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1) It was nowhere near as good as Red Alert. Too complicated, and not enough fun.
2) What the well was this box it came in? A DVD box, bah. Whatever happened to the good old cut-down-ten-trees-to-make-box-and-instructions big cardboard set-ups. They were great.
I miss the old games. It was after I bought Red Alert 2 I decided to give up PC gaming. And, to be honest, RA2 was the first PC game I'd bought in quite a while. About a year and a half, at least. So what was it that I missed so much about the old games? Well, can't have been the graphics, for sure, right? Wrong. For my example of this, I turn to the Broken Sword series, currently 2 titles in and with the 3rd epected some time next year. I simply loved Broken Sword : Shadow of the Templars. THE best point and click I've ever played, and the point and click genre is my favourite genre by far - making Broken Sword my favourite game ever. It was great, with bumbling George Stobbart and his leatherclad assistant Nico going all over the globe for the hell of it, and the most obscure things helping you to complete the quest. But thats the beauty of Broken Sword, in a way. Who would have thought that you'd only be able to get into the sewers at Montfaucon if you'd picked up the red clowns nose earlier? And the easiest way to escape villians is to throw C4 at them, right? Ah, that game was a classic. And it even had a little pong game when you were installing it to entertain you. Broken Sword 2: Smoking Mirror was no less amazing. So, you'd think by this pattern I'd be eargly anticipating Broken Sword 3 : Sleeping Dragon? No way. Because Revolution are under the idea that they have to 'modernise', to keep up with the gaming world. And for point and clicks, that means 3D. Oh god no, we all know what that did to the Monkey Island series, another masterpiece of 2D point and clicks, until they went 3D and magically went poor at the same time.
Bah, it's a real shame. Old PC games rocked. I used to love FPS. Used t being the operative words. Doom was amazing, we installed it at school and played it. Along with Lemmings. Anyone remember Lemmings? That was amazing, until they made it 3D...Anyway, back to FPS. Doom, yeah. Then came Quake, which was OK. But come Quake 3, which I played at a mates house, I got depressed. Just so complicated. And no single-player game, hardly. Therein is the problem. I have no interest in online gaming. Doesn't mean I don't want to play. Alright, it does these days, but it didn't back then. Single player, for me, is infinitely more fun that online gaming. There is one exception, and that was Diablo and Diablo II. Battle.net owned. I used to love gaming on there. Until my computer got wiped and I lost my level 88 Paladin all tooled up with a really huge sceptre. They were the only two games with a real difference and new experience to be had online, even if it only was collecting the ears of the poor hapless newbies who strayed into your game.
I come now, in all my wisdom that I don't have, to console gaming. Aha, you think, he's going to ramble about how good the good old days were. And you're right, of course. But that doesn't mean I don't think the Gamecube or X-Box could produce any decent games. Maybe not the X-Box. Anyway, I used to have a SNES. Twas great. I had Street Fighter II, and I used to deck my mates with Ryu. Then I had Super Mario World, and what an awesome platformer that was. I spent hours completing that, and when I did, not to worry, I had plenty of other games. Including Asterix and The Lion King, for some odd reason. I'm not quite sure where they came from. But the great obscure game I had was The Lost Vikings? Anyone here have that? Oh, it was great. You had three Vikings to control, right, and they'd been abducted by a space thingy. So you woke up on this space ship, and had to get through the level by alternating between the three Vikings, all of whom had different skills. One of them was called Erik, I remember, and could run really fast and smash stuff down with his head. Another was called Olaf, and had a big shield which could be used as a platform or a block to the space-uglies. The thirs one, I can't remember his name, but he had a bow and arrow and a sword, and he was mean. Shot space-uglies up a treat. Then he hacked them up, and probably quaffed some space-ale.
