Stiletto wrote:

mmmmm DX-Ball. My roommate and I were such DX-Ball 1 addicts in college it wasn't funny. 😀

My sister's husband got so addicted to DX-Ball 2 it nearly broke up their engagement (I'm not kidding! 😮 ). It took a lot of apologies and promises before they got back in good terms with each other (and one of those promises was to stop playing DX-Ball 2 for good, and somehow he's kept it to this day).

xjas wrote:

My personal favorite Arkanoid/Breakout game is Cyber Sphere. I got the Amiga version an emu/shovelware CD I picked up in Berlin (Amiga Classics Gold), and loved it. I later found out there's a solid DOS port with *really good* MOD -> OPL conversions of the music. Great soundtrack, wildly colorful graphics, responsive controls & a few nice innovations on the typical formula. Believe it's freeware these days.

Yup, Cyber Sphere is freeware alright; I got both it and Cyber Sphere Plus but haven't played either yet. And after watching this ADG review from Gemini000 I'm going to give them both a good try ^^.

Well, i think Kerbal Space Program is going to become a drug...

Lately I've mainly been playing Luftrausers and a bit of TF2, as well as Smash Bros on my 3DS.

I tried out Deus Ex: Invisible War yesterday...was not too bad, but didn't have the same appeal to me as the first right off the bat. Going to play it some more this weekend and see how it goes. It might grow on me.

I've been playing a lot of Survarium through STEAM but that's not exactly retro, the game is still in development. It's also very un-optimized and needs a pretty hefty machine to run smoothly. As I am currently in-between graphics cards I've had to put Survarium on the back burner for now. I tried to run it with my backup card (HD4870) and it brought that ancient Titan to it's knees, a jittery 10-25fps and as a result unplayable. Never fear though, I have my friends GTX980 lined up for December once he upgrades.

So I have been going back to the oldschool lately. Here's a few of what I've been playing...

Heroes of Might and Magic 4... I got tired of HOMM6 with the bugs and whatnot. HOMM7 looks to have gone the exact same way too. For me HOMM4 was the best.

Shogun Total War (the first one - still not started the second...).

Last week I did another play through of System Shock 2. Tried out the higher tech energy weapons this time (something I've never done). Not overly impressed, despite not needing actual ammo thanks to the recharge stations littered throughout the levels, even the beast energy cannon was very weak against all bio enemies.

I was mucking around with my 286 the other night and happened to boot Prince of Persia up and I'm hooked all over again. Initially I was playing with a Gravis pad, which is quite accurate, but occasionally the prince would jump when I wanted him to run, and a mistake usually means instant death. Keyboard is the way to go.

I'm under the impression that you can save your progress but I'll have to break out my manual to check. There might be a penalty for saving? Not sure.

I had to put here, also... nice and funny (obscure) title I'm playing these days: HARVESTER (1996):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEvFEBuwUq4

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.

I had to switch difficulty down to "Neighbourhood Watch" because one of the missions is so badly designed I can't seem to win it regardless of what I try on the higher difficulties.

I'm in a Star Wars craze at the moment, so I've gone back and started playing The Old Republic again (first time since the beta). My sister just really got into Star Wars with watching the origina trilogy, the prequels, and Ep7 last night so we're going to play together.

I've been going through the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games as well again. Jedi Outcast is far more frustrating that I remember...I've kind of taken a break from it.

Just played through Doom III again. Took around 11-12 hours to finish but I ensure I open every storage locker and find as many secrets as possible. Not my first playthrough but my first in a long time. An amazing game. Hard to believe how good the game looks for a 12 year old game.

