A long, long, time ago on FFG we used to have a feature called The Cupboard of Shame. The phrase was a euphemism for the place we put the games that, for one reason or another, we wished we’d never bought in the first place. It didn’t mean those games were necessarily all that bad, although sometimes that was the case.

More often than not, the shame referred to the fact that we ended up getting something that we wouldn’t normally go for, and despite dithering briefly in the shop, ultimately convincing ourselves that proceeding would be a good decision, only for the game to remain unplayed, sometimes unopened, on the shelf.

After some time, the guilt associated with our foolishness would get to us and we’d have to move these games somewhere else, where they couldn’t mock us so openly (“Ha! Back to your easy racing games again, eh? When are you going to grow a pair and play a REAL game?”) – into a dark and dusty place, known colloquially as The Cupboard of Shame.

In a bid to give these unwanted games a home, we opened up the doors of our respective cupboards and published the list of games on the site, asking for any interested parties to come forward and claim anything that took their fancy, asking for nothing but the cost of postage to be covered in return.

As an endeavour, it was well-meaning but fairly unsuccessful. From my point of view, I can recall a mighty scramble for my copy of System Shock and a collection of Police Quest games, with little interest being registered in anything else. (Police Quest proved to be a complicated and, ultimately, loss-making saga, as I dispatched the goods to the US, failed to receive any payment for the postage for a number of weeks, and ended up buying the same games again years later anyway).

Anyway, now the Cupboard returns, this time via the medium of eBay. Here’s what’s on offer:

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow – Stealth games, stealth games, stealth games. Who knows why I buy them, when I know I cannot play them? I gave the original about twenty minutes before giving up, meaning this impulse purchase remains untouched and sealed.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Grand Theft Auto III – No regrets about either of these, only the way I went about acquiring the GTA series. Instead of buying the GTA pack the first time it was in the Steam sale, I got Vice City on its own, then picked up boxed copies of these two, bringing the total bill to…well, more than the cost of the GTA pack in the Steam sale.

Messiah – A classic case of getting something that I wasn’t interested in at the time, years after release, somehow figuring that the intervening years would make it more appealing. I’m never going to play it, so hopefully someone else will want my copy.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Red Faction – In 2007 my wife went on holiday with her mum and I stayed at home and experienced the expected regression into eccentricity-bordering-on-madness: eating pizza every night, watching films I’d already seen into the early hours of the morning, washing less frequently, and buying games on eBay without a care in the world. Embarrassingly, these are two games I bought with the intention of reviewing for FFG, only for Stoo and JMan, respectively, to beat me to it. Would things have been any different if they hadn’t? Probably not.

Homeworld – A classic case of buying something because some reviews said, “Worth a look, even if you don’t like strategy games.” They should have added, “But probably not worth buying if you’re quite thick.” I last played this in 2001, the day I bought it, and got about halfway through the tutorial before realising my mistake. It’s supposed to be quite good though – Stoo says so.

That’s it for now – for PC stuff at least. I’m getting rid of some PSP games too, including more stealth games (see above). The full listing is here.

There could be more to come, from both of us. Hopefully this doesn’t come across as me pushing eBay sales onto you (frankly, even if they all go I don’t think I’ll be looking at a net profit), and the intention in posting here is to own up to something that most of us probably experience – however eager we are to commit to these things, there are too many games and too little time. My genuine hope, if it doesn’t sound too cheesy, is that these games find a home where someone will get some use and enjoyment out of them. If eBay is no good, then it may be down to the charity shop with some of these. Or maybe they’ll be back to the cupboard for a little while longer.

Update: Success! Everything sold. Currently having some trouble persuading one of the buyers to pay up, but apart from that, it all went pretty well. Prepare for Round 2…

Final Fantasy 7 comes to PC once again.

The list of new features is a little unimpressive:

-Achievements – a means to push you to see all the content in a game? Or utterly useless gimmick?
-a built-in cheat mode – okay, that could be useful for casual players who don’t want to level grind for a week to beat a boss.
-Cloud saves – haha.

What we don’t get is what we’d most wish for: some sort of graphical facelift. I guess a brand new shiny engine would be too much to ask for, but couldn’t we at least have a high-resolution version ,in these days of 1920×1080 being commonplace?