I miss that game. I have a Playstation 2 now, but the only reason I got that was for a cheap DVD Player in my room. So I half-heartedly got some games for it. Tekken Tag - Ryu could obviously kick Heihachi or King back to Japan or Korea or wherever. But then I found a great, original game. Devil May Cry. Loved it. Reminded me of Zelda on the N64, in a dark kind of way. I hacked stuff up, and loved it. Then I flew about and lightning-bolted anyone who thought they'd mock my silly red coat and gay white hair. Plus I was called Dante, and rate that as a cool name. When they got really hard and mocked my lightning boltedness, I donned some orange gloves and pelted them with fireballs until they were sorry and/or dead. But then it finished. Shortest game ever. Whats up with that? Damn, almost had a classic there. Instead I get half a classic. I got GTA3 after that, and yeah that was fun, mowing down pensioners and thinking you really should get on with the missions instead of jumping cars with an ambulace. But then that got boring. I can remember on the N64 how Zelda: Ocarina of Time never got boring. At all. All the way through I loved it. Maybe I'm just a Ninty, but I doubt it. Games these days just don't interest me as much.
It's not so much the lack of originality, but that is a factor. It's that everyone takes games so seriously these days. Sam and Max, Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle - those were blatantly mick-take games. And thats why they ruled. Games these days think they have to be serious. It's a big shame.
Anyway, thats my rant finished. While you guys may prefer to drive perfectly rendered cars around a track and comment seriously on how the handling echoes that of a real car, I remember Mario Kart where you shoot shells at other people. Excellent.
> 1) It was nowhere near as good as Red Alert. Too complicated, and not
> enough fun.
>
> 2) What the well was this box it came in? A DVD box, bah. Whatever
> happened to the good old
> cut-down-ten-trees-to-make-box-and-instructions big cardboard set-ups.
> They were great.
I can't agree there, red alert 2 is one of my fave games. Admittedly it is a bit more complex than ra1, but aren't sequels supposed to be more advanced.
I did used to like getting huge boxes with my games, they looked good and you felt you were getting more for your dough, but truth be told, once you've looked at the box , you will probably put it in a cupboard and not look at it again, as the CD in its case is all you need to play.
The only thing that annoys me is on some games they choose not to supply a manual, putting it on the CD instead, which is just cheap in my view.
"Stryke's drug dreams of a better Orcdom are touching"
I have drug dreams. Cool.
> I intend to get that series. Just because I'm in it. Stan Nicholls
> writes them, right? I don't agree with Orcs being good though. Tut
> tut. They should be mean and have names like Azgog and kill dwarves.
They are mean in that series. VERY mean.
From what I read (The first book only) they can be a little too gruesome. At one point a troop of Orcs ravage a village killing men. And gruesome acts such as an Orc Queen forcing a Man to go.. ahem.. to bed. She of course kills him after!.
Mean as mean can be, you'd be surprised.
> Maybe not the X-Box.
Eh?
read The Bodyguard of Lightning series.
A lot of 2D-3D conversions go wrong somewhere. Look at tetris and the attempts at bringing that to 3D. Tetrisphere? Pah...
Some 2D-3D conversions are good... puzzle games usually aren't in my experience.
I dunno if I ever won it... I remember I got to the last set of levels set on the aliens spaceship though that was undoubtedly more due to the set of codes me and my brother found than skill :D
Can't remember if either of us actually won it though. I'm sure they made a sequel, I think I remember seeing on the PSX a while ago...? But if they made it into a 3D game, the sequel would be crap...
> Agent Under Fire sucks. Anyway I HAD THE LOST VIKINGS! And yes, it did
> rock! All the worlds were cool too... I remember one world like a
> clown/playroom kind of one. And a few alien spaceship levels. The game
> was rock hard too.
--
Yeah, I never managed to complete it. I got to this swamp type level, and my mean Mr T-wannabe Viking with sword kept on getting fried by a energy shooting thing. I tried to use shiled guy, but he got fried too. God I loved that game. Especially the intro, when they all got beamed up.
"Ug, where are we? Olaf head hurt. More mead."
:D