f2bnp
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f2bnpParticipantI’d heard about Outlaws for many years, usually people that played back in the day tended to wax poetic about it. I finally got the chance to play it back in 2020 or so. I have to say that while I wasn’t completely enamored with the game, I was fascinated in a few ways. First off I adore the score and the many Ennio Morricone motifs in it, as well as the phenomenal for the era cutscenes, an audio-visual treat and major upgrade over Full Throttle, The Dig and Dark Forces in the way they were animated and also much better compressed.
As far as the game goes, I felt it truly belonged in 1997. Vast open spaces with vertical traversal, similar to Jedi Knight at times. I enjoyed levels like that, those set in towns less so. I think Outlaws may have played great in multiplayer, there’s something to be said about its reload mechanic, I can see how it would have led to stressful moment-to-moment combat. I believe it’s also one of the first to implement scoped weapons in the way that it does.
Gripes? Well, ammo and health pickups can be a bit scarce at times and the enemies can take you down fairly easily. It’s really more a pop’n’shoot kind of FPS, you’re not expected to get far if you just rush things.
I had a good time with it overall, I’m sure I would have adored it at the time!
f2bnpParticipantIf you liked LBA or LBA2 even slightly, but want less combat and more adventure/puzzles, take a look at The Touryst, it is in a lot of ways very similar (and also has a cute voxel engine/look).
f2bnpParticipantLBA 3 has been kicked around as an idea from way back and it resurfaces every now and then. I can’t recall how these were made public, but there was a working title for the project which went something along the lines of “The Stellar Entity Genesis” and even a story layout which included Twinsen and Zoe’s teenage son as one of the main characters.
I’m unsure when the interview above took place, but I’d imagine it’s been some years. I can’t see it happening any time soon. The current IP holders, 2.21, have stated that they are working on a remake/re-imagining of the original title, a move which I welcome to be honest.
f2bnpParticipantLBA2 is indeed both DOS and Win95. The version they used to ship on digital storefronts was the DOS version running under DOSBox, but that changed 2 weeks ago when they released a new version that’s native to Windows (and other platforms maybe, haven’t looked into it?) using a modern codebase. They also added a new camera system among other things, it’s cool!
f2bnpParticipantOh lord… that ad!
f2bnpParticipantHey, I’m glad you managed to beat it! Pat yourself on the back, it ain’t an easy feat! I’m of the opinion that the greatest issue with this game is as you said the lack of direction and guidance, it feels pretty aimless at times, so I feel no shame in looking up where to go next. It’s just a sign of the times, trial & error was a far easier pill to swallow at the time and it made games feel longer than they necessarily were.
I have a very good friend with whom I beat this game again a few years ago who happened to play a demo of it on PS1 way back and he had such a detailed memory of the prison entrance of the game, even though it was such a small demo that ended as soon as you got out. I’m sure part of it has to do with age and being a kid.
As a side note, you can somewhat get around the stun-locking by pressing CTRL just as you get hit, this essentially cancels the *hit animation, though it works much more smoothly in LBA2. But yes, the stun-locking has prevented a lot of people from enjoying these games and it can get very ridiculous very fast in the original game.
As I’ve said, I happened to play LBA1 quite a bit later than LBA2, probably around 2002 or 2003 and as such I was more warm to the “fun adventures of Twinsen” sort of vibe from the second game. The first game offers a far more serious and delicate premise, which initially caught me off-guard, but I’ve become quite warm to its idea in recent years. My main gripe is that they don’t really do anything with it. You are presented with this dictator figure and an entire totalitarian regime that seems to allude to Mussolini’s 30’s & 40’s Italy or perhaps some of the many other military coups of the 20th century, the protagonist (and I assume more characters) is imprisoned for dreaming the destruction of the planet! That’s such a cool premise and the whole dreaming part can be extended beyond the concepts of messiah complexes, benevolent deities and evil leaders (or corporations) destroying the planet by means of exhausting resources. It could also just be an allusion to just… dreaming. Imprisoning people for literally dreaming a better, safer world or whatever. What a great idea!
