Happy New Year! Hope you all had a good one.

Once again, we narrowly failed to make a final New Year’s Eve update for 2009. So let’s put a positive spin on it – at least we’re in early with our first entry for 2010.

And it’s a double update too. I’ve taken a look at The Mystery of the Druids, a relatively modern point-and-click adventure, while Stoo’s been bashing away at the PC version of hack-and-slash classic, Golden Axe.

So that was 2009. Despite our best efforts it’s been a quiet one, although we did manage to update each month, which is still better than we used to manage back in the early days (when, ironically, we had much more free time).

Anyway, our limited ambitions for the year were largely realised. Having started the year by adding a review of a Sierra adventure, Police Quest II, we went not one but two better by covering chapters three and four as well. By my reckoning that’s the PQ series covered – we’re not counting the SWAT games, goddammit.

However, having enjoyed PQ more than we were perhaps expecting, in a fit of enthusiasm I decided to review Jim Walls’ Blue Force. That was my mistake – it’s rubbish.

All police questing aside, we also met our (well, my) commitment to cover Davilex’s Knight Rider game. Which is also, er, not very good. Thankfully, we didn’t bother with Daikatana or else the year would have been a depressing slog through old rubbish (let’s not mention MegaRace, then).

Thankfully, though, that wasn’t the case. Personal highlights included finally getting around to playing cult classic Grim Fandango. Plus a selection of decent racing games, the best of which was Rockstar’s Midnight Club II.

In between all my larking around on light-hearted, commitment-free titles, Stoo was hard at work boosting the neglected areas of the site. Haegemonia was added to the strategy section, while after years of trying to get a party together to venture forth, the long-awaited review of Baldur’s Gate finally materialised. Free Dr Pepper for everyone!

In a first for the site, we finally got a fighting game – or “beat ’em up”, if you will – reviewed. Fittingly it was a PC-only effort, One Must Fall. While in the action section, Stoo continued our quest to review every FPS except Doom with reviews of the ageing Heretic and the more modern Unreal 2.

So what for 2010? With this site, as with life, I have no specific ambitions. We should have some more reviews of some old games at various stages throughout the year. Stay tuned.

I’d hoped to have something interesting to post for xmas, but if all else fails at least we can highlight a great deal out there in the world of digital distribution.

So how about Loom, The Dig, and both Indiana Jones adventures for £1.74? Get it!

[edit]Also worth a look, the entire Dark Forces/Jedi Knight set for £7.49.

Hello all. Just one review today, the shooter Wheel of Time.

Hopefully we’ll have another update before christmas!

I’ve been meaning to do a reformat\system reinstall for a while now, and since I gave Windows Vista a miss I figured why not upgrade to the latest incarnation.

Upgrading from XP actually means a clean install, so of course afterwards I hastily had to re-install the most important applications:

This also gives me a chance to update some of our compatibility info. While we’ve always included a few details on running oldies on modern PCs, unfortunately by “modern” we mostly mean Windows XP. So I’m planning on re-checking some of our oldies to check how they do in this shiny new world. I could go look such details up but I do prefer to field-test myself.

For Dos games I figure we’ll just go on using DosBox, with no problems, so I’m more concerned with the windows 95\98 generation. So I’ll update reviews if I learn of any new problems. Just to assure you all, the information in our Running the Oldies still stands, it’s just a question of maybe a few more games falling into the category of needing help to run.

(sidenote: Unfortunately I won’t be able to see if the XP compatibility mode helps as it doesn’t come with the Home Premium edition. I don’t know if it’s any different to just running XP under Windows Virtual PC, which I would imagine is too slow for gaming anyway?)

So GOG have just added Myst to their catalogue.

Which gives me the opportunity to post a link to this. I’m a PC.

News update: Gaming celebrity Jimmy White fails to win jungle-based reality show. Meanwhile, a handful of people watch a video of him saying “Blame the Chalk” on YouTube.

Those of us in the UK are currently being subjected to the latest series of ITV’s jungle-based reality show. The ‘celebrities’ are of a particularly poor standard this year – Samantha Fox, a bloke who used to be in Hollyoaks – that kind of thing.

But they have got Jimmy White, who gaming fans may recall from his endorsement of Archer Maclean’s snooker and pool games. I certainly remember his halting delivery of a terrible script in the otherwise-decent Cueball World. So I’ve been occasionally shouting “Blame the Chalk!” at the screen in a terrible cockney accent.

Unfortunately, it’s a reference that most people, especially my bewildered other half, aren’t going to be familiar with.

EDIT: Okay, this is ridiculous. If you google “Blame the chalk”, we’re the top two entries on the list. And there’s no clip on YouTube either. That is, until now…

EDIT 2: Scratch that, we’re not top any more. But we’re the only site to refer to Jimmy White saying these words. Fact.

Hello. We seem to have missed an October update, which I’m sure had retro gamers the world around in a state of loss and despair. But to try and make up for it here are two reviews.

One sticks to familiar FFG ground – that is, first person shooters. I’ve had a look at the Doom-powered Heretic, featuring a fantasy setting and magic fireballs.

On the other hand Rik has ventured onto new ground – fighting games. It’s new to us cos, frankly, there wasn’t a lot out there that wasn’t a console port. And while we might review the odd such port, there’s a limit to how many times we want to end with “better on the Megadrive”. But for a rare PC-native title, take a look at One Must Fall 2097.

(bit different to our usual posts, cribbed from my livejournal)

Deus Ex spoiler alert

So imagine a dystopian cyberpunk-ish near future. There’s terrorism, disease and rioting in the streets. An ever growing gap between the lives of the rich in their shiny safe towers and the struggling poor, living in fear. Shadowy conspiracy groups pull the strings of national governments, operate their own armies, control the media and watch over us all.

You as the Hero of the Tale have fought your way to the Shadowy Conspiracy Group’s secret headquarters. It contains a massive network hub through which all electronic communications and computers around the world are monitored (and if needs be, controlled), watched over by a sentient AI. The ability to gather information, watch over peoples lives and manipulate infrastructure is absolutely integral to Shadowy Group’s grip on power.

Do you

1: Blow the whole place up. This destroys the hub and stops anyone abusing its power. It also destroys with it every computer network on the planet. In this tech-dependent world, it means being blown back to a new dark age.

It’s a huge victory for liberty, at the cost of security. No one can rule the world again and smaller more manegable power structures will arise, more accountable to the people. But there will be great hardship and suffering along the way.

2: Elminate the Conspiracy leaders and let another, still shadowy but more benign group take over. They will continue to use the hub. This keeps the world largely the same but dials back the dystopia, perhaps leading to a state of affairs more like the present day. Hardly ideal but less drastic than the other options. However, since the system is still in place, its open to abuse in the future.

3: Merge with the AI to become a kind of godlike administrator of the human race. Watching over every bank, security robot and construction facility. It has intellect, but you will bring compassion. It’s the end of democracy, but also maybe the strongest force the world has ever seen against war and poverty. An all-seeing benevolent dictator will now shape our lives.

I went for 3 the first time I played through. I don’t have a lot of confidence in people sometimes.

So I was flicking through the radio in my car at the Weekend, and on a whim turned to Long Wave. There was a kind of low buzzing noise that I was about to turn off when I realised it was rising and falling in pitch with the engine revs. I’m guessing the signal was being induced by the alternator.

I’m only boring you with this tedious trivia because it sounded just like the kind of tortured approximation to an engine noise that games like Stunts would try and squeeze out of your adlib card (or PC Speaker), back in the early 90s.