Games

WiBArM

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There was a game that I played as a child on our old Tandy 1000 that I’ve wanted to look up for about the last 20 years or so. A relative had sent us a copy, but no one really could read it since the instructions were in Japanese. The 5 1/4″ diskette however, worked just fine.

One of those problems with being a kid, even if I can remember things from way back in more details than I probably should, is that memory is more visual than auditory for me. My best recollection of the name was something like ‘Wib barn,” but hey I was like 5 when I played the game! It’s not like I could spell yet! Literally, I was using MS-DOS before I could read…lol.

Needless to say, trying to find the game on this side of the floppy diskette era has been largely fruitless whenever I’ve tried.

Well, last night I was watching a video on 80s game development, and noticed that the clip of Thexder was Really, Really similar to what I remember but definitely not the same game. Sadly, doing some research into the game also showed that its sequel wasn’t it. Also, I’m pretty sure that I never encountered the Firehawk games personally.

Attempting to find similar games led me to the similar games tab on Giant Bomb, which began as mostly another exercise in futility. I’ve tried to look up the game in the past, always without success. Like seriously, how many late 80s side scrollers were there where you can transform between a robot, and a jet, and a car while exploring pseudo 3D dungeons reminiscent of the Windows 95 Maze? Yeah, you’d think that’s easy, but a lot of old stuff on old video games never made a big impact on the Internet. There were more than a few such ‘robot’ games, but I don’t think any that combined all three modes.

Then in scrolling through the list, I come across one word and it’s like “Holy shit, I remembered the name right,” and lo’ and behold: their page on Wibarm even matches my childhood memory to a tee on the screenshots. It’s without a doubt the same game, and it checks all the boxes: the three modes, the side scroll and 3D like dungeon, and the almost RPG like battles when you encounter the mobs.

So now, after many years, I finally know what that game was, and that my childhood memories are even more accurate than I expected.

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A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: ‘I hate you’ — PC Gamer.

I can’t help but giggle snort, and also wonder how many times a piece of 3D accelerator could be defined as fundamentally broken until they redesign something.

For some reason, I’m picturing the evidence as akin to Klaatu taking a chalk to Professor Barnhardt’s blackboard….gah, I’m getting old, aren’t I? 😀

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Visiting the original mansion again for the first time in this millennium, it’s an interesting exercise in how much I’ve forgotten, how much I’ve remembered, and how much comes back to me when I’m there.

On one hand, after do many years it’s kind of hard to remember which door leads to zombie ridden stairways and which leads to almost becoming a Jill Sandwich in the name of acquiring a shotgun. Honestly, I don’t remember that horrible joke at all even though I still remember the distinction of Jill gets rescued from becoming a human pancake by Barry, while Chris has to bugger about looking for a broken shotgun in order to win.

Access to guides that have been around for years, and I can’t even remember the name of it, but there’s a wiki somewhere that goes into posting the maps and details (I’ve probably written about that here, regarding the RE2 remake); certainly make for a good augment to the old ‘what order should I?’ problem but not so much the minute directions.

The mansion has always been a hard place to navigate because of its size. It’s pretty easy to remember the general flow, especially easily reached locations like the hallway you meet Cerberus or the balcony where you acquire the grenade launcher. But smaller details like which door in the upstairs east hallway leads to the knights puzzle or what’s at the end of the ground floor dining room hallway, is a bit harder to remember.

This is kinda nice. Like one how it’s easy to remember there’s little point to grabbing the wooden emblem, but hard to remember when it’s time to bring it to the piano room. Couldn’t remember where the knight puzzle was but on the flip side once finding it, I did remember to avoid the poison gas on the first go, lol.

Some parts are a lot harder to remember than others. For example, I have pretty much no real recollection of the layout of the guard house. Just old mental images of things like pool tables and giant spiders.

But unlike the “Huh, what the frell is this?” feeling the GameCube remake always gave me, the GOG’ified PC edition is more like an old stomping ground. If one filled with zombies and horrors that want to decapitate you, lol.

A real original RE at last

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Over the years, I’ve generally considered GOG a good thing but haven’t cared terribly much given my focus elsewhere. But much to my pleasure, it turns out they have a real nice treat that I never expected to find: Resident Evil.

While I appreciated the HD version of the remake, I also didn’t enjoy my childhood memories being made useless by the fact that it was built from the GameCube remake rather than one of the original PlayStation releases. Meanwhile, the version recently released on GOG looks like it’s a fairly vanilla build of the PC release of Resident Evil rolled up for modern machines without extra hackwittery.

