Now we need to get on to thinking about the next mission.

Loved it. Well done, lads.

Work continues daily.

And now, we crash. G’night, everyone!

My favorite was the creeper staring longingly through the Sniper Wolf entrance door. He soooo wanted to blow up Mark.

And yeah, creepers are around but I think in general the lights keep the darkness at bay. A creeper blew the door off Wolf Base last night after hanging around for about an hour despondently, and manged to destroy half of the welcome sign.

Also a zombie started banging the hell out of the door at one point, and seriously startled me.

Wolf base’s ceiling drips near the entrance, which irritates me, but I guess the damn thing is built 1 tile underneath the seabed so whatcha gonna do. I tried fixing it and flooded the whole room.

That said, I have noticed that there seem to be “bad” days and “good” days for monster generation. Some nights I can’t get anywhere for the monsters, some nights I can wander pretty much anywhere with relative impunity. I’m not sure if that’s a real thing or just my luck/imagination. Do you suppose the moon phase has anything to do with it?

I know there are endermen around because we ran into a bunch in the NPC village of mysterious monks too.

Either way, I’m pretty sure one of those blow-uppy bastards took out my original farm land, along with the cows I was breeding. I made up for it last night. I’m going to breed an army of cows!

I hear Age of Empires 3 is a great multiplayer game, if anything. I didn’t have the massive love affair with the second and, arguably, greatest in Age of Kings, but it certainly has a wide following all these years later. Ever play Galactic Battlegrounds, the Star Wars reskinning? Not bad.

Would love to see that graph as well, with all the moments of mechanical inception. As far as I know, Eugen Systems’ first ‘big’ title (that’s The Gladiators) was possibly the point of divergence for the Dawn of War squad-based RTT idea. You’ve got other titles prior that feed into the idea, but it’s the closest common ancestor I can find.

Yeah, the Age of Empires formula was pretty strong on its own for a while, begat several series like Empire Earth, Rise of Nations, and then went out with a whimper. Its only surviving heir is the facebook game, I guess? Kind of a shame, but Total War satisfies that niche for me now. Tried playing my .01 cent copy of Age 3 last month… yuck.

On that note, I kind of want to see a graph that shows the entire history, starting from Dune (or whatever), everything that arose from it, and all of the subsequent evolutions that spawned from them up to present day (if they made it). I wonder how that would look. Probably way more complicated than I’m imagining.

I think it might have been a culmination of all the things you mentioned, the glut especially, but Dark Colony certainly had a lot going for it – symmetry notwithstanding.

In regards to Age of Empires, thematically it cast its own shadow and enjoyed a position outside of the sphere of its pulpy fantasy/sci-fi contemporaries. Not to mention it had the Microsoft backing…in DC’s case, SSI probably didn’t have the marketing swathe – being a publisher primarily of neckbeard entertainment. Sort of like if Matrix Games wanted to tussle with the big boys.

The late 90s/early 2000s were my favourite times for the genre. So many interesting and ultimately forgotten titles to sift through. Force 21, The Gladiators, Submarine Titans, Conquest: Frontier Wars, those strange Homeworld B-tiers in Starmaggedon and Offworld Resource Base etc. etc.

I’ll rustle up another retrospective on a far newer title that I think you’d enjoy, or at least be intrigued to read about.

Was it Starcraft that overshadowed this game? Or was it Total Annihilation? Or was it that RTS games were a dime a dozen in the mid-late 90′s, and this one just didn’t differentiate itself enough from the pack to be remembered? The first Age of Empires came out the same year, was very different and is still remembered today despite Starcraft’s long, dark umbra.

Either way, I’m definitely glad that mirrored faction idea is a thing of the past. Also, I wonder if that day/night cycle was Blizzard’s inspiration for a similar cycle in Warcraft 3.

Looking forward to seeing how it unfolds — and very much looking forward to some hot John Rhys-Davies action in QfG4.

And just as an aside to this Squaddies by the Fireside chat…it’s nice to be able to engage in some of that high-level discussion that is usually reserved for podcasts, as the logistics, timezone and familial duties will always prevent anything further…a man weeps.

Anyway, Bowley, I echo Pete in saying this is very much your bag.

Intrigued by Endless Space, for sure, sounds right up my alley, “but can my aged computer run it?” is the question. Also kind of bummed to hear it lacks a touch of personality and that diplomacy isn’t all there, although I think a lot of space games struggle with those aspects. Actually I feel like all 4X games (at least the ones I have played) struggle with diplomacy the most, even the mighty Civ. It’s all you can do to keep every A.I. from acting completely irrational and dickish.

As for personality, it’s hard to love an empire of faceless planets. A council is a good start. I really think the planetary council in Alpha Centauri was a nice step in the personality direction, and it gave you reasons to contact faction leaders for more than just trading. There was a nice game of politics there that focused around votes and who you could persuade/buy off to vote your way on issues that affected everyone. I don’t see why there couldn’t be an inter-empire version of this, or maybe that’s too much to deal with. Civ 4/5 have the U.N. council, but it’s little more than a floating GUI with text.

