Gemini000 wrote:

Sometimes it's so easy to criticize something that it's difficult to see past one's own critiques and realize the level of fun behind it, either on part of the guy making it, or the people enjoying it. It's part of the reason I don't assign numerical ratings on my reviews: Everyone has different tastes and even if *I* don't like a particular game, it may be done well enough that other people will.

Yes, but sometimes you have to get a good friend, take him aside, and tell him that you want a good, honest opinion of what you're working on. It's easy to become lost in your own cleverness and lose objectivity. I highly recommend you watch this Notacon presentation (Skip to the 40 minute mark if you're impatient).

Ancient DOS Games Episode 171 - Ultima I is online!

Geeze, this game really threw me a couple curves. The notion of time travel didn't bother me so much but as soon as I saw Air Cars, Pistols and Blasters, I had a feeling things were going to be a bit more surreal than expected. :o

I'm going to guess the sequels are better than this one... and have fewer loopholes to exploit for becoming super-ultra-powerful. :B

Also, as an aside, private testing's begun for my secret project! The first game for it is 100% complete, minus bugs to fix. Two more games to go (both thankfully much smaller than the first) before I can make the initial release and get it onto Steam Greenlight! :D

Good luck and I hope Jim "Fucking" Sterling notices it.

leileilol wrote:

Good luck and I hope Jim "Fucking" Sterling notices it.

...there's so many ways I could interpret that comment... ;D

Regardless of anything though, there's an old saying, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."

Even if a number of people are overly critical of my project once it's made its public debut, there's almost certainly going to be people who enjoy it. One of the testers has already dumped an unhealthy amount of hours into the first game for it and I was speaking with another of them today in person (as he lives in the same city) who's intrigued by how far this concept could be taken in the long run.

I think Greenlight as an entity onto itself has lost its way to some extent, but as always, people need to make informed decisions about this stuff. If a game passes through Greenlight which is tripe, people will play it, review it, and it'll get a thumbs down symbol and all random sales will disappear before too long. AAA titles released in traditional ways weren't invulnerable to this treatment either and it's much harder to get away with nowadays with an entire internet which gathers and disseminates information to such an extreme degree. The difference is that Greenlight provides a nice bulls-eye to point a finger at since it's easy to do so. :P

...I could go on, but I'm kinda straying off topic so I'm gonna stop now. :B

leileilol wrote:

Good luck and I hope Jim "Fucking" Sterling notices it.

That's Jim "Fucking" Sterling, SON to you!

....Yeah, I'm a huge fan of him. 😈

And as long as Kris doesn't pull off any shenanigans resembling Digital Homicide or Konami at anyone criticizing his game, then things should be fine.

Gemini000 wrote:

I'm going to guess the sequels are better than this one...

Have you seen the Spoony One's reviews?

Ancient DOS Games Episode 172 - Pinball World is online!

Something I find interesting about pinball in general is that even when a particular game is considered "worst", it's often still better than some of the "worst" video games out there. Today's game definitely doesn't qualify as "worst" by any stretch of the imagination, but for those who feel it is, it's understandable given how VERY different this thing is from virtually every other pinball game ever made. :P

Also...

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote:

Gemini000 wrote:

I'm going to guess the sequels are better than this one...

Have you seen the Spoony One's reviews?

I watched a handful many years ago. He's really good at what he does, he just doesn't appeal to me. *shrugs* To each his own. :B

Gemini000 wrote:

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote:

Gemini000 wrote:

I'm going to guess the sequels are better than this one...

Have you seen the Spoony One's reviews?

I watched a handful many years ago. He's really good at what he does, he just doesn't appeal to me. *shrugs* To each his own. :B

Point being there's a lot that went wrong with certain games in the series.

Oh, wow.... That "pinball" game reminds me of a certain quote from Top Gear: "Ambitious, but rubbish". I can kinda see what they were trying to do here, but their efforts just did not pay off at all. The mini-games, weird table designs, and even the entire method of selecting tables are either pointless, or far more complex than they should be. It tries and fails to bite off more than it can chew.

I wonder if you'll be looking at Pinball Fantasies in the future? As far as I can tell, it's a much more beloved classic in terms of old pinball games for PC's. Clint already reviewed it, but I want to see what you would think of that game. 😀

For me Pinball World was a snoozer fest, just like your review of Electro Man. I fell asleep the three times I tried to play through the tables 😒

The really bad pinball game IMHO was Star Trek Pinball. Only the graphics and some of the sound effects were decent, the rest was awful 😵 . And one of the three tables is for two players only *_*. As you said Kris, this is in stark contrast to the real pinball machines made by Bally, Williams, Stern and others which were much better by comparison.

