xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-07-12, 16:52:

Still playing Pirates Doom II […]
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Still playing Pirates Doom II

The attachment Screenshot_Doom_20250712_185039.png is no longer available

Sometimes I have to stop and be in awe of the level design, music, enemy design, graphics, doom cute, color palette, humor, atmosphere, and gameplay.

Everything gels together in a really great and fun total conversion for Doom II.

All of this is for free and that's insane to me. The months/years of work and play tests those 32 levels surely have taken is mind blowing.

As a life long avid Doom guy.... how did I miss this???

I just downloaded it, a few levels in. I love it! So much fun! 😀

Thanks for putting it on my radar.

I finished yet another playthrough of "Urban Assault: Metropolis Dawn"...

Did the Ghorkovs campaign first; Taerkasten campaign afterwards.

It's a shame this didn't have a bit more time to form and eventually became a actual retail product back then, but Microsoft really treated Urban Asssault as a "throwaway IP".

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-07-12, 16:23:

Have you played the first one? Both are actually worth playing, even though they look very similar (and imo the second game is an improvement in every way over the first). They both have some really nice worlds to explore, and both are quite short by RPG standards.

No I haven't, and in fact I'm pretty new to this style of cRPG. I've played endless action cRPGs with real time combat but as I get older and slower I'm looking for less twitch and massive open worlds that I get lost in, so am trying my hand at smaller scale games with turn based combat.

I'm currently trying out SKALD: Against the Black Priory and will look at Legends of Amberland II next. If I like it I'll go back and check out the first one, but I wanted to try the more polished second one first to see if it stuck.

StriderTR wrote on 2025-07-12, 18:52:

As a life long avid Doom guy.... how did I miss this??? […]
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xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-07-12, 16:52:

Still playing Pirates Doom II […]
Show full quote

Still playing Pirates Doom II

The attachment Screenshot_Doom_20250712_185039.png is no longer available

Sometimes I have to stop and be in awe of the level design, music, enemy design, graphics, doom cute, color palette, humor, atmosphere, and gameplay.

Everything gels together in a really great and fun total conversion for Doom II.

All of this is for free and that's insane to me. The months/years of work and play tests those 32 levels surely have taken is mind blowing.

As a life long avid Doom guy.... how did I miss this???

I just downloaded it, a few levels in. I love it! So much fun! 😀

Thanks for putting it on my radar.

I just played through the first level because of the posts here and it's great!

If it weren't so late I'd keep going.

Mainly these two games on and off on my xp build

Farcry 1 - tough game, even on easy setting. autosave restarts so many times

Dota 1 6.88 ai - wc3 mod i used to play all the time back in the day but with ai players (?) - also has save game featureso when interrupted can continue

badmojo wrote on 2025-07-13, 04:14:

No I haven't, and in fact I'm pretty new to this style of cRPG. I've played endless action cRPGs with real time combat but as I get older and slower I'm looking for less twitch and massive open worlds that I get lost in, so am trying my hand at smaller scale games with turn based combat.

I'm currently trying out SKALD: Against the Black Priory and will look at Legends of Amberland II next. If I like it I'll go back and check out the first one, but I wanted to try the more polished second one first to see if it stuck.

For me, there's simply nothing finer than a nice turn-based RPG, so I hope that you'll have fun exploring the sub-genre! I really like SKALD and need to get back into it (roughly 12 hours in). In comparison, the Amberland games are quite a bit more accessible; between the excellent automap and quest journal, you really never feel lost even though the game is very nonlinear.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-07-12, 16:52:

Still playing Pirates Doom II
..
All of this is for free and that's insane to me. The months/years of work and play tests those 32 levels surely have taken is mind blowing.

that's what impresses me, it must take so much time and consistency - for many the idea of a pirate themed doom might be enticing, but to sustain the quality and testing over all the levels is the difference between projects with a last update some years ago and "hi guys, sorry I've been busy but I'm getting back to it now!" as the last message, and projects like these, where there is an entire high quality output

many TCs and other big mods of games are so impressive!

I've been in the middle of moving a bunch of stuff around the house from one room to another, all I have hooked up is the XT, so mostly Duke Nukem 1.

Formula 1 from 1997 (ATi 3D CIF) edition, but why this version does not have Pg Up/Down = Change perspective?
640x480 resolution and max/ninja settings like with 3DFX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_1_(video_game)

Devil May Cry on the PS2. I'm currently stuck in Mission 18, trying to defeat Nightmare with only 2 holy waters in my inventory. Another game I suck at, yaaay! 😁

It's always fun to go through my library of unplayed games after completing a game, to decide what to finish next. I spent a nice quiet evening installing and testing out a dozen games, and here's what I've settled on:

West of Loathing
This is a "joke" game (complete with black & white stickman graphics) that's actually a surprisingly solid RPG, complete with a large open world, many quests with several solutions, simple but interesting combat, choices that have actual consequences throughout the game, and actual character builds that affect how you play the game and solve quests.
The game auto saves as you play (you cannot manually save), but it's set up so that you'll never get stuck or get a game over; for example, losing a fight might just kick you out of the dungeon (with all the progress you've made kept) or lock you out of one of the solutions to the quest. This makes it a perfect game to just play for a few minutes and see what you can find as you explore around the world.
It's a really funny game, but the constant jokes do get a bit tiresome after a while (absolutely nothing is taken seriously). So far, I really like, but it's almost a bit of a shame that the developer does not try creating a serious RPG with the same system, because I think that would be awesome.

