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I’ll send you a mail with the invite code. Please ask again if the mail isn’t there in an hour or so, some mail providers don’t like our mails.
What Tijn meant but is too polite to say is that our problem lies with T8BG for his gun bullshit, while the people who made The Aching are extra cool.
o_O
I didn’t even realize you could have a user account there…
Okay, after some lengthy discussions about how long the game is, we decided to play this in December and move all the other games we had planned one month back so we can make use of the sweet sweet holiday season where more people will have time to actually play the game.
Hehe, yeah, we do things the old way here. IRC+Forum instead of this Discord nonsense everybody else is doing π
Welcome!
Obviously ours was “Schneider” branded, but the machines were the same.
A fellow Amstrad user π My parents bought the PC1512 of one of my classmates for my sister. I had a 486 at the time, but I always found this clunky little machine super intriguing and interesting. Too bad we binned it a couple years later. They’ve become quite expensive these days.
Welcome aboard! And thanks for the kudos, we’re quite proud of it π
We should show this to yozy to make him join more often. It’s important for people!
Welcome aboard!
Welcome aboard! Nice to see more real hardware users. Though I must admit, I’m often too lazy to actually sit in front of an actual DOS PC, when DOSBox on the couch is also an option π
“I have to say I very much enjoy listening to Florianβs (spelling?) dry humour and bluntness, always gets a chuckle.”
Awwww *blushes*.
Welcome aboard! Also, the spelling is spot-on!
I finally finished it, too.
Overall, it’s a brilliant movie with (some) very clever puzzles. The atmosphere is great, music, art direction everything just perfect.
Sadly, the gameplay itself was frustrating at times for me. I also hit a bug when transitioning from part 2 to part 3. First time I didn’t meet Kahina after steeling the briefcase from Kronos, so I didn’t get the scene with Kronos where he takes the scarf. Somehow that kept the things after Vienna from properly unfold. Neither did Tatiana come to my compartment to ask for help with her Alexei problem, nor did the conductor make my bed (he entered, stayed for a couple seconds and returned without doing anything). So I couldn’t get the dream that foreshadows Alexei’s death.
Second time, I had the briefcase with me while arriving at Vienna. While everything worked as expected (Tatiana came and I could go sleep), I couldn’t put the briefcase away anymore, which meant I couldn’t equip the master key to get into Alexei’s compartment and find the detonator.
I had to replay from all the way back from the beginning of the concert several times to get it working. I had to consult a walk through to understand what was missing and try and fix it.
Anyway, some of the puzzles do not give proper feedback, which is sad. Figuring out how to get past Vienna in the first place was problematic, with so many things that need to be done in a short amount of time.
I also have some open questions regarding the story: Why didn’t I just give the firebird to Kronos? Except for the story to proceed past Belgrade, there was no reason not to, as far as I can tell? Also, how did Kronos and Kahina get back onto the train? How did they outrun it to be in Ottoman Empire before the train got there?
Also, what did I miss about Robert and Anna? Where did that love story come from all of a sudden? In my playthrough, they only talked like two or three times before getting to Budapest.
Anyway, all in all I’m glad I finally tried the game. It does have some nasty issues in game play, but that’s easily made up for by the brilliant writing (except for my two questions above, which are probably explained somewhere) and atmosphere. Clearly a work of art and directed by someone who’s clearly interested in making movies more than games.
DJGPP is actually pretty good. It does only work on 386+ models, because it needs a proper protected mode interface. But that also means you’re not limited by the 16bit nature of older CPUs. You’ll also get support for modern C++ (and C11).
If you want to go for 16bit code, be prepared for some extra weirdness in C (you’ll have to worry about “memory models” and segments, and all that). It can be very rewarding, but may be quite the culture shock for people who are used to writing 32 or 64 bit code for modern systems.
If you want to have a go at that, OpenWatcom is actually not bad, but it is less well maintained than DJGPP and has does show its age here and there, with only older standards being supported, the command line being somewhat crappy and some bugs that can make you question your sanity before you find out the compiler is to blame π
So for 16bit code, I’ve only really used assembly extensively, because of the aforementioned issues with OpenWatcom. But for simple stuff it’s probably good enough.
It was an interesting choice indeed, and so we’re playing it this year.
For once I was right with my prediction about something.
We’re playing this right now π Moving to “accepted games”
We’re going to play this in August 2022!
We’re going to play this in July π
rcon is what you need to admin the server remotely. The password is something else and I honestly don’t know how to set it in any client other than nquake.
I’ll set up a vkquake server on the weekend. That won’t be Quake World, but a port of the original Quake. I hope that will solve the client questions (because the original Quake clients are a lot dumber).
Password is dgc. Sorry, didn’t realize that finally worked.
We’re running a test session on Wednesday evening (March 9), we don’t know an exact time, yet. But I’d aim for ~9PM CET. The actual tournament will likely be on the weekend of the 19th.
I’d love to hear about that, too. Sadly, I missed the Q1 era by 2 years or so when I was young, so I know hardly anything about the culture surrounding the game.
There will definitely be a tournament. I’ve set up a QuakeWorld server. If you want to join through a DOS client, that’s double cool, but expect everyone else to use a modern source port π
The server is up, at least for the rest of the month on dosgameclub.com:28501.
Not much going on there, yet, and we probably need to do some configuration, still, but it’s a start.
Best check IRC for other people to join.
Wait, are we the only active Podcast that focusses on DOS gaming? o_O
“we donβt want to create a 12 hour podcast haha” – speak for yourself
This looks brilliant. Definitely something I’d want to try out!
It’s just a matter of time, I’m afraid. Big plans, little time. We may look into some forum CSS fixes for now. I actually forgot about this issue to be honest.
It’s not so interesting to have a side scroller that predates Keen. The interesting thing about Keen was *smooth* scrolling. Thexder scrolls tile-by-tile at what looks like 10fps which gives the game more than enough time to update the entire screen.
Turns out multiplayer is a lot of fun in this game.
We have a permanent server now, just join dosgameclub.com from within OpenTTD πNo, I found it. But you can do a lot before knowing what or why you are doing it. You escape from the freighter, then you have three places to visit, which leaves you a bit in limbo for a while.
Yeah, I played entirely without mouse. Too used to navigating with the cursor keys now.
This one appears to have hardly any softlocks, which is great. You know immediately when you messed up. The art is brilliant, I’d almost say this is peak 8088 stuff.
All in all this one was a lot of fun, even if half the game you don’t know what you’re supposed to do, which made me lack a bit of motivation to do on.
I think this is the first one, that is beatable in a reasonable amount of time even without hints.
@TigerQuoll: The worst part is that you don’t only have to look at the pod, you need to stand in the right spot when doing so. This is pure evil.
@Shattered: I tried to press the “Do not Press” button, but I couldn’t find the syntax for it, the game didn’t accept anything I tried. I guess I missed out on a brilliant death scene.Just finished the first one, and it’s also the first classic Sierra adventure I’ve actually finished.
I hear that’s what those games are all about but to be honest, I’m not a big fan of the game humiliating me constantly. First you die, then it insults you for doing so. I feel like playing a game written by 10-year-olds.
That said, most of the game isn’t too hard, but some “puzzles” are just pure insanity. To find certain required items, you need not only look at the right object in the room, but you also have to stand at the right spot while doing so. This is positively malicious. A similar one is that you need to walk past the right tiny spot in order to find the entrance to one area, that is not visually distinct from any of its surroundings.
There are multiple barriers that, once crossed, keep you from returning to find an item you need later, so even when you dodged one of them, you can still be trapped, having to replay a bigger part of the game.
Ultimately, I didn’t mind having to replay two sections after realizing I probably missed an item, BUT I would have hated it a lot if I hadn’t gotten the hint from Tijn that I was, indeed, missing an item.
The action scenes are horrible, the gambling is painful and it’s another case of malicious puzzle design that you can break the gambling machine before you have all the money you need.
There are at least two spots in which you can miss important information, one of which I only found because I was actually trying to provoke another death scene.
The dying part is more or less about the game, to be honest. At least you know you’ve messed up.
I think it’s kinda cool that there are multiple solutions to some puzzles, but maybe a single solution, but making that less evil would have helped the game.
Fail π
Okay, let’s try again: Everybody who’s interested in joining, please fill out this poll so we can find a time to play!
https://framadate.org/EHu5EeMCGUxvMvsR
On all the week days, it’s gonna be in the European evening, on the weekend, I guess we can be a bit more flexible.
