TigerQuoll
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April 26, 2024 at 7:47 am in reply to: Cricket explained for beginners + my experience playing cricket games #8613
I sometimes joke that NOBODY knows the rules of cricket, because there are actually none – the whole game is just a giant prank played on the non-cricketing nations. The players are just making stuff up as they go along, and the commentators are deliberately spouting nonsense.
Hi there! I don’t think we don’t get many people from Iran around here. Glad you found us, and look forward to seeing you around!
Pretty sure I played the non-talkie version in the past. I think I’ll give the DOS talkie version a go.
(That’s if I get around to playing it at all- I’m away for two weeks this month!)
I played this years ago and did fists and wits, but never got around to team. Guess I’m doing that one!
Timeline-wise, I’m pretty sure Spear of Destiny is supposed to be a prequel. I guess you could call it an extra episode, but it was sold as a standalone product. It’s not like the weird arrangement of 3 or 6 episodes for Wolf3D which all still launched from the same executable.
There were two “mission packs” released for it, which I guess you could call episodes as well. They have all-new textures and sprites (worse looking in my opinion), and were made by an outside team with little input from Id.
These were also standalone, but I’m not sure if they were sold individually.
I don’t think they could have made all of this more confusing if they had tried.I decided to concentrate on SoD this month, since I don’t think I’ve beaten it before.
I played on “death incarnate”, and you get absolutely swamped with enemies in some levels.
The “final” final boss is still pretty easy, but the fake-out final boss is quite a challenge because the level is swarming with baddies, and you’re forced to try to deal with them at the same time.SoD does have a bit of a different tone and feel to it than Wold3D – a bit dirtier and grungier maybe?
It may be a bit shorter, but with 5 bosses across 21 levels and a generally more focussed approach to level design, I think it stays a bit fresher than the main game.
That said, it offers very little wholly new content over the original, and I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have felt a little ripped off had I bought it new.
Id did pretty much the same thing with Doom 2, but seem to have pulled it off a little better.Nice review, dr_st!
I played a bit of this back in the day. It was also the one and only game I ever played with someone over modem!
The mechanics were really great for the time. Every other pool game I had played before this felt stodgy, unnatural and restrictive.
The way the mouse is used in Virtual Pool, though, seemed so natural and obvious. I also loved being able to activate the predictive lines.
I’m not much of one for this type of game in general, but this one was lots of fun to just muck about in.Incidentally, there’s a really fun bug when playing rotation. If you play against the computer and you both score exactly 60, there are no more balls on the table but no winner, and the AI totally freaks out!
This is one of those games that is so defining for me and I have so much nostalgia for that it’s hard for me to look at it objectively, so take the following with a grain of salt.
Wolf3D is still as playable for me now as the first time I experienced it when I was 8 or 9.
If it had an automap, was truly 3D or had deeper mechanics it just wouldn’t be the same game anymore.I see it a bit like Tetris. There are modern clones with all sorts of extra mechanics and gimmicks, and nobody can deny that the original is just the same thing over and over again. But the original, in all its simplicity, is still worth playing.
And just like in Tetris, which sometimes refuses to throw a line piece at you for ages, sometimes Wolf3D throws endless, bamboozling mazes at you. But I still love it and will never stop going back to it.
I’m using default controls, keyboard only.
I tend to switch between numpad and arrow keys depending on how I feel at the time. Also, on the machine I’m using, for some reason the left shift key doesn’t seem to have rollover, so unless I use right shift I stop running every time I press a few keys at a time.
This basically means I’ve defaulted to the same control scheme I used as a kid, with my hands smushed together under the nav cluster.On the topic of mouse control for wolf3d, back in the day I always wondered how they recorded the demos for the game. If you watch the demos, they’ve got the precise, finely tuned movements of a mouse. But whenever I tried playing with a mouse, I found moving forward required a lot of stop/starting when the mouse reached the edge of the table and you had to pick it up and move it back, which the demos didn’t have.
It’s only much later in life that I realised they must have used a mouse/keyboard combo!I’m playing an original, unmodified version, but my ideal scheme (if I’m ever not feeling too purist) would be for the left/right cursor keys to strafe, and the mouse to turn. As Martli has pointed out, I don’t think this is possible on my setup…
I had a friend who had wolfenstein on their mac.
I never admitted it, but I was always faintly jealous of the fact that the assets were more high-res and there were more items, weapons etc.Looking back now, I actually think the assets on the PC version look better, despite being more pixellated.
I still wish we had a flamethrower and rocket launcher though…A while ago I tried getting a mac emulator to work on my linux machine. Yikes, it was a gnarly experience. I’m not sure if I picked the wrong one or something, but I never did get it to work.
I am curious to try the mac version of Wolf3d for myself, but I’m not sure I have the heart to wrangle with emulators again.Oh yeah, you’re right!
I stick by my point that I love it for just how redundant it is.
It’s not like this is ever going to be anyone’s only or best way of playing Wolf3D, but actually getting it to run on your Turbo XT or Tandy 1000 is still totally cool as hell.Haha, cool find!
A mod of an ancient, irrelevant game to make it even more redundant and crippled for little practical reason? I am so here for this kind of thing you have no idea!It’s true – reading computer magazines from the 90s, you do get the impression reviewers had a weird prejudice against shareware. Sometimes it’s more than an impression, and they outright say shareware isn’t worth reviewing.
It’s telling how many of people’s most fondly remembered DOS games are actually shareware.
(DOS Game club members excluded of course, with our encyclopedic and recent memory of the era!)Good find though, pix! I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a contemporary review of Wolfenstein 3D
Catacomb 3D is a sequel to a an earlier top-down game by Id called simply “catacomb”, which is actually a pretty fun little ditty.
Problem was they kind of just translated everything directly from this to the 3D game, including level design. The maze-like levels and backtracking worked well enough in 2D, because you have a broad overview, but I agree it’s absolutely maddening in Catacomb 3D.I much prefer the Catacomb Abyss. When Id parted ways with Softdisk, they left the Catacomb IP behind, and Softdisk made, in my opinion, a quite fun sequel with the same engine. (The other two in the series by Softdisk, Armageddon and Apocalypse went off the rails a bit I think)
The levels are more detailed and easier to navigate, the gameplay overall feels much less barebones, and I’ve always felt it has a pretty good atmosphere.
The turning is still a bit slow though…The RNG seems a bit dicey in some of the versions. I read somewhere (can’t remember if it was a manual or text file, nor for which version of the game) that taking a city with an army is supposed to be a 50% chance.
Well, sometimes I found myself pouring upwards of five armies each into three or four cities in a row to take them…Wow. The name of this game has definitely come up for me in the past, but I always assumed it was some gritty, realistic noir. Sounds like I was partly right!
Anyway, an adventure game with little to no dialogue is something you don’t see every day (does Dropsy count?), and the setting sounds pretty wild. Could be an interesting game to do!
😉But seriously, I’m not sure what your level is with C, but I’ve found the Sam’s series of programming books usually quite good.
I had a lot of fun with the shareware episode of Blake Stone back in the day.
I revisited it a couple of years ago and… hoo boy! It is way harder than I remember!
I think it is a worthy member of the Wolf3D engine family though. It’s fairly slick and well put together. There’s some really cool enemies and weapons, and a few nice extra gameplay elements, such as automap and money, as well as ceiling and floor textures.
One of the big things I remember is that they did not waste any space on the maps – every empty space was usually crammed with secret areas.Another game based on the engine was the notorious “depth dwellers”.
Never played it, but I’ve definitely heard… things about it.Of course, the Wolf3D engine is actually an improved version of the Catacomb 3D engine, which itself is an improved version of the Hovertank 3D engine, so I guess those games deserve a mention as well.
Earthworm Jim,
The Soil He Did Crawl
Earthworm Jim,
A Super Suit Did Fall.Jim Was Just A Dirt Eating,
Chewing Length Of Worm Flesh
But All That Came To A Crashing endGroovy!
The music loops! Ugh, totally agree with you on that one, pix.
I’ve played a little sampler of three different versions for DOS – version 1 point something, 2 point something and deluxe. (I sort of like version 2 the best)
Having dabbled in a number of 4x games in the past, I was able to pretty much figure out all the versions of empire on the fly with just a text document open for reference.
My thought is that it’s clear just how influential this game was. Every 4x game there is probably owes a lot to this title. As I implied, if you’ve ever played civilization, master of orion, master of magic or anything vaguely like that, you’ll have no problem picking this up. It almost feels like a 4x game engine of which “empire” is itself just the barebones sample came that came with it!
But as basic as it seems, you have to remember that it was originally made in the late 70s on a mainframe computer! I think you could say that it’s way ahead of its time in that respect.
Oooh, I love Web 1.0 sites like this! Great find Tijn!
I especially like the system requirements section. The challenge would be to make a system that DOESN’T meet them!I feel like Bullfrog was trying to have their cake and eat it as far as tactics go.
They could have gone the traditional RTS route and made it possible to directly order/micromanage all of your minions, and give you the power to recruit whichever units you see fit.
OR they could have leaned further into making your horde an undifferentiated, uncontrollable mass, and tweaked the mechanics to suit that.But they seem to have gone with an uncomfortable middle ground. I won’t say it doesn’t work – you do get used to it, but I felt a bit like I was fighting the mechanics rather than working with them a lot of the time.
Not very far I’m afraid… just last night (the 1st of February) I beat the first level against another Deungeon Keeper (whichever number that is. Level 5? Level 6?)
I had a very DOS issue hold me back though. Being a total masochist, I generally prefer to play on real hardware. In this case it was a Pentium I 166 that I have been using for some years for DOS Game club games and all sorts of other tinkering and mucking about. It hasn’t been cleaned up or reinstalled in a very long time.
Anyway, I got halfway through this level about a week ago when the game ground to a halt, with constant disk accesses. I then realised the whole hard disk was chock-a-block full and horribly fragmented, as well as needing a serious scandisk.
So I spent a few days cleaning up and servicing the hard drive instead of playing DK haha!
Remember defragging and surface scans? Good times…
Anyway, the game runs like a charm now!Not sure if anyone needed to know all that, but thought I’d share anyway 😉
I might go back to DK this month and see how far I can get – depending on how much Empire tickles my fancy.
I was a little addicted to retro computing youtube for a while, so this game definitely crossed my radar.
If it was going for free or, like, $1 on gog I might give it a shot, but I suspect I would regret parting with $7.50 of my hard earned cash for it.
Advanced and innovative source ports for old games are definitely a cool thing – I like the idea that people are still showing love to these really old games and doing fresh and interesting things with them.
…but I’m just too much of a purist.I’ve played a number of total conversions in various doom engines and wolf3d engines, but for playing the vanilla game it’s always going to be the original engine for me.
So after finally getting a chance to play this game for a bit, I’m actually (slightly) pleasantly surprised.
