Retro Games Worth Playing

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

@Elric of Melnibone You're missing Lionheart. Oddly enough it looks like an Infinity Engine game and is built around the SPECIAL system from Fallout, Black Isle was even involved in the development. It is a magic+steampunk game like Arcanum set in Europe using historical figures. It has a lot of things going for it...

There is a reason people forgot about it.

 

[ThinkThankThunk]

@Elric of Melnibone You're missing Lionheart. Oddly enough it looks like an Infinity Engine game and is built around the SPECIAL system from Fallout, Black Isle was even involved in the development. It is a magic+steampunk game like Arcanum set in Europe using historical figures. It has a lot of things going for it...

There is a reason people forgot about it.

Lionheart actually had some good traction pre-release. Even though it's pretty ugly and came out in 2003 there was still interest in isometric CRPGs among a lot of the PC audience, especially one from Black Isle.

What really killed it is the fact that Interplay forced Black Isle to put it out halfway through development, which is why the first 12 or so hours is a great RPG, and the last 8 or so is a shitty Diablo clone with almost no role playing to be found. It makes in nearly impossible to beat if you don't pump your combat stats, and even if you do it gets painfully boring. The premature launch and subsequent failure is a large part of what led to Interplay cutting Black Isle loose and selling the Fallout rights, which would result in Fallout 3 getting axed by Bethesda mere weeks before going gold. The game is fine overall, but I'll always have a stick up my ass over it as the game that killed Van Buren.

 

[Elric of Melnibone]

@Elric of Melnibone You're missing Lionheart. Oddly enough it looks like an Infinity Engine game and is built around the SPECIAL system from Fallout, Black Isle was even involved in the development. It is a magic+steampunk game like Arcanum set in Europe using historical figures. It has a lot of things going for it...
View attachment 1073858

There is a reason people forgot about it.

Thanks for the tip, just snagged it on gog for 3 bucks. Im currently about 10 hours into a Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition playthrough, and will probably give this a whirl when I finish my adventures as a mad traveling bard out for a murderous stroll through the sword coast.

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader on GOG.com

www.gog.com

 

[Coolio55]

Lionheart actually had some good traction pre-release. Even though it's pretty ugly and came out in 2003 there was still interest in isometric CRPGs among a lot of the PC audience, especially one from Black Isle.

What really killed it is the fact that Interplay forced Black Isle to put it out halfway through development, which is why the first 12 or so hours is a great RPG, and the last 8 or so is a shitty Diablo clone with almost no role playing to be found. It makes in nearly impossible to beat if you don't pump your combat stats, and even if you do it gets painfully boring. The premature launch and subsequent failure is a large part of what led to Interplay cutting Black Isle loose and selling the Fallout rights, which would result in Fallout 3 getting axed by Bethesda mere weeks before going gold. The game is fine overall, but I'll always have a stick up my ass over it as the game that killed Van Buren.

Fucked up but that sort of shit is why you always finallize the beginning and ending portions of the game first. Most players will naturally focus on those bits and you won't leave a sour taste in the mouth of people who finish and it's always easier to cut through the middle if something REALLY doesn't work. I guess the rushed release was completely unexpected though

Also, was fallout 3 really that far in development? Shame it's never been properly leaked outside of a small demo but I guess todd personally burnt all the HDDs considering what a fucking hash his company made of the franchise.

 

[ThinkThankThunk]

Fucked up but that sort of shit is why you always finallize the beginning and ending portions of the game first. Most players will naturally focus on those bits and you won't leave a sour taste in the mouth of people who finish and it's always easier to cut through the middle if something REALLY doesn't work. I guess the rushed release was completely unexpected though

Also, was fallout 3 really that far in development? Shame it's never been properly leaked outside of a small demo but I guess todd personally burnt all the HDDs considering what a fucking hash his company made of the franchise.

