Tag Archives: late to the party

Blog 744: Prey

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I didn’t play Prey at the time because it was visually unappealing to me and I’m as shallow as a puddle. While the thought of sneaking and shooting one’s way around a space station ticks many of my boxes, the thought of doing so while fighting the most nondescript aliens you could ever imagine poured doubt on the entire enterprise.

But the reviews all said it was good and I saw it on sale while I was picking up the fantastic XCOM2, so I thought to myself, “how bad can it be?”

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Blog 742: XcellentCOM 2

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It saddened me that I had to buy the XCOM2 Collection digitally, as no physical version of the end-of-life complete edition was ever released.

After having completed it, I am doubly sad not to have a proper box, because it was really really good.

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Blog 726: Tiberian Renegade

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It seems to me that everything Westwood touched turned to gold. They were most famous for their real-time strategies — the pinnacle being Tiberian Sun itself — but they seemed to diverge from that mould more than history would have you believe and come up roses all the same. Foremost of course was their stab at the hack ‘n’ slash RPG, which produced one of the greatest games of all time, Nox.

Over here, though, we have their first-person shooter. Set in the Command & Conqueriverse, occurring some time during the original C&C, this answers the age-old question that haunts every strategy franchise — what would it be like to be in one of those battles?

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Blog 717: Urban Chaos

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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.)

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Blog 714: SiN

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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.

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Blog 691: Dio Recommends – Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

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I have a habit of getting stuck in ruts, we all know this by now. I try to get out of them, I really do — and one way I find can dislodge sticky wheels is by getting other people to suggest activities I wouldn’t ordinarily lean towards.

Today, Dionesiist recommends that I play Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. Third person post-apocalyptic fantasy vampire action!

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Blog 689: Titan Quest

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My quest for the perfect action-RPG, the elusive Nox-killer, continues. I’ve heard a lot about Titan Quest over the years, constant rumours of its goodness, but it was never purchaseable so I shrugged and moved on.

I think you already know how this story begins. A remaster appears on gog.com, it is deeply launch-discounted, and gosh, I’m not playing anything right now.

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Blog 688: Turok

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I wish I could have been a part of the late-90s shooter boom, but we could never afford a PC or any of those early 3D consoles at the time. Luckily gog.com exists in the present day and is slowly but surely unearthing all the shonky PC ports of strange games I glimpsed on billboards and in magazines but never imagined I would ever get to touch.

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter here is not the original game, but a (slightly?) remastered edition that was actually cranked out fairly recently. Generally I aim for purism — all official original patches and expansions but nothing more — but that’s not an option here so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance of the Original Version and take my review as being of… whatever they’ve changed/fixed/upgraded in this new version.

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