’ve reviewed a football game: Sensible Soccer: European Club Edition. (Don’t worry – it has international teams too).