Kerr Avon wrote:

Timesplitters (the first game) is very basic, and has aged very badly I think. It was a late launch tile, and at the time it was […]
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Timesplitters (the first game) is very basic, and has aged very badly I think. It was a late launch tile, and at the time it wasn't too bad, but I was expecting much more, given that some of the team who had made it were ex-Rare employees, who'd worked on the fantastic Goldeneye, N64 and Perfect Dark.

[...]

But anyway, I'd *very strongly* recommend anyone who likes first person shooters to play Timesplitters 2, and Timesplitters: Future Perfect (available on the original XBox, Gamecube, and PS2, or you can probably emulate them on a PC nowadays), as they are very enjoyable, occasionally have humourous dialogue, have lots of great characters, and the two games are full of unlockables and the multiplayer modes allow the players to choose so many options and facets of the games.

[...]

XIII is rather good too (and makes much better use of the graphics style than I was expecting), apart from some annoying forced stealth sections, which, fortunately, aren't too long.

It really deserved a sequel.

Cool, I'll definitely check out TS2 and Future Perfect then. I think I had high hopes for TS1 as I'd heard a lot of praise for the sequels, but I figured the first game would be a good place to start (it was also the cheapest of the series in my local game shop.) I played it some more after my review here and I could definitely see some potential, it just didn't feel very fleshed out.

Timesplitters 2 has one of my all-time favorite "game" music tracks ever (which I first heard in an IWBTG fangame of all things), so I want to give it a go for that aspect alone.

On this topic, I finally played through the XIII demo disc. It has two missions - the game start, on the beach, and a later level in a snowy military base. It looks great for a PS2 era game, I love the comic book elements thrown in, and it's fun as hell. The first "weapon" I picked up was a metal folding chair I got to bash over somebody's head to steal his gun. How could anyone not like this? Definite win.

I may have already grabbed the full game for my Wiicube. 😜 But figured I may as well start with the demo.

^^ seriously, this is awesome.

Seeing as it was included with the not-for-resale free demo, I don't think anybody'll be up-in-arms if I upload that extras/soundtrack disc. Grab it here (link won't last forever.) I didn't have room to upload a "pure" ISO but the zip has all the files and the audio tracks as mp3 (V0, properly tagged.) Enjoy!

I just realized this thread existed, as I was going to make one myself.

I scored a big box Blue Force and SWAT 3: Elite Edition on Amazon, and I got Defiance on eBay, and it's still sealed. Can't find jack in the wild so I have to make do, but hey, I paid only around $22 for all three.

More PSX promo content! Gran Turismo 2 is probably the title I've sunk more hours in than anything else on the original Playstation. It was the perfect storm of a game for me: it came out just days before my 18th birthday, right around the time I started dipping my feet into REAL amateur motorsport (autocross, track days, etc. - no "street racing" BS.) It had all kinds of neat cars I could realistically aspire to own*, including variants of the Mitsubishi Mirage I did own at the time, awesome graphics & environments, a great selection of tracks, and even auto-x, rally, and drag racing stages. It was - literally - my RPG on the system.

(* I've since bought several of the cars in real life that were in my original GT2 garage - also, I still have that save file on one of my memory sticks.)

So yeah, I've sunk no doubt hundreds of hours into the game. I still have my original black spine version, although the discs are scratched to hell from lugging them all over, and the Greatest Hits copy I got for $5 at a garage sale to replace it.

THAT SAID... probably 99% of those hundreds of hours of gameplay were done with the music OFF and my own stuff playing in the background. The music selections in the game never did a damn thing for me, the tracks all sounded like cheap commercial cash-ins, didn't fit the gameplay at all, and couldn't hold a candle to the amazing Rom di Prisco original scores of the contemporary Need for Speed games.

Why, then, did I just buy the soundtrack?

Well, okay, not all the tracks are bad, and it was in a sale bin of 25-cent "CDs" at my nearby non-chain thrift shop. (Waitaminute I was in there AGAIN??! WTF did I just say to myself?) I also have a thing for game soundtracks on real CD releases, especially from this era. Like XIII above, it has both an audio CD and a PSX CD full of demos and extra content.

Of course I was gonna grab it!

I left this pic large so you can hopefully still read all the text if you blow it up:

^^ I might actually hang this poster up. At least for a while. 😜

I also found this shovelware CD in the 25c bin. The label suffered a coffee spill at some point, but the disc itself cleaned up fine. Nothing particularly unusual in its whopping 7MB of content (two Wolf3D mods and a few common games - Megatron is pretty cool though), but the price was right:

There's apparently no record on the internet that this disc even existed, so here you all go.

I bought a game! First retro game purchase in a long time but I saw this going for 15 bucks and decided that although it's not a great game, or even a good game, the memories associated with it justified a place on my shelf.

This is one of many examples of a game not living up to my wild teenage expectations - most of the hype was probably internally generated. I wanted to believe.

