Hello all. It might look once again like I’ve left Rik to run the show, but I’m back. With Titan Quest. Which is… alright. I hadn’t even been planning on reviewing it until I realised that, at 2006, it’s narrowly within our range.

That’s not the most exciting return ever, is it? But at least the wheels are turning.

Hi there.

As you may know, it’s Halloween soon, and it’d be remiss of us to let that pass by without delivering some related content.

So, as a special treat, here’s a review of Rugby Challenge 2006. Oooooooh!

Kids – don’t have nightmares.

So Rockstar have announced GTAV. Here’s some speculation from PSM.

My first thought is, will this be the sort of change we saw from GTAIII to Vice City – same technology but more features? After all there was much we saw cut from VC and San Andreas, like buying property or SA’s RPG style skills system, that we might wish to see put back in (personally I care more about the former than the latter).

However incrementing the numeral suggests a whole new engine\graphics upgrade, I’m not sure they’d do that *and* add substantial gameplay features?

(sidenote, I’d be happy for them to ditch the one side-feature GTAIV did have, ie people calling you up demanding to go bowling).

Also I’m wondering if it’ll address the odd sort of dichotomy that came up GTAIV.

GTAIV the story – Nico Bellic, a former soldier haunted by his past, seeks a new start in America. But he remains tragically trapped in a world of crime and violence, culminating in the death of someone close to him.

GTAIV gameplay – hi tech murder simulator as you run over 40 people, find this terribly humorous, then shoot up the cops that come after you.

You could say this disconnect started earlier in the series, I just felt it more in GTAIV which tried for a more grim and gritty story than the slight cartoonishness of before.

Anyway, I appreciate no-one would come to this crappy blog for news on the latest games, I just kinda want to update more often and this seemed like a good opportunity for a post. From our retro-gaming perspective, we’ve shied away from GTA (after the early installments) pretty much for the same reason we’ve not looked at Doom or Diablo2 – pretty much everyone into PC gaming will have played it and have an opinion of their own already. But, eh, I picked up GTAIII for £2 on steam the other day so a review could still happen eventually.

So, we’ve managed ten years of this humble little site. We’ve never been quite as productive as the ideal I hold in my head, but we have in total churned out a lot of reviews of PC games from the past. I hope you’ve found our writing to be useful and interesting.

Anyway tho, Rik will have his own comments to mark the anniversary, but for now I’ll just remark on what the passage of a decade has meant for us as retro gamers. Some of this is our internal existential analysis, the rest a general comment on retro gaming.

Firstly, always hanging over us is the question, what are we classing as retro in the first place. Our criteria has generally (but not rigidly) become “1990 to 5-ish years ago”. As it stands today, that’s half the total span of PC gaming, and the fraction will always increase. It starts in the days where VGA graphics and sound-cards were only just coming into force, and ends in the kind of 3D graphics that are light years ahead of that, even if a bit dated compared to modern games.

That’s a very broad range. We’re now writing about “oldies” that would have looked astoundingly futuristic to our 2001 selves. Seriously, go remind yourself of the leaps from Wolfenstein 3D to Doom 3. Is a site based on anything not modern the same as a retro-gaming site? I do sometimes wonder if we need to narrow our focus. But to what, exactly? What would our cut-off year be? Tied to some particular development in technology, like the rise of 3D cards? Or just stick down an arbitrary year?

Also, even we nerds both only spend a certain amount of time a week gaming. And we don’t want to dedicate all of that to games over a decade old. We’ve never claimed to be solely interested in VGA games to the exclusion of more modern material. The way we do it now, we can write about a decent proportion of the games we play. Right now if we said, say “pre 2000 only”, the cut in output would be unacceptable.

There’s another, related matter: do retro- reviews themselves become dated? Is a 5-years-on retrospective on a game the same as 15-years-on? I think some of our reviews could stand more or less indefinitely. For example I don’t see our opinions on old point and click adventures being any different in 2020. However, what about say shooters or racing games? Although, re-visiting stuff we’ve already covered could get onerous, and would just further cut into new content. I might redo the likes of Descent one day, but I’m certainly not about to ask Rik to revisit anything.

All that aside, there are some other key changes in the retro gaming experience, that have occurred since I first bashed this site together. Which can be summarised as, “we’ve never had it so good”.

The first would be, for playing those genuinely old oldies, DOSBOX. When we first started, MS-DOS games were frequently a pain to run. You sometimes had to drop into DOS mode, then go fiddle with memory configurations. If you had already moved to windows 2000 or XP, you didn’t even have that option unless you got into dual booting. I recall with Lemmings 2 just giving up and playing the Atari ST version on an emulator.

What we needed really was an old-PC emulator. Which nowadays, is the service DOSBOX provides, making our lives so much easier. Even better, it’s an emulation of an idealised DOS PC – one that takes care of all the memory management and hardware divers. So unlike the bad old days, you don’t have to prat around with config.sys trying to free up 20k of conventional memory without losing the mouse.

The other key factor to arise is digital distribution, making many oldies easier to find. Where we used to have to tell you to go look on ebay, or rummage around the bargain bins or your local gaming store, we can frequently now give you just a link. We are of course huge fans of Good Old Games, which has an ever-growing range of 90s-to-early-00s material. Other services like Steam have some good choices, too.

Of course, this also means we’re less frequently pointing readers at Abandonware sites to find a download. Now, I don’t want to look like I’m shunning them too hard. (what’s left of them anyway – I get the impression there are less active sites than there used to be, and definitely less of a sense of community). We started off pretty much as a satellite to the Abandonware scene, providing reading material to inform peoples’ decisions as to what to download. We might not even exist if not inspired by it.

