Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Over at Eurogamer today I’ve a retro piece about the completely brilliant Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Or Jedi Knight to its friends. It includes words such as:

“And by crikey, it’s good. It’s very, very good. It’s so good that you can only look down at the ground, shake your head in confusion, and slowly pen a letter to LucasArts asking them what the hell they were thinking when they abandoned FPS development and handed the reins over to Raven. With this, Dark Forces, and indeed the enormous Mysteries of the Sith expansion, LucasArts demonstrated a rare and brilliant skill with a genre that’s so often so mediocre.”

Read the rest here.

Sometimes when my cat is licking herself clean, something I can’t see or hear will distract her. A rustle. An insect. Someone belching 18 miles away. The ghost of Michael Jackson. Y’know, whatever it is that their tiny animal brains mysteriously fixate on without warning. So she’ll stop cleaning herself, close her mouth and stare unblinkingly at whatever it is. Once a while, though, she’ll close the mouth but forget to put her tongue away first. So she sits there with her little pink tongue sticking out, sometimes for ten or fifteen straight minutes, looking charmingly, ludicrously foolish. She doesn’t seem even slightly aware that she’s doing it, or of how ridiculous, how hilarious she looks. And that only makes this absurd image all the more delightful.

And that, right there, is The Typing Of The Dead.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why? Why does he want to eat me? What did I ever do to him?

I’m just skiing, man. I’m not a threat to him or his people. I can’t believe I taste that great, underneath this garish windcheater and plastic boots. I’m certainly not going to replace all the calories he spends chasing me down a frozen mountain slope at about 90mph. He wants to eat me because he’s just a massive bastard. There’s no other possible explanation.
Read the rest of this entry »

Having spent rather a lot of time talking about how unfairly unremembered the Sierra Space Quest series are when people get nostalgic about adventure games, I went back in time to replay my remembered favourite, Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers. The results were an interesting combination of absolute brilliance and maddening failings, with a story more interesting behind the scenes than in front. You can read the results on Eurogamer, which include this:

“The story behind the development of Space Quest IV is certainly more interesting than the story in the game. The tale of Roger Wilco, hapless space janitor, travelling through time to prevent something something, and rescue maybe his son or something, is clumsy at best. In fact, in a throbbingly bad bit of storytelling, you only find out any of the motivating reasons for doing anything you do in the closing cut-scene. However, SQ4 is about gags, lots and lots of gags, everywhere.”

The really rather special LucasArts adventure, The Dig, had me getting my retro hat and trousers on for Eurogamer. It begins,

Seeing the 15 to 20 year-old point-and-click adventures appearing in Steam’s top sellers warms my heart. There is still an audience for these games, and they don’t need them to be in 3D with volumetric physics and dynamic downloadable content. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has, unsurprisingly, sold the most so far, but for me the game I was drawn to uncover from the archives was The Dig. Not because I have fond memories of it – I had almost no memories at all. But because when The Dig was released in 1995, it carried the weight of six years of expensive, over-hyped development around its neck, and was played under a cloud of preconceptions and prejudice.

I feel that I should restate where I write in the piece that I discuss events throughout the fifteen year old game, including the ending. People seem to be missing this, and then getting cross. It’s not a game that would have been interesting to write about if not discussing its entirety. So don’t read page 3 if you’re about to play the game. Or read it anyway and yell at me.

400 smashes and 120 billboards smashed, it’s crashed again. And I’m secretly hoping it will have taken my save game with it for a second time. I’ve got a horrible feeling I’ll end up starting a new save game otherwise, just so I can smash everything again. I have a bit of a problem, and it involves Burnout Paradise.

Read the rest of this entry »

Being up late last night, Alec and I were filled with the urge to post a screenshot from Plants Versus Zombies – or even better, an animated Gif – and just leave it there overnight. In a rare moment of leaning towards good taste, we decided against it. Waking up in the morning, we find that a mass of the mainstream games press have pulled together articles about his many appearances in videogames.

Googling around isn’t good enough, sez I. Someone should play the game.
Read the rest of this entry »

It is impossible to overstate quite how much open source emulator DOSBox has done for PC gaming. Without the tireless efforts of its volunteer staff, vast tracts of PC gaming history would be all but lost to us and our fancy modern operating systems. Yeah, the likes of Steam and GoG may be keeping olden classics in print, but c’mon – they’re doing it for the money more than for the love. The guys, though – they’re bally heroes. Even those aforementioned download services occasionally hook their wares onto DOSBox to ensure maxi-compatibility. So, on behalf of the PC gaming community, I would like to award them the biggest invisible medal in the world for it. Perhaps more usefully, I can direct you to the DOSBox website, where a brand new version of this essential retro gaming tool has just become available.
Read the rest of this entry »

With the announcement of Thief 4 (Thifourth) this week, it seemed an apposite time to go back to the very beginning and remember why this series was so special. Armed with a commission from Eurogamer, I snuck back to 1998 to play Thief: The Dark Project once again. It begins:

“This is a game where turning the difficulty up reduces the number of enemies you have to kill. Certainly it also increases the number of guards (but slightly and smartly, never feeling unfair or unrealistic), and repositions them into more strategic patrol routes. But it doesn’t make your weapons less effective, or raise enemy hit-points, or artificially hinder you in any ‘gamey’ way. It simply asks you to be a better, subtler, smarter thief.”

You can read the rest here.

It’s always fun to see what relics will appear on Good Old Games next. Plundering the PC gaming archives, they pull out a Duke Nukem 3D or a Stonekeep, and suddenly you’re back in the mid 90s, the blocky graphics and absence of physics are immediately forgotten, and you’re having a damned great time. And then there’s MegaRace. It’s fascinating to see it appearing – one of the most famously terrible games of all time, given new life. But is it really as bad as everyone remembers?

Read the rest of this entry »