Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
It's been a little while since I've played some computer games. It's now summer in the newtmonkey caves, so I've been spending my evenings in the living area, which is well ventilated and cool at night, rather than the computer area, which builds up heat during the day and doesn't cool down until late at night. That means I've been playing console games lately, though I don't talk about those here (I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy IX).

Anyway, it suddenly got very cool again, so I'm back to playing PoEII, and it's still great. One thing that would normally annoy me but actually is very cool is that the game ranks the difficulty of every quest and side quest based on, I guess, your average party level. You can bring up the quest log, and either go around completing stuff that's easy until you bring the difficulty level of the main quest down, or attempt the main quest even though you are "underleveled." Because there's so much involved with the game, you can often handily clear quests ranked above your level through good use of tactics and abilities. In other words, all this does is just save you from wasting time throwing yourself at something difficult if you don't want to deal with it, and yet allows you to do so if you want the challenge. It's genius.

Even though the game is very modern with regard to how it plays and looks, it's still got the classic RPG loop of exploring, leveling up, finding loot, and returning to town to sell stuff and buy better stuff. It just also adds a bunch of faction stuff and truly nonlinear open-world sailing exploration. It's just full of stuff to do, and so far, all of it is good.

Every modern Baldur's Gate "clone" has some weird minigame or something, and in PoEII it's sailing. This requires resources, and you need to keep your crew fed and happy. What I did was buy 500 units of the cheapest food and drink first chance I got, so I wouldn't have to worry about it. Crew morale will drop with this stuff, but it's fine at first because you can increase morale by boarding enemy ships and sharing spoils. Once you start making decent money a few hours in, you can buy better food and drink for your crew, which will increase morale each day. It's something that will doom you if you don't pay attention to it, but if you take care of it early on, you don't really have to worry much about it.

Over the past week or so, I completed another run through Doom 1 and Doom 2, but this time on the "Ultra Violence" difficulty setting. Not sure why I didn't try this sooner, it was super fun. The original Doom was very manageable on UV, with only the first one or two of levels of each episode being somewhat irksome, until you find your staple weapons and sufficient ammo. For the most part, this game does provide enough resources to deal with the extra enemies that appear on UV, but I did find myself using the chainsaw and berserk fist slightly more than usual, in an effort to conserve ammo.

Doom 2 suffered a bit more from ammo scarcity on UV, especially in certain levels like Refueling Base. I had to rely on the chainsaw and berserk a fair bit during the ammo starved levels. Thankfully, they weren't too frequent, and you could stock up on some of the more plentiful maps to build up a reserve for later. It also helps to discover every single secret. I did find a few of Doom 2's ambushes on UV a bit tiresome, mostly due to the frequent placement of hitscan enemies beyond the player's line of sight (i.e. far above you). I still had a good time overall, but it wasn't always as fun as the original Doom.

Lastly, I also played through the No Rest for the Living expansion for Doom 2. From my experience, its levels were perfectly balanced for UV, providing just enough ammo to dish out some serious pain to the extra enemies, while still keeping the game very challenging and fun. Honestly, I liked the expansion content more than certain levels from the original Doom 2 campaign. The maps are filled with tough (but fair) combat encounters, interesting secrets and cool visuals. Most importantly, they don't use any silly gimmicks that the base Doom 2 campaign was (in)famous for.

If I had to find one super minor thing to nitpick about, it would be that the expansion doesn't provide you with a backpack (for increased ammo capacity) until the final level. But to be honest, this didn't cause any issues during my UV run, as the ammo distribution is nicely balanced for each level, so you don't have to save up as much as in vanilla Doom 2. Overall, I'd say that No Rest for the Living was the highlight of my UV playthrough, and I can highly recommend it. From all of the official expansions for the classic Doom games, this one is definitively my favorite.

Half-life blue shift

Been playing a lot of an old favorite recently, a "classic comfort game" if you will. 😀

OpenRCT2 is an amazing re-implementation of this classic. The originals are still better than all the later versions of Roller Coaster Tycoon in my humble opinion.

Blasting it out with Duke Nukem 3D, baby.

ncmark wrote on 2024-06-18, 23:44:

Half-life blue shift

i've said this before i think, but i like blue shift a lot, especially in that the player is not the centre of the story, just trying to escape

StriderTR wrote on 2024-06-19, 08:29:

Been playing a lot of an old favorite recently, a "classic comfort game" if you will. 😀

OpenRCT2 is an amazing re-implementation of this classic. The originals are still better than all the later versions of Roller Coaster Tycoon in my humble opinion.

it does look good, should give this a try

It's been a long time since I got some good old DOS gaming done! A couple days ago I finally cleaned up the area around my dedicated DOS machine, and now that I'm not forced to see a disgusting sea of wires, I was finally in the mood to start the computer up and play some games.