I haven’t really played the original since the 1990s and the original PlayStation. Within moments of launching the game, I felt like a proper trip backdown memory lane — in just about every way, it’s how I remember it from almost 30 years ago.

Metal Gear Solid Delta Trailer

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I’m going to take this as a good sign that the remake of MGS3 will actually be released closer to ‘soon’ than ‘later’, as in we may actually get to see it this year.

The original Snake Eater was one of the more personally significant / formative video games that I played as a teenager, and remains my favorite in the series. Literally, if they throw modern controls in the sense of MGS5 at it and remain largely faithful, I’m likely to be happy. When I originally learned of Delta, my first words were probably in the vein of ‘Shut and take my money!’, so it’s likely I’ll be buying it and finding out 😀.

Playing Snake Eater in the 2020s has generally been a somewhat grainy problem. My Play Station 2 can only output 480i, which looks pretty damn grainy on a modern 2160p screens compared to ’90s era tube televisions. That’s sort of alleviated by the ‘HD’ release for modern consoles where we get progressive output, but there’s really no fixing the control scheme with that. It’s ingrained in the design, just like it was in its predecessors.

I love Metal Gear Solid 3 very much. But even at the time it came out, the choice to retain the control scheme (and I assume engine) from Sons of Liberty made the Snake Eater experience less than ideal for the jungles. The mechanics and such worked really well in the first two metal gear and virtual reality training missions, where the majority of your environments are close quarters or high octane. Creeping through the jungle would have been better served by an already then contemporary shooter control scheme, like that seen in SOCOM and many others. The controls never were the good part of MGS3, but yet the game was freaking brilliant and the story poignant. Everything else about the game was superb, and perhaps was Metal Gear Solid at its finest.

Here’s hoping for a solid remake, and that we don’t end up crying tears of blood.

The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy

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Nice video giving an overview of the classic handheld’s architecture. The opening may be a little bit harsh IMHO, but also not unwarranted. At least, the way that I look at it the hardware is closer to what a microcomputer could have passed for just over a decade prior, and devices like the Apple II or TRS-80 were hardly portable and battery friendly devices.

That’s a trend that I think largely tends to continue with really portable devices. I remember looking at data about the first Raspberry Pi, and decided it would likely be on par with a ten year old PC — except closer in size to a credit card than a microwave oven, and pretty darn cheap. Likewise, while I find the Steam Deck’s graphics very unimpressive, I find it amazing that someone crammed an Xbox One level of horse power into such a portable package.

It’s pretty darn cool how that sort of evolution plays out, even if my wrist watch literally has an order of magnitude more computing power than my first Personal Computer….

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Apparently, one of the reasons Steam Deck’s underlaying technology owes to Nier Automata if the itnerviewlets at Proton and Tier: Automata – the unique story behind what makes Steam Deck tick, are to be believed. Which really doesn’t surprise me.

Steam Deck’s graphics and battery life in my opinion aren’t as impressive as achieving them in such a small, portable package. You get roughly Xbox One grade graphics from roughly Xbox One grade hardware, and x86 will never offer great battery life under heavy load. But it’s got one thing I love most of all.

Video games work on it. There’s a fair bit of video games on Steam that actually have a native Linux version, and unlike the support for macOS, it’s not quite a joke. But the vast majority of games are Direct3D based games for Windows that require DirectX. That’s how video games are written in this world.

Yet, Steam Deck runs them well as the hardware is capable. In ways that I was never able to achieve back in the day, now more than a decade in the past, using purely Wine and derivative solutions. So I find myself very glad now that folks made a video game with 2B and 9S 🙂

Actually, that reminds me: I’ve been debating picking up a copy of the game on Steam one of these sales. Haven’t played it since I was active on console, and I haven’t even bothered to hook up Deathstar One since moving thanks to getting Rimuru operational and Steam Deck largely taking over for both the ol’ Steam Link and Deathstar One.

Tomb Raider Remastered

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One of the games that I’ve been waiting for has recently released, and largely consumed my Saturday plans. That’s of course, Tomb Raider I-III Remastered.

Whereas Tomb Raider: Anniversary took the settings and general concepts and made a decent to good Tomb Raider game out of modern technology, it quite rapidly bugged me. Almost nothing about the game connected with my childhood. So while I enjoyed that, it was also disappointing. And quite franky, I think that the 2013 – 2018 Survivor trilogy has become the best Tomb Raider games we’ve got since the original PlayStation.

