Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Sword of Justice"]anyone who has played video games for more than 10 years has some old classic they love despite not having the latest graphics or having a sequel out that is more popular or whatever. but the question is, can that game still be considered fun by todays higher standards of game design? [/quote] There's three games I'd like to talk about this morning. It infuriates me that nobody can keep a screenshot on the Internet for more than a couple years, but I am tired of not writing this post because I can't be bothered to upload things to imageshack. The first game I'd like to talk about is <b>Wasteland</b>. <img src="http://goofybeast.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/wasteland.jpg"> This is an amazing role playing game, and the only one that has ever existed that put a real premium on your character's intelligence over brawn. The publisher made a decision that is unforgivable - you need to consult the manual for the game's plot and story. Text compresses really well. Things compress none more better. I can't remember if the screenshot up above shows text at mode 40 or 80 (I think 40) but even still, there was a text box area that could give you everything that was presented in the manual. But they didn't do it that way because of copy protection. So if you're playing Wasteland in 2010, you have to sit there like an asshole with either a text file open, or the manual itself (I bought Interplay's RPG Archives product, or whatever it was called, so I have the manuals to ten of their games together and it's not spiral bound, so it's such an aggravation) and flip back and forth. It ruins the experience. Interplay, the publisher, is out of business. Good! What a bunch of assholes. Of all the games that have been remade, I'm shocked that nobody has done a Wasteland total conversion. 2. <b>Rocket Jockey</b> <img src="http://i.d.com.com/i/dl/media/dlimage/89/36/7/89367_large.jpeg"> The gameplay is still unmatched. Nobody has even<i>tried</i> to make a clone of this. But it came out during an awkward time of PC gaming. It needed something like Direct X 5. I still can't believe how fundamentally broken Direct X was for the first 15 years it was around. "We'll make a system that acts as a software bridge between all graphical and audio hardware and Windows 98. You can then just program to the 'middleware' instead of the hardware directly. I know. I know! It will be awesome, only we'll fuck it completely up." (I'm probably using the word "middleware" wrong there.) Anyway, you basically need a copy of Windows 98 around to play this, since trying to install the thing on a modern-day system is almost impossible. There are instructions out there on how to do it for XP, but they don't really work. I should have grabbed the warez version of this so I could install it years later, even though I bought Rocket Jockey in a two pack with Steve Meretzky's "The Space Bar" in what is still, to this day, the best software two-pack ever. I guess you could do a virtual W98 install, but I have no idea how gamepad support is over such a thing. Can you direct a gamepad to a VM like that? 3. <b>Xenophobe</b> <img src="http://lh4.google.com/robb.sherwin/RsEr5NsGSJI/AAAAAAAAAJI/yMqbznb_0yY/s400/Rotation%20of%20Xenophobe011.jpg"> I played this a lot when I was a kid. Then I paid three times what it was worth to have it in my house. It quickly becomes repetitive and impossible, and it's a quarter-eater like Gauntlet only much less fun. My illusions were all shattered. And there's no attract mode! How did they not put an attract mode on it??! Motherfuckers! I paid $1000 for it and sold it for $230 a couple years later. Oh, and a game that size, that demands three people crowd around it, only had a 19" monitor? What a failure. It does not hold up! the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey![/quote]