🚀 go-pugleaf

Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know. This thread is very late. In my defense
I've had a busy few days, not helped the least by the sunburn covering
three quarters of my body (it's not so much as its painful as that
sunburns make me sleepy). But here's the thread started at last.

This month I've either played very few games, or achieved a record
high number, depending on how you count things. Much of my time was
spent delving into the intricacies of DOSBox and ancient DOS gaming.
Although I only finished three games to completion, I touched at least
sixty other titles. Some only occupied my time for a few minutes,
while others entertained me for hours and hours. The DOS environment
itself was almost as enthralling, as I relearned the "skills" of the
command-line, BATCH files and Windows .INI files.


--------------------
Short and Sweet
--------------------

* The Orion Conspiracy (new)
* Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis (replay)
* The Last of Us (replay)
* DOSBox!!!!


TL; DR 
----------

* The Orion Conspiracy (new)
If I were pressed to list a few of my favorite games ever, 1995's
"Mission Critical" by Legend Entertainment would rank near the top. A
beautifully illustrated, well-written game with solid puzzles and an
excellent story, it was a mature and thought-provoking sci-fi
adventure; a stark contrast to its competitors, which too often relied
on trope-filled fantasy and comedy situations with inane and illogical
challenges. But "Mission Critical" wasn't the only adventure game
released that year which promised a more adult take on sci-fi than the
usual space-opera that was an all too commonly-used genre in computer
gaming; there was also Domark's "The Orion Conspiracy". Less focused,
the ad-copy promised, on battles between good and evil or aliens vs
humans, it was a more grounded story that starts simply enough when a
grieving father arrives at a distant space station to investigate the
death of his recently-deceased son.

"The Orion Conspiracy" came and went with very little splash; it got
poor reviews and disappeared from store shelves quite soon after it
was released. Yet it was a game that I have long wanted to play, and
after more than two decades of (not-very-intensive) searching, I was
fortunate enough to get my hands on a copy.

Initial impressions were not kind. Despite promises of "CD quality
music", I never got the game to output its soundtrack as anything but
MIDI. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing; a properly written
MIDI soundtrack can be quite impressive and be far more reactive to
the gameplay than Redbook audio, but this game's music boasted neither
of these. Even with a wavetable soundcard and a decent patch-set, the
game sounded little better than the peeps and pops you might have
heard on an ancient Adlib FM synthesizer. It wasn't even very good
music; just a dull collection of droning melodies that made me want to
quickly drop the volume so I wouldn't have to listen to it anymore.
The game did boast full voice-acting and the quality of the wave files
was acceptable, but the acting itself was poor; stilted, and full of
mispronunciations and weirdly emphasized. The background artwork was
acceptable and in some places even quite interesting (at least when
viewed through the filter of a 1995 gamer) but the character sprites
were badly detailed and poorly animated, looking little better than
what you might have seen from a game five years its junior.

Unfortunately, the gameplay itself was little better. Its 30 or so
characters had very detailed back-stories, but all this history was
wasted by the terrible voice-acting and lack of any real
interactivity. The game was a more "mature" adventure only in the fact
that some of its characters cursed like sailors, but otherwise it
failed to be thought provoking in any way. The puzzles were fairly
mundane, but too often I was left without any direction; solving the
puzzles wasn't the hard part, but finding them was. The map layout was
horrid; the space station where the action took place was divided into
multiple floors, but access to the different floors required constant
backtracking to the elevators scattered on level 2. Plus, in the end,
the plot devolved to yet-another-alien-invasion storyline. 

Sometimes anticipation of a game is far, far more enjoyable than
actually playing the damn thing.




* Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis (replay)
Viewed from a distance, 1992's "Fate of Atlantis" is an unexceptional
game; it's a run-of-the-mill adventure game from the mid-90s with all
the usual tropes and problems those titles. Its puzzles were often
illogical "guess-what-the-developer-is-thinking" type-challenges, with
a fairly nonsensical story requiring an unfortunate amount of
backtracking. 

Visually, the game is run-of-the-mill, but not without charm. Much of
its background art lacks in detail and character, but there are a few
scenes that are quite memorable. The animation is well done and
varied, and the tiny sprites are surprisingly emotive given how few
pixels are used in their creation. While the soundtrack - MIDI based,
as was common for games of its era - lacks the weight of a more modern
soundtrack, the game utilized the available technology fairly well and
the music - never annoying - supported the story and action far more
often than it hindered it. 

The puzzles were not the greatest - and some, such as the interminable
hot-air balloon sequence - were obvious padding - but many felt
natural extensions of the current situation. Some did suffer by
requiring the player to repeatedly backtrack between two or three
locations to find the necessary item (often by trial and error,
because the solution was randomized). Yet these faults were
counter-balanced by the fact that the game offered three distinct
story-lines (they three stories rejoined near the end); quantity in
this case more than made up for a slight deficiency in quality. The
voice-acting was surprisingly good for a game produced in the mid 90s,
too.

