I’m happy to report that we now have nearly all of the Lucasarts adventures covered. Given that the favourites were so well loved, and even 2nd-tier stuff like The Dig is very enjoyable, I do think comprehensive coverage is a worthy goal for a site like ours. All that’s left now are Zak McCracken and Grim Fandango – games from the start and the end of their adventure days respectively.

After that we could turn our attention more to the Sierra adventures. Even though they invented the genre they always seemed somehwat outmached to us – lacking the wit, style or imagination of Lucasarts games. Certainly we’d like to expand our range somewhat, but right now I’d say it’s very unlikely that more than about half their pantheon will be covered. Feel free to let us know if there are any particular that deserve a look.

I do think we should have a King’s quest at least – this is where the Graphical Adventure began after all. Unfortunately my last attempt was to try the remake of the original, and for the record: it’s really dull. There’s no story to speak of, and the world consists of just a castle in a forest surrounded by wolves and fairies and other fairytale cliches. I might give number six a go instead.

Looking at other series, we already have reviews of the VGA remakes of the originals from Police Quest, Space Quest and Quest for Glory. The first of those three series is the most likely candidate for further investigation. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Leisure Suit Larry.

Hi all. We have a double helping of Lucasarts adventure goodness tonite!

First up, Jo has reviewed Escape from Monkey Island for us. Meanwhile scooting back a few years earlier, I’ve looked at the classic Indy adventure Fate of Atlantis.

Well, the Olympics got underway this weekend, and I have to say I personally couldn’t really care less about any of it. Inevitably though, with the BBC shoving aside the majority of their programming to show it, I found myself watching Sue Barker introducing the women’s weightlifting final on Saturday morning.

Though the spectacle of extremely slightly-built Asian women lifting massive weights above their heads with consummate ease was mildly diverting, my own (extremely nerdy) thoughts were centred on exactly what button combinations and techniques were required to succeed in the weightlifting event on International Track and Field 2 on the Playstation.

Despite the dubious appeal of athletics as a spectator sport, when it comes to games I have to admit to a love of the joystick waggling/button bashing genre. What started it all was Daley Thompson’s Decathlon on the Amstrad CPC, a game loosely based on Konami’s arcade classic International Track and Field which saw you guide the Great Britain’s favourite moustachioed decathlete through a variety of running, jumping and throwing events.

Of course, success in virtually every event was mostly contingent on your ability to waggle a joystick from left to right at a frenetic pace (punctuated by the occasional press of the fire button). With an old Atari joystick in my hand, I was unstoppable, even managing to negate tricky timing issues in the hurdles event by simply ploughing through each and every one of the bastard things – although an almost superhuman amount of physical effort was required to achieve the necessary waggling speed (who needs Wii Fit?).

Obviously DTD isn’t eligible for inclusion on FFG, but a quick perusal of Abandonia revealed one or two familiar titles on which I’ve also wasted a few too many hours. Expect a review of something more recent and PC based sometime soon.

We’ve got something new for you this evening. It’s a review of XIII, the amnesiac spy shooter from 2003.

That’s right, I said 2003. That’s five years ago. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Next week – a review of Zork. And Pacman.

Spending hour after hour on a game that never ends just to achieve a high score isn’t something I’ve ever been particularly interested in, but it has to be said that my recent dabble with pinball reminded me that occasionally such an obsession has taken a hold.

Some time ago I spent a not-unreasonable amount of time playing a game called Major Motion on the Atari ST. Although times (and games) were simpler then, it has to be said that a Spy Hunter clone with fairly dreadful graphics didn’t represent the cutting edge of 16-bit gaming and as a relatively early release, it was doomed to a life on a mail-order budget label being ordered by those happy to make a purchase based on a game’s name and a postage stamp sized picture of the box cover.

Luckily, my Dad was one such person and my obsession with driving up a never-ending road smashing evil blue cars into the grass verge was born. For years I toiled to finally knock the names of the programming team off the top of the high score charts, an achievement I was proud of until I downloaded a copy of the disk image for my ST emulator and saw my best efforts failing to register on the high-score chart, for they had easily (and repeatedly) eclipsed by whoever had owned that particular copy of the game. The bastard.

