I played it for the first time yesterday, flyinj, and I just read the manual. I’m using the num pad, mouse felt weird.
I saw that there are a bunch of mods for EECH, I think I’m going to try that out since it’s on sale. There’s even a thread by scharmers on GoG.
Is EECH the one with more mod support, or EEAH?
What is it with big mods and 1.13? Both JA2 and EECH have the exact same version.
Kryten
4843
EECH is the one you want - if you have both you can play the EEAH content from within EECH anyway (once modded).
There were more wargames then on PC, certainly, but I don’t know that I would ever say they were part of the “mainstream.” What titles are we talking about, exactly?
I’m just thinking back to store shelves in the 90’s, and while not crawling with wargames, there were a decent amount of them. The wargame construction sets, steel panthers, panzer generals, perfect generals and so on.
In the early / mid 1980s, when “PC” meant C64, Atari 800, Apple II, etc. more than DOS, wargames were a much bigger portion of the “mainstream” I think. Hell, doing a grid-based map and a spreadsheet-style CRT was a lot easier and could be made to look better than a full-on action game back then. And computer wargaming grew out of and with the computer geek culture back then. SSI was the company of choice, and they had a boatload of games.
So there’s a very, very liberal definition of “mainstream” in play here, is what I’m gathering.
Yeah, even in their heyday (80s - early 90s SSI, SSG) wargames were still pretty niche. You could buy 'em in a software (or general gaming/hobby) store, but not a lot of people did. Note: PzG and its ilk aren’t wargames, let’s get that straight.
Quitch
4854
It’s not mainstream because if it is it’s not a wargame?
Sharpe
4855
The truly hardcore grogs don’t consider something a wargame unless it is a fairly specific simulation of an actual battle or war. Introducing fantastic elements, getting too abstract, or sacrificing realism for gameplay can all disqualify a piece of software from being considered a “wargame” by the hardcore grog definition. Frankly, I’m not sure I would call the resultant software products “games” at all - they are trying to be simulations. This is the primary reason why I am not a hardcore grog despite my love of historical scenarios: I am all about the gameplay, and strongly in the Geryk camp on the detail/realism vs playability/elegance spectrum. I’m perfectly fine with games that model things abstractly, or that sacrifice “realism” in order to have better gameplay. True grogs want as much historical detail and realism as they can get, even if it means the gameplay is a painful slog. The historical simulation is the point, not the gameplay.
Well, now I own JA2 and Alpha Centauri. Time to see what all the fuss is about.
In the early mid-80s the best wargames were selling as well as anything else. I had a friend send me some scans of mid 80s CGWs, and they had multiple wargame columns in each issue. The entire hobby was niche then.
What Peacedog said. Another example of a mainstream -> niche transition is interactive fiction; in Infocom’s heyday, their titles would not only hit the top of sales charts, they’d stay there for years. Now it’s all free titles produced by hobbyists - but, still, if you love IF, you’re just as well served now as you would have been back then.
Probably better, to be honest. The parsers have, on average, gotten much better, the best writers are mostly a notch above the olden days, if not two or three, and they’ve gotten a much better sense of what does and does not work in the medium.
That said, if you liked Zork-style puzzlefests you’re increasingly out of luck.
I’ve played a few hours of Ultima Underworld so far (currently exploring level 4) and I’m happy to report that it holds up surprisingly well. I played UU2 soon after it came out, but never really got that far, mostly because I didn’t have the patience for figuring out RPGs when I was 14.
For this game, I set the difficulty to Easy since early 90’s first-person melee combat was never great, and what I’m really interested in is the exploration and the story bits. The graphics are obviously dated, but they don’t get in the way of playing the game (it is generally easy to tell what’s what), and I’m still impressed by some of the complexity of the levels. There are also more systems than I remembered: hunger, sleep, repairing items (either by NPC or repair skill), trading, identifying items, encumbrance, numerous (initially) non-hostile NPC factions, new languages, rune-based magic system with coherent rules, and more.
I was never comfortable with the controls back in the day, but the SZXC scheme (WASD shifted down a row) with A & D to turn and W to sprint forward feels pretty natural now. The key is learning how the “default” control scheme works when using the mouse, so you aren’t constantly switching between interaction modes. Combat still requires switching to combat mode, but this isn’t overly burdensome for the amount of combat I’ve encountered. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for anyone to get acquainted with the controls.
It’s an interesting game because it takes the structure of a classic dungeon-crawl in a “limited” underground environment, uses free-roaming (as opposed to tile-based) first-person movement, and then spices it up with some additional simulation-y elements and NPC interactions. It obviously laid the groundwork for System Shock and Deus Ex, but any modern exploration-heavy first-person RPG is building on that foundation.
It’s funny, I remember playing System Shock and Terra Nova from Looking Glass, and really getting into the SZXC system and thinking it was ergonomically brilliant once you got used to it (much more comfortable for sitting at the keyboard with than the arrow keys I was used to from Doom). A few years later, Valve introduced WASD in Half Life and I thought, “oh yeah, they’ve nicked that idea from Looking Glass, except they’ve shifted it up a key, and actually it’s even more ergonomic that way because it’s easier to bash the space bar with your thumb”.
I wonder if Valve did consciously nick it or just came up with the general idea independently? Does anyone know the real facts behind that curious little corner of gaming history?
