We’re well into 2008, and with the January blues blurring into a more general malaise, and all thoughts of self-improvement having long been abandoned, what better way to spend your free time than by shutting out the outside world and enjoying a few hours of gaming goodness?

We’ve again covered a couple of more recent titles this month. In a notable reversal of roles, Stoo’s been adventuring away, and has reviewed Funcom’s tale of two parallel worlds, The Longest Journey.

Meanwhile, I’ve been uncharacteristically engrossed in a strategy game by the name of Hostile Waters.

Hope you enjoy the update. Next time, we might have something a little more retro for you.

While thumbing through the latest (extremely thin) issue of PC Zone magazine, their lukewarm review of the latest unremarkable racer to get a multi-format release made for fairly depressing reading:

“In any other year a PC racing-lite enthusiast would be reading this review and being subjected to a list of reasons as to why the latest Need for Speed is far better. But that’s now been thrown high up in the air what with [NFS] ProStreet being an ill-conceived dog egg of a game…so instead of putting forward this year’s NFS as an alternative, just get last year’s.”

To tell the truth, the NFS games seem to have been short of new ideas since someone at EA watched The Fast and the Furious and realised a game loosely based on the film would go down pretty well with ‘da kidz’. To be fair, Need for Speed: Underground was a reasonable lark, injecting the series with a new lease of life, but subsequent games have been pretty short on new ideas, with 2007’s ProStreet removing all traces of illegality by shifting from street racing to (yawn) track-based events.

Whatever happened to all the racing games? I may be lumbered with an ancient PC and a previous generation console, but Test Drive Unlimited apart, there hasn’t really been anything in recent releases to make me sit up and take notice. More depressingly, there seems to have been a genuine shortage of new games in the genre. It could of course be my nostalgia-addled brain playing tricks on me, but it did seem at one stage that new racing games were being released left, right and centre – between 2000 and 2002 we had at least 10,000 rally titles come out on the PC alone.

Now it seems we can’t even rely on EA to churn out a reliably decent NFS game in time for Christmas. Without that, the cupboard seems pretty bare. While sim fans with steering wheels and pedals set up in front of their PC will undoubtedly point to Simbin’s GTR games, the non-hardcore petrolheads are left with very little else.

I guess if there really were lots of racing titles being released ‘in the old days’ then it must be worth trying to dig some of them out now. I’m currently engrossed (ie past the tutorial level) in a strategy game – hence the lack of new content from me recently – but once I’m done I think it’s worth investigating.

If we end up with a racing section full of indistinguishably average rally titles, then I’ll hold my hands up and admit I was wrong. Or delete this entry from the journal.

Hi all.

It’s a double-whammy of few-years-old shooters for you tonight – of the generation that was cutting edge when we started this site seven or so years ago. Rik has examined Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza and I’ve covered Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Well, that’s another year of retro-gaming over and done with. 2007 has actually been fairly productive for us in terms of content, and any regular readers out there might have noted that updates have been more frequent in the last 12 months.

Although what we do here at FFG doesn’t really warrant any detailed analysis, I thought it might be kind of interesting to take a quick look back at the last year. If nothing else, it was certainly useful for me: having now reached the age where each year blurs into the next, I occasionally check back on a review that I thought I wrote a couple of months ago to find that it was actually two or three years. [Fascinating! – a reader]

Anyway, the FFG year was book-ended by reviews of 3-star games (I know, they’re more like blobs than stars, but I’m not going to use the expression ‘3-blob’). In January we kicked things off with Covert Action, that simple but addictive spy caper from the early 90s, and it all ended on the last day of the year with the addition to the racing section of the superficially-entertaining Sega Rally 2. This seemed to sum up the vast majority of games covered, with many of them falling into the ‘not bad’ category.

Still, there were a few gems: I gushed about Monkey Island 2 and Max Payne, and Stoo lavished praise on Outcast, with all three receiving the highest ratings of the year. Action and Adventure were the two sections added to most often, with all but one of the games receiving ratings of four stars or more this year being games of this type (the exception being the surprisingly-nifty Need for Speed: Porsche 2000).

There was also a significant minority of not-particularly-enjoyable titles, and an all-time low point was reached when a review of the excerable Viva Football was added to the Sport section. Aside from the significant achievement of finding a football game that we enjoyed less than Sensible World of Soccer, the previously undernourished Sport section grew to a more healthy size. Now, we need more RPGs – perhaps it’s time to dig out Fallout again…

And so, what does this half-arsed re-cap tell us? Well, er, nothing really. But, seeing as we’re here, it might be worth making some New Year’s resolutions, even if, as tradition dictates, we aren’t likely to keep to them. Still, as all my self-help books tell me, it’s worth setting achievable targets, so we may as well settle for the following: at least one (1) review of a Sierra adventure game (with the word Quest in the title), no more Need for Speed games appearing in the racing section (no matter how tempting it might be) and, er something else (details TBC).

Oh yes! 2008: It’s gonna rock.

[Edit – Ahem. Of course, if anyone has any sensible suggestions or comments, then we’d be happy to hear them…]

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.