Just when you thought we’d probably had enough of games based around following police procedure, we’re back once again, with a review of Jim Walls’ Blue Force.

I can categorically state that we have had enough of them now. And we will never, ever, ever be reviewing Police Quest: SWAT. Ever.

Next time, something good.

Hello.

After our last few updates, we’ve started to tire of fighting crime ‘by the book’. What about the world of criminals who operate above the law?

One man can make a difference. Providing, of course, he has an indestructible super-car at his disposal. Now you can be that man (sort of) – if you play Knight Rider: The Game. We wouldn’t recommend it though.

games from Apogee

Pick of the (short so far) list beying Duke Nukem 3D. Which i’ll put on my “possible coverage” list. Despite being technically inferior I always thought it was a superior experience to Quake. More fun, more of a sense of character and “real-world” locations.

The rest of the list is only of moderate interest tho. Blake Stone is basically a sci-fi Wolf3d; playing the free shareware version would be enough unless you’re really hardcore. And I don’t recall the Doom-era Rise of the Triad being all that inspiring.

What might be tempting is a compilation of their 2D stuff – Raptor, Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure, Commander Keen. Well ok we can get that last one off Steam, but I know some folks prefer the GoG approach.

The company i work for is about to move office, and as part of the process of clearing out we’re throwing out some old P2 to P3 era hardware.

So I’ve taken for myself a hard disk and a few other bits – I now have more or less everything I need to resurrect my own first PC, a P3-450 I obtained in 1999. Of course why I’d actually want to do that, and whether or not I have space, is another matter, especially as it becomes ever-easier to run DOS oldies on modern sytems. Guess it’s just the collector in me talking.

Tonight we have a double whammy, completing our coverage of Sierra’s Police Quest series. Well, apart from the EGA original. And the SWAT spin-offs. Still, this is our greatest show of dedication yet to the Sierra adventures!

So Rik has reviewed the final installment in the adventures of Sonny Bonds: Police Quest 3: The Kindred. Meanwhile the depature of Jim Walls saw a new setting and player character, so have a read of my thoughts on Police Quest 4: Open Season.

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

For PS3, Xbox and not PC.

Dammit!

Oh well maybe i’ll get a Wii one day, then I could legally get such classics via the Virtual Console. Er except I’d need a TV first.

Sometimes I buy the gaming magazine Edge. It’s supposedly the magazine for ‘serious’ gamers, which I like to think I am – perhaps that’s why I buy it – but almost every time I do, I come across something that makes me think it isn’t aimed at people like me at all.

Such as this for example. It’s a retrospective look at the merits of the PlayStation game Ridge Racer Revolution. Back when I owned one of those grey-box things, I came across this game myself, and I have to say it didn’t strike me as the kind of thing anyone would look upon with any great fondness.

Still, that’s not really the issue. Whoever wrote the article obviously disagrees with me, and that’s fine. What disturbs me is what he/she (Edge don’t like to put their writers’ names on anything, for whatever reason) has actually written about the game. How’s this for starters?

”The primary rule of a great pop song: always leave your audience wanting more…The primary rule of a great arcade game: follow the rules of the great pop song. Ridge Racer always had it nailed. If the straights are the verses, the corners are the chorus – the build-up and the anticipation, followed by the emphatic and joyful release.

And Ridge Racer Revolution is the exemplar of that concept, a three and-a-half minute explosion of colour, excitement and optimism that acts as an adrenaline shot to the heart.”

Pretentious? Oh yes. But at least you can kind of follow what’s going on. Ridge Racer – it’s like a pop song, apparently. But what about the graphics? What are they like?

“The sunset that greets the player on the first lap of the second track consists of the richest Del Monte orange imaginable. Water lapping up against the thin stretch of road halfway around the novice course is turned a beautiful shade of peppermint green thanks to its shallowness and the sand underneath, a section of track made all the more memorable and heavenly due to the flash of lens flare that appears for a split second just out of the corner of the player’s eye. Planes jetting off to new destinations, sailboats idling on all sides: the atmosphere is clubland holiday, a paradisiacal Ibiza.

Hmm, now you’ve lost me. It’s been a while since I played the game, but if pressed to come up with a description of my own I might have gone for “ugly” or “blocky” instead.

Anyway, the article continues in this vein, and there are times you could be forgiven for forgetting that he/she is, in fact, talking about a game – an old game in fact, where you drive a fake car around in circles on a fake island while ridiculous techno music pumps away in the background (go here if you’re not familiar with it yourself).

I’ve got nothing against taking games seriously, or using long words to talk about them occasionally, but it’s usually worth stopping right before the point you start to come out with this kind of bollocks.

So, just finished Fahrenheit. It was good stuff, actually – flawed, yes – but still very, very good. I didn’t even mind the sub-Nickelback “rawk” that played over the end credits.

I’m tempted to say that it’s unlike any game I’ve played, although a couple of things tell me stop short of making such a claim:

Firstly, for a game that’s mainly about storytelling and dialogue, it’s actually fairly restrictive in terms of the choices you can make and how you can take the story down different paths. You can say and do things you regret (or which are clearly ‘wrong’) but still come out of it okay in terms of driving the story forward. At several points it did strike me that, save for the fact that the technology has all moved on and there’s polygons where the grainy video used to be, the game isn’t really that much different from the dreaded ‘interactive movie’ that plagued gaming (particularly on PC) during the early-mid 1990s.

Secondly, your progress in the more action-oriented sequences is normally determined by your ability to either hammer a couple of buttons quite quickly or move the analogue sticks on your joypad according to a sequence displayed on the screen. Your character may be moving about, fighting monsters or doing a backflip, but you’re playing an altogether different game, focusing on moving your thumb in the right direction. While it’s certainly better executed, the general concept reminded me of the much derided non-interactive Don Bluth cartoon/games that appeared on Amiga and ST such as Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair. They looked good, but they were bum – and widely derided as such (although possibly not by using the word ‘bum’).

Both of the parallels I’ve drawn are with genres that are probably better best forgotten, yet I still really enjoyed the game. Still, since it’s a little too new for a full review, I won’t worry too much about breaking down the reasons why – I’ll just recommend that you check it out if you haven’t already.

Migman’s Flight Sim Museum

Given our own near-total lack of flight sim coverage, I thought it might be worth linking this site, which has entries for sims going all the way back to the beginning. Not a great detail of information on each game, but there are still some interesting bits and pieces looking back on over twenty years of the genre, see here and also here.

Hello.

Well, I guess that was January. I figured we’d have no problem getting a second update in before next month, but having done a bit of work on this one I got a bit lazy.

No matter, we made it (just about) – here’s a review of TOCA Race Driver.