Fallout 3's canellation is perhaps the single most cruel thing I've seen out of this god forsaken industry. If my autismal memory for all things Fallout serves me right, Bethesda obtained the rights about two months before release. Within a week Black Isle and it's employees were flooded with C&Ds and the game was ordered to be destroyed with about 90 percent of development complete. The only things left to finalize were voice files and the last of the bug fixes. Most of the employees walked at that point, going on to Obsidian.

Most of the game sans engine and code was leaked a few months later, which is where all the scripts and art files come from. The few things that were lost ended up being remade in New Vegas anyways, since it's a direct sequel to Van Buren (especially in the Legion's content and Honest Hearts, which are almost entirely picking up from where the original 3 left off.) I'm surprised that at no point in the last decade and a half nobody has bothered to try remaking the assets in a real engine. The maps, perks, dialouge, and a good portion of the audio recordings are all floating around out there. It would take a year or two of dicking around but I'm sure someone could remake it all in Unity, assuming they could dodge Bethesda's legal department and Todd's hit squads long enough to finish it.

 

[Coolio55]

Fallout 3's canellation is perhaps the single most cruel thing I've seen out of this god forsaken industry. If my autismal memory for all things Fallout serves me right, Bethesda obtained the rights about two months before release. Within a week Black Isle and it's employees were flooded with C&Ds and the game was ordered to be destroyed with about 90 percent of development complete. The only things left to finalize were voice files and the last of the bug fixes. Most of the employees walked at that point, going on to Obsidian.

Most of the game sans engine and code was leaked a few months later, which is where all the scripts and art files come from. The few things that were lost ended up being remade in New Vegas anyways, since it's a direct sequel to Van Buren (especially in the Legion's content and Honest Hearts, which are almost entirely picking up from where the original 3 left off.) I'm surprised that at no point in the last decade and a half nobody has bothered to try remaking the assets in a real engine. The maps, perks, dialouge, and a good portion of the audio recordings are all floating around out there. It would take a year or two of dicking around but I'm sure someone could remake it all in Unity, assuming they could dodge Bethesda's legal department and Todd's hit squads long enough to finish it.

Wow. Most of the time these famously unreleased games just get buried for various reasons but actually being destroyed is a (sorta) new one.
I guess I just have a nose for the sort of horrible bullshit that goes on in the gaming industry considering I was right on the money.

 

[ThinkThankThunk]

Wow. Most of the time these famously unreleased games just get buried for various reasons but actually being destroyed is a (sorta) new one.
I guess I just have a nose for the sort of horrible bullshit that goes on in the gaming industry considering I was right on the money.

There could be an entire thread on games that were treated similarly. Duke Nukem Forever has a build from 2002 that still exists within the walls of Gearbox, but each copy is fingerprinted and anyone who drops it would be outed immediately. Screenshots and video have slowly leaked out, but the fact that Randy Pitchford is allegedly a monster who beats and molests his employees children to keep them in line prevents anyone with a copy from showing any more than that. The 1997 build of Prey is in a very similar spot, where there are still floppy drives that were sent to press outlets floating around, but they're all under indefinite NDA now at Bethesda's behest.

Compared to any of that Black Isle's Fallout 3 got off relatively easy; it had a sequel to tie up loose ends and give closure to the development team that were forced to junk it the first time around. The same can't be said of something like Prey 2 which was forced to be destroyed just as Van Buren was once Human Head refused Bethesda's aqisition demands.

 

[Coolio55]

There could be an entire thread on games that were treated similarly. Duke Nukem Forever has a build from 2002 that still exists within the walls of Gearbox, but each copy is fingerprinted and anyone who drops it would be outed immediately. Screenshots and video have slowly leaked out, but the fact that Randy Pitchford is allegedly a monster who beats and molests his employees children to keep them in line prevents anyone with a copy from showing any more than that. The 1997 build of Prey is in a very similar spot, where there are still floppy drives that were sent to press outlets floating around, but they're all under indefinite NDA now at Bethesda's behest.

