What’s best to do on a stormy spring autumn evening in your cozy carpeted living room with fireplace lightened messy bachelor apartment on the seventh floor while the wind cries outside through the trees concrete gaps? Correct! Playing a nice and well-matured Role-playing Game like for example Ultima.
Ultima is the one role-playing game where you start in the present world and then travel into a fantasy parallel world of Britannia, usually via a portal. Here’s a nice video (from RetroHD) of the last game in the Ultima series, Ultima 9 -- Ascension which introduces the beginning of the game.
Today’s video pick (yeah right, as if I had a new post everyday here) is from YouTube user Five5Six and about how he managed to get Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic to run on DOSBox with Tandy sound enabled. That’s right, Tandy sound! By default the game uses those bleepy PC speaker sounds as in my own video. Personally I haven’t yet figured out how to get Tandy sound working with this game, so there … a video with the marvelous Tandy-enabled sound of SW1:FM in all it’s glory …
The classic dungeon crawler Sword of Fargoal has been released for the iPhone and it turns out that it’s one of the few computer/console-game-to-iPhone conversions I’ve came across that are actually fun to play on the touch-screen (unlike, say, Sonic, Bomberman et al). Go check it out if you’re into RPGs with an ever-changing maze-like dungeon accompanied by nicely done atmospheric music and sound effects.
Back in the days when computer games still required you to use your imagination to play them there was a role-playing game pearl named Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic, one of the many scifi-themed RPGs back then which today are only sparsely seeded in retailer shelves.
Future Magic was first released for DOS and a port for the C64 was published later which looked almost equally good as the DOS version with excellent graphics done by Michael Kosaka. At times the game is quite bizarre. For example there is a planet with ranchers and farms just like in an old western. Another planet has two very high towers that reach into the orbit and these are the only colonies on the otherwise untouched surface. On another, icy planet you scout an abandoned research base which is overrun by saber-toothed creatures … but this is how the games were made in the golden age of RPG. Despite the number in the title a follower was never developed for Future Magic but instead the acclaimed Hard Nova served as a spiritual sequel.
The game let’s you control a group of five space mercs who are send out on a mission to stop mysteriously appearing raiders which are attacking ships in the local system. Right after your ships drops out of hyperspeed you are being attacked by them. However while the other ships of the space convoy with that you came are trying to fight them you are able to take some distance and locate a yacht floating in nearby space. It’s the space yacht of a tycoon named Grager which turns out to be a luxurious vessel full with the newest technology.
After their last RPG masterpiece release, the Might & Magic 6-Pack, gog.com have now released Realms of Arkania 1+2 and 3. RoA is the English version of what I only knew as Das Schwarze Auge in German back in the 16-bit days of Amiga. If my memory serves me right only the first part of RoA made it to the Amiga while the two followers were only available for DOS.
Realms of Arkania is classic hardcore role-playing, flip3D style intermezzed with isometric combat screens and you can get this for a ridiculous cheap price now.
So far gog.com is only releasing DOS or Windows based games. For some games I wish they’d add Amiga games to their line-up simply because many Amiga games were better than their DOS conversions, just take a look at highly regarded Hired Guns. in case of Hired Guns you feel that the developers were a team of Amiga enthusiasts. The DOS version feels bland and rushed compared to the shiny and atmosphere-oozing Amiga version.
Either way, for DOS games Good Old Games are packing their releases up with a copy of DOSBox pre-configured and ready to install and run. For Amiga versions they would probably have to pack up a copy of WinUAE to assure a hassle-free experience. Not sure how that would work out.
While Jagged Alliance is without discussion one of the finest squat squad-based strategy games ever made that has seen the daylight, I especially enjoy the ‘personal’ characteristics that the mercenaries bring with them and the frivolous Butt Groping demonstrated in this clip shows this side of JADG nicely. The map seen in this video is one of the scenarios that can be found here.
