I finished playing the available chapters of the Black Mesa version of Blue Shift. It is very much like Black Mesa, and I give it a positive rating overall, but there are a couple of puzzles that drove me bananas and left me feeling more like I was doing algebra homework rather than playing a game.

Got in the mood for some StarCraft so it's time for another run through the campaigns. I did replay this game a few years back, but it was on a fast system and with some later patch applied, which seemed to change the gameplay in certain ways. This time, I'm deliberately playing the retail release of StarCraft (version 1.00) on a slow, period correct K6-2 (non-plus) rig from 1998 running Win95B.

While the PC itself is from that time, I have it hooked up to a much newer 24" LCD monitor (set to the 4:3 aspect ratio) as it does a fairly decent job at upscaling from 640x480 when displayed by a Matrox Millennium II. That way, I get the viewing area which is comparable to a 21" CRT monitor, but without the bulkiness. Of course, no LCD can match the warm glow of a real CRT, though I do appreciate the extra screen space.

Anyway, I just started the Terran campaign, and this is indeed how I remember the game from my youth. No expansion pack (yet) and no late patches with souped up computer opponent behavior. Just the original gameplay mechanics that the campaigns were initially balanced for. Good times!

Has anybody tried "Guns Gore and Cannoli", especially the multiplayer version? Its not really a retro game, although it has an awesome retro artstyle. The couch coop is a lot of fun, and the humor (both graphic and verbal) is hilarious.

PG rating (profound carnage... 😉 )

Under a Killing Moon
I just got through Day 1, and so far I'm loving this game! It took a bit of time to get used to the controls, since the game forces you to move in 3D with the mouse (and mouse only), but the interface itself is quite nice. I also find the goofy sense of humor to be charming, even though I normally would get annoyed by this stuff. It helps that the characters are interesting, fun, and likeable.
One thing I really like about this one is the built-in help system. You earn points as make progress in the game, and can spend those points on increasingly specific hints. My goal is to not use any of the hints at all, but the hint system also doubles as a sort of quest log, and it even breaks each "quest" down into individual steps that get added as you make progress. You can even tell if you've missed stuff since steps only get listed when you actually discover a clue in the game. I wish games like King's Quest V had something like this!

Law212 wrote on 2024-03-15, 14:54:

Its incredibly tough to find time for gaming when you are a new dad. I try to squeeze in an hour or so when the kid goes to bed. […]
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henryVK wrote on 2024-03-15, 11:26:

Tough to find time to play games right now. My wife and I take turns putting the kid in bed and that would be the hour or so I'd have to play but recently stuff has gotten a habit of cropping up. The night before last the boy developed GI symptoms, requiring all hands on deck for several hours just do deal with that and the resulting laundry. Other nights, because I do sit at my desk a fair bit for my job, I notice that my eyes are frequently getting tired with even more screen time, so I have to do something different after hours rather than looking at another smaller screen.

Its incredibly tough to find time for gaming when you are a new dad. I try to squeeze in an hour or so when the kid goes to bed. Hes just over 2 right now.

I have been having a great time though in gaming lately. I had 3 days off work this week and made a lot of progress in South Park the Fracture but Whole , which is super fun, hilarious and the gameplay is very fun.

I have also completed 4 episodes in Wolfenstein 3D and am nearly done episode 5. I have never gone past episode 1 before. so I'm exited to beat the game and the game is super fun. The sounds are so great and when the guards yell at you suddenly I nearly crap my pants!

I'm also playing Blake Stone Aliens of Gold, but I just started and I'm only on floor 2 of the first episode. Just like Wolf 3D but a nice new aesthetic. Another game where I never played past the shareware.

Also , I opened my sealed copy of Rise of the Triad and started to play it on my 486 but I think it runs too slow and i need to install it on my Pentium 1

These old games are incredibly fun and i'm having so much fun gaming again.

Cheers, our boy is going on 2.5 years and since I don't have an office or room to myself in our flat, I'm once again glad I took the time to build a portable rig.

RotT was such a good effort, if anything I would have liked it to lean even more into the supernatural elements. The gunplay is fresh and I always like the animations and use of the VGA colour palette. I should go back and have a look at it.

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-03-12, 15:50:

gerry wrote on 2024-03-12, 14:36:

played a bit of Wolfenstein 2009

it looks good and plays fine, not sure i care for the supernatural gameplay elements though, i kind of preferred the balance/mix in "return to" from 2001
..

