Oops. I took the picture at lunchtime and I’ve completely forgotten what the new thing was !
Let’s have a reminder.
There we go. I tried out something new today, a delayed timer shot from the phone. First time I’ve done that and it was so I could press the button and then quickly grab 4D so he could take his place in the shot.
Today I think it was either one of the train cars from Solo or an Imperial transport from Rebels. The train sequence was one of the inspired bits of Solo and when I watch that movie again, I’ll look forward to that bit of the movie.
Today ? Game books again. Games don’t give you what they used to pack in ! Long gone are the days of a big box and things inside that truly rattled. Mind you, they used to squeeze enough into some of the dvd style boxes that the box would bulge open and refuse to close up again without spilling its contents all over the place.
You don’t get nearly as much now. Barely anything in fact and rarely anything that is in physical form. I was very impressed with the art book that came with Battletech but that did cost me extra.
So – what are the games today ?
In the middle is the Falcon 4 manual. This is over half an inch thick ! Plus you got a quick reference guide, a key map and a reasonably details map of the Korean subcontinent, the region you fought over in the game.
It’s actually fitting for the complexity of the game and this was an incredibly complex game. It’s still going actually, 20 years after its original release in 1998. It was a buggy mess when it came out but still pretty darn good. I can remember flying missions on it and flying towards a glow on the horizon that would gradually resolve into missiles and shells whizzing back and forth as you got closer.
This was an incredible game for its time and this would still look quite decent today. Flight sims can cheat, as the detail is all very far away instead of you standing right next to the wall with the dodgy texture as you would in a first person game.
Next up is the Settlers. In the days where Digital Rights Management hadn’t found its way into the sneaky ways and always online of today, they had to do it via other means. Still in the software this time but for this game, it would ask you to turn to a certain page and pop in the runes on that page.
Settlers is a colony management wargame. It’s a pretty complicated one, with basic resources combining together to make things like swords for soldiers, bread for food and gold for improvements.
It was one of the ground breaking games of its time, although deathly dreary to play a game all the way through. The strategic aspect was bolted around warrior huts … and these caused an effect like attritional trench warfare.
It took a long time to make a dent in the other players’ territory and that made games drag on a long time. But it is a game I enjoyed in its time, as I highly enjoyed losing evenings to Settlers IV.
Next one is a game called Titan Quest, which included a printed out ability tree for its widespread character class system.
Bit of a shame this one, as the game had massive potential but I never actually played much into it. One reason for that was because it coincided with a previous Windows XP install going very strange and the campfires would be so bright, they would white-out the screen. It was a very broken WinXP install.
Last one is not something I got with a game, I acquired the StarFleet Command III strategy guide later.
This was from a time before broadband (I think). A time before google searches became the thing you would do if you got stuck. Wowhead hadn’t been invented back then. (The game was published in 2002).
It’s a nice strategy guide too. It gives you a description of all of the missions, plus a description of the ships and the various ways they could be customised. A super manual if you like.
I was super addicted to the Starfleet Command games in their day. The nearest modern equivalent is Battlefleet Gothic, set in the Warhammer 40k world but very definitely a rip off of the Starfleet Battles rules that SFC was based on. Battlefleet Gothic 2 looks impressive though, I’ll enjoy watching Enter Elysium play through that when it’s released but I won’t buy it.
That’s it for today !