If there’s no new content from me for several weeks, you’ll know what I’ve been doing. Now, even though this journal has never been the most active (or ‘interactive’) place, I’ll ask anyway, for the hell of it: anyone out there got a favourite high-score type game? Anyone else had their feelings of supremacy on an oldie shattered by the entries on the high-score table after downloading from an abandonware site?

A friend of mine sent a link to this: GOG.com. It’s an online distribution service, focussing on older games – the front page has stuff like Fallout 2 and Sacrifice.

Ever since Steam came along I’ve been hoping for more oldies on online services like this. There’s certainly some demand out there for the classics, and even if it’s not a really huge market, the costs involved should be pretty small. Apparently the guys behind GOG have enthused about one day adding the Lucasarts back catelogue, which I’d especially like to see.

Anyway i’ve signed up for the beta test so if i’m lucky I’ll let you all know.

Hello.

No summer holidays for us, we’re staying inside with the curtains drawn, all in the name of retro-gaming.

We’ve added one new review – of Codemasters’ Psycho Pinball.

Not an update as such, but I’ve spent a bit of time updating my brief histories. The racing one’s been done for a little while now, and the football and adventure histories have now been brought up to speed. There are new screenshots, games that we’ve covered are now linked to the review pages, and I’ve tried to remove any glib evaluations of games I haven’t actually played.

I’m leaving the cut-off date at 2004 for now rather than attempting to add entries for more recent years. That means they cover roughly the same time period as the games we review – detailed info on recent stuff is more readily available on ‘the internet’, after all.

If there’s a better way to spend a day off, I’d like to know what it is. Thanks to Jo for helping me out with some of the screenies.

Well, I finally got around to getting a new PC. As regular visitors to FFG may know, I’ve been making do with an old AMD Duron 900 for the past six years or so, and despite several makeshift upgrades, there comes a point when you have to accept that brand new technology is the only way forward. The final straw came when we moved house and my internet provider told me that it no longer supported Windows 98. I had been using their service and Win 98 at our old place pretty successfully since 2006, but after enduring snorts of derision from customer services (“I didn’t know anyone still used that operating system, sir“) and searching frantically for some kind of workaround, it soon became apparent that the game was up.

Admittedly, I could have just bought Win XP and put it on my old PC, but one look at the old girl told me she just wouldn’t be able to take another temporary fix. So despite unsteady economic times, I got out the credit card and splashed out on the best rig I could reasonably afford. It’s not a particularly powerful machine, but it does open up the possibility of experiencing about five years’ worth of gaming that were previously inaccessible to me.

Effectively, this means two things for FFG. Firstly, it puts a stop on me ranting about how things won’t work with Windows 98 (well, at least until the whole world’s using Vista, then I’ll repeat the same trick as I keep XP on my machine until 2020). Secondly, I think we can now entertain the prospect of covering one or two slightly more modern titles on FFG. We’ve never had any strict rules about this kind of thing, but in recent years we’ve certainly tried to keep to pre-2002 titles, partly because we’re supposed to be a retro games site, and partly because I would sulk a bit if anything too new to run on my machine was suggested for review.

When we first started we weren’t so worried about such things. FFG was more of a ‘here are games that we’ve played and liked’ tribute site than anything too specifically retro-focused. The first game I ever reviewed here was Blade Runner in 2001 (the date on the review refers to a later rewrite) – only three years after it had been released. So I guess there’s an argument for saying that if it was alright then, it should be alright now.

We’re not going to go too recent though. The focus of the site has changed, and with some logical reasoning behind that change, too. But don’t be surprised if you see the odd title from 2003 cropping up on FFG in the future.

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As a footnote, it’s been a little quiet on the journal of late. Not that we’ve been too busy (or certainly I haven’t) but I seemed to have subconsciously imposed some kind of quality control on stuff that should or shouldn’t go up here. But blogs are generally fairly self-indulgent creations: and it’s not like I’m writing about what I bought from the supermarket or my Friday night down the pub. So there’ll be more of this kind of rubbish more regularly from now on. Bet you can’t wait.

Wow, it’s a double-whammy of updates. I guess if we’d have been better organised we could have rolled it into one, but hey, it’s sort of more exciting this way.

Anyway, we have one new review for you this evening, and the game in question is the cheerfully chaotic city-based racer Midtown Madness 2.