🚀 go-pugleaf

Spalls Hurgenson  <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>In 1994, Sierra released an little game called "Outpost", that
>promised to let us fulfill all our sci-fi fantasies of creating our
>own colonies on far-off worlds. With impressive SVGA graphics,
>attention to realism and gameplay liberally cribbed from the
>award-winning SimCity games, it was expected to be one of the great
>classic games of the era. However, Outpost is now better remembered
>for unfulfilled promises and technical ineptitude so bad that even its
>sequel distanced itself from the original title's gameplay by becoming
>an RTS. The city-builder-in-space genre has remained relatively barren
>ever since... 

Oh, yah, Outpost, or Outhouse as it was often called here on
the newsgroups back in the day, is another contender for the
if-the-Internet-were-as-big over hyped game category.  I bought into the
hype and almost bought the game depsite the negative reviews it got here.
Fortunately, as I was taking the copy I was going to buy to the cash
register I realised that it was used copy and balked at paying nearly
full price for it.

I ended up going to a different store and getting Alien Legacy instead,
the other 1994 Sierra title that lets you create colonies on far-off
worlds.  It has its own problems but it pretty much tops my "overlooked
gems" list.  Its city building mechanics are pretty simplistic, it
doesn't matter where you put a building for instance, but I don't know
of any other game that has you mananging mutliple colonies across an
entire solar system.  The biggest difference from Outpost is that there's
actually a story giving purpose to the game.  You're trying to build up
your colonies and balance their needs while figuring out why the colony
ship that arrived before you vanished with barely a trace.

>Still, while playing The Witcher was often a tedious slog, it was
>generally a rewarding one. Despite its age, the game was still fairly
>good looking and it is still a more adult adventure than most CRPGs on
>the market today (and not just because of the sophomoric sex scenes).
>It just takes a lot more effort.

One thing about The Witcher 1 that stood out for me was those sex scenes.
Not the the scenes themselves, but the effort you had to go through to
see some of them.  Convincing a couple of the girls to sleep with you
were effectively optional quests in the game.  And unlike many side
quests or even story quests sometimes, it's not hard to see why your
character would actually motivated to do them.  I was disappointed that
they didn't expand on this in the sequel.

					Ross Ridge

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