Tuesday, April 22, 2008

What am I playing?

Here's what I've been playing over the past week or so:

DOS Games!
Downloaded DOSBox and went back to a few old favorites - and games I'd never tried. Among these:

Descent: What a great game, and a start to an awesome series. Maybe this will refresh your memory a little?

It's essentially Doom, but with zero gravity and you fly a spaceship. It's a really unique game and still holds up well today. Try out Descent 3, the most recent one, for a real treat.

Escape Velocity: Arcade flight combat game, pretty cool for its open-world style gameplay. You can fly just about anywhere and shoot up everything you see, and explore for hidden tunnels, but there's always an objective arrow to your next target. The game is fun if a bit simplistic.

MechWarrior 2: Wow. I didn't know what I was missing but this game is insanely fun! It's basically a detailed simulator for large battlemechs. Much slower and more realistic than other titles like Armored Core(if a nonexistent vehicle can be portrayed realistically), it's much more immersing as a result. I'm already looking for the more modern MechWarrior 3.

Monkey Island: I'm terrible at point-and-click adventure games and this one is no exception. It's really funny and clever, but I'm just unable to advance without walkthroughs and this really hurts my enjoyment of it.

Planetfall: What? An Infocom text adventure? Astounding! A fairly good one, too. I'm trying to play this one correctly by making a map and keeping track of things better, so I might have a chance of progressing a little.

Other Games
Aside from the oldies, I downloaded the recent free release of Trackmania: Nations. This is a racing game built entirely around time trials, with insane courses that include trick jumps, obstacles, and difficult layouts built on top of a good physics engine. I'm currently something like 15th in Connecticut. Some of the gold medals are just really hard to get, though, hindering my progression to the top of the ladder. This game can be downloaded for free here.

Another game I downloaded just today was FaceWound. It's a side-scrolling zombie shooter with impressive effects and ragdolls incorporated with 2D graphics. It's a lot of fun for anyone who has a hankering for shooting a zombie's head off and seeing a shower of blood. It can be downloaded for free here.

Finally, I'll finish this entry off with Rome: Total War. I haven't played it too much yet but I do love me some realistic strategy. Good luck sieging Sparta, because some bearded guy keeps kicking me into this pit after yelling about something. It's just getting annoying now.

2 comments:

eedok said...

seriously get Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall

it's quite wicked

organic io said...

Came here to read your post about crappy western Shmup reviews that you linked from the shmups forum.
But I noticed you mentioned Descent (my favourite game of all time!)

Dosbox is not a good way to play Descent anymore! For years there has been an open source improvement called D1X. It has evolved quite a bit and the best of the recent open source iterations is D2X Rebirth
http://www.dxx-rebirth.de/

Most importantly it adds 3d acceleration, support for windows game controllers (think: a good joystick). D2x now even supports D1 levels.

You can even find matches on Kali still if you go on the Descent server and ask. :)

Nothing beats a good Descent deathmatch. Never has, never will. :)