I did initally have a moment of feeling like I had no idea what I was expected to do, but it seems like that was just the game glitching partway through the tutorial, and all I could do was tunnel around endlessly and make no progress.
After starting a new game, the tutorial actually ran properly and I beat the first two levels.
Everything people have said here is pretty true – there’s no real tactics, and some of the stuff you can do is just a waste of time. But I dunno… it’s still oddly fun to play.
I find the sound effects are a big part of this. They’re funny and weirdly satisfying, and just seem to make the gameplay loop come alive.I’m not sure how much lasting appeal this game will have for me, but for now I’m finding it charming and oddly satisfying.
Haven’t quite made time to play this one yet this month, but from the posts I’m reading here I’m beginning to dread it just a little bit.
Sounds pretty typical of a Molyneux game – easy to bumble around on a surface level for ages, but full of obscure mechanics that make it really hard to figure out what the game actually wants you to do.
A lot of bullfrog games of this era have really cool and creative ideas at their core, but are too ambitious for their own good and don’t quite stick the landing.Am I far off? I’m hoping I get a bit of time in the next week to actually give it a crack, and I’ll see how close my impression is!
Great! Thanks so much 🙂
December being what it is, I only got around to checking out your levels now! And unfortunately the link has expired. Any chance you could re-upload them?
I played a few hours of this game many years back. On the surface it looks a lot like populous, but I quickly found how different it was!
I didn’t have any instructions and had to figure it out by trial and error, which for strategy games of the era is not the easiest task!The thing I always remember is coming to the world map screen and being totally blown away by how many levels there are.
I’ve always enjoyed lemmings, and I’ve given it many decent cracks on a semi-regular basis.
I don’t think I’ve ever beaten every level, but my problem usually wasn’t getting stuck and giving up, it was moreso that I just lost steam and played it less and less until I stopped altogether, usually somewhere in Mayhem difficulty.I’ve always appreciated the beauty of the concept, and how well presented and handsome it is. More recently I’ve also found myself impressed by how the well the DOS port runs even on a toaster, especially given how many individual elements it has to keep track of at any given moment.
Oooh… I’ve always loved level editors, and I’ve always loved lemmings. Going to have to check this out!
“I’m Lance Boyle, and that’s who you’d be if you were me.”
Good… good… soon there will be enough Aussies to defeat the Europeans, and we will take our rightful place as lords of the DOSverse!
I dunno… even for 1996 this game seems to make some odd choices for controls.
Not sure what other releases are like, but like Wesbat, in my Australian release the “,” and “.” buttons are the only way to strafe.
“Alt”, which, let’s be honest, has been standard at least since Wolf3D, does nothing.
I could never get my head around strafing as a kid, but I’ve since learned to love it, so it’s implementation incredibly awkward here. But I am playing on real hardware, so I guess I am partially to blame.Other than that the controls aren’t really TOO bad for the time. They’re obviously going to be a little atypical given the mixing of genres, but apart from the strafing issues it actually feels fairly natural.
As far as menus and other functions and options go I’m a bit more puzzled. Why does it feel like every menu and subscreen follows a different set of rules and has to be accessed in a different way? Why are things like resolution and gamma assigned to random keys when there’s plenty of room in the already sparse options menus?
The manual doesn’t do a great job of clearing it up either – there is a short list of keys, but they’re only for movement.
What other commands you might need are hidden in the middle of passages of text, if they’re mentioned at all. No easy to reference quick guide in my version. (To be fair, I only have the jewel case, not a big box, so perhaps a quick guide was included in that.)All that being said, what little I’ve played of this so far I’ve quite enjoyed and I’m looking forward to playing more. I’m trying to take the interface with a grain of salt – I know the era was known for baffling interface options, and I’m sure it won’t take me long to get used to it.
I struggle with the notion of “flawed” and “great/perfect” games in general.
The way I see it, every game is the perfect example of… whatever specific thing it ended up being. And whatever combination of features it’s made of, hypothetically there is someone out there for whom that mix describes the perfect game.Take Ultima VI for example. It’s often criticised for having a tedious system for interacting with objects and your inventory. But it’s precisely that “busywork” that I feel provides me with a lot of the immersion – sifting through each item, selecting it individually, moving it from here to there etc. forces me to delve into the world on an up close, granular level that makes it feel all the more real and alive.
I get a similar experience from lots of things that are generally considered objective “flaws”. Things like forced backtracking, cheap traps you have to memorise, slow character movement, unconventional control schemes, the list goes on. For each of those, I can name you a game I absolutely love precisely because of that feature.
And of course there are plenty of games I can’t get invested in for exactly the reason most people love them. (Practically every online game for example)
Everybody’s yuck is someone else’s yum, and to my mind there is no such thing as an objectively “great” game.
Apart from Portal. That game is perfect.
I can usually only get to about 10 items in a GOAT list before I start just listing games that I played through once and kinda liked… not necessarily “greatest of all time” games.
That said, I think a good half of my GOAT games would be DOS games. A few that would definitely make the cut:
Ultima VI, Hexen, Commander Keen IV, Day of the Tentacle, Prince of Persia, Another World.
Honourable mentions to Doom, Lemmings, Wolfenstein 3D, Keen I-III, Legend of Kyrandia, Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem 3D, Catacomb Abyss and probably a few others I can’t think of right now.Actually, the choice of colour on Traxtor worked well.
As it turns out, I am colour blind, and I have a very hard time differentiating cyan from white, and teal from light grey on the cga palette.
Magenta, however, stands out very well, and I had no problem telling the tiles apart!I haven’t had a chance to try out Gold Mine yet, but Traxtor played quite nicely on my 8088 machine! What did you code it in? It seems very well optimised.
It looks good and polished, and the controls work great. The relentless march of new lines of blocks is too stressful for me though, haha!
Hey there! Always great to see new members around! Looking forward to seeing those games of yours!
Awesome work, Tijn! I think this will come in very useful.
Thanks for the video, Tijn!
I will openly admit I suck at adventure games, and when even the text file included with the game said it was full of softlocks, I was about to ask around if anybody knew of a walkthrough.
I reckon I’ll just watch your video instead!Hey there, great to meet you!
I love the sound of OPL synthesis too, and I think it’s sometimes underappreciated in favour of wavetables.
(I admit I actually have a soft spot for the PC speaker too, and I love the sound of games that get OPL and PC speaker working together!)I’ve never used a gravis gamepad (although for some reason I really wanted one as a kid), so I have no comparison, but maybe my offbrand gamepad is a particularly good one. I’ve had no issues with it in the least. It feels just as accurate, responsive and satisfying as if I were playing something on the SNES.
(Is now a good time to confess I never had a SEGA as a kid, and have barely played 5 minutes of Sonic in my life?)
That being said, the keyboard still feels better for DOS gaming in most instances. I decided to use the gamepad for Jazz mainly out of irony, given how heavily the gravis is promoted in the game!But yes, I have to agree about the music – it’s pretty awesome!
EDIT:
For the record, look how much cooler my controller looks than the gravis gamepad:
Yes, it’s an even more shameless ripoff of the SNES controller than the gravis, but in the best possible way.I’d agree with most of that pix.
I’ve dipped my toes in this game a few times over the years, but never really put a lot of effort into it. Just now I just had probably my longest play session to date, and that was only about 15 or 30 minutes before I got bored and had to stop.
(I did get some gleeful, sadistic satisfaction by using an off-brand, non gravis gamepad!)I’m going to persevere and finish the first episode, but I have to be honest and say it’s not really my kind of game.
As you said, pix, the levels aren’t very memorable, and it’s a tad TOO fast. It’s intentional, but doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels more like that common DOS experience of playing an older game that wasn’t made with more powerful processors in mind.For me the result is a bit mind-numbing and forgettable – just zooming right through levels that are already plain and hard to distinguish.
I can get how this game would appeal to certain people – speedrunners or completionists for example – but I just prefer a slower, more methodical type of action game.
Wow, I’ve never heard of this. Seems interesting!
An English translation of a Czech parody of an English game which is itself a parody of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland (which I like to imagine, based on no evidence, was built by Czech people).The only way it could get better is if there were a mod turning it into a Pirates of the Caribbean game.
Thanks Mike!
I’ve been tinkering with a little ASCII platformer lately, mainly to test out some new qbasic techniques and then one day finish my EGA platformer.
But I’ve been having trouble getting motivated (I keep getting distracted tinkering with vintage-style home networking).
Maybe a jam could kick me into gear again!Hey there, fellow Aussie! Which corner of Oz do you hail from?
That avatar is definitely tickling some dusty old neurons, but I’ll be stuffed if I can remember…
It’s not a “bug” from the Usborne series of books, is it?I still keep thinking about this from time to time as well. Seconded for reviving this idea!
So, for the record, I finally had a go at both speedball games.
TBH, I actually liked the in-match gameplay of SB2 a little better, although the difference was not major. The slicker graphics and animations and larger field size I think just felt nicer.But I still agree with you, sorceress – the management meta-game was not my cup of tea. I preferred the straightforwardness of SB1 in that respect.
To be fair, I only put at most an hour into each game, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.
I haven’t gotten around to playing them yet (I have a couple of days off atm, so soon!), but from your description I have a feeling I might like SB1 better as well.
I’m not much of a fan of sports games usually – they need to be pretty arcadey, have little to no “long game”, and preferably have some kind of silly gimmick for me to get into them.
The only sports game I remember ever playing much of is Nintendo World Cup Soccer, which allows you to totally KO any opposing player with no penalty, and you even have special kicks which border on sci-fi. The only “management” involved in it is choosing player positions before the match and at half time.
Speedball (well, number one at least) sounds like it is very similar!
I was debating whether to try it at all, given that this month is about SB2, but you’ve helped me decide that I will!As for Xenon and Xenon 2 – I played Xenon 2 when I was a little’un, and a few times since, but I never tried the first one until a few years ago. To me they are apples and oranges – too different to be able to say X2 jumped the shark.
I never beat Xenon 2 without the cheats (in fact, I’ve never given it a serious go), but I’ve got a soft spot for it. The graphics, as you would expect from the Bitmap Brothers, are fantastic, and the variety of weaponry is fun.
I could never get my head around Xenon 1 though, and I don’t find the graphics quite up to the usual Bitmap Brothers standards.
It didn’t help that (to my mind) the PC controls are cumbersome. The mechanics (being able to switch between a spaceship and a tank and having the freedom to go backwards and forwards at will) sound fun on paper, but I just found myself having no idea what I was supposed to do and dying all the time. I probably just need to try it again but with invincibility… It’s only fair, since that’s the only way I’ve been able to enjoy Xenon 2.Well, sorry for the brain dump! Just a few loose thoughts I felt I needed to shake out of my head.
Thanks Pix!
I managed to track a review down as well, from PC Format #44, May 1995. (My scanner is not quite big enough, so the part that actually says the magazine name has been cut off!)
