Tag Archives: video games

In Praise Of: Mega Lo Mania

Waaaay back in the early nineties – let us say pre-1993 and Doom — the PC was something of a duff gaming platform in the UK. Computers had yet to become standardised, Windows was not yet ubiquitous, and whenever somebody writes an article about those dark days they inevitably fall to reminiscing about DOS installers and IRQ settings while muttering “You weren’t there, man,” to anyone who asks why the hell they went to all that trouble when the games console renaissance was in full swing. PCs tended to be used for beardy games like RPGs and simulations since the beardy were the only ones obsessive enough to make the sodding things work. If you wanted innovation and excitement in your gaming life you didn’t buy a PC. You bought an Amiga instead.

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Thoughts: Defender’s Quest.

A slight scheduling snafu means today’s article isn’t quite ready yet, so I’m swapping it with Tuesday’s. Tune in tomorrow if you want to read science!

This isn’t really a genuine review of Defender’s Quest. A genuine review would outline all – or at least most of – the specific reasons why you personally should or should not buy the game. However, the existence of this excellent browser-based demo makes a genuine review of Defender’s Quest entirely pointless. (Go ahead! Play it! It’ll even let you export your demo save to the full game if you end up liking it so much that you buy it!) Instead, I’m going to spend this column space writing about why I personally like Defender’s Quest, and why it is an outstanding example of – not to mention an excellent take on – the tower defence genre.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: Stand And Deliver!

After consulting a walkthrough to find out just where the hell I should be looking for this storeroom, Cate eventually finds the entrance concealed behind a secret door activated by a hidden lever – a hidden lever in a game where pretty much everything can be interacted with in some way. I’ve heard that the designers of Ultima VII loved hiding secrets behind the curious isometric viewpoint they’ve chosen to portray the game, but I wasn’t expecting them to secrete plot-critical items (a spellbook) inside a hidden object puzzle. There is definitely something to be said for the last two decades of progress in this regard.

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In Praise Of: Microprose Manuals.

Sitting on my desk just across from me is my copy of the original Civilization manual. It’s a relic of a bygone age: 129 pages long; written in a single language meaning all 129 pages are relevant; and just chock-full of information about how best to play the game. Twenty years ago this is what manuals for complex strategy games like Civilization had to be – while the game had what was for the time a very advanced in-game encyclopedia and tips system, dedicated interactive tutorials that taught the player to play as they played were not yet a thing. They couldn’t be; games came on a couple of floppy disks and computers and development philosophy were not yet mature enough to implement that sort of advanced feature.

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Thoughts: Unstoppable Gorg.

Just one thing before we start:

GORG! AAAAAAAHHH! HE IS THE UNSTOPPABLE!

Right, now that’s out of my system we can get on with the review.

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Ultima VII Odyssey: The Revolution Starts Here.

Never have I been so disappointed on entering a building as I was when Cate went inside the National Branch. Rather than a bank filled with all sorts of stealable valuables, it turns out instead to be Scientology Central where the head of the Fellowship, Batlin, lives.

Talking to him is predictably boring, but Cate does get one useful bit of information: Elizabeth and Abraham, two cultists – can I call them cultists yet? – who deal with the organisation’s money and who were up to entirely unsuspicious activities in Trinsic the night before the murder, have passed through Britain en route to somewhere else called Minoc. Next stop Minoc then, I guess.

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Thoughts: Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

For anyone born into the heady days of the early nineties, playing Sonic 4 is kind of like returning to your family home after a long absence only to find it populated by complete strangers. They say they know you. They say they’re your family. They say please put the knife down, you’ll hurt yourself. And then they say BLEEP BLOOP as you cut away their human-looking exterior to reveal the unfeeling robot automata beneath. Sonic 4 is a clinical, emotionless replica of the original games, an experience utterly devoid of any warmth or vital spirit. It’s the sort of game you’d expect to see if there was a race of intelligent aliens out there who had quixotically decided to make a Sonic sequel fifteen years after the last “true” instalment in the series – all the parts are there and they’re all working as you’d expect, but the end product is fundamentally wrong on a level so subtle you can’t define it.

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