Ahoy, mateys!

A tale of adventure on the high seas be awaiting ye, if ye dare follow the treasure map (by which we mean link) to a review of Sid Meier’s Pirates!

So the other day I posted some positive opinions on Diablo 3. This weekend I’ve had a chance to see it from another perspective, by trying to play on a crappy 1 Mb/s rural internet connection. Last night I didn’t have too much trouble, but today it’s unplayable; the game chucks me out a few seconds after logging in.

It’s especially galling when we consider that the console version works offline. I suppose the justification is, keeping a large portion of the game’s information on the server side is a defense against both piracy, and the sort of hacking that afflicted Diablo 2. With consoles, both of these are harder to do so the need for protection is reduced.

I’m back to my 57-jiggabits broadband tonight anyway. Still, it’s a reminder of the appeal of getting the happily offline-available Torchlight on our favourite DRM-free source, gog.com.

(PS I’ve no idea why the comments were turned off in my last post. Sorry!)

Recently I finally caved in and bought Diablo 3. I’d been a bit wary of it over the past couple years; as I sometimes find action-rpgs become a repetitive chore to slog through. In fact I remember posting here a couple of years ago thinking I was maybe simply bored of the genre. However, for the past week or so I’ve been totally hooked, once again slaughtering my way through a host of Demons and picking up stacks of shiny loot. It’s just as addictive as this sort of faster paced dungeon-crawling experience should be. Blizzard have refined their arpg framework, making it ever more slick and user friendly, but also addressed problems that previously could make playing for more than a few hours tedious or discouraging.

A lot comes down to how it handles development of character skills. Previously you had the “tree” system where with each level-up you were granted a point to gain a new skill, or upgrade an existing one, and with certain choices new options became available for next time. Originally in Diablo 2 your choices were permanent so if you made a crappy character or just got bored with the current abilities then, well, tough. The only option was to start again. Later patches let you reset skills, but only a few times. Titan Quest, following this sort of model, gave some reset options but only to a limited extent.

With Diablo 3 you basically have 6 ability slots for each character. Typically 2 slots represent stuff you’ll use constantly, so bound to mouse buttons, others are stuff like situational abilities, cooldowns and constant-effect. As you level you gain new skills to choose for each slot. So for the mage the primary slots might be stuff like the freeze ray, fireballs, lightning shots etc whilst the others are emergency teleport, defensive shields, or panic-button “root everyone in place while you run away” spells.

Each ability chosen can then have a further customisation option selected – so the wizard’s lightning might be one big blast, lots of little shots, one that adds freezing effects and so on. So it might sound like there’s a lot of options to choose here, and there are. But here’s the important thing – none of it’s permanent. You can change any or all of your chosen abilities at any time (except right in the middle of a fight). No choices affect how your character handles further down the line.

I guess some RPG veterans might bemoan the lack of lasting consequences in your character development choices. Myself though, I welcome it. I spend an hour with my wizard shooting magic missiles and freeze beams, then change tack and have him use the disintegration ray and lightning. Just for the sake of variety, or to field test some newly available options. It holds my interest for longer periods of time, and if I have a crappy build then, eh, can change it when I need to.

There are a few other minor quality of life tweaks – automatically picking up gold, unlimited ability to teleport back to town to sell stuff whenever I like. Also they’ve thrown in an item-crafting facility, which I think is quite popular in RPGs these days.

Diablo 2’s system of followers has been expanded on too. You have a choice of 3 characters each with very different abilities of their own. They also have their own personalities and backstories, so you can feel a little more attached to them as they follow you into battle I tend to take along the Templar as he complements the wizard quite nicely; he can charge in and get monsters attention while I hang back at a safe distance. Also he boosts the representation of Yorkshiremen in videogames. (I can’t think of many others. Sean Bean in Oblivion?)