Yeah, but the thing is, it doesn’t really work to play and record a podcast at the same time. Please check out the Scorched Earth episode to see what I mean π
None of those games work very well with Internet-like latencies. We tried. Lag really kills all of these games. We’ve also tried playing live on an episode before, it wasn’t the best idea we’ve ever had π
We’d have to think about how to properly stream that with multiple viewpoints.
How about we just set a date. Say Saturday, 13 November sometime in the European evening?
Someone on Twitter also recommended to check out TTDPatch, which seems to add exactly the things you’re missing?
Me.
Okay, apparently you only get full score if you pick up the pumpkin before breaking it.
Interesting! It would be the one topic in the series I know absolutely nothing about, so that would rely solely on other people filling in the blanks.
Congrats on getting the WR back, Dr. Dos! It was a cool stream. Really hope you’ll join the podcast.
Very cool! I think I should have time to watch.
Hey TigerQuoll, did you get our mails about the recording? Please respond <3
May 2022 it is!
It doesn’t have to be an either-or π
Damn, I didn’t even get to 190 :-/
How can you ruin your safe? Anyway, the game is super weird, haha. Quick to finish, no real hard puzzles. The one that took me the longest was the mummy. Unless there’s a real solution to that other than abusing its path finding to get it stuck, it’s really a bad one.
Everything else is just random small puzzles. Also the combination lock code for the shed? WHY is it where it is? Super crazy.
The trivia question were either easy enough or at least easy to google (who on earth is Roy Rogers?), but the riddle took me two guesses, it didn’t like “human”. Ah well.
I ended the game with 188/190 points, I wonder where the remaining two are. Maybe you have to somehow get out of the lab while small and enter the small door under the stairs? Anyway.
Okay, here’s my verdict: It’s okay fun for a while, but nothing to keep me occupied for more than a couple hours.
Not sure how to get new cars (got one in about 20 races I did, that one was crap, so no idea). Opponents get stuck (they can’t recover, apparently) but once you drive away from them, the game seems to lose track of them, as Pix already mentioned, but it’s actually good, because otherwise sometimes opponents would be stuck underwater or something so you couldn’t possible wreck them.
Driving is painful in the game. Cars are either super slidey or don’t turn at all. Ever tried driving with the side of your car stuck to a wall and trying to steer away from it? Not possible, because (presumably), the back of the car would push against the wall, which the physics engine seems to prohibit. The only solution is to drive backward and turn away from the wall, very annoying.
Hitting opponents with this sliding car is super difficult and it’s not really clear to me, how hard or often you need to hit them to take them out either.
So the game doesn’t work as a racing game (racing is 100% optional anyway, as AI never seems to go through checkpoints) or as a fighting game because it’s so hard to hit, which is very sad (also, doesn’t AI repair? Why can I hit them more often then they can hit me).
On top of that, races are just more of the same over and over again, there’s hardly any progression except new parts becoming available or the occasional car you get. Worked my way through 60 ranks or so without anything new happening.
That said, the game has a lot of style. The entire psychopaths driving a death race is pretty well done and I’m a big fan of the whole way “Die Anna” and “Max Damage” are designed.
The graphics are pretty cool. Not top notch for the time, but some nice detail in there, like stickers on the tires and turning wheels, cool car designs.
The music is exactly my cup of tea, very fitting, too.
Welcome, Naikhanom!
“You guys really did your research” – it’s usually Tijn alone who digs really deep into all of this. All kudos to him!
Yeah, don’t we all? All this cool hardware I trashed over the decades.
I think the majority of people here play in DOSBox. It’s cool that those games are that accessible these days.
What, people skip over parts of the podcast? O__O
sorceress, DIMMs weren’t often installed in pairs, at least not before DDR RAM, which we shouldn’t cover, it’s not a DOS topic.
30-pin SIMMs were always installed in pairs or even quadruples. They are 8-bit wide but CPUs had 16 or even 32 bit wide data busses).
Personally, I think, all those memory tech advances are pretty cool. I just hope we don’t lose the audience with those details.
I wonder how we would fit Piracy into all of this? It seems a relatively small topic, maybe we can fit it into the storage devices episode?
And yeah, we will probably talk a lot about how each new innovation influenced us as young gamers.
Good one. I guess this will be more a history of the PC think, explaining also BIOS stuff, maybe extension ROMs? All the basics before diving into the individual topics.
Btw, a couple people have mentioned on IRC that they’d be interested about a hardware episode. Maybe we can widen the scope a bit and call it DOS Game Tech, also discussing things like “what on earth is config.sys and why should i care?”.
I’ll start a new thread for that and ask for questions. Some were already asked on IRC, but it would be cool to collect them and answer them in the episodes.
Ah, too bad with the yellowing. But still better than what I got from retrobriting my ST π
Actually… this topic is so vast, maybe a mini series is in order instead.
We could either split it up by era or by hardware component? One episode for CPU evolution, one for music and sound cards, one for graphics, connectivity and so on.You know, we should do a special episode about DOS-era hardware. I know Tijn isn’t too interested in that, but maybe we can somehow bribe him into moderating it anyway.
Anyone interested in joining such an episode?
Is that yellowing or nicotine on the keyboard? Seems like it might need a little treatment (like the right monitor’s case). Pretty amazing setup. I should see if I can find some space for a permanent one here.
Oh, we’ll definitely play Sam’n’Max at one point. No way around it.
Sounds intriguing. We haven’t had an RTS in a while. This could be an option.
We’re doing this game in April 2022 \o/
I do have tons of hardware but I don’t have the space currently for a permanent setup. Very cool stuff you guys have!
We do have a couple proper Indies here, but nobody from a big studio as far as I’m aware.
Hi Matt! Welcome to the club. Always cool to have new people around, especially veterans π
We’re going to do it in February 2022!
Simon is supposed to 14yo, isn’t he? So he’s just a jerky who has just reached puberty. The worst age of them all.
I’m surprised he even tries to help Calypso at all.
But yeah, he does a few nasty things to people, maybe Sordid was the good guy!
It’s a misconception to think that you can be “non political”. Not speaking out about something is implicitly saying “I’m okay with the status quo”.
As part of the Retro Computing community, I think it is our duty to hold other retro computerists to a high standard, especially super influential ones like David with millions of viewers.
Playing PX3 essentially means condoning his behaviour. Sure, playing it would probably bring in lots of his viewers as listeners, but that’s not worth it, imho.
As for other new DOS games, sure, certainly! Just put in a message in the Suggestions forum.
Also, we got very far yesterday, I think we might finish the game this week already.
Let’s try to record the next session onWednesday, 10PM CEST.
Yeah, I told Tijn about it but he insists that was not in the original floppy version. Can you settle this dispute?
This is very short notice, but we’re going to record in about an hour (10pm CEST).
Not if you play with the CD version. I tried π
No subtitles whatsoever. Maybe the 25th anniversary version allows both?“No wonder it’s so Polished”.
Bravo! πBtw, here’s the first part: https://www.dosgameclub.com/play-together-simon-the-sorcerer-part-1/
Sunday, Monday?
You wanted an early session π
So, Tijn and I did the first session and made some very good progress.
I’ll upload our recording tomorrow for everyone else to listen to!So, let’s try to get this going!
Let’s have our first call on Thursday, 3 June at 7PM UTC (9PM CEST)https://meet.jit.si/DGCSimonTheSorcererPlayTogether
We’re going to record this, but I don’t think we should put in all the extra effort of a normal episode, so we’ll record the entire call, no need for participants to set up proper recording.
Please do use headphones though, otherwise audio quality may be too limited.
See how far you can get in the game, but DON’T look at a walkthrough or anything. Also, if you have finished the game before, please don’t participate π
We’ll discuss where we got stuck and try to give hints to each other so we can all progress again.
Yep! Vertically split screen. Resolution wasn’t too bad, settlers supported at least 640×480, maybe even more, I don’t remember exactly.
I’d be interested in doing some sort of streaming thing, but not on Discord π
He, I remember playing Settlers 2 with a friend and two mice on one PC. It was blowing my mind to find out that would work!
Certainly! I think the main reason was that we didn’t want to focus too much on id games after doing DOOM and Keen already.
We’re also saving Quake for later π
Looks awesome. I’ve only known it from another podcast so I had no idea what it actually looks like.
We already have a game for this October (Hugo’s House of Horror!), but this could be an interesting choice for next year!
Yeah, the name for this thread seems a bit dated.
Maybe it’s better to call it Casual Games or something like that.You know, this being our very first proper suggestion, maybe we should finally take a look at it!
I think we’re switching to an entirely new forum software for the new site (ETA somewhere in the second half of the year).
Do you think you can still live with the current one until then?
Thanks, I think Tijn fixed it a couple days ago.