And yet the game does very little with these concepts. Bad guy trying to make a whole in big ass construction site, kidnaps your gurl because we have to have a damsel in distress (thankfully Zoe is a bit more of a character in the second g ame) and then you have a final showdown of sorts. I was pretty disappointed when I finally beat it back in 2005 or so.
And yet, it still holds a lot of charm for me to this day, despite all that.
f2bnpParticipantThe above reads like some sort of inspirational YOLO post on Facebook a few years ago. “Fuck your job, make love, go on a trip, live your life to the max!”
There must have been some sort of unspoken movement back in the mid and late 90s, mainly from French studios (off the top of my head I recall most Cryo games doing this)
that pulled this sort of saving scheme. Not a huge fan either.
f2bnpParticipantHey that’s a great idea! Also allows you to express in some detail exactly how this game affected you, share memories and which parts you still like or don’t like
f2bnpParticipantI might have to watch this later, it’s so much fun to see how people break games that I’ve spent a lot of time with and think I know inside and out!
I’ve seen a couple of LBA2 from a few years ago and they took advantage of a rather interesting oversight in which if you perform a jump and save the game just as you’re about to reach the maximum altitude from said jump, you can load the game and see that the jump animation restarts from that point. Keep doing that and you can reach pretty much any spot in the game as the trick not only increases your height but also furthers the distance horizontally as well.
f2bnpParticipantI think a lot of the more frustrating elements of LBA were ironed out to a degree with LBA2, which is IMO a far superior game with just as much charm. It also helps that I played it first :p
f2bnpParticipantYep, that’s pretty much how the original was! Thankfully, the sequel allowed you to save anywhere.
f2bnpParticipantIt does indeed get more open as you progress, but never any easier I might say. You do become accustomed to its madness I suppose :P.
LBA 2 is a far better designed and less cruel if you wish to try that as well.
f2bnpParticipant2.21 which is made up of people that seem passionate about the original games and also people that worked on them, acquired the source code for both games and open-sourced them a while ago. They are working on a remake/re-imagining/reboot of the original game but I guess in the meantime they decided to work on new releases for the two games that have been out for years now. I think it’s pretty cool, they’re adding some sweet quality of life features there plus they’re native Windows ports (unsure if they released on other platforms as well).
LBA 1 already had a port on mobile platforms that found its way to PCs as well, but it was iffy to say the least. If you had a controller to play it with it wasn’t that bad of a version though. The new release adds the original keyboard controls back in, New Game+ mode, ability to interact with objects in other modes and maintains the option not to take damage when hitting walls. I played it a little bit and found it adequate, though I managed to get hit from walls more often than I’d like to (which is never, honestly :-p), so I guess that’s a bit buggy. My other gripe has to do with scaling options, it’s just completely barebones as is. Pretty decent overall and definitely an upgrade over the previous version.
LBA 2’s original DOS version was packaged with DOSBox and shipped in digital storefronts for some years now. New release is pretty awesome, revamped controls for controllers, New Game+ and a new camera for outdoor 3D areas in which it updates automatically and follows Twinsen around. This has a profoundly transformative effect on the game. My gripes are once again the barebones nature of the display and scaling options otherwise plus some visual issues that creep up with the new camera. Hopefully they don’t leave it as is and new features will be added, but this is already very impressive.
f2bnpParticipantI sort of gave up after playing halfway for each campaign. The mutant campaign is certainly a lot easier than the “Survivors” campaign or perhaps I was better accustomed to the controls and mechanics by this point.
Before I began playing I looked into source ports, reverse-engineered engines, wrappers or anything remotely helpful in order to get the game in its best state in this day and age and found out that the only such effort is a mod for OpenRA, an open source engine for Red Alert (and perhaps even C&C Tiberian Dawn?), which struck me as odd. Why would you even bother with this if not for some practice and/or personal fun? Then again, people have “ported” Blood and Half-Life to the Doom engine, so there’s that.
