Hello there!

Well, we have another review for you today. It’s Test Drive III: The Passion.

Ahem. I’m sure I used to have more interesting stuff to say in these newsposts. Oh, hang on, I forgot we can add pictures now:

Yeeeeaaaaaahhhh! *sets off fireworks*

I was rooting around my big folder of game screenshots and extracted graphics files, and came across this pic from 1994 strategy classic, UFO: Enemy Unknown. It shows the “equipment screen” graphics for your soldiers in personal armour.

You know what I find quite interesting? This amour has a very stylised, comic-book look to it. Form-fitting, showing off their muscles and big shoulder pads. Yet it’s not gendered. We’ve gotten used to scifi or fantasy warrior women in gaming showing lots of cleavage, or having boob-shaped chest armour. But here guys and gals are dressed exactly the same.

Ok, everyone here also look really 90s. They’ve got hoods with a hole in the top to let hair through, which instantly makes me think of Gambit out of X-men. Wouldn’t a helmet be a good idea? And I think that’s Guile from Streetfighter 2 on the far left. But still, it’s good to know X-com is above objectifying women and treats all its troops equally.

Hi there!

I’ve been on holiday, but I managed to do a little retro-gaming while I was away.

Here’s a review of an old racer called Crazy Cars III.

I was vaguely interested in giving Diablo 3 a try, but Blizzard are still asking £45 for it. These action RPGs are something I approach pretty casually – I’m not going to play solidly for weeks finding the optimum DPS builds for different classes, I’m just happy to charge through the game once or twice on Regular difficulty. So I’m not willing to commit that much cash. I went for Torchlight 2 instead, for a mere £15 on steam.

While I was rummaging around the Battle.net site, however, I was reminded of the selection of Blizzard’s other games you can buy and download there. There are their two other major current titles, of course, WoW and Starcraft 2. Also you can also buy some older titles: Warcraft 3, Diablo 2 and Starcraft, plus expansion packs. Of that set I think these days I’d most enjoy replaying Warcraft 3, which had one of the best story-driven campaigns I’ve seen in a realtime strategy.

Also if you already own an old CD copy of any of those, you can enter the CD-key and it registers with battle.net, letting you download the game at leisure. A useful backup feature then. I stumbled across an extra bonus though: since Starcraft is now packaged with its expansion as a single Anthology item, when I entered the key for just the vanilla game, Battle.net decided I now own the anthology!

Sadly though you can’t go further back into Blizzard’s history. I’d have thought that, say, bundling the first two warcraft games together for a few quid would gain a bit of interest. The first suffers from an early, frustrating interface but the second is a much slicker example of mid-90s RTS. Also the early games establish the world later used by the MMO, and the battles that occur make up Wow’s immediate past. So for example, if you’ve been questing in the ruins of Stromgarde, you can go back to Warcraft 2 and see how it got ruined in the first place.

Some might enjoy the original Diablo also. Its spell system predates the current trend for finely tuned Talent Trees and as I recall your character was stuck at a movement speed of “steady march”. which was annoying as hell when chasing fleeing enemies. Still it managed to feel quite dark and forboding, as you descended through a massive complex of creepy crypts, ever further underground.

It’s the usual argument in favour of making oldies available – sure they’re not going to generate enormous revenue, but the costs won’t be much, either. Fix whatever compatibility issues you need for modern windows (iirc the only one of these to predate win95 is the original Warcraft), wrap up in a battle.net installer. Sounds like a month’s work for a couple of eager interns to me. (he says, knowing nothing about programming). Then sit back and enjoy the run of impulse nostalgia buys from people who, ahem, already have like 24 unplayed oldies sat on their GOG.com shelf…

A while back I mentioned the Wizardry 6+7 bundle on Gog. This has enabled me to finally own a legal copy of Crusaders of the Dark Savant (wiz 7), about 20 years late. I thought I’d allow myself a replay, even tho I have about 394 games awaiting my attention, none getting any attention because of Fallout New Vegas, and I have no time for nostalgia like this. Instead of the MS Dos original though, I felt like trying the re-release for win95 known as Wizardry Gold.

At heart it’s more or less the same game , so mostly not a lot of changes to comment on. The mini-map is always active, which is handy. The interface feels slower to respond, which is mildly irritating. Most significantly though, there’s voice acting. Which is utterly godawful.

Ok, let me retract that slightly. The guy voicing the ever-present narration is pretty good. He has a bit of gravitas, which is essential given the way his script frequenly meanders off from simple descriptions of locations and events, onto philosophical musings on a range of topics.

Everyone else tho is voiced in an incredibly amateurish manner. I wasn’t at all surprised to find, when I looked up the credits, that the Sir-Tech guys did most of the voice acting themselves. They did try for various distinctive voices, but not once could I buy into the illusion I was listening to a burly soldier or haughty mystics. In each case, characters sound like exactly what they really are, which is a guy in an office haltingly reading aloud and doing a silly voice.