I’d still be up for a match! Not sure how well it will work, judging from how laggy original DOOM is over TCP.
Is that a new record number?
Perfect! We’ll keep asking you for every episode until we made up for this π
I’m a bit concerned about more than three guests (on top of the two hosts). We did that in the Monkey Island episode and it’s been a bit much, honestly.
dollarone already agreed to send a voice message instead. If it’s okay for you, taxalot, would that be a possibility, too? You’re more than welcome to join a later episode, it’s nothing against you π
If you’re interested in joining, we try to pick a date that suits everyone. No later than the weekend means Friday is an option, too π
We’re going to do this one in July 2021! Whoo!
I remember playing that on a friend’s computer. And we just covered a different game from the same studio. It’s maybe a bit small to make a whole month about it, but maybe we can do tetris-like month next year or so.
That one looks awesome! Seems to be quite an unknown game, which is great. We have too few unknown games.
I’d love to play it! I’ve only played EWJ2 on Mega Drive, but liked it a lot.
One of my all-time favourites. Really looking forward to playing it again, haha. Since it contains Maniac Mansion 1, I hope to find the time and patience to complete that for the first time, too!
May 2021!
We just picked ROTT for March 2021!
December Game?
Might give me a reason to finally repair my 386. Hoping that one isn’t too fast. I guess I could get a 286 from storage or something instead.
Jill also supports the Joystick out of the box (when asked at the stark of the game, press C to reconfigure). All I had to do in DOSBox was assign two different buttons for jump and fire because the default was terrible.
I haven’t started for reals yet, just tried it a bit and found the controls terrible. I think I’ll play with my controller instead, I think that may make more sense.
Not a bad idea!
Yeah, I ended up using wait, in the end. Before that I used “listen”, but that also gave a default response “you hear nothing special in particular” and then the thing the NPC said.
I agree. The puzzles are better (or, more fitting) in Homeworld, but the story is worse and while the dialog system was a nice touch, I *hate* almost all dialog options. They make the protagonist sound like an unbearable dick.
The indirect “ask X about Y” or “tell X about Y” in the first game avoids that issue entirely.
Note though, that vanilla DOSBox doesn’t have MT-32 support. I think the ECE supports it, but vanilla can output MIDI to the system to which you can then attach an MT-32 emulator like Munt.
I don’t think I solved anything there. I thought it was just for entertainment. Could be wrong though and that’s where my missing 15 points went.
“Breezed through”. I think I spent like 20h on it. firefyte did it in like 12 minutes or so.
Clearly looks like the vertices of a plane. The outliers might be color information or triangle index lists intermixed with the vertex coordinates?
Hehe, once you find the solution to that one you’ll facepalm hard, I think.
I wasn’t really stuck in the first game for more than an hour or so. But yesterday I spent three hours at the end of part 3 of Gateway 2. In the end I had Tijn read the hintbook questions to me, looking for one that might help me get unstuck. But then the question itself gave me an epiphany. So I don’t know if that counts as a hint or what.
FireFyte just tears through those games like it was nothing. It’s disheartening, really.
Might be interesting to check out, but even for an experienced programmer it’s not easy without the actual code being available.
I have no info on that, but I *assume* the “textures” are actually solid color polygons, so editing them would mean editing the plane geometry.
Andy Ruby is 5 years newer than the game, so that’s highly unlikely π
Here’s what I thought about the game:
I think it’s a really good game for text adventure beginners (such as myself). There are no dead ends (or if there are, they happen locally and you don’t get to play for a dozen hours before realizing you fucked up) and if you die, you can always just undo your last step – no regular saving required. With one exception, where I am not sure you can still recover if you did it wrong and you only realize after another 7 or 8 turns or so.
Puzzles are mostly solvable locally, i.e. you get most of the items you need to solve a planet on that planet. The only exception I can think of is the pistol from Gateway that you need to defeat the giant spider on one of the planets. The game goes so far to disallow you to bring any items from the planets you visit in the main series of four planets – this relieves you from needlessly searching all four planets for items that you might need on a different planet. It’s a clever little trick that I first thought was a bit strange, but realizing it kept the planetary puzzles to a manageable difficulty, made me really appreciate it.
The graphics are really beautiful and they make *excellent* use of the 16 colours they have available. The pictures clearly look like more than 16 colours.
The music is nice, but ultimately quite disconnected from the game. It’s not annoying, but not really supporting the world either.
Some of the writing was really excellent. I giggled quite a few times at messages like “One of the hydra’s heads bites off one of yours. You are dead” or “You attack the spider. The spider attacks you. The spider is poisenous [sic]. You are not. You are dead”.
Here are some things I didn’t like too much, for balance:
* You need to find the exact right phrasing to get Becker onto the raft. This was the one place where I had to ask for help, after this idiot standing there for about an hour – why didn’t he go on the raft by himself, we were there for rafting, actually.
* Some places, like the sleepy planet Dorma 5 change music every few rooms, sometimes have different music on each of three adjacent rooms. A change in music takes around 3-4 seconds each time in which you can’t do anything else but wait. That made navigating those places annoying.
* All the text in the text based cutscenes advances automatically. Everything else in the game can be done at your own pace, but these cutscenes often contain essential information and you cannot pause them. This stressed me out quite a lot. Especially when you’re a bit tired and don’t read that fast anymore, these scenes can become a problem. Doesn’t help that English isn’t my first language either. On top of that, if a text is short and you’re done reading it early, you can press a button to manually advance – a couple of times I pressed the button just to see that the text advances automatically a fraction of a second earlier, so I skipped an entire page of text. The only way to get it back is to reload the game.
* Some of the puzzles don’t really fit into the world. Those are all the logic puzzles in the first part, or those based on colours. Especially the one on the first planet in part one, where you have to insert a rod of one colour into a socket of a different colour to make a third color. Some of those combinations were additive (red + blue = violet), others were subtractive (blue + yellow = green). That’s inconsistent, but ultimately not really hard to deal with.
* You get a promise of $1,000,000 early on in the game if you can find Rolf Becker. But by the time you find him, you have a couple of millions already and just returning from the mission you find him on already gives you $5,000,000. So by then this one extra million doesn’t really feel like a big achievement anymore.
That’s it for now. All in all I really enjoyed the game.
Thanks! Some of those actually answered questions I had about the game.
Definitely a title worth checking out!
That’s what I did. For two hours before I gave up and used the racerx invulnerability cheat and then stopped playing. I hear it was better in Descent 2, so I’ll try that next.
I mean… Boss Fights? Has anyone mastered the first boss fight? I’m still on the low difficulty but that boss fight is killing me.
Haha, we had actual LAN parties every couple of weeks. But it never occurred to us to play Descent. It was also ~99-2004 or so, so Descent was not really on our radar anymore.
I’ve never played it!
I feel betrayed.
“as weβve done Monkey Island recently.” – well, in September 2018, really, so almost 1 1/2 years ago. But I would like to play some adventure by neither Sierra nor Lucas Arts next, before going back to those incumbents.
I fully expect everyone to play all 9 matches though.
I have no idea what that means.
I’m in! I just stumbled upon a big box copy of the game in a thrift store a few weeks ago. Time to put it to good use!
Wow. I wish there was a recording of this match-of-the-century!
Haha.
Let’s not forget the first round in which we both suicided a couple of worms, then wasted a homing missile each by shooting it into the void. On the same side of the screen. In two successive turns.We’re real pros!
It is possible with DOSBox, but you’ll need a public IPv4 address and need to be able to open ports on one end of the connection.
Can you do that? Then I can help :-p
Alright! That’s 11 players registered.
I think we should go for a qualification round in which every player plays one match against each other one, in the end we pick the 8 players with the best win to loss ratio and have a final KO round to find the actual Worms champion.
I’ll write down all the rules tomorrow and then we can get started!
I am, obviously, in, too.
I guess it’s been long enough since we played a proper turn based strategy game (not counting X-COM).
Maybe this year is finally the year we play Civ?
Yeah, I’m all for it once we’ve looked a bit over the rim of our adventure tea cup!
I would like to play more Sierra adventures, but maybe we should first look into a few other company’s works. Like Simon the Sorcerer, or Normality which sorceress has suggested quite a while ago already.
Now that’s a big improvement!
It’s in the screen where you buy new buildings. There is an adjustment thingie in the panel in the left.
The map will actually show you how far the heat reaches.
Yeah, I feel motivated to do some races, as well π
There are quite a few MUDs still active today (I played one just a few years ago) and some of them are really sophisticated now.
I just feel, since they don’t actually run on DOS but you just use DOS as a terminal to connect to them, they are not really DOS games.
Of course, if others disagree with my opinion, we might totally do it!
