Razgon
4742
I especially liked the illness “Inflated head”, where the “Deflator” was a pin needle needed to cure the patients. As they filed up in the waiting room, you could see their enormous heads. I may misremember, but after deflating their heads, they had to be be pumped full of air again :-)
You never played or even heard of Theme Hospital? Get out of here!
It does seem strange. Though it came out in '97, which does explain things a bit. Back in 97 I was pretty much a one genre-gamer. (Space Sims).
I loved Theme Park, run it in my pentium II…good old times.
For those of you who are going to play Privateer for the first time, feast your eyes on this map. That’s the map of the Wing Commander Universe that came with every initial boxed copy of Wing Commander Prophecy. I loved mulling over that map. As you’ll see, the area you explore in Privateer is a large portion of that map, but there’s a lot more out there in the Wing Commander universe, including lots of Kilrathi Space.
That map really fueled my imagination after Prophecy came out. I really wanted there to be a new Privateer game that let you explore a part of that map. Of course, the Privateer in development at Origin as described in the cover story of CGS+ let you do just that. Stupid EA. But hey, they were kind of smart, I have to grudgingly admit. None of the space sims that came out after Prophecy did well. Freespace, Freespace 2, I-war, I-war 2, etc. The failure of WC: Prophecy and X-wing Alliance soon after really foretold the death of the genre.
I hope so, I played the fuck out of that game.
OMG I loved that map! Wish I still had it.
Same here. I’ve moved so many times since then, across various parts of the country, I don’t even have any idea what section of the country I left it in.
And you can found new cities.
The only WC game I ever played was Prophecy. It was the first modern-ish space sim I played, and I really liked it a lot. Then I played Freespace and enjoyed it too. Alliance wasn’t great, IMO, and I’ve never tried the IW games.
Privateer looks a bit dated at this point. I could be wrong though.
Hell, Privateer was dated ten years ago. I really like the idea of the game and enjoyed it in its time but it could use an update.
There were a couple of fan-made Privateer remakes out there a few years ago, weren’t there?
Yeah, this one was finished about four years ago. I always meant to try it, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I have it, and even have different colored pins (representing each WC game in different colors/flags) depicting areas explored! A lot of the map was never utilized.
Is Privateer playable (and fun) with a mouse? I know it supports it, but is it worth playing mouse/keyboard only?
JM1
4757
Yeah. This one’s pretty good.
I’m so happy that EA offered its catalog to GOG - I honestly thought that would NEVER happen – so many great games that I’d love to see easily playable on modern systems.
Crusader games definitely hold up - I played through both a couple of years ago. No Remorse played perfectly fine in DOSbox - No Regret played fine as well, but you had to manually adjust the playback speed for video (it needed to be sped up, and then slowed down again for gameplay, which was a bit of a pain).
I dunno how GOG can overcome the crazy voodoo memory manager of Ultima 7 though - maybe they’ll go with the Exult version instead, which would be a shame - I’d rather have a working original.
Wing Commander Kiltrathi Saga will hopefully get a lot less valuable soon.
I think there’s still scope for a space exploration game that’s focused on what you find at the destinations rather than on ridiculous WW-1 style dogfighting in space. My favorite game of all time* is basically like this, though admittedly it’s as far behind a typical GoG game in tech as a GoG game is behind a modern game.
Pure RPG with teams exploring tiny zones on the destination worlds and structures is probably not the world’s best approach, though, pace Mass Effect, but some kind of hybrid approach that involves interesting settings on each world and a mix of generic and special-destination-focused gameplay might be feasible. Still, it would be a stretch to pull it off with any kind of decent production values, and why bother when you can just work on a multiplayer modern combat shooter instead.
*Sundog – though it too had a terrible space combat mode, and I suppose even if I could find a working emulator, it might be unplayable now being so dated. Still, I’d like to see a nice encapsulated version of the game that could be played on a PC without a huge amount of groundwork.
It’s amazing how well 2D games age, compared with early (and sometimes even later) 3D games.
rei
4761
I still love the old BBS door game TradeWars 2002.
