Hi all.

I’ve been on holiday. I had a good rest, thank you – thanks for asking.

Due to the wonders of modern technology I was able to indulge in some retro gaming (and writing) while I was away. So there are a few bits and pieces waiting to be tidied up and finished and – hopefully – added to the site over the coming days and weeks.

Anyway, for tonight, we have a holiday-themed game. Well, it starts off as a holiday anyway. Somebody’s done a murder, and only you can find the killer, in Delphine’s Cruise for a Corpse.

So a while back I had my first introduction to the world of Fremium gaming, with EA’s Theme-Park for iOS and android.

Here’s how it works: you buy rides and shops, which periodically generate either game money or experience points. Pathways are all already in place, and the park is divided into sections that can be themed (western, fururistic etc) Most of the time the only maintenance you need to do is clean up puke. Actually, you do a lot of puke-cleaning. Rides can be manually worked (wave your finger around the screen) to make them churn out experience faster but may break in the process

Initially you only have crappy rides available. New ones become available as you gain level, but progress is slow and your income to pay for them is meagre anyway. Which of course is where the Fremium bit comes in – pay real money for tokens that let you put down superior rides right away. Some rides, if I recall right, are *only* available for real money.

Some of these rides can easily set you back $5 a shot. And remember, a park needs many rides. Amongst the the most expensive, you could spend like $60!! Of course you don’t *have* to fork out cash, but the game is painfully tedious otherwise, waiting for your few meagre rides to churn out game-money and cleaning up yet more puke in the interim. I can easily see impatient kids ringing up bills for their parents here.

Except, even if you do spend real money it’s still probably goddamn tedious because all you do is plonk stuff down, occasionally click it, and clean up puke. That’s it, the pretty much the sum total of gameplay on offer. The game is only briefly addictive in the most mindless sense of, it’s been half an hour and you want to push buttons to hear reward noises and see some numbers go up. It’s an awful, soulless, cash grabbing automaton of a game, cynically dressed in the clothes of a beloved early-90s classic.

The only reason I ended up playing was because my GF enjoyed Theme Park as a kid, and this seemed like the easiest way to revisit it given that she’s not enough of a nerd to go faffing around with dosbox. Since then gog.com have added the original to their selection, as usual all wrapped up a user-friendly installer, so I might just buy her that instead.

Anyway, I was inspired to post this when I saw that another former Bullfrog title,  Dungeon Keeper has a fremium tablet\smartphone incarnation now too. It looks like it might hang on to more features of the original, but still throws lots of paywalls in your way.

I wonder what will be next – Syndicate? (only 300 Credits to give your guy a minigun! Credits cost $20 for 500.)

Hello everyone. I don’t do reviews so much these days, but have been feeling steadily more ashamed as Rik continues to churn out articles like a pro. So here’s one humble effort – mid 2000s shooter Quake IV.

I have something else in the works, of a much earlier generation, for you grizzled early-90s veterans out there. See you next time!

Pointed out to me by a friend on facebook:

TIE Fighter soundtrack updated by Laserschwert

The game originally used midi music, played through the dinky little synth chip on your adlib or soundblaster card. This chap however has instead used some professional-grade orchestral sample libraries. As much as I have a soft spot for the old fm synthesis days, I have to admit this sounds a lot more impressive.

Of course, TIE fighter had a great soundtrack in the first place. The original composer came up with pieces that feel mysterious or grandiose, without being permanently parked in the realm of Obviously Villainous. After all, despite you working for the Empire all this isn’t just a game about blowing up transports full of refugees or somesuch. It does try giving you a sense of how, an Imperial Pilot could feel he’s on the right side, bringing order to the galaxy. So the themes and fanfares need to be inspiring in their own way, stirring you to go forth and do your duty to the Empire.

What you’ll find here is basically is all the music from between missions – cutscenes, menu screens and so on. I especially love the “Tech Specs room” theme. Sadly he’s not done the in-mission music but that’s understandable. It consisted of a multitude of little snippets that were assembled on the fly (using Lucasarts iMuse system), reacting to events as they happened. I imagine it would be quite a lot of work to assemble all that into a satisfying few-minutes-long standalone piece.

(ps if you’re looking for Actual Content, Rik did a great roundup on Ea Sports Cricket 97 a couple of days ago)

Hi there!

Wow, two updates in a week. Well, if our discussion of hack and slash RPGs wasn’t for you, how does this review of a really old cricket game grab you? *chorus of boos*

It would have arrived sooner, if the recent Ashes series hadn’t been such an unmitigated tale of woe – but it has, so that sort of put me off a little bit. Sporting disappointment is always compounded when you’ve made the rather foolish decision to stay up until 3am to listen to your team get hammered.

Usually, cricket games are about as much fun as doing just that, although this one isn’t too bad actually – here’s Cricket 97 for you.

Evening, all! It’s time for another discussion piece. We aim to do something a little different each time, and certainly we’ve not got much coverage of Japanese RPGs on this site in general. So today we’re looking exactly at just that sort of game, with Ys: The Oath in Felghana.

Hello everyone. With the year drawing to a close, it’s time to take a quick look back at all things FFG in 2013.

In terms of content, things were pretty quiet during the early months, as the not-inconsiderable task of porting content from the old site to the new one took up the bulk of our time. In an effort to continue our discussion features, as well as actually play some of the modern classics that everyone else is always raving on about, we started off with a (spoiler-tastic) discussion of Mass Effect. Although the end product probably wasn’t very helpful as a review, both the game, and the discussion, were a lot of fun.

