Posts Tagged ‘PC games’

Retro Gaming Anniversary: Star Wars: KOTOR

By Chief Oddball on July 15th, 2010 at 11:10 pm

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Damn it feels good to be a Jedi gangsta

Seven years ago today — July 15th, 2003 — Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released for the original Xbox console. Now, I normally don’t go around spouting off release dates of games; I happened to run across this one a couple days ago only because I am once again playing this game. Since I have been so completely addicted to it in recent days, I thought it might be an appropriate subject for one of those elusive Oddball Update “Retro Gaming” posts. And so here we are.

Star Wars: KOTOR (as it shall henceforth be called, since I don’t want to type out that whole name again) has the honor of being the first game I ever reviewed here at Oddball Update. It was, in fact, the subject of my second post ever on this blog. Reading that old post from 2003 is somewhat disorienting today, as it talks about the old Xbox console and its hamfisted controller, and makes comparisons to other games of the era that I have long since forgotten. But the overall bent of the review still holds true: KOTOR is an amazing game, even today in 2010, and now — as then — it’s an absolute pleasure to play.

Today’s post won’t really be a review of the game (hence the absence of the word “review” from the already-overlong post title). It’s more a chance for me to discuss the technical fine points of going to back to such old software on a modern computer. This is a process which is typically fraught with compatibility nightmares, driver hacks and other stuff-and-nonsense that makes you wonder why you even bothered in the first place. However, thanks to Valve Software’s inestimably helpful Steam digital delivery platform, playing KOTOR on your PC is now as easy as plopping down $9.99, downloading 4GB of data and firing it right up — natively — on your Windows 7 box. Yep — KOTOR is on Steam.

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Star Trek Online: Latest Screenshots

By Chief Oddball on February 28th, 2010 at 12:25 am

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I last posted about the massively multiplayer PC game Star Trek Online during the open beta phase. The game hit retail release in early February, and now that it’s been several weeks since then, what’s the current state of the game? Am I still playing?

In fact, today was the first time I logged onto Star Trek Online in almost two weeks. I have Mass Effect to thank for this — as much as I love all things Trek, Mass Effect is simply a far superior sci-fi RPG in every conceivable way. But I like to bounce back and forth between my hobbies (and obsessions!), and because today was a Star Trek day in every other regard (hint hint), I decided to change things up and take a seat at the helm of my Constitution-class starship once more.

Star Trek Online has been steadily improving over time, and a number of the more irritating bugs have been fixed since I last ventured out into the Alpha Quadrant. Notably, my ship’s bridge officers are finally allowed to wear the custom Next Generation style uniforms that came with my Collector’s Edition of the game, so now we all look pretty spiffy as we tool around on those away missions. (Also, if you have the TOS-style uniforms, the “Roddenberry Special” miniskirts are now available to your female officers, for which I’m sure they’ll, ah, thank you.) There has also been a litany of gameplay enhancements, new missions, new ship designs and other errata that are detailed in much depth on the STO website. If you hate the lack of content on the Klingon side or have a beef with the overall gameplay mechanics, you’re going to continue to be disappointed — probably forever. But there it’s clear that Cryptic does keep improving and evolving the game as we go.

I’m still a lowly Lieutenant Grade 6, which essentially means I haven’t amounted to a hill of beans in the STO universe. Unlike two weeks ago, now I find myself surrounded by huge Galaxy and Sovereign-class ships as I fly through sector space, a grim reminder of the fact that tons of other players have leveled way, way past me while I was busy recruiting the galaxy’s best and brightest for Commander Shepard’s suicide mission. (Hey, the Normandy ain’t gonna fly herself, no matter what EDI might tell you. I make no apologies.)

While I haven’t yet spent enough time to offer a more in-depth review of the new content and the other enhancements that lurk just beneath the surface, I did take a bunch of screenshots that might give you a glimpse into the exciting and ever-changing world of Star Trek Online. If you have a soft spot for the original Enterprise as I do, some of these shots may be a real feast your eyes.