Compared to any of that Black Isle's Fallout 3 got off relatively easy; it had a sequel to tie up loose ends and give closure to the development team that were forced to junk it the first time around. The same can't be said of something like Prey 2 which was forced to be destroyed just as Van Buren was once Human Head refused Bethesda's aqisition demands.

Ah DNF, at least we KNOW that one still exists. (Well, multiple versions if we're counting both the 2001 and 2003 versions) Randy also constantly make BS claims about how to release anything they'd have to release both a duke collection AND also do unspecified work on it that he refuses to disclose. The fucker.
Didn't know the original prey was out there and that it's sequel was destroyed. Seems that original at least has a fighting chance of appearing in the wild considering how many obscure outlets have gone under since.

 

[ThinkThankThunk]

Ah DNF, at least we KNOW that one still exists. (Well, multiple versions if we're counting both the 2001 and 2003 versions) Randy also constantly make BS claims about how to release anything they'd have to release both a duke collection AND also do unspecified work on it that he refuses to disclose. The fucker.
Didn't know the original prey was out there and that it's sequel was destroyed. Seems that original at least has a fighting chance of appearing in the wild considering how many obscure outlets have gone under since.

The old Build Engine versions of Prey will eventually drop, it's just a matter of waiting until someone unassuming digs it out of an attic or a garage sale and hoping I'm still alive by then. As far as Prey 2 goes, I wish I could live in ignorance of it's shitcanning. Long story short on it is that Bethesda wanted Human Head Studios. They were up and coming, had a lot of venture investment and had a strong team behind them. To aquire the studio, Bethesda had 3D Realms license them the rights to a Prey sequel. They let them work for years on it, only to turn around at the eleventh hour and demand the studio sell themselves to Bethesda or have the rights yanked. Human Head refused, and were promptly annihilated with not just C&Ds, but multiple infringment suits. With no game to release and mounting legal bills, the company folded and it's employees scattered. As an attendee of PAX Prime 2011 I got to see the gameplay demo of Prey 2 firsthand at Bethesda's booth and it was fucking finished. It was officially due out November 2012, or more reasonably early 2013 to get away from Bethesda's own Dishonored, and was only cancelled sometime in August or September of 2012.

And as a footnote since both PAX and Randy are in my mind, the original version of Aliens: Colonial Marines is gone too, also destroyed by Bitchford. The playable demo of CM that was at PAX for years was developed by a completely different studio, which was never paid for their work, and was essensially what GTFO is now. Gearbox hires on a third party to develop a game they can use in their marketing, refuses to pay for it, and quickly slaps togther some shovelware to cash in on all the great buzz surrounding it.

I guess what I'm getting at with all of this is that the games industry has been trash for a long time and I should have gotten into another hobby. I bet the marbles community doesn't have to put up with this shit.

 

[Coolio55]

The old Build Engine versions of Prey will eventually drop, it's just a matter of waiting until someone unassuming digs it out of an attic or a garage sale and hoping I'm still alive by then. As far as Prey 2 goes, I wish I could live in ignorance of it's shitcanning. Long story short on it is that Bethesda wanted Human Head Studios. They were up and coming, had a lot of venture investment and had a strong team behind them. To aquire the studio, Bethesda had 3D Realms license them the rights to a Prey sequel. They let them work for years on it, only to turn around at the eleventh hour and demand the studio sell themselves to Bethesda or have the rights yanked. Human Head refused, and were promptly annihilated with not just C&Ds, but multiple infringment suits. With no game to release and mounting legal bills, the company folded and it's employees scattered. As an attendee of PAX Prime 2011 I got to see the gameplay demo of Prey 2 firsthand at Bethesda's booth and it was fucking finished. It was officially due out November 2012, or more reasonably early 2013 to get away from Bethesda's own Dishonored, and was only cancelled sometime in August or September of 2012.

