Links to the Past for June 7th, 2009
- If computer & video games were my first love during the early 1980s, then Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy books were a close second. Someone over at Mindless Ones clearly shares a similar passion for the classic mash-up of Dungeons & Dragons and Choose Your Own Adventure books, because they’ve written up a wonderfully nostalgic recollection of the Fighting Fantasy series. Several decades have passed since I last played one, but I still have fond memories of Starship Traveller, City of Thieves, Freeway Fighter and Rebel Planet (I was quite partial to the futuristic ones). While I no longer have the books, I did manage to hold onto all thirteen issues of the spin-off Warlock magazine, all in pristine condition. It was also a geeky thrill to actually meet Steve Jackson while I did a playtesting stint at Lionhead Studios back in 2000. I may very well have to grab a few of the reprinted Fighting Fantasy books one of these days.
- The Retroist was kind enough to draw my attention to CoinOpVideoGames.com, home to a collection of hundreds of field recordings of video game arcades. While many hardcore retro gamers already have access to their own home arcade (courtesy of MAME) you can’t really beat that authentic arcade ambience. While CoinOpVideoGames.com offers recordings of individual games in handy DVD format, you may also want to take a look at the Arcade Ambience Project web site, which offers much longer recordings of multiple machines playing simultaneously. Just be aware that these recordings are edited from MAME-generated sound rather than from actual arcade environments.
- Unless you’ve been living under a rock, this week’s biggest buzz in retro gaming land concerns the availability of the Pocket Retro Game Emulator over at ThinkGeek. This versatile little gizmo, which looks like a chunkier Game Boy Micro, offers built-in emulation of NES, SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, GBA, Neo-Geo and Capcom’s CPS1 & CPS2 systems. Not only that, it can play back a variety of audio and video formats, display images and ebooks and even has a built-in FM receiver and sound recorder. Not a bad little piece of kit, which I’m seriously considering grabbing before the hordes lawyers of Nintendo and Sega find a way to kill it.
- Meanwhile, if you’ve been living under a block for the last week, then there’s a good chance you might be playing Tetris, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Pretty much every web site on the planet wrote some sort of article to celebrate the occasion, so have a browse through Google’s Blog Search results and pick your favorite.
- Finally, last week offered a double helping of good news for Monkey Island fans. Not only are we being treated to an enhanced remake of the original game in the series, but also a whole new episodic series of adventures. Adventure Gamers gives us a detailed lowdown of The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, which takes the original game and spruces up the artwork for 1080i displays for XBLA and PC platforms, as well as throwing in full voice acting and a remastered musical score. Meanwhile, Lucasarts reopen their official Monkey Island web site, The Scumm Bar, to announce details of Tales of Monkey Island. Developed in association with Telltale Games, who helped resurrect the careers of everyone’s favourite freelance police officers, Sam & Max, Tales of Monkey Island will be an episodic continuation of the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood for PC and Wii platforms.
More Links to the Past next week, folks!
Links to the Past for March 8th, 2009
It’s been a while since we’ve had some Links to the Past, so let’s take a look at some of the more interesting retro-related goings-on in recent weeks:
- Whenever I chanced upon an arcade during a family vacation, I’d immediately seek out the nearest Pac-Man cabinet and begin filling it with all my hard-earned cash. I even went as far as buying one of those Pac-Man playing guides that required you to memorize a series of patterns. I never mastered them all, but managed to make my ten pence pieces go further than most. Jamey Pittman, however, could probably teach us all a thing or two about one of the world’s most cherished arcade games. He’s put together The Pac-Man Dossier, one of the most exhaustive guides to the game’s mechanics. Just try resisting firing up MAME for a quick Pac-Man session once you’ve browsed through it.
- I must admit to never being a big fan of Sierra On-Line’s adventure games. Too many illogical puzzles, trial & error and instant death scenarios for my liking. However, I did enjoy Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, which I felt came much closer to the LucasArts aesthetic. Anyway, if you want a quick recap of Sierra On-Line’s contribution to the point & click genre, you may want to check out Gunaxin’s overview. Their omission of the Gabriel Knight series is a bit baffling though.
- The upcoming release of Nintendo’s DSi in North America, Europe and Australia has inspired a number of gaming sites to offer up retrospectives of Nintendo’s handheld technology. IGN’s The Evolution of Nintendo Portables is as detailed as they come.
- Classic titles are all very well and good, but many retro gamers overlook the army of bedroom coders out there still producing brand new games for classic hardware platforms. RGCD is a discmag (offered as a downloadable ISO) chock full of the very best “new” retro titles for old systems, remakes for modern systems and detailed reviews of each. The whole discmag concept seems a bit redundant (there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why they don’t just put all the content on their web site), but it still remains one of the better resources out there. The long-awaited Issue 5 of RGCD is now available to download.
