Gemini000 wrote on 2020-02-08, 08:34:

Ancient DOS Games Episode 263 - XF5700 Mantis Experimental Fighter is online!

At first, I was kinda surprised I'd never heard of this game, then I played it for this review... then I wasn't surprised anymore. It's not that the game is bad, far from it, it's just... very, very, average.

At least we get a good unboxing out of this video! 😀

What format did they use for the FMV scenes? Animated GIF?

Gemini000 wrote on 2020-02-08, 08:34:

Ancient DOS Games Episode 263 - XF5700 Mantis Experimental Fighter is online!

I wonder how far you got while playing the game. At one point you defeat the Sirians and the rest of the game you fight the Rexum Empire. I thought the game was rather easy until then. I just loaded up on missiles and targeted the stronger ships first. Making sure that I was always getting more kills than my wingmen. However once the plot switched over the difficulty spiked until the missions were completely unwinnable.

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote on 2020-02-08, 21:10:

I wonder how far you got while playing the game. At one point you defeat the Sirians and the rest of the game you fight the Rexum Empire. I thought the game was rather easy until then. I just loaded up on missiles and targeted the stronger ships first. Making sure that I was always getting more kills than my wingmen. However once the plot switched over the difficulty spiked until the missions were completely unwinnable.

Not THAT far. I think I stopped around Mission 20-something because it didn't feel like I was getting much in the way of useful footage anymore given how similar everything was up to that point. :P

I have a copy of this game and I was excited to pull it off the shelf. I knew I had the 5.25 version, and I opened the box to see a slip of paper proclaiming the speech pack is "coming soon". I was also sad to learn I am missing the keybinding chart and manual.

drat.

it does have a plethora of other slips of paper, advertising everything under the sun. oh well.

edit, now that I'm dwelling on this game, and I have it handy, it only has 11 5.25 floppies, yes?

Ancient DOS Games Filler #80 - Volumetric 3D Rendering is online!

This has been in my queue for awhile now, but I kept losing track of my old QuickBASIC code so I kept pushing it back more and more. I've actually been wanting to do a video on this since 2014! :O

But yeah, one of the things I find interesting is the concept of rendering three-dimensional objects out of mathematical constructs, and so I wrote a program way back in 2008 to investigate the process, then discovered Ken Silverman's "EvalDraw" program not long following, though never really experimented with it as much as I should've because I was too entranced by the numerous examples included with it! :B

So this video first goes over my own stuff, followed by a showcase of a tiny number of things EvalDraw comes with, followed by my attempts to convert my old volumetric code into the EvalDraw format!

Also...

luckybob wrote on 2020-02-09, 20:47:

edit, now that I'm dwelling on this game, and I have it handy, it only has 11 5.25 floppies, yes?

I have no idea. Sorry. :/

Ancient DOS Games Episode 264 - Dominus is online!

This one's quite the odd experience. The production values are through the roof, with some of the best artwork and music the days of DOS have to offer, but then at the same time, the UI is a bit weird to work with and on top of that, the gameplay is extremely overcomplicated and repetitive, with only maybe about 10% of the game's features needing to be utilized to succeed.

Either way though, it's good to give this one some coverage given how incredibly obscure it is... Not to mention I'm not 100% convinced there's no sound effects, but I sure couldn't find a way to get any working, nor was able to find any demonstrations online proving the existence of sound effects, so... the jury's still out on that one. :P

Ancient DOS Games Pro 12 - ACTUAL Weapon Stats - MechWarrior 2 is online!

This is something that's been bugging me for a LONG time now given that I've been playing Mech2 since it was brand new, as I always knew SOMETHING was up with the weapons and couldn't quite put my finger on it. Now, armed with much stronger analytical skills than my younger self had, I was able to thoroughly investigate the weapon stats and the results... were definitely interesting! :O

Mechwarrior 2 is a extremely buggy game under the hood and the patches and Titanium Edition re-release just confound the problems even further.

I still remember beating all of Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries BY ONLY USING MACHINEGUNS

Machineguns are actually really powerful, pound for pound. You can dump heat sinks and use the mass for armor and ammo.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 265 - Star Trek: Judgement Rites is online!

I've actually had this game for quite awhile now, longer than 25th Anniversary, but was keeping it aside in case I needed to shift gears on short notice given that I knew I could put a review of it together VERY fast. Well... I originally planned way back in October to do Theme Hospital this week, but given the current pandemic stuff going on felt that might be a little too on-the-nose, not to mention would serve as an uncomfortable reminder to current events, so made the decision to switch. :B

Judgement Rites is nearly identical to 25th Anniversary in terms of gameplay, but naturally it's all new stories, with half of them tying together to form a more elaborate narrative about morality and philosophy; VERY deep stuff that starts simple but by the final mission will have you really questioning which of your decisions throughout the game have been right or wrong... at least in terms of what the devs had in mind for the entities behind it all. ;)

Ancient DOS Games Mod 7 - Level Editing - Transland is online!

I felt I should do this sooner rather than later given how little information there is out there about Transland and, as far as I could tell, ZERO documented details about how its built-in editor worked, so here we are! Given that this prototype game was never really "finished", and given how extensive the editor is, I primarily wanted to investigate what was possible and try to answer the question as to how practical it would be to make anything with it.

This is awesome 😄 I only recently learned about Transland from dosgames.com, nice to know there are some hidden features in this prototype.

Pretty cool! I wonder how many other beta/prototypes or even commercial release out there have hidden editors that nobody knows about?

Probably *WAY* out of the scope for you Kris, but what if you did a Mod video about In Pursuit of Greed seeing how the source code has been openly available from the original dev for years now?

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-04-04, 19:49:

Probably *WAY* out of the scope for you Kris, but what if you did a Mod video about In Pursuit of Greed seeing how the source code has been openly available from the original dev for years now?

Before I'll do a Pro or Mod video on a particular game the game must be reviewed first, as it doesn't make sense to talk about a game in a highly technical light without first giving it a once-over. Also, I don't believe anyone's requested that one yet.

Well, I can't be a patreon because I have no income but, I'd still want to suggest the game if you haven't done it already. It makes use of "Raven Engine" and tries to use it with Doom style FPS gameplay.

Kinda reminds me of CyberBykes' editor...

DracoNihil wrote on 2020-04-05, 01:25:

Well, I can't be a patreon because I have no income but, I'd still want to suggest the game if you haven't done it already. It makes use of "Raven Engine" and tries to use it with Doom style FPS gameplay.

No need to be a Patreon supporter to make requests! All I ask is that you eMail it in so I can properly track it as I don't want to have to be tracking requests from literally FIVE different places. :P

But I have tons of gifted games to get through and I prioritize requests based on how many there have been for each game, so if there's no requests for a particular game by this point it'll probably be a number of years before I get around to it.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 266: Muppet Adventure - Chaos at the Carnival is online!

So all I wanted to do was pick a fun little game to showcase for edutainment month and figured a game with the Muppets was going to be a safe bet. BOY WAS THAT A MISTAKE... >_>;;;

Yeah... I think this might be the most broken DOS game I've ever come across that actually saw a proper release, through a well known publisher, fully boxed and everything. To try and counterbalance that, I decided to focus more on describing how I would do aspects of this program differently to make it better, softlocks and glitches not withstanding. :P

8|

^^ they charged money for this. They PAID money for the license & made this. Muppets were a HUGE franchise in the '80s too, so I bet there was some high-profile wheeling & dealing behind that license.

Was it written in BASIC? It kind of looks like it.

Great review Kris! Thanks for playing this so we don't have to.