I finished the TW2 Vortex Campaign at last, with the High Elves. 200+ turns of madness. Loved it.

Have some screenshots from the best battle of the whole campaign, where over 7000 Skaven tried to take on 2500 High Elves.







It didn't really go well for either side.



But a few years later Tyrion ended up on the beach at the Vortex, and saved the Old World. For now.

It's really hard to get nice screenshots. I think the best way is to probably go back in after saving a replay, and mess around with the graphic settings a bit.

Pics not showing up?

The pics are showing, it’s the text I’m talking about.

(Clearly I have not communicated my friendly ribbing particularly clearly, which is something of an irony.)

It's actually 8.5k rat boys. Obscene.

Heh. I got that up next.

Just started, apart from some wierdness around where to stand for holding x options, everything is....fine.

Conquests of Camelot: The Search For The Grail

This is a Sierra adventure from 1989, just a little more advanced than the first Quest games, not by much.  I had it as a child on our Amstrad PC-20.  It was a game that came on 4 floppy disks (not including the blank disk you'd save your game on) and we could only run it in monochrome with the audio, such as it was, coming through the PC speaker.

It's available on GOG nowadays though and runs just as intended.  Little did I know it had a really funky colour scheme, with lots of magentas and bright yellows, not really what I expect in a knights and castles video game.  I like it!

Never beat the game back in the day.  These quest games were really pedantic and seemed to pride themselves on having dozens of almost unforeseeable ways to give you a game over screen.  Further to that a lot of the input is text based, so if you don't know the right combination of words to use, you are buggered.  Luckily, the GOG version comes with a scanned copy of the guide!  Fantastic stuff.  

Still, I misread a line from the guide near the beginning of the game, and it lets you play about 70% of the game through before it lets you know you've fucked up and can't win without a complete restart.  I swore at my laptop for that.  What a nasty game.  I'm not playing it again for a week or so.

But I will come back, there is something there, more than just wanting to beat a game I couldn't beat 25 years ago.  I love how detailed it is, in that you can type 'look at' or 'ask about' just about anything and you'll get a text box for your trouble.  Merlin narrates the game and he has a dry wit that is pretty entertaining.  I even don't mind the pedantic game over deaths (at least, the ones that end your game instantly instead of letting you think you have a chance of winning for a couple of hours) in a choose-your-own-adventure kind of way.  

There's also some old school piracy protection bits, where you have to read the manual (also available as a pdf on GOG) and hunt for clues like you are a pissweak Indiana Jones type - I kinda like it when you have to go outside of games and try and solve puzzles with real world means.  It's novel at least.

One of those games that's pretty cool to revisit but would probably be bafflingly shit to anyone trying it for the first time in 2018 lol.

Another Rime pro-tip: play Ico instead.

Exactly. It does its thing well and doesn't outstay its welcome. Plus the story elements are smartly integrated.

You completely misunderstand how a modern auto camera works. They don't prevent you looking around when moving, but they do keep the important things in view while you're doing things that require buttons and can't look after the camera. Spider-Man, for example, has a really good one and would be practically unplayable without.

Mutant Year Zero

Really enjoying this so far. Seems almost X-Com light and the mix of free roam exploration with tactical grid combat works very nicely.

AndCallMeCharlie wrote:

Aaroncupboard wrote:

Mutant Year Zero Really enjoying this so far. Seems almost X-Com light and the mix of free roam exploration with tactical grid combat works very nicely.

Really fancied that - keep us updated on your thoughts please
Is it a graphics heavy game ie does it seem like you could play it on a older laptop?

Nope, it is not the fanciest looking game ever made, very simple graphics but it looks decent enough, can’t imagine it would require particularly high specs but I’m not an expert.

The world and the theme is very cliched but the gameplay has been great. The ability to perform a stealth ambush before fights is pretty cool. Especially when you split up and flank the enemies, launch a stealth attack with one and then go loud with the other whilst all the enemies are confused.

Plus I found a cool hat for the duck.

Rime is very competent so far. Enjoying it.

Aaroncupboard wrote:

AndCallMeCharlie wrote:

Aaroncupboard wrote:

Mutant Year Zero Really enjoying this so far. Seems almost X-Com light and the mix of free roam exploration with tactical grid combat works very nicely.

Really fancied that - keep us updated on your thoughts please Is it a graphics heavy game ie does it seem like you could play it on a older laptop?

Nope, it is not the fanciest looking game ever made, very simple graphics but it looks decent enough, can’t imagine it would require particularly high specs but I’m not an expert. The world and the theme is very cliched but the gameplay has been great. The ability to perform a stealth ambush before fights is pretty cool. Especially when you split up and flank the enemies, launch a stealth attack with one and then go loud with the other whilst all the enemies are confused. Plus I found a cool hat for the duck.

Cheers 
I love invisible inc and XCOM so defo on my wish list