A Little Bird Told Me
Time for a little experiment!
I thought it might be fun to trawl a retro gaming net through Twitter and see what ended up inside. For this first foray into the retro gaming niche of the twitterverse, I decided to search for any mention of the Commodore 64. Here’s a few of the more interesting gems I uncovered:
- @christopherbahn discovered The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk, a presentation delivered by Michael Steil at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress. It’s not for the faint of heart, being a pretty hardcore overview of the C64′s architecture and the various assembly code tricks used by programmers to exploit it. Worth a look if you’re a more technically minded C64 gamer interested in learning how the various game developers coaxed so much out the machine.
- While we’re on a C64 tip, @adamgetsawesome drew my attention to a rather awesome YouTube video showing a custom built MIDIbox SID V2 being put through its paces. The hardware comprises eight of the C64′s SID chips (the chip responsible for generating the C64′s sound) wired together and manipulated via MIDI controllers.
- @DontPanicJasz twittered a recommendation for LoadingReadyRun, providing geeks with web-based sketch comedy and C64 aesthetics. Yeah, sounds bizarre — but there’s some pretty good stuff there.
Don’t forget to follow Retroblique on Twitter. I regularly tweet about games, with a little bit of music, film and literature thrown in for good measure.
Fave Games of 2008
You know the drill. It’s the end of the year, this is a gaming blog and a list of my favourite games of 2008 is presented below.
But wait! Yes, you, Little Miss Skipahead. I can see that furrowed brow from here. You stole a glance at the list and are a little perplexed about the presence of a few games from 2007. Well, I can explain. You see, I wandered out of 2007 and through most of 2008 with a decidedly underpowered desktop PC. It could just about manage BioShock and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, but beefier innards were required for anything a little more advanced. I finally got all multi-cored and 9800GTX+ed in September, whereupon I spent the following months playing catch up.
Well, that and the fact that most of 2008′s triple A titles were a bit shit. But hey-ho, let’s soldier on and see what’s what:
BioShock
Anyone who knows me can safely attest that I’m gay for Looking Glass. Their gameography reads like a list of my all-time favourite PC titles: Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld II, System Shock, Terra Nova, Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2 and Thief II: The Metal Age. (Yes, even Terra Nova. Bet you forgot about that one, didn’t you?) Needless to say, any fruit produced from the loins of Ken Levine would be mine for the chomping, so I was on board with this so-called “spiritual successor” to System Shock from day one.
I blasted through BioShock in a couple of weeks and loved every minute of it. It more than lived up to its Looking Glass legacy and delivered a highly-polished FPS experience that’s light years ahead of what most developers are capable of. Great visual design, gorgeous graphics, outstanding sound design and music. Despite what my fawning may suggest, it wasn’t an altogether perfect experience. The linear level design cramped my love of more open-ended gaming environments (which, ironically, Looking Glass pioneered so successfully in days gone by). Character design and movement borrowed heavily from the Quake II school of cartoon-like figures moving with gravity-defying speed and agility. (Don’t get me wrong — it all looked great but otherwise detracted from the realism. With the exception of the big daddies, the enemies never really felt as if they had any real weight or presence within the game world.) Still, in the grand scheme of things these are relatively minor quibbles. If 2K Marin do the same thing all over again with BioShock 2: Sea of Dreams, I’ll still be a happy punter.
Crysis & Crysis Warhead
Crytek’s Far Cry has a special place in my heart. True, it came free with my eVGA 7950GT card, but I’m not shallow enough to express my undying love for it on that basis alone. I’d never really followed Far Cry during its development phase and so knew very little about it, other than it sported some rather pretty graphics. I had the likes of Doom 3, Quake 4 and Half-Life 2 all queued up for my attention, but after spending a few hours with Far Cry just to “give it a go” I’d found my new gaming fix. Being somewhat disappointed with the never-ending parade of linear shooters, Far Cry knocked me for six. Here was a shooter that sported huge environments with massive draw distances. I could approach my objectives from numerous angles, opening up the tactical scope of the game considerably. The somewhat pedestrian “take out the evil drug lord’s henchmen” missions began to take on subtle sci-fi overtones as I delved deeper into the game. It was all very compulsive and… well, just pure fun.
So, yeah. Crysis? Pretty much Far Cry with prettier graphics and a nifty futuristic combat suit (and I got it free with my eVGA 9800GTX+!).
