I am a little bit sad that I missed the late 90s computer game era; things seemed to be more aligned to my tastes back then. Oh well, we’ve got ports on gog.com to make up for it — better late than never, right?
Today’s interesting morsel from the dark ages is Urban Chaos, a crime-fighting action adventure. (Well, not that dark, 1999 wasn’t that long ago.)
My brother gave me five games for crimbo, but I’ve been so busy working on my own that I’ve hardly even looked at them. I played open-world RPG Two Worlds during the festive holiday but didn’t have much to say about it; it’s a bit janky, sometimes interesting, couple of nice ideas but ultimately bland.
Sometimes, though, you need to recharge your batteries with a classic late-90s first-person shooter, and it seems we have one in the pile — SiN.
When I’m feeling a bit sorry for myself, I like to buy some hoary old low-poly action game for a pittance at gog.com. My wishlist is absolutely chocka with… well, things that I find visually appealing and seem like decent games too. Every Friday they announce the weekend’s sale and I look down that list and see if there are any matches, and then think to myself… do I want this?
The answer this time is… yes. Yes, I want this. It’s called Expendable and it’s an “arcade shooter” from 1999.
Having given Helios a decent work-out with Crysis, what could I do next but pick up an ancient 3D hack ‘n’ slash from GOG.com that it could probably run while switched off?
Hey — my game is going to be a hack ‘n’ slash, it’s totally research.
GoG.com is a wonderful thing. All these late-90s FPSes, that I was too young and lacking in computing power to appreciate at the time, are suddenly available for extremely reasonable prices.
While I was just meandering around a while ago, I stumbled across Shogo – Mobile Armor Division and figured it’d be worth a punt some time in the future. I added it to my wishlist against the day I could be bothered.
Last weekend, it came on sale. As is always the way, I took the plunge.
They say that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I was vaguely interested in Torchlight at the time, but based on its status as a digital-download-only title and rumours that it was just a cash cow for an eventual MMO, it fell by the wayside (ain’t no way I’m funding an MMO if I can help it).
Then GoG.com offered it to me for free. Free. What kind of man would I be if I refused?
Little Big Adventure 2 came with our first computer, as part of the “family pack”. That was more than ten years ago. It took a couple of tries to get into (for my brain that hadn’t quite grasped how to games yet), but once I did it was a delightful experience that just kept on giving.
So I’ve been waiting about ten years for its prequel, the original Little Big Adventure (Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure according to some screens), to be somehow re-released so that I could bask in the series’ origins.
Just scant weeks ago, GOG.com fulfulled that wish.
Rao Dao Zao 