As a bonus, there was also an interview with Terry Pratchett himself in the same issue!
Actually, I just realised the infra-red goggles and the headlamp are two different things. The goggles (F2) seem a bit useless, but the headlamp (F5) is pretty useful.
Then there’s the ice cleats and the gas mask and probably some more items I haven’t gotten yet, all activated by the function keys. So annoying when you’re fumbling to turn the right one on while you’re being chased by a Dark Trooper or something!
For some reason, based on little to no evidence, I was expecting the gameplay and controls to be janky, slow and awkward, but it struck me just how smooth, agile and playable it is.
I even find the laser weapons to be more fun and satisfying than expected.I seem to recall a few years ago there was a misconception going around that this game was actually made with the build engine, given how similar it is.
A lot of the reviews describe it as being fully 3D, but so far (apart from the aforementioned 3D sprites), I haven’t seen any evidence of that. It seems, again, to be like the Build engine (2 and 3/4 Dimensions?) which allows sectors over sectors, so long as they’re not all visible at the same time and you use some smoke and mirrors.
So yeah, I’m enjoying it. I especially appreciate the emphasis on story – so rare in action games of the era.
There’s a lot that can be said about the old, now defunct Star Wars extended universe, but frankly I’d take Dark Forces over episodes 7, 8 and 9 any day.
(But is this better than Rogue One? Ask me again when I’ve finished it. The jury is still out…)There’s a pair of infrared goggles somewhere near the start of Anoat. You turn them on with F5, but they have limited (although quite generous) battery life.
It’s still gloomy and hard to see with them, but much better than pitch darkness.(Maybe this thread belongs in the DOS talk forum?)
Anyway, to answer your question, one obvious answer is Master of Orion or MOO2. Randomly generated maps, tons of different options and variables for each game and endless play styles – pretty much the perfect recipe for replayability.
You mentioned level editors, so it’s also hard to go past Duke3D. I almost certainly spent more time in my youth making levels than playing the official episodes.It also depends on what you mean by replayability. There’s a number of games I come back to nearly every year even though there’s nothing really new to discover. (I’m replaying Hexen right now in fact!)
Some games just have amazing atmosphere or fun mechanics or some other mysterious x factor that makes them a joy to revisit time and time again.But I guess for most people “replayability” means not needing a cool-off period – just keep playing them non-stop for an indefinite amount of time. In which case any game that’s good for speedrunning is a contender, and you will often get an active community to boot.
Apart from Doom, however, I can’t think of many DOS games that have a particularly large speedrunning scene (but I also haven’t looked into it in a while)Nice work as always, pix!
To my surprise, even I found a couple of reviews lying around for this one.
(Sorry for the sloppy photos instead of scans. Feeling a bit lazy today.)
The club did Ultima VII some time ago, and I feel like the Underworld games have been mentioned somewhere on the podcast.
I would love an excuse to revisit these. I started playing UUW 1 some time ago, but it felt very slow to get started. I loved the engine and the atmosphere and the depth of gameplay and story, but I struggled to get past those first several hours you need to really get into the swing of it.
It also suffers from that typical RPG problem of asking you to go in blind when creating your character, with no idea of what classes or combination of stats are going to be useful.I put in an hour or two yesterday, so it might be a bit premature to give my first impressions, but here they are anyway!
First off, I’ve played a heap of Master of Orion (and a fair amount of MOO2), and one thing I always wanted was overworld maps of planets and the ability to lay out settlements, so I was pretty happy when I saw that AL has that!My copies of MOO and MOO2 were budget re-releases with no physical manual – just a pdf on the disc, so there was no way I was going to read that. (So annoying for the copy protection by the way!) Basically I had to figure out how to do everything in those games by trial and error.
I think that experience must have prepared me for this game, because I’m not really finding it that hard to figure out how to do things or what everything means.
I’m finding myself just asking my advisors for advice and then just clicking around until I figure out how to do it.The one thing I’m really enjoying so far about this game is the way it blends story with gameplay. For any other strategy game of the era I can think of, if there is any story at all (besides that which you make for yourself), it was always just crammed into text boxes between missions.
It’s really cool that the story here is integrated organically with the gameplay itself.I also like that the science seems reasonably well researched. The star systems that are mentioned are all real, and a lot of the technologies, if not already real, are based on hypotheses by scientists.
So yeah. I haven’t decided if I really like it yet or not – I still only have one settlement and haven’t really gotten to the grindy part yet, but there is a lot in here that I at least like in principle!
Thanks, evilcommiedictator!
I have a little bit of free time before the end of the month. Maybe I will try firing it up and seeing if I can make heads or tails of it at all.If memory serves it was a solo project using the commander keen 4 (or maybe keen dreams) engine. Maybe published by id?
Should be easy to find out, but I’m too lazy right now 😛I really love the idea of this game. It reminds me a tiny bit of FTL: faster than light, but in some ways way cooler.
Unfortunately I can’t see myself getting into it. The barrier for entry just looks too high for my scattered little brain. If there was a tutorial that eased you into the mechanics one-by-one through play I would definitely give it a good crack, but I can just see myself sitting frustrated in front of the computer too long trying to work out what I’m actually supposed to do, how to do it, why and when. I watched a youtube video of the first mission, and came away totally confused.Now if somebody just made basically this game with a tutorial, but in a sci-fi space setting – well, that would be a game for me!
It does look pretty impressive for 1986.
Despite, as you say, the Macintosh version looking a little bit like nightmare-fuel, I sort of like its goofy charm.My way of installing it on my linux machine, for anyone interested, was as follows:
So, “game.gog” and “game.ins” are just renamed .bin and .cue CD image files. As long as you can extract or install those (really you just need “game.gog”) you can install the game in the emulator of your choice.
If you want or need it in .iso format, you can use a tool like “iat” to convert it.
I just installed the game from the windows installer using wine to get at these files, but there might be a more elegant way to do it.
I then mounted the CD image in 86Box, and installed it from there.
(BTW, I highly recommend 86Box or PCem to anyone wanting the most authentic possible DOS experience without a real vintage machine)You can do something similar with many games on gog. Sometimes the files have different names, or are hidden in a different folder.
I started reading a little bit of a walkthrough, which went through meticulous detail on how to scrounge for all the rations you can pick up on the Toronto.
Glad I didn’t bother…It’s always interesting to read opinions on pixel art from the latter half of the 90s, haha!
In retrospect, lovingly hand-painted graphics like these have aged WAY better than early 3D. This game looks absolutely gorgeous.
But if your game didn’t look like a bunch of crudely painted cardboard boxes glued together, then expect to be dragged over coals by late 90s reviewers.
Hey, welcome!
So right about the “don’t know what you got” thing. I’ve definitely gotten rid of old computer things years ago that I’m kicking myself for now!
I’m glad you’ve found the podcast and hope to see (and hear) you around!I suggest corncob 3d. LGR did a video on this one, but it’s a bit wacky – set in an alternate WWII in which you fight off aliens. You can even get out of your plane and walk around to plant bombs and stuff.
I haven’t played it, but it intrigues me, and apparently has a lot of interesting mechanics.Oh… my… goodness. I played many hours of this game back in the day, and never knew about destruction moves until now.
I just watched them all on youtube, and I would agree that Shadow’s is pretty awesome. Electra’s is decent too, and I didn’t mind Gargoyle’s. I sorta liked Nova’s actually, with his smug laugh at the end.
But most of them are just some variant on punching the other bot so hard their top half explodes.Nice, thanks again pix.
One thing I can’t help but mention, both the reviews seem to think that the pilot is physically inside their robot, but according to the manual the pilot projects their consciousness into the robot in a way that sounds a lot like how people jack into the matrix.Yeah, those controls are just… weird. Like unnecessarily weird.
As for the audio sync issues, the only thing I can think of is that they just never changed the duration of the animations to match the audio for the talkie CD version. (I’m pretty sure the floppy version came out a year earlier?)
I thought it might have been a system speed issue, but I’ve tried it with so many different combinations in DOSBox and 86Box with no luck that I’m sure it can’t be the problem.
My main problem with the game though, as you pointed out, is that I just have no idea what it wants me to do. Straight out of the gate we’re dropped into a town approximately 3/4 the size of Tokyo with an empty, labyrinthine forest next to it of about the same area as the Amazon rainforest. There’s not much you can do but blunder around aimlessly for ages.I’ve seen the name of this game bandied about here and there, but I never actually knew anything about it. The graphics look friggin phenomenal! Kind of a mix between Bitmap Brothers, Ultima VI & VII, and maybe some JRPGs.
I’m really looking forward to playing this, but also a little worried. It looks like a pretty serious commitment! As somebody who lives in Australia, where December is routinely the most hectic month of the year, I find it amusing that it was the month chosen to give people the MOST time to play it haha! 😀
I used to love this one back in the day. It did some interesting things with the Wolf3D engine. I played it a little recently, and realised it’s also tougher than I remember.
I don’t think we’ve done a Wolf3D engine game (well, apart from Rise of the Triad). I wonder if we could do a roundup episode?
For what it’s worth, this is the only review of EOB 1 I could find in my magazines.
I’m playing the Windows 3.1 version (for DOS game club!? Shock Horror!), so I’m not sure how much of this will translate to the DOS version, but I didn’t find the tutorial particularly helpful. I got a much better idea of how to play the game by reading through the manual with the game open.
I’ve only done one “quick game” so far, which I beat incredibly easily by keeping the pause button on. This way time only progresses while your ant is moving, so by the time I got to the red ant nest, they only had like one or two workers ambling about the surface, and I demolished the unguarded queen with about 5 soldiers.
Wow, this game looks really cool! I love the interface and the art style. Can’t believe I haven’t heard of it before.
(And, as somebody in my 30s with an adult job and a house to look after, the short length of the game sounds like a pro more than a con!)Wow, that looks really awesome! I’d love to play your farming simulator demake when it’s ready. You say you haven’t really coded anything since you were a kid? Well, colour me impressed!
I’ve been working on a little Metroidvania for some time. Pace has slowed considerably in recent weeks, but I’m hoping I’ll get it done by the end of the year.
Programming is about 95% done (unless I figure out how to do key polling in QB, in which case I’ll probably ditch a fair chunk of code and rewrite it).
I still need to make about 60-70 % of the levels though…
I have to say, I love the haircut and expression worn by Conan on the box art!
I’ve just discovered a language called XPL0
http://www.xpl0.org/I haven’t had much time with it yet, but it looks like exactly the language I’ve always wanted. It’s got the power of C, but the syntax is a lot more like pascal, which means it should be a lot easier to learn.
There are 16 and 32 bit compilers for DOS, a really good manual and heaps of example programs.Yeah, there are a few annoying bits as you mentioned. I’m a bit over halfway through myself. So far I had real trouble dealing with the giant horde of skeletons (I decided to go for a very magic-user heavy party this time and, whoops, the skeletons are highly resistant to magic!)