Upon playing the game, I understood why the above project was ever conceived. It plays shockingly close to C&C, to the point where someone may be fooled into thinking it’s a mod for that game (actual phrase a friend of mine used to describe it in a recent chat).
A less polished version of C&C anyway, as it looks pretty rough IMO and it also plays a lot worse with somewhat weird balancing (soldiers seemed incredibly powerful compared to vehicles or was it just me?) and all sorts of weird AI behavior (hellooooooo pathfinding!). One neat trick I found and used to exploit the AI was to camp next to an oil drillers and wait for opponent’s rigs to come harvest resources at which point I destroyed them. The enemy AI will keep creating more of them and waste all its money on buying rigs. It’s still a lot of fun though and I imagine multiplayer was pretty decent at the time as well.I also found the soundtrack to be… almost unbearable when it came to the Evolved, the Survivor side had some decent tunes.
I’m considering giving KKnD 2 a try, it’s been a few years since I last played that one and it’s apparently massively expanded in every area (although it lacks live-action FMV which is a damn shame!) and also adds another faction.
f2bnpParticipantAgreed, I have played the first five missions of the “human” faction and was surprised at how thin my victory was for the first two missions. It’s fun though and I did find myself getting a lot better at it once I got more comfy with the controls.
The cinematics are fun and actually very well shot (and encoded!) for what I assume was a somewhat lower budget production. Evolved cutscene costumes remind me a bit of Mad Max villains and maybe a touch of the Harkonnen in Lynch’s Dune 🙂
f2bnpParticipantHey, Starcraft only allowed you to queue construction of up to 5 units at a time I believe, so KKND has that beat there 😛
f2bnpParticipantIt does seem that the project has progressed quite a bit, although it’s not feature complete yet? In any case, they need to give it a name such as OpenKKND or something for easier referencing :P.
f2bnpParticipantUnfortunately, even though I love this game and wanted to sit down and finally beat it, had no chance to do so during this past month. I need to get my joystick hooked up and start blasting some mechs I think!
f2bnpParticipantQuake sound design in a nutshell:
Joke’s aside, I love the music and the sound design of Quake. The ambient sound effects complement the soundtrack, which I agree may not be up to everyone’s taste, but I feel like it fits the otherword-ly mood great. It’s not the type of music that will have you humming or tapping your foot to the rhythm like Doom did, but it is going for something entirely different and I think it really succeeds.
There’s nothing quite like popping a few grunts coming at you with the shotgun, then quickly equipping the nail gun and mowing down a few scrags and ogres, taking in that nail-gun sound as they all go down with the soundtrack slowly beating in the distance.
f2bnpParticipantThe first time I remember seeing Quake must have been around 1996-1997, when my older brother stumbled on what was probably the shareware release on a coverdisk CD. I can’t say I recall much as I was only a kid, but I do remember being a bit creeped out by the zombie enemies, the very iconic rocket launcher and also my mom telling my brother not to play these sorts of videogames in front of me :D. This was the family PC after all, so it resided in the living room where everyone had access to it, and more importantly the parents could keep an eye out on what was happening.
I skipped Quake 2 and played a lot of Quake 3 a few years later, so I obviously knew the franchise, but I didn’t get to play Quake until some time later, around 2004 or so. I have this memory of looking at screenshots of the original Quake online and in magazines that I used to read, usually denoting it as a major 3D milestone. I eventually managed to get a copy of the entire thing (or was it just the shareware?) off of Limewire, a classic P2P client that you were never really sure if you were getting the real deal or the Sasser worm. Anyway, I still remember that 18MB download vividly, it took a while with my 56K dial-up connection! To my amazement, extracting the zipped archive resulted in the entire thing (minus the music of course) residing in my desktop, but I had difficulty getting it to work. By this point I had moved on to Windows XP and the OS just wasn’t having it with the DOS executable of the game, thankfully I quickly found WinQuake online and managed to play the game, to my delight!