On the other, Abandonware is a concept that in an ideal world shouldn’t have to exist – these games would be available by legitimate means. Which is exactly what’s now gradually happening. I guess Abandonware sites have to move with the times – the better ones seem to be offering reviews of their own, supplementary materials like game music etc, and linking to GoG where possible. They’ll still have a role in providing games released as freeware, and also the really obscure titles that remain abandoned.

So. If I was launching a site based on writing about old PC games today, it could well be somewhat different. More of a focus on what you can get via GOG etc. But I don’t have any real radical changes in mind right now. Plenty of improvements we could make in the details, I guess. That can wait for another post.

So I went and got Operation Flashpoint from Good Old Games, which may have been incredibly foolish. I bought it once already, the first time around nine-ish years ago. And I sucked. My attempts usually worked out as:

1: lie prone in cover
2: carefully line up shot against target silhouetted against sky
3: miss
4: get killed by return fire

or when patience failed just

1: run around spraying bullets
2: this is not Commando so,
3: get killed

After failing on about the third mission, over and over, ragequitting and selling it on ebay soon followed. But I want to love this game, as the idea of huge open spaces, freedom of movement, lots of drivable vehicles, planning the best approach for a strike etc is hugely appealing. I’m just not so good with the realistic weapons and dead-in-2-hits (if you’re lucky). So… attempt 2 will happen sometime in the near future.

In non-retro news I also picked up one of the Codemasters sequels, which I’ve heard accusations of being dumbed down a bit, but frankly if that makes them easier to get to grips with, I can handle that.

[edit]Oops, no I didn’t buy it from GoG, but rather Steam under its new name of ARMA: Cold War Assault.

I recently bought myself a second-hand PSP. Now, given that I already own a DS, it may seem like a slightly strange decision, especially as I like my DS, which has kept me thoroughly entertained on my journeys to and from work over the past four years or so (despite me having no previous predilection for Nintendo consoles or properties – I don’t care about Mario, Zelda, Metroid…any of ’em – sorry).

Furthermore, if we must reduce everything to a who-won-the-console-war (and for my purposes here, we must) then it’s fair to say that the DS won the battle of the noughties handheld gaming devices, fashioning an image for itself as a wholesome, accessible gadget for normal people and celebrities that could somehow improve your brainpower.

The PSP, on the other hand, was for antisocial teenage knobheads (ie the stereotypical gamer) to play the same old FIFA and Need for Speed on, year after year. Pity the poor PSP owner, the forum-dwellers and games-website-comment-leavers would say, for he has no brain and he is not a real gamer. (And then they’d also say something about the DS being for female children – perhaps for balance, but mainly because that’s just what forum-dwellers and games-website-comment-leavers, basking behind the cloak of internet anonymity, like to do).

But for some people, playing FIFA and Need for Speed is not particularly something to be sneered at. And while the DS has a jolly good go at both (NFS: ProStreet on DS is a particularly creditable effort), it’s fair to say it just wasn’t built for football or racing games. And those just happen to be my two favourite genres. Hence, my purchase.

One wonders how it went so wrong for the PSP. There was so much cooing about its superior hardware when it was first released, and even now, it’s an impressive machine. It’s been said many times before, but PSP games are effectively PS2 games with slightly longer loading times and a layer of audio-visual polish chiselled off. Perhaps that was the problem: I mean, why would you pay full asking price just to play a very similar game to one you already own on the move?

I won’t speculate any further on it, because if I knew what was going to be a success and what wasn’t, I’d be a rich man working somewhere else*. Will the Vita be a hit? I predict…nothing. All I know is that for around £50 I’ve now got decent portable versions of, among others: Pro Evolution Soccer, Need for Speed, Football Manager and Midnight Club. Which is nice.

—-

*Here’s some further speculation: despite some interesting news here and here, in all likelihood, the PSP is a dead system. Games shops don’t have PSP sections now, and if they do, they’re very small indeed.

Also: only a retro-bore like me could take some pleasure in owning a technically competent but defunct system because it reminds him of previous times when he owned a technically competent but defunct system. I had (still have, actually – somewhere) an Atari Lynx and thought it was awesome, but the gaming public preferred that silly little one with the green screen. There were some good games though – if you could ever find anywhere to buy them. And it really was a decent machine. You know, back then, we had to use batteries in our handhelds, you couldn’t charge them…[continues on in this vein for several hours]

Hello all. We’ve gone and covered another CSI game: this time it’s Miami.

I do appreciate that’s the third this year. If you’re of the opinion that we should be playing more “worthy” titles rather than TV tie-ins then, well, some of that on the way soon I hope.

Good evening.

In between all of this discussion-review tomfoolery, there’s no getting around the fact that new reviews have been thin on the ground of late.

Here’s one, though – I take a look at Michel Ancel’s Beyond Good & Evil.

Hello.

Our series of retrospective discussions continues, as Stoo, Jo and myself take a look back at Broken Sword.

We hope you’re enjoying these, and hope to do more, but watch out for some brand-new reviews in the near future.

So I got the CSI Miami game.

It’s… not very good. I was warned, of course, since it’s basically just Dark Motives with new missions and the Miami cast. I think I’m going to give myself RSI from mass-clicking every screen, and showing every bit of evidence to every suspect, so maybe I should just wimp out and turn on the visual “you can do something significant here” aids.

Also the voice-acting is pretty disinterested so far, not helped by the blank expressions on the CG models. Calleigh is hardest hit, going from sunny and cheery to a dead-eyed stare.

I’ll probably hack through to the end, but I’m already thinking that if you want to go muder-investigating on your PC you’re probably better off digging out a Police Quest.