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.

So it’s that time of year again, the Steam summer Sale. I’ll probably grab Dishonoured, the X-Com remake, then a bunch more impulse buys that I never find time to play, and glare at me from my library. “you’ve not played us yet.” “It’s been a year now”. “What’s the matter, too incompetent?” With digital distribtion you can’t even get rif of the shame by selling off second hand. They’re there, forever.

Anyway while Steam is now my primary source for recent games, when it comes to retro gaming I prefer to take advantage of the DRM-free service provided by gog (who have plenty of sales of their own). However, there are still some noteworthy oldies on steam that have yet to make it to gog, so I thought it might be worth listing some of them.

X-com: Terror From the Deep
It’s odd that the original UFO: Enemy Unknown has never made it to digital distribution. Still if you want some squad-level turn-based combat in good old VGA, steam has the first sequel. Which is basically UFO underwater with lovecraftian themes, and playing on hard mode.

[later edit]I’m an idiot. UFO is on Steam too, under its American title X-COM: UFO Defense.

iD Software
Pretty much everything they’ve released from Wolf3d onwards. Which means several highly influential first-person shooters. I can honestly say I still find Doom to be a blast – something about the smooth circle-strafing action, blasting imps in the murky depths of a mars base, and a soundtrack that’s basically South of Heaven in midi. The Quakes never appealed to me so much, I keep thinking of the first two as brown and orange-brown respectively. But I’m not even sure I can rationally say why I like Doom and not those, anymore. Certainly most of the rest of the shooter fans thought highly of them!

Also of note, they have some of Raven’s iD-engine-powered titles. I particularly have fond memories of Hexen, which made a worthy effort at moving the shooter formula on a bit, with puzzle-solving and hub-based levels.

Lucasarts
Apart from the Monkey Island remakes (also on gog) they have four of Lucasarts other graphical adventures:  both the Indiana Jones titles, Loom and The Dig. Why just those ones I’ve no idea, I think many fans would say that Fate of Atlantis aside that’s not the strongest selection. Still, even on a slightly off day they still made some damn fine adventures. I particularly love the dark, enchanting fantasy of Loom, even if it is really short and easy.

Oh, and as someone recently reminded me, they have the old Star Wars shooter Dark Forces. You rebel scum!

Morrowind
Elder Scrolls number 3 is a bit clunky compared to the latest outing, Skyrim. Still it has in my opinion the most interesting setting of the series, the strange and exotic homeland of the Dunmmer. And there’s still that signature open-world freedom, letting you follow the main quest, go work for guilds or just roam around exploring.

Half Life
Obviously enough, since this is Valve’s own service. If you’ve somehow never noticed this one, it’s the shooter than changed our single-player expectations. We went from fairly mindless run-and-gun to being immersed in a series of events that told a story, of one scientist’s day in the lab that goes horribly wrong.

Bound to be some I’ve missed. Let me know in the comments!

Hey there.

Who likes tennis? Well, if you can’t like it on a day like today, then I guess there’s no pleasing you.

Anyway, slightly later than planned, and with characteristically poor timing, here’s a review of 4D Sports: Tennis.

The demise of LucasArts didn’t go totally unnoticed here at FFG, but we were a little busy with other things to do much more than post a brief note (and a link to a clip from the Spanish-language version of Monkey Island).

As it happens, though, around the time of the announcement, I did come across a history of the company in one of those discount bookshops that specialises in offering heavy reductions on celebrity hardbacks from a few years ago. So rather than rake up our old opinions about the favourites and put them in chronological order, I thought that reviewing the book might be a good way to look back at the LucasArts story.

While I was in the middle of doing that, I picked up an issue of Retro Gamer magazine, which also had its own retrospective, and I’ll bung a few thoughts on that in for good measure too. [And any aspirations of moving towards more highbrow territory by reviewing a book evaporated the moment you used the word ‘bung’. Well done, sir – a reader].

Book review: Rogue Leaders continued »

Hello everyone. It’s been a long time since I wrote up a game here by myself, but here’s Shadowcaster. It’s an interesting and mostly forgotten little first-person title from Raven Games.

Right now I playing: Ys: The Oath in Felghana for the sake of trying something a bit different, since Japanese RPGs are pretty rare on PC. Also dabbling in Simcity 2000, building my mighty metropolis of Stootopia. So hopefully I’ll have more content in coming weeks!