Graphically I don’t think it was cutting edge for 2012 but I suppose that’s never been Blizzard’s priority. It does look good, though. I recall some fan gripes about it being too colourful, which is bizarre as vast swathes of the second game were yellow or green. It’s still got that ominous atmosphere to it, that reminder that you’re up against not just monsters but the forces of evil itself, crawling up from hell.

Regarding a couple of other concerns that were raised originally – that auction house that used real money is gone now. I don’t know exactly how players felt about it, for people but I imagine feeling pressured to spend ££ for weapons to participate in high-level multiplayer wouldn’t be fun. Also, the game does require you to be constantly online, as if playing an MMO. This doesn’t bother me personally as I have BT infinity, but it still seems kind of un-necessary.

So all round it looks to me like a sensible evolution of Diablo 2, and a great piece of work from Blizzard, accessible and enormously entertaining. I still giggle every time my mage hits the Archon button and briefly turns spitting death rays all round, and the game happily announces I’ve just scythed down 12 monsters in 2 seconds. Then pick through the resulting loot whilst Templar guy makes exuberant noises about how much fun that was. There’s still innately something super-repetitive about this sort of game, but from what I’ve seen so far they’ve set up the right sort of satisfaction and rewards to keep me coming back for more.

Hi there.

Today we’re looking at an old pinball game: Pinball Fantasies. For reasons that will be explained, I also decided to go back and write a little more about its sequel, Pinball Illisions, too.

Currently playing: FIFA 14

I’m not sure if it’s my inability to get on with the 360 pad, my sloth-like reflexes and arthritic fingers, or just the fact that I haven’t practised enough, but I’m finding the latest FIFA fairly hard going. I’ll reserve judgement on the main game for now, but in terms of presentation, part of the draw of FIFA is that it has all the licenses and money behind it to deliver an authentic experience, as opposed to the enjoyable but intermittently ludicrous alternative reality offered by the older PES titles.

It seems to me that the more EA strive for perfection, the more it jars when they miss the mark. The decision, for example, to have Alan McInally interrupt your game with updates from other matches initially seems an impressive touch, but it soon becomes tiresome as you realise a) his performance isn’t that convincing; b) these updates repeat themselves very quickly; and c) you actually don’t care about what’s happening in the other matches. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard Martin “Puma World Football ’98” Tyler refer to a player as ‘this lad’ in real life, which he does repeatedly here.

Most crucially, though, the feeling persists that, for all the real names and photos, you’re never quite immersed in another world of football in the same way you are with, say, the Championship Manager/Football Manager series. I mean, they’ve improved things quite a bit since the screen below made me despair, but it still sort of sums up my feelings on what they’re getting wrong:

Fan imagines Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a LucasArts-era adventure game

Some artwork of scenes from TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, drawn in the style of a classic Lucasarts adventure.

For a 30-something nerd and Joss Whedon fan like myself it’s a perfect combination of two different sources of 90s nostalgia. If such a game was to actually exist I’d be reaching for my wallet in microseconds.

I’ve never talked much about flight sims as frankly I’m pretty bad at them, and aren’t really qualified to offer much commentary, beyond subjective experience. One I did play a bit though, back in my childhood, was F-117A from Microprose. which puts you in command of the USAF’s stealth fighter. Rather than flashy Top-Gun style heroics, this is aerial warfare of a slower, more cautious nature. It’s your job to evade radar, sneak past enemy fighters, then drop lots of heavy ordnance on some bridge in Libya.

he gives a thumbs up but that was the wrong bridge, you muppet

Back in those days, Microprose were well known for this sort of military simulator. I don’t know what hardcore sim fans would make of features like the flight modelling and controls nowadays, and I’m sure the genre has advanced, but I think it was deemed pretty realistic back in 1991. Myself, I thought it managed a decent balance between being accessible and feeling reasonably challenging and authentic. Or to put it another way, I completed several successful strike missions without turning my hundred-million-dollar warplane into a flaming wreck, but I soon decided that manual landings were too much hard work.