And as a footnote since both PAX and Randy are in my mind, the original version of Aliens: Colonial Marines is gone too, also destroyed by Bitchford. The playable demo of CM that was at PAX for years was developed by a completely different studio, which was never paid for their work, and was essensially what GTFO is now. Gearbox hires on a third party to develop a game they can use in their marketing, refuses to pay for it, and quickly slaps togther some shovelware to cash in on all the great buzz surrounding it.

I guess what I'm getting at with all of this is that the games industry has been trash for a long time and I should have gotten into another hobby. I bet the marbles community doesn't have to put up with this shit.

Speaking of that old improved build engine prey, those old screenshots have stuff in them that is very similar to a toy engine Ken Silverman made in the mid 2000s that recently got released. Maybe he reused some ideas.

You might also get a kick out of some of the wierd other silverman engine demos in this vid:

Also, gotta love that the final colonial marines was completely fucked up the ass due to a single letter misspelling in an ini file. (No, I'm not kidding)

Ps. I'm going to bed now so expect a delayed response

 

[Dom Cruise]

Fallout 3's canellation is perhaps the single most cruel thing I've seen out of this god forsaken industry. If my autismal memory for all things Fallout serves me right, Bethesda obtained the rights about two months before release. Within a week Black Isle and it's employees were flooded with C&Ds and the game was ordered to be destroyed with about 90 percent of development complete. The only things left to finalize were voice files and the last of the bug fixes. Most of the employees walked at that point, going on to Obsidian.

Most of the game sans engine and code was leaked a few months later, which is where all the scripts and art files come from. The few things that were lost ended up being remade in New Vegas anyways, since it's a direct sequel to Van Buren (especially in the Legion's content and Honest Hearts, which are almost entirely picking up from where the original 3 left off.) I'm surprised that at no point in the last decade and a half nobody has bothered to try remaking the assets in a real engine. The maps, perks, dialouge, and a good portion of the audio recordings are all floating around out there. It would take a year or two of dicking around but I'm sure someone could remake it all in Unity, assuming they could dodge Bethesda's legal department and Todd's hit squads long enough to finish it.

The trouble with the original Fallout 3 is while it had a lot of great ideas, the bland 3D graphics were so unappealing compared to the graphics of 1 and 2, I wish the game had been released, but with a graphics engine like Arcanum.

When was Fallout 3 scheduled to be released though, by the way?

That's pretty cruel, but the cruelest thing in gaming history to me is what Konami did to Team Silent, Silent Hill 2 is the greatest achievement in gaming history from an artistic standpoint and most of the talent behind it was pissed away into obscurity, it's akin to murdering Stanley Kubrick after he had only made a few movies or something.

The loss to gaming as an artistic medium thanks to that can't really be understated.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

The 1E AD&D "Gold Box" series. Pseudo-3D (on a 2D grid, 1 box = 10 feet, supposedly), overland travel on maps, pseudo-isometric (grid again) combat. Very limited but fun. Combat-focused, limited role-playing opportunity (although one game tried the mechanic of characters falling in love. Among other things, if their lover was killed, they'd go into a rampage and be controlled by the AI, and they'd get depressed [minus to hit and save] if the party rejected their love.) Wild variation in art quality. A fairly faithful recreation of the AD&D rules, limited of course by the technology. Stories were of varying quality although mostly unmemorable and similar to one another. You could edit your character's ability scores to be all 18's (a feature designed for importing pen and paper characters.) Had obnoxious copy protection that involved physical objects (an "adventurer's journal" that included most of the game content. Would say "type word X on page Y" when booting up in addition to being more or less unplayable without, or at least much less enjoyable. Now available readily online. Many of them were fakes, like "I can't believe [NPC] turned out to be a traitor!" so you couldn't just read through. They also sold clue books with spoilers, walkthroughs, and detailed maps.) For their era (1988-1993) were class. Spawned a game-making program, Unlimited Adventures and an MMO, Neverwinter Nights. I don't know if it's just because it's nostalgic for me but I love these.