Onto the shelf of nostalgic joy it goes:

I seem to be building a collection of space games with zero effort on my part - I just bump into them when I am in the second hand shops!

badmojo wrote:

I bought a game! First retro game purchase in a long time but I saw this going for 15 bucks and decided that although it's not a […]
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I bought a game! First retro game purchase in a long time but I saw this going for 15 bucks and decided that although it's not a great game, or even a good game, the memories associated with it justified a place on my shelf.

This is one of many examples of a game not living up to my wild teenage expectations - most of the hype was probably internally generated. I wanted to believe.

Onto the shelf of nostalgic joy it goes:

Sick collection 😎

badmojo wrote:

I bought a game! First retro game purchase in a long time but I saw this going for 15 bucks and decided that although it's not a […]
Show full quote

I bought a game! First retro game purchase in a long time but I saw this going for 15 bucks and decided that although it's not a great game, or even a good game, the memories associated with it justified a place on my shelf.

This is one of many examples of a game not living up to my wild teenage expectations - most of the hype was probably internally generated. I wanted to believe.

Sweet, I love that box art. I actually like Mega Race a lot, the soundtrack is great, I love the 3D rendered artwork & environments, and it's fun to play even if totally simple. The actor who played Lance Boyle nailed it in the first game (not the sequels where I think the directors told him to "just do the same thing, but more extreme!!!") and made him one of the more memorable characters of the FMV era for me.

I tend to love rail shooters and anything with a lot of '90s 3D rendering, so I may not be a representative critic here. 😜 Great score though.

Mega Race was one of the first games I had on CD-ROM; I bought my first CD drive from our local living-room computer dealer when I was just a kid, so he threw it & some other ex-bundled games in so I'd have something to play.

I have a bunch of stuff to add here, but I'll space it out as to not flood the thread. First up, and speaking of awesome box art, a lucky minimum bid on Ebay got me this:

I didn't really need legit a copy of this, as I burned one long ago & have played tons of it, but it was semi-local and only ran me $7.99. I'm not gonna say no to just about any 3DO long box game for that kind of price, especially one in this nice condition. Score.

The Ebay listing helpfully warned me that the manual was "in great shape but smells like cigarette smoke". What it actually smells like is the kind of bath soap my grandmother would have used. I don't know how it's possible to mix those two smells up.

I honestly think this is a hidden gem on the 3DO and is definitely one of the best ports of this game (which was on everything, even the Apple II & C64.) It's full of epic sci-fi atmosphere, has some fantastically '90s voiceover work from Michael Dorn (aka Worf from TNG), and the music is freaking awesome. Seriously, compare the graphics and sound in this to the lame-ass DOS version - worlds away.

Now to track down a copy of Star Fighter... 😉

xjas wrote:

Mega Race was one of the first games I had on CD-ROM; I bought my first CD drive from our local living-room computer dealer when I was just a kid, so he threw it & some other ex-bundled games in so I'd have something to play.

Yes this was an early CD-ROM purchase for me too, circa 1994 I guess so I would have still been rocking my 2 spin SCSI drive then, which was attached to my PAS16 in a 486SX 33. I just gave it a run in my current-day 486SX33 which is sporting a 24X drive - still kinda jerky during the FMV sequences. The gameplay is smooth though.

xjas wrote:

I honestly think this is a hidden gem on the 3DO and is definitely one of the best ports of this game (which was on everything, even the Apple II & C64.) It's full of epic sci-fi atmosphere, has some fantastically '90s voiceover work from Michael Dorn (aka Worf from TNG), and the music is freaking awesome. Seriously, compare the graphics and sound in this to the lame-ass DOS version - worlds away.

Now to track down a copy of Star Fighter... 😉

As I've said in posts long ago this most definitely is the premium version of Stellar 7 and a fun Battlezone style game for the 3DO. The bonus is you can still find them new and cheap.

^^ agreed. 😀 It's a must-try for the system IMHO.

Next up is some classic Sierra content. I spotted this AMAZINGLY tidy copy of Police Quest 1 in a local charity shop. On half-price day. For THREE dollars. Get.

I left some of these pics huge so you can zoom in & read all the text. I am astounded at the number of pack-in materials and the fact that they're all still there. Sierra really pulled out all the stops with the presentation of their titles in this era.

^^ It has been played, as there's obviously a save game disk included, but damn if this doesn't look like it came straight out of 1988.

I'm not a huge fan of the series - I think I played the first two games, but I was always more of a Space Quest guy out of the Sierra 'big three'. However this is really cool to see in this condition. It's even got a map of the town and a frigging guide on how to play poker. This might end up being trade fodder later on(*) but pretty pleased with this find all the same.

(* if any of you wanna trade me a Space Quest in similar condition, PM me on VCF or something. 😉 )

All the pack-in documentation & materials are in excellent condition - I'd be more than happy to do high-res scans of everything if there's need for it. Is there a site still around that collects scans of these and makes them available at full resolution?