And did Alex really drop a Star Wars Rebellion reference? Here I thought I was the only one who played that wonderful, but flawed, wrist-crippling strategy game. It definitely had personality, you recruited Star Wars characters for god sakes, but it also sounds like Endless Space has a similar combat system where you watch ships auto-battle with very loose interaction from the player. It worked back then, despite looking like ass, so I can image it still works for Endless Space. I’m down with the spectacle and cinematics. I don’t care about micromanaging battles as much.

OH, and yes to 4X narrative, however thin.

Anyway, I’ll probably pick this up the first time it’s on sale.

ALT-ENTER switches between windowed mode and fullscreen mode in DOSBOX. In the title there in windowed mode you can see the number of cycles running.

CTRL-F11 slows the clock cycles down, CTRL-F12 speeds them back up. I was able to prevent certain infamous crashes that were causing my game to die due to timing glitches by slowing down the clock cycles to 1% and then continuing the game as normal. After you’re past the glitchy spots, speed the cycles back up to 100%.

Unless they’ve patched Quest for Glory 4, I anticipate having to do this to solve the dreaded Error 52 in the mordavian swamps.

QFG3, still great though. More games need to be set in Africa with or without Sandford and Son jokes. Fighting still kind of sucks in this one, but who cares — it’s so not a focus of the third installment.

Found, but did not bother killing the Pizza Elemental. Screw that secret boss man. He just dropped pizzas on my head and then I died. SO DIFFICULT. Also, not worth it though I understand you can give pizza from his corpse to people for extra honor. Any hope I had of becoming a paladin was gone as soon as I put those x-ray specs on to watch harem girls and 386-era boobies.

HINT: I had difficulty importing my hero until from the QFG2 remake to QFG3 NON remake I did the following:

A) Went to the directory specified in the forums here:
“Any time a non-elevated account tries to save to a UAC controlled folder (like Program Files), the file is instead stored in the VirtualStore folder of that user. The location of that folder is at “C:\Users\\Appdata\local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Quest for Glory Pack\”, with the AppData folder being a hidden folder, “Users” and “Program Files (x86)” may be localized in your language, and being your Windows User’s name. You can also use the %localappdata% alias in the location bar of Windows Explorer that will take you to the AppData\Local folder directly.
So, after you find the VirtualStore directory that contains your file, copy it to the directory the game you want to import is installed at, meaning the “C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Quest for Glory Pack\Quest for Glory 2″ directory, not the one located in VirtualStore. ”

b) Grabbed my save game, went back to the (NON virtual) C:/program files… /GOG/Quest for Glory Directory

c) Now for some weird reason I could NOT import directly when the save was placed directly in that directory, but when I created a NEW DIRECTORY INSIDE THE GOG QFG3 DIRECTORY (I called it “/save”) and moved my saved game in there, I was able to “change directory” within the QFG 3 import screen to “C:/save/” My save game was there, and it imported fine.

TLDR: QFG3 (and 4?) consider “C:/” to be “The Root Of Your Game Directory”. Make a new directory inside it, put your (QF2 remake) save file in there and import away!

I tried Auditorium for the first time last night. I’ve been aware of it for a long time but never actually played it. What a fascinating experience! Reminds me, if anything, of Jeff “Yak the Hairy” Minter’s “light synthesiser” experiments in the ’80s and early ’90s — Colourspace and Trip-A-Tron, if anyone remembers those. (I’ll be impressed if you do.)

Auditorium has a special place in my heart. It was one of the first review codes I ever obtained.

On the QFG2 front, yeah you got 3, more to go. After that your only about 2/3′s of the way through the game. Personally, I think QFG 2 and 4 have the best plots of the series. I think you will find 3 more interesting since it does stray from the epic adventure in a small area.

Just beat the Fire elemental. Three to go?

I have finished QFG1 EGA finally. I was playing from a rusty memory, but it worked.
Thus the hero from the east freed the man from form of beast, saved beauty from brigands band and forced the ogress to leave the land.

I love that in the credits someone is credited as being responsible for the ‘Next Generation Graphics’
I have no doubt the game was impressive in its time, but its funny how we are still talking about graphics in the same way as they did then.

Big thanks for the Nier episode. It’s my game of the generation, possibly all time! You guys “got” it

I still have an hour of the ep left, so not sure if this is covered but here’s my chin strokey contribution: If androids had to create a creepy mansion in a post-apocalypse world, with no real-life version to copy, I guess they would copy a digitally coded version instead, hence the near-carbon-copy Resi mansion! #wankery

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/quest_for_glory_series/export_and_import_faq/page1

Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly better combat, but man, some of those critters sure can work you over if you’re not prepared. (instant kill with a brief tell from the scorpion? really? D: )

We’re getting our powerful and unique experiences at the same time, and seeing things like The Last of Us, Metro: Last Light etc. show that there’s a great balance being struck via taking cinematic queues and fusing them with traditional game mechanics…

…but come on. This po-faced want to fast-track videogames’ cultural legitimacy has its place, and by all means, despite falling out of love for the most part with narrative-heavy games and ones with social commentary, I encourage developers to follow in the footsteps of industry leaders like Irrational et al., but not at the expense of creativity.

And given THQ’s current situation, Rubin should be encouraging Volition to run in any direction and keep working their magic.