Hi there!

It’s been a while, but we’ve got a new review for you this evening. Check out CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder.

We’re going to work on something special now. Maybe not for next time, but over the coming weeks and months, there should be some good stuff coming. Stay tuned.

My current gaming project is: Gothic 2. If you’re not familiar with the Gothic series, imagine something like Elder Scrolls (single character, open world, action combat) but with a steeper learning curve. By which I mean, expect your pitifully weak hero to get casually murdered by every wolf, bandit and oversized insect lurking 20 yards outside the town gates. This is not the sort of game to hold your hand in the opening chapters.

I think a lot of people found that off-putting, especially given the funky default controls. In fact it can feel like some sort of RPG hazing ritual at first. But it’s worth it once you get the hang of suriviving in the wilderness. You can become proficient in melee which involves your own skill as well as character stats – blocking, dodging, recognising enemy attack patterns etc. Or you can be cheap like me and go climb on top of rocks and shoot stuff up with bows. Anyway once you’re capable of handling the more common enemies, there’s loads of exploring, questing and looting to be doing. All quite rewarding.

Anyway if you fancy a go yourself, it’s going stupidly cheap on gog.com. There’s a major JoWood sale on until next tuesday. Given the latter’s impending bankruptcy, who knows if their stuff will still be on gog this time next year.

Hello all.

Today I bring you one of the greatest PC RPGs: Planescape Torment. I’m glad this one’s a classic as it marks a minor milestone here: our 200th game covered.

For those of you who have read a signficiant number of them, you have our thanks. And hey even if you just flick through a couple, I hope they are of interest. We do genuinely wish to be useful, for those of you seeking to experience some PC Gaming of the past, in helping you decide which titles are worth your time.

Hi all. Today’s review is Starship Troopers. Which would be the game of the film of the book.

It’s kindly provided by guest-reviewer the J-Man. While it’s no longer updated, he still has a lot of quality reviews up at Just Games Retro and we recommend you have a read there. Especially as he’s covered some oldies I keep meaning to get around to but never will, like Dune 2. He can also be found writing at the rather professional-looking Gamecrashers.

Stumbled across this completely by accident: Ascendancy for iOS

Originally an MS-DOS title from 1995, Ascendancy is a space-based 4X strategy game – the sort where you colonise worlds, build up an infrastructure, build a stack of warships and go conquering other civilisations. It’s actually somewhat flawed, for one thing the AI is lamentably dumb and limited. Still I had a lot of fun with it – distinctive artwork and music, detailed ship design options. And you have to love it when you get to build a weapon called a Long Range Orbital Whopper. Go read our review if you like. I wrote that ages back but the conclusions mostly still stand.

I can’t comment as to how well Ascendancy handles on iDevices, although I imagine the interface should work fine on a touchscreen. Also I’m glad to see the Logic Factory are still around, given how since Ascendancy they’ve only released one game, and that was in 97. (the odd-looking Tone Rebellion, which I intend to play and review sometime).

One of the benefits of Steam is the stack of indie games they make available. I’ve been slow to look into such things, but this week have been enjoying some Nightsky.

It’s a puzzle-platformer – popular format amongst indies, I hear? The idea is you have to navigate a sphere across the screen whilst obeying realistic laws of physics. There’s no “jump” button, your basic controls are just roll left or right, so to accomplish that you need to take a run-up (rollup?). If you can’t do that, probably have to go another way something else.

It’s not just about jumping gaps – you get subtleties like the ball rolling onto a car (transferring momentum). Or having enough momentum to follow a wall and roll along an ceiling briefly. Or releasing other movable items to clear a path. The game likes to show off its physics especially when you get a feature like two platforms hanging from one chain strung across the sceren. Which you might have to navigate carefully or you’ll just go tumbling off.

There are no bad guys, the only way to “die” is to fall off the bottom of the screen. But then you just start again from the start of that little section. That leads to a fairly relaxed pace. There are some fiddly\twitchy bits but they tend to come in short bursts, and you can usually sit still a moment to figure out what to do next.

On those ground we’d have a fun little distraction, but Nightsky also has a really distinctive design style. It’s all in monochrome, with a backdrop of sunset hues. The soundtrack is ambient and moody. So it becomes a quiet, introspective experience. Even if it’s just a game about, er, a big marble, you feel like he’s diligently rolling his way home across a world that’s forgotten and empty. Now there’s just owls and the occasional creaking leftover piece of machinery.

So it’s a very “evening” game, and has helped me relax anyway after a shitty week. £6 on steam, if you fancy a look.

Good evening.

Double update tonight.

First, Stoo takes a look at 90s console RPG Shining Force – which recently arrived on PC via Steam. [Archive note: this later moved to JGR]

Our second review is of something a bit more recent – the TV tie-in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Dark Motives.

Hope you enjoy them. We’re coming up on a milestone soon. So we might have something special to celebrate. Or it might the be usual rubbish; we haven’t decided.

Some screenshots for Skyrim at Rock Paper Shotgun.

From what I’ve heard so far, it’s like Oblivion with upgraded graphics and more advanced combat physics. Rest assured I’ll be getting a copy; I missed the early installments of Elder Scrolls but have been a huge fan since Morrowind. My current thought tho is how they’re going to move on from Oblivion’s wonky balance system.

See, in that one the level of enemies is always matched to your own. This means weird situations like winning the Imperial Gladiatorial Arena at a lowly level 2. Or conversely at high level, common bandits running around with rare, exotic weapons and armour. A dungeon that was for a lvl2 hero populated by wimpy skeletons with rusty swords at one point, is at lv25 now full of spell-flinging liches. It sort of takes away from your sense of progressing as a hero if, whatever you do, you don’t feel a clear change in your power relative to the world around you.

I can see how Bethesda arrived at such a situation. In many RPGs your progress around the game’s world is restricted by level. You start off in the relatively friendly GreenShire Forest, if you try going into Murky Swamp or Orcish Caverns you get your ass handed to you, until you’ve killed a load of rats and goblins, bought some better armour and levelled up. A core tenet of Elder Scrolls games however is an open world where you can start exploring wherever you want from level one. So how do you stop low level guys from getting arbitrarily splatted yet keep it challenging for high-level mighty champions?

In other words, free roaming is difficult to fit with traditional RPG dynamics. Oblivion, as mentioned, had the surrounding situation alter itself to your level, sometimes to silly extents. Morrowind sort of tried that but in a half-hearted manner. So on the one hand no ludicrously over-geared bandits, but on the other you were utterly unstoppable by level 25. I’ll be interested to see how Bethesda tackle it this time.

Hi there!

We have one new review for you tonight. Our friend and sometime contributor Jo (of blog fame) has written a review of Bullfrog’s strategy caper Theme Hospital.

Thanks Jo! Now all we need is for the other FFG staff to get off their asses and produce some content.

Which we, er, will do very shortly. We’re just, er, doing something else at the moment. But we’ll get right on it.

Surely that involves blocking off the entrances and starving the monsters within into surrender over the course of several months. Which, er, doesn’t describe the nature of today’s game at all. But anyway here’s Dungeon Siege.