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!

So a while ago I picked up Daikatana because…. I was curious? Because I crave punishment for my sins? Because the JMan tells me it’s actually tolerable once you make it past the the awful, robo-frog infested early maps? And I was going to comment on the infamous “make you his bitch” poster, because apparently grown adults thought that was a good idea. But then I figured Daikatana gets enough of a kicking. And I was reminded of another terrible PC gaming ad from yesteryear.

It was for Battlecruiser 3000AD and was seen in PC gaming mags around the late 90s. I’ve put it behind a cut as it’s slightly naughty:

The worst ad I remember continued »

A couple of weeks ago we had another one of those releases from gog, some classics of PC gaming, that reminds us why we’re grateful they exist. I don’t mind that they’ve added indie games to the lineup, if it helps keep them in good financial health, but I’m glad to see the commitment to oldies continues.

The games in question come from the Wizardry series, the long-running line of hardcore fantasy RPGs. Common features being a party of several adventurers, a shared first-person view, and rather unforgiving turn-based combat. The full series isn’t available, sadly, although you really would have to be into your wizard hats, +2 maces of bashing and late night dungeon crawling to really get into the early-80s stuff. What we do get, though, is the final three games, which form their own trilogy.

First up there’s Wizardry 6 and 7 for $6. You could call these the last outings of “old-school” wizardry, with a basic tile-based engine to approximate 3d graphics. I never played 6, but did spend countless hours on 7, aka Crusaders of the Darak Savant, in my mid-teens. In fact it must have accounted for several school holidays, sat in front of the family pc whilst listening to my Greatest Hits of 1993 tape (featuring Haddaway and Annie Lennox). While other kids were going outside or, talking to girls or something I was exploring the fortress of orkogore, level-grinding killing monsters in the mountains, mapping the sea of sorrows and fighting T’Rang in the city of Nyctalinth. And, er, dying and reloading a lot.

The pack also includes Wizardry Gold, a remake of 7 for windows 95, but I honestly wouldn’t bother. Unless you have a burning desire to listen to terrible voice acting.

Then we have Wizardry 8. This arrived about nine years after 7 and moved the series over to true 3d graphics, which caused some oddities in the combat. For example in old games enemies lined up in neat rows rows, an obvious abstraction of an actual battle. Now they can move around freely, but your team is stuck in a huddle because of the shared first person view..

That said, I think it made a grand effort at updating the mechanics whilst still feeling recognizably like a Wizardry game. So there’s plenty of satisfying tactical combat once again. Also, like 7, it has its own unique mix of fantasy and technology, sending you up against up against both sword-and-magic wielding monsters, and killer androids. Here are my thoughts, from relatively soon after release.

(Sidenote: if someone was to make a wizardry today, they could probably go deliberately retro and return to the tile-based mechanics. 8 came too late for that sort of thing to be considered current, and too soon for nostalgia-based gaming to be viable).

Hi there.

Don’t mind the mess – do come in. Yes, we have actually got a review for you this evening. It’s been written for a little while and was supposed to coincide with one of the big football finals that have all…happened already.

Still, I guess the great thing about football is there’s always a match going on somewhere, so (ahem) in honour of tonight’s England vs. Brazil match, here’s a review of European Champions!

You may notice I’ve added a video clip – just to reassure any regular readers that this isn’t the start of a new YouTube obsession, but for this game I noticed that there weren’t any gameplay clips on there that I could find, so figured I’d do the honours. Don’t worry – I cut it down to a manageable length, and it’s just gameplay – no voiceovers here.

Also, just to add to Stoo’s note below, you’ll probably notice a few things that still need to be tidied up. I’m afraid that there’ll be broken links a-plenty in my old reviews, and though the old journal posts have all been ported across, only the more recent ones have been checked and sorted. So, those are a couple of things I’ll be working on – and we hope to do more here and there now the core funtionality is all working ok.

There’ll be more content, too – not an avalanche by any means, but hopefully back to our usual pace from this point on.

Hello everyone and welcome to the third incarnation of A Force For Good. That is, the site where Rik and I write about old PC games.

The previous version was based on a basic scratch-built CMS I wrote eight years ago, and was rather in need of modernising. Unfortunately, that was going to take a lot of time and effort for someone with my “php for dummies” level of understanding. So, we decided to shift the whole thing over to WordPress.

This allows us to easily bring about a few major changes. For one, the blogging and game-review aspects to the site are much better integrated whereas previously we basically had two sites in parallel. Also, it’s now possible to comment on reviews. A feature that could turn out to be a bad idea, but we’ll see!

Now, I’m hoping that the revamp prompts us to update more regularly, but I’m not promising a torrent of content or weekly reviews. I’ve seen too many blogs get off to an enthusiastic start then run out of steam after a couple of months. We’re a fairly slow-moving place and I think acceptance of that fact has been part of our 11-odd years’ endurance.

Apart from that, it’ll be pretty much business as usual around here. For review purposes we continue to look at games from about 1990 to 6-ish years ago. Blog posts will have oldies as their main focus but will occasionally stray out into more general PC gaming topics.

We hope to continue the relatively new discussion review feature; the criteria for choosing a game is a bit ill-defined, but it basically comes down to choosing something one (or both) of us would have normally overlooked. I’ve also been toying with the idea of reviewing indie games; it might be too much of a distraction from the core mission for the sake of something already much talked about in geek circles. But you’ll probably see the odd blog post on the topic.

Anyways, go have a read around, and feel free to make suggestions for games we should look at. Or tell me if I broke the wordpress code somewhere.

Final note: many thanks to Voh for providing some useful advice about our transition to WP.

A quick note: everything before this point is archived from the old site.