Yeah. That old lady spending £3000 a month on gems for “Royal Candy Blaster Treasure Blitz Origins” is the gaming industry now. :(

He genuinely did some quality stuff in the 1980s and 1990s. Populous (1989) and Powermonger (1990) were genre-defining, and in their era, were amongst the best games available on the Atari ST/Amiga.

He seemed to have a run of innovative classics - Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper were quality…

…and then at some point he just started promising things he couldn’t deliver. Black and White still turned out pretty good, despite the broken promises…

… then in the last handful of years, he’s worked hard to destroy his previous reputation by churning out overhyped shit.

I wonder what the staff member who wrote this article had on their mind?

Ubisoft Guide - Kill a Boss

It’s been on my wishlist for a while and I was hovering over buying it during this Steam sale… I might get it tomorrow.

Is the first one in the series worth playing as well?

Absolutely, I plan to :)

I’m a little shocked by how few of those I’ve even heard of

Understood. Buying all the Star Wars games.

Where can I learn this skill?

Makes you think of what could have been, if they’d done the new Fallouts as tactical/Turn Based RPGs, rather than first person shooters - although the new Wasteland games do a pretty good job of filling that niche.

I either use the default names, or give them “standard English older bloke names”. The grander the adventure, the more un-grand a name they get.

Things like “Ian Williams”, “Neville Smith”, “Terry Phillips”, “Frank Jones” etc. The sort of names that would work for the City Council’s Road Maintenance Department.

Yeah, the Steam Deck is actually pretty good for this on most games.

On a computer, you can, I suppose, set up a keyboard shortcut to pause the process, but you still think “this should just be part of the game in the first place”.

Not being able to pause or save at any point.

I’m a “grown-up” these days, but I grew up with games and they’re part of my life, and I love them - but in the larger scale of things, they’re still toys. The requirements of a pet/partner/child/phone call/doorbell will always nearly always outrank them.

“We don’t let you pause because it’s a simulation and and you can’t pause real life so it means the game is more realistic” = piss off

Obviously, they’d be in danger of learning something.

Good work, thank you :)

Before games had full epic soundtracks, you still got quality “intro tracks”, occasionally with a few other songs for whilst you’re playing.

Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe intro music (youtube link)

From the same Atari ST/Amiga era: Chaos Engine, Frontier Elite 2, Xenon 2 Megablast, Syndicate Wars

For newer stuff with “full soundtracks”, you can’t beat Stellaris OST (youtube link)

Fried Ian Slip

Thank you, and likewise. It’s good to know I’m not the only person using a pseudonym. I guess everyone else is using their real names :)

Personally, I’d probably prefer to see Fallout 3/4/NV converted to an isometric turn-based engine.

However, I know I’m old and have a niche opinion on such things, so I genuinely wish them good luck :)

The “Fonline” engine fodev.net or fonline.ru was (almost) able to create a fully functional Fallout game, with zoom, higher resolution sprites or isometric 3D models, whilst retaining the look, feel and controls of the originals.

The main problem (from my perspective) was that it was designed as a “multiplayer-first” engine with real-time pew-pew-pew combat, and getting it to do anything singleplayer and turn-based needed quite a lot of work at the time - and engine updates weren’t often backwards compatible, and the documentation was often only in Russian. A lot of half-finished projects showed great promise, but then broke and fizzled out.

I think it’s still in development. Last time I looked, they were “refactoring” all the code (including fixing all the single-player stuff). It still holds promise for the future.

Judging by the amount of times I hear the same ringtone as mine, I think where I live in the UK is about 70-80% Samsung Android phones.

I previously wasn’t bothered by it, but you’re totally right. I can’t unsee it now. It’s wrong and I’m now bothered by it.