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Hot chicks:

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Ahhh, I remember the Gold Box games, just about. The finest hour was the cover art to Curse of the Azure Bonds which featured a she-warrior with 80s hair and a boobplate with cleavage window which was then justified in universe by it being a magic boobplate that emits a forcefield over the cleavage window. No shit.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

The 1997 build of Prey is in a very similar spot, where there are still floppy drives that were sent to press outlets floating around, but they're all under indefinite NDA now at Bethesda's behest.

I think it's Interceptor or whoever it is calling themselves 3D Realms these days that sits on the old Prey builds and have showed it off to people visiting them. They can't figure out a way to release it though.

Speaking of that old improved build engine prey, those old screenshots have stuff in them that is very similar to a toy engine Ken Silverman made in the mid 2000s that recently got released. Maybe he reused some ideas.
View attachment 1073986View attachment 1073987View attachment 1073988
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3qtmkkdND6M

Those screenshots were included on the original Duke3D CD release with a .txt file announcing the game, it was neat although it looked mostly like fullbright Quake. I don't think Silverman ever had anything directly to do with it, he peaced out of games shortly after Duke3D.

When they started talking about portals in the original Prey it was a type of visibility culling, if the viewport can't see an entry to a room it can't see the room so geometry and shit doesn't need to be processed. Checking if a doorway or window, referred to as a portal into another space, is visible and if not discarding anything contained in that room/cell, is very fast because the question/query is simple.

Then they got a game designer that had misinterpreted what portals dividing and connecting space actually meant and he had some wild ideas... That was when Prey turned into the Prey we know and it was a huge headache for the engine programmers. Those kinds of portals are easy to figure out these days but I can't imagine what kind of nightmare it would have been at that time.

Severance: Blade of Darkness, Unreal and Max Payne* were using portals in the same way the original Prey was meant to. Unreal 1 even had portals that defied spatial geometry just like Prey. Later on Quake 3 had much simpler "portals" for the very same reason: engine parity, the Prey engine had bells and whistles that the other ones didn't.
Epic even had something Prey didn't: they had their portals running in software, Prey was controversially enough made exclusively for 3d accelerators.

*Max Payne was produced by 3D Realms, if you somehow manage to find screenshots of their level editors both of them will, in 98-99, have some visual similarities. Not indicative of anything but I found it interesting.

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

Super Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Gaplus, and Dig Dug II. They're just as addictive as the more well-known games in their series.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Speaking of Max Payne I can't get either of part 1 or 2 to work on Steam. I've checked the forum and nothing. I thought "Okay, I have a new rig with new video card and everything. Maybe it'll work?" And used my $5 Steam credit to grab part 2 and it refused to launch.

 

[I Love Beef]

You want to bust your balls with out of the ordinary Nintendo Hard games?

Try Lifeforce, Mr. Gimmick, Gunnac, and Crystalis.

If it counts, try getting old CPS games. Warzard, Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara, I'll name more because this alcohol is kicking my ass

 

[Autisimodo]

Master of Magic: A really fun 4X strategy game with high fantasy themes and a magic-themed "Tech Tree" of spells. Its a game I'd recommend to anyone into old-school strategy games.

Also, a lot of Bullfrog's games are awesome, particularly Dungeon Keeper 1. Its graphics are dated but it still plays very well and the dark comedy tends to make up for some of the more brutal and repetitive levels later in the game. It's a shame EA bought them out all those years ago.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Speaking of Max Payne I can't get either of part 1 or 2 to work on Steam. I've checked the forum and nothing. I thought "Okay, I have a new rig with new video card and everything. Maybe it'll work?" And used my $5 Steam credit to grab part 2 and it refused to launch.

I wish I could help you but I've not played the original Max Payne since 2013 and Max Payne 2 since 2010, both were on Windows 7.

 

[Rice Is Ready]

The whole might and magic series. Just beautiful games to look at.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Even though I’m not the only one, I still think playing the old PSP and PS2 is still a treat.
My birthday is coming up soon, so I’ll just save to get those two, and probably an NES (or SNES), or a Famicon in late spring.