My other rant for the day applies to both old and new version of the game. Every time I start anew I realise, good lord, I hate the character creation.

So, when drawing up a new hero you have to allocate points to stats like and strength, agility. That’s quite common for RPGs, for example still seen in the Fallout games. Here though, the number of points available is randomised. Of course, you want the most possible. So, just keep trying until you get a max roll of the virtual dice, right?

Except, if you get a crappy roll you can’t immediately try again, you have to complete the rest of the character creation. Allocate skills, choose a character portrait, choose spells. A minute’s clicking for a character you will then immediately delete as junk.

To make matters worse, I’m sure the roll is skewed somehow. As in, the results don’t seem fairly distributed between max and min; rolls in the upper range are too rare. It’s possible to have to go through 20 or thirty times to get something above “mediocre”. Oh and then once you have a character you’re happy with, do it all five more times to make a full team.

Okay, so, just suck it up and march out with sub-optimal characters? Don’t be too fussy, you say? Character’s stats go up as you level anyway. Sure, but this is a challenging game and you might miss still those extra points. What’s more, some elite classes such as the Lord or Ninja aren’t even available without a good roll.

tl;dr the game punishes you with an inferior team, for being unwilling to sit through an hour’s boredom before commencing play.

So, yes, ranting today. I still think that Crusaders is great if you want a truly beardy, old school RPG with some good old fashioned dungeon crawling, and nail-biting combat. But accessibility was never its strong spot.

Good evening.

Fans of football: hey, isn’t it great that the new season has started?

Non-fans of football: isn’t it ridiculous that the football season has started again? It’s August, ferchrissakes.

Anyway, as we’re talking about football, here’s a review of a computer game that features lots of it: Pro Evolution Soccer 2008.

Hello there!

Do you like cricket? Sure you do! Don’t you? Oh. Right.

Well, for once, I actually managed to get a review to successfully coincide with the thing I was aiming for. Admittedly, the Ashes series does give you quite a big window, but hey, as I write this, it’s still going on and the destination of the urn is as yet undetermined.

So, here we go: a review of EA’s Cricket 2005. I’m off to have a bit of a lie down.

Coming soon – a game with some men shooting other men, and explosions and stuff. (Probably).

Because every radio device I could ever listen to is permanently set to Radio 4, I occasionally happen upon an episode of The Archers. This always reminds me that some time ago, adventure game specialists Level 9 released an Archers game, in which the player controlled the main characters, with the aim of directing them to make decisions that the show’s listeners would respond to best.

I haven’t played it, although it certainly sounds like an interesting approach, with some potential for unintentional, low-key comedy (“Who should you take to the Conservative Association dance? Choose Hazel, Caroline, or Peggy“). However, the more I listen to The Archers, the more I think there could be a market for a new spin-off: Tom Archer’s Ready Meals.

In the game, you would be Tom Archer, and continue his never-ending quest to further the interests of his food empire. Much like the original The Archers game, it would essentially take the form of an adventure, with multiple-choice decision-making:

Of course, for today’s modern gamers, that approach would be too one-dimensional, so we’d also need to include a business element too:

Obviously, this is just concept art – I doubt the final product could look as good as this – but I reckon I’m onto a winner.

[With apologies to anyone who likes/does not like The Archers.]

Next week: An in-depth appraisal of the Grange Hill game’s death sequence.

Hi there!

Today we have another one of our discussion reviews. The game under the microscope is Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Hope you like it. We’ll have more, soon.

It seems you can hardly move without a remake or Kickstarter-funded ‘reimagining’ being announced at the moment.

First up is news of a remake of old Amiga favourite The Chaos Engine (the DOS version of which we reviewed here). My eyes may be deceiving me, but I don’t see what’s so new about it.

Another remake in the works is of the much-loved (although not-much-played-by-me) Delphine platformer Flashback. Already opinion appears to be divided between “I loved the original and would love a new version with updated graphics!” and “This doesn’t look as good as the original.”

Remakes seem on a bit of a hiding to nothing. If developers change a lot, then people complain that it’s not true to the original. If they don’t change very much, then people ask what the point of it was in the first place.

One remake that’s actually been released is of the first Leisure Suit Larry game, which managed to accrue donations of around $650,000. The response has been mixed: Richard Cobbett on Rock Paper Shotgun considers it rather more charitably than Ellie Gibson on Eurogamer. I think I’ll give it a miss.

This last one isn’t exactly a remake, but I’ll include it anyway:

Yes! Jim Walls will come out of retirement if you’ll only give him $500,000 to make another police adventure. For $19, it had better be an improvement on Blue Force.

There’s an interview on RPS here – it’s mainly to promote the Precinct Kickstarter, but there’s some good stuff on the PQ series too.