U.S.S. Songkhla (NCC-104750-A)

Tugboat Duty: Towing a Wrecked Freighter

Entering Standard Orbit While Deftly Avoiding the Asteroids

Ensign Sansanee and Captain Harvie on the Bridge

Not Exactly an Ideal Vacation Spot

The Constitution-Class Ship's Unique Blue Phasers

Sansanee, More Interested in a Tribble than the Mission

Ready to Repel the Klingon Invasion of Vulcan

It's Drive-In Movie Time at Starbase One!

My Recreation of a Classic TOS Orbit Shot

Second Star to the Right, and Straight On Till Morning

Lending a Hand to a Disabled Crewman

If It's Borg, Shoot It!

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Impressions: Star Trek Online (Open Beta)

By Chief Oddball on January 23rd, 2010 at 12:27 am

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Visiting strange new worlds

Star Trek and video games. Like many geeks, they’re two of my first loves, forged in my early years when bright colors and awe-inspiring, imagination-stoking stories were all I needed to be truly happy. So it should be no surprise that every time these two elements come together, I sit up and take notice. Usually I find myself underwhelmed, but today I’m positively aglow. And you, dear reader, whether you like it or not, are about to discover why.

For the past week, I’ve been participating in the open beta test of Star Trek Online, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) from Cryptic Studios, makers of Champions Online and City of Heroes. If those titles don’t exactly inspire confidence, you’re not alone. Maybe, being a hardcore Trekker, I’m more forgiving than most — but it’s my opinion that Cryptic has created something amazing in Star Trek Online, something the cosmos has badly needed for a good number of years: a decent Star Trek video game.

In fact, STO is more than mere decency would imply. In the short couple of weeks since the beta began, I’ve watched it evolve from a rough, buggy and somewhat small-feeling universe to a huge, open-universe game with real polish and real potential — even with the bugs that remain to be fixed. Every Star Trek fan’s dream, whether you like the classic original series, the iconic adventures of Picard’s Enterprise or the dark days of the Dominion War, is represented faithfully by at least one slice of Star Trek Online. It’s enough to make a grown man imitate phaser sound effects while flying his very own replica of the Enterprise about the galaxy.

Because it’s an MMORPG, Star Trek Online is different than your average singleplayer-centric game. It’s a huge open world, a persistent virtual universe that’s constantly running on a farm of servers 24/7, changing and evolving whether you’re part of it or not. You share this game world with all of the other players, who are exploring space, getting into battles and engaging in commerce at the same time you are. Although there aren’t as many opportunities for you to actually play with others as there are in most MMOs, there are still lots of ways to team up and tackle missions, attack the enemy and defend Federation starbases with tons of other people from around the world.

Being a somewhat anti-social person, I’ve never had a real hankering to play popular MMOs like World of Warcraft or EVE Online; usually I would rather explore a game’s virtual universe my myself. Additionally, I was never really a fan of the fantasy setting (dragons, orcs, wizards and so forth) on which most MMOs are based. Star Trek Online therefore presents a unique opportunity for me to enter the world of MMORPGs on my own terms, using a setting both familiar and welcome. And the fact that solo play seems to be rather commonplace — even hard to avoid — in STO only made it easier for me to give it a try.

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Bankruptcy Is Our Game

By Chief Oddball on May 7th, 2009 at 6:04 pm

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…“We’re here to kick ass and make money…and we’re all out of money.”Title of 3D Realms’ last quarterly financial statement (just kidding)

Barely more than a week after eulogizing Pontiac Motor Division, I’m back again to say “Sayonara!” to another staple of my formative years: game development studio 3D Realms, formerly known as Apogee Software LTD, makers of Duke Nukem 3D. Yesterday, in a sudden announcement that has taken the world by surprise — and has even rocketed to the top of BBC News’ list of most popular stories — it was revealed that 3DR was “shutting down” by the end of this week due to a lack of funds. All of their employees have already been let go.