Also it was funny running the timedemo with this GTX980 + i5-2500K. I remember playing Doom 3 on an AGP Geforce 6200 (yes... a 6200) with a Pentium 4 2.0Ghz back when it released. I actually finished the game on Hard on that PC. Had to hack the config files to hell and back to get somewhere close to 60fps in 800x600. A few months later I upgraded my entire rig to an Athlon 64 3000+ and an AGP 6800XT with the vertex + shader pipes unlocked and I played through Doom III again. It was far more enjoyable that time around. I just finished playing it on my current rig in 1920x1200 and averaging 290fps. How times change...

badmojo wrote:

Keyboard is the way to go.
I'm under the impression that you can save your progress but I'll have to break out my manual to check.

I came to the same conclusion, one misstep = death 😵
Awesome game. There is definitely a save function, but I don't think it's really needed with the 60 minute time limit.
A successful run requires concentration for that whole time, so saving and picking up later will probably result in failure anyway 😎

I think my best time was somewhere around 35 minutes.

Back to playing Terraria for me.

In 2016 I'm making an effort to actually finish some games!

Over Christmas I tackled Maniac Mansion. I was expecting it to be a bit of a slog but it was actually a lot of fun.
You can select up to three playable characters, which is fairly unique for a point-and-click adventure. Each combination of characters has unique puzzles and a different ending. There's a great video on Youtube with Ron Gilbert talking about the headaches this caused them during the development of the game.

This game does have deaths and dead-ends, but nothing too punishing. Graphically it's no masterpiece, as I believe the C64 version imposed restrictions, but it's colourful and each character is unique. Playing with Tandy sound, there's only two pieces of music and some sound effects, but it does the job.

I've completed it for one ending, and I guess at some point I might come back and try different characters. Each playthrough is short and sweet. Some of the puzzles are great fun, and you can certainly see the genesis of later LucasArts games here. The exploding hamster gag is a favourite 😵 Definitely worth a play for anyone who likes adventure games.

Played the enhanced version from this compilation that I got for Xmas 95. And thank goodness because this game is ridiculously expensive on eBay. I don't know why it's not on GOG or Steam yet. However, the game is included with Day Of The Tentacle, which is much easier to get hold of.

Choose 3 of 7 playable characters.

You enter a spooky (haunted?) mansion...

And discover an observatory, dungeon and many other crazy things.

Push the wrong button and this might happen.

Maniac Mansion! That is very groovy. I've been meaning to attempt a play through on my C64 but haven't managed it yet.

I'm going through a slump at the movement. I was in a Star Wars mood after The Force Awakens so fired up Dark Forces; 3 levels in I remembered why I've never finished - tedious puzzle level design. Then I booted up Tie Fighter, but wasn't feeling it. Wing Commander III likewise came and went.

Must be a mid-life crisis come early.

Haha. Time to buy a convertible and/or a motorbike!

Before retro-fever hit me a couple months ago, the only games I ever played were Battle for Wesnoth (very addicting turn-based open source game) and occasional Minecraft.

In the past couple of weeks since getting my DOS retro-rig up and running, I've been playing a bunch of old games, seeing which ones keep calling me back for more. Unfortunately, I remembered how hard X-wing was and after failing the 2nd mission twice and having to start all over, I walked away from it for now.

The ones I'm playing the most now are Wing Commander 1, System Shock 1, and Duke Nukem 3D. I'm probably going to dive into WC2, Wings of Glory, or Pacific Strike when I'm done with WC1.

I also have System Shock 2 waiting for me on my Win98 retro-rig, but that is set up in another room that is less convenient for me to go to. My plan is to get a workbench that will fit both machines so I can have them in the same office.

Freedom Planet \o/
A Saturn-style platformer that is awesome. Haven't been this hooked on a platformer for ages.

-

bjt wrote:

Haha. Time to buy a convertible and/or a motorbike!

Arg I couldn't think of anything worse!

Fortunately all this talk of a Crisis reminded me that I'd started Crisis 2 a while back, so I picked up where I'd left off and my slump is over!

"Cloak engaged"

shoot shoot bang!

bjt wrote:

Haha. Time to buy a convertible and/or a motorbike!

In that case I got my mid-life crisis when I was 19.. 😊 And it's still going.. 🤣 🤣