I also found the light beam room with the mantises beyond it very annoying, but it didn’t take me long to get past it. I’m just on the level with the beholders now. You just have to use guerilla tactics on them and they’re not too hard (hit and run). Not sure about the bullettes yet…
But a few little annoyances like that aside, I’m really enjoying this game. I love the art and the atmosphere, and a lot of the puzzles are fun and interesting. Most of the locations feel a lot more believable than the first one as well. In EOB1 all the levels just felt like abstract mazes, and I never felt like I was in dwarven ruins or a drow city or whatever. But in EOB2, even with basic grid-based maps, they managed to make the locations feel alive and believable.
When you look at it, the story isn’t really any more complex than in EOB1, but it feels more involved and intricate, with more and better interactions with NPCs.I have been waiting about 25 years to play this game, and despite all the buildup I’m definitely not disappointed.
If I can distance myself from my nostalgia, then I’d have to say EOB 1 is … fine. If all you’re after is a straightforward first person dungeon crawler then this should tick most of your boxes. I think it looked and still looks great, what with everything being hand painted and no ugly scaling. A few more frames of animation for the enemies would have made a massive difference, but whatever.
The game loop is not too bad either. A few unnecessarily tedious aspects aside (picking up all your daggers, darts and arrows after a big fight!), the controls and interface are a lot smoother and more intuitive than many games of the era.
But for me the levels and story are just so-so. I will say there is (slightly) more story and interaction with NPCs than you might expect of a simple dungeon crawler, but it’s all pretty perfunctory. The levels also feel mostly abstract and soulless to me, but that could just be me.Long story short, I’d agree the first title isn’t some kind of standout gem (different story for number 2!), but it’s enjoyable enough if you don’t set your expectations too high.
I’ve never used it, but All Seeing Eye is an extra program you can use to do auto-mapping and maybe a few other things in DosBox.
https://ase.zorbus.net/To me it feels like too much of a cheat. From my point of view a big part of the fun of the game is mapping, but to each their own.
Another tip that occurred to me:
There are a LOT of items in this game, but no way to sell or trade them. How do you know what to keep and what not to?
Armour is easy: put it on, and if your AC goes down keep it (low AC is better)Weapons are harder. Later in the game there is a way you can identify items exactly (with an orb of power at the oracle of knowledge), but you can also determine what items are magical with the Detect Magic spell. It will also tell you which rings and amulets are useless. It’s not an exact science, but better than nothing.
Potions and scrolls: most of the time, don’t feel bad about discarding these. If you have a well-balanced party with a healer or two and a magic user, you’ll never find yourself needing them. Just make sure you keep a few neutralize poisons around in earlier levels, and cure-paralysis in later levels. If you save often, you won’t even need raise-dead scrolls.
Also, don’t be afraid of pits. There are some areas you can only reach by jumping down these.
I find most of the interface is surprisingly intuitive, but there’s a few details you mightn’t figure out for yourself.
To swap characters, click on their NAMES. (I think it needs to be a right click?)
The view screen is very contextual. What you are holding and where you click will determine whether you place the item on the ground, throw it, or use it (like a key)
Throwing items manually (left clicking then taking them to the view screen) can damage monsters, but not as well as using them as a weapon (right click). You can still exploit this when you’ve run out of missile weapons! (Just chuck everything you have at them – keys, books, bones, whatever)
Whenever you find a mage scroll that’s new, go to the CAMP menu and select Scribe Scrolls. It’s the only way AFAIK to get new spells in your spellbook.
Exploit the fact that you can run much faster than the enemies (you can move basically as fast as you can press buttons). Hit and Run. I think the manual even tells you this.
If you are not using a tool like All Seeing Eye, keep an eye on your compass, especially if you keep getting unexplainably lost, or parts of the map don’t make sense. The game loves to spin you around or teleport you without indication.
Hold onto bones.
I’m sure I’ll think of more. I might post again later 😉
I went for the middle ground and printed off some maps I found on the internet, and got the pdf of the hint guide to look at on my phone.
Having physical paper maps and a handful of highlighters to mark off where you’ve visited is a pretty close approximation of making your own maps back in the day without as much of the hair-pulling tedium.I did end up watching a few playthroughs. Unfortunately a lot of them seem to expect prior knowledge of the game, but I did find one in the end that went a bit more slowly and explained things as it went.
This is an amazing game. I really have to make some time and play it properly at some point!Haha, that is so cool Dave! I love it!
Lemmings is one of the truly great games of that era. I find it interesting how it and Prince of Persia are such defining and iconic games for DOS, yet they are actually ports from other systems.
They also both have annoying/complex copyright status and, as far as I’m aware, there is currently no legit way to get a digital copy of the DOS version. Such a pity, in a slightly ironic way.
Haha, glad to hear I’m not the only one that happens to!
If you want to ease into programming for DOS, you could always start with QuickBasic 4.5
A surprising number of very good games have been made with it (I’m working on one now myself), and I still find it very easy and intuitive to use and learn.
It can also serve as a gateway to FreeBasic, which has a 32bit DOS compiler, is highly compatible with QBasic code and lets you link C libraries, so you can get your toes wet in C as well.
That’s the direction I’m heading down anyway. Food for thought!Eh, in the mid-90s advanced 3D graphics was all you needed to get your review score to, well, the mid-90s 😉
Heye Pete, nice to meet you!
I live in Tassie now, but I lived in Geelong for most of my life. Not too far from your neck of the woods.
I wish I had’ve had a modem back in the BBS days. It’s an element of vintage computing that passed me by.
Look forward to seeing you around!Hi haytada!
Forums are great aren’t they? I personally can’t get used to this social media business. Forums all the way for me.I agree with you on the podcast format too. As a rule I usually like my podcasts highly produced and scripted, but round table actually works really well in this case.
(But there is more planning involved than just getting everyone together and asking “so what did you think of the game?” 😉 )
Anyway, nice to meet you and I hope to see you around!So… I just realised that the “units.cfg” file only affects multiplayer. I think.
I played 2 or 3 single player missions that way, thinking I was cheating and doing pretty well (much better than before). Then I tried the editor and realised my changes to the “units.cfg” file hadn’t actually affected the game at all! (The editor on the other hand made a noticeable difference)
It’s amazing what a bit of misplaced confidence does for you…Nice tool. You can edit units pretty easily with any text editor if you just open “units.cfg”, but it’s a pretty tedious way to do it. A tool like this can make it a bit simpler.
Yeah, I’ve just discovered that you can edit unit stats as well. I’m pretty sure I’ll never finish this game without cheating, so I think I’ll just steamroll the game this way just so I can see all the levels and cutscenes!
Can’t say I really feel any guilt heheOooh, so jealous pix. One day I might own a genuine 5150 or 5160, but I’m not holding my breath.
I’m not the biggest RTS fan in the world. My favourite RTS is Warcraft II for all the reasons that everyone else seems to dislike it. Gameplay wise, this Command and Conquer kind of model has never resonated with me.
In terms of getting into the game it’s not too bad. Having only one resource is nice, and it’s pretty obvious what all the buildings do and how to progress in building your base.
The AI seems to be a bit more interesting (not sure about smart) than in other games of this type.
Navigating the map and using the interface feels a bit clunky to me at times.
Pathfinding doesn’t always work too well, especially in the heat of battle – but that is a pretty common problem, even in my beloved Warcraft II.
But overall, the gameplay isn’t really my thing. I find myself enjoying the early missions without base building the most.Aside from the gameplay:
Acting is above par – sure it’s cheesy, but in a fun, not cringey way.
The overall tongue-in-cheek tone is pretty good, although I feel at times the self-referential fourth wall breaks (especially in the manual and text files) go a bit too far.Long story short, despite my not loving this particular genre, I can’t help but be a little bit charmed by this game.
It gets bonus points for being Australian too 😉I’ve had a very busy month, so not far at all. I got through the training mission and about 4 or 5 missions of Jade Falcon
Star Control II has always intrigued me, and looks really awesome, but I’ve never played more than about 30 minutes of it.
It was heavily inspired by Starflight, which the club did a few years ago (and which I also haven’t played!)
I think it could make for a good DGC episode – there’s a lot of rich discussion you could have about the differences and similarities between the two games.I could have sworn that it was made freeware a number of years ago, but now I see it for sale on gog and steam (for just a few bucks to be fair).
I must be getting mixed up with the open-source spin off, “The Ur-Quan Masters”. Which, like, is apparently exactly the same and why would you buy Star Control II when you can just play the open source version?I’m getting the impression that MechWarrior and BattleTech are a huge, deep rabbit hole.
I think I’m just going to get the original CD version and go for it.
Should I read up on any lore, or maybe even give MechWarrior 1989 a shot first, or just dive right in?In regards to the kex engine remaster, I wonder if the problem is the “pre-emphasis” that the tracks have on the CD audio? I’m not much of an audiophile, so I may mangle this explanation, but apparently you can’t just straight up rip the tracks and play them in a modern engine because they have certain filters applied to them that you need to reverse first.
Anyway, I really enjoy the Quake music. It’s really up my alley (even though I’m not really into NIN), and reminds me of a lot of Aphex Twin’s ambient work. Repetitive doesn’t bother me, especially in a video game, but I will agree that it doesn’t quite tonally fit in this game. I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but it would have worked better in a survival horror game.
I’m beginning to wonder if the problem with Quake is not that the enemies are too bullet-spongy, but that they’re not bullet-spongy enough.
Given the creepy soundtrack and overall design of the game, I think id could have beefed the monsters up even more and slowed down the pace of gameplay and it could have made a pretty solid survival horror game.The single player campaign is actually growing on me, and I don’t know why.
I agree 110% with every criticism of this game, plus plenty of my own, but… I’m most of the way through the second episode and for some reason I’m really getting into it and enjoying myself.I’m trying to join the server as a spectator (because my lag is too bad to be a player), but I’m having some trouble. I’m a n00b with this stuff, and it seems to be weirdly hard to google, like everyone is expected to know all the details already and so it’s not posted anywhere.
Anyway, before trying to join the server I’ve used the console to set the password and my status to spectator thus:
rcon_password dgc
setinfo spectator 1But I still can’t join the server. It just says Trying to connect, then connect: failed.
Does anyone know what I’m doing wrong? Does it just not work with the Darkplaces Engine?Edit: I think rcon has to do with some master password for the server? Anyway, I’ve tried every conceivable combination of setinfo, password and dgc and still nothing.
DarkWhalebone – in my experience it’s a blessing and a curse for people like us. A large proportion of the stuff I have has been rescued from eWaste, which makes me wonder just how much more gets dumped and destroyed.
A lot of people don’t know there are even collectors out there, so if you are after something specific you have to get really lucky or pay through the nose to buy off greedy ebay sellers.
It also depends on where you live. I’m in a pretty unpopulated area where pickings are slim. I understand collectors in bigger cities are practically swimming in cheap vintage hardware!
