One of my favourite Amiga games of the 90′s was Syndicate. The PC version will be available on GOG.com from next Thursday. Great little shooter, go buy it! (via)
Syndicate on Thursday
Aside
Reply
Tag Archives: Retro Gaming
Wing Commander IV
Oh look what I found at home a few days ago! A boxed copy of Wing Commander IV for Windows 95 and DOS. I have never even played this and honestly don’t remember buying it but since GOG have just released the third game in the series I should give this a go. The game comes on 6 CDs so I might just wait until the GOG release of one nicely zipped up download. I wonder if they’ll give me a discount if I send them a scan of the barcode?
I also found Resident Evil 2 for PC, which boldly says it only requires a P166. Imagine that. A PC running on a 166MHz CPU. How quaint. My phone is close to ten times faster than that. Gulp.
Painkiller!
No, not the podcast, but a Polish game released in 2004 and it’s on gog.com now. Yesterday it was priced at $3.99 and I jumped at the chance after watching the Zero Punctuation review and a couple of Youtube gameplay videos. Looks very old school like Quake, Doom or Serious Sam!
It’s back to $9.99 now however.
Gaming History in Pictures
A few games I found recently while sorting through boxes at home:
- Quake 3 tin box, Linux edition. I wrote an article about this for the Irish Times a few years ago.
- Double Dragon, C64 version, I posted pictures of this before of course.
- Gyroscope, the first 5 1/4 disk based game I owned on the C64. It was given to me by someone, can’t remember who now but I used it later for Stunt Car Racer and even printed the loading screen from that game on a dot matrix printer for the disk cover.
- The excellent Stunt Car Racer manual and box cover.
- The System 3 Premier Collection and Thalamus The Hits compilations were the pride of my games collection at one time. I still remember the excitement of getting those boxes in the post.
- C64 Cabal, tape version. Brilliant game. I remember spending as much time tinkering with the game ASM code as playing it..
- Half Life 2 Collector’s Edition and Half Life 1. Steam was launched when HL2 was released and I was recently able to register the HL1 CD key in Steam and download that great game.
Pangea Arcade is free on the Mac App sto…
Aside
Pangea Arcade is free on the Mac App store right now. There are 3 classic arcade games in this app based on Centipede, Asteroids and Missile Command so there’s plenty of gameplay on offer here!
I’m trying to install it but the App Store has frozen on my machine. Hopefully it’ll stop being a buggy POS sometime this morning so I can download this. *sigh* (Thanks James for the news!)
MAME saves the day
Arcade emulator MAME saved the day for a software developer working on a mobile port of Spy Hunter.
Fascinating read about extracting the assets from the game to speed up development. Shame how the lawyers treated the guy who extracted the sound effects! (via)
I was a big fan of Stunt Car Racer on th…
Aside
I was a big fan of Stunt Car Racer on the C64, and later played it on the Amiga too but I never knew about Stunt Car Racer TNT.
TNT is an extra tracks mod of the Amiga version released a few years ago by AmiGer. Here’s his announcement post:
Stunt Car Racer TNT (The New Tracks) will be released around christmas.
Modifications
Eight new tracks:
DIZZY DESCENT, WITTY WAY, CRAZY CAPER, AMAZING ADEPT, JERKILY JUMP, EVILLY EPISODE, TEASING TEMPER and RAT RACETrack parameters changed:
start positions, start height, damage sensitivity, boost countAI speed adjusted/changed for all tracks
Some visual adjustments
e.g. race colours, track names gfx dropped, title screen modified etc.AGA fixed
Cracked
Long time readers will know my dislike for Blur and I’ve hardly played NFS Hot Pursuit since I got it last month but Stunt Car Racer gripped me like no other racer since. It required perfectly timed boosts, cornering and was literally a rollercoaster of a ride.
Rocky Memphis and The Temple of Ophuxoff
If you’re an older gamer who loved the classic gameplay of Rick Dangerous and other platformers you’ll love Rocky Memphis and The Temple of Ophuxoff, a freeware game made by Trevor (Smilia) Storey and Stuart Collier.
It’s a huge 600 screen platformer to explore so this won’t be finished quickly. It’s “casual gamer” friendly too as there are infinite lives and you can save the game at any time, and you can upload your top scores to the game website. It’s also available for Windows and Mac OS X so you (probably) don’t have any excuse for not trying it!
Here’s an interview with the authors including titbits about their Last Ninja remake, and news of their Myth remake too. They also shed some light on sales of the commercial Armalyte remake. If I had a PC I’d buy that in an instant!
VVVVVV Preview
I have a new favourite game and it’s VVVVVV. I’d never heard of this game until this post brought it to my attention.
Apparently it’s an indie hit on modern platforms, but here it is for the venerable C64! Having played it I’m tempted to buy the modern original game and I’m looking forward to seeing the final C64 version!
So, go grab a C64 emulator like Vice or any of the other ones out there and give it a whirl. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about check out the faq on c64.com.
Great game.
The Insane Console History Video 2.0
Amazing video by Eliot Hagen. So far I’ve got to 1978 and I haven’t seen that console my parents bought us all those years ago. Eliot is more than right, I don’t recognise most of those old consoles.
Streaming is so slow I created a Vimeo account so I could download the file. It’s currently downloading at 60k/s from Amazon S3 so it’ll be a few hours before I get a chance to watch the whole thing.
