I've been playing Battlezone 2

I've gotta say that I think the first one is better. Maybe I just liked the cold war setting better but BZ1 seemed to have more interesting and memorable missions. I'm about 10 missions in to BZ2 and it seems pretty ho hum so far. The voice acting is noticeably worse than the first one as well, and the story is basically telegraphed in the mission briefing audio, its pretty obvious what is going to happen.

I will say that BZ2 has nice graphics for its age but otherwise that's about the only thing its got going for it.

BZ2's shortcoming really was the dramatic change in gameplay. Scrap is instantaneously collected, there are no geysers, your recycler is a permanent building after deploying, the armoury and factory are also permanent buildings CONSTRUCTED by the constructor unit, and additional scrap capacity is gained by creating "Extractors" by permanently deploying your scavengers above "scrap pools" that looks uncannily like a geyser. Oh and the Scion race having power generators built into the buildings, plus their ships can transform to\from combat\assault modes at will. While the ISDF on the other hand only has a few vehicles that have assault weapon hardpoints.

Yeah they seemed to be pushing more towards the action/combat than the strategy side of gameplay. There's no pilot count to worry about either which makes it a lot simpler to just pump out units and rush the enemy.

The 1.3 patch introduces some interesting "Recycler Variants" that change up the gameplay. Even though the scrap mechanic remains the same some of these mods actually make BZ2 alot more fun than the stock version.

Forgotten Enemies was also a really, really good community based expansion. I actually enjoyed it even if it had mediocre voice acting done by amateur’s.

Just finished of Freespace 2. Will keep it spoiler free but let's just say that neither the more positive, nor the darker ending were particularly satisfying. Lots of loose ends left and it doesn't look like we'll get a sequel either. Interplay got the rights back last year, but they haven't really put out anything worthwhile since 2004 and Volition are doing Saints Row, so I'm not holding my breath. FS1 and 2 are both great games though.

Might give Giants Citizen Kabuto a go next, but apparently there's a GeForce3 bundled version that comes with slightly upgraded graphics, so I might just hold off until I get my mitts on that one before digging in.

After finishing one more time DreamWeb, I'm with Future Wars.

I’ve been playing Network Q Rally (again) and now Descent II on a PIII + ESS Audiodrive + Yamaha DB50XG + Geforce 2 Ultra + Flightstick Pro. It looks awesome, it sounds awesome, and thanks to the flightstick it controls awesome, but it’s just not holding my attention. DOOM has real atmosphere so wandering the halls looking for keys is fun. Descent is technically great but just doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi (personal opinion of course). Even with the help of my trusty guide bot I lose the will to go on pretty quickly.

I think I’ll try Terminal Velocity next, which is another game that I played a bit back in the day but which I couldn’t experience in all its glory on my 486. By the time I had a PC fast enough to run it, the world had moved on.

Badmojo: Did you struggle with the controls at all? I've been itching to get into the Descent series, but I heard people saying that it was difficult to control, and a bit disorienting, even with a joystick.

Thirst wrote:

Badmojo: Did you struggle with the controls at all? I've been itching to get into the Descent series, but I heard people saying that it was difficult to control, and a bit disorienting, even with a joystick.

With the right joystick it's fine, with a lesser one it's harder. The Flightstick Pro for example has the hat for strafing left/right up/down, and that makes a big difference. A Sidewinder 3D Pro works well too with the twisty handle. Even a gravis game pad is OK - basically anything that's supported I guess.

So no I don't think it's a hard game to control, dive right in!

Cheers!

I've got a Thrustmaster F-16 stick in the post. I'll give it a spin once that arrives.

I dunno what came over me but I shelled out full price for a new release title yesterday - Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. It's 35GB's or something outrageous - it took a very long time to download. I had a brief play and it looks very impressive, visually I mean. My specs were on the low end of the requirements scale but it's pumping out nice smooth frames.

If I can get off my tookus and learn the controls then it should be a good time - I like an open world. And the voice acting didn't make me roll my eyes once, which is a milestone in my gaming history.

I'm pretty tempted to purchase Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, It looks epic fun if nothing else. Plus the included CD soundtrack? Awesome!