I don't know if I should give Pinball World another chance to prove itself; falling asleep while trying to play a PC game just feels too weird 😅

Funny thing is that I actually LIKE some of the games which put me to sleep. Sword of Vermilion for the Sega Genesis is one such game. It's very unique and has a surprising amount of depth to it despite how basic it ultimately is, yet every time I play it, it acts like a sedative. :B

Ancient DOS Games Episode 173 - Alien Carnage / Halloween Harry is online!

So... this is a shareware game I never got working as a kid. I tried multiple times but for some reason my computers of the time just couldn't run this thing and I never figured out what the deal was. I don't think I was trying very hard as it was likely right around the time I had started getting shareware CDs and was just trying to get as many games working as possible. :P

But, this week's episode saw 28 guesses sent in... the same number of guesses sent in for Duke Nukem 3D which holds the current record! So I assumed that because of all of those guesses and the good review scores surely this game must be some hidden gem of a platformer I never experienced and that lots of fun would ensue! :D

...

...yeah, that went about as well as three train wrecks and a zombie apocalypse... >_<;

Yeah... I definitely remember having issues with this game even back then. I had a Sound Blaster Pro at the time and the game would refuse to play both music and sound effects on my old PC, forcing me to deal with PC Speaker only. Nevertheless, I still remember playing the shareware version so much because the game had zombies and flamethrowers in it, which appealed to my childish mind at the time. The nice VGA graphics was also an added bonus too. 😉 Playing Alien Carnage again after all this time, I can easily say that it hasn't aged well gameplay-wise. That said, it still has nice graphics and Commodore Amiga-like music and sound effects.

Also, you might want to add this information as an addendum for playing this game in DOSBox: In the dosbox.conf, set the machine type from the default svga_s3 to vgaonly (machine=vgaonly). Doing this fixes the fading sequences within the intro of the game, so it now fades in and out properly.

switchblade wrote:

Also, you might want to add this information as an addendum for playing this game in DOSBox: In the dosbox.conf, set the machine type from the default svga_s3 to vgaonly (machine=vgaonly). Doing this fixes the fading sequences within the intro of the game, so it now fades in and out properly.

That's not necessarily a good fix as the "vgaonly" setting can cause other emulation issues, notably, it's incompatible with OpenGL mode, which is the best mode to use under Windows 8. DirectDraw doesn't work under Windows 8 and without using OpenGL there's large delays every time the video mode changes, which in the case of Alien Carnage is frequently. :P

Gemini000 wrote:

That's not necessarily a good fix as the "vgaonly" setting can cause other emulation issues, notably, it's incompatible with OpenGL mode, which is the best mode to use under Windows 8. DirectDraw doesn't work under Windows 8 and without using OpenGL there's large delays every time the video mode changes, which in the case of Alien Carnage is frequently. 😜

I never said it was a "good fix" now, did I? All I'm saying is that the intro sequence is improperly emulated on the standard machine mode in DOSBox. It's not exactly a game-breaking bug (compared to what's in the game 😵 ), but there is a workaround to it.

And yes, I'm well aware that vgaonly is rather pointless in OpenGL mode since it refuses to scale at all. I'm using Windows 10 64-bit and a Radeon GPU, and the vgaonly setting in OpenGL refuses to scale any higher other than 640x480 in either windowed or full-screen mode.

The episode re-shuffle came with the name-change from Halloween Harry to Alien Carnage.

Shareware versions of Halloween Harry came with Office Block, while shareware versions of Alien Carnage came with Sewers.

They were apparently just too lazy to move the tutorial messages around to accommodate.

I used to have the registered version of Halloween Harry (not Alien Carnage). It would hard lock at the mission select screen on my PC, however after we upgraded it from 4MB to 8MB RAM it started working.
Apart from that I never had any crashes or runtime errors; I wonder if the errors you received are an emulation issue or due to a change made in Alien Carnage?
Another change made in Alien Carnage is that flamethrower fuel is free; in the original it costs 5 credits.

I do agree with most of your points. I loved this game as a kid although I think that was largely due to the graphics and music. Last time I replayed it I remember thinking that the gameplay was pretty mediocre.
The version I had came with a file called STUDIO.EXE that was basically a player for all the game's music - I probably spent just as much time in there as in the game itself.

When Alien Carnage was rereleased as freeware there were some hacks and fixes included to get it stable in DOSBox

I think you may have found the spiritual successor to the Mega Man PC games, infuriating maze levels and design choices that cannot help but frustrate the player.

The next ADG episode is being delayed by YouTube... It's been sitting at 0% processing for a couple hours now, which is extremely unusual. I tried reuploading the video but am getting the same result. So either YouTube's processing system is currently broken, is going exceptionally slow and/or not reporting progress, or it just doesn't like this latest ADG episode for reasons which don't make any sense. x_x;

Once it's up I'll post links as usual, but it's annoying when stuff like this that's beyond my control occurs and I absolutely HATE it when my videos go up late, even when it's my own fault. >:(

EDIT: ...and of course, it suddenly JUMPS to 94% processed the moment I posted that. Go figure. XD