Still! This is worth it just for the sake of the FF7 being easily available on PC once again. I believe this is the first time it’s been on digital distribution. Meanwhile ebay copies frequently cleared £20. I guess they were relatively rare since I never actually saw the game in shops much, or any sort of Sold-Out style budget treatment. Now you can get it for a tenner. (or £8 until september 12th).

I’m tempted just cos my own copy was, ahem, pirated. And I cheated on the endgame. I always felt I wanted to give it another shot.

Anyway to any RPG fans who have so far missed out, i’d recommend it. Sure it’s been somewhat heavily over-hyped over the years. Also I was never a big fan of the combat. But it does have decent characters, and a genuinely compelling and moving storyline that kept me guessing to the end. Here are my thoughts, from when the game was half as old as it is now but they still mostly hold.

[edit]My orignal comments on graphics were a little misleading. Character models have been sharpened up, as have the battle scenes. The pre-rendered backgrounds are however untouched and thus look rather muddy.

Hi there.

With characteristically poor timing, we have an Olympic-themed update for you. Here’s a review of The Games: Summer Edition from Epyx.

And, er, enjoy the closing ceremony (unless, as is likely, it’s happened already by the time you read this).

Online multiplayer remains relatively unexplored territory for FFG. In recent months we’ve been making attempts to rectify the situation, albeit with very little success. Several hours, for example, were spent tinkering with network and router settings in the hope of getting Rise of the Triad deathmatch to work on DOSBox (which it did, eventually, but only for about 30 seconds – long enough for Stoo to type “Is this working?” while I shot him repeatedly in the head).

Undeterred, we moved onto something else (which I won’t name here, lest it expose an embarrassing delay with the planned site content associated with these efforts) and spent roughly the same amount of time tinkering and restarting, but this time with absolutely no game-time to show for it.

Given that we’d both set aside some time for multiplayer fun, it soon became a question of whether we could find any game that a) we both owned and b) we could set up and get to work without too much fuss.

What we came up with was: Test Drive Unlimited. And it was all rather hassle free to set up and fun to play, which is supposed to be the point of these things really.

Annoyingly, for me at least, the game won’t allow you to transfer the progress you’ve made in the single-player to the online mode if you accidentally created an ‘offline profile’ when you first started. (The manual even crows, ”Beware: If you create an offline profile, you won’t be able to turn it into an online profile afterwards!” – although perhaps I added the exclamation mark myself.) So I had to start again, again (a previous profile had already been erased thanks to a truly terrible menu system that makes such an accident all the more likely).

Stoo, meanwhile, didn’t even have the game installed, so I guess it was just as well that we were both lumbered with unexotic, entry-level cars usually driven by estate agents.

Once we were up and running, it was a no-holds-barred grudge match (or, you know, a moderately diverting series of races around Hawaii) which was quite evenly balanced, considering my supposed ‘expertise’ in the genre. One track in particular caused a mental aberration on my part as I repeatedly missed the same turn, allowing my opponent to race to victory. Stoo’s creative use of off-road short-cuts also proved my undoing on more than one occasion, most memorably when I realised he was nothing more than some red text and a cloud of dust in the middle distance.

The embarrassment was compounded by the fact my friend and colleague had access to a microphone, which captured and relayed any comments and/or laughter relating to the on-screen action through my speakers. Meanwhile, I had to settle for typing garbled insults on the keyboard while trying to keep the car straight with the joypad (don’t type and drive, kids).

Still, it was all jolly good fun. We might do it again sometime.

Hi there!

This was going to be another football review, to tie in with the end of Euro 2012, but…well, that’s long gone now, isn’t it. Can we pass it off as an Olympics tie-in, instead? No? Well, we’re going to try:

[Clears throat]

To tie-in with the London Olympics, we’ve reviewed a football game! Here’s FIFA ’96.

So thanks to the Steam Sale I finally caved and got Skyrim. And am trying not to play for 6 hours every day. It doesn’t radically change the Elder SCrolls formula but continues to tweak and modernise it, whilst providing the same amazingly compelling sandbox style play.

