Tag: advent

Day 9 !

What is that dragon getting up to ? Next thing you know, he’ll bring his friends in. Now there’s a thought.

It’s Rey making an appearance today. I liked Rey. She had a great entrance leading us into The Force Awakens as a scrapper junker kid with attitude and an instinctive (from taking ships apart to loot the best bits) head for starship workings.

There could only be a couple of games to feature today for Rey. Well, perhaps the Jedi Knight games and Jedi Academy too but I don’t think I owned those. (I tried the Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight demo but I don’t think I got the game).

So … Knights of the Old Republic (aka Kotor). There were two of these games … They were set 4,000 years before the movies in a similar but different universe. Instead, the galaxy is balanced between the hordes of the Sith and the legions of the Jedi. They really don’t like each other.

Like Rey, you don’t start as a Jedi though. There’s no lightsabre as you wake from a coma with no memory, escape an exploding starship and find yourself marooned on the city planet of Taris.

And the adventure launches off from there as you find your ship, the Ebon Hawk, before heading off around the galaxy in search of answers to your mysterious past.

Along the way, you pick up Bastila (the lady on the cover of the game), with the incredible voice of Jennifer Hale who was later to become the only Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect games.

There we go. Jedi and fella with apparently no jaw.

HK-47 is there as well, as the assassin droid with the best lines in the two games.

I played through Kotor once, enjoying the way they turned d20 mechanics from the Dungeons and Dragons system into something that played really well as a faux-real time system on the computer. The game had decent writing, good characters and was probably when the publishers Bioware were at the peak of their powers, producing an excellent game that didn’t outstay its welcome too much. Modern games can be a bit too long.

Kotor spawned a sequel, Kotor 2. I do actually own this game after coming to it a bit late but it’s a digital copy so no box to take a picture of. One reason for not getting it back then was because it had picked up a reputation for being a bit broken. It’s since had the fans having a go at it, patching it up and restoring some cut content.

I’m not sure why but I didn’t really take to Kotor 2 and only got perhaps halfway through. I might have to try again at some point. Maybe because it felt like it was following a similar line to the one before. Not sure. Perhaps like some of the others here, it’s tough to go back to the old games again. New games have come out and do everything so much better. There was also a game that should have been Kotor 3 … but it got overtaken by the trend towards turning everything into Massive Multiplayer Online games and became The Old Republic. I did try that … but it kinda sent me back into Warcraft.

One thing for that is the expectations around How To Play.

The old games would have manuals and keyboard reference charts in their boxes along with the cds. My Mass Effect Andromeda box didn’t even have a disc in it !

Nowadays, the games have their tutorials built in. Games still steadily build up the mechanics that you play in, rarely throwing you in at the deep end. But instead of it being in a book, you’re led by on screen prompts.

I’m not complaining there, this is progress that is good :-D.

Now wondering what’s behind Door Number 10. That’s one for tomorrow. Maggie K’s just updated her discord and twitch emotes and said nice things about the animated and edited versions of those that I do, so I know what I’m doing after hitting the Publish buttons 😀

Be well everyone, stay safe.

Hello everyone,

Before I start, no food was sacrificed in today’s advent picture.

There we are, Luke Skywalker there and a guest XWing at the back.

I’m going to have to investigate the phone too to see if I can figure out the whys and hows of doing off centre focus. Cos the figure tends to be closer and lower and the focus goes on the back.

Oh and don’t mind the discolourations of my night stand table, it’s ancient and those were there when I acquired it.

Not guilty.

Everyone knows what Luke did … Well. In the first movie. He was still off flying X Wings in the later Expanded Universe (true canon) books as well. Usually on solo missions for the burgeoning New Republic or doing Jedi Things.

There was a game for that …

This one came out in 1993 and is thought of as being the impetus for people acquiring many, many PCs with 486 processors. You know, those old 32 bit processors that occasionally came with a math chip added in. The one I got was a 486 DX2/66, which meant it had the math chip and ran the memory at 33MHz and the cpu doubled at 66MHz.

3d accelerated graphics wasn’t really a thing back then. We had 2d cards with perhaps 1MB on board if we were lucky, so the graphics were extremely simple and resolutions were low. This is 640×480 upscaled to my monitor – ish. (Display scaling often reduces it from 1440p).

They start you off in a flight simulator game thing where you fly through the hoops and shoot the occasional targets. There’s a 3d representation, although the models are exceptionally simple. Such as the platforms above having no depth. Other objects will be polygonal boxes with sides 1 pixel thick.

It looked good too when it came out. Note that this is the Special Edition which came out later, using the XWing vs Tie Fighter engine which had actual texture work included. The best that could be done when the games first came out was clever shading.

The game was broken up into small missions, preceded by a briefing. Sometimes it was Admiral Ackbar. Sometimes it was General Dodonna. It worked really well for the time, although nowadays the mission objectives would be spoken in game through voice overlays and targeting indicators.

An early mission where you’re in an A Wing (Y-Wings were also available with the B-Wing coming later) saw you whooshing through an enemy fleet on a mission to identify everything. I think this got copied in a more expansive XvT mission later where you needed to abuse the Need For Speed more.

It was interesting going back to the old game. It’s still nicely fast but also balanced to be playable. The 4th XCom game, Interceptor, made the critical error of attempting to match the XWing flight and control style to an engine that was just far too fast to be playable. It worked pretty well in XWing.

I was starting to make the precision shots as well. The lasers take a bit of time to travel between shooter and target, so you need to lead your shots to be able to hit. Works well.

The story was good too. It starts up before A New Hope and amongst other things, sees you picking up the Death Star plans and eventually, doing the Death Star Trench Run.

However, I didn’t finish XWing back in the day. I came to it a bit later, having been solidly addicted to Tie Fighter, which saw you fighting for the Empire instead, seeing Galactic security from the other side. The way games worked back then was to pad out the content with occasional insane level missions, which acted as a bump to slow down your progress so I never got to the Death Star missions.

I think there’s another game in the middle that I can’t remember but the follow up to Tie Fighter, XWing Alliance, saw you eventually flying a Millennium Falcon type ship.

The last one was XWing vs Tie Fighter (XvT), a multiplayer online starfighter game that erupted on the scene perhaps 5 years too early. It was a cracking game too, although the world of dial up modems and higher pings was not ready for it. The Star Wars starfighter games pretty much died with XvT, although they’re back now with Squadrons. This is what modern graphics can do :

Shiny. I didn’t buy Squadrons though and I understand that even with initial hype, it’s ended up a bit of an underseller. Many, many people were wanting a Tie Fighter 2 or a true successor to XWing, with a strong single player storyline. What we got was a tutorial campaign which unlocked the different ships … and a multiplayer online battle arena game.

Oh and the cockpit displays get in the way far too much (even worse in the Tie Fighters). I thought it was very difficult to pick the targets out of the background clutter too, probably because the modern game can put background clutter in that would just be a starfield in the old game.

It was another one that was good to have a little look at but I sense a recurring theme here will be that Nostalgia is great but going back to the old stuff can end up being a bit of a let down. I was curious that the control mapping had the stick set up to yaw the ship instead of roll it. Brain was going Does Not Computer somewhat at that, although I adjusted somewhat to it.

(I started off in flight sims, where you would roll to initiate a turn. You wouldn’t side slip with the rudder)

One more pic ? Oh go on then. Plus Farcebook demands it :-D.

Stay safe, be well.