Well, we did it (just about) – here’s one final update for 2007.

Unfortunately there wasn’t as much time for retro gaming over the holidays as we thought; however, we did manage to get in a couple of reviews in between all of the drinking and scoffing.

First up, we have the spy caper Operation Stealth from Delphine. Another point and click game added to the Adventure section.

We’ve also taken a look at Sega Rally 2. That’s a racing game, by the way.

Thanks for visiting us in 2007. We’ll be back in 2008 – all the best for the new year.

To help get into the festive spirit, I went looking for: Christmas Lemmings! Which is really just regular lemmings with snowy levels and the little guys in red costumes. Oh, and adlib-card FM Synthesis renditions of “Good King Wenceslas”. Which coming through Dosbox’s sound emulation will probably drive you mad within around 7 minutes.

What I hadn’t realised tho, is that there were *four* editions. Xmas Lemmings 91 and 92 were just 4-level freebies, used to publicise the Oh No! expansion. Holiday Lemmings 1993 and 1994 were commercially released, although at 16 levels each I guess they were probably quite cheap.

Season’s greetings!

At a time when gamers are hoping that Santa is going to bring them one of the year’s must-have titles, here at FFG we’ve decided to bring you a review of something that we can pretty much guarantee no-one will be expecting to find in their Christmas stocking – the trucking sim King of the Road.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Another update before Christmas seems unlikely, but it’d be a shame to end the year in such a low-key fashion. We may have new content before we see in the New Year – keep ’em peeled.

Whatever the pros and cons of Steam, it’s clear that it (and other similar methods of online content delivery) are going to play a big part in gaming’s immediate future. There will always be some who prefer having their games in boxes, but there’s no doubting the convenience of being able to buy and download a game rather than popping down to the shops – particularly when most chains are more concerned about having space for 10,000 more copies of FIFA 2008 than stocking budget or lesser-known titles – or bidding on eBay.

Such was my thinking with Introversion’s understated hacker sim Uplink – rather than buggering around on eBay for a week, six quid and around ten minutes later, I was up and running with the Steam version. And, as is generally my wont, I played with it for an hour or so and then went and did something else, leaving it (metaphorically) on my pile marked ‘games to play later’.

Clearly, I must have left it quite a long time, because when I double clicked on the icon this week I was confronted with the following:

If you visit the support site, you basically get a message saying “You’re using Windows 98 – you’re buggered!”

I can appreciate that not many people are using Win 98 any more, and believe me, I’m not holding onto my current setup because of some misguided suspicion of new technology, but the fact remains that I’m suddenly without access to something I paid for.

You can’t argue with progress, and obviously there’s a valid technical reason for removing support for my ageing O/S, but it has to be a bit of a black mark against using Steam to boost your collection. I’ll be sticking to boxed copies for the time being…

So my adventures into the Forgotten Realms come to a premature halt, thanks to missing data.

Originally Baldur’s gate came on five disks. Some time later it was re-released along with the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion, but now fitted on two disks + one for the expansion. Presumably the reduction in disks was thanks to improved compression. Except, some releases of this package in the UK were botched. A few hours in it asked me for a non-existent 3rd CD. Looking on the existing disks, they seem to contain the data for original CDs 1 and 2, but not 4-5. So then: huge cock-up, rather than releasing the game re-packed onto two disks, they just issued the first two disks of the original set. Oops!

I think this was later fixed, though. Check the blurb on the back of the box: If it says “5 CDs filled with nearly 10000 scrolling game screens”, it’s the b0rked version. If it says “3 CDs” it should be ok. Also, if you bought the American version of this pack (named Baldur’s Gate: The original Saga) that should work fine too.

I could go complain to the ebay seller and ask for a refund, dunno how well that will work. For now though I’ll try and grab a working copy through, ahem, unofficial means.

A year or so ago I recall that of our review categories, Sports was the smallest in size. Since then tho Rik has churned out several reviews from the realms of football, golf, tennis and cricket. I don’t have a lot to offer in this section myself, but you never know. I have this odd urge to attempt a US sports game and write a hopelessly ill-informed review.