I’m going to try to be there for the test session, but since it’s pretty early for me I might not quite make it at 9PM! (7AM for me)
Anything much happening on this server yet?
I would love to try and join on one of my real DOS machines, but I’m shockingly bad at network-y stuff. I’d probably be spending the rest of the month just trying to get it to work.
I’ll probably just use Darkplaces or Quakespasm instead…
Noice, great work!
I don’t have the patience for speedrunning or other challenges like that, but I enjoy watching others doing them. Thanks for sharing! You got some skills 😉I’ve ordered the original CD version from eBay to play on one of my old machines. Until that arrives I’ve been playing the demo version through DosBox on my linux PC and… Hoo boy!
I don’t know why, but this particular setup is BUGGY! The most noticable (and hilarious) bug happens with the Spawn – half the time they load with the wrong assets and become a floating head or ammo box, flying around and attacking you. Other than that, I’m getting elevators that clip through you and gun graphics vanishing.As fun as all that is, I’m getting a little tired of being soft locked. I guess I could install the shareware episode on my Pentium machine, but for the sake of science I’m going to try Quakespasm, mainly because I want a more “vanilla” experience.
So far I’ve had little luck with it though. It supposedly supports the Shareware version, but it keeps insisting I need a file called pak1.pak, which I understand to be the data from the full version…Welcome back, sorceress, and thanks for sharing! I always love hearing people’s nostalgic stories about video games. I wish my home room at high school had been a computer room 😉
I was afraid of sharing my thoughts on this game so far. I feel like I’ve been overly critical of everything lately, and that I’m probably missing something with Quake since it’s so popular. But you have said basically everything I’ve thought about the game – the poor balance and design of weapons and enemies, the monotonous colour scheme, etc.
The fact that somebody that has been playing this game since it came out can see these flaws makes me think it’s not just me being picky!Still, I can see why the game is and was so popular. It plays remarkably modern – with just a slight tweak of the controls you can almost forget this game is 25 years old. It’s just so smooth, and it sells the genuine 3D environments really well.
Apparently the true joy in this game is in the multiplayer. While I’ve never liked multiplayer shooters, I think I’m going to give it a shot this month with the club.I like that text file you linked. It’s a really interesting to get into John Carmack’s mind a bit.
Do you have any videos or demos of your runs, Sorceress? I quite enjoy watching that sort of thing 🙂Wow, I had no idea you were such a seasoned veteran of this game, pix!
My first impression at the time was about the same as yours. I was playing a lot of Duke3D, and by comparison Quake just looked brown and bland. I was also an insufferable teenage so-and-so that thought anything that was hyped or popular couldn’t be good. Add to that the fact that I didn’t have a machine powerful enough to play Quake, and it ended up totally passing me by.
I don’t think I’ve played more than about 5 minutes of Quake in my life – something I’m looking forward to remedying this month!Wow, nice work Richard! Is this a new record for number of reviews?
I also think that last one from PCZone may just be the longest single review!I went looking for basically the same thing some time around 2016 and was equally surprised and disappointed at the lack of good offerings.
The best podcast I could find at the time claimed to be a general “retro gaming” podcast, but almost every episode was about japanese games on the NES and SNES. I only listened to one episode where they attempted a DOS game (Ultima IV), and most of the hosts had not even heard of it before!
Anyway, I’ve added “Like a DOS” to my podcast player. Let’s hope it’s good!It does look similar to Archimedean Dynasty. TBH, before seeing this game I wasn’t aware of any submarine-sims for DOS apart from a few very sluggish ones from the very early 90s. It seems a whole genre passed me by!
By the way, shout out to psy for suggesting SubWar before me. I didn’t realise there was already a post about it back when I made this one!
I beat the game quite quickly as well, so I decided to spend the rest of the month playing various other DOS shmups.
In addition to Raptor, I played Overkill, Space bats of Doom, Major Stryker, Xenon2, Galactix, the Dragon’s Power, Stargunner, and Tyrian.
Most of them are pretty short (and I was not afraid to use cheats), and I would say for me Raptor, for all its flaws, still comes in second of the ones I tried.I’ve always been curious about this game because it looks quite similar to Zelda II, which is my all-time favourite game on the NES. I would definitely love to play this.
You know, it seems like this is something I would have done, but I can’t think of any time I’ve ever run DOS on something non-traditional. Apart from maybe when I booted my main PC into MS-DOS 6.22 natively just to see if I could.
I have thought about trying something on my android phone, but then I just think about touchscreen controls and nope right back out of there.Don’t feel bad about sharing your opinion, titanduck!
I have a soft spot for this game, but I can see why people might not like it.
It feels like Raptor can only appeal to a very narrow band of people. Fans of shooters will be bored by it – it’s very short, the enemies are mostly pretty boring and the weapons are not as wildly over-the-top bonkers as in other shooters.
Non shooter-fans (such as yourself) on the other hand are not going to find anything in here to change their minds.
The only people I can really see it appealing to are PC gamers that have a passing interest in shooters. People who want to have the experience of playing a vertical scrolling shmup but don’t want to spend too much time memorising every level.It is painful for me to say this because I have always strongly been in Team Apogee, but Tyrian seems to be better than Raptor in every way I can think of.
I just played Stargunner for a bit… also an interesting one to contrast with Raptor. Again an Apogee game (this time coming a bit later), and also with interesting similarities and differences.
The energy of this one is a lot more in line with traditional shmups – the power ups, types of enemies and their attack patterns etc. It’s also side-scrolling which is always fun to see.
But… it has a store, persistent power-ups and health bars, which is a lot more like Raptor again.Nice review, Mr Creosote! You pretty much summed up all of my thoughts on the game.
One more thing that’s worth mentioning is: don’t stop moving. Even with your fire button down for the whole level (as it should be), you should be spending at least as much time ducking and weaving around bullets as you are firing at baddies.
I feel like the enemies and levels were hard-coded with exactly one screen size in mind.
If you tried to increase your screen space or implement a vertical mode you would probably have enemies popping up out of nowhere where they’re programmed to appear.I’m not 100% about this, but that’s just how it seems to me while playing.
I think the reason this game is so beloved is because it is so much more approachable than most top-down shmups. You can cop a lot of hits before dying and you can generally bumble your way through the whole game on the lower difficulties without having to memorise a whole lot of patterns or strategies.
Blowing stuff up in this game is also especially satisfying.I like the look of this one! It looks like one of those hidden gems you would find in a 1001 shareware games CD.
It does a very good job of using a custom 16 colour palette for 1989, when VGA wasn’t quite the standard yet.
I just found a video on youtube, and the controls look hard as nails, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.So after playing the first three games, this is my general impression:
While the gameplay is definitely better in number 3, I like the story, atmosphere and “vibe” of the first two way better. I’ve always been a fan of star-wars-like, dirty, low-fi, lived-in space opera universes, and to me the chunkier graphics of the earlier games achieves this better. I do understand that this is totally my opinion, and I will admit I’m impressed by the quality of the EGA graphics in the 3rd game. I also appreciate that it now has proper music and sound (though I wish there could have been even more of it)Now for the bad:
I’m probably on my own on this one, but I found the story, plot and setting of the 3rd game totally insufferable. The entire premise is based on a smug, self-referential in-joke, and we’re not given any actual in-game reason to care about the two dudes we’re supposed to rescue. It just feels completely un-earned that Wilco risks his life for two ungrateful strangers just because we as the audience know that they’re ham-fisted stand-ins for the game designers.
The first two games, despite the occasional postmodern joke thrown in, felt earnest and sincere. Pirates of Pestulon on the other hand was just about the epitome of insincere, self-satisfied, ironically ironic post-post-modernism.(OK, re-reading that I realise I sound overly savage, hehe. But I stand by it. I do want to reiterate the gameplay was good and fresh with some great new ideas and there were some good locations and puzzles and sequences. It’s just the story and tone of the game taken as a whole that I don’t like.)
Evil Taco – has it always had flicker issues, or is it something that it’s developed recently? Apparently some all-in-one compaqs from that era have weird refresh rates that can cause flickering. It may be something you can fix or minimise with the right settings or drivers/software.
I’ve always loved adventure games, but I’ve never been good at them.
Back when I was a kid I would happily sit on a game for hours, restarting again and again or bashing my head against a wall until I made progress or gave up entirely. I didn’t mind dying, and save scumming was not only acceptable, it was mandatory.
In principle I actually like this approach – it’s got an almost zenlike quality, and feels incredibly satisfying when you make progress.
In practice though I have very little willpower and even less time, so the temptation of walkthroughs are just too great…I’m still undecided as to what my opinion of these types of games are, with their evil puzzles and lots of ways to screw yourself over.
In some ways I’m reminded of a lot of old action games on console and arcade from the era.
You weren’t supposed to beat them on your first run, you were supposed to keep trying them over and over, finding new secrets and items along the way and getting a little further each time.
The main thing that bothers me is consistency and signalling. It’s when the game makes a point of teaching you the logic of its mechanics, then randomly expects you to discard that for a single case.
I’m sure there’s more examples, but the one that comes to my mind is after you crash land. I instinctively type “look around” on every new screen, but in this case you won’t see the survival kit unless you type “look at pod”.
There’s not even any puzzle justification for this. It just arbitrarily changes the rules for a single case.
That’s the main thing that bothers me – when you actually had the solution to a puzzle, but the game makes you feel like you’re on completely the wrong track just because you didn’t do some pointless thing exactly right.
Playing over and over again wouldn’t bother me so much if they did that better.I played the VGA version years ago, so I’ve decided to go back and play the original AGI EGA version this time.
I might go on to play more in the series, but not sure if I’ll have much time for that this month…Wow, super cool find, Tijn! Thanks foir sharing. I’m not sure I’ll get through the whole document (it is pretty huge), but I’m enjoying scanning through it.
My answer to the question “best way to play it?” is – Hold Down The Fire Button and Kill Everything In Sight 😉
Nice find, trumad!
I was going to add that George R R Martin uses WordStar… but the article beat me to it!
Psy,I have to agree with you that it’s relaxing. I use my various pieces of ancient hardware from time to time to do a bit of casual writing and I generally prefer it to my modern system. I would also add that there’s no facebook or other modern things tempting me. I like that old systems generally just do one thing at a time and you can dedicate the whole of your focus on that.
The only downside to my particularly purist way is that old systems are prone to dying. And if I don’t want to lose my work, it can be a major hassle to backup onto newer hardware.
Yep I got them. Sorry for the late reply!
Awesome! I love watching speedruns! There are so many bugs and exploits in this game I didn’t know about. Very cool…
Unfortunately I don’t thing I’ll be able to watch the live stream, but best of luck!Sure, as long as you can put up with me for two months in a row! 😀
I’d be happy to join, but I’d like to be on the Hugo episode even more *wink wink*
Oooh, that’s interesting. Nice find!