I'm a huge fan of the first two games in the series and I envy you right now..

Finally got Thief 1 and Thief 2. I already owned 3 and 4. So now I have the full series:

had to have this... because SVP 🤣

psychz wrote:

had to have this... because SVP 🤣

Ah, one of the chips I pwned on behalf of MAMEDev... the documentation on the SVP was impossible to find until I dug around for it. It was very challenging, eventually I sourced the docs from someone in Korea. However, before that happened, external emulator author "notaz" (http://notaz.gp2x.de/svp.php ) had basically completely reverse-engineered all its opcodes without documentation. 😲

@Psychz - great game, love those flat shaded polygons. 😀 I wouldn't mind picking that up again, had a copy a while ago but traded it away (didn't have a working Megadrive at the time.) Even with the SVP it's still impressive what they managed to squeeze out of the system.

Here's another folly^H^H^H^H^H lucky find while thrifting the other day. A literal red book (HAH! *) of CD-ROMs with a price tag of a whole five bucks. What could be inside?
(* yes I KNOW CD-ROMs aren't Redbook, it's a joke, don't over-analyze it barglargkgkgk- )

If you're really good at recognizing fonts, you may have already figured out what this is from. 😉 Open it up, and

...it's full of goodies! As that warranty text in the upper left indicates, this booklet is an Apple product, specifically the bundled software suite for a Performa 6360 or 6400. Interestingly, the word 'Apple' only appears once, anywhere in this set, in one line of that tiny disclaimer.

I have no idea if this is everything a Performa 6x00 was supposed to come with, but this is as I found it, order & contents unchanged.

Starting from page 1, there's the "Color Pak" which contains Adobe HomePublisher and PhotoDeluxe (lay off on the CamelCase, Adobe!), Sierra PrintArtist (you too??), and some extras including "Outrageous Iron-On Art", "Funtastic Fonts", and "Fab Photos." Then we have the original System 7.5.3 install/restore disc - always handy - and a Guided Tour of said System 7.5.3.

The next pages are edutainment & multimedia - encyclopedias and stuff. For some reason "The Amazing Writing Machine" is a mixed Mac/Windows CD. Not much to say about Our Times or Grolier's (1996 edition!). "3D Atlas" also came out on the 3DO(!), but this is predictably the Mac version.

(Sorry for the double-stacked pics BTW. I added the page numbers to make this post easier to follow.)

Next!

Now things are getting interesting, we're into the games section. We have F/A-18 Hornet 2.0 and SSI's Allied General, which to be honest, I'm probably never gonna play, and all three discs of Buried in Time: The Journeyman Project 2 which absolutely ticks all the right "weird-ass experimental adventure game" boxes for me. Will have fun checking this one out!

Onward:

FUCKING JACKPOT. I've mentioned before that the Descent series are pretty much my all-time favorite games. Well, here's one I didn't have! The Mac version of Descent 1 is an awesome port and has a stunning, bombastic remixed soundtrack partly done by legendary Amiga composer Allistair Brimble (who more recently worked with the O.G. Descent team on Overload.) Sure, I already have the Playstation version which has the same tunes, and you can download the soundtrack in full lossless in tons of places, but having an original disc is really cool.

(And yes, the music tracks ARE standard CD Audio so I can play them with anything, and hey! there is some "redbook" content in the "red book" after all. The joke works.)

Bit of a scattershot of other offerings on these pages, we have Nikolai's Trains (a boring kid's game), Quicken, Special Edition (a boring dad's game), and a burned copy of OS8.1 to balance the legit 7.5.3 we saw earlier.

And that's it! But before we go, let's just zoom in on Descent quickly:

I was wondering if most of these were part of the original software bundle, or if the owner of the machine this went with was just sticking their other CDs into the folder for convenience. But there it is, in black and in bold: Bundled Software. This was a damn good bundle.

I'm completely screwed. I vouched not to get much more games, and now I've bought more games in the past 3 months than whole last year! Mostly from flea markets, local auctions etc.

You got some good stuff up there, the boxed Flight of the Amazon Queen & Discworld are pretty neat to see. Care to open them up and share the contents? 😀

Here's my lucky $5 garage sale haul this morning:

Bunch of Unreal games, Klingon Honor Guard (also Unreal engine!), Dark Forces for Mac, X-Wing Alliance for Win9x, Resident Evil for Wii, the shiniest Neverwinter Nights I've ever seen (it was sitting in bright sunlight and was like a reflective beacon, drawing me to the sale), a stack of empty jewel cases & some empty DVD cases, and a random funk record. And the plastic crate, too. 😜 Not bad.

All the boxed games seem to be complete but I haven't looked through every single one extensively.

xjas wrote:

You got some good stuff up there, the boxed Flight of the Amazon Queen & Discworld are pretty neat to see. Care to open them up and share the contents? 😀

Nothing interesting in them, just a CD with a manual.