And then, after all that hassle and eventual success, I just… didn’t really play it much. I seem to recall beating the first episode and fighting Cthon, but it just didn’t click at the time. I kept it around, using it as a benchmark and stress test for various machines, especially when I got my first Voodoo card and wanted to run GLQuake on it. So, it was always kinda around after that point and eventually, around 2009 I decided to give it another go and I was hooked! By this point, I had gotten a legit, boxed copy of the game which I still have, and I’m fairly certain the soundtrack played a role in this and reading Masters of Doom also gave me more context. I even went ahead and played the expansion packs, which I enjoyed.
From this point on, I’ve replayed and beaten Quake multiple times over the years and I can safely say it is one of my favorite FPS games, probably edging Doom on my personal scale. The pick up and play nature of the game is immensely satisfying to me. My latest run was during August when the re-release hit the scene. I went through the entire thing twice, once on Hard and another on Nightmare, including the new (and amazing) episode, the 5th episode released on its 20th anniversary and the expansion packs. It was a fun challenge to say the least!
f2bnpParticipantthread should be renamed “the duality of man”
f2bnpParticipantPlease don’t call Shamblers “the lightning yeti”. It hurts their feelings :(.
f2bnpParticipantUnfortunately I’ll be away on Wednesday, but will definitely apply for the tourney 😛
f2bnpParticipantYes, X-Men Ravages of Apocalypse is not good, at all. Be that as it may, I have a fascination with it, I stumbled on it about 20 years ago on “Home of the Underdogs” and I was very young and quite ignorant of what “total conversion” and certainly “requires full version of Quake” actually meant. I spent hours grabbing that mod on dial-up only to find out the hard way.
Some time later, when I finally got a copy of Quake, I managed to actually set it up and play it and… sorta liked it at the time. It certainly is a time capsule and I couldn’t resist grabbing a copy I found for cheap (lucky me!) some years ago.
f2bnpParticipantCan’t wait to hear more about the tournament, count me in!
f2bnpParticipantI ended up giving WinROTTGL 1.70 a spin and did have a bit of fun with this game. There’s a newer version of WinROTTGL around, but I couldn’t get it to work and apparently has all sorts of issues so I didn’t bother.
It played well enough without deviating from the core experience. With a little bit more polish, this could be the definitive way to experience this game.
f2bnpParticipantAgreed with Mike. I can’t disagree with any of the points, but I did find some enjoyment in the game or at least the episodes I played (shareware + ep1).
It is an acquired taste to say the least and it makes you appreciate all the ways Doom manages to keep things fresh and you on your toes all the time. I have great appreciation for the developers, they crammed so much stuff in there that would cater to all sorts of people. There’s a ton of singleplayer content with an insane amount of secrets, but the multiplayer seems very complete for 1995 as well.
I’m not sure you could ever achieve something more polished or refined with an engine that in principle does not stray much from Wolf3D.
f2bnpParticipantI too would be interested, but it seems like the roster is already full. If one of the above folks changes their minds, I’d be glad to take over. 🙂
f2bnpParticipantYes, the connecting dot (pun intended) if you will!
As for Tim Schafer, I also picked up on that particular commentary line and it left me thinking. I guess the “innocence” was lost from that point forward. I think there’s a lot to unpack here, game budgets began to increase dramatically, teams began encompassing more people and projects came under a lot more scrutiny as a result. Lucasarts’ old motto of “don’t lose us any money” no longer applied I suspect. Then later on, adventure games started to underperform in sales relative to their budgets, Tim went on to create his own studio which came with its own set of headaches (and stress I’m sure) when their freshman release had a deeply dev cycle and also underperformed in the market despite being a masterpiece etc
f2bnpParticipantHey that’s pretty awesome! Hmm, how about this…
How does it feel to know that a game you worked on (Maniac Mansion) ended up shaping an entire industry of graphic adventure games in its shape and form of with its usage of predefined verbs and a cursor driven interface?
f2bnpParticipantI laugh a lot with the silly humor in DOTT. I feel like Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman come off as naturally funny people and this really shines through in their writing. It’s the kind of humor that is never mean spirited or punching down on specific groups (well okay, there is some body shaming on Hoagie’s part in DOTT, but it’s thankfully never really played too much) and yet comes off as funny both to younger audiences and especially slightly older audiences.