Somebody else mentioned that Gray probably got a different artist to help on Jungle of Doom, and it looks very much like some of the artwork in Whodunit is digitised photos.
I guess he’s not much of an artist, but he is resourceful!Right, I just did a test. You can just keep throwing the chop and picking it up over and over again, getting more and more points. It also makes the dog glitch and do the moonwalk sometimes.
Interestingly, I think the score maxes out at 255 or something before going back round to 0. Just now I did the chop trick until I got bored, then went on to finish the game and realised my final score is 25!
I pass my crown to you my good sir
Do you know what you did to get that score?
This one is probably my favourite of the three games.
A lot of this may come down to having played it to death as a kid because of having nothing else to play and heaps of spare time, but nothing in it really frustrated me.
Apart from maybe the chasm. That’s my biggest pet peeve in adventure games – when the solution to a problem seems to be the opposite of what the design is telling you.
(ie, the game seems to be explicitly telling you the solution to the chasm is NOT brute force… but then it is)But I didn’t find anything else too annoying.
The venus flytraps are fine. Saving and reloading is quick and easy, and you can do it at any point, so I just save scummed every time I made a little progress.The bridge is a little tedious, and admittedly makes you feel like you’re cheating by abusing the drop/pickup mechanics, but for me it’s no deal-breaker and you get passed it quickly enough. (I think I read somewhere you can make it across by moving VERY carefully, but I’ve never managed it so I dunno…)
The hedge-maze is fine too. You just need to take a little bit of time to draw a map. I actually like drawing maps for games – it’s satisfying and a little zen.
Maybe I’m just weird, but I still like the Hugo games, and even if I hadn’t played them before I think I’d find something to enjoy about them.
Out of the three games this is probably the one I had played the least when I was young. I probably only beat it once or twice before today.
The only puzzle that stumped me was finding the book. The game explicitly told me off for looking at trees and plants, but then this critical item is just hidden in a random piece of shrubbery!Anyway, I would have to say it’s my least favourite of the three. The graphics may be better, but it lost some of its charm. Despite being set in such an exotic location, it has a lot less of the quirky, weird, unexpected and baffling elements that to me define the series.
It also strays a little too close to uncomfortably racist at times. (“Ullu wulla jumba”? Ugh…)As for why this series is so beloved, I think it’s a combination of a few things, and it largely comes down to just how accessible the games are.
The games are short, (relatively) easy, and the shareware versions are basically complete. They are also full of very memorable and unique locations and set pieces. (Both for good and bad reasons. All publicity is good publicity!)
They were also very widely distributed – partly for the reasons above, but also because you can fit two of them on a single floppy if zipped.If I hadn’t played this game as a kid and had all sorts of rose tinted glasses on for it I would probably agree with you, pix.
One mitigating factor, though, is that this is one of those shareware games where the registered version is practically identical to the free one, so if you wanted to pay $40 then that was entirely your fault haha!After having played it for a while now (I’ve maxed out my car, but haven’t quite beaten it yet), I have to say there are a few things that bug me.
The game seems to be praised for the “realistic” physics, but I have to say for an over-the-top, absurd game like this they are perhaps a little *too* realistic.
As rnlf said, the cars are painfully hard to drive, mainly because you are supposed to do stupid things with them that real cars aren’t designed to do.
Insane top speeds and acceleration together with realistic handling is just a recipe for disaster.
Launching yourself into the air in an uncontrolled spin is always fun though 😉That is probably my main criticism, although I have to say, without finding the right powerups, wiping out all the civilians on a map is next to impossible.
Apart from those points, yes there are some frustrating and unbalanced design choices, but somehow I feel I wouldn’t change any of them. They’re what give the game its charm!
Funny – it seems everybody’s evaluation of this game is along the lines of “here’s a huge list of everything wrong with this game. Verdict: it’s great!”
Yes, there are definitely more cursed ones than non-cursed. (Don’t tell anyone, but I think even Doom is a bit cursed!)
I would agree with your example of OMF though.
I’m still not sure if the dead-ends and save-ruining moves are deliberate or just oversights by the developer!
As a kid I thought this game was really long and difficult, but I was surprised to find on a recent replay that it took me less than an hour to beat.
Still, I have a huge soft spot for it. Probably the first adventure game I ever played, and it’s charming as heck.
You know I’m interested! I’m sure I could think of something to say about any topic, but I guess I’m most interested in the early 90s 386 period. I also know a little bit about the early graphics adapters (MDA, CGA, EGA, Hercules), and sound blaster cards.
I think it would be useful to have a general DOS episode – what it is, a (short) history, how it works “under the hood”, what autoexec.bat and config.sys are etc.
Since this is “DOS Game club”, this would be a good way to really show how the hardware and the OS work with and influence each other.I would definitely be interested in a special hardware episode or mini-series! Count me in!
As for the keyboard, it’s definitely not nicotine, it’s just 30ish years of sun (it’s been used on and off that whole time). I did retrobrite it a while ago and it looked good for a little while, but the uv has obviously penetrated pretty deeply and the yellow just bubbled back to the surface. I think it’s going to need numerous, repeated treatments.
I’m not as fussed about the monitor on the right – it’s just my backup CRT.And as promised, here it is. “Chip”, my 386 DX-33 (on the left)
I mentioned earlier that it’s my pride and joy. That’s because I built it as a tribute to the computer I had as a kid. It’s the same (or as close as possible) as the original in all the important ways, but upgraded in all the ways I wished it had been back in the day.
The only original component is the keyboard (that’s why it’s so yellow!)
Specs:
* 386DX-33
* 8MB Ram
* 120MB HDD
* Maths Co-Processor (I don’t need it, but it always bothered my that the POST screen said I didn’t have one!)
* Tseng Labs 1MB graphics card
* Creative Sound Blaster 2.0
* MS-DOS 5.0 & Windows 3.0Yeah, I found software mode surprisingly respectable, and runs quite smoothly too. It honestly doesn’t take much away from the experience.
However, I skipped over the early 3D accelerated era back in the day, and I haven’t given the Voodoo card in this machine much of a workout, so I’m using this game as a good way to experience what I missed out on! (And isn’t that what this club is all about?)
The game ran flawlessly for me straight away with no tweaking or anything. (Pentium I 166, Voodoo 1 card, pure DOS)
Well, apart from the MIDI music that is, but I think that has something to do with my system because it’s not the first game I’ve had problems with.Thanks rnlf! I’m pretty sure I found out about DOS Game Club from watching one of your youtube videos, so I’ve already seen a bit of your hardware. I hope you get a chance to show it off again some time!
(BTW, the “new” case for my 386 arrived today. I should have some more pics soon…)
I’m usually not much into fighting games, so the fact that I’ve actually sunk a bit of time into this one speaks volumes for its quality.
Definitely agree we should do this.Wow! Quite a complex setup you have there. I like it! The Tandy is pretty special as you say. And I’ve heard about FM-Towns, but never really seen one and didn’t know much about them. It’s a pretty cute little machine actually.
I’m quite envious of the older hardware you have. I’ve only started collecting again in the last few years after having got rid of most of my stuff, and I’m finding anything older than a Pentium I is absurdly hard to get my hands on at a reasonable price. (The Atari PC3 was a once-in-a-lifetime find I think…)
I too live in a bigger house than I really need, and also got it at a surprisingly low price, but still feel constrained for all my vintage stuff!Nice setup pix! Cable salads tend to be unavoidable don’t they? Looking forward to seeing some of your other gear.
Here’s a bit more of my stuff:
Picture 1, living on top of each other you see “The Beige Baron”, a Pentium II 333mhz, and the same Pentium I from the last photo. Under the blue cover on the left is the Atari computer.
Picture 2 shows a (still unnamed) Compaq Deskpro 486. I’m still on the lookout for a matching monitor. Covered up is my pride and joy – a 386DX 33 called “Chip”. I’ve recently ordered a new case for it, so when that arrives I’ll post a photo of that too. (Sorry about the cat litter. I only just realised it was in the photo!)
I’m lucky I have the space for all this stuff, but as you can see I still need to get creative with how I set them up!
This is something I’d like to see too. I tried the IRC, but the way in which I tend to be online together with my timezone means it doesn’t really work for me.
+1 for a General Discussion section!Glad I could help! I appreciate your scans too, as always.
I was surprised by the low score in PCF too, especially because the description the review gives actually has me quite hyped, and so many other reviewers give it much better scores. I was getting the feeling the reviewer chose the score out of some opaque “principle” or something rather than the quality of the game itself.But I’ll reserve my judgement until I’ve actually played it. I’m not a massive trekkie, so I’ll be curious to see how well it works for me!
Wait, does that mean we can consider anything that runs on ZSNES a DOS game now? 😉 😛
But seriously, thanks for sharing! Why the focus on the last level in particular?
Hi Matt!
Looking forward to seeing you around the forums. It’ll be great to hear some views from an industry dev! (I don’t think we have anyone else like that around here??)
What games have you worked on?Ooooh, I’ve heard of this game! This would make for a really interesting podcast methinks…
I’m currently on the TRDR level (level 30 I think?), and I’m definitely feeling the same thing I did last time I played this 10 or 15 years ago – the game feels too long by about 1/4.
I feel ready to fight the boss and be satisfied finishing the game, but there’s still 8 or 10 levels left!I think it is in part because there is only a password system and no saves, so you get only limited sense of progress and achievement.
I also think we’re so trained to be used to threes – three episodes in games, three acts in a play or movie etc.
Lost Vikings has – what – 4 or 5 worlds? And then you even go back to the first one the last stretch.
I dunno. Maybe I’m the only one that feels this way. Does anybody else think it’s too long?My opinion of the first game is that it is gorgeous with heart achingly beautiful atmosphere and music, but some pretty repetitive puzzles.
The second game is really creative and has some cool locations, but it’s not as atmospheric as the first one. The puzzles and game progression are way better though.
I couldn’t get into the third game. I just can’t stand pre-rendered 3D graphics of that era!
I’d love to do an episode on this!
Oh… I see. I guess there’s some logic there haha! I’ll try that scheme the way it’s intended from now on!
I still think it would have been nice to simply map the vikings to the numbers 123 though…Yeah, console games of that era (particularly SNES) really knew how to teach you the gameplay. I think a lot of games even today could learn some lessons from the likes of Lost Vikings.
The game definitely has some rough patches.
It doesn’t feel slow to me per se, but it is a little tedious in some ways. Most of this comes directly or indirectly from the password system carried over from the consoles.
One of the biggest annoyances, for example, is having to redo levels right from the start if you mess up. It also makes secrets less satisfying to find, as you don’t carry anything over to the next level.
To me it also feels a tad too long by about 1/4 and the controls seem a bit weird. Ctrl and ins to switch back and forth between vikings? (Not sure if they can be remapped)That being said, none of those complaints are too fatal for me. I still enjoy it – the mechanics and game loop are imaginative without trying too hard, the puzzles are clever but not too fiendish, and it’s really nice that they make an effort to keep us engaged with the characters through regular dialogue. (Even if their banter is a bit lame at times!)
