Missed out on the late DOS era and just now getting play some of them on my Xp rig, the latest of which is Redneck Rampage from GOG.
This game is absolutely a hoot! Living in the south USA I fully appreciate the "hillbilly atmosphere" and whatnot.

buckeye wrote:

Missed out on the late DOS era and just now getting play some of them on my Xp rig, the latest of which is Redneck Rampage from GOG.
This game is absolutely a hoot! Living in the south USA I fully appreciate the "hillbilly atmosphere" and whatnot.

Heh, I actually have the original CD. Never played it tho 😀

More Rally Championship. I patched up and started tweaking the physics a bit. I have gravity set to 127% and 'sticky grass' turned off, which dialled down the twitchiness of the cars & grabbiness of the scenery a bit. I wish there were a way to increase the mass of the cars instead of the weight, but this is close enough; playing this way seems to smooth everything out. Having tons of fun with it now.

The biggest improvement in gameplay, however, came when I stuck a GeForce 3 in the system instead of the onboard S3 ProSavage. I've said lots of times that I'm not an FPS snob, but suddenly jumping from 20-25 FPS at 640x480 to 60+ FPS at 1600x1200 was (literally - hah!) a game changer. 😜

^^ my own screenshot, this time. Dated engine or not, this is a good looking game, especially in high-res.

I also found a copy of ISI's Sports Car GT that I forgot I had. I think I'm in the market for a Win98-compatible racing wheel now.

liqmat wrote:

Rally Championship is and absolute blast over LAN and if you are ever up for some VPN LAN play let me know. Although I don't know if your DSL would have enough bandwidth actually.

That would be amazing! I got into this one when it was only a year or so old, but I've never played it multiplayer before.
Unfortunately my schedule is all over the place right now and I tend to game well after 1-2AM PDT, but let's give it a go in a few weeks when things settle down here (and I get some more practice in keeping the car rubber-side-down. 😀 )

^^ I remember buying this in the late 90s at a local Best Buy and realizing when I got home this game set to max detail and resolution was going to kick my PC in the nuts. I am pretty sure I upgraded my graphics card after playing for a number of hours and that soundtrack! Sticks in your head.

A little bit of Doom 3 after work on my IWILL ZMAXDP.

There’s a little bit of magic about that little box - how does it handle DOOM? I’m assuming you have to compromise on the graphical settings a bit?

badmojo wrote:

There’s a little bit of magic about that little box - how does it handle DOOM? I’m assuming you have to compromise on the graphical settings a bit?

2x Opteron 250's + 2GB DDR400 ECC with a HD Radeon 3650 1GB. It plays at 1280x1024 high settings (no-AA) without much of a problem.. just a few frame dips here and there.

I've started replaying Kingdom Come: Deliverance. A new patch and DLC dropped recently so I decided to start another playthrough.

I really rate this game, reminds me a little bit of morrowind minus the fantasy and magic. Probably my favourite game to come out of the last few years after Prey.

Does the patch address the performance issues in towns at all? It is an amazing game but that really bothered me.

I haven’t noticed any performance issues however I did upgrade my rig last year which probably helps. I’m playing on Very High settings with an I5 8400 and a GTX960 and seems to run pretty well.

I just started Dark Forces on my MS-DOS PC. I've only completed the first mission, so I've played about 15 minutes and watched almost 10 minutes of cutscenes. I kind of like the elaborate cutscenes as they flesh out the story and make the game more than just a run-n-gun shmup.

Dark Forces is a fantastic game, with the exception of some (not all!) of those pesky maze-like levels with lots of backtracking. There's even one level where you have to get through a maze section in complete darkness. No idea what the developers were smokin' back then...!?

clueless1 wrote:

I just started Dark Forces on my MS-DOS PC. I've only completed the first mission, so I've played about 15 minutes and watched almost 10 minutes of cutscenes. I kind of like the elaborate cutscenes as they flesh out the story and make the game more than just a run-n-gun shmup.

Love all the late dos games - Darkforces, Redneck Rampage, Duke Nukem 3d and etc., keep coming back to them. My son can't see it as he plays the latest titles, so just laughs at me. 😵

blurks wrote:

Dark Forces is a fantastic game, with the exception of some (not all!) of those pesky maze-like levels with lots of backtracking. There's even one level where you have to get through a maze section in complete darkness. No idea what the developers were smokin' back then...!?