I’ve also slapped Crysis Warhead down because I played both games back-to-back, with nary a pause for breath. They both blend into one big homogeneous ball of pixels as far as my memory’s concerned. The only thing that made Warhead stand out for me, other than Psycho’s Cockney twang, was its far superior climactic level. The aircraft carrier battle in Crysis was fine, but there’s nothing to beat the combination of sheer terror and adrenaline rush in Warhead when you have to climb down from the radio tower, into an area swarming with aliens, with low health and little ammo, hoping you can make it to the downed aircraft without having to change your underwear too many times.
Awesome stuff. Crytek are now on my list of developers whose games I’ll automatically buy (or get free with my video cards) on release day without question.
Fallout 3
I decided not to follow Fallout 3 during its development process. Not because I wasn’t interested in the game — I’m a huge fan of both Fallout and Oblivion, so there was no question I wouldn’t be grabbing this the moment it hit the shelves — but simply because I wanted to avoid all the tedious fan squabbling and bullshit that came with it. (You know what I’m talking about — hardcore Fallout fans who had difficulty distinguishing Bethesda from the Antichrist, hardcore Oblivion fans who wanted nothing to do with the a sequel to some old turn-based bollocks, etc.) Consequently, I was able to simply knuckle down and enjoy the game once it finally arrived, free of all the pre-release hype, bluster and myriad spoilers courtesy of everyone who had access to beta code.
Fallout 3 checked all the right boxes for me: open-ended environment, non-linear design, sandbox potential, post apocalyptic setting, great visuals and sound design, etc. The only minor quibble, which was also true of Oblivion, is that there’s not much variety in the interior locations. Many buildings are laid out almost identically, which is a little bit disappointing given that the main exterior map is a veritable smörgåsbord of variety. Still, it doesn’t detract too much from the experience, given that it’s simply great fun to head off in a random direction and explore the world in front of you with relatively few constraints.
At the moment I’m not quite sure about the game’s replay value. Maybe its because I explored a huge percentage of the game’s content on my first run through — I don’t feel there’s a whole lot more to see or do. Oblivion was a little different in this respect. Much of that game’s content was tied to very specific character classes, so playing the game as a Paladin gave you a very different experience than if you’d played through it as a member of the Dark Brotherhood. Fallout 3‘s class system pretty much begins and ends with the weapons available to you. The game’s content remains pretty much the same regardless of what character you’re playing.
But like I said, these are just minor quibbles. Assuming you’ve got about 80+ hours of spare time to dedicate to one single game, Fallout 3 remains one of the most compulsive gaming experiences of the last few years.
Left 4 Dead
Valve? Check. Zombies? Check. What more could a zombie-lovin’ PC gamer possibly want?
I can’t say I’m a huge fan of multiplayer games. There are a few I get a big kick out of (Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Red Orchestra being my particular faves), but I largely find them to be an empty, soulless experience. Most online games swing between two extremes — you’re either playing with a bunch of retarded, griefing fuckwits or a with a hardcore elite band of players who get more fun out of exploiting the game’s bugs and quirks than actually playing the game as originally designed. I guess there’s some entertainment to be had from each group (although both tend to gravitate towards Counterstrike), if you’re that way inclined, but I tend to be a little bit more conservative in my approach to multiplayer gaming.
Valve take an interesting approach with Left 4 Dead, where griefing is a legitimate tactic (if you’re played as the Infected) and anything less than tightly-knit teamwork is likely to get you in trouble as much as your team. It’s nice to have this sort of idiot filter built into the gameplay mechanics, because it invariably makes the multiplayer experience heaps of fun rather than the usual test of your patience.
Of course, L4D also works well as a single player game. Not that anyone in their right mind would want to play it that way exclusively, but it’s nice to be able to put in a bit of practice before you brave the online servers. This is one feature I felt lacking in Team Fortress 2. Granted, the tactical scope offered by the different character classes in TF2 makes it nigh on impossible to craft effective bots, but having “trial by fire” the only mode of gameplay has no doubt scared off many people who’d otherwise get a kick out of the game.
If L4D is lacking anything, it’s that the Survivors vs Infected mode is limited to just two of the game’s four campaigns. I’ve no doubt Valve will remedy this somewhere down the line, but little more than six weeks or so after the game’s release, I’m already starting to get a little tired of the existing campaigns and have decided to take a break from the game for a while.
Otherwise, L4D is the best damn zombie blasting fun I’ve ever had. Yeah, and that includes Resident Evil 4.
