I’ve had enough of Tomb Raider for now; overall I enjoyed it but not enough to finish it unfortunately. The graphics are amazing, and I can imagine how mind blowing this game would have seemed on release in ‘96. A single Voodoo2 handled it with ease and it really does look great. The game play is likewise excellent and its exploration and puzzle aspects are lots of fun. What isn’t fun are the controls, and in the end that’s what stopped me playing. They’re logical enough and well set-out, but the camera gets stuck often, particularly in tight tunnels etc. Combat became a drag because for the most part I found myself fighting the controls more than the monsters. Again, particularly in tight spots, unfriendly critters like bats and wolves jammed themselves right up against you, and Lara – sensibly – refused to shoot at a bat which had wrapped itself around her face. So that left rolling or jumping out of the way, which was often thwarted with an “oomph” as Lara bounced off a nearby wall and ended up back where she started. The other thing which I found to be lacking was music and FX. It’s a very quiet game, and I found myself wishing that Lara had packed her walkman to help while away the hours of tomb raiding.

I didn’t play this game back in the day, so I didn’t have nostalgia to keep me going, and so I’ve bowed out for now.

Next up is the ‘CD Enhanced’ version of System Shock. I have both the floppy and CD versions but the latter is the only way to go from what I understand. I’ll be playing this on the same P166MMX as I was playing Tomb Raider on, but I’ve recently changed sound cards to a Sound Blaster 16 CT2230, and will be using a Roland SCC1 for music. I installed it last night to familiarise myself with the controls and at max settings, with the highest possible resolution the graphics look beautiful on my Matrox Mystique G220 (4MB). The frame rate lags a little in full screen mode but is fine in “normal mode”, which is how I expect I’ll be playing for the most part. The system requirements on the box claim that you can play SVGA on a 486DX33 with 8MB of RAM – that’s a stretch!

I’m still reading the excellent manual, but looking forward to turning the lights out and “jacking in” to System Shock soon.

Lately I've been playing ZDaemon and TF2. 😁

Definitely the CD version for System Shock - the voiceover work is really great. Music should rock on an SCC-1 too. Still one of my all-time favourites, moreso than the sequel.

I'm inspired to try system shock.....

Currently I play Doom2 and a little Lands of Lore daily.

I've just started the $4 GOG indie "Signal Ops". It has a great offbeat look and feel but I'm struggling mightily with the interface - both in how to do the things I want to do, and understanding just what it is I'm capable of doing. I'm still mired in the tutorial section. Much more head scratching and I may have to give this otherwise neat little game a pass.

bjt wrote:

Definitely the CD version for System Shock - the voiceover work is really great. Music should rock on an SCC-1 too. Still one of my all-time favourites, moreso than the sequel.

Also for the higher resolution options and the for its time very good intro animation.
I finished this game two years ago or so, played it back in the nineties too and was very impressed then, but I got stuck in disabling the reactor and gave up, I didn't have internet back then for consulting a walkthrough.

tincup wrote:

I've just started the $4 GOG indie "Signal Ops". It has a great offbeat look and feel but I'm struggling mightily with the interface - both in how to do the things I want to do, and understanding just what it is I'm capable of doing. I'm still mired in the tutorial section. Much more head scratching and I may have to give this otherwise neat little game a pass.

I bought it too, maybe I give it a try when I finished Strikesuit Zero.

Badmofo, if you need that little bit more grunt for SVGA, does your board support AMD K6-2+ or 3+ CPUs?

The thing is that these CPUs allow setting the multiplier per software from 2 to 6. So with a 66 MHz FSB you can have 133 to 400 MHz and on a 100 MHz FSB you can have 200 to 600. On a 100 MHz FSB it's quite the beast I must say...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Badmofo, if you need that little bit more grunt for SVGA, does your board support AMD K6-2+ or 3+

No I don't think so, it's an ASUS VX97. The fastest Intel chip it supports is a 233Mhz MMX, which I have and would be a decent speed increase, but I'm loyal to the 166 for some hard-to-justify reasons (like '166' looks cool on the LED Mhz display 😵 )

If I want some more frames in SVGA then I have a PIII which boots to DOS 7 too.

Thanks for the suggestion though!

I've been replaying GTA Vice City in the past few days.

Used copies of Skyrim finally got cheap enough for me to break down and buy it, so playing that now.

Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare (or mockingly Aline In the Dark) (3 CD-ROM's version)
It's funny how when it came out my friends and I didn't enjoy the game and criticize it making comparisons with Alone In The Dark 1, 2, 3 and Resident Evil 1, 2, 3.
I just had some troubles making it run on Windows 7 HDMI but now it works. Just the backgrounds look a bit pixellated, I think it's because of the unofficial patch to make it run at higher resolutions (or to make it run at all, in my case)

Yeah, I've played the Playstation version of AITD4. Somehow it didn't feel like the first three AITD games. I didn't finish the game though.

Currently playing Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition, usually against players online. This is the only online game I've been playing for sometime now. When I get beaten up badly, I turn back to my homeland in Skyrim.