There's the Headlamp and IR Goggles for dealing with dark rooms... so I don't understand your complaint, heh.

I'm still playing racing games on my Athlon/GF3 box, but to change things up I started digging into The Witness after it was recommended to me in the FPS thread. This game is definitely in the vein of Myst or more recently, Qube, FRACT_OSC, or Antichamber - you're basically exploring an environment, finding puzzles to solve, and solving them. Needless to say I love it, but YMMV.

It's also an exceptionally pretty:

^^ this is only the first area relatively near the start, there's a ton of variety in there too.

Seriously, I want to live on this island. I already figured out where my apartment would be. And I already live on an island, but this one's nicer.

My only complaint is, like a lot of these first-person puzzle games, there's a ton of invisible walls and no jump or crouch functionality. They do this as a way to control what sequence the player can access certain areas in, but to me it just comes off as artificial - if I see a rock I can jump over with something interesting behind it, I am GOING to try to jump over that rock. Deal with it.

Still, ignoring that, awesome experience so far. Highly recommended.

DracoNihil wrote:

There's the Headlamp and IR Goggles for dealing with dark rooms... so I don't understand your complaint, heh.

I was playing the first 6 or 7 missions using the DarkXL engine and I was somehow not able to use any of the equipment (at least not consciously).

My enthusiasm for S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl ran out after being interrupted by a couple of scripted set pieces, and realising that it's a pretty linear game with no real incentive to explore the world. But I was digging on the vibe of it and the gun-play was fun, so I'm checking out Call of Pripyat now and so far it's more to my liking. It's made up of separate areas like SoC, but it's much more of an open world type deal. I've done maybe 6 missions and a couple of them have been downright memorable. The world is packed with interesting locations, the mutants range from nasty to brutal, and the enemy A.I is generally impressive - I was having F.E.A.R flashbacks during one indoor firefight and that's high praise from me. I loved that game.

At it's worst it's clunky and outdated, but more often than not I'm finding its unique blend of FPS, horror, and lite-RPG to be pretty dang engaging. My mod list is below - mainly 'ABR' but I installed 'Absolute Nature 3 Lite' over the top of it because the grim brown hues were just too depressing.

1-- install the game
2-- install OpenAL
3-- delete 'gamedata' dir from game dir if it exists
4-- copy contents of '01 - ABR Mod' dir into the game dir, replace all
5-- ABR Mod\03 - Options\11 - Weight options with classic crosshair
6-- ABR Mod\03 - Options\03 - Rain options\01 - Less rain
7-- ABR Mod\03 - Options\12 - Open scopes (+ adaptation for squarish monitors)\16x9
8-- copy patch in to game dir (from ..\ABR Mod v.1.2.1\01 - Patch)
9-- copy in FOV changer (..\ABR Mod v.1.2.1\02 - Options\04 - FOV Changer\75 (recommended and stable)) into BIN dir
10
11-- install Absolute Nature 3 Lite, 'Default' option for all areas.
12
13-- set 4X AA in the Nvidia menu, as well as Vsync which doesn't work in game.
14-- set the graphics option to High.

There are a lot of mods for SoC that turn it into a more sandboxy game..

I think when I start SoC, I'm going to try it vanilla first. I've got the GoG version. Some games I'm more open to mods (like Planescape Torment and Arcanum, which add widescreen support in addition to bug fixes and other graphical enhancement). SoC is 2007, which in my book is close enough to modern that it looks really good vanilla. Haven't dug into the bugfixes yet, are they alone worth the mods?

@badmojo The not working V-sync was fixed by some official patch and it's included in GOG/Steam versions. Though nothing wrong in forcing it through gfx driver, just letting you know.

clueless1 wrote:

I think when I start SoC, I'm going to try it vanilla first. I've got the GoG version. Some games I'm more open to mods (like Planescape Torment and Arcanum, which add widescreen support in addition to bug fixes and other graphical enhancement). SoC is 2007, which in my book is close enough to modern that it looks really good vanilla. Haven't dug into the bugfixes yet, are they alone worth the mods?

SoC was a horrible pile of bugs at release. They did release few patches for it but I never went back to the game so I don't know how buggy the game still is after the official patches. Just to be safe you might want to use Zone Reclamation Project which is the best/most recommended bugfix pack for SoC.