Finally in Act III of Tyranny and the game is slowly coming to an end. And as it does, the seams begin to show. I am continuously bumbing into more bugs and what appear to be unfinished/missing game content. And Act III seems to just basically blitz by; the game seems improperly balanced for high power levels (I can AOE nuke pretty much everything the game throws at me with a 4 mage party) and you feel like you are being rather forcefully thrown at the endgame, which is a bit too railroady considering how open the first two acts are.. I mean, I can *feel* that the final four showdowns I have will play over very differently due to my choices, and I certainly want to do a second playthrough, this time siding with one of the lesser evil factions rather than the rebels - which should change almost everything dramatically, I still feel like I am being forced into these confrontations in a way that feels rushed. The content in this act is sparse, and the game just pushes you along to its ending, as if the budget or time ran short. It feels a lot like KOTOR 2 in that sense. Actually, this game feels a lot like KOTOR 2 in many senses. It is a flawed gem, and I recommend it to everyone who likes a good RPG (and does not actively hate real time / pause gameplay).

I just finished Tyranny and immediately started a second playthrough, this time playing the Disfavored path.

This game is criminally underrated and underappreciated.

Whenever I finish a game, I will try a bunch of games for 15-20 minutes to decide what to play next. I keep doing this until I arrive at a couple of games, preferable one I can play in the living room (i.e. console game) and one I can play in the office (i.e. PC game). Having just completed Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, here's what I've been playing:

Dungeons of Chaos (PC)
A PC port of a smartphone RPG that looks like total garbage (horrible smartphone UI, graphic assets of inconsistent resolution, etc.)... but is actually a really good, deep, turn-based party-based RPG. If I had to compare it to anything, it would probably be Demon's Winter as it's an overhead tile-based world with a separate screen for (turn-based) combat. I'm at just over 8 hours in and it's really a bit of a hidden gem as far as I'm concerned. One thing that's REALLY nice is that it has an auto combat feature that can be toggled on/off for each individual character with plenty of options to tweak—for example, you can tell your spellcasters to use a favored spell until they drop to XX% MP and then stop casting. This is really great for just blasting through easier encounters very quickly. It also has a lot of nice quality of life features, like a quest log and editable map notes. It will even record which NPCs train each skill, once you've met them.

Party evelopment is quite good. Leveling a character up gives you bonuses to HP, etc., but also gives you talent points. You can use these to increase your stats, or can spend them with trainers to buy new or level up existing skills. You also level up skills through use. It's a great system that constantly rewards you.

If there's a downside (other than the graphics), it would be the world/setting/story, whatever you want to call it. It's pretty generic fantasy and it's definitely not a game to play for its involving plot or interesting dialog. It's a game to play for the exploration, combat, and party building. Anyway, I really like it so far.

Dark Souls III (PC)
I only just finished this for the first time a couple of months ago, but after completing DS1 and DS2, I couldn't stop myself from replaying this one. This time I'm determined to go through the game as a pyromancer. I found this game to be a lot less annoying this time through, not because of using a pyro but because I know it pretty well at this point. I'm still annoyed at all the enemies that just run at you and flail around endlessly—the game breaks the unspoken rule of DS1 and even DS2 in that even large and powerful "slow" monsters will still just attack over and over and over giving you little chance to attack. I also don't like how the game does not even pretend to be one interconnected world anymore; you reach each area by teleporting from a central hub rather than finding areas through exploration. Still a great game though.

Caves of Qud (PC)
I've always wanted to get into roguelikes, but the closest I ever got was getting an hour or so into ADOM. I decided to give this one a try and really like what I'm seeing so far. I though the completely alien world would be a turnoff, but it's pretty fascinating. One complaint—the UI is all over the place, whether using the modern or classic UI. I'd really like an option to set the font size, for example.

Continued playing Freedom Fighters. It's actually quite a good game once you get past the somewhat crappy graphics (even for the day) and somewhat dodgy controls. It has a quite effective squad based system, where you can recruit up to 2 team members and then direct them with 3 simple commands. The actual missions are quite fun and have a fair degree of purpose and meaningful objectives, and scale up in difficulty as you get into the game. I don't generally play 3rd person shooters, but this one is satisfying enough to keep me playing.

A few days ago I have finished the Half Life games.
HL1, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Very enjoyable until the very end. But dreadfull at times because I played the games on Difficult settings.
After that I had a few days scoping and trying out some other of the 50+ games I have installed on my Win98 pc. Tried out Carmageddon 2 but I could not be moved to continue the game, perhaps another time. Same goes for the NFS games. But after that I came to Battlezone 2. Which I very much enjoyed. I played some free skirmish rounds and yesterday I have started the single player story mode, currently at the 3rd mission. How much pleasure one can have with a game one has not touched for over a decade.