DOOM had one in every episode, I think π
Mouse look was weird in all those old shooters. I think Quake was the first to get it right? Thanks for the link!
We’ve just picked it for May. Nobody should ever say we take decisions slowly here.
Thanks for advertising it so I don’t have to :-p
We don’t really have a good place for OT stuff at the moment. I think the closest will be the support forum.
Maybe we should rename it to something more general.
Hey, have you checked https://www.vogons.org/ ?
These guys even have it in their name: “Very Old Games On New Systems”.
I bet you’ll find many valuable resources over there. (I haven’t checked personally, because I prefer old systems :-p)
I’m in!
It’s been a while since our last simulation game, let alone combat simulation.
That was kinda underwhelming, to be honest. I should try Micro! Deluxe. I think maybe that was the game I had on that shareware disk?
Time to find out!
I’ve played 48h gamejam entries that were more complete than this, but then again, they were not written in Microsoft Quick C using sound routines in assembler.
Attachments:
You picked up the rock! You can only transport one thing at a time.
The rock will actually show up near the speech bubble in the status bar. It’s hard to distinguish from the background, so you have to look closely.You can drop the rock by pressing right ctrl. When you drop it onto the tree, it will also drop some fruit for your caveman (just make sure you don’t accidentally pick up the rock again).
Uninspired graphics my ass. Pfft.
We picked the game for February 2019!
I hope you will join the show, kdrnic!
On the Importance of Research: Research is key. You need research to improve construction speed, you need it to get better weapons, more money, more people, faster population growth, you even need it to generate faster research.
You should put as many resources into research as possible. For me it’s always a difficult decision when to scale back research and start producing bigger fleets. It’s tempting to keep researching just that one more tech that will give you an edge on your opponents. But if you wait too long, you may have all the cool tech but no ships to use it on. Nothing worse than a big fleet of ships 10 tech levels behind yours taking away colony after colony from you because you neglected actually building ships with your cool technology.
Don’t be afraid to build ships early on with early tech. As you progress you can refit your ships to use newer technology at a fraction of the cost and time a new ship would mean. Refit your ships regularly. Every research level of fuel cells and drives will be automatically made available to all your ships, but computers, armor and shields need to be manually updated (unless you disabled tactical combat as I suggested in the first post).
When you research new space ship technologies, they are very bulky. When you research more levels of the same research category, previous technologies get miniaturized. So it can often be a better idea to keep older weapons in your ship but then have a lot more of them, than to have the newest weapons but relatively few.
There is one technology for ships that you almost universally want to use: Battle Pods. Those don’t use up space but provide extra space, which is very useful for packing more systems or weapons into your ship.
When building your fleet, ships typically don’t cost any upkeep. That is, as long as you don’t have too many. How many you can have depends on the number of Control Points your empire produces. Each star base (or their upgrade levels) provide a certain number of control points, each ship costs control points. As long has you don’t use more control points than you produce, you don’t pay any maintenance for your ships. There is one race option that gives you virtually unlimited fleet sizes: Warlord. Races with that option generate control points from every colony they own. Very useful.
There are technologies to increase the number of control points generated from your star bases. Bigger ships use proportionally fewer command points per size. Like, four times the weapons for less than twice the command points.
Always keep in mind that in this game, almost every stat can be improved in one way or another, typically cumulative with other effects. You can for example add stuff to your ships that increases the percentage of damage that bypasses shields. You can then add stuff that increases the overall damage. You can add something to increase the probability of hitting. It all stacks!
On the defense, you can add missile evasion stuff like ECM jammers, combined with hardened shields point defence weapons to make your ships almost invulnerable to missiles.
You can increase the morale on your planet while at the same time providing production bonuses and reducing waste to easily triple the production output of a planet.
The whole game is build on those principles. Make the best of it π
So you have started a game – now what?
Your ultimate goal is to have a stronger military than all other players, but there are different routes towards that goal.
You can try to outnumber your opponents or you can try to have more advanced technology. The difference between a tech oriented fleet and a number oriented fleet built at the same time can be pretty extreme.
A single high tech ship can wipe out dozens of low tech ships, and certain technologies can make your ships completely invulnerable to lower tech weapons.
the difficulty is that your two goals, fast research vs. fast production are in direct competition with each other. At the beginning of the game you want to move most of your people into research and research things that help you build and/or research faster. If you need to produce food (i.e. you didn’t pick a lithovore race), it will also be important for you to reduce the number of people you need to produce enough food – those people are better used in research or production.
When picking things to research and to build, check their effects with right-click. And unless you know what’s going on: If something takes more than 20 turns to finish, it’s probably too early for you or you’re missing something important or you’re aiming too high for the current evolution of your empire.
Don’t wait 150 turns to build a battleship, put people into research and find technologies that improve construction speed. There are many factors that influence construction speed, the number of people you put into production is the biggest factor but their effectiveness is a result of many other things in the game.
Planets can be good for construction or they can be bad for construction. The morale of your people (which is local to the colony but influenced by various empire-wide things) is a direct multiplier of production efficiency. There are various buildings that either generate production points on their own or increase the production points each worker generates. When you generate production points, you also generate waste, which is directly deducted from your actual production.
If your tax rate is >0%, that amount is directly deducted from your production (empire wide!).
You race options make a huge difference in terms of production efficiency. There are race options that increase or decrease production efficiency of workers.
There are options that _half_ the production cost (and thus time) of space ships.
Optimizing any of these aspects will result in faster production.
The key to success is having as many people as possible in as good a morale as possible. It also means you need to pick the best planets for colonization as a bad planet can be a waste of time and resources. A colony ship is a serious project for early games, don’t waste it on a worthless planet.
But how do you pick a good planet?
A planet has various stats, all of which are important. First and easiest to understand is the size. The bigger, the better, obviously. Second is the climate. Climate + Size + certain race options determine how many people can fit onto a planet. Before colonizing a planet, you can see the maximum population *your* race can have on that planet. Other races might be different.
The climate also influences if, and if so, how much food your farmers can produce there. That’s very important in the early game where you don’t have the resources to shovel food from one planet to another.
There are three more things about planets, the more important one is its mineral abundancy. The more minerals a planet has, the more production point each worker can generate.
The second important is its gravity class. There are normal, low and high gravity planets. On normal planets, most races can use 100% of the planet’s production. On low gravity planets, that’s reduced by 25% and on high gravity planets by 50%. There are race traits that make this worse or better.
There are things you can do to improve the quality of a planet, but they are expensive. You can change the gravity later in the game by building planetary gravity generators, you can improve the climate using terraforming. You cannot change the mineral level of the planet or its size.
There’s one more thing about a planet: It can have special attributes: Natives, gold or gem deposity or ancient artifacts. Natives are perfect farmers and produce more food than any of your people ever could. Gem and gold deposits directly translate into money *each turn* for your empire. Artifacts improve the number of research points generated on that planet, per scientist.
But the vast majority of planets is nowhere near ideal. You’ll have to pick something that is best for you current situation. And the best planets are typically guarded by space monsters.
As a beginner I would suggest to not colonize planets that have less than 3 production per worker, less than 1 food production per farmer and a maximum population of less than 5.
There is a good number of those, but sometimes it can be a point of conflict with other races to get them first.
Really good planets are typically a serious reason for war. A medium size terran world with abundant minerals and normal gravity (like most homeworlds – if you didn’t pick options that give you a better or worse homeworld) can make the difference between winning and losing. A huge Gaia planet with normal gravity and ultra rich in minerals (like the legendary Orion system) will almost certainly cause conflict between empires that claim it – better keep a strong fleet there just to defend it. A fully populated world like that can *without any buildings to further improve the situation* produce up to 125 production points per turn. That means they can build a colony ship in 4 turns. A typical homeworld (Normal size, mineral abundant, terran) on the other hand will be more in the 36-40 production per turn range, taking 13 turns to build a colony ship.
DOSBox has the same problems, I’m afraid.
I don’t remember that problem on any of my real machines.
We just picked MoO2 for November, we’ll have to wait a while for another turn based 4X games, but once we revisit that genre, Civ would be a cool pick!
Still pretty cool!
October seems to be everyone’s favourite month! We have so many Halloween-y games, it’s perfect!
I’m in for some Wacky Wheels! I only had the demo (or shareware version?) as a kid and loved it. Good stuff.
I think DOSBox has modem emulation. At the very least it has a serial port emulation that can then be used to hook up other programs to from the outside. So it should be possible to have multiplayer sessions π
Since California Games once failed to win the poll, maybe this is a cool alternative. I like these kinds of games.
Look at all that EGA awesomeness π
As a life-long Duck Tales fan, I think this clearly needs to go on the to-play list!
