Howdy.

Is it October already? It’s getting cold, the nights are drawing in…all the more reason to not bother going outside and enjoy some classic gaming in the warm comfort of your home. You could tidy the place up a bit though – how about recycling some of those empty Dr Pepper cans instead of leaving them scattered around your PC, huh?

Content from myself has ground to a bit of a halt recently. Luckily, Jo decided it was time she did another piece for this site – check out her review of Maniac Mansion.

Stoo, meanwhile, recklessly shelled out £40 on the ID Super Pack on Steam. To justify the expenditure he’s now forsaking all other forms of entertainment in favour of ageing 3D shooters a-plenty. First up is the one that started it all (kind of) – Wolfenstein 3D.

Finally, I managed to recover sufficiently from minor brain damage incurred while attempting to comprehend all the different stats in Fallout to add a review of Viva Football to the Sport section.

So a week or two ago I went out and got the ID Super Pack on Steam. It covers pretty much iD’s entire back catalogue, bar a few obscure titles, from Commander Keen to Doom3. Plus there’s some of the iD-engine-powered titles from Raven, like Heretic and Hexen. Total cost is $69.95 – far less than the combined cost of the separate components, which comes to $213.90.

As it happens a good half of the bundled items are either multiplayer-centric (like Quake 3), or expansion packs, and thus not of much interest to me. Going back to the original Quake to see what I missed is one thing, but I doubt I’ll bother slogging through 3rd-party mission packs. Also I already own a couple of the games and, er, have been borrowing Rik’s copy of Hexen 2 for about 8 years now. Still, I did the math and the pack still works out as decent value for money, albeit by a smaller margin.

Anyway, is this the way forward for keeping oldies alive? I appreciate people would sometimes rather have a copy on CD. Also there are legitimate concerns about what happens if Valve go out of business and steam shuts down. However this is a quick and easy way for companies to make old favourites available to consumers. They don’t have to worry about printing or distributing copies, or extensive advertising campaigns. Just stick the games on Steam and let word-of-mouth do its work. With the process made relatively painless, there’s more incentive for them to give it a try, when they probably wouldn’t bother if only the traditional methods of distribution were available.

Hello all.

Rik is trying something new and tackling an RPG. He’s currently spending hours every night shooting rats and mutants and grinding his way through endless quests, and reckons he might be finished sometime around 2014. So in the meantime you’re stuck with me. And I’ve reviewed a charming old Lucasarts adventure, huzzah! So take a look at Loom.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, The Abandonware Blog is back in business.

Which is clearly a good thing, I’m sure you’ll agree. So anyone who’s been missing their semi-regular dose of abandonware-related news can now head over there and get it…

Okay, so having steadfastly ignored RPGs since Dungeon Master (can’t remember much about that apart from that ‘oof, I’ve hit a wall’ noise when you, er, hit a wall), I’m currently making tentative progress through Fallout.

It’s such a well-loved game I’m feeling under a bit of pressure to really love it. It’s slow going at the moment, but it’s perhaps best to reserve judgement for now.

My lack of RPG nous is pretty obvious. One thing I clearly didn’t understand at the outset is that RPGs allow you a hell of a lot of freedom to go to different places and embark on different quests. When you think about the kind of song and dance people make about a bit of choice and multiple pathways in other genres, it’s nothing compared to the likes of this. And that kind of thing usually spells danger for me.

Another RPG trait, apparently, is having to kill lots of small creatures right at the beginning. In Fallout’s case, it’s rats. After the first few I actually started feeling sorry for the little critters. Not the giant pig-rats though – they can go to hell.

Hi all.

Been a fairly quiet summer, but we finally stirred ourselves into action and have two new articles for you. Having now lost my soul to World of Warcraft (troll hunter at level 69), I thought it fitting that I play through and review Blizzard’s earlier Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

Meanwhile, continuing in his role of champion of all things adventuring, Rik has reviewed Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Meanwhile, over at Just Games Retro…

“I never realized how many people were actually running sites like this until a few weeks ago. And if not their own sites, then talking over vid captures on YouTube, or swarming meta-review sites or Gamefaqs with their opinions. It’s a little disheartening, I suppose, that I’m not as fresh and edgy as I thought. I think it’s part of the reason that a review of the original Mega Man is currently dead on paragraph three. Maybe Tycho’s right.
Too bad the Abandonware Blog is still down, this would be a good topic. Maybe the boys at FFG will pick it up? Hmmmm?”