So I moved. Finally got out of the 1200 sq ft town home my wife and kid were stacked into, and got out into the country in a 2500 sq ft SFH on 4 acres. Bills are even cheaper to boot. Plus I get to work from home. My "home office" expanded from an extremely cramped guest "bedroom" into a quite luxurious 1/3rd of the basement. And as luck would have it, someone popped up on Craigslist giving away a 22" Dell P1230. It was even on my way home from work. So I swapped out this

With this

Gives me about 3 more viewable inches on the diagonal, and is so much easier on my increasingly poor eyes. The upper left is a bit more blue than the rest of the screen. And honestly, I'd have preferred beige. But it was free, and beggars can't be choosers. Celebrated with a level of Doom 2 on my K6-2+ machine, and a level of Return to Castle Wolfenstein on my Athlon 64 machine.

Il testing out my Pentium m build with Oni (2001) it was maybe 2 years old when my build was relevant but it runs extremely smoothly at 1024x758 and maxed out graphics.

I had almost forgotten about this gem. It is very challenging at normal difficulty in comparison to many games.

This is nuts!

http://www.indieretronews.com/2021/06/dune-ii … s-has-been.html

Still on Tomb Raider 1. After reaching the third level "Lost Valley" the frame rate in S3D mode (640x480 with all settings on) started dropping into the single digits in the area where you fight the T-Rex. Reducing the resolution to 512x384 helps, but it's clear that large, open levels are not going to work so great on the Virge.

I then tried Glide mode using my Voodoo1 and noticed that it suffers a frame rate decrease as well, though with far less impact. On the Voodoo, the frame rate drops from 30 to 20 in the T-Rex area. Not so great, but much more playable than sub 10 FPS that I was getting in S3D mode at the same 640x480 resolution.

Good ol xbill.

And by golly look at all those megagigas it took to load Xwindows and the XFCE4 desktop environment on my P200mmx which took 3 minutes to boot up to on my P200MMX system.. And it's as fast as it ran over 17 years ago on this very system with a trimmed down Red Hat 7.3 installation. And look at all that bloat on far newer linux distribution.. Davuan Linux went to archive statis around the middle of last year... 😉

Xfce has always been my favorite DE. 😀

xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-06-29, 19:40:

Xfce has always been my favorite DE. 😀

I's nice alright. I first came across it while using #! (CrunchBang linux )as my main OS on a Celeron 2.6, I think it was, Acer F1 system. Customised #! until I had a nice set up which saw me right for around 5 years. As I've mentioned before I don't distro hoop because under the hood linux is the similar on all of them. The first versions of XFCE tried to imitate CDE(Common Desktop Environment) on *nix operating systems. I really didn't like the earlier XFCE and chose Window Maker as my primary desktop on Red Hat 7.3. Had to cut RH 7.3 right down by removing a lot of bloated crap..😉 The system had 128megs of ram and a 4gig hard drive back then. My first ever try at a *nix type operating system and learnt a lot by just using it and sorting out issies on it.. I believe a linux version of real CDE has been ported and is available for linux now.

With this P200mmx being my first linux only system I thought I'd give it a go on a more modern distro a shot and was presently surprised how hassle free the installation was of Davuan Jessie was starting off from the minimal installation cd. Then once it was running and changing to the apt config to point to the Davuan Jessie archive to download and install other programs. It really impressed me when it install 15gig of game related files.It actually maxed the hdd in fact. But running apt clean and running the command synapic suggest the down loads continued on as it nothing had happen. There was ony one program files set that didn't get pulled from the archives out of that 15gig.

Finished The Dig. Was really quite a good game, and once you get past the initial "floating in space" scene it's really a very traditional adventure game. Not sure why it is not more widely recognized as a classic adventure classic.

Following it up by starting Gabriel Knight 2 on same PC. Started with the Windows version, but after realizing it would not full-screen, went back to the DOS version which worked perfectly of course. Why is the DOS version almost always better if it exists? The big shock is how it is massively different from the GK1 - it's a FMV game like Phantasmagoria rather than a point-and-click lke GK1. Oh well I enjoyed Phantasmagoria so maybe I will enjoy this too.

kolderman wrote on 2021-07-01, 19:22:

Finished The Dig. Was really quite a good game, and once you get past the initial "floating in space" scene it's really a very traditional adventure game. Not sure why it is not more widely recognized as a classic adventure classic.