Though I'm still trying to slog through these games when I can be arsed:

Half life
Half life Opposing force
" " Blue Shift
Gunman chronicals
Half life 2
half life 2: ep1, ep2 (lol)
quake 1
Quake 2: The reckoning (I;ve completed the main q2)
I want to play through Dishonoured again more stealthily if i can, but i still have the DLC to complete
Skyrim

I've got alot of half life to get through.... 🤣

I've been playing Skyrim, Deus Ex with the mod GMDX v7(very good - http://genericname112.wix.com/gmdx), and Batman: Arkham City.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Lately I've been playing a whole bunch of different games. The main ones are: […]
Show full quote

Lately I've been playing a whole bunch of different games. The main ones are:

...
- Perfect Dark (n64)
- Unreal Tournament '99 GOTY
- Timesplitters: Future Perfect (Gamecube)
...

It's hard for me to just stick to one or two games. 🤣

A man (or woman!) of great taste! Those are three of my favourite ever games. And you mention Carmageddon, which I also really like (on the PC, the N64 version is awful).

Blurredman wrote:

I'm pretty tempted to purchase Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, It looks epic fun if nothing else. Plus the included CD soundtrack? Awes […]
Show full quote

I'm pretty tempted to purchase Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, It looks epic fun if nothing else. Plus the included CD soundtrack? Awesome!

Though I'm still trying to slog through these games when I can be arsed:

Half life
Half life Opposing force
" " Blue Shift
Gunman chronicals
Half life 2
half life 2: ep1, ep2 (lol)
quake 1
Quake 2: The reckoning (I;ve completed the main q2)
I want to play through Dishonoured again more stealthily if i can, but i still have the DLC to complete
Skyrim

I've got alot of half life to get through.... 🤣

Half-Life is brilliant, Opposing Force is even better (my favourite of the whole franchise), HL2 is really good, Ep1 is disappointing, and Ep is much better but still not as good as HL2. Don't bother with Blue-shift though, unless you want to be able to say that you've played it, as it's very weak and short. Instead play the free fan made mod "Azure Sheep", which has the same premise as Blue-Shift (you play as a security guard, Barney Calhoun, who you (as Gordon Freeman) meet up again with in HL2), but is a million times better. Azure Sheep is fantastic, much long, and much, much, much, much more inventive than Blue-Shift. You even get to fight alongside Gordon Freeman and Adrian Shepard (Shepard is the soldier you play as in Opposing Force)!

MechWarrior 4: Vengeance. I played a TON of MechWarrior 4 Mercenaries before Vista and 7 were around, and I got this one, too. I think I played a few missions of it, really liked it, but then got distracted by Mercenaries again. I managed to get a working install of the game so I've started to play it again since I got on an MW kick as I found MW2 at a thrift store a few days ago, and also because I'm running out of games to review.

Not very retro perhaps but Im playing GTA IV using my 2006 system with a single Geforce 8800 GTX. Well Im actually using a clone system as the 2006 system is a finished great working system I dont want to mess with and Im in a tinkering mood. The performance should be the same though as the hardware is more or less the same except this system uses a Intel chipset motherboard instead of the Nforce 680i board my 2006 system uses. This system only has 2GB memory at the moment while the 2006 system has 4GB but GTA IV seems to run fine.

It seems a first generation quad core @ 3.6Ghz (Kentsfield), 2GB DDR800 memory and a Geforce 8800 GTX is all you need for playing GTA IV with high settings. I play at 1280*1024 with high detail textures and the draw distances at 31 and its butter smooth.

I remember that many people had performance issues with much newer systems but for me GTA IV always seemed to run decently. I use Windows XP, I do not think the game would run this well with only 2GB memory in Windows Vista or Windows 7/8.

a TINY bit of the The Witcher 1 and some Bro Force. Just salpped a 256gb SSD in my PS3, maybe Tokyo Jungle and The Last Of Us in near future.

I spent most of the day making my way through Lemmings. So far I've beat the Fun and Tricky difficulty settings and I'm a few levels into Taxing. I'm not sure if I'll be able to beat it on Mayhem but I'll give it my best shot 😵

Have been trying out OpenXcom lately (thanks Jorpho for the link 😀 ). It works great, just like the original X-COM, but with several differences and enhancements that improves gameplay significantly. I really like it 😊

Here are some in-game screenshots (click on the image for larger version):

Now to continue "taming" the aliens and turn them into personal playthings 😁