Because that’s what I suggested and it’s a much better game :-p
It’s not the first time we pick the second game in a series, we’re also doing it with WC2 and Sim City 2000 for example (and technically, Nitemare-3D and Duke Nukem 3D are not the first in their series either).
That doesn’t meant we can’t also play MoO1 in this month. Just that the focus should be on MoO2!
September 13, 2018 at 9:43 pm in reply to: Favourite Gags and Jokes? Heavy spoilers, potentially :-p #1892Ah. Good to know. Will try it in ScummVM
September 13, 2018 at 12:46 pm in reply to: Favourite Gags and Jokes? Heavy spoilers, potentially :-p #1889“Too many memos”. I made the mistake to “Look at too many memos”. Guybrush kept reading them for 5 minutes.
Nice! I’m a bit sad that floppies are not a thing anymore. They were so much more satisfying than downloading stuff from the internet and running it from hard disk :-p
Oh nice, that’s pretty cool π
Exploding sheep are my all time favourite easter egg.
Yeah, we tweeted about it, it’s a damn good deal!
Yeah. I love clicking through old magazine scans. Mostly for hardware related stuff, but especially for our DGC games it’s also fun to find stuff about them.
I have the PS1 version of Wipeout 2097, it’s good fun. I remember playing it a few times on my (several years older) cousin’s Playstation. I sucked terribly at it.
For some reason I remembered the game having local multiplayer, but apparently it only works with two Playstations linked? Very weird. I would like to try it on DOS π
I’ll just take your version. I need to run it in DOSBox anyway (still no support for connecting real machines to DOSBox’ virtual IPX net).
Yeah, but the problems with DOSBox are probably related to my DOSBox installation.
It works pretty well on my 486@80MHz. It ran like shit on the same machine in non-turbo mode (40MHz), even though the box says it needs a 33MHz 486.
In DOSBox, my videos kept stuttering, same at 40Mhz. At 80Mhz it just works perfectly in every way.
I think the original game supports IPX networking only (Battle.net didn’t exist yet in the beginning, IIRC, and there is a dedicated Battle.net edition).
But DOSBox supports tunneling IPX through UDP and we’ve done that for a few games already. It worked reasonably well (given what a makeshift solution that is). I think we’ll try that for sure π
I only got a single upgrade in my playthrough. Even that was unnecessary in the end. Once you master sword fighting it’s very unlikely you ever lose a hitpoint.
I think the only essential potion is the feather falling one without which you cannot finish that one level.
I kinda feel like they forgot what made PoP1 great and changed everything in PoP2.
I only played the first level, but I really cannot endure more of this.
The constant hectic music, the higher detail but ugly graphics, the way you don’t get to think about what you are doing and guards are coming for you from left and right… It’s just a completely different game (and it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to even survive the first guard because the game doesn’t give you two seconds to figure out how to draw and use your sword).
All in all I feel PoP2 is awful compared to PoP1.
Yeah. In modern “immediate response” platformers (well “modern”, I think the original Super Mario Bros does it, too, and it’s 4 years older), you usually get few frames after you ran off the platform to hit jump and it will register as if you pressed jump in the very last moment.
This is not necessary in PoP, because you need to plan ahead and the prince will actually only jump at the sensible time.
It’s a different type of game entirely and people used to the other, more action-y genre of Mario-likes may have a hard time getting used to it.
And he’s moving in discrete steps (I think 3 per tile?) You cannot just move pixel by pixel.
> That version still had the original copy protection, but they forgot to attach the relevant manual information until the following month.
LOL. This is hilarious.
I tried finding the game on eBay. At least around here it’s virtually impossible π
I think I never made it past level 3 as a kid. Somehow I knew all the uses of the shift key, it may have been a friend who told me about them. I never had it on my own computer (somehow very few titles made their way there), but I played it on the computer by Belgian uncle gave me for when I was visiting my grandpa there. It only had a monochrome graphics card. Can you imagine my surprise when I saw it in four color CGA a few years later?
But I didn’t learn anything from that and had the same experience a few years ago when I first saw it in VGA.
Next you’re going to tell me it has Voodoo support, right?
Though I’ve played the game as a kid, I never really knew what I was doing, so I’m mostly discovering the game now as if I’m playing it for the first time. But with nostalgia.
I figured out the swordfighting thing pretty quickly (block then immediately strike). That works 99% of the time against the guards.
You say “get away from knocked down platforms”. But HOW? As soon as the prince lands, it takes a second or so for him to move again, but by then the platform is already too close to get away. Any hints here?
We’re mostly on IRC. That’s where the party is π
I don’t use discord, sorry, but I’m sure a few others do.Our pleasure π
It’s cool you like it! Maybe you’ll stick around to discuss more games with us?Yeah, maybe I should try easy π I’ve been playing on the medium difficulty level, whatever it’s called (“Medium”, I guess :-p).
Ugh. But the secret levels are terrible π
I’ve always managed the generator such that I can have continuous fire and still recharge my shields.
Yeah, I tried Destruct (along with some other cheat codes) and it’s pretty cool. I wonder if that was ever released standalone? Because I clearly remember those sprites from somewhere but I’mm 99% sure I never played Tyrian before.
Very weird feeling.
Oh, I’m doing that π Spending all the money on weapons. But when I reach episode 2, my weapons can’t manage to destroy any of the enemies before they fly off screen.
There are also some free upgrades you can get during certain levels. I think collecting all of them, too, would help.
But yeah, I don’t kill enough enemies to get enough money to buy enough weapons for episode 2, which in turn means I make even less money…
butterburp, you won’t distract people by talking about a previous game π
In the end we’re a club discussing old games. The months are just there to make sure we have something common to talk about and so we have the topics for the podcast episodes.
But really, we can discuss any game at any time. If you don’t feel like posting too much on the forums for a previous game, feel free to join us on IRC where we spent 80% of the time talking about other stuff anyway :-p
The shield regenerates when you have full energy. So if you make sure to always get the best generator, you can also fire and still recharge your shield.
I tried using your QWE input scheme, but sadly my trusty old Cherry keyboard doesn’t seem to have reliable four-key rollover and jams when I use fire, left+right sidekick and try to move backwards at the same time (which is basically all the time when you just keep all three fire buttons down).
I changed to Alt+Z+X and that works reasonable well.
As for the gameplay, after the first level I thought the game was at least as good as Raptor, but that opinion changed as I went through episode one. It’s often just a ton of enemies thrown at you, without much thought. One level near the end features basically 20s of mostly huge missilies filling the screen.
The boss fights have been mostly boring to me so far. There have been two possible outcomes for me: Either the boss moves and hits my ship, pushes it around and destroys it, or the boss doesn’t push my ship around and their weapons are mostly useless.
Then there is the thing with the Bonus levels… I must say I really dislike them. The normal Bonus levels are okay I guess, but still kill every bit of immersion. In those you just shoot a ton of stuff for extra money.
The other kind though… It almost ruins the game for me. You suddenly get a 4-screen long text explaining to you how the beer of some space dude was stolen and that you have to recover it. Then you get a completely different ship with a horribly weak weapon and start shooting ships and collecting beer glasses, all while southern German brass music plays in the background.
I mean, wtf? You can skip this bonus level, but man. I think they tried to be funny but it kills every single bit of the narrative and immersion they had built up.
BTW, I tried the “Wild Game Detail” mode and I think all it adds on top of the “Pentium” mode is a quite okay looking but useless and destracting shadow-wave effect on the background.
I also have a problem with some of the other design things. For example, there’s one level on a lava planet. The lava is obviously glowing hot and the hot hair is refracting the light and all. But still for some reason you get headlights in this level and cannot see much outside of their range.
And another thing: It looks cool that there are level parts that your ship goes below, but so do your bullets. But sometimes there’s stuff on those floating islands which explodes despite you having shot below their island… a bit weird, eh?
The enemies are a bit generic sometimes, I feel. And the same type of enemy ship seems to be used with wildly different attacks. There are two very small ships that sometimes just fly across the screen. But later on they stop and produce a truckload of bullets. This makes the enemies much less memorable than in Raptor.
Also the music is quite repetetive, I think. I don’t remember thiking that when I last played Raptor, which has a much better sound theme overall.
I don’t think Tyrian is a bad game, but Raptor has many advantages compared to it.
Yeah, tell that to the asshole AI who use their faster cars to push you against the wall :-p
There are also some collision glitches. Sometime you tunnel through the wall. If there’s road on the other side, it won’t count as progress until you reach the place you left (or some hidden checkpoint, I assume).
