Good, Old, Under Appreciated/Cult PC titles.

[SyntadxError]

the links work fine - yes if you want a legit copy by all means head on over to GOG; seems a bit much to pay £5/6 for a game that is 20 years old, especially if you've already bought a copy in the past (which i have)

[small_world]

Total Annihilation.

Possibly my all time favourite strategy/war game.
Just so much to it.
The good thing is, there's still a decent online community mod-ding it and playing online.


I had a PC for ages, played a few of the games on the machine, and messed about with the software that came with it, but never really took much of an interest.
One day, when bored, I scanned through some of the software again, and this little gem popped out.

I showed it to a friend and copied it for him.
He then went out and found the upgrade discs which gave him a load of new units.
From there, we got involved making maps and messing about with some unit files.
It was an amazing piece of a game, really easy to mess around with, even for someone like me who knows nothing about computers 'n' that.



I can't leave without mentioning Settlers 1+2. Both amazing.
As well as Elite2:Frontier - Is there anything like that game around now? I played on X2(?) which was meant to be the modern day equivalent (a few years back). But just couldn't get in to it.

There was also a Mech game I had.
You started off on some other planet, based in a tank, then you were ejected and had to get to a large walker thing where you could command other units and place buildings. Can't really remember the whole thing, but it was an amazing game.
If anyone knows what the fuck I'm on about, let me know.

[gabrielconroy]

As well as Elite2:Frontier - Is there anything like that game around now? I played on X2(?) which was meant to be the modern day equivalent (a few years back). But just couldn't get in to it.

I would also very much like to know this. Privateer II (part of the Wing Commander series) that I linked to above was similar, and someone recently recommended X3 to me, but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. It seems this type of game is just unfashionable at the moment, but it offers such scope for huge, immersive environments, grand-scale plot lines and fun laser fun that surely it's only a matter of time before another of its type emerges.

There was also a Mech game I had.
You started off on some other planet, based in a tank, then you were ejected and had to get to a large walker thing where you could command other units and place buildings. Can't really remember the whole thing, but it was an amazing game.
If anyone knows what the fuck I'm on about, let me know.

Wasn't that just called MechWarrior?

[Jerzy Bondov]

Freelancer is the most recent[nb]Nine years old!![/nb] going-around-in-space-doing-stuff game I've played; I thought it was great. It had really stilted voice acting. I can still remember the way your man introduces himself 'Trent...' The graphics looked great for the time and you could ignore the story and just go wandering around, collecting stuff to trade and upgrading your spaceship. And I think the spaceships left trails like in Homeworld, which is always brilliant. Not as hardcore as Frontier or X but still a lot of fun, and it's got quite clever mouse controls which mean you don't need to dig out your flightstick (steady)

[SyntadxError]

I would also very much like to know this. Privateer II (part of the Wing Commander series) that I linked to above was similar, and someone recently recommended X3 to me, but I haven't had a chance to check it out yet. It seems this type of game is just unfashionable at the moment, but it offers such scope for huge, immersive environments, grand-scale plot lines and fun laser fun that surely it's only a matter of time before another of its type emerges.

you could give Darkstar One a try. Its not great but its on similar lines.

[gabrielconroy]

I also played Freelancer a few years ago, chasing the Privateer II buzz. It was good, and I quite enjoyed it. But it wasn't the same (although it's hard to tell if my judgement's coloured by youthful enthusiasm and nostalgia). Even so, does anyone know what the best type of game like this there's been since? Is it X3 Evo?

Also for the new reply ^ I actually did try that out, but got bored of it before I even got into the game proper. It was making me fly around inside a warehouse to prove I knew how to work the spaceship, so I gave up in a fit of prideful rage ("don't you know I was a feared wonder-pilot?!").

[Big Jack McBastard]

X³ is just as fundamentally broken as its predecessors, the AI is highly variable, bordering on outright suicidal, it's complexity, general fiddlyness and the need to micromanage and intervene to defend your assets or prevent species-wide incidents in home territories in who knows how many regions (cos it's so bloody huge), means any serious none cheating, method of generating the shit-load of money you're going to need to take on fleets of Xenon and co and win, is going to take months of gameplay to generate and could be lost in minutes.

