I'm liking the port, mainly because of the upgraded control system. In the original game, you had to hold a strafe button to strafe left and right. At the time, it worked out pretty well, but after the advent of the circle strafing technique (where you have buttons designated as strafe left and strafe right then use other buttons/mouse/whatever to turn), it kind of rendered the scheme completely obsolete.

The inability to circle strafe really put a damper on my ability to get into Blake Stone and Planet Strike not that long ago, so it was nice and refreshing to fire up Wolf3D and be able to run around with a control scheme that I've become comfortable with over the years.

Sadly, it doesn't include a few of the key improvements of the iphone version (level select grid, map or sticky objects), but the improved control far outweighs those features. I swear, if someone were to take the iphone version's features and merge them with a mouse+kb or dual analog control scheme, I'd be in heaven.

Probably going to play up through the first or second episode today and then go back to sleuthing in Pandora Directive. Haven't had a lot of game time recently and right about now it feels nice to just mow down nazis. Can't believe how old this game is...really brings back memories.

Here's the level that replaced E1M8 - Ziggurat Vertigo. Obviously, it doesn't come close to comparing to the low grav rocket love of E1M8, but it's not bad. Maybe a bit of overkill on the Fiend usage (probably should have used pairs of knights instead in a couple of instances) and that last bit resulted in way more deaths and failed recording than I care to admit...but hey, two more bonus levels to go!

One thing that really bugged me was trying to wrestle with the sensitivity of the analog looking. There's no way to adjust it, so you just have to get used to it and it's set to an ungodly high number. Also, if you use the hidden alternate control method (makes the analog look/turn and the face buttons move/strafe), there's no way to rebind the buttons..kind of sucks because left trigger is fire and right trigger is jump. The exact opposite of what I feel comfortable using.

Video of my crummy playthrough of the level after the cut. Contrast was bumped up a little bit to make it a bit easier on the eyes than my video for The Coliseum.
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http://www.lucasarts.com/company/vip/catalog/lec_backcatalog_2009.pdf

tl;dr - Starting July 8th, Lucasarts is adding the following games to Steam:

• Armed and Dangerous
  
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
  
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
  
• LEGO Indiana Jones
  
• LOOM
  
• Star Wars Battlefront II
  
• Star Wars Republic Commando
  
• Star Wars Starfighter
  
• The Dig
  
• Thrillville: Off the Rails

It's about damn time they started realizing that there's a market for their back catalog and that digital distribution was the most cost effective way to get it out there. What the hell took them so long? Jesus.

No idea if that's the CD version of Loom. Hope so. Guess we'll find out. Would be nice if they used SCUMMVM.

Sounds like it's just the tip of the iceberg, too. Looking forward to rebuying a bunch of these (or buying them for the first time in the case of Last Crusade) to show some support and love for 'em.

Pretty neat little map that replaces the Episode 3 hidden level.



tl;dw - You run into an arena and find a wrestling/boxing ring. The CPU picks a monster to represent it within the ring and then you have to select a monster from the portraits on the wall to represent you. They fight to the death. After three wins, you get to leave the level.

Yea, it's dark :( The Saturn port seems darker than the PC version, but hey, colored lighting!

Thank you, GOG

If you enjoy adventure games in the slightest then you owe it to yourself to play this. It's even better than Under a Killing Moon (by a pretty large margin, really), but if that doesn't mean anything to you (because you refuse to experience an example of FMV being handled extremely well in a game) then think of it this way:

Adventure Gamers put it above Monkey Island 2, Full Throttle and Quest For Glory on their top 20 list a few years ago.

It's only $10! That's nothing! No DRM! Redownload whenever you want! You can easily migrate the dosbox.conf over to other platforms and builds of DOSbox if you haven't got a wintel!

I took Frontline for PS2 off of the shelf again after having given up on it sometime last March. Originally I gave up because I got fed up with playing 30+ minute long levels with no checkpoints, only to die at the very end. I mean, that's just capping off the other perks of the game, like the jumpy framerate, sluggish/unresponsive control and terrible encounter design.