Tomb Raider remastered however is *exactly* my childhood! It’s literally a 1:1, or as much as it can be with the PC’s save anytime you like system instead of the silly save crystals used in the Sony PlayStation release. Which quite honestly, I prefer the PC approach because you can say fuck it and reload a save right before a series of difficult jumps, or a room that’s liable to break your neck or cause drowning.

The original Tomb Raider was one of the games of its era that I enjoyed as a kid. Both playing it myself and watching my brother play through the entire trilogy. I loved that the game spent more emphasis on exploring and circumnavigating the tombs than on running around shooting things, which is more or less why I didn’t care for TR3 at all. The original is kind of unique among Tomb Raider games, and has never quite been replicated — it’s also one of my favorites 😁

One of the remaster’s better features IMHO is the ability to toggle between the remastered graphics and the classic graphics, similar to the remaster of Halo CE. In classic mode, it’s like looking at my childhood, if you had a crystal clear rendering to a 4K screen instead of a PlayStation hooked up to composite video and a tube TV, lol. In remastered graphics, the game remains very faithful and it is superbly respectful of what the original game looked like: while also improving upon it! The only alteration that I find obvious is that in classic mode, med packs use a green cross rather than a red, similar to modern releases of DooM ’93 and Doom II.

Something that’s also refreshing and horrifying is the mechanics. Literally, they are the same. This means you must play their way or you’ll find yourself leaping off a ledge in frustration. Stella’s Tips & Strategies page was actually a better crash course in remembering how the system worked than the tutorial. If you have any problems with the games mechanics, seriously hit up that page and the video of the running jump, and then go back to Lara’s house and practice until all of the jump exercises in the ball room are easily doable. If not, you’ll end up rage quitting before ever leaving Peru 😝. The mechanics aren’t hard, but are no longer natural, and seemingly require tank controls, and TR may be the only ’90s era game where those were actually a good thing compared to modern controls.

In fact, if you ever need a guide on a TR game, I highly recommend Stella’s site. We now live in the world of Google, Game FAQs, IGN, Wikia, and countless other just Google it and you’ll either find a walkthrough or a clue somewhere. But Stella’s guides are probably the best resource you’re ever going to find for the original Trilogy, and good options for any of the later TRs I’m sure.

Back in the day, we spent lots of time trying to figure out the original Tomb Raider. At some point, my brother probably bought the strategy guide because he usually bought those for every game. Heck, I can still remember Saint Francis’ Folly and the various puzzle rooms. Our mother never had an interest in video games or really, games at all. Us having questions about Greek and Egyptian mythology in our search for puzzle-room solutions was probably the closest she ever came to playing a game with us.

If you want to video game like it’s 1996, go play Tomb Raider!

What harm ever came from reading a book?

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Sometimes games are hilarious, even if unintentionally. Playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I managed to make three savings throws in a row (DC 10, 15, 20) without being cursed by the Necromancy of Thay….and the game crashed as I try to stuff the book into a storage backpack.

Last night, I had encountered coffins while exploring an apothecary’s cellar, and lo and behold behind a secret passage I found some coffins! Thinking it must be vampires, I swapped one of my party mates for our resident vampire and went to investigate thinking he might offer some insight or gain som inspiration. Nah, it wasn’t vampires.

Skeleton leapt out of the box and soon a whole bunch of skelemen go running around triggering coffins and marching around like some kind of romanized dragur and I’m like what the fuck. And then I found the contents of the last coffin, which included a rock with “Nut Buster” scratched on it in claw marks, a dagger named the poo scraper that has clearly seen worse things than the abyss, and a skull named friend that was creatively used for a Cast Away reference. Then after a visit to a magic mirror full of riddles, and maybe a Harry Potter reference, I found the necromancer’s lab. Complete with a very Necronomicon inspired book behind a locked and trapped door, and looked it up on the wiki. Apparently you read it and get a perm boon or cursed for like fifty rolls or something.

At that point, I said screw it and decided to go to bed. Because I’m not such a fool as to ignore an obvious Evil Dead reference after what happened with the skeletons! And turns out, after a bit more of questing this morning it was worth while to go battle the spider to get the key to the book. Because who doesn’t want to fight teleporting, poison spewing spiders the size of Grog and their matriarch the size of a semi who summons swarms of spiders the size of small dogs!?! But compared to when I found their lair on my way to the goblin camp the first time, it was more “What the fuck did we just fight through” and less sucidal thanks to the level progression.

Having taken a lunch break and time to do other things, I eventually headed back to my various quest antics. And decided as I start wrapping up for the night to make a save point and try the book. When the game crashed, I laughed. When it asked to verify files because it crashed so hard, I really, really laughed 😀 😀 😀