For now however, it’s the RPG section that’s looking rather meagre. I think there is a fair reason for this – RPGs are simply a bigger commitment. And I have to admit, old ones can be both very punishing on newbies, and look pretty clunky, which is offputting; that’s pretty much the reason why my attempts to play the early Elder Scrolls games have as yet come to nothing. A clunky old shooter is one thing – you’ll see all you need to in a few days. A clunky RPG however is something you could have to wrestle with for weeks to make real progress. On that kind of timescale, even oldies fans like myself can be forgiven for preferring something a little more modern.

Still it’s about time I made a renewed effort, and have finally started Baldur’s Gate. Whiich is fairly old-skool, but at least has some attractive artwork and a decently slick interface. Also it’s actually more forgiving in the early stages than I recal from my last (aborted) attempt. Rather than getting murderd by Level 1 Wimpy Rats, my team seems able to handle the starting enemies well enough. Maybe I’ll still get my ass kicked once I venture further afield – we’ll see!

Shame about the plastic-looking pre-rendered CG intro tho – looking back these were a regular curse on late-90s games. Simple old-fashioned 2D art would have set the scene a lot better IMO.

November: it’s dull and grey outside, so you may as well stop feeling guilty about playing videogames. Thus we’ve been unusually active these past few weeks.

A while back we were thinking that the Sports section looked undernourished; Rik has been working steadily over the past year to rectify that and his latest offering is Tennis Masters Series. Also he’s reviewed another adventure: Flight of the Amazon Queen. Meanwhile I’ve added my own thoughts on Clive Barker’s Undying, and waded through several hours of iD’s slightly brown milestone in first person shooters, Quake.

Good evening.

One new review for you this evening – of EA horror shooter Clive Barker’s Undying.

My plan was to have this review ready for a Halloween update, so it would be kind of, er, topical. Unfortunately this didn’t happen, although round my way the scares aren’t over until the shops have flogged the last of the fireworks.

Enjoy!

So here’s a question – I’m keeping it hypothetical for now.

Game A is released, and it’s awesome, gaining both critical and popular acclaim. The publishers see dollar signs, and demand a sequel as soon as possible. With no time to develop an entirely new title, Game B is thus virtually the same except for cosmetic changes and a few tweaks.

Now, how is a reviewer to respond to game B? Do they criticise it for being just a re-tread of a Game we’ve already played, and a cynical cash in? If B is the same as A, however, doesn’t that by default mean that it’s awesome too?

In the context of reviewing brand new games, I think the issue is resolved fairly easily: you can assume that many potential fans will already have paid £30 for A, and question if a second helping is really worth another £30. Looking back on A and B from years later, though, it’s a bit different. We’re talking games you’ll probably either get cheap on ebay or scrounge off an abandonware site. Also, even if you already slogged through A, that might have been 8 years ago, so you might be more open to the idea of that second helping.

Because of this, I’m wondering if the mindset of “same as the original, we’ve already been there and done that” is really a valid comment when reviewing oldies. How much weight should we place on similarity to predecessors when assessing a game?

So I’ve finally played Half-Life 2. And it’s awesome! The trick is, Valve sat down and and thought up a whole bunch of set-piece scenarios to put you in. So it’s not just running from one room to the next shooting people, and you never feel like you’re doing exactly the same thing twice. The gravity gun adds a lot too – Valve’s strategy seems have an emphasis on thinking of clever things you could do with it, rather than adding a huge arsenal of guns.

Classic moments!
-Flinging saw blades at zombies
-Charging around the beaches on a buggy, looking for safe spots from the Antlions
-Arranging a safe path over sand with bits of debris, again to avoid antlions
-Bitter shootouts with scaring looming tripods in the city streets

No Xen section, for those of you who hated it first time around. Also, the urban environments are very well done – I’m out of touch with the latest graphics but to me the Source engine looks really awesome in action, even in locations that don’t sound too promising like ruined warehouses.

The story is minimalist in some regards – by the end you still don’t really know much of what’s going on – but still quite gripping. And there’s a strong element of human drama thanks to the characters you meet. They really are brought to life in a convincing manner – animation, choreography and voice-acting are the best I’ve ever seen in a game. More on that point in a future post.

Anyway I’d like to replay the original but have lost the CD, godammit. However, I’ve already shelled out on the (confusingly titled) Episode 1. Steam is insidious like that, it’s so easy to spend money!