The game is bad enough to make Finest Hour look good, if that means anything to anyone. Frontline is a perfect example of why both console first person shooters had such a bad rap for the longest time and why people so quickly got burnt out on World War II themed games.

Ok, so Morrowind helped me better understand that I totally want something as structured as Gothic but with an intuitive control scheme. There's just too damn much to worry about in Morrowind. I don't want to juggle stats right about now and the game reeks of generic western fantasy in the way that the Tales of games reek of generic anime. The freeform gameplay doesn't appeal to me right now.

Guess I'm pretty much hosed for the time being, so I think I'll play Screamer instead.

Fuck Gothic.

I know it gets showered with love for a variety of reasons (less reliance on stats, flexible character growth, story), but the control (and combat control in specific) absolutely kill the game. For the last two hours that I've put into the game, I've derived zero fucking enjoyment.

As much as it pains me to say it, I would not recommend buying this game from GOG. The sequel may be better or it may be worse. I don't know and I honestly don't care. Until a magical patch comes out that makes Gothic not play like shit, this game can sit in the dark corners of my hard drive populated by other entirely unfun games like Quake II, Red Faction 2, Trespasser and Ultima IX.

Installing Morrowind patches and mods right now. I hope this pans out.

Gothic has quite the reputation for being a great game hobbled by shitty controls. I'm finally attempting to play it and while I'm way too early in to know if it's great or not, I'm damn sure about the controls blowing.

First off, you need to rebind the keys to the preconfigured "alternate" binding, which sets up a somewhat familiar WASD setup. Enable the mouse and you'd think that you were on the road to awesometown. Sadly: no.

Do you want to pick up an item? Try hitting the action key. Doesn't do anything, does it? That's because you have to hit the action key (CTRL) and forward (UP or W).

Want to open a chest? Press CTRL until you're kneeling and then press forward to open it. An interface pops up where you see your items on the right and the chest inventory on the left. You can scroll through the items with the arrow keys or mouse wheel, you can't simply click on objects to take them. Try pressing CTRL+Forward and nothing happens. You have to press CTRL+right to move the items into your inventory. This isn't in the manual.

How about when you want to fight? First you have to press SPACEBAR to toggle your attack posture (or draw your weapon if you've managed to figure out how to equip it via the clusterfuck inventory management method above) and then you have to hold down CTRL and press forward, left or right depending on how you want to attack and what weapon you have equipped. Very clunky, but it seems to work ok once you get the hang of it.

Thankfully you can substitute the left mouse button for CTRL, but it doesn't make it any more preferable to a laundry list of other, more effective control schemes. You could blame the control inadequacies on the release date if you like, but it's not like 2001 was some stone age in third person action RPG design or anything. It really comes across as the developers trying too hard to be different for the sake of being different.

Jumping/climbing is a mess and the game didn't like saving my graphics settings (leaving me to have to manually edit the gothic.ini file), but hey, I'm working my way through the early game right now. Hopefully I adjust to the combat a bit more and suffer through the interface quirks enough to make it all second nature.

In other news, I want to play Morrowind but have no idea what all mods I should install and I don't feel like signing up for tesnexus just to download a few patches.

So I've been spending some money at gog.com and have built up a nice collection of stuff for pretty damn cheap (especially with working package deals / discounts / etc). Not everything has been as good as I'd hoped, so hey, here's a quick rundown of stuff I bought and how I feel about it!
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Oh, and I've already added Pandora Directive and Overseer to my "Wanted List". The day they go available, I'm buying them. You know, there's a reason why Pandora Directive and Under a Killing Moon are considered among the best adventure games ever. You ought to invest a little $$ and see why first hand!

If you pick up anything, you'll probably want to edit the conf file to switch the fullscreen and windowed resolutions in addition to adding double buffering. Maybe change the output renderer. Pretty straightforward stuff for the most part, but if you get hung up on anything let me know.

I just hate having my desktop resize and prefer to scale stuff :(