So I’ll find myself on a mission to track down some enemy of the Thieves guild. But then I get see some Nord tomb, which takes the best part of an hour to fight my way through. Then I come out the other side and see some village in the distance that I’ve never seen before. So I trek there and sell some of the loot from the tomb. Then the blacksmith tells me they’re having problems with raiders, so maybe I should go check that out. Except there were also those funky Dwarvern ruins somewhere near here, weren’t there? Must be plenty cool to see there. Oh also the Thane of Makarth had a chore for me to do around here, trolls or something. And I was meant to be finding a book for some high elf douchebag at the college of Winterhold and I’m sure that’s in bandit hideout about ten minutes up the road so I’ll go do that first, maybe stop off at the silver mine along the way. Wait wasn’t I meant to be on that mission for the Thieves OH SHIT A DRAGON

So the Dragon fights are a new feature that punctuates your exp;oration. They’re amazingly well done, I’ve never seen an enemy that big and dynamic in an unscripted open-world type game. It’s more like something you’d expect in a contained boss-fight. They’re huge, they swoop around, they flamethrower everything in site while you cower behind a rock and think “ok tough guy, what now”.

So that’s Skyrim: 18 things to do at once, if I’m not just taking a walk in the hills to enjoy the scenery, then dragons happen.

Note that despite 20 odd hours play now, I’ve not even touched the central questline. I’ve done a fair bit for the Thieves guild, a couple of Mages Guild missions. Large chunks of the map are either unexplored, or have had points of interest bypassed with a mental note to go back later. The game is staggeringly vast.

re: modernisation, a key change is that character stats are reduced to a minimum, and now each skill has an assocaited talent tree. So on levelup I get decisions like, do I want some new sneaking-related ability like improved backstabs. Or a bonus to armour skill to boost mobility. Or the ability to craft more advanced weapons. I guess this is Blizzard’s legacy to gaming? (or did someone else think of Talent trees first).

Also I notice that weapons and armour no longer degrade and break. Perhaps thats a sign of being pampered modern gamers, but it’s not something I miss. The old make-your-own-spell feature I slightly miss, but again it was rather fiddly.

Anyways in an effort to tie this into retro-gaming, you could go read my thoughts on Morrowind. That review was arguably a bit premature, it was written when MW was only a few years old, before games 4 and 5 had come out. Looking back I can see how it feels somehow a bit bare in comparison. Well, the volume of content was there, but quests tended to be rather mechanical “go kill stuff and find an item” without so much scripting or storytelling. Also NPCs, unless key to some plot line, tended to be a bit generic, and stood weirdly rooted to the spot around the clock. Later games do a more convincing job of showing towns as places populated by living people.

That said I think it did well establish that addictive Elder Scrolls magic, the feeling of having a whole world to explore and find adventure in. It helped that it had a slightly mysterious, exotic feel – Oblivion, while a better game overall, was fairly generic High Fantasy.

So anyway i’m not getting a lot of retro gaming done right now, but as compensation the first feelers into creating FFG V3 are underway. By which I mean I learned how to bugger up wordpress templates. WAtch this space.

Lately I’ve been getting the bad feeling that I’ve lost interest in action-rpgs. I say “bad” because it’s meant to be one of the topics I write about here. To be clear I’m not giving up on RPGs in general, just that click-to-kill sort, influenced in the past decade by Diablo 2.

See, last year I launched into Titan Quest, hoping for some monster-slaying fun. The sort that has you playing for hours, thinking “just one more dungeon” or “until I get a better sword”. Yet by about halfway through I was bored. It was a slog, endlessly clicking my way through one wave of goat-men after the other. Shoot lightning, they all fall down. Here come some more, shoot lighting again. Click click click. The reward for completing one section being… another wave of goat-men. And that staff with an extra +10 mana (or whatever) really not that thrilling a reward.

Then a couple months ago I fired up Diablo 2 itself again, with the aim of being vaguely topical and tying in with the release of the third game in that series. Now this is one I definitely played a fair bit back in the day, even if only tooling around on normal difficulty. Once again tho, it’s a slog. My character is stalled on act 2 after a few hours spamming the same few spells over and over and over. (if you diversify it weakens the character).

Recently picked up Torchlight 2. I like the art style, and it has some good ideas to add variety. Like, your characters are at first glance the warrior\ranger\mage archetypes, but in fact each can be figured to mix that up with other roles. The warrior can ehance himself with magic, the ranger can be more a melee-rogue type etc. However after a brief play it’s been utterly forgotten since I got Skyrim.

I can see where the appeal of these games is meant to lie: addictive gameplay that satisfies our twitch urges and basic effort-reward responses. Then on the slightly more intellectual side, the goal of putting together a great talent build to optimise your character. I mean, this worked for me, once.