I would agree with all of that, and add… pixel hunting.
All those tiny twigs and pebbles that just look like part of the background but are actually vital to finishing the game can go take a long walk off a short pier.On the pro side, I really like the graphics. The artists really knew how to make the best of the VGA limitations and came up with some really stunning screens.
Thanks Tijn!
I now have the same post like 3 times haha! Feel free to delete them.I came across this one while looking for a lost vikings review:
So I was looking through my small collection of magazines in case I have a Simon the Sorcerer review somewhere (I do!), and came across this Syndicate: American Revolt one I missed earlier.
So, for what it’s worth after the fact, here it is:
Sorry for the poor quality. Couldn’t get my scanner working so I had to use the camera on my phone.
The last posts I tried all had links and tags in them. I’m wondering if it has anything to do with that?
Edit:
I just tried re-posting a review for Simon the Sorcerer and it didn’t work…If you are reading this then the problem is solved!
You’re right, it’s not possible to be truly apolitical. I guess what I meant is it’s not the goal of the club to explicitly discuss/inform on political issues. The comment was more about why I didn’t want to get into too many details.
But I’ll get my thinking hat on and see if I can come up with a modern DOS game to suggest!
I’m playing the CD version on hardware. I can’t say the lack of subtitles bothers me too much. Maybe I’m just used to hearing british accents, but I don’t find anybody hard to understand at all.
Simon himself seems to be the best actor, but it’s clear he wasn’t given enough direction or context. Some characters just sound bored, and others… well, they get an A for effort at least!It does make you jump through a few hoops when you first start the game, doesn’t it?
In my version, that feature is also (obliquely) explained if you watch the whole intro.I wouldn’t want Dos Game Club to start getting political, so let’s just say David Murray said some… unfortunate things, and has acted at times a little less than professionally.
For the record, while I certainly don’t agree with David Murray on those issues, they’re not a dealbreaker for me personally. I’m still happy to watch him on youtube and play PX3.
That being said, I think it’s fair enough that DGC steers clear of him. As I said, we’re into DOS gaming here, not politics, and we wouldn’t want to get caught up in that stuff.
HOWEVER… I think it’s about time we consider some other “new” DOS game. Retro city rampage maybe? There’s enough coming out these days that we should be able to find something.
I feel like if you own it digitally on GOG it should be alright to get an alternate version from somewhere like archive.org
Correct me if I’m wrong?Hi Gn0me!
Always good to see another DOS game fan, and looking forward to seeing you around on the forums!No worries Spoonboy.
I probably should have made it a separate thread though…
TBH, I haven’t actually played it myself. I never got the coverdisk with the magazine, and only just realised I could find it online!I’ll jump on the bandwagon too, hehe.
For what it’s worth, here’s an article from PC Format issue 27, December 1993, about the Syndicate add-on they bundled with their coverdisk that month:
Edit: Re-uploaded second page because the bottom was cut off.
There’s also a download of the disk itself here:
https://beigebox.co.uk/retro/coverdisk-archive-pc-format/Apparently the full PC Format review is in issue #20, may 1993, but I don’t have a copy of that 🙁
I played some variant of this game when I was younger. It seems to be one of those weird games with very confusing different versions/releases with varying names for maybe/maybe not the same product.
But anyway, it is a pretty neat soccer game from memory, and dos game club hasn’t done a whole lot of sports games.I can see what you mean tijn.
I haven’t quite finished it myself yet, but it feels like the developers thought as long as they got great music, great (for the time) graphics, an interesting setting, a decent engine and a bunch of voice actors, the game would just automatically turn out awesome. No need to put effort into writing or making the gameplay engaging – if we just tie all these other elements together in the laziest way we can think of the game can’t help but be great!I’m just pretending like it’s an interactive movie, and despite the awkward writing and threadbare and contrived gameplay constantly trying their hardest to break my immersion, I am finding myself enjoying it. Mainly for the music and atmosphere.
My first impressions:
I settled down with a tasty beer as promised and gave this game a good hour or so on my Pentium I machine.
So, I think I’m glad I’ve gone in with the expectations I did. I’m approaching it more as an interactive movie, and I’m finding myself quite immersed.
There were a couple of spots so far where the writing was so bad I nearly quit, but I pushed through and I’m glad I did. (I’ve just finished the first section in the citadel)
The music, as mentioned, is absolutely awesome. Although I’m hoping there will be more than the three or four tracks I’ve heard so far in the rest of the game.
The setting and story are intriguing, and I appreciate the experimentation the developers have done with the mechanics. There’s some great ideas in there, albeit a bit rough around the edges.
I’m giving it a rest for tonight, but I’ll definitely give it another go tomorrow.My Mum played a text-mode tetris game on our old XT clone computer, and solitaire on later computers. That is it.
BTW Tijn, I’m a little floored by that super tetris. I made a game that was almost exactly that in qbasic when I was 16 or 17! I thought I had come up with the idea myself! (Of course it looked way worse and was super buggy)
Nice idea!
I’ve actually been trawling through the games on doshaven.eu recently.
There’s heaps of new(ish) games for DOS there, and a lot of them are made in some form of basic, so if we ever do this topic that would be a great place to find inspiration!My better half is heading away for a week later this month, so I think I’m going to take a couple of nights off, and settle down to this game with a few tasty beers and the volume turned up!
As long as I’m prepared for the fact that it’s light on gameplay, I don’t think that will bother me. I can happily immerse myself in it if the music and story are as good as they’re supposed to be!It took me until about half-way through the shareware episode to figure out why the FM chip on my soundblaster wasn’t working, so unfortunately I didn’t get to experience all the music.
But what I did hear, I will agree, was pretty good!
(I don’t think I’ll go on to play the full game though.)I think your description of the levels is spot on!
You mention Wolf3D, and I will bring it up again because, despite it being probably even more maze-like and with a less advanced version of the engine, every level still managed to feel unique and distinct, unlike in ROTT.
If they had just done a better job of “theming” the levels (with the help of more colourful textures, and maybe more sprites for decoration) I could look past all the other flaws.
Honestly, despite some rough patches with hit-scanners and aiming and the like, the core mechanics are pretty fun and satisfying.Claw: weird coincidence: my dad brought home a second-hand olivetti M24 in about 1990 as well! (Give or take a year)
The only difference is mine had a CGA monitor.
I believe it was almost exactly the model shown on this page:
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/10534/Olivetti-M24/
Except that it had to floppy drives and no hard drive.This is another game I played most of the way through and fizzled out near the end.
I remember enjoying the controls and how satisfying and intuitive it was to play. But after what felt like about 3000 levels it started to get a bit repetitive and I gave up.I had only played a few minutes of this game before this month, and watched friends play it a bit, so this is my first *proper* experience of it, and I have to say…
Meh. (So far)
The guns are all fun and satisfying, and in some cases creative and ridiculous. I appreciate the slight nuances in enemy behaviour/ai as well. The weird powerups are funny.
But I’m having a hard time getting excited about the game as a whole, mainly because of the level design.
It’s just a bunch of bland brown and grey textures plastered on vague, unspecified “Areas” (calling them rooms would be giving them too much credit).
I’ve only played two levels so far as well, but first impressions are that the levels almost feel procedurally generated, by a very uncreative algorithm. I’m just not getting any sense of overall theme or logic or personality to them, and it doesn’t draw me in.
That being said, I hope it gets better and it will change my mind. The combat really is satisfying and cathartic.[Edit:] I also can’t get the music to work for some reason (playing on a Pentium I with SB Vibra 16 card). It keeps saying it can’t detect the FM chip. What the heck? If anything should work on the card, it’s the OPL chip! (Which works in other programs btw…) Grumble grumble.
Quick question to everyone:
I went ahead and bought Maniac Mansion from GOG, but there’s no executable for the original 1987 version, and I want to play that on my 386 (instead of through ScummVM).Does anybody have the original executable they can send to me?
Or does anybody know where the file is hidden?
Thanks!
(I think it’s OK to ask for this? I mean, I do own the game…)
Wow, I just realised that GOG sells Maniac Mansion seperately to DotT – even though the full game exists inside it haha!
I probably had more time on my hands when I first played it as a teenager, but I never felt fully stuck for long. With enough of rubbing everything against everything else, eventually something always gave.
(Since then I’ve played it so much I could finish it in my sleep)I’ve slowly come to the realisation that while some people can treat adventure games like puzzle games where you can logically figure out the solutions, I can’t. I’ve sort of shifted my thinking so that it’s more like a “secret finding” game where you just have to slow down, be patient and slowly comb through all your options until you stumble on the way forward.
Makes sense to do that actually. I’ve already finished DotT twice this month.
That being said, I tried playing Maniac Mansion years ago, and it was too hard for me haha!The “Ted is red” line is a reference to a series of kids books from the 30s called Dick and Jane which were filled with simplistic lines like that. “This is Spot. See spot run.” That sort of thing.
Honestly, I thought it was a reference to Dr. Seuss until I looked it up just now!Too many to mention!
My favourite “one-liner” is when Hoagie says a statue of him would have a seam in it. Bernard has some good ones too, I can’t remember them off the top of my head.But I think my funniest moments are not the one-liners, but the physical comedy, and the situational comedy. Like the cow in the intro that nearly comes along, or that one tentacle that thinks Laverne is ugly, but when she’s disguised as a tentacle she’s beautiful, or just everything about the beauty contest.
The humour is a bit of a sign of how things have changed though. There’s some jokes that come at the expense of mental illness (Dwayne and Ed Edison in particular) that you couldn’t do these days, but you can’t deny the writers had some great comedic skills!
I definitely agree that the commentary is great. I’m playing through that version now! (Just finished a “straight” playthrough with the new graphics)
To be clear, I can see how a lot of people would prefer the remastered graphics, especially if they’re not a fan of low-res, chunky pixels. I just can’t help but be bothered by some of the small details that are a bit messy.
I think Dos game club could stand to do a few more flight sims. It seems to have been forgotten now, but flight sims were absolutely huge on PCs back in the day. Their heyday might have been waning by the time of fleet defender, but it does look impressive.
My approach so far has been, each time I start a new game I choose as different starting conditions as possible to my last game, so that I get exposed to as much of the game’s variety as I can. (Never played this game before)
My first game was OK – I played as Merlin with Halflings, intro difficulty. I had no idea what I was doing or what spells to research or how to use them, but I easily bumbled my way to victory anyway.
My second game is… interesting. I decided to go with easy and create my own wizard – Myrran, Draconian with equal number of chaos and sorcery. (No real strategy behind this – I just wanted a game totally different to my last)
I’ve learned that I like the “small land” setting. It has a better sense of exploration for me – it feels more satisfying to discover new islands than opening up a continent.