Consider it done.

So, did you see any particularly good ones? I don’t really like to look for the same reason.

I guess it shouldn’t come as a massive shock that there are lots of people out there who play and enjoy old games and are capable of stringing a few sentences together. Puncturing of egos aside, I think it can only be a good thing for old games if people are putting together and maintaining decent review sites. It’s more disheartening to log onto MobyGames and observe the plethora of poorly written user reviews on there.

As for the Penny Arcade thing, I’d like to think that it really is the reviews of the likes of Pac-Man and Solitaire that they’re criticising as completely unnecessary, but I guess it could be taken to mean that we’re all wasting our time here. Certainly, when covering games like Monkey Island or Half-Life, you can sort of feel like you’re reviewing Star Wars, but it’s an easy trap to fall into to assume that everyone’s played and enjoyed them already. For example, I’ve just started to play Fallout, a classic in most people’s eyes, for the first time. I’d have to say that reading a few well-written reviews and features (such as on JGR) beforehand were a significant factor in me giving it a go.

Sorry – I seem to have hijacked JMan’s original point here, so I’ll cease my rambling. Anyone got any thoughts?

Recently I was thinking about updating our Brief History of Space-sims – and something occured to me: what releases have there been in the past two or three years? The only significant one I can think of, off the top of my head, is X3.

Back in the day I used to be a big fan of Tie Fighter, Frontier and Freespace. It would be sad if this genre was to die off and go the same was as that other old favourite, the point-and-click graphical adventure. And I can’t really think of a reason it would be happening. You could argue that the old adventures were killed off by the coming of 3D and more action-adventury types like Tomb Raider. But I wouldn’t have thought space-sims have anything to fear from advancing technology.

Anyone got any ideas? Dying, or just a quiet patch?

So I flicked through Gamespot’s review of Doom3, and it seems to come down to “yeah it’s a generic shooter that kills its own tension by being so repetitive. But it’s really shiny!!!! 8/10”

It’ll be a few years before we look at Doom3 ourselves – but for now here’s my own summary which is “it’s really good at one thing, but just repeats that one thing over for entire game, 6/10”. That one thing being:

“creep fearfully into a chamber, lights flickering on and off, the edges of the room shrouded in darkness. It’s all far too quiet, corpses litter the floor and machinery whirs away. You can almost hear your own heartbeat. You see some ammo scattered on a table, cautiously move to take it. Then BAM an imp teleport in front of you. You scream like a girl and empty an entire clip into it, and BAM another one teleports in behind and another on a ledge up above. So more screaming as you whirl around and spray the entire room with shells and rockets, hopefully hitting a bad guy at some point. Then run and hide behind something”

Except that by the 875th time it’s all not quite so shocking anymore. It got to the point where I walked into each room backwards so I could catch the BAM! BEHIND YOU! guy, then dash to the relative safety of the previously cleared room.

Hello,

Okay, so July came and went without too much in the way of new content. No excuses, no lengthy stories of how bloody busy we are with our desperately interesting lives – let’s just say that July was a fallow month; we apologise.

Only one new review tonight, but it’s a biggie. In this site’s early days, the ethos was ‘let’s write about some of our all-time favourite old games in the hope that someone might seek them out and enjoy them too’. Covering oldies more generally meant we didn’t run out of new content after a year or so, but it’s always nice to be able to add something you’re particularly fond of and recommend it to all, especially if you’ve found yourself playing one too many average-mcaverage racing games recently.

Anyway, what all of this means is we’ve added a review of Max Payne. Hope you like it.

p.s. We’re not going to mention the journal in every newspost from now on – in fact this will probably be the last time – but it’s worth pointing out that we do try and post there in between ‘proper’ updates, so do come back and check it out once in a while if you just can’t get enough FFG action…