The next ‘proper’ discussion review on the schedule was an RPG of a slightly different vintage,  Shadowcaster, although it became a solo effort after yours truly wimped out early on. Later in the year, Jo joined us to chat about the edutainment classic, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? – but although we had other discussions planned, that was it for our new review format in 2013.

While Stoo offered his thoughts on Worms, in the form of our long-neglected second opinion feature, I was revisiting a true oldie from my Atari ST days – Midwinter. To my surprise, it had aged surprisingly well, and becoming engrossed in, and completing, the game some 20 years after I last played it was one of my favourite moments of the year.

Ignoring my oft-repeated promise to not play any more games based on the TV show, I added a review of the hugely-inconsequential CSI: NY to our database in March, by which time it was full steam ahead on the new site, which was finally unveiled at the beginning of June. It was sad to say goodbye to the old design that had served us so well for many years (even more so for my colleague, who actually put the thing together from scratch) but hopefully WordPress will better allow us to add tweaks and improvements without too much fuss.

For the rest of the year, content seemed to fit into one of two categories – abandonware from the early 90s, and more modern stuff from the middle of the last decade. Like Midwinter, reviews of the likes of Crazy Cars III, European Champions and Corruption were motivated by a sense of unfinished business from the 16-bit era, and it was fun to go back and revisit them all. Meanwhile, the likes of FlatOut 2, Test Drive Unlimited and PES 2008 represented some of my favourite titles of more recent years, and it was good to be able to write about, and recommend them, here.

Oh, and the JMan dropped by to offer a guest review of the first Euro Truck Simulator game, causing me to believe that I’d probably gone a little easy on the amateurish efforts of King of the Road a few years back, as well as stirring my interest in the critically well-received sequel (since purchased at a low, low price thanks to the Steam sale, breaking my no-games-in-2013-embargo in the process).

With any luck, the year ahead should offer a similar amount of more of the same. Aside from projects already in progress, we have no fixed plan – and, as always, we’re happy to take requests.

Thanks for reading, and all the best to you in 2014.

Hi there!

Hope you all had a good Christmas.

Our final review for the year is Corruption, which gives the site a couple of firsts. It’s our first review of a text adventure, and also the first time my stated intention to review a text adventure wasn’t just a glib throwaway line at the end of a newspost attempting to assuage some guilt at having covered a reasonably modern game. Huzzah!

Readers may or may not remember my vow to not buy any games in 2013. As New Year’s resolutions go, it lasted longer than most, although in the end, I didn’t quite make it. The lure of the Christmas Steam sale, and the prospect of transporting fake manure from fake Grimsby to fake Carlisle in a fake truck proved too much to resist.

In one way it seems a shame not to see it through the extra few days to the new year. But this was never really about contriving a sense of achievement out of an extended period of self-denial. If it had, the whole thing would have been a lot harder, and I would have been feverishly been counting down the days until it was over.

To tell you the truth, though, it wasn’t all that difficult at all. At first, it felt a little strange not to be making my usual lunchtime trips to the Computer Exchange. (Instead, I went to Superdrug, and probably went overboard on keeping the household stocked up on toothpaste and shower gel in those early months.) And yes, I was occasionally tempted by news of Steam or GOG discounts, whenever they reached me. But it was never anything more than that – a mild feeling of going without, like being at a dinner party and not helping yourself to the last bit of pudding, even though you kind of wanted to. (If you were alone, you’d have eaten it, even though you were full, but you’d only have regretted it later.)

I didn’t save any money, although given that I normally only buy heavily-discounted or second-hand games, I didn’t expect to – especially seeing as these funds were most likely diverted to the purchase of dental flossing sticks and large bottles of Sanex. I also didn’t make much progress through my backlog – a quick review of the year (speaking of which – don’t worry readers, it’s coming soon!) suggests that my time was largely split between newer games that I’d already played quite a bit of and older abandonware fare.

So, you may ask, what was the point? Well, I guess it goes back to that conversation I had with my work colleague that prompted this whole idea. I’m not sure when the last time was that I had a look at my games collection and thought, there’s nothing here for me – time for something new. In fact, I don’t think that’s ever happened. At no stage in the year was I bored. Given a free evening or weekend I’d never be short of ideas about what to play.

I’m not interested in paying a premium for the latest tech or releases, and buying newer games that I’m not interested in simply to try and keep up to date is something I’ve become less and less bothered about. (That’s not to say I’m not interested in newer games, and over the Christmas period, generous friends and relatives have furnished me with some items from my Steam wishlist and an Xbox 360, for those times when I’m in the mood for such things.)

In the meantime, older titles have been added to the collection because they could be potential review-fodder. But I’ve come to realise that there’s a limit to what I’m going to be able to write about. On the evidence of the past year, I’ve probably got my hands full already.

Reason enough, I reckon, to keep it going. No new games in 2014? Why not?

Hi there!

Tonight we take a look at Test Drive Unlimited, a fact that makes us feel quite old, because we can actually remember writing about it as something new and exciting at various points a few years ago.

Still, when you put the depressing march of time to one side, it’s good to be able to actually write about the game properly and include it among our reviews.

Next time on FFG: a text adventure (probably).