The Good Old Days
 

Now online for more than 21 years itself, we're still doing our thing – talking about games ;)

What we're trying these days is not just mechanically describe, rate according to standard scales of "graphics", "sound" etc., but put things in historical context, see what still works in spite of age, but not hold back on pointing out what hasn't aged so well. All mixed up with personal memories, anecdotes etc.

Today's update: Pirates! on the Amiga.

Just to show overall variety, not Amiga related but on Saturday, we had Wizardry 4: The Return of Werdna and the week before that a new (!) Spectrum game called MetaMorphosis.

From the review...



That cracked me up!


I didn't like Gold that much. Just found out from the comments that the CD32 version is different as well.

The article implies that the Amiga port can't be controlled via joystick, which is not correct.

Nah, that is what you inferred from it ;) Anyway, thanks for the addition. Myself, I prefer playing with the mouse.

Congrats!

Lately I would read some old mags (EGM, GamePro, CVG etc.) and than check some games. Your site always helps find some original reviews back from the day. :great

Very interesting reding! Thanks!

Enviado desde mi Redmi Note 4 mediante Tapatalk

Joystick is great for swordfights, navigation and aiming cannons, use mouse.

Chris

Today's update: coverage of Skeleton Krew.

Updates since my last post:
Tales of Maj'Eyal: a highly polished roguelike which revitalized the genre ten years ago
The Telwynium: Book One – Winter's Dawn: a retro-style point & click adventure game released just last month

Somehow, I keep thinking that Chaos Engine 2 should be a good game. The idea behind it works for me. So I give it a try every couple of years :D

Chaos Engine 2 would have worked so much better if they simply hadn't called it Chaos Engine 2 but rather made it some spin-off game. You can't just drastically change the gameplay loop in a sequel and get away with it, they should have learned that from Zelda 2. It took eons before the "it is different so it is terrible" opinion of that game was washed away and it started to adopt fans.

Agreed, going against expectations was not a good idea at all. Dissociated from its huge legacy, by itself, the game isn't terrible. Still, even with another name, it would have needed more work. If anyone wants to give it a go a "remake", I wouldn't mind ;)

This week's update: XTrek.

Those were simpler times, when two paragraphs of text about sex with imaginary Star Trek characters were enough to excite people :D

Latest additions:
* Der Planer – German business simulation which is overall surprisingly non-awful
* The Train: Escape to Normandy – entertaining war action on the C64
* B.C. Kid – well, you all know this one :)
* Cannon Fodder 2 – unplayable sequel of an already too hard first game
* Captain Cutter's Treasure – modern day text adventure running on any computer from 8 bit up
* Wild Streets – awful street brawler from Titus
* Mech Commander – can this dethrone with MechForce as best Mech game?
* Bi-Fi Roll: Action in Hollywood – sorry, I keep a soft spot for cheesy promotional games ;)

The Revenge of Moriarty

Classic text adventure released in 2019 for multiple systems (including Amiga) featuring a MacGyver version of the great detective.

Don't know if Cannon Fodder was "too hard". The later levels were surely a kick in the teeth but aren't last levels supposed to be like that? :) It had a good difficulty ramp-up, and you could save your game in between missions.

I'll say this: losing high ranked soldiers (Jools, Jops, ...) in later levels is a right pain. I've reloaded a fair few times because of it. It'd probably have been nicer if people waiting would overtime get trained and increase in rank so you don't have to go into the harder levels with piss-poor range on your guns.

Cannon Fodder 2... yeah that was basically a community mod but developed in-house and released standalone. Designed for masochists.

Agree for the Cannon Fodder hardness, also the first one imo.
Unfair at least, ie the enemies that shoot rockets, and not yet viewable in the screen

Well, I was still using the original A500 tank mouse at the time Cannon Fodder came out... it was close to unplayable with that ;) On a more serious note, good point about losing the experienced soldiers. This is also something I really always disliked in shoot 'em ups: you die, you also lose all your power-ups. Great, so now the level which just killed me already became even harder!

This week's additions:

* Raptor: Call of the Shadows: when the shoot 'em up genre finally arrived on MS-DOS.
* Soccer Kid: awfully named, but remains one of my favourites in the genre to this day!

I like Raptor but it has one major design flaw: it overcrowds. The enemy sprites are rather large and more often than not the game likes to send waves at you where 4 are flying next to each other - that makes them use up most of the horizontal space since it has to fit in a limited 320*200 arena. Good luck dodging all of that.

It is one of those games where the difficulty ramps down; it starts really quite hard because you have really pissy weapons and no money, but when you manage to push through and get to the rocket rains and huge lasers, you're unstoppable.