I remember enjoying this game when it came out, but its been to long for me to give any specific impressions about it. I don't think I thought it was an amazing game but good.

i carried on until the super powers and futuristic powers become more necessary - I'd agree it was good, but not actually as good as the 2001 version. looks great though, the look of the underground cavern part was impressive.

nezwick wrote on 2024-03-12, 23:06:

Chex Quest! […]
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Chex Quest!

For those unfamiliar, it's basically a "family friendly" port of DOOM that was given away as a promotion for Chex cereal. I had Chex Quest 1 and 2 when I was a kid. I can't remember if they were included in the box of cereal or if we had to send away for it in the mail. At first, we didn't have a computer fast enough to run them (we had an old 286) so I had to wait until we got a Windows 95 PC in 1997. Before that I played at the neighbor's house sometimes.

Chex0.PNG

Chex1.PNG

Chex2.PNG

These screenshots were taken tonight on my Pentium 200 MMX system running Windows 95.

I remember as a kid seeing the Chex cereal box with the game and begged my parents to buy it. They did buy it and man did we enjoy that game. Then we so got Chex Quest 2 and that was also alot of fun. I need to install that game again so my boys can play it.

I finally completed Wolfenstein 3D. It only took 30 years.

Currently playing C&C Tiberian Sun.

Law212 wrote on 2024-03-18, 17:16:

I finally completed Wolfenstein 3D. It only took 30 years.

I still fire it up on occasion, but haven't completed it apart from the shareware levels. As a kid, I really wanted the full game, but couldn't afford it. Now, I no longer have the patience and attention span to finish it before I find it too repetitive. Maybe I'll finish it sometime in the next 30 years...

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-03-18, 18:56:

Law212 wrote on 2024-03-18, 17:16:

I finally completed Wolfenstein 3D. It only took 30 years.

I still fire it up on occasion, but haven't completed it apart from the shareware levels. As a kid, I really wanted the full game, but couldn't afford it. Now, I no longer have the patience and attention span to finish it before I find it too repetitive. Maybe I'll finish it sometime in the next 30 years...

It is 60 ish levels and it can get repetitive, but I mostly enjoyed it. I plan to install and play Spear of Destiny, but I also have the itch to finish some other games that are similar, such as blake stone and rise of the triad. I also, have never finished Doom2, which I will start after I finish Sigil 1 and 2.

Law212 wrote on 2024-03-18, 19:22:

It is 60 ish levels and it can get repetitive, but I mostly enjoyed it. I plan to install and play Spear of Destiny, but I also have the itch to finish some other games that are similar, such as blake stone and rise of the triad. I also, have never finished Doom2, which I will start after I finish Sigil 1 and 2.

rise of the triad never felt repetitive in the same way as original wolfenstein, even though it is by comparison with doom there are a number of level and gameplay quirks that keep it just varied enough

Under a Killing Moon
I managed to get to Day 3. I do like the game a lot (especially the engine and interface)... but the pixel hunting is a bit annoying. It's honestly not so bad when you know what you're looking for or are able to connect the dots and have something to go on, but sometimes it goes too far and you are forced to search every single inch of every wall and floor to find random stuff until the puzzle reveals itself (a common complaint I have with many point and click adventures I've played).

I intended to try to clear the game without hints, but I was completely stumped with that second pixel hunt and had to get a hint. I was pretty thorough (or so I thought) searching each of the rooms multiple times, but I missed that crucial item each time.

I somehow ended up revisiting Unreal II: The Awakening

I should start by mentioning I haven't played the first Unreal much at all. I've twice tried to give it a go mostly because I absolutely love all the tracker music Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos and all the others made back in the day and I have also always really liked how the first Unreal engine games look aesthetically, but the game just never clicked with me. I petered out quickly on both tries so I can't really compare Unreal II to the first one, but it seems to me the two don't have much more in common other than the world they take place in. The tutorial does have a little nod for both Unreal and Unreal Tournament and the way Skaarj are introduced seems veeeeeeeery familiar but other than one other thing that seems to be it.

In a nutshell I think the game is a B-tier FPS. But it's a B-tier FPS I kinda have a bit of a soft spot for. Scifi setting is always welcome in my books and its levels are pleasently varied, which is something I'm always glad to see. They often are surprisingly short too which I honestly see as a good thing here, keeps things going and it helps the game not overstay its welcome. Also its music, while nowhere near as good as what the previously mentioned wizards put out is still pretty good. The end credits look great too, I hope who ever made them got a pat on the back.