Now though i can’t motivate myself enough to care. All these games feel like a tedious grind. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the genre, or if I just got old, or what.

Anyway this is why you haven’t seen a Diablo 2 review yet. Sorry! Also I’m not in a hurry to play Diablo 3. Although I hear it lets you swap your talents around more freely? Which would help – I might be doing better in D2 if I could casually change my ice mage into a lightning mage, then back again, just for variety between dungeons.

Hello!

I’ve recently returned from a somewhat-deserved holiday, which was A Good Thing for all kinds of reasons. Without the drudgery of everyday life turning your brain into mush, a few days’ rest can see you gather together whatever scraps of creative thought remain up there and begin to regain the ability to form ideas and opinions. So, suitably refreshed, let me share some of my holiday thoughts with you (and apologies, but this is going to be a bit like one of those Christmas newsletters you get from relatives you don’t really know):

1) There’s a fundamental problem with handheld versions of games well-established on other platforms. If you buy one and like it, you can’t help but wonder if you’d like the ‘big-brother’ version more (and, given that the graphics, sound and controls are all likely to be better, that answer is likely to be ‘yes’). On the other hand, if you buy a handheld game because you want a portable, cut-down version of something you already know you like, it has to be pretty damn good to make you think something other than, “I already played this, and it was better the first time.” (Holiday example of the former: EA Fight Night; and of the latter: Midnight Club: LA Remix – both on PSP – and both perfectly enjoyable, incidentally).

2) Games that are called Splinter Cell or Syphon Filter, or otherwise involve sneaking around in the dark and being careful, are just not for me. Does this stop me buying them? No, it does not. My misplaced confidence arguably stems from the fact I once completed Metal Gear: Solid, when I had finished my final university exams and had nothing else to do. (I am sure Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow on PSP is a fine game – it certainly looked quite nice – but I’ll be buggered if I can get the hang of something that maps different controls to the analogue stick and the D-pad and expects you to remember them). Time for another eBay sale.

3) Retro Gamer magazine [one of a number of ‘holiday periodicals’ purchased for the express purpose of distracting me from the brutal reality that air travel is made possible by fuel and engines firing you into the sky, and not by magic] seems to have improved since I last bought it a couple of years ago. (This particular issue seemed to feature a number of articles or interviews recalling the days when hit home-micro titles could be spawned from a keen programmer’s bedroom, with one person responsible for each and every element of the game, and it was a look back I enjoyed, even if I only remembered the names and/or brief details of the games in question, rather than having particularly fond memories of playing them.) But, I can’t avoid the conclusion that it’s still not as good as it could be. With a wealth of potential material across all formats, and even taking into account that you can’t please everyone all of the time, I still think it could offer more.

4) Staying on the topic of Retro Gamer, it struck me as odd that they would plan a Kick Off series retrospective and then ask Stuart Campbell to write it. I’m a big fan of his work, but he’s hardly known as a lover of the games themselves – to the extent that he and series creator Dino Dini became involved in some undignified internet squabbling many years after the fact – so it seemed like a strange choice. And so it proved, with the resultant piece straining for objectivity but clearly written by a man for whom too much had gone before. And whatever your opinion on the ages-old Sensi vs. Kick Off debate, you’d have to be seriously crazy to argue that the series didn’t take a serious nose-dive after the first couple of games, anyway.

Epilogue:

Post-Holiday Realisation #1: There’s a Steam Sale on.
Post-Holiday Realisation #2: You can get a Steam app for your Android phone.
Post-Holiday Realisation #3: Danger! Danger!

Hi there!

With all the excitement of Euro 2012, and on the eve of England beating/losing to Italy, we thought it might be time to add another football review to our archives.

So, finally, we have a game from the most famous football series of them all – the original FIFA International Soccer.

Hello everyone. We’ve got another discussion review for you today. If old platformers are your thing, take a look at Bio Menace.

Might be a few more discussions yet, hopefully looking at a range of types of game. If you’d rather read a “proper” review then don’t worry, those will remain the main feature.

The first set of discussions were complements to “important” games already reviewed. This second bunch meanwhile has a different focus; odds and ends that maybe don’t warrant an in depth review. Or we’re too inept to provide one (ahem, baseball). So instead we have fun comparing how well we did, bouncing questions off each other and maybe ruminating on the nature of the kind of game in question.