Grand Theft Auto IV
I lost count of the number of hoops Rockstar and Microsoft made me jump through to get this game up and running. After the 25 minutes or so it took to pull 15GB of data off two DVDs, you have to create an account with Rockstar’s Social Club (without which you can’t play the game’s multiplayer component). Want to save your game? (Yes!) Well, you’ll need to create a Games for Windows Live account. And before you do that you’ll need a Windows Live account too. Once that’s all done, you’ll typically need to patch something, then discover that the game crashes when Social Club’s running anyway. I think I finally got into the game after ninety minutes of faffing around. It doesn’t help matters that the game’s an absolute beast when it comes to system resources (making Crysis as demanding as Doom in comparison). The PC required to run this game with maxed out details at 720p+ resolutions has yet to be built, but a fairly decent modern rig will get the game running at Xbox 360 quality levels.
The game itself? Well, it’s okay, but it doesn’t hold a candle to San Andreas. The first thing that’s immediately apparent is that the game is much, much smaller than San Andreas. This is a bit disappointing at first, but GTA4 makes up for things by giving you a much more detailed city than you’ve ever seen in a previous GTA title. The attention to detail is nothing short of incredible. I walked around an area of the city on foot for about two hours, just taking in the sights and sounds, and was constantly amazed at just how vibrant and realistic the city felt.
In a nutshell, GTA4 is pretty much Now That’s What I Call Grand Theft Auto with pretty graphics. If you’ve played GTA3/VC/SA to death then there’s really nothing new on offer. You’ve played all the missions before, seen all the gameplay mechanics before and progressed through the same plot before. It’s fun to play, but Game of the Year material? Not by a long chalk, but then 2008 has sadly been a year of half-assed sequels and new IPs that have failed to inspire, so it’s been slim pickings.
Honorable Mentions
A few other games caught my attention in 2008. PC-wise, STALKER: Clear Sky, Far Cry 2 and Dead Space all looked interesting from the brief, cursory session I had with each. I’ll tackle each of those games properly during the new year. I also enjoyed The World Ends With You and Professor Layton and the Curious Village on the DS. I also finally got round to completing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the GameCube. Looking forward to Rage, Empire: Total War, Portal 2, Half-Life 2: Episode Three and Singularity on the PC in the year(s) ahead. May grab a PS3 some time in 2009.
Here’s to another twelve months of happy gaming!
Links to the Past for September 14th, 2008
Here’s our weekly cherry-picking delve into the retro gaming blogosphere:
- Ever wondered what Silent Hill 2 would have looked like had it been released on the NES? No, neither had we, but evidently someone did. The Indie Games blog drew my attention to Soundless Mountain II, a homebrew NES version of Konami’s classic survival horror game. It’s a bit rough around the edges and far from finished, but well worth a look.
- Over at Critical-Gaming, KirbyKid examines the phenomenon of remaking and updating retro classics for modern systems, going as far to suggest such games are now a genre unto themselves.
- Anyone who still has a passing interest in the interactive fiction genre (the posh way of referring to text adventures) should head on over to the IFWiki, where the winners for this year’s IntroComp have been announced. For the benefit of those in the dark: the IntroComp is an annual competition designed to fill a gap between the bigger IFComp competitions. Rather than develop full-length games, entrants are encouraged to submit games in an unfinished state. The winners usually go on to finish making their games. Others, embittered by the experience, usually fall into a downward spiral of drugs, prostitution and suicide.
- Still have a TI-89 calculator gathering dust somewhere in your home? Do you continue to pine for the days when there were decent Ultima games to be had? If you answered “yes’ to both questions then run over to Fidgit and celebrate a new Ultima V port for the TI-89. Yes, Ultima V on a frigging calculator!
- CaptainD’s PC Gaming Blog has an interesting little article on the Atari STe’s unsuccessful attempt to bridge the gap between the basic Atari ST and Commodore’s Amiga. I’d completely forgotten about this machine. I did have an Atari ST myself. While it remained a decent games machine (perhaps let down only by its weedy sound chip), as the 80s gave way to the 90s I only really used it for its built-in MIDI ports and whopping 20MB hard drive (“That’ll take me years to fill up!”).
More Links to the Past next week.
The Crash Challenge: Deathchase
Deathchase remains the stuff of legend within ZX Spectrum circles.
The game arrived fairly early on in the Spectrum’s life, so much so that few gamers were lucky enough to swipe a copy off the shelves of WH Smith—at least not until the much later rerelease. Discussion of this glittering prize, within the playground’s elite gaming cliques, amounted to little more than whispers and rumours, often conducted in a hushed, reverent tone. The stature of the game’s reputation seemed inversely proportional to the number of people who actually played it.
Despite its less than ubiquitous nature, Deathchase would regularly top the polls and top ten lists of the various Speccy magazines. The reason became obvious once gamers were able to secure a copy: the game’s as addictive and more-ish as a packet of of Jaffa Cakes.