It does have some problems though. The first one you'll notice is the painfully slow running speed, this game has to have the slowest movement speed I've ever seen in a FPS. It's not a huge problem indoors usually but you do occasionally find yourself in more open areas and there it's not great. Solution: open console and write bemymonkey to enable cheats and then setspeed 1.5. Enabling cheats sticks but the setspeed part needs to be re-enabled every time you reload or load a new level. I ended up getting somewhat used to the default speed and increased it only in certain parts of the game.

Other things I can't say I'm a huge fan of are how some enemies can be a bit too spongy for my liking. Also the game has a rather annoying habit of starting every level with measly amounts of ammo on you. Oh we are stopping for repairs and magically know we are going to get attacked? Better take only these two clips of ammo for every weapon with me! Then there's the three other crew members you interact with in between missions on your ship. The two humans come with pretty forcefully written uninteresting backstories they struggle with but the weird alien blob in a space suit is the worst of the bunch. He speaks like it was translated by google translate and every time the game forced me to talk to him I just sighed deeply. And yeah, the story is crap but what else is new.

There's some technical issues too. The game uses DirectX API called DirectMusic that was apparently deprecated after WinXP, which causes issues if played on OS's later than that. These issues can be mostly fixed by replacing the pruned DirectMusic files with ones taken from WinXP but it doesn't seem to be a 100% complete fix, on my Ivy Bridge Win7 system music still sometimes took a moment to remember it should be playing. Under WinXP it has the Unreal Engine 2 WinXP microstutter if played with NVIDIA GeForce 8-series GPU or later, though it's very minor. It's not at all as apparent as in UT2004, I didn't even notice it at first during my testing and had to go look at certain things to see it.

Oh and the in-game V-Sync doesn't work too great and should be forced via GPU drivers. Except it's one of those games where enabling V-Sync makes loading times about 20x longer. How the hell does that even happen, tying up loading speed to frames? Sheesh.

All in all I think the game sits in that hazy no man's land between mediocrity and good. It doesn't blow my mind but I nevertheless did have mostly good time playing it again.

Finished StarCraft's Terran campaign. It was a pretty smooth ride, except for the final mission which dragged on a bit too long. You're initially outnumbered, and the map is huge, so you need to play defensively until you gather a sizable fleet of Battlecruisers. After that, things get a lot easier. I'm not a fan of levels where you're fighting the same faction that you're playing as (e.g. Terran vs. Terran). Somehow, these always feel boring.

Anyway, the voice acting in StarCraft is quite good. In fact, some of the more memorable lines like "Battlecruiser operational!" remained stuck in my head ever since I first played this game all those years ago. It was nice to hear some of the familiar phrases once again. A few of the sound effects (not voices) can get a bit too loud though, like when a dozen Siege Tanks are firing in unison. The music is non-intrusive, but still very fitting and well made. It never feels repetitive or boring.

I also like the story of this game, and the lore behind the events that led up to everything, as presented in the manual. The writers really put a lot of thought into this stuff. Sigh, I miss the Blizzard of old. They used to be one of my favorite developers back in the day, before the dark times. Now, they are just another microtransaction obsessed corporation that I have no interest in.

It took me so long to finish StarCraft ( + Brood War), that I had already forgotten the early stuff, but I do remember liking it a lot, lore and all. I didn't start by reading the manual, possibly because there was no physical booklet in my copy of the Battle Chest, so perhaps I missed a good deal of the background. However, the cutscenes between missions do a great job of keeping the player up to speed on the plot as it unrolls.

To me the most amazing thing about Blizzard of old was how they continued supporting and patching and fixing their games for a decade and more. I do not know another publisher that was doing that. Of course, as you say, it is possible that a lot of those balancing patches were mostly targeted at multiplayer, which may have meant they were not perfect for the single-player campaign. However, I never noticed anything down right broken.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-03-15, 16:58:

Yeah I played and beat mean streets back in the day but never had a decent machine to run the sequels when they came out. Played the last Tex Murphy game and liked it a couple of years ago. My backlog is so huge I doubt I'll ever play the ones I missed since other games rank higher for me on my must play list but they are on there.

i always like mission critical because of the lore, it came out in 1995 so its ancient but it is cool just watching the videos and reading about some alt future. Tex Murphy I havent played but my eyesight is bad so ill just have to listen to it in a lets play

Sombrero wrote on 2024-03-20, 13:19:

I somehow ended up revisiting Unreal II: The Awakening […]
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I somehow ended up revisiting Unreal II: The Awakening

I should start by mentioning I haven't played the first Unreal much at all. I've twice tried to give it a go mostly because I absolutely love all the tracker music Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos and all the others made back in the day and I have also always really liked how the first Unreal engine games look aesthetically, but the game just never clicked with me. I petered out quickly on both tries so I can't really compare Unreal II to the first one, but it seems to me the two don't have much more in common other than the world they take place in. The tutorial does have a little nod for both Unreal and Unreal Tournament and the way Skaarj are introduced seems veeeeeeeery familiar but other than one other thing that seems to be it.