Also, playing Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded. It's nice to see Al Lowe's game using classic game mechanincs.

Well now I am switching gears from my last post and been getting back into Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. I sadly missed this title back in 2004 since I didn't have a good gaming PC to play it at the time. Thanks to having a decent PC now and Goodwill for having this for a few dollars complete in box, I can finally play it and I can say that I am thoroughly enjoying it despite some of the flaws here and there.

SpooferJahk wrote:

Well now I am switching gears from my last post and been getting back into Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. I sadly missed this title back in 2004 since I didn't have a good gaming PC to play it at the time. Thanks to having a decent PC now and Goodwill for having this for a few dollars complete in box, I can finally play it and I can say that I am thoroughly enjoying it despite some of the flaws here and there.

Great game that. A bit of a flawed jem like you say but it has some great moments.

Are you using the unoffial patch? I did, and I think it was better for it.

badmofo wrote:

SpooferJahk wrote:

Well now I am switching gears from my last post and been getting back into Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. I sadly missed this title back in 2004 since I didn't have a good gaming PC to play it at the time. Thanks to having a decent PC now and Goodwill for having this for a few dollars complete in box, I can finally play it and I can say that I am thoroughly enjoying it despite some of the flaws here and there.

Great game that. A bit of a flawed jem like you say but it has some great moments.

Are you using the unoffial patch? I did, and I think it was better for it.

That I am and the game is radical because of it.

My purchase of a Geforce 8800GTX recently prompted me to pull my P4 out and give it a run, which of course required a game, so I installed my favourite from the ~2005 era (and contender for my favourite of all time game) – Boiling Point: Road to Hell by Deep Shadows. This game caught my eye on release because it looked like FarCry, which I loved and wanted more of. But Boiling Point turned out to be much more – think Morrowind with guns, set in a massive (fictional) corner of South America. On release it was very buggy, and although a large patch fixed a lot of the issues, the damage was done and it got relatively poor reviews. It was also poorly optimised and quite CPU dependant, so it didn’t run well on hardware at the time. Some people loved it, most hated it.

It’s a massive open world game with limited RPG elements (leveling up, factions, etc). It has a rare sense of humour, the graphics are superb (IMHO) and although some aspects of it really are poorly implemented because of Atari rushing it out the door, so much of it works that it comes together into the most immersive and enjoyable games I’ve ever played.

As well as adding the 8800GTX, I upgraded the RAM to 2GB which made a huge difference to the amount of HDD thrashing that was going on. I’m playing on a 17” CRT as I did back in the day, and sound is taken care of by an Audigy 2 SZ. It looks and sounds beautiful:

Deep Shadows made two more amazing open world RPG-ish FPS before apparently closing down ~2010. Their website is still up (http://www.deep-shadows.com/#/en), but the forums were overrun with SPAM and we eventually had to move to RPGWatch, where a community still exists for these unique games. The more recent games are called “White Gold” (or Xenus 2) and “The Precursors”. They were not officially translated to English (Deep Shadows was a Ukrainian based company), but someone discovered that a dodgy, nearly complete English translation did exist in the game files, so I duly hacked it out of there and spent months of my life improving the translations, which are now included in a fan made patch (available on the Patches Scrolls). I also wrote a tool which unpacks the resource files, so quite a few mods were made possible (details here: http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=42). Unfortunately I stared too deeply into the seedy underbelly of those games and it’s ruined the fun of playing them for me. But Boiling Point still rocks my world though, and I recommend it to anyone who likes open world games. There's a good review of it here which I think sums it up well:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/boiling … eviewerId,6226/

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I play the original Unreal 1 and UT99, still making mods and maps for it to this day.

I also been playing Spectre VR thanks to the helpful residents of this forum for pointing me in the right direction to getting the game finally patched after all these years of playing the retail floppy version....

badmojo wrote:

No I don't think so, it's an ASUS VX97. The fastest Intel chip it supports is a 233Mhz MMX, which I have and would be a decent speed increase, but I'm loyal to the 166 for some hard-to-justify reasons (like '166' looks cool on the LED Mhz display 😵 )

Ah I'm considering the same board for my socket 7 build because it's ATX. How is the onboard video?

I'm currently playing League of Legends on my main rig.

On the 386 I just finished setting up, I installed King's Quest I to IV as well as Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers. Now if only I could get a PS/2 to Serial adapter for the mouse!

Half-Saint wrote:

Ah I'm considering the same board for my socket 7 build because it's ATX. How is the onboard video?

I'm currently playing League of Legends on my main rig.

On the 386 I just finished setting up, I installed King's Quest I to IV as well as Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers. Now if only I could get a PS/2 to Serial adapter for the mouse!

Nah it's an AT board that one, and there's no onboard video.

Out of interest why don't people like serial mice around here? Are they less accurate or something?

Oh, I thought yours is ASUS SP97-XV..

I have nothing against serial mice but the only one that I own is dead unfortunately.