I’ve been playing several different games over the last
couple of weeks, so if this blog seems a little longer it is because these
notes cover two weeks rather than one!
They’ve mainly been on my laptop. I played a bit of
Wolfenstein 3D, killing Hitler at the end of the third chapter and playing
through the prequel campaigns; I’m about half way through them now. It’s an odd
experience; I’ve been playing WWII-related games for many years now, and this
is the first time I’ve killed Hitler!
I’ve found that because the game requires a certain amount
of timing and skill to complete, this isn’t the sort of game where you can play
it for ten hours and beat the whole thing. After about an hour and a half, my
concentration drops, and I make silly mistakes that get me killed; at that
point I find it’s best to drop the game for a little while and come back to it
another day. But it’s nice to have that option!
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| Not exactly historically accurate, but fun nonetheless! |
I’ve also found that
with a few exceptions, the level design of the game is generally very good. The
graphics must have been impressive for the time but were hardly the
photo-realistic polygons we’ve come to expect now, the sound was tinny and
distorted, and while the presentation was thematic and did the job, it’s basic.
The design team at ID software were aware of this and had to really concentrate
on making the game playable – which they have, without a doubt. They might only
have one level of view and and three guns to play with, but they designed the
levels and challenges to really get the most out of their limited resources. So
apart from a couple of clangers (one of the levels require you to find a secret
in order to find the key, which when the secret areas are not telegraphed very
well is a significant challenge, that you’ll only really achieve by luck rather
than judgement. Or read a guide, like I did. It’s not fun to press the activate
button on every wall on a huge stage on the off chance you’ll get the right
one!) the game is designed very well.
I carried on with my game of Open TTD and I’ve realised some
of the problems you can run in to when running a transport network consisting
mainly of road vehicles – they get old and need replacing. I’m playing on a
large map and I have a lot of road vehicles; it takes time and it is a massive
faff. It’s part of the game, I suppose, and it gives you the option to replace
those vehicles with improved versions, but I wish there was some way to
automate the replacement! I’ve also reached a point in the game where some of
the supplying businesses start to close; I’ve noticed it mainly with oil: there
comes a point where the primary business doesn’t operate anymore, and a lot of
the transport designed around it becomes redundant. Rerouting your entire
network to compensate is a challenge!
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| Of course, as Kingpin was released in 1999, the character models are absolutely hideous. |
There were some other games as well. A while ago I bought
Kingpin: Life of Crime, plus a couple of older Games Workshop games, Final
Liberation and Chaos Gate. I’ll go in to specifics in a minute but for now let
me say that as I downloaded these games from GOG, all three of them required
fiddling around with the game files to run. This involved looking for advice
from the community, finding out what patches I need, and making sure they were
in the game files. Kingpin wouldn’t boot at all until I’d installed a patch,
and Chaos Gate wouldn’t proceed past the point where I’d launched the mission
because apparently it can’t handle particularly long file paths, so I had to
make a new directory for it. Final Liberation was a little easier to fix; for
some reason it doesn’t want to play the videos, so I had to go into the
configuration file to disable them. This is a little sad as some of those
videos were brilliant; not technically wonderful but the actors and producers
were clearly in to what they were doing! I got them all working eventually but
this is not something I expect to have to do with a product I’ve bought from a
game distributor on the understanding that it will work.
I wasn’t too impressed with Kingpin, actually. From the
marketing, I was expecting a kind of Grand Theft Auto without the cars, where
you build up your criminal empire and take on the people who betrayed you. In
fact, it’s a difficult shooter with some shopping and recruiting. I didn’t get
far in to it; maybe it gets better at some point but starting a game like this
with no weapons and being surrounded by enemies who are at least on par with
you and often much tougher made the game frustratingly difficult.
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| The rest of the squad are in the Thunderhawk... |
Chaos Gate was a lot of fun, though. It’s a Warhammer 40K
squad-based tactics game, and I’m a lot better at them now than I was when I
originally bought the game in 1999 so I set it on the middle difficulty rather
than the easy mode I would usually look for back then! The graphics look a bit
“Second Edition,”[1]
and while the weapons make the right noises, I’m not sure how I feel about
firing the rocket launcher and seeing the impact of it with absolutely nothing
in between, but the game itself is pretty good if a little clunky. It must be one
of the first games I played with a Permadeath function; if your squad members
get killed, there’s no replacing them at all in the campaign. It even has an
Iron Man mode, which I haven’t touched yet. I’ve got to the second mission, but
I can’t seem to get through it without at least one squad member dying; I’ll
keep trying though!
[1] If
you know, you know.
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