But if there’s nothing behind the wall you tunnel through, the game just freezes…
Toasty, you can also combine these!
In one race I got $4000 for destroying them all, $6000 for finishing without damage, whatever the price money for winning was ($3000, I think, medium tier race?) and $12000 for the hitman mission I got in that round πHere! Me!!
Ohh, they look exactly how 90s shareware has to look π
We should have a shareware month where we just try a bunch of smaller shareware titles like these.
We could think about streaming the game π
And record it to have audio samples of the multiplayer action for the podcast π
I was wondering, if everybody tries to stay behind during the initial machine-gunning, will the race ever actually start?
I’m in! Now that I have had some training I feel ready to do this. Does the game support networking and four-player multiplayer? Or will we have to do one-on-one matches using simulated serial links?
I am somewhat positively surprised by the game. Yes, there are some problems with the physics, especially how touching an obstacle *lightly* can bring your car to a dead stop and how you cannot turn your car anymore once an enemy bumps into you and pushes you even slightly around.
But at the same time, these physics problems, which are bad for racing are *great* for fighting. It’s much easier to target enemies and stay on target than it would be in actual racing physics.
I also like how they apparently saw some problems with the game design and counteracted them by imposing additional requirements for the payout of money and such:
In theory you could just go very slowly and collect all the money in a race. That would allow you to reliably (though slowly) save the money you need for better cars and upgrades. But the game actually requires you to place at least 3rd so you actually get the money. I like how they found an ingame explanation for the fact (“Money is for winners!”).
The same goes for being lapped. You could just sit in one spot, waiting for your enemies to come by again and shoot them until all three of them are dead. That would make you the winner and doesn’t require any driving (except to collect up machine gun ammo). But being lapped also means no money for you at all, with more or less the same explanation. Even though you technically won the race, you’re still considered a disgrace for the racing community and get nothing.
The only thing they were fair enough to still give you is the wrenches you picked up. So when you have a badly damaged car, just drive slowly behind everyone else and pick them up to fix your car for free.
“Death Rally has the explosive power of a safety match”. Dawwwww. That’s mean. I guess you have to look at other games that were released the same year to understand that rating. After all, Monster Truck Madness and Mario Kart 64 were released around the same time and GTA just a bit later. Clearly each of these games have better driving physics and don’t feel so clunky when you brush an obstacle.
Yeah, lagging behind and let everyone else empty their mags is a good tactic. I try to go for the kills afterwards. Depending on the race difficulty, you get up to six laps to destroy everyone else. That gives you the prize money for the race + a bonus from your “sponsor”, the grim reaper π
I also noticed, that the AI drives differently based on how you drive. In one race I was trying to stay behind to only pick up the wrenches because I was out of money and had a badly damaged car. But the opponents never got very far ahead despite me driving deliberately slow.
But when you race for 1st place, they suddenly are very strong o_O
I like to buy Armor early on to save money on repairs in the long run. I think buying Armor later has a way lower return-of-investment.
OMG, I was unaware that there was a DOS version of Theme Hospital. I’m all for it! I had so much fun with this game back in the day π
Hey, welcome! You’re doing everything right. Even the game you suggest is great!
> Meanwhile, our friend rnlf acquired his own a boxed copy of the game, and made a few gameplay videos of it, on youtube, albeit without getting much further than I did.
You’re trying everything to make me continue the playthrough, amirite?
Oh, we also played various modern DOOM ports. Most people play on DOSBOX anyway, so this is not too far away from that.
Thanks for sharing!
Wow, thanks for sharing these! Especially with all the history of your dad’s copy. I love seeing such items with marks that show it was loved by someone for a long time.
Right, I think the whole game even fits on a double density (i.e. 720K) floppy. It is indeed impressive they made all the content fit!
It looks interesting! I am not sure many people in the club besides me actually enjoy combat flight simulators, but if we get to play another one, this one should definitely be on the short list!
March 8, 2018 at 8:21 am in reply to: What a Game! aka. WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME _HOW_ GOOD IT IT?? #1213There’s no default. It asks you which controller you want to use :-p
That being said, I set it to WASD + Mouse and with mouse look it almost feels like a modern shooter.
First he has the guts to talk about the Amiga version of a game on a DOS related podcast and now this!
Removing the strippers was not the worst idea, to be honest.
Interesting though, that Nintendo did it when in other games of the N64 era they were not so strict with their family-friendliness – Conker comes to mind…
“You can beat the entire game in under 30 minutes by holding down up+right+kick for endless jump kicks.” SPOILERS! π
The game looks cool. We should definitely give it a try!
March 2, 2018 at 8:53 am in reply to: What a Game! aka. WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME _HOW_ GOOD IT IT?? #1188Yeah, the sexism is terrible. It’s the one thing I can think of that you can remove from the game to make it even better.
Luckily, the player doesn’t have to engage in any of this, reducing it to unpleasant background noise.
I wonder if 3D Realms thought they had to add all of this to sell the game? Though back then it was probably just used as a tool to make the Duke look even manlier. People just didn’t think a lot about such issues. That’s not trying to justify, just to explain what I think is the reason.
I was born back then but didn’t have a computer :-p
Today I’m running it on a Pentium MMX at 233MHz. That CPU is a year newer than the game, not unreasonable that people would have run it like that back in the day.
It runs smooth as silk at 640×480, full screen size (or actually the third highest screen size, the one where you can see your ammo all the time) with best audio mixing quality, too.
I played it for a few minutes on my 486DX2 at 80MHz and in 320×240 I already need to reduce the screen size to about half way before it starts running really playable.
It cannot hurt. But also spread them along your train. You can do that at one of the few stations around the map.
There’s only one quest, “find the sun”. I think the only way to know that is to read the exposition in the manual.
There are no quests in the classical sense and no progress indicators of any kind. It’s a bit of an adventure game in that sense.
In some cities, you cannot trade anything, but you can reveal some information. All this information is supposed to guide you towards solving the main quest.
I don’t think that’s explicitly stated in any way, you just have to manage that yourself π
Battle will happen sooner or later when you run into the Viking Union. Better be well-prepared, and when you get into battle, defend your importan wagons at any costs!
There are only two possible outcomes to battle: You get destroyed or the other train gets destroyed. No fleeing, no retreating.
We’ve talked about the game a few times, it should definitely be one of the next platformers we play!
There’s also Abuse on that list though. Tough decisions.
I hope it won’t take us twenty years to finish it as well π
Actually, we have about 20 days left, so we must be 365 times as efficient :-p
Oh hey, welcome!
Always cool to have people around who actually know something about the games we play π
I skipped your “Goals to complete” list, because I think hope those goals will be explained in-game sooner or later.
TOWNS
There are different towns:
Trade posts (where you can buy and sell stuff).
————As far as I can tell, there’s mostly stuff you only use for trading: You buy it at one place and sell it at another. The manual suggests writing down what stuff towns produce and for which price you can sell stuff there. I don’t think there’s a real economy behind that, but I’m not sure.
Just keep in mind that you can only store one type of merchandise per storage wagon.
Slave Markets & Soldier Markets & Mammoth Markets
————————————————–Self-explanatory?
Train Markets
————–Here you can buy new wagons: It’s good to buy cargo and such early on, as far as I can tell, otherwise trade will be tedious. Weapons and barrack wagons should be useful when you get into battle.
Train Stations
—————Here you can repair or rearrange your wagons or trash them.
Quest Towns
————These provide information needed to restore the sun. They give two types of information: written records from the past and rumors offered by inhabitants of the city.
STARTING THE GAME
There are not many options. You can choose the difficulty level (no idea how they differ). You can enable or disable music and you (apparently, haven’t tried it yet) can disable train battles, which will then be done by the computer (maybe a good idea, given how terrible the battle are to control).
DEFAULT WAGONS
You start out with three functional wagons: The locomotive, where you can let the two dudes shovel coal into the boiler and set the speed at which you want the train to go. Everything else can be done from the map screen (enabled/disable breaks, set train direction). Oh, there’s also the whistle, which doesn’t to anything as far as I can tell except being cool π
The guy on the left will shovel Lignite into the oven, that stuff is both money and fuel. The right dude shovels Anthracite into the oven. That stuff burns longer and cannot be used as money. So, if you run out of that stuff you’ll literally burn money.
You can enter the engine controls by clicking the control panel in the back, next to the guy with the wheel. On these controls, only the lever on the top does something: Set the rate at which steam is used to move the pistons. There’s also a temperature view and a pressure gauge: When the pressure gets too high, your train will explode.
The third guy in the locomotive can control the train’s direction (by clicking the wheel) and the breaks (the lever right of him) and the whistle (chain on above the breaks on the roof).