All throughout the ’90s, Apogee/3D Realms gave me plenty to do. From publishing the iconic Wolfenstein 3-D to developing witty shooters like Duke and Shadow Warrior, the company’s games always topped my “must-have” list. I famously spent the entire holiday seasons of 1994 and 1995 waiting, respectively, for the release of Rise of the Triad and Duke3D. While ROTT was a bit of let-down for me, the critically-acclaimed Duke3D fully redeemed 3D Realms, and kept me occupied for a record-breaking two solid years of fun. It became a source of pop culture in-jokes, woven into practically everything I created in 1996 and 1997. I played countless head-to-head modem games (“Dukematches”) with my high school friends in the off hours. The game was an epic success around the world.

My friend Reaper and I were even creating our own respective takes on our high school in Duke’s level editor — his featured the infamous auditorium rocket launchers that you had no chance in hell of escaping, while mine sported a hidden “war room” off the cafeteria where school officials could keep watch for troublesome parents who had come to question the administration’s insane policies. Ah, those were the days.

Following the incredible success of Duke3D, 3D Realms — whose tagline was “Reality is Our Game” — first revealed news of an upcoming sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, in late 1997. Somewhere, I still have the issue of PC Gamer whose cover sported the exclusive announcement, which I picked up from the local Egghead Software on my way home from school one day. (Count the anachronisms in that sentence, why don’t you!) Duke Forever, or DNF, was billed as a revolutionary shooter that would essentially be the best game ever made. Fresh on the heels of Duke3D, everyone was taking about it — and hotly anticipating it.

Unfortunately, a ridiculous 12 years later, we now know that DNF stands for nothing more than “Did Not Finish.” The only thing finished here is the now-defunct 3D Realms.

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The Next Red-Letter Date: DNF Teaser Trailer 2007

By Chief Oddball on December 18th, 2007 at 8:49 pm

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Duke Nukem Forever - Teaser screenshot released 12/18/2007

The Shacknews headline reads: “Duke Nukem Forever Teaser Releasing Tomorrow; This is Real and We Are Not Shitting You.”

So says George Broussard, longtime president of 3D Realms, who today announced that a Very Special Teaser Trailer of the now-joketacular Duke Nukem Forever will be released tomorrow around noon, Central Time. This is the first time any actual piece of DNF material has been shown since the E3 2001 trailer, which, despite going down as a classic, hasn’t accurately represented the game’s appearance in years.

The 3D Realms message forums are now practically unusable due to all the traffic. Various gaming websites have exploded upon hearing the news. After all, since Duke Nukem Forever was first announced in 1997, it has gone on to become the stuff of legend. With one of the longest development cycles in gaming history, the arrival of any piece of DNF media — to say nothing of the game itself — may as well signify the end of days.

It is, in a word, biblical.

I stopped following the DNF news a long time ago, but the previous game in the franchise — Duke Nukem 3D — remains one of my all-time gaming favorites. And while most of the Internet has spent the better part of the last ten years laughing and mocking the apparent vaporware status of DNF, it looks like 3D Realms is about to snap us all back to attention.

I know what I’ll be watching on my lunch break tomorrow. In the meantime, check out this humorous list of facts about DNF’s development cycle — and the world events that have occurred since it was announced. You may be surprised!

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The Week In Review

By Chief Oddball on April 13th, 2007 at 6:30 pm

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Random bloggage is imminent. All hands abandon ship.

So here it is, Friday evening, and I’m about to sit down to a meal of home-cooked chicken fricassee. It’s the (welcome) end of another work week, during which I got a lot done and learned a good deal in the process. This weekend I’m planning to chill out, do some creative writing (a continuation of something I already started on earlier this week), hang out with Apple, play some games, go to Sushi-Thai, watch some TV, maybe do some driving, and enjoy life. It’s what weekends are supposed to be!

In case you hadn’t heard — I understand you midwesterners are busy with the recent snowfall, of all the ridiculous things — we here in Florida have been baking to death. We’ve had next to zero rain since 2006 ended, and that currently has us in what is being called the worst drought in Florida in over 100 years. All of the man-made lakes in the community are down at least two-thirds from their usual levels, and officials are starting to worry about the drinking water supply. There’s still another month or two before the rainy season normaly kicks in, so to mitigate the disaster, the South Florida Water Management District has imposed the rarely-used Phase II restrictions.