Ripley's Believe It or Not! The Riddle of Master Lu
I've been reading old issues of CGW and PC Gamer lately, and the coverage of this game in these mags intrigued me. I knew of this game back in the day (I read both CGW and PC Gamer back then, of course!), but never ended up actually buying or playing it. I installed it tonight and gave it a try.
It's a traditional point and click adventure that runs in (only) SVGA, with a mix of digitized actors and rendered backgrounds. It actually still looks great today, imo, with detailed CG and fluidly animated characters. I've read that there's sort of a mandatory side quest throughout the game, where you need to be on the lookout for interesting items to add to your museum back home to keep it running, but I haven't played enough to really get into that.

Descent
I go back and forth between playing this in the Rebirth source port, and the original version on my DOS machine. Both are great ways to play this classic, but it just feels wrong to me to use a source port to play such an amazing game, when I have the original hardware to play it on sitting there. It just feels right playing it on a P133 with a decent joystick.
After reading about how the various difficulty levels play, I decided to just go with the default Rookie level. It seems like this was the intended difficulty level, with everything above it apparently being quite a leap in difficulty. I completed the first mission, and had a blast! What a cool game.

By the way, that half-life blue shift is on grossly overpowered system
Win98, AthlonXP 2400+, and radeon 9600
*laughing*

I believe someone on here once had a similar system and called it retro-rocket

newtmonkey wrote on 2024-06-19, 17:59:

It's been a long time since I got some good old DOS gaming done! A couple days ago I finally cleaned up the area around my dedicated DOS machine, and now that I'm not forced to see a disgusting sea of wires, I was finally in the mood to start the computer up and play some games.

Ripley's Believe It or Not! The Riddle of Master Lu
I've been reading old issues of CGW and PC Gamer lately, and the coverage of this game in these mags intrigued me. I knew of this game back in the day (I read both CGW and PC Gamer back then, of course!), but never ended up actually buying or playing it. I installed it tonight and gave it a try.

I like to go on "period correct" gaming journeys using old books and magazines. I find it fun to start with a blank hard drive and install/play games in the order that they come up in old magazines. Same goes for the old books that came with a CD full of shareware games.

ncmark wrote on 2024-06-19, 20:04:

By the way, that half-life blue shift is on grossly overpowered system Win98, AthlonXP 2400+, and radeon 9600 *laughing* […]
Show full quote

By the way, that half-life blue shift is on grossly overpowered system
Win98, AthlonXP 2400+, and radeon 9600
*laughing*

I believe someone on here once had a similar system and called it retro-rocket

Retro rocket is my C2D E6400 + X800XTPE running Win98SE. Heh heh..

appiah4 wrote on 2024-06-20, 15:34:

Retro rocket is my C2D E6400 + X800XTPE running Win98SE. Heh heh..

Similar "max power" setup for me. It's great for running Win98 games at 1600x1200 with AA and AF cranked up.

Also, X800 series cards have the special temporal anti aliasing which ATi introduced way back. I've been experimenting with that as of late, and I really like it.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-06-19, 21:53:

I like to go on "period correct" gaming journeys using old books and magazines. I find it fun to start with a blank hard drive and install/play games in the order that they come up in old magazines. Same goes for the old books that came with a CD full of shareware games.

this is probably the best way to simulate the actual process of back in the day, especially if you persist with a games even when it starts out frustrating or not so great. its too easy to just switch now and i tend to do that, sometimes its worth just slowing down and playing whats in front of you

newtmonkey wrote on 2024-06-19, 17:59:

Ripley's Believe It or Not! The Riddle of Master Lu
I've been reading old issues of CGW and PC Gamer lately, and the coverage of this game in these mags intrigued me. I knew of this game back in the day (I read both CGW and PC Gamer back then, of course!), but never ended up actually buying or playing it. I installed it tonight and gave it a try.
It's a traditional point and click adventure that runs in (only) SVGA, with a mix of digitized actors and rendered backgrounds. It actually still looks great today, imo, with detailed CG and fluidly animated characters. I've read that there's sort of a mandatory side quest throughout the game, where you need to be on the lookout for interesting items to add to your museum back home to keep it running, but I haven't played enough to really get into that.

all that is left from this castle https://youtu.be/g2pse57Ab0E?t=2117
is this part of wall https://www.google.pl/maps/@54.3536985,18.659 … 05409&entry=ttu

it's funny i live in this city whole my life and if not this game i would never know about existence of this castle 😉
https://www.zamkipolskie.com/gdansk/gdansk.html

You forgot to say this game was to be like Indiana Jones, though I don't feel that atmosphere at all.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-06-19, 21:53:

I like to go on "period correct" gaming journeys using old books and magazines. I find it fun to start with a blank hard drive and install/play games in the order that they come up in old magazines. Same goes for the old books that came with a CD full of shareware games.

