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in reply to: Games for moms #4468

My mum likes RPGs. She was all about Eye of the Beholder and the Lands of Lore series. I think the last major game she played was Skyrim and its expansions.

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in reply to: Inventory Seems Buggy #4393

I have the manual – it’s included with the Steam release – but it’s only 7 pages long and most of those are taken up with a history lesson and installation instructions.

The only key it mentions is P for pausing time on the valley map, but I’ve found the arrow keys do move the cursor around.

I can’t get my inventory to scroll at all.

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in reply to: DreamWeb #4322

I tried to play this a few years back. It seemed to have a lot of potential, but it’s extremely unforgiving as I recall. You can pick up pretty much every inconsequantial bit of rubbish and put it in your inventory. I think you can even pick up individual peas that have dropped on the floor in one room. I never knew which items mattered and which didn’t. I eventually got into a point of no return where I’d get shot and die as I stepped out of an elevator.

I’d be willing to go back to it. The art was super cool, the cyberpunk vibe was nice, I think the music was pretty good too.

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in reply to: 3D Tetris called BlockOut from 1989 #4297

TigerQuoll: yep, pretty sure that’s the same one. Maybe it was actually CGA and I’m misremembering, we had some 8-bit machines in the house that did way more colours than CGA so it could’ve just seemed like monochrome.

I don’t know where he got it from, could have been second hand from the BBC where he worked at the time.

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in reply to: Terminal Velocity #4290

I got this off the Duke Nukem 3D CD-ROM, I think it was the shareware version and I was super impressed at how well it ran in true 3D.

Of course, it was coded by Mark Randel who was lead programmer on Microsoft Flight Simulator before founding Terminal Reality to create Terminal Velocity. Terminal Reality are still around today and Mark’s still the CEO.

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in reply to: Ideal way to play ROTT these days? #4287

There’s WinROTT and something called rottexpr that I couldn’t get to work, and also the GOG version of the game is pretty well packaged. I’ve tried WinROTT and it seems pretty broken on Windows 10 – It always runs fullscreen with the window title and menu bar visible, and the resolution selection doesn’t work properly.

I’d say the best way to play it is the GOG version, which includes some helpful utils to play COMM-BAT games via DOSBox’s IPX tunneling if you care about that.

I’ve not found any accelerated versions, but I doubt the game would really benefit much from that. I think it would make the limitations of the Wolf3D engine rather more obvious…

Edit: I just tried the more recent WinRottAPI which is supposed to be for Windows 64 bit machines and it doesn’t feel right at all. Movement is very juddery on my machine at 1024×768, and the window is too small for the game screen so it gets cropped on the right and bottom edge. The WinROTTGL version doesn’t work at all with missing DLL errors for me, I guess it needs some OpenGL DLLs I don’t have. Stick with DOSBox!

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in reply to: 3D Tetris called BlockOut from 1989 #4263

I remember this! This and Prince of Persia were the first two games I played on PC when my dad brought home a second-hand Olivetti M24 around 1990. Green phosphor monitor and PC speaker sound didn’t do it many favours. Looking back on it gives me the warm fuzzies but I’m not sure it was that great a game in hindsight. It had a cool title screen, though.

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in reply to: Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty #4262

I love Dune II, not least because of the awesome Frank Klepacki MT-32 soundtrack. You can really hear the roots of the Command & Conquer soundtracks here.

I got used to not having group-select when I played it a few months ago. The game’s simple enough not to require as many units as C&C does, and I found the number of units required to complete the missions was usually manageable, provided you make liberal use of the vehicles ability to squash dudes. I was playing as Atreides, though, and they’re supposedly the easiest house.

I found the minimap that appears once you build an Outpost to be essential because you can click on it to give orders without having to pan away from your current view. Click a unit, press M for move or A for attack, then click somewhere in the minimap to complete the order. This is especially nice for quickly ordering those blundering harvesters around.

I remember completing this game as a kid, only to see various parts of the emperor turn purple before my weird knock-off copy hard locked after the final battle. I think I played Ordos then, I remember their ability to take over enemy units being stupidly overpowered.