In a nutshell I think the game is a B-tier FPS. But it's a B-tier FPS I kinda have a bit of a soft spot for. Scifi setting is always welcome in my books and its levels are pleasently varied, which is something I'm always glad to see. They often are surprisingly short too which I honestly see as a good thing here, keeps things going and it helps the game not overstay its welcome. Also its music, while nowhere near as good as what the previously mentioned wizards put out is still pretty good. The end credits look great too, I hope who ever made them got a pat on the back.

It does have some problems though. The first one you'll notice is the painfully slow running speed, this game has to have the slowest movement speed I've ever seen in a FPS. It's not a huge problem indoors usually but you do occasionally find yourself in more open areas and there it's not great. Solution: open console and write bemymonkey to enable cheats and then setspeed 1.5. Enabling cheats sticks but the setspeed part needs to be re-enabled every time you reload or load a new level. I ended up getting somewhat used to the default speed and increased it only in certain parts of the game.

Other things I can't say I'm a huge fan of are how some enemies can be a bit too spongy for my liking. Also the game has a rather annoying habit of starting every level with measly amounts of ammo on you. Oh we are stopping for repairs and magically know we are going to get attacked? Better take only these two clips of ammo for every weapon with me! Then there's the three other crew members you interact with in between missions on your ship. The two humans come with pretty forcefully written uninteresting backstories they struggle with but the weird alien blob in a space suit is the worst of the bunch. He speaks like it was translated by google translate and every time the game forced me to talk to him I just sighed deeply. And yeah, the story is crap but what else is new.

There's some technical issues too. The game uses DirectX API called DirectMusic that was apparently deprecated after WinXP, which causes issues if played on OS's later than that. These issues can be mostly fixed by replacing the pruned DirectMusic files with ones taken from WinXP but it doesn't seem to be a 100% complete fix, on my Ivy Bridge Win7 system music still sometimes took a moment to remember it should be playing. Under WinXP it has the Unreal Engine 2 WinXP microstutter if played with NVIDIA GeForce 8-series GPU or later, though it's very minor. It's not at all as apparent as in UT2004, I didn't even notice it at first during my testing and had to go look at certain things to see it.

Oh and the in-game V-Sync doesn't work too great and should be forced via GPU drivers. Except it's one of those games where enabling V-Sync makes loading times about 20x longer. How the hell does that even happen, tying up loading speed to frames? Sheesh.

All in all I think the game sits in that hazy no man's land between mediocrity and good. It doesn't blow my mind but I nevertheless did have mostly good time playing it again.

yea unreal 2 suffered the same fate as deus ex 2 IW, great originals lackluster sequels. plus engine issues at the time forced a CTD when the levels changed, didnt happen in UT2003-2004 and I suspect why is Epic was holding back. Unreal 2 imho is the spiritual successor to Legend's earlier title Mission Critical 1995

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-03-16, 17:14:

I finished playing the available chapters of the Black Mesa version of Blue Shift. It is very much like Black Mesa, and I give it a positive rating overall, but there are a couple of puzzles that drove me bananas and left me feeling more like I was doing algebra homework rather than playing a game.

i found it funny how the colors for half life and its expansion packs were the same colors of mass effect 3's endings. sure its just funny but something tells me the devs loved half life

I started playing X-Wing. This is probably my favourite game ever, but big shock, I have never finished it. I plan to finish it this time around. I just did a couple of those training ground levels for X-wing. Passing the gates. I never did those back in the day but this time I plan to finish everything in the game. I also have the B-Wing and Imperial Pursuit expansions.

I need a controller for the game though. Trying to play with the mouse is not working well. I couldnt even complete the first historical mission as manuevering with the mouse was too tedious and slow. I have a flight stick I will try to use. When I played this game back in the mid 90s, I didnt have the digital sound and voices.