Arcania (aka Gothic 4)
This is an infamously bad game, as it was basically a cynical attempt at hoodwinking Gothic fans into buying a game that really has absolutely nothing to do with that (mostly) legendary series. It jettisons the carefully designed open worlds, addictive character development, tough but satisfying combat, interesting quests, and grim atmosphere of the series... leaving you with a completely generic action game with light RPG elements. It's honestly hard to come up with anything to say about the game; it's like something an AI came up with when asked to design a basic open world action RPG. Quests are all boring fetch quests, every single battle can be easily won by simply smashing the attack button over and over, NPCs are merely quest dispensers, every piece of equipment you find is either slightly better or far worse than what you already have, and the world consists of a bunch of tiny open areas that you unlock one after another.
It's too bad, because it starts out with a cool hook, in which you control the antagonist who is haunted by the ghosts of the people he's slain during his rise to power (he's also the hero from the Gothic games, which is both cool but also insulting, like Stephen Hawking telling you you're the least stupid person he's ever met). After that, though, the game devolves into running around grasslands and forest slaying giant mosquitoes and goblins while swinging your sword around or shooting arrows or fireballs or whatever, to collect five squirrel nuts for Farmer or five wolf pelts for Townsperson.
But you know what? Sometimes it's fun to play some easy trash while listening to podcasts, and so that's why I'm playing this game.

I'm playing Counter-Strike classic 1.6 version online, a website (Idk if I can post the URL) is running the game web-based. It is just like the real deal from 25 years ago. All in a browser, no install required (though it needs some time to download the assets).

It needs a modern browser of course. Runs from Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari.

I'm impressed with how good it works. And I also found a web-based version of the famous game "Elifoot 98". I added both to the dock of my mac as "web-apps" and they work like native apps. Another win for retro gaming.

Bruninho wrote on 2025-07-19, 19:04:

(Idk if I can post the URL)

I know it, I did it once and the thread was locked. 😜 It's literally first search result on probably every search engine if you concat('counter-strike', 'online');

West of Loathing
Finished! Short but sweet, this game took just under 10 hours to do everything I could find (including the fun DLC area). It actually has some good replayability, though, since each of the three classes plays quite differently, most quests have multiple solutions, and each of the companions is quite different. The game saves as you play, so you're stuck with whatever decisions you make, so it would be interesting to replay and see how things differ.

There's a sequel to this game called Shadows over Loathing that I'll definitely be playing at some point.

Completed Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle.

Back in the day I played a heck of a lot of LucasArts adventures, mainly Monkey Island 1&2 and Sam & Max Hit the Road, but some of them I only completed once. Day of the Tentacle was one of those. While I remember why I never returned to The Dig, another one I only completed once (I didn't like the puzzles all that much), I had absolutely no idea why I never revisited DotT. Sometimes I wondered about that.

The main draw of the game is the three protagonists who end up in three different time periods due to time machine malfunction. All still in the same house, just one one in the 18th century, one in present day and one two hundred years in the future. You can freely swap between the characters and send items to the other two by flushing the item down the outhouse time machine toilet. In addition of getting a needed item in some other time period to use it in other you also sometimes need to do something in the past to solve a puzzle in the future, which I find pretty neat.

The drawback of that is if you ever get so totally stuck you need to resort to the good 'ol try everything on everything manouver you have to bring everyone back to their time travel crapper, send a single item from one character, swap to the receiver, pick that item up, swap back to the sender and keep repeating till all items have been transferred one at a time. Imagine doing that with like 12 items. Not the most fun I've ever had and I had to do that a few times.

Annoyingly the three puzzles I got the most stuck requiring me to go though that item juggle turned out to be the kind that didn't need any items at all to solve them! Oh well, at least I figured them out in the end. Never resorted to walkthroughs, I get to play adventure games I either don't rembember or are new to me so rarely I don't want to ruin the experience by looking up solutions, only as a last resort I'll do that. What can I say, I'm a puzzle solver by nature.

Another thing I quite like about the game is its open endedness, all three characters are in the same house just in different times and the whole area is open to explore from the start. If something seems like something you can't yet solve you can just move on or swap to another character and come back later. Several times I tried to solve some other puzzle only to accidentally make progress elsewhere.

But overall I can't rise the game as high as Monkey Island 1&2 on my personal lists. It's a good game, but something is missing to make it really click with me. Maybe it's how it relies on visual gags that didn't make me chuckle all that often. Also I found the music a bit lacking, it mostly just blends in the background. I used General MIDI, I still don't know is it composed for MIDI or OPL.

Still had a good time playing it though! Next up is Sam & Max Hit the Road, I used to love it back in the day but I haven't played it in ages. It will be interesting to see does it still hold up in my books.

Finally finished Crysis 2 after 13 years of save games. My slowest burn ever.