It was also kind of atmospheric, cruising over the desert under under sunset skies in my alien-looking black jet. One key part of your interface is a little gauge showing how visible you currently are, and how close enemy radar is to picking you out; if I recall correctly this would depend on what maneuvers you were pulling, how high you were going, whether or not the weapons bays were open and so on. That created quite a sense of tension, as I picked my way through threats such as SAM launchers, watching the detection indicator creep upwards. Change course and risk blundering near another enemy, or risk it and plough on ahead?

For those of you who might this appealing, gog.com have now added F117 to their lineup. I hope in time they bring us some more of the old Microprose sims; I’d particularly like to see Gunship 2000.

And now, some fun stealth fighter related facts!

1: This game is Stealth Fighter 2.0. The first game was based on the F19, which apparently only existed in rumours and Tom Clancy novels.
2: The weird shape of the aircraft is to help deflect radar signals. Futuristic as it looks, the US Air Force actually retired the F117 six years ago.
3: The real F117 has no air-to-air capability, so I have no idea why it has the F-for-Fighter designation. So while it’s great for really dedicated stealth fans, the airborne version of Thief players, it’s perhaps a little limiting for everyone else. So Microprose offer you the choice of the real jet, or their own version which has a cannon and anti-air missiles, at the cost of being a bit less stealthy.

Hello there.

Continuing a series which we like to call “Old racing games that Rik will write lots of words about but ultimately give either a score of 5 or 6 to” [We told you to change the name – FFG Board] we have a review of a game called Juiced.

Yesterday the extended Support Phase of windows XP ended. That was the last stage in its official life cycle, where users were getting security updates but not a lot else. So as far as Microsoft is concerned, that’s all folks, XP is now finished. Unless you pay them anyway, apparently our government is shelling out £5.5mil to keep it going a little while longer.

It’s the end of an era, then. Or at least a formal end, even if a majority of users had already moved on to new systems. I’m not enough of a tech expert to say on how great an OS XP was, other than to comment that it always seemed pretty stable and user-friendly, and it served us well for many years. Certainly, it dominated the 00’s. Lots of us kept using it past the release of the widely disliked Vista, until microsoft got back on form with Win 7. Rik in fact kept true to his promise to stick with XP until the bitter end, and has only now upgraded.

Anyway I thought this would be a good moment to revisit our how to run old games piece, where we list the various options open to retro gamers on modern Windows PCs. When we wrote it, we both had XP in mind when we said “modern windows”, and now of course there have been three major new iterations of the OS. (four if you count 8.1 as a major iteration).

Fortunately, the general picture hasn’t changed a lot. Generally, your solution for running MS-DOS games is the emulator DOSBox. In years past that had speed issues with more demanding titles from late in the DOS days (such as first person shooters) but on a modern PC you should get a decent framerate.

For old adventures like Monkey Island, you have a choice of ScummVM, written specifically for such games, or sticking with DOSBox. I generally prefer the former since it’s a bit more user friendly, with a built in GUI, but these days it’s largely a matter of personal preference.

Stuff from the windows 95 days may become increasingly problematic, especially if you’re using a 64-bit system which will not run 16-bit software. We don’t yet have an equivalent to Dosbox for this generation, and I think Rik’s answer was to resort to keeping an old beige win98 box lurking around. You could try virtualisation software if you’re feeling really dedicated although you’ll need your own copy of Win 95 or 98, and I don’t know if it’s fast enough for gaming purposes.

What is worth remarking on though, is that since we first wrote that piece, GoG.com have steadily expanded their range and become one of our favourite sources of classic games. Anything you buy there should be ready to run on a modern PC, either bundled with dosbox or patched up, with a minimum of tinkering. Same goes for oldies found on Steam.

If you’re a windows user reading this, odds are you’re on Win 7. I’ve yet to encounter any issues with Windows 8 that didn’t already exist with 7, but if I learn a game we wrote about is newly broken I’ll update the relevant article. If you’re a Linux user you’re on your own, and are probably enough of a tech-head to sort it out for yourself!