Old Game Tuesday - Rocket Arena 2, Jailbreak
May 26, 2008 PC Games
Note: Release this early as I’ve missed a few. Thanks for reading!
I remember the time fondly. Having switched away from gaming on computers (via my C64 and the like) I had been hooked on Nintendo console and handheld systems. One fateful day, I went over to my friend James’s house to play on the new computer he had built, which in and of itself was a new concept to me. He also had a massive stereo system connected to it. It was at his house that I first encountered real network gaming. He started Quake 2 and joined a deathmatch server. I was floored. I had never thought of such a thing, here we were, playing a game against real PEOPLE across the INTERNET. I never laughed so hard at getting beat down in a game, and I wanted more. I wanted to get better. I was hooked.
I started pricing computer parts the next day. I ended up with a Pentium 166mmx (gives you an idea of the timeframe here), a Riva 128 video card, and a couple of game recommendations from James. I installed and played Quake 2, never getting very far in the single player as each new patch for multiplayer killed your savegames. I started going to PlanetQuake, and that’s where I found out that there was a whole community of people coding modifications for games. I installed a couple of the most popular, Rocket Arena 2 and Jailbreak. Rocket Arena (2 for Quake 2, it was available for all the Quake games as well as UT and others) takes deathmatch combat and evens the playing field. A player with knowledge of a particular DM map could dominate based on knowing where to get all the items and weapons, not based on skill. RA2 just gives you all the weapons allowed (based on map/server settings) and once you get killed, you are out for that round. IIRC, You could play one-on-one or team matches, though my favorite were the maps that took everybody and split them in to two teams. Mayhem.
Jailbreak is another teamplay mod, again splitting players into red and blue teams. You have a base to defend, the major difference being that upon death, you were put in a jail. Your teammates could then attempt to break you out by busting in to the enemy base. Some maps also had a way to break at least a few of your guys out of the jail cell, if you could get some cooperation. Both mods, in fact, first got me thinking about team-based play as fun. Up to that point, my attempts to play CTF usually ended up with me going back to regular ol’ DM. Now I gave it another try. (UT’s CTF really sold me though)
These mods, along with Starcraft and MechWarrior 2 (the other game witnessed that fateful day) are what got me back in to gaming on the PC platform, and I’ve been there ever since. Even though it seems to be drying up a bit with the advances console gaming has taken.
Tags: id, id software, ogt, pc games, pc gaming, quake 2, quake ii, ra2, rocket arena, rocket arena 2
Old Game Tuesday - Stars!
Apr 29, 2008 PC Games
As I roll through these old games, you are going to notice that 4X games are well-represented. One of my personal favorites is Stars!, released wa-a-ay back in 1995. Jeff Johnson and Jeff McBride created the game for their own enjoyment, and decided to release it as Shareware. People still did that back then, you know. I came in a bit later, after Empire Interactive picked it up to sell in stores.
By the way, a bit on 4X: it means eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. The details vary game to game, but in general in a 4X game you start with a base of operations (your home planet in Stars!, or your Settler unit in Civ), from which you expand your territory. You have to exploit the resources of the map, and exterminate your opponents. That’s one that varies now, as there are usually less than lethal win conditions.
Stars! has all the 4x standards. You begin with one planet and a couple of ships. Early turns are spent exploring the nearby systems and colonizing whatever ones are habitable by your (customizable) race. During this time your scientific research is progressing, and some basic improvements are being built. Soon enough, you will encounter your first opponent, ripe for destruction. As time goes by, your research ramps up and you start learning of new technologies, from weapons and shields to new terraforming abilities. If there is one downside to the game, it’s the sheer volume of stuff to manage. There are dozens of ship parts, for example, and a whole mess of hulls for custom-designing ships. It really hepls to try and keep a standard naming convention for ships, creative names are fun but not when you can’t remember the stats for each one. There’s a TON of micro-management in the game, which of course is not for everyone, but can get tedious. Thankfully, planetary management has some helpful shortcuts, including the ability to save preset build orders. You can set a default that any new colony starts to build as well.
There is a lot more I could say - this is one of those games that I always come back to, and it never gets old. It’s very hard to find, I’m not even sure if you can get CD keys for it any more, but if you like this style game and find a copy, try it!
Old Game Tuesday - M.U.L.E.