"Fate of Atlantis" will never top my "favorite adventures ever" list,
but its decent production values and variety of gameplay make up for
the fact that it doesn't really evolve the genre in any way. It was a
solid title well worth revisiting.




* The Last of Us (replay)
I didn't get very far with this game, but it's all my fault. Having
played through the game two or three times before, I thought I was
ready for the hardest difficulty level. It turns out that while I can
fight and sneak my way through the game that way, the constant
challenge and reloading drained the fun right out of the experience.
"The Last of Us'" strength is in the character of its world and its
protagonists, and that is lost when one is constantly forced to focus
on the enemies rather than the beautiful scenery or the tiny, optional
interactions between the protagonists. Playing on hard also made me
realize how shallow the actual gameplay of the game was; with its lack
of variety in monsters and puzzles. I struggled through about half of
the game before I just finally tired of the whole thing and decided to
move on. I know one day I'll give "The Last of Us" another try, but
I'll do it with the difficulty cranked down so I can experience the
game's strengths - its world-building - rather than its weaker
elements, such as its gameplay.

* DOSBox!!!!
I've maintained a DOSBox installation on my hard-drive for more than a
decade. DOSBox is an invaluable tool for a PC gamer who wants to
re-experience the highs - and the lows - of old-school gaming. I'm
thrilled that it's been taken up as a middle-ware tool by many
publishers so they can re-release their older titles. But I personally
prefer having a full DOSBox installation rather than relying on DOSBox
as an invisible shim used to get old-school games running on modern
hardware.

So this month I spent a lot of time playing around in DOSBox. While I
did use it to play numerous games, I had as much fun fiddling with the
DOSBox subsystems and revisiting the ancient DOS environment. I
successfully got the Gravis and Roland emulation working. I installed
Windows 3.11 and 4DOS. I reinstalled ancient DOS shells and
word-processors (the latter subsequently allowing me to read documents
I had written 20 years ago). I created an overly complicated DOS games
launcher through the power of DOS Batch file scripting. I had fun -
yes, fun - messing around with IRQ, DMA and I/O port settings. And I
played games.

Currently my installed DOS games are an eclectic and impressive
selection. While I didn't spend too much time playing on any one of
these games individually, all of them provided me a degree of
nostalgic entertainment. Alphabetically, these games included
Bioforge, Bards Tale (1-3, although I spent the most time on Bards
Tale 1), Bill Elliot's NASCAR Challenge, Commander Keen, Crusader No
Remorse, Cybermage Darklight Awakening (awful!), Darklands,
Destruction Derby, Doom, Dragon Wars (a game I loved so much I wrote
fanfic for it back in the day), F-117 Stealth Fighter 2.0, Falcon 3.0,
Flashback, Hexen, Ironman Stewart's Super Offroad Racing, Lemmings 1 &
2, Mission Critical, Master of Orion 1 & 2, Need For Speed Special Ed,
Nuclear War, One Must Fall 2097, Overkill, Populous 2, Pacific Strike,
Scorched Earth (shareware; I really should get around to registering
it one of these days :), SimCity and SimCity 2000, Star Trek 25th
Anniversary, Star Trek A Final Unity, Star Wars Dark Forces, Strike
Commander, Syndicate, Syndicate Wars, Terra Nova Strike Force
Centauri, Terminator 2029, Ultima 5, Ultima 7, Ultima 7.5, Ultima 8,
Underworld 1 & 2, 'Vette, Whiplash, Wing Commander 1, 2, Privateer and
Armada, Wings of Glory, Wolfenstein 3D and X-Com UFO Defense (whew!).
Fortunately, I had either imaged the original floppy disks or was able
to transfer the files over from the GOG.com installations (although in
a few cases I had to go out and re-purchase one of these classic
games). A number of them proved troublesome to install but that, after
all, was half the fun. 

Many of the games, admittedly, have not aged well. Almost of the games
that used the PC speaker for their sound effects are practically
unplayable as far as I am concerned, regardless of how entertaining
the rest of the game might be (I'm looking in your direction in
particular, 'Vette!). I was surprised at how difficult many of the
games were; truly we modern gamers have been spoiled both by varying
difficulty levels and iterative play-testing. Control schemes were
almost universally awful; even when they didn't require me to contort
my hand into uncomfortable positions, they were rarely as responsive
as required by the quick-paced action. But a few games remained
remarkably enjoyable (Need For Speed SE, for instance, kept me
wonderfully enthralled for hours and hours). 

I don't know how often I'll be returning to my DOSBox installation,
but I love that I have such a huge selection available at my
fingertips, all the more so since the whole thing weighs in at a
surprisingly light 10GB (less than the 1/3 the space required by one
modern game!). There are so many classic and often forgotten titles
from yesteryear and it's always a blast to revisit these archaic
experiences, both to enjoy the games themselves and to see how far our
hobby has advanced since those early years.

--------------------

So my month was full; I hope yours was equally so. Let's find out.

What have you been playing... IN JUNE 2017?