Magic power of the world is high, which I think was a mistake.
I basically have the world of Myrror all to myself, but I can’t capture any nodes, towers, caves etc. because they are too well guarded, and I don’t seem to have the right kinds of spells or troops to counter them! (Any tips there?)Anyway, I’ll keep fumbling around with this. Hopefully I’ll figure something out. If not, I’ve learned a valuable lesson!
That is cool! I’m guessing it’s just a straight substitution cipher, like the standard galactic alphabet in commander keen?
That would be cool if you got some info from Seravy!
I don’t have anything to ask him though as I’m pretty sure I’m just going to stick with vanilla MoM. I don’t play these games for balance or difficulty – I just like exploring the world and then flattening everybody with overpowered tactics!I played Master of Orion I and II before playing this, and both of them I just sort of picked up through trial and error by playing them. For this game I thought I’d try the same as you and read the manual first, but now I realise that it’s more useful just as a reference. You just have to sort of dive into the game, mess up a lot and slowly figure it out.
You can definitely see the same DNA in this game as the two MoO games, especially number 2. And I will admit, for the first few hours I actually just found myself wishing I was playing that instead. I’ve gotten past that now and I’m enjoying the game for what it is, but I would still say I like Orion better. I think I mainly just like the sci-fi setting more!
I can see I’m not going to really experience all this game has to offer in just one month! It’s half way through the month already, and I’m still in my first game (at least the first where I didn’t completely screw up and have to start again!). I see all the veterans here talking about OP strategies and such, and it’s all going way over my head.
But then again, I think I’ll mainly be playing this the same way I play the Orions: I don’t go in for challenge much. I just set the skill level low, focus on building my empire, and fend off and ignore my opponents until I’m ready to steamroll them in one fell swoop! I guess I just treat these games as more of a management sim because I love that feeling of exploring a universe/world and creating an empire.As for Dosbox: you’re right. It does seem to be a quite picky game in that regard. The default settings were way too sluggish on my system, but with cputype=auto and cycles=max it works fine.
(I actually wanted to play this on proper harware, but my 386 is underpowered, I’m waiting on components for my 486, and my pentium I and II are currently packed up!)You have to wonder why they even targetted DOS at all? (Same goes for a few other games of the era). The market for people with machines powerful enough to run the game but who didn’t have windows 95 must have been pretty small.
I had no idea it was on the Saturn first! I was also surprised the first time I learned that it runs under DOS.
I got it running (poorly) a few years ago on a 100mhz 486. I played it until I was probably near the end, but I got bored when the levels all started to feel the same and then I never finished it. It probably didn’t help that I was getting single digit framerates a lot of the time!
It does look interesting, and seems to be quite a programming feat. The technology behind it alone would make it worthy of an episode, even though it seems to only get middling reviews for gameplay.
Jazz was Mario or Sonic for MS-DOS? Them’s fighting words haha!
In my circle of friends and acquaintances, that title definitely belonged to Commander Keen, even if a lot of people now feel like the CK games didn’t age as well as Jazz… I disagree because I am a diehard Keen fan, but that’s just me.
Jazz is definitely an important game though, and I think it would make a great podcast episode.I’ve never played this game before, so I’d be interested in some beginners tips as well.
I’ve played a lot of Master of Orion I and II, and basically figured them out by trial and error back in the day. Not sure if I’ve got that kind of patience these days though…I played a clone of this from a bit later. I think it was just called 3Dtris or something?
Mine had the gimmick where you could turn on an option that would make it work with 3D glasses! (Like the old cardboard and cellophane style ones)I would also have a bunch of suggestions for tetris alikes and clones!
OK, nope. Just gave this game another decent shot, and it’s pretty disappointing for 1994. You see the actually quite nice graphics and then expect something good, and it turns out to be worse from a technical and gameplay perspective than Winter Challenge from 2 or 3 years earlier.
The downhill games all use exactly the same controls and physics (winter challenge changes slightly depending on the event), and the engine is really very basic.
No curves or dips or bowls or much in the way topography in the terrain like Winter Challenge has – just like a slightly wavy ribbon you have to ski down.And then the skier with his tight buttocks are taking up too much of the screen, especially given the low angle, and it was way too hard to see the oncoming flags.
The tournament mode feels undercooked after playing Winter Challenge, the controls in all of the events feel flat and unsatisfying, and the menus are horrible to navigate.
The only good thing about it is the 3D graphics in the luge/bobsled events, but even there it could have been better for 1994.
December 15, 2020 at 2:04 am in reply to: The Games: Winter Challenge (1991, Ballistic / Accolade) #4007Edit: whoops, posted in the wrong thread! See my reply in Lillehammer
December 14, 2020 at 3:11 am in reply to: The Games: Winter Challenge (1991, Ballistic / Accolade) #4006This is definitely my favourite of the tournament-style multi event “serious” simulations. I played it a bit when I was a kid too.
The controls feel fairly realistic and intuitive. Some of the events are a bit difficult, but never feel unfair. I even managed to earn a few golds on my first tournament.
There’s a lot of versatility on the tournament mode too. You can assign as many human players as you like, there’s lots of portraits and flags to choose from (but no Australia. Boo!), and a good choice of difficulties.December 14, 2020 at 3:07 am in reply to: Winter Challenge: World Class Competition (1988, Tynesoft) #4005This is very similar to Epyx’s “Winter Games” from 2 years earlier. The biathlon in particular seems to be an almost direct clone.
The graphics in this one may be a couple of degrees better, but I think Epyx did a better job on gameplay.Exactly my thoughts. Just such a weird combination of some really good graphics and presentation with terrible choices and bad gameplay.
The menus are incredibly tedious, having to wait for the little girl to press the button on the remote control etc.Was it just me, or did the combination of the low camera angle and huge character sprite in some of the events make it really hard to actually see the course and what is in front of you?
Anyway, I’ve only played a little bit of this game. In the spirit of fairness I think I’ll revisit it and give it a bit more of a chance.
There’s a lot I like about this game. Well, OK, mainly the charm. This game is charming as heck. There’s a lot of creativity there in the types of events they went with, and each one has heaps of cheeky, whimsical touches.
But yes, the controls in the downhill event in particular are absolute balls to get used to. I imagine when I get a feel for them it would be fine though.Out of all of the multi-event simulation games on my list, I have to say this one might be my least favourite so far. Probably a large part of that is that pre-rendered 3D sprites from this era almost never look good. They are at the same time too smooth and untextured, but still end up looking weirdly … crunchy? dirty? I dunno, but I think it’s from the compression. And then to me it feels like there are too few frames of animation for the size of the sprites, and it kind of moves too jerky.
But mostly I didn’t like the controls and the physics. A lot of the other games of this type really do a good effort of making you “feel” the snow and the landscape and the weight of your skier, but I really wasn’t getting much of that here. Also for some reason my copy defaulted to mouse control, which was HIDEOUS!
But take all that with a grain of salt. With so many games on my list, I really haven’t given this one enough time yet.
I love these kinds of wonky freeware/shareware games made in somebody’s basement. They just ooze charm, and you can tell somebody put love into them. (Even if in number one it looks like you’re skiing over sand!)
One thing I noticed in Ski King 2 is the controls are surprisingly intuitive. They feel a bit heavy, but I just thought something as simple as having the down button pull you back to dead centre, regardless of if you were currently facing left or right, worked really well.
In Ski or Die there’s a downhill minigame with very similar controls, except you only have left and right (or clockwise and anti-clockwise). That game I found alomst impossible to control, but Ski King 2 is just completely fluid and natural.It’s hard for me to decide between these two ski jump games. The controls in Deluxe are probably more finely tuned, but I really think the coach feature in this one can’t be understated.
December 9, 2020 at 2:11 am in reply to: Vardit BeHarpatka Hadasha BeAlifut HaGlisha (1996, Multimedia KID) #3990Google translate tells me the title means “Vardit on a new adventure in the surfing championship”
Yeah, entirely mouse as far as I can tell. And I think that’s a good thing because of the really fine grained control you need when you’re in the air.
The ragdoll physics kind of remind me of that game “Stair Dismount”…
I read a lot of bad reviews for the DLC.
Can anybody say if it’s worth it? And will it work on old hardware, or is it one of those things that only works on some recompiled version for modern systems?I found if you watch the snowflakes flying past you as you’re in the air it gives you some kind of a hint as to how to hold your angle. What the exact formula is I haven’t worked out yet.
I would love to do this one. It’s such a classic, way ahead of its time and really genre inventing. Yet I’ve never played it. Doing it here would be a great excuse for me to finally give it a shot.
I played quite far into this. I’m not sure if I ever finished it though. It’s one of those games that seems to go on maybe 1/4 longer than it needs to, and I remember losing a lot of motivation by the last world.
It’s on special again if anybody missed it.
Wow, even on an actual 4.77Mhz machine it’s fast?
And yeah, I haven’t figured out what the real difference between most of the events is either.
I’m using a keyboard, but I’ll see if I can translate what you did for the jump to keyboard controls.
One other quirk of the controls I noticed: to stop moving altogether (so you don’t crash into the barrier at the end of a run for example), you have to be very specific with your movements.
For starters, the manual is simply wrong about the buttons you have to press (not sure if it’s the same for joystick). The manual says “down” + “left” + “shift” to stop. It’s actually “down” + “RIGHT” + “shift”.
They all have to be held together, and it matters which order you push them down in. Pretty sure it’s the order I wrote.The manual was a bit threadbare for some details. Has anybody worked out how to land a jump?
I’ve worked out hitting shift just as you jump puts your guy into the jump position which gives you heaps of distance, but if you’re in that position when you land then you just crumple into a heap. I have no idea how to get out of that position though. I managed it once by accident (and got a pretty good score too!), but I haven’t managed to replicate it.I’m having trouble getting a manageable speed too. Even on my 386 using a slowdown utility which I’ve supposedly set to emulate a 4.77mhz 8088 it still feels too fast.
I found some youtube videos. They’re for different systems, but they all play much slower.There’s a version of this floating about called “Quader’s release”.
It seems to be just the same thing but bundled with DOSBox, and probably some tweaks to get it working well.
Can anybody confirm this? Or are there other differences?Great, thanks for the info.
Looking forward to playing some skiing games since there’s not much chance of any real skiing where I live!Hi! I just recently found out about this forum/podcast and it’s totally up my alley! (I was hoping there would be an newbies introduction section to the forum, but I guess it’s not that kind of message board)
Anyway, I really hope to get involved here regularly. (I have 3 vintage PCs and in the process of building 2 more – more details for anyone who’s interested!)
So I’m just wondering about this month’s topic. Firstly, is the idea just to play the three skiing themed games Tijn has made topics about (winter games, downhill challenge and ski or die), or just to find as many of my own as I can and play those?
Also, is there an “official” source people get their copies from, or is it just a matter of sourcing it from wherever?Thanks for the info!