My favorite example is in MI2 when Guybrush is digging up Largo’s grandfather’s grave and grabs a bone, dramatically posing as he holds it up in the air for the world to see and then his pants fall down while a thunderbolt goes off in the background. I distinctly remember seeing that for the first time as a kid, snorting from laughing and then every subsequent time it makes me laugh a lot.I can’t really pinpoint any specific jokes in DOTT, it’s just silly all round, in a good way! Watching Twin Peaks a few years ago gave me a new appreciation for the line “Damn good coffee” though!
f2bnpParticipantI was stuck at home for the last couple of days due to a blizzard, so no real work besides some tech support over the phone, which meant that my Tuesday morning was all about finishing Day of the Tentacle, which I started on Friday, while enjoying my morning cup of tea. That was a blast!
A few weeks ago I got the parts to build my very first 386 system and as such felt compelled to play my original floppy version of the game on this system. I then installed the remastered version on my main PC to get through the commentary which was really cool to hear, although I wish there was a lot more of it.
I think DOTT is the connecting link between the old style of Lucas’ adventure games where games were made without voice acting (or that was added later as is the case with Loom and Indy4) and were played in silence for the most part (although MI2 and I believe Indy4 both had iMuse, can’t recall if music was played constantly) and the later games which started going exclusively CD-ROM with much higher budgets, full voice acting and animated cutscenes that had to be compressed, pre-rendered 3D etc.
I find this very interesting, it’s that exact point in time where Brian Moriarty gives up on The Dig, a troubled project torn between this conflict of old and new, and leaves Lucasarts. The fact that this game came out at all is astounding to be honest.
f2bnpParticipantI think perhaps Dave Grossman and Tim Schaffer felt like they could do more with the nerdy/geeky character (they themselves being total nerds!).
Although they may as well had designed new characters such as Hoagie and Laverne first and then chose Bernard to complement them or perhaps it went the other way around?
I always found it hilarious that they were roommates and somehow seemed to get along fine.
f2bnpParticipantI see what you mean TigerQuoll. It’s certainly not without its detractors. When I first saw screenshots of the remaster, I too thought they had perhaps used some kind of upscaling filter like xbrz.
However, on closer inspection once it was released, it became fairly obvious that they actually did touch up on the visuals in significant ways and redraw details on characters and backgrounds, perhaps they even rescanned the originals?
I think it’s a testament to DOTT’s visual composition that it still looks so fantastic after all those years that we’re even having this debate!I can’t recall where I first heard of it, it might have been in an interview or perhaps the audio commentary of the remastered version, but Monkey Island 2 moved away from the original’s pixel drawn backgrounds and instead used hand-drawn backgrounds from Peter Chan that were scanned in the game. Unfortunately, back in 1991, the technology wasn’t really there and while I love the look of Monkey Island 2, it is fair to say that the artist, Peter Chan, felt like his artwork got mangled in the process.
For the next game, he went ahead and studied the issue and decided to draw things in a way that would look much better on the 320×200 resolutions and 256 VGA colors of the day.I think the wheel interface is fine. As much as I love the verb interface due to nostalgia, I think usability suffers a bit, although I almost always use keyboard shortcuts for the verbs these days.
DOTT Remastered has a few tricks up its sleeve though:
– First off, the audio commentary is superb and I recommend it to anyone that has a love for this game and other Lucasarts adventure games from that era, it is a curtain into how they went about developing it back then. Also, it can be pretty hilarious!