Thy Dungeonman 3: Behold Thy Graphics, a text/graphics adventure from Homestarrunner in the style of the very early days of computing. Complete with fake floppy load delay and amber screen display! You find yourself in a dungeon cell with doom lurking all around you. The texts are intentionally exaggerated old ‘english’ and once you got out of the first area you’ll notice that this game plays quite smooth. It’s a short but funny and while you’re there, you find several other oldschool imitations on Homestarrunner and videlectrix.com.
Everybody has probably by now blogged about this but Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall are writing a Commodore C64 emulator in ActionScript 3.0! It is still to early to tell how this will take shape but things are looking good so far and by the current state the basic ROM works already. Try it and type the following listing in …
Note that you need the latest Flash Player PlugIn (9.0) to see this. Either way this is exciting stuff and shows how powerful AS 3.0 and Flash Player 9 are going to be. Additionally the current beta player is a debug-only version that throttles the speed down several times. The final Player might be quite a bit faster.
From the good old days of low-res pixeling to todays high resolution blood
Videogame violence anno 1984 - Jack The Ripper (C64) ...
Sex and violence was a topic in video games since the early days of computer game history. Some people might not have realized it but there was always an urge to use forbidden topics in a virtual scenario not just since recently. Even among the first text adventures were subjects with quite a lot of (fictional) violence and blood. Remember The Lurking Horror from Infocom, a horror text adventure or Jack The Ripper which already introduced some graphical images of violence.
More Shoot’em’up goodness can be found at Shmups!, a website dedicated to 2D Shooter games with plenty of reviews and information from Katakis on the C64 over Z-Out on Amiga up to Ketsui on Arcade machines! Z-Out wasn’t the best Shooter maybe but Chris Huelsbeck’s music on level 4 and 6 was brilliant! I still like the music of Gunbird a lot!
I’ve bought an Owltech PC-0301 today! That’s an adapter in form of a 5 1/2 inch drive bay insert which offers two ports for connecting Playstation controllers to the PC and use them for a crapload of things. They not only perform well for usual PC games but also worked great on PSX Emu’s and WinVice and WinUAE and MAME32 and… well that where the ones which I’ve tested so far. Gunbird with PSX Analogue Control rocks! Installation was super-easy with plugging to a free USB port and a 3-click-long driver installation from the included CD.
I know what you think! And you are right! I’ve been absent for a while again from here but there are reasons for it. I’m working on a bigger scale personal Flash Project since shortly. As soon as I can tell more about it I will open a Flash category here to post more of Flash things like news about the project, actionscripting tips and code snippets which might be useful!
More and more people becoming something like a Retro-game-developer which is good news! It seems recently even the now young generation loves to play videogames that have an age of 10 years and beyond. Today’s games come with high class super realtime rendered 3D graphics and cinematic atmosphere but still the games from yesterday keep their spirit. I believe the reason for this comes a lot from the fact that the simplified graphic of old games allows more room for one’s own fantasy. While today’s high class 3D games look good while you play them (a decent hardware assumed), classics from the 8 and 16bit era look always good – in a gadget-likewise way.
The other day I was playing the Point Lookout Add-on for Fallout 3 and there is this one main quest where you go to inspect an area named Calvert Mansion just to run into a ghoul named Desmond. He seemed very busy trying to defend the mansion against Tribal intruders and without asking me directly... [READ]
More Shoot’em’up goodness can be found at 
More and more people becoming something like a Retro-game-developer which is good news! It seems recently even the now young generation loves to play videogames that have an age of 10 years and beyond. Today’s games come with high class super realtime rendered 3D graphics and cinematic atmosphere but still the games from yesterday keep their spirit. I believe the reason for this comes a lot from the fact that the simplified graphic of old games allows more room for one’s own fantasy. While today’s high class 3D games look good while you play them (a decent hardware assumed), classics from the 8 and 16bit era look always good – in a gadget-likewise way.
