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…

iD have added their back-catalogue to steam! Also Raven have added some of their iD-engine-powered games like Hexen.

just look at the front page

I’d still rather be able to buy these titles on a CD-compilation, but I’m old-fashioned like that. This is a good move on iD’s part, and I only hope other companies follow suit!

I don’t know, however, if the various source ports like jDoom will work with these Steam versions.

First up – (genuine) new content is coming very soon. In the meantime…

Back in the mid-eighties, the big argument among computer-owning kids was whether the Sinclair Spectrum or the Commodore 64 was ‘the best’ machine to own. Frankly, I always found this a little bit baffling – Speccy games only ever seemed to feature about two colours, and while the Commodore 64 was supposed to be technically superior, I didn’t think much of its washed-out palette either.

Our family had an Amstrad CPC – possibly the least celebrated of the three major 8-bit home computers – and while it may be wrong to focus on graphics, with virtually every major computer release appearing across all three formats (CPC, Speccy, C64), on the old ‘comparing the screenshots on the back of the box’ test, the CPC came out on top every time.

Okay, I may be a little biased, and admittedly the more colourful CPC graphics occasionally seemed a little more chunky than the others, but on the other hand, I never came back from an afternoon squinting at my mate’s Spectrum games thinking, ‘cor, I wish I had one of those…’

By the time the Amigas and Atari STs of this world started emerging, we’d built up a collection of some 350 games, a total boosted somewhat by the presence of quite a number of £2 budget titles. At that price, it didn’t really matter if they were rubbish, but quite a lot of them weren’t. Codemasters may now be a respectable publisher of endless full-price Colin McRae titles, but back in the 80s their business was cranking out fun-size little arcade games that were cheap as chips.

It has to be said that these were the games that I played and enjoyed most. Other titles had a surprising amount of depth, but they were usually hard as nails, too, and I recall my Dad being forced into constructing several labyrinthine home-made maps in a vain attempt to complete Gargoyle Games’ Marsport.

Meanwhile, I was busy enjoying the likes of Codemasters’ Twin Turbo V8, a cheap knock-off of Outrun which actually looked pretty good when compared to the CPC conversion of the arcade classic (pictured below – and no, that isn’t a reverse view, I just crashed the bloody thing, okay?). Recently I got the urge to pick up a CPC emulator specifically to have a go at this game – an experiment which took up roughly ten minutes of my time. While I don’t for a second imagine I’ll be forsaking my PC oldies for a CPC emulator, I’d still like to give some of my old collection a go – perhaps it could even be a semi-regular feature on the journal (whoop-di-frickin’-do – a reader).

In the meantime, if you’re at all interested in anything CPC related, you could do a lot worse than check out the following:

Caprice – A top CPC emulator that’ll do pretty much everything you could want, er, CPC-wise.

The Amstrad CPC Games Resource – There’s a ton of CPC games available for download here, with links to reviews, too.

Since I’ve greatly enjoyed Warcraft 3, I look forward to writing about it for our site. However, while now a budget title and thus viable material for our attention, it’s still relatively young. So I thought we should do this properly and go right back to the first Warcraft, and play through them in order.

Except, here’s the problem: it sucks. It’s just a pain in the ass. Here’s why:
-you can only select up to four units at once
-no use of hotkeys to reselect groups
-there’s no drag-a-box selection
-to give orders you have to first select the action from the panel on the left, then click the target. There’s no automatic selector of “move\attack\harvest” based on what’s under the pointer.

This makes simply getting a dozen soldiers across the map and into battle a chore. Grab some, shuffle them along, grab another four. With the result that they reach the enemies piecemeal, a couple at a time, instead of all at once in a mighty rush. I suppose I could, with patience, get used to it and compensate. But, why bother? I gave up on the second mission.

It seems to me that that really decent and intuitive gameplay mechanics came about with Command and Conquer. The early fore-runners, Dune 2 and Warcraft were important events in gaming, but they’re just too clunky to be enjoyable today.

So should I hang up my retro-gamer hat in shame? Am I too pampered by slicker modern titles? I don’t think so, we just have to acknowledge that some oldies age better than others. For now, I’m playing Warcraft 2. Which is essentially the first game redone with more units, more attractive artwork and, importantly, greatly improved controls!

Hi all.

I still miserably fail to match Rik’s pace in writing content, so here’s just one review for today. It’s another Trek game: Judgment Rites.

Also, another reminder about our shiny new journal, full of quality gaming goodness.

I recently discovered that Sierra have recently re-released a number of their old adventure games in Windows-friendly ‘Classic Collection’ packs. UK gamers can now get all of the Space, Police or King’s Quest games in one handy (and legal) collection for the reasonable(ish) sum of £10.

This is the kind of thing that should happen more often. Even though I’m not the greatest fan of the Sierra adventures, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to snap up a couple of these packs when I saw them. LucasArts have been doing something similar, if a little less wallet-friendly, with some of their old adventures for a little while now, and seeing old adventure games back in the shops again is good news as far as I’m concerned.

As ever, there are a few niggles. Sierra purists might baulk at the inclusion of some remakes in place of the original releases, and they might have a point: why can’t we have BOTH the original and the remake included? Also, later releases in each series are excluded – so there’s no Mask of Eternity in the KQ Collection, for example – which is also a bit of a shame. I don’t want to complain too much, but it would be nice if we could have gotten a more comprehensive selection. I shelled out a tenner about eight years ago for a PQ collection that included original releases, remakes and PQ: SWAT (okay, so that was a bit crap, but still…) so for things to have been removed for this latest release seems like a bit of a con.

It’s also worth mentioning as a side-note that these Sierra collections make use of a version of DOSBox. It’s not the first time I’ve seen something like this (the latest Broken Sword re-issues use ScummVM) but it still struck me as slightly unusual. While it’s great for those who want to play the oldies but don’t want to fart around with DOSBox itself, hardened nerds might be frustrated by the fact that some options, such as screen and video capture, are disabled.

Anyway, it’s good that they’re back out there. Some may be slightly irked at the fact that Sierra have just humped some of their oldies onto a CD with a cut-down version of an independently-developed piece of software freely available on the internet, but at the end of the day, they still own the games, and we should pay if we still want to play ’em.

Three new reviews for you this evening, and they’re linked by a theme of automotive mayhem…

First up, we have Carmageddon, which caused quite a stir when it was first released – probably something to do with all the blood.

The other major controversy in game-land during 1997 was Grand Theft Auto. We’ve already covered that one, and more recently we’ve turned our attentions to the first sequel, GTA 2.

Finally, we’ve decided to take a look at yet another game in the Need for Speed series. Road Challenge may not let you go on a killing spree, or run anyone over, but it does let you drive faster than you’re supposed to. Remember, kids – speed kills, too.

Okay, so the link was a bit tenuous. Still, we’ve got three reviews in one update for the first time since, well, ever (I think), so that’s something, I guess.

Cheerio!