Posted on November 12, 2021
Livestream 11/11/2021 – Daikatana
Not many games bring as many reactions as the now legendary game of Daikatana. Stuck in development hell for a long time with the promise of being the next blockbuster from one of the creators of Doom it is probably the definition of an infamous game judging by the standards of today.
John Romero founded the studio Ion Storm hot off the fame and fortune that came from having been part of the phenomenon that ended up creating landmark titles such as Doom and Quake. There was no denying the impact this had on the video game industry as a whole and in many cases it defined the landscape of FPS games for decades. Daikatana is none of these things.
A game that reached way too far and way too high it was marred with delays, horrible bugs and just uninteresting gameplay. I never played the game when it originally came out as by 2000 it already felt dated. Add poor follower AI, bland environment design and just generally uninteresting gameplay… it flopped hard. But that makes it even more fun to revisit right? Right?!
Hope you like watching someone shooting at dragonflies and frogs for a few hours? Oh that’s not what you wanted in an edgy sci-fi FPS game? Well here’s the replay regardless…
Posted on October 29, 2021
Livestream 10/28/2021 – Morrowind
I had been thinking I needed to play deeper RPG for a while and Morrowind came to mind. The third entry in the Elder Scrolls saga of games it really laid the foundation to what we expect out of one. Interestingly enough I did have this game bundled with a video card I bought back in the day but ended up trading that copy for Neverwinter Nights. Not sure if that was the right call or not but I enjoyed that game more than Morrowind.
Even though I have spent countless of hours in both Oblivion and Skyrim (and who hasn’t on the latter one there and they are still selling it!) Morrowind never managed to grab me. That said I was deeply into MMORPGs like Dark Age of Camelot and Planetside at the time so I probably felt I couldn’t ignore my in game characters to focus on yet another deep game like Morrowind.
That was different this time though and after just a stint of about 3 hours of play time during the stream I’m wanting to go back in again! There is something satisfying with this one where it doesn’t hold your hand with waypoints or quest markers. If the game says go up a hill, take a right and go past a tree that’s where you have to go. Many modern RPGs do tend to focus on the follow the waypoint gameplay which is a fair design choice and many times you can turn this off but Morrowind feels like a more “true to life” RPG in that sense. So yes super fun! We also played it on original hardware which in this case is my beloved Shuttle system which is period accurate for this very game. Check out the replay below.
Posted on October 28, 2021
Upgrading the video editing rig
My current computer has served me well through my short content creation “career”. That being based around an Intel i5-6600k that I primarily bought for gaming. I wasn’t making videos back in 2016 when I built the machine but I felt the time had finally come for an upgrade. This time the upgrade focused basically solely on video editing and rendering performance so that means the primary thing to upgrade was the CPU. The GPU will have to wait considering the current market which is unfortunate because that definitely helps as well with video encoding.
I figured I should also film this as I was doing it so that resulted in this Extra Bit episode. As a reminder the Extra Bit videos are basically my unscripted and considerably less edited videos that’s more of a raw or direct video. In theory they should take less time to make but yeah… this one still took a long time to make!
Either way it was fun, the upgrade is a huge improvement and my editing and streaming is now much less stress inducing. Check out the video on it!
Posted on October 22, 2021
Livestream 10/21/2021 – Emperor: Battle for Dune
Dune is in the news right now thanks to the new movie. While I haven’t seen it yet the Dune universe and mythos has been around for a long time now of course. Everything being based on the original books by Frank Herbert there have been many adapations in just about all forms of media. The 1984 movie definitely provided inspiration to what the Dune universe “should” look like trippy as it were.
As far as games we have had quite a few as well but besides the first Dune game featuring a mixture of strategy, adventure and some RPG elements my heart lies in the field of Real Time Strategy games or RTS. Westwood studios made Dune 2 which may be considered the first modern RTS with most of the trappings we have come to expect from the genre. Sure it’s a bit rough around the edges these days but all the basic building blocks for the genre are there. Westwood moved on to working on their highly successful Command and Conquer series after that but did revisit Dune in the excellent Dune 2000 which is basically a Dune 2 remake.
The last game they made set in that universe is the game we streamed this week which is Emperor: Battle for Dune. Positioned as a direct sequel to Dune 2000 it picks up the story right after with a war for the throne of the Emperor (hint hint in the name) of the known universe of course all set on the planet Arrakis again known as Dune. It’s an ambitious game that goes all in on the story and the FMV sequences that Westwood became so known for. Probably not my favorite game of theirs from this era but it’s still great fun. It’s a Westwood game through and through and it flew under the radar it feels like for many. Check out the replay below and see what you think!
Posted on October 18, 2021
Livestream 10/14/2021 – Diablo 2 on the Mac
I think it’s an unspoken rule now that I stream on whatever was the focus of the most recently published video. So since I just upgraded the video card in the Power Mac G4 AGP model that became the natural choice. I struggled a bit when it came what to play since this was mostly a 3D performance boost and not so much 2D (although I’m sure there was a gain there as well) I just couldn’t think of what to play. Since during the last stream with this machine we focused on the, then current, Rage 128 Pro we had already gone through a ton of 3D titles.
So my choice fell on Diablo 2 which is a game I have spent countless hours in but of course on PC. It was available on Mac as well and as we found out perhaps best run in software mode on our machine. The game supports accelerated graphics either via the Mac specific renderer Rave or the more common OpenGL option. Either one interestingly enough proved difficult as the game was freezing up frequently. First we thought it was due to the hard drive giving out due to the long loading times that followed before the machine unfroze (aka drink break) but after switching to sofware rendering everything ran like a charm! Gaming on the Mac platform as a whole is still a learning experience for me and honestly I think it’s sort of fun to dig into something new like this and learn all the ins and outs of a particular environment.
So technical detours aside Diablo 2 is just as addictive as it was back then. Of course considering the recent resurrected release of this game it still holds a special place with gamers yet to this day. Check out the replay below with about the first half having the slowdown issues which we then fixed and the game ran great after that.