Sometimes, spies find coal mines or other events: They will send you a letter which will appear on the tube on the left. Every of the primary wagons has such a tube.
The next starting wagon is the general’s quarters. Here you can enter the mini map (from which you can enter the main map screen by zooming in) and do spying stuff, which I haven’t tried so far.
The last one is your own quarters. Here you can commit suicide (yes, I know!), save the game and check your log book.
Another screen that is available right form the start is the map screen, where you can set the railroad switches, start and stop the train and set its direction (you have to set the speed from the locomotive though).
You can also speed up the game at any time by clicking the clock in the lower left corner.
If we have 5 participants, you may have to upgrade handraisr after all :-p
I’m so in! In fact, we can have multiple games on hold at the same time, so we don’t have to wait for one game to be finished before starting the next one with other people π
Oh yeah, it feels like one can just continue from the Even More Incredible Machine once you have finished that one π
Perfect as a Solitaire replacement :-p
Yeah, though it is really lacking fast paced action, in my opinion. That’s really where DOOM and Quake excelled!
I played Descent always with a bit more foresight and patience. The 6DOF was a lot less intuitive than the 4.5DOF of Quake or the 3.5DOF of DOOM.
Yeah, maybe we can make WC2 our next RTS π
I am also much more familiar with it than I was with C&C!
Why don’t the heroes intervene in the battle at all?
What’s the point of having a Knight Hero if said Knight doesn’t knight?Played for the first time now and after I started understanding the game, it got really good!
It’s way less micromanagement than some other 4X style games I played (and love). The exploration is real fun and there are lots of things to discover, though I imagine the stuff you discover will get old relatively quickly.
I think the graphics work pretty well, except for one or two unit sprites in the battle screen, which are horrible. Also, what’s going on with unit walking backwards in battle π
At the moment I’m missing the depth of games like MoO a bit, but it also means there’s more action.
As I mentioned in chat, the game feels older than it actually is. Comparing how smooth other games from 1995 play, this feels a bit less sophisticated. But it might just be caused by the turn based nature which makes stuff feel less dynamic.
@butterburp, I think Tijn likes this game so much, we’ll just play it without a vote some time during the year. That and Master of Orion (2), because I want it :-p
I still have to finish any GTA game at all π
Didn’t get to play all the levels of GTA1 for DGC last month, but I’ll keep it on my DOS PC so I can go back again when I’ve got a bit more time π
Very cool! That will come in handy for the podcast recording.
What! I’ll look into it tonight. It was working once…
You can set the speed for the text in the options. And you can use F6 to pause the game while you read the mission description. And there’s another F-key (F8, maybe? Not entirely sure) that replays the last message you received.
What do you mean, you pick up stuff you don’t need? It doesn’t hurt either and you can’t pick up stuff you already have (for example, you can’t pick up more Ammo and only one Get out of Jail Free card and such).
Yeah, it’s a bit annoying that you can only try each mission once, but then again, playing a complete city including all missions takes about an hour. I think it’s intentional and not such a big deal. The game is probably designed to be replayed several times (it even gives you a high score list and all), and on the next time you play the level, you’ll do better. It’s not like in Mafia or the later GTAs where you’re playing a single campaign. It’s much more arcade-y.
I’m not even sure the viewing distance is the real problem. I think the cars are too jittery at high speed to evade other cars, even if you see them early enough.
It’s actually pretty easy to get to the 2,000,000 points: Just finish missions and don’t let the cops get you. Each successful mission gives you a +1 score multiplier, after four successful missions you already get 5 times the normal points for everything you do. The first 1,000,000 points are hard, everything beyond that goes really quick. You can also pick up a +1 in every level, I think. Getting killed doesn’t reduce your multipliers. Sometimes it’s better to let the cops kill you than to let them catch you.
And yes, the aiming thing is probably my biggest point of criticism. I just avoid gun fights completely, whenever possible.
You have such a mission where you go from one corner of the map to another one and to yet another one, in Heist Almighty, too. Forgot the exact things you had to do, but it was about getting cars from A to B and then to C and so on.
The puns in the names are not only in the places but also in the car and level names and even in the game’s title.
I didn’t realize any of that as a kid, with English not even being my native language.
I think it’s good to experiment. Completing the level takes about an hour if you do all the missions, so it’s not really a lot of lost time to try all the missions in different ways.
Good to know! I think some people had problems running the game in DOSBox.
Oh dear, let’s forget about the VM solution. VirtualBox’ VESA emulation is incompatible with GTA.
I think running the game on Windows could be a good option for most.
Concerning the 3DFX: If you really want it to work, you’ll have to put the GLIDE2X.OVL into the GTADOS directory, not the GTA directory. I’m not sure you were trying that. I’ve never used Glide wrapper, no idea wher the DLL goes π
I think many people have problems running it on a modern computer. I was going to prepare a FreeDOS VM, hoping it would run better. But the GTA24 version is the best looking in my opinion, so you don’t really lose anything by playing that.
The 3DFX version looks too blurry for me.
I just tried the F11 menu, didn’t even know about it π
I honestly don’t think the higher resolutions than 320×240 are worth it.
15-Bit color was quite common, even in the Windows era. It’s basically 16-Bit but with the same number of bits per color channel, which, I assume, makes it easier to program for.
I never heard of it, but it looks intriguing!
I think it would be the oldest game so far. We should definitely keep it on our list of RPGs for the future!What do you mean “surprisingly”?
Oh, totally, DOTT and S&M were great games. We just finished Quest for Glory, which is at least partly adventure. The next adventure game will have to wait a few months, but we’ll certainly play more π
Oh, I’m all for it! I still suck at RTS, as the C&C month clearly proved, but WC2 was one of my favourites anyway!
Oh, that sounds like a sweet take on the genre! Too bad I never heard about it, I think it’s pretty unique. Makes the game a whole lot harder π
So… I played level 1 (which took about 2 minutes) and then a huge part of level 2 (which took another hour or so). Here are my thoughts so far:
The game has a rather strange balancing. Some enemies are ridiculously easy to kill, usually with a single hit from the gun. Others are really hard to kill and are very strong themselves (like the Witches). The weapon needed to easily kill them is not available until much later (it seems). And Witches hiding behind a corner and then attacking immediatly when you’re close (which is inevitable because you just ran around the corner) take about half your health points on medium difficulty. They take about 20 hits or so in return to kill. Very weird balancing.
The skeletons are almost impossible to hit. Their hitboxes are really tiny, and a single tap of the cursor keys can move the (non-existant) crosshair from too far on one side to too far on the other side. Slow turning with left shit helps, but it also means being slower to strafe back away into cover. Wolfenstein didn’t suffer from that problem because enemies were much wider sprites usually and had way bigger hitboxes.
Also, I don’t know about later weapons, but the standard pistol shoots terribly slow bullets while the enemies all use hitscan and hit without delay. That’s a bit frustrating.
On the plus side, the game looks pretty good, imho. Better than Wolfenstein with much more detailed and beautiful wall textures. I like the stairs and elevators, even though elevators could have been done in a more interesting way (making them a sperate room and teleport the player to the new floor while the doors are closed – that gives a much better impression of using an elevator, while using exactly the same engine technology).
The garden area is actually kinda cute, but I guess they could have changed the sky and floor color while leaving the house. I know that the engine can only display a single color for floor and sky at any given time, but it would have been possible to fade from one color to the other while walking out of the house into the garden and back.
So those are clearly two low hanging fruits they missed to use (but you can’t blame them, id Software did exactly the same in Wolfenstein 3D, just that they didn’t even have elevators).
On the other hand, N3D was released one year after DOOM, so they could have taken some inspiration from that, game design wise.
It’s cool that there are so many usable objects in the world, though besides stairs, elevators and doors I haven’t found a use for any of them.
Btw, kinda interesting that every single bookshelf in the game is actually a hidden door :-p
GTA was at least suggested on IRC. I would love to play it. It’s not a racing game though π
I had to think about Z, too, when I saw there was a new reply in this thread. Z had a quite unique gameplay mechanic with its sector control thing. I think either of the two should be our next RTS! They’re also both slightly more obscure than the whole Westwood and Blizzard blockbusters.
Hi Pix,
welcome to the club!We’re probably going to touch on QfG2 and later games, too, in the podcast, though the focus will be on the first game.
I can’t say very much about the rest you wrote, because I’m not done with the game yet π
Haha, I know a certain DGC host who’s not a big Peter Molyneux fan π
I would gladly try Dungeon Keeper! We’d need to push it a bit to later though since we have just finished a strategy game.
It’s definitely an RTS we should keep on our list! I remember many people not liking it very much, but only one way to find out if they were right.