You make a very delicate network of lobotomized cargo drones to do your bidding, if they're not crashing heedlessly into jump-gates and grinding themselves to death on the way to their destination then they accidentally ram once friendly, home sector capital ships while returning with your (now lost) cargo and now you've got another problem on your hands because the armed drone escort ship you sent with the cargo carrying idiot thinks the capital ship its wayward ward kamikazed into is now a threat.

Even cheating the hell out of it yields paltry results, I've set up sector patrols of fully decked out Boron Rays and loads of smaller support ships to reclaim a rather sunny, empty, bar traffic, sector, which was only very occasionally visited by the Kha'ak. I semi-confidently left my lads to patrol and defend my assets, as while I was in sector observing, every encounter they had ended with virtually no damage to my guys and a total raping for the invaders.

So I go off to manage crystal production in a quieter sector for 20 minutes, I nip back into the maps and see half my beacons in the patrolled sector are out and my ship count there has dropped from 22 to 6. What the fuck?

I raid my solar plants for energy cells and jump back to find most of the remaining craft on fire, I realised later one of the many possible issues would have been them ramming each other to bits while trying to pathfind around streams of traffic. They also started a fight with the Split, probably through ramming, who occupied the three adjoining sections of space in the direction back to my paltry hub and thus utterly fucked my energy cell route as every ship on the way there or back was now fair game for their arsey pilots.

I've duplicated 16 capital ships with every bell, whistle, gun, missile and shield to the nth degree, made them invincible (well as much as cheating permits) and tried to take a Xenon home sector, I think I lost 4 times in a row before managing to destroy their shipyard and take out the Hub thingy. They pound the living shit out of you and will ram with abandon, it's impossible to hold their sectors for any length of time as they casually flood the jump gates and wear down whatever force remains through attrition and then re-build just to rub it in.

Maddening, infuriating games but endlessly pretty, it's nice to just watch the flow of a sector for a while, I always start out as a pirate hunter to get police licenses and end up regretting it when the pirates have loads of cool illegal stuff to buy, There is something almost equally alluring about the far flung dream of manipulating the markets to your benefit on a mass scale, of building of your own economic empire simply by undercutting everyone else or being the only game in town and gaining the favour of your adopted race(s).

Never works out quite like that though, you build some solar plants, get some wheat (or whatever) farms going, sell cheap food and energy till the cash flow stalls then you start to build crystal plants to use the excess energy cells but then you need more obscure resources to process them into silicon chips, said resources might only be readily available in foreign or hostile sectors or which are available locally but are slowly created by-broducts of just a few other stations processes and your mass buying of it hikes the price up to the point where it's a waiting game for then to fall again so then you start to diversify into the other species food stuffs and products and before you know it you're drowning in possibilities, resource needs that you can't fill and shit you can't sell for profit without taking massive risks or making dinky/very dangerous/expensive/supervised trips with insanely precious cargos because you can't afford to leave it up to your bods and there's every possibility you'll be destroyed on the way there or back.

Your efforts at control are repelled, the universe conspires to keep your influence down and reset it's self by it's rather wonky design.

Fun though, I'm almost tempted to re-install it even after all that, even though I know what awaits.

[Default to the negative]

Funny thing about the first LBA, despite the fact that the whole aesthetic risked alienating older players, it was pretty damn hard. I never got far in that game. I wanted to, because I could see its charms, but I lost my temper with it too many times. The second game was much more mellow, I liked that one a lot. What a mad, fucked-up world Twinsen lives in.

I'm another person who enjoyed Privateer 2 and Frontier back in the day, and I went looking for a modern equivalent last year. All roads led to Freelancer, which was simply too old for me to enjoy. Yes, I'm a graphics whore.

