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.

Disney Closes Game Publisher LucasArts

I’d have to admit I haven’t played a Lucasarts game in over a decade, and couldn’t really tell you anything about their current output. But this is still a sad moment for those of us who were PC gamers back in the 90s. Apart from Star Wars stuff, they were of course one of the big names in graphical adventures, bringing us some inventive and characterful classics like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.

A better blog than us would write some lengthy retrospective, but for a little tribute, here’s just one of the most memorable scenes from their games, the intro to the original Monkey:

A few years ago I reviewed a game called King of the Road. My main motivation for doing so was that it seemed like quite an original idea, and the prospect of doing some normal, open-world driving without distractions like speed boosts, handbrake turns and jumps was fairly appealing.

Unfortunately the game was a bit dull and also lacked a little polish, but it was interesting enough for a while, and I was glad to have covered something a little unusual that hadn’t been done to death before or since. This mild self-satisfaction soon dissipated upon my later discovery of the prolific 18 Wheels of Steel series, and the fact that there had been numerous lonely truck driver games released between the time that King of the Road came out and the point at which I came to write my review. Ahem.

Whether any of them are any good, I don’t know – I’d lazily assumed not, to be honest, and my KOTR experience didn’t prompt a rush to find out for myself – but my head was recently turned by one of the writers from Rock, Paper, Shotgun speaking of a game called Euro Truck Simulator 2 in fairly glowing terms.

At first, I thought it was a big joke, especially given the extremely un-promising reputation of any game with the word ‘simulator’ attached. But, according to Metacritic, it seems not.

The trailer seems to be simultaneously taking the piss while also making the game look quite appealing:

The guy from RPS seemed quite taken with it, too.

Hello.

Today’s review is CSI: NY – The Game.

Work continues, both on the site and on new content. We’ll get more to you as soon as we can. Until then, Happy Easter, everyone!

Hi there. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Sorry for the delay.

We go a little further back in time than usual for this one – it’s a favourite from my Atari ST days, the snow-based strategy game Midwinter.

Hope you enjoy it. There will be more, as soon as we can bring it to you. We’re also working on upgrading the site, which takes time away from reviews, but hopefully it’ll be worth it when it’s done. Until then, thanks for reading.

Recently we had some great news in the world of retro gaming – System Shock 2 finally made its way onto gog.com. So after many years in the wilderness, you can once again buy a copy of the classic scifi-horror themed shooter-rpg hybrid.

This did however inspire me to ponder, other games that are yet to make an appearance on digital distribution. The list of available oldies is ever growing, but there are still a few conspicuous absences left. Here are a few suggestions (note, I’m talking games we’re unable to buy anywhere, not just on gog).

System Shock
Okay I admit this was something of a niche interest. I intended this list to be more games more objectively in need of recognition, as opposed to my personal favourites.

However, as I just mentioned we do now have the sequel. Also Shock is still the second most requested game on gog (after Grim Fandango), so there’s clearly demand. The Thinking Man’s Doom, as it was called, was in several regards far ahead of the standard shooters of the day. So I hope we can one day see it available to modern audiences. (probably with the mouselook mod installed).

Lemmings
The fiendishly frustrating-yet addictive strategy-puzzler. We all remember lemmings, surely? Has to be one of the most popular games of the early 90s. I’m sure this would sell quite readily. What’s more, apart from desire to see it on gog, this strikes me as something that should be sold for tablets. The controls are suited to touchscreen. Also, ipad is the perfect platform for grabbing the attention of those who are only casual gamers but do recall Lemmings from their childhoods.

Sadly, since original publishers Psygnosis were owned by Sony, the only release we’ve had in the past decade was for PSP, in 2006.

Most of the Lucasarts Back Catalogue
By far the most glaring omission. What’s going on here? A few years ago they created special editions of the first two Monkey Islands, and a scattering of other oldies like Loom got Steam releases too. Since then, nothing. We’re still waiting for some of the very greatest point-and-click adventures, like Day of the Tentacle or Sam and Max. Not to mention, outside of adventuring, the X-wing series.

Those are the most obvious picks to me, but feel free to chip in with any suggestions you feel are priorities!