Following it up by starting Gabriel Knight 2 on same PC. Started with the Windows version, but after realizing it would not full-screen, went back to the DOS version which worked perfectly of course. Why is the DOS version almost always better if it exists? The big shock is how it is massively different from the GK1 - it's a FMV game like Phantasmagoria rather than a point-and-click lke GK1. Oh well I enjoyed Phantasmagoria so maybe I will enjoy this too.

Gabriel knight is one of my favorite series. The game has a true special feeling to it even when I first played them they were 10 years old.. The Dig is good but not my favorite.

I'm playing NoX. I could never get the GOG version to run smoothly on my k6-2+ @500 MHz with 16 bit colours for some reason. My Pentium M does better. 😀

Nox! I enjoyed that, especially the earlier part of the game before it turns into a relentless battle fest

I played through soldier of fortune 1 and 2 recently and so i then played soldier of fortune payback - but that one disappoints. It has fairly good game mechanics and the graphics are impressive but the game is lacklustre featuring silly boss fights and overall seems too short, certainly when compared to the first two

kolderman wrote on 2021-07-01, 19:22:

Finished The Dig. Was really quite a good game, and once you get past the initial "floating in space" scene it's really a very traditional adventure game. Not sure why it is not more widely recognized as a classic adventure classic.

I played The Dig when it first came out and never quite understood how it did not become a cult classic. Aside from the incredibly annoying puzzle inside the asteroid, it was an incredibly satisfying adventure and a very good story overall.

Don't lynch me for this but The Dig > Full Throttle

gerry wrote on 2021-07-02, 08:09:

Nox! I enjoyed that, especially the earlier part of the game before it turns into a relentless battle fest

I played through soldier of fortune 1 and 2 recently and so i then played soldier of fortune payback - but that one disappoints. It has fairly good game mechanics and the graphics are impressive but the game is lacklustre featuring silly boss fights and overall seems too short, certainly when compared to the first two

Actually I found Nox when I was looking for a game I played in my childhood. But now that I play it I don't know think this is it. It was some other game where you played a summoner/beastlord but could only have one pet I believe. It was also much more casual, Nox is incredibly hard. I must be playing it wrong..

Joakim wrote on 2021-07-02, 14:30:

Actually I found Nox when I was looking for a game I played in my childhood. But now that I play it I don't know think this is it. It was some other game where you played a summoner/beastlord but could only have one pet I believe. It was also much more casual, Nox is incredibly hard. I must be playing it wrong..

Wasn't "Magic & Mayhem" was it? Casual summoner style game. Loved it back in the day.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/magic-mayhem

I'm continuing my trek through Doom 2. I'm not sure I've played this game in earnest since 1995. And I have no memory of ever having beaten it besides being 12 years old and cheating my whole way through. Now Doom on the other hand, I've played that fairly regularly over the many years, and left my cheating youth firmly in the past. But Doom 2 I think I played furiously for a summer when a middle school friend installed it on my family computer, and then almost never again. So most of these levels, I never even learned how to beat legitimately. I just clipped my way through whenever I got stuck.

Wrapping up Barrels o' Fun just now, it was indeed barrels of fun.

I've also been dabbling in Populous. I've attempted to learn this game multiple times, and always wind up bouncing off it frustrated as soon as the AI even slightly begins fighting back. The UI really requires having the manual on hand, at least at first, and at least for me. And whatever the correct strategy is, was not intuitive to me. My natural inclination being to just quietly build up in my own little corner. But I think this time around I've finally cracked the code. The key to maintaining supremacy over the AI is to never lose it. Attack early, attack often, never let up. As soon as I get to a point where I can Earthquake them, I hit them with it. And then I just keep hitting them with it every time it looks like they are getting back on their feet. Escalating to swamp or volcano as my mana supply grows. I've gone from the AI rolling me with nonstop Volcanos, to hardly letting them get beyond mud huts. It's also a much more enjoyable game this way. Not sure I'll "beat" it, as that seems rather daunting given how many levels there are, even if you skip them in leaps and bounds as your performance grows.

But who knows. I've beaten 8 or 9 worlds and I'm in the 30's I think? Is the "battle number" the actual sequential level you are on?

Namrok wrote on 2021-07-04, 04:06:

I'm continuing my trek through Doom 2. I'm not sure I've played this game in earnest since 1995. And I have no memory of ever having beaten it besides being 12 years old and cheating my whole way through. Now Doom on the other hand, I've played that fairly regularly over the many years, and left my cheating youth firmly in the past.

I may be in the minority here, but I prefer the level design in Doom 1 over what they did for Doom 2. The latter just feels too gimmicky at times, speaking strictly from a single player perspective.

Also, the city levels just don't feel as interesting as the military installations and otherworldly areas of the original game.