Apr 22, 2008 PC Games
M.U.L.E. holds the distinction of being the game I’ve probably played the longest. I was first exposed to it on my old Commodore 64, and though there are many classics from that era (which may be covered here in the future), this is the one that has kept my interest continually since then.
M.U.L.E. is a game of economic strategy. You begin as colonists on the planet Irata (it’s Atari backwards, you see). The goal is to build up the colony for a set period of time based on the difficulty level chosen, and individually, to build your wealth. Up to four players could participate, either human or computer, and there were multiple ’species’ to choose from with various bonuses or handicaps. Each pioneer picks plots of land (with an occasional auction of additional plots) and then takes turns working them. The M.U.L.E.s (Multiple Use Labor Elements) themselves are robotic assistants that are outfitted with equipment to harvest Food, Energy, Smithore (to make more M.U.L.E.s) and Crystite (in Tournament mode). After each player has their turn, their plots of land experience their growth cycle, assuming they have a M.U.L.E. on them that is outfitted properly. Oh, and there is a bit of game balance each turn. The player with the lowest score gets a boon (bonus money from an inheritance, etc.) and the player with the highest gets smacked down a bit (darn glak-elves).
Next up is the auction…and here’s where it gets nasty. Each player gets a chance to buy and sell the various commodities, either to other players or the store. The store runs out at times, though, forcing you to rely on the other players for what you need to survive. Not enough energy, some of your plots go fallow. No food, and you have very little time to work your plots. If the colony has no smithore, no more M.U.L.E.s, or the cost of them go up. There is a fine line, you want to be the winner, but if the colony collapses, you all lose. You can try and hoard all the energy and force your opponents to pay through the nose - they even provided a way to collude with another player as a feature - but an ill-timed global event (pirates stealing all the smithore!) could be disastrous.
The game was developed by Dan (later Dani) Bunten, who also made several other favorites of mine, Seven Cities of Gold and Command HQ. She pioneered several features that are commonplace in games now, including multiplayer and modem/network gaming. M.U.L.E. is widely available via emulation, with the original Atari 800 version being the most popular. I’ll link it up tonight if I get a chance. Now I’m off to hunt the mountain wampus…
edit: Here’s the link, just go to the download page and pick your version of Windows. Has everything you need. You can even play over the network or internet with a bit of work.
Tags: bunten, games, gaming, m.u.l.e., ogt, pc games, pc gaming, wampus
Old Game Tuesday - Oni
Apr 15, 2008 Console Games, PC Games
Programming Note: I’m looking to make this a regular feature, as I am constantly revisiting older games, and many of those are games that maybe were overlooked for some reason. We’ve also been cleaning quite a bit so I’ve rediscovered a bunch of lost favorites. If anyone has any suggestions (or wants to guest review an ‘older’ game) let me know.
I bought Oni a bit after it was released, although I had been interested in it right off the bat. I think I got it in a two pack with Rune. Anyway, Oni is a third-person action game that focuses on melee combat. There are weapons which can help in a pinch, but the real draw was the martial-arts combat. The design is obviously anime-inspired, what with the purple-haired heroine named Konoko. The game is set in a near-future timeline where a world government is in place, and you are a new agent for the ‘Technological Crimes Task Force’, or TCTF. You progress through missions taking on organized crime and investigating your origins.
What I like about Oni is the melee combat. It’s a pretty simple system of punches and kicks, with some short combos for extra oomph. It’s good enough to produce in me what I call the Lightsaber effect - where I want to use that combat mode exclusively, even though there are perhaps better weapon choices for a given situation. There is a definite visceral thrill to successfully sneaking up on a guard and executing a back-breaker compared to just shooting them from cover.
The game does suffer from some of the same issues as many older games in the genre, namely that many of the levels (while nicely laid out and expansive) are mostly filled with crates. The voice-overs are cheesy (and some overlong, looking at you Shinatama) but the cheesiness fits with the anime style. There’s no multiplayer, though it was tried and dropped. I’ve seen fan sites out there where Oni fans are trying to resurrect it, though. For the most part, the game was a victim of Bungie getting bought by Microsoft, as the development and release of Oni happened right in the middle of that. Sort of got lost in the shuffle.
If you can still find it, Oni is a fun experience that is one of the few games of that era I wanted to experience again. Late Edit: also available for PlayStation 2 and Mac. Almost forgot to mention that.
Tags: bungie, mac, mac games, microsoft, ogt, oni, pc games, pc gaming