I do have a couple of the shareware collections on CD; I used to have a blast with these things back in the day, and it's still a ton of fun today to just randomly pick some game and play it for 15 minutes or so.
However, I've never thought of just opening up a magazine and installing/playing the games that are covered in order. This is such a cool idea! With a P133, you could just pick some random issue from 1996 or whatever and be able to run anything, and get a nice survey of games from that time in all genres. I will have to try that out sometime.

newtmonkey wrote on 2024-06-20, 18:04:

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-06-19, 21:53:

I like to go on "period correct" gaming journeys using old books and magazines. I find it fun to start with a blank hard drive and install/play games in the order that they come up in old magazines. Same goes for the old books that came with a CD full of shareware games.

I do have a couple of the shareware collections on CD; I used to have a blast with these things back in the day, and it's still a ton of fun today to just randomly pick some game and play it for 15 minutes or so.
However, I've never thought of just opening up a magazine and installing/playing the games that are covered in order. This is such a cool idea! With a P133, you could just pick some random issue from 1996 or whatever and be able to run anything, and get a nice survey of games from that time in all genres. I will have to try that out sometime.

Computer Gaming World even allowed all of their back issues to be shared online when they went under:

https://www.cgwmuseum.org/index.php

Unreal 2!
Brough back some memories. The first computer I tried to run that on was a 1 GHz pentium 3 - woefully underpowered. Currently running on Athlon XP 2400 (and honestly even that seems slow)

Baldur's Gate 1 (enhanced edition). I am at the end, I never actually come this far. I mostly strolled around before and became a bit confused when I got Baldur's Gate.

I think I will skip the side missions and skip directly to bg2 and then perhaps dip into bg3 (if I have some way of playing it).

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-06-19, 21:53:

I like to go on "period correct" gaming journeys using old books and magazines. I find it fun to start with a blank hard drive and install/play games in the order that they come up in old magazines. Same goes for the old books that came with a CD full of shareware games.

I do something similar with my various period correct builds. I like to load them up with games of the specific year(s) and see what it's like to play with the hardware of the time.

Going through old magazines and seeing which games were relevant at the time is fun too. 😀

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-06-18, 16:41:

Over the past week or so, I completed another run through Doom 1 and Doom 2, but this time on the "Ultra Violence" difficulty setting. Not sure why I didn't try this sooner, it was super fun. The original Doom was very manageable on UV, with only the first one or two of levels of each episode being somewhat irksome, until you find your staple weapons and sufficient ammo. For the most part, this game does provide enough resources to deal with the extra enemies that appear on UV, but I did find myself using the chainsaw and berserk fist slightly more than usual, in an effort to conserve ammo.

Doom 2 suffered a bit more from ammo scarcity on UV, especially in certain levels like Refueling Base. I had to rely on the chainsaw and berserk a fair bit during the ammo starved levels. Thankfully, they weren't too frequent, and you could stock up on some of the more plentiful maps to build up a reserve for later. It also helps to discover every single secret. I did find a few of Doom 2's ambushes on UV a bit tiresome, mostly due to the frequent placement of hitscan enemies beyond the player's line of sight (i.e. far above you). I still had a good time overall, but it wasn't always as fun as the original Doom.

Playing through the original Doom games on UV is a good time, and feels closer to survival horror with the requirement to conserve ammo compared to just run 'n gun gameplay.

Especially with the some of the levels where there are a handful of enemies left that you can hear, but can't necessarily find.

Playing Quake 2 Remaster.

Was massively put off by the brown and boring maps on original release back in the day so barely played much of it back then and it's still the same today but I'm pushing through. More color, more space missions, better maps please. (cough *duke3d* cough)
Playing on hard and only using special items only if feel like it which there is barely ever a need. Mostly rebreather and environmental suit (one map?) and rebreather not necessary most of the time if you move fast.
Finished Quake 2 campaign surprisingly quickly and am on the first expansion now.....I doubt my opinion will change much with this expansion. Mabye Quake 2 64 and Call of the Machine may be less meh. heh.

Something nice about playing old games is the top of my small case doesn't feel like the surface of the sun since the GPU is barely used so that's nice.