– Not certain on the music as I haven’t played it since release, but the voices are of higher quality than was possible on the old CD release. In the process however, they replaced pretty much every sound effect which really annoys me as they were iconic and came from sound effect libraries that have been used worldwide for decades (aren’t they royalty free by now?).
– The subtle hint system which definitely helps without having to resort to a walkthrough.
– The fact that you can, as you said, mix and match with original and remastered elements, something that was missing from their Grim Fandango remaster.
Overall, I think it is a more than decent effort. Double Fine really pulled it off with the Full Throttle Remaster however, that truly was a labor of love and it shows, one of the finest remasters I’ve ever seen.
f2bnpParticipantOne of my favorites, looking forward to replaying it 🙂
f2bnpParticipantYeah, Tomb Raider really requires a Pentium to shine and even a brings a Pentium II to its knees in SVGA, although the 3D accelerated versions are always an option.
f2bnpParticipantI approve of this
f2bnpParticipantCan’t think of something like that. There are a couple of unwinnable states but they are 100% obvious within 2-3 minutes of having done specific actions.
Perhaps tell us where you got stuck so that we can maybe help you?
f2bnpParticipantYeah, don’t rely on your punches!
Also, don’t try to kill the werewolf, if you do enough damage to him (needs 3-4 hits with one of the weapons), he’ll start backing off and you can just run away and he usually won’t follow you.
Other than that, try to make a mental image of the map. And avoid becoming a frog, I don’t think it’s beneficial in any way. There are other ways to become small enough to fit. Have you searched every house in the village thoroughly 😉 ?
f2bnpParticipantI think he might be, I saw him posting a couple of screenshots and this particular version of the game just a few days ago on Twitter.
He does seem to be a great fellow indeed :).
f2bnpParticipantHello! The wonderful Anatoly (aka DOS Nostalgia) has uploaded an image of the Windows re-release on archive.org. You can find it here:
f2bnpParticipantThat is indeed true, I only just noticed it. It also reaches higher framerates, I believe the original is locked to a maximum of 20, but it may have been 30 (it’s been a while since I last played it).
I think I do prefer the Windows version, as I’m a sucker for crisp visuals, but as for it being the definitive release, it is debatable. It has a few quirks, such as text moving too quickly on anything that’s faster than an original Pentium and voice lines triggering a bit too fast for my liking, not to mention various little bugs here and there that have been catalogued by the Ecstatica wiki (oh yes, it exists!).
More importantly, I think there’s something to be said about the original’s visuals. The pre-rendered backgrounds had to be updated for the newer release with higher resolution assets and some of the added detail is bizarre and even surreal at times, especially on rocky formations. I personally liked it, but it does have a sort of unfinished look, where as in the original release, the lower resolution hides most of the fine detail and imagination fills the gaps. This might be one of these cases where “less is more”.
f2bnpParticipantVery useful for those that don’t own a copy, thank you!
f2bnpParticipantPretty cool! Do we have enough players to have a go at a mini tournament 😀 ?
f2bnpParticipantI’m interested, although I’ve never tried doing DOSBox multiplayer before. Perhaps the ZOD engine might prove easier to set up.
f2bnpParticipantYes, that does seem to be the winning strategy against the AI. I’m 15 levels (out of 20) in and it has gotten a bit repetitive, to the point where I’m thinking of giving up at this point. I think it’d be a lot more interesting with human opponents, should we perhaps look into setting up online matches before the end of the month?
f2bnpParticipant
f2bnpParticipantWell, like I said, I am playing under Win98, so the mouse driver is not loaded, I’m not in Real DOS when playing.
Besides, I already use cutemouse as my main mouse driver for my Real DOS 😛
f2bnpParticipantOdd! Thankfully I’ve not encountered this, playing the DOS version under Win98, although I did encounter a seemingly random crash.