What this means is that you can only water your lawn twice a week, for four hours a day between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. You can only wash your car on those same two days between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. And this time, businesses and golf courses have to play by the rules, too. The car wash rules even say that you have to wash your car on a non-paved surface, or in a place where the water will drain to a non-paved surface so it can soak back into the ground. (That’s not possible in our community, because we’re not allowed to park on the grass, even if we own the property on which said grass is planted.) And local cops have been ordered not to give warnings to first time offenders, but rather to just hand out multi-hundred dollar tickets instead.

So as you can imagine, I’m glad that with restrictions like these, we’re not getting any rainfall — because if I needed to clean my car, the only way I could 100% comply with the law would be to go to a car wash, where they use unrestricted reclaimed water (read: toilet wastewater that’s been treated). And that should be all you need to know, in case you happen to visit Florida and wonder why our car washes smell so bad.

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First Play: Call of Duty Demo

By Chief Oddball on August 31st, 2003 at 12:00 am

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Call of Duty promo screenshotWorld War II-themed first person shooters: They’ve been everywhere on the PC since the boxoffice success of Saving Private Ryan, to the point of almost becoming a cliche. For a while there, a few Vietnam shooters were tried, until people figured out that hey, the Vietnam war wasn’t exactly all glory for the U.S. So now a new crop of WWII shooters are on the rise, and this fall’s Call of Duty is set to de-throne the reigning king of the genre, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

The single-player demo of Call of Duty arrived at 8 p.m. eastern last night, and my BitTorrent client was crunching away on it just minutes later. After a little while, I had the game installed and ready to go—and I was promptly floored. I thought WWII action couldn’t get much more realistic than MOHAA, but CoD makes the former look like a child’s game. This is absolutely, positively the one title you must buy this fall if you enjoy WWII action games as much as I do.

CoD is different from MOHAA in that it is a squad-based single-player military FPS. Whereas MOHAA had you playing the part of just one man (who was sometimes joined by a small squad of three or four men), the CoD demo sets you in the midst of an entire company of paratroopers who have dropped into enemy territory on D-Day. The realism of the battlefield is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Not just because of the sheer number of soldiers—you really get the feeling you’re fighting against an entire legion of men, not just a handful of them here and here—but because of the graphic effects of combat all around you.

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Expanding The Game Collection

By Chief Oddball on August 27th, 2003 at 4:30 am

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Chaser screenshotHad some fun this past weekend. A trip to the mall netted some nice goodies, including a couple of new cellular phones and re-upped service from Verizon, but more importantly for me, a couple of new games. Well, one new game, and a deposit slip guaranteeing me a copy of a second game when it comes out tomorrow.

The game I did buy was Chaser, a PC title developed by Cauldron & JoWood that uses the CloakNT engine. This relatively small outfit, with a pretty much unknown game engine, have managed to whip together a pretty solid title. I’ve seen a lot of humdrum reviews of Chaser, and the general opinion seems to be that it’s pretty drab and “middle-of-the-road” as far as PC shooters go. I’ll agree that it may not stand out it terms of plot or story, but graphically I think this is one of the nicest engines I’ve seen in a while. The chrome and environment mapping effects are intense, the water looks great, the weapons are extremely cool, and the character animation is very fluid and natural. Plus the blood that splatters behind your targets is probably among the most realistic I’ve ever seen. And the game runs incredibly smoothly, constantly.

As I recall, Chaser was originally developed by a Russian team, and then “ported” to English. As a result, the voice acting is not that great, and at time the lines being read make you say “Wha?” Overall, though, the cutscenes and story-evolving elements seem well done. There is one thing I was not too impressed with, however: The level design. It seems somewhat pedestrian and repetitive. Of course, I’m only two levels in, but I thought I’d offer that up so it doesn’t seem like I’m on the payroll at JoWood or anything.

To sum up: I’m enjoying Chaser quite a bit more than the average bear.

As for the game I pre-ordered, it looks to be much more interesting.

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