Ever gone back and watched those Privateer 2 cutscenes? They're hilariously bad. They remind me a lot of Battlefield Earth with that same overuse of the Dutch angle. Amazing that so many big(ish) names took part. I mean, you'd expect it from Brian Blessed, but Christopher Walken?

It's weird, because back then, before GTA3, Frontier seemed like the future of gaming to me. I expected that in the future, long before 2012, we'd have a much more advanced version of Frontier, with more detailed planets and more depth to the gameplay. But nothing like that has surfaced. You'd think that with the popularity of free-roaming games, someone would have taken the sandbox back into space by now. This is definitely a kickstarter waiting to happen, though it's plausible that Rockstar or Bethesda could make something along these lines.

[Sexton Brackets Drugbust]

I think I'm the only person aside from a handful of journo's to play Kingdom O' Magic.  Very much an old-school point n' clicker adventure game of the Full Throttle variety, but with three different "modes" and I think plots, too. But same characters, same world each time.

John Sessions does the voice of one of the two playable characters, and I remember it having a very odd sense of humour which made me laugh at the time.  Though it certainly lacked polish... everything about the game was slightly "oh I see what you tried to do there".

Damn my memory's hazy.... if anyone finds and plays it I'd love to see a retrospective review of sorts.

I have that and used to love it as a kid. Played it through loads of times - I thought it was hilarious. There was a scene that particularly captivated my child mind, where you repeatedly ring and run the Dark Tower and the Dark Lord sounds exactly like Alfred Hitchcock. "Once again, there is noone at my door. I shall repair to my boudoir and hope it does not happen again."

Considering how daft it was, it was a fairly detailed and faithful parody of Middle Earth and TLoTR in general, albeit with old 1950s film footage spliced in for comedy effect.

Thinking about it. I remeber it all in alarmingly vivid detail.

[NoSleep]

Noooooooo! The Mac way of running DOSBox is Boxer.

Tried Boxer but it runs some games too fast and didn't allow enough scope to slow them down. Dapplegrey, by its nature, runs the games at a suitably slow speed.

[KLG-7A]

Tried Boxer but it runs some games too fast and didn't allow enough scope to slow them down. Dapplegrey, by its nature, runs the games at a suitably slow speed.

By its nature? All it does is set a slowdown parameter to activate functionality that's built into DOSBox.

[Puffin Chunks]

Syndicate fits 3 of your 4 requirements (I don't think you could describe it as under appreciated as it is fairly universally accepted that the game is excellent). I wrote about it here a couple of years ago under a different guise, and 'cos I'm a lazy bugger I'm just going to link to that:

http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=22925.msg1228207#msg1228207

I will say that since then I have replayed the PC version, which has improved graphics over the (reviewed) Amiga version but is otherwise the same game. I loved playing through it again, and since this thread has reminded me of it, I think I'm going to give it another bash.

[gabrielconroy]

Are you talking about the original PC port of the Amiga game? If it's the one I'm thinking of, it involved trying to secure gang territory with a nuanced political system, and was ridiculously addictive. Looks like there's a recent update for the PC - know if it's any good?

[Puffin Chunks]

Yes I am.

The remake (not played or seen much) is apparently a pretty bog standard fps that lacks any of the charm, originality or addictiveness of the original.

Edit: Actually apparently it received generally positive reviews so it appears that I'm speaking complete bollocks.

[Big Jack McBastard]

I've still got the sequel Syndicate Wars sat in a box somewhere, don't know if I could bare going back to the original.

[NoSleep]

By its nature? All it does is set a slowdown parameter to activate functionality that's built into DOSBox.

Does it? I've tried Boxer and Ragnor before that and worked out out how to speed and slow games down for myself using DOSbox. This didn't help me on my current computer (G5 Quad 2.5). It showed that it had slowed it down but not usefully; everything still running too fast. It's was even explained to me (possibly in the accompanying literature) that Dapplegrey works really (usefully) sluggishly, because it was written in sluggish old Basic.

[KLG-7A]

Nah. It's just a front-end, the slowness of the BASIC wouldn't affect the games running in DOSBox (unless it really brought the entire system to a crawl). And it wouldn't be THAT slow anyway.