Par for the course I guess!
f2bnpParticipantBeen playing these last few days, I’m halfway through and I’ve a couple of tips to give to anyone reading this:
– You can press and hold the RMB to drag the camera around much quicker than moving the cursor to the edge of the screen. I found this to be VERY handy!
– Something I didn’t know, you can click on the production facilities that you own, press “CANCEL” and select a different unit/vehicle/stationary gun to be manufactured instead. For the first few levels I did not notice this.
– Save often to different slots and experiment!
f2bnpParticipantWow! Quite subtle overall and very smart way to cut down on memory requirements! Thanks for the demonstration.
f2bnpParticipantI too think Dungeon Keeper is very easy to get into even today. Both this and Theme Hospital, released in 1997, had easily understood mechanics and thanks to tutorials (!) during the first couple of levels or whenever a new feature was introduced, I feel like they are very approachable.
Also, both are supremely fun games!
f2bnpParticipantLove this game! I never managed to beat it, but it had a great atmosphere and very fucked up visuals at points.
I think it makes an interesting case for games greatly inspired by Alone in the Dark that came out before Resident Evil. In that sense, I think it is one of the better ones, although time certainly hasn’t been kind to it and the numpad controls might get some getting used to.
f2bnpParticipantI love the LBA games, although I have to confess I think the original has aged rather poorly, especially compared to the 2nd game which I still feel is a fantastic game.
The mobile port Shattered is referring to also supports gamepad controls which play very nicely. The touchscreen controls on PC with a mouse are…pretty bad IMO.
f2bnpParticipantWow, I had no idea this was a thing. I’d have to look into it, sounds interesting!
f2bnpParticipantSorry for the bump, but as others have stated, Wing Commander was never designed to run at 70, 60, 30 or probably even 20fps. The target was probably a fast 286 or one of the early 386 that were around at the time.
Performance is sluggish on those systems, but I personally quickly get accustomed to it, it just takes a bit of time. Running Wing Commander on newer systems, even 486 just a couple of years later, caused performance to speed up to obscene levels thanks to the lack of a frame limiter in the game. I believe Wing Commander 2 fixed that, but WC1 is definitely one of those games that people tweak their systems by disabling caches and adjusting frequencies just to get the right balance to play the game properly.
As such, people attempting to play the game nowadays through DOSBox might try to raise the cycles to get smoother performance, which in turn makes the game play way too fast and it becomes impossible to control your ship and hit Kilrathi crafts.
The situation is not unlike StarFox on the original SNES which ran pretty sluggishly, probably sub 10fps at times. When powerful emulators and systems came around, people tried to hack it so that the SuperFX chip hidden within the cartridge ran at a higher frequency. While this undoubtedly made the game run smoother, it also meant that it ran a lot faster making it very very hard to play. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t!
I too recommend a joystick with this one, mouse doesn’t feel good at all for this one for me, it feels like they tried to map the mouse axes to joystick axes, so it’s just weird to control. Keyboard is better, but obviously not as good as a joystick.
f2bnpParticipantYeah, many thanks for this! It’s been a while since I played Z and I distinctly remember having a rough time at first thanks to the lack of tutorial and overall high level of difficulty. This will surely help 🙂
f2bnpParticipantYeah, it is a little unfortunate. The “remake” is essentially a port of a mobile version of the game, which might have worked fine on touch screens, but has quite a few issues on PC.
I think going with either the DOS version running at SVGA or perhaps the open source re-implementation “Zod Engine” is the way to go, although I haven’t tried the latter and as such I’m not sure if it is feature-complete!
f2bnpParticipantNice, thanks for the uploads!
Yeah, those PC Zone reviews were definitely something. I like how most if not all of the screenshots appear to be running the game at VGA resolutions when you could run the game at SVGA and have the visuals be much sharper, as well as gain an advantage in terms of gameplay since you could see further and manage your units accordingly!
