The grand videogame thread

[Liquid Ice]

So anyone pick up Dragon Age 2?

[Albertosaurus Rex]

From the lack of replies, I guess not...

['thul]

These being rarely pick up games. Not out of lack of enjoyment, but out of lack of time...

They did play a bit of Empire: Total War this weekend, but they have not acquired it themselves...

[Albertosaurus Rex]

Now this is the most bizarre thing I've come across in a long time...

Back when I was a kid I played the game Oscar a lot. It was an unremarkable but challenging game with nice, colorful graphics.

I recently discovered that a sequel called Oscar in Toyland for the DSi came out last year. That news left me totally falbbergasted. Why would anyone bother to make a sequel to a totally obscure game that came out... wait for it... seventeen years ago?

The answer: they wouldn't. Back in 1993, Flair software made two games: Oscar and the more popular Trolls, based on those Troll dolls with the brightly colored hair. (Anyone remember those? I do.) Somebody decided to port Trolls to the DSi, but decided that the Trolls had lost their marketability and, apparently too lazy to come up with a new protagonist themselves, just stuck Oscar in the game. And so a sequel was born. And now there's an Oscar in Toyland 2 coming up, I'm not kidding.

(By the way... "The new kid on the block"? I don't think so...)

EDIT: Apparently, Oscar in Toyland 2 has already been released a few months ago. I don't know if they made original levels this time or got "inspiration" from somewhere else, but do note that they haven't used the levels from the original game so far...

['thul]

These beings recently decided to play god a bit, so they started playing "Black & White 2"...

Decent game so far... but it does take quite some time to finish...

[Albertosaurus Rex]

I'm trying to get an old videogame to work again, but I'm very inexperienced using emulators, so I can't get it running... Just for the record: what I am doing is legal. We still have an Atari ST and a floppy of Fast Food Dizzy kying around. Of course, the game has also been released on DOS, so why don't I try to run that version in the easy to use DOSbox? Because that version's music isn't right. I want the music from my childhood to play again...

['thul]

the newer a computer, the harder it is to get an old game to work. These beings discovered a while ago that the 64-bit version of windows 7 has removed most of the remaining parts of the old DOS... even a game as new as warcraft 2 (from 1995) is no longer supported on a 64-bit win7 computer... Using emulator to get that working is very, very hard...
DOSbox isnt an easy thing to use...

Have you tried searching online for the game in adapted version? There are many sites that help with such, or may even have the solution ready-made...

[Albertosaurus Rex]

I often manage to get DOSbox to work for me. Rayman, Lands of Lore 2 and indeed the DOS version of Fast Food work fine for me. But as I said before: the music is different and it just feels wrong to play it like that... Alright, now I have got an emulator working but I can't find the right kind of file. (It needs to have a .ST extension and mine has a .STX extension???)

['thul]

rayman was a funny game... These beings cannot help much more here, since they have only tried DOSbox once, and then they did not have time to experiment...

[Albertosaurus Rex]

I did it! After trying out no less than four different emulators, I finally managed to run the game. (Now I'll have to get rid of all that junk I've accumelated by trying all sort of things...)

I have played a lot of good videogames in my life, but there are only two that I have been totally obsessed with: Fast Food and the original Rayman.

Rayman has a repuration of being very long and very difficult, and indeedon my first playthrough it took me months to beat the game. However, after that I did a sevond playthrough. And a third. And a fourth. Up to at least sixteen, if I remember correctly. In the end, I could beat the game in just two days. I never could avoid dying completely, but I did manage to avoid the continue screen.

And then there's Fast Food, an arcade spinoff of the Dizzy series. Basically, it's a Pac-Man clone. And I don't even like Pac-Man, so what is it about this game that makes it so good? I honestly don't know, but I absolutely loved it when I was a kid. And I had a blast playing it again this morning.