I think we’ll have to play some other genres first, with C&C being the game of last month, though.
No, it’s no problem. You’re very humble. Losing against you is a great pleasure. Best winner ever. 10/10, would lose again :-p
Yeah, we played a multiplayer match, it was quite fun. You were idling in the channel at the time, though…
First thing I noticed in 1930 was that Dossington barely had any Fire Departments. We all had our experiences with fires devastating a whole city, so I built two new fire stations in strategic locations. Both are in areas that had no protection at all, but also still have quite a bit of unused land around them, so that they will protect new zones, too.
The first one was placed in Hillview, the second one on a hill overlooking Stinky Place Industrial Park.
In the same year, I realized that several zones weren’t connected to the Urban Water Distribution Network (UH2ODN), so I naturally fixed that.
In 1932, I renamed the City College to Dossington Engineering School, which in turn prompted the principal of Micropolis Highschool to rename his school to Mayor Rnlf Highschool, a great honor for me.
In 1934, a new road connecting Dossington to Hoek Creek was completed, causing a raise in annual income by about $300, so that the expenses for the improved fire protection are more than compensated for.
Last, I noticed some heavy traffic building up in Old Town so I decided to build a second connection between Old Town and Hillview. While building the roads, I noticed that many roads across the city were in horrible shape and that the water pumps were overloaded, so as a last action before leaving the office, I renewed the broken streets and build 4 new water pumps, which is the reason why the treasury only contains $393 at the moment, sorry about that, successing mayor of Dossington, but I leave you with a bit more annual income than I had when I took over:
Population 19250
Treasury $393
Income $707
Approval 68%Attachments:
Okay, I’m gonna take over until 1935!
Okay, I started the first city π
Here is Dossington GC! I started in easy mode with $20000. I built a big industrial area, surrounded by a commercial center and some residential areas outside. I wanted to use hydro power, but there were no waterfalls in the map, so I went for oil instead.
In the recent past there were some water shortages, power should be enough for a while. The residential area on the hill is a bit new and needs some care.
I raised the taxes a bit and lower spendings in all areas to 90% to increase cash flow π
Here are the numbers:
City Size: 5140
Treasury: $1,342I thought I had started in 1901 for some reason and played until 1905 instead of 1904. Please forgive me. The next mayor may also play 5 years. Let’s make it 5 for everyone in this first round!
I’d say, whoever wants to continue writes a reply to this post and says “I’m mayor now”. Then you play and edit or post your new city.
Attachments:
Toasty, that’s mostly because they slow down the engine at lower speeds. We assume it has to do with how they implement the fixed point math, but so far I’ve been unable to find a confirmation about that.
My first computer didn’t have one. And it was an AT “clone” with a 286 CPU. But on the other hand, there were 486 machines with it. Such weird times π
My copy of TD2 has the same at least. It’s probably something that happened during the time when machines from an original PC to things like fast PS/2s without 5.25″ floppy drives were used at the same time. I wonder why they didn’t make separate boxes for 5.25 and 3.5″ floppies though.
I haven’t! But I was also lost most of the time in this level, trying to find the normal exit π
It’s totally 80s! Not only the stylish sunglasses, also that the box art doesn’t look like the actual game at all, not even remotely. Perfectly 80s π
I see now that the game also has Hercules Monochrome graphics support. That would be a fun thing to try π
Right! I’ll look into it tonight!
Thanks for telling me!
Computer Gaming World March 1989 (Page 45): “Grand Prix Circuit is a good game.”.
Interestingly they (and the previous review!) complained about the keys used to stear the car. Cursor keys in the PC version and IJKL in the C64 version (“why keys that are placed so close together?”).
Could you imagine that today? People complaining about WASD being used for a shooter for example. But I have to say, when I played the game as a kid, I had my problems with that too and I remember using both hands on the cursor keys to play. Of course that made every difficulty level beyond 1 unplayable π
Yeah, we should find some reviews from back in the day and talk about them in the podcast. That could be somethign we do for every game in the future!
Oh, I’m so in! I wanted to play the whole Commander Keen series anyway.
I remember playing Hugo’s House of Horrors on a friend’s computer when I was a kid. I failed miserably, because it’s a parser based adventure and my English was horrible back then π
Is that qualifying times? Or best lap in a race?
Haha, saving and loading is good and all… if you manage to finish a single race π
I would suggest: Post lap time per circuit and difficulty level? Or we only accept highest difficulty π
So far I think I like the Ferrari best, too. Even though I wasn’t able to finish a single race with it so far (thanks to the red area on the tachometer).
Oh damn, GTA has Glide support? It thought they added that in GTA 2. But I just checked and you’re right.
That means I need to make a move on that Voodoo card for my Pentium 2 machine. I actually bought GTA just yesterday π
Oh! Absolutely. SimCity 2000 was one of the coolest games I had as a kid. We should SO cover that in DGC π
Okay, so we chose GPC for April, which is great because April is also an LD month, so we should keep the DGC time shorter.
But that means we can plan C&C for May, right? π
voxel is right though, it was authentic LAN feeling π
Maybe all the problem we had in our late 90’s LANs were not entirely due to our lack of technical understanding π
I feel Episode 3 got better again, though. The levels are more arena like (especially E3M6, which is just a huge area with a few buildings on it).
If I’m not mistaken, the Episode 2 levels were made earlier than Episode 1 levels. (I’d have to watch the DOOM post mortem from GDC 15 (I think) again to be sure).
I’m in! We’ll just have to figure out how to link my 486 to the Internet. I assume I’ll have to use a second computer for tunneling IPX through the Internet…
toasty, you can reconfigure the keys in default.cfg.
I’ve setkey_right 0 key_left 0 key_up 17 key_down 31 key_strafeleft 30 key_straferight 32 use_mouse 1 mouse_sensitivity 15
That makes it behave almost like a modern FPS, you just have to make sure you don’t move the mouse up and down, because that will make you walk in that direction π
Strike Commander looks interesting! I like dogfight games anyway!
Yeah, I figured out you could save. I have honestly no idea what happened there. I think I just expected DOOM not to have save games and therefore didn’t notice them.
Brains are weird. Especially mine π
I’ve played through most of Episode 1 now (until I hit a bug that killed me and I lost the engagement to continue).
I like the leveldesign so far. The game is making use of many sharp turns behind which often a whole army of enemies is waiting. Stylistically it reminds me a lot of later games, including the different Quakes and later Dooms.
As others already mentioned, the level design forces you to pass through the same area multiple times, to get different keys or use levers that open doors or pathways.
Because the levels are relatively small overall, backtracking through already cleared areas is a lot less tedious than it would be in a level of modern dimensions.
There are often smart and less smart ways to approach a certain level. Often you can kill off a bunch of enemies from relative safety before entering a new area.
Two things I don’t like very much though:
a) When getting killed in a level, it is often _very_ hard to survive the first wave of enemies. You start with nothing but the pistol and often have to improvise, kill the first enemies (that don’t wait for you!) in a certain order to get a shotgun, run over radiated water multiple times just to survive the first minute of the level or so.
b) The lacking AI forced the level designers to replace smart enemies with hordes of enemies. While that I feel that is part of DOOM’s gameplay, it also feels older than the rest of the game from today’s perspective.
Grand Prix Circuit is one of my oldest games memories. Played it on a friend’s computer in primary school. We didn’t understand anything about DOS back then and he had a list of commands we had to type to start different games he had installed (I remember Grand Prix Circuit, Arkanoid and Battle Chess).
Since all commands began with “cd” we thought that was meant to select the game and the actual executable name was some kind of password.
So, “cd granprix” and then the password “gpega” π
It was all very mysterious back then. I was wondering what other games where hidden on the machine that we would never find because we didn’t know the name or the “password”.
He also knew about “dir”, which we tried and whcih displayed some arcane information we never understood, but of course we noticed that granprix and chess were among them words it showed so we tried the others but failed at the “password” of course.
Ah, children are dumb π
sorceress, what do you think about the way Half-Life does it? Having the player pass through a continuous world without any real level gaps but putting a chapter marker every now and then?
And most levels actually have a unique theme to them.
I didn’t play any of the recent block buster FPSs, but in most that I have played, you seem to pass through each area at most a few times, and usually only when you’re solving a puzzle. Most seem to be more linear in many respects. Probably because they have a stronger focus on the story.
Haha! I guess it was to be expected. But imagine what the game must have been for people who didn’t mind the dark atmosphere back in the day!
The was backstory! It was just posted on IRC: http://www.wolfensteingoodies.com/archives/olddoom/manuals/Doom_-_Manual_-_PC.pdf