You can't slow down a modern computer in a meaningful way to get old games to run by bogging it down. The architecture is too complicated. The only meaningful slowdown is to control the number of emulated CPU cycles DOSBox performs in a certain time, which is what Dapplegrey instructs DOSBox to do.

[NoSleep]

You mean using the Function buttons to speed or slow the cycles down? If so, the games are actually playable via Dapplegrey but not via Boxer.

[KLG-7A]

I've never used Dapplegrey or Boxer, I don't know what specific messages they differ in when talking to DOSBox.

[NoSleep]

In both programs you have to change the number of cycles via the function buttons in DOSBox itself (not the respective interfaces), but the games are still uncontrollably fast in Boxer, despite turning the speed down.

[KLG-7A]

Sounds like Boxer doesn't send the right messages to DOSBox.

Dapplegrey definitely isn't doing the slowdown itself, and it's not an effect of it being written in BASIC and slowing down the system.

[NoSleep]

Dapplegrey works well, anyway, and I like the means given for running DOS apps, either directly or placing them in a custom list, assigning folders as directories etc. I found it less troublesome than Boxer, which is supposed to simplify using DOSbox.

[KLG-7A]

But it has prettier icons!

[monolith]

Battlezone - An RTS and FPS hybrid. Far too few of them, this was the shit, although I believe the one I'm talking about was a remake of an even older game.

Unreal - Everyone remembers Unreal Tournament but the first Unreal game was spectacular, it was just very unlucky to be released when Half-Life came out.

Tribes - (the original, I thought it was completely forgotten but a long awaited sequel "Tribes - Vengeance" is thankfully doing pretty well right now) Multiplayer only, jetpacking, skiiing, vehicles, disc throwing, heavy armoured mortar throwing mofos, light armoured sniping little bastards, huge floating bases.... So ridiculously far ahead of it's time for the multiplayer FPS genre and I'd say it's better than the latest Modern Warfare even now.

Total Annihilation - So much better than C&C, I should have loved it's spirtual successor Supreme Commander but it never quite clicked. Or maybe I just wasn't good enough at it...

Jedi Knight + Mysteries of the Sith expansion - Still my favourite Star Wars FPS, incredible level design and really fun multiplayer despite the slight absurdity of having to aim about 10 foot in front of whoever you wanted to shoot.

They probably aren't particularly obscure and the final two definately weren't under appreciated by most.

[monolith]

Total Annihilation.

Possibly my all time favourite strategy/war game.
Just so much to it.
The good thing is, there's still a decent online community mod-ding it and playing online.


I had a PC for ages, played a few of the games on the machine, and messed about with the software that came with it, but never really took much of an interest.
One day, when bored, I scanned through some of the software again, and this little gem popped out.

I showed it to a friend and copied it for him.
He then went out and found the upgrade discs which gave him a load of new units.
From there, we got involved making maps and messing about with some unit files.
It was an amazing piece of a game, really easy to mess around with, even for someone like me who knows nothing about computers 'n' that.



I can't leave without mentioning Settlers 1+2. Both amazing.
As well as Elite2:Frontier - Is there anything like that game around now? I played on X2(?) which was meant to be the modern day equivalent (a few years back). But just couldn't get in to it.

There was also a Mech game I had.
You started off on some other planet, based in a tank, then you were ejected and had to get to a large walker thing where you could command other units and place buildings. Can't really remember the whole thing, but it was an amazing game.
If anyone knows what the fuck I'm on about, let me know.

Oh bugger, no sooner do I post that I see you've already mentioned TA.

And also reminded me about The Settlers 2. That game was slow as f*ck but wonderful at the same time. I remember such a feeling of adventure and excitement (I hadn't played many games, particularly on the PC at the time).

[Junglist]

I didn't know where to put this, so:

I have five invites for Underground Gamer, if anyone would like one.

[BlueSkies]

Yes please!

[KLG-7A]

Yes please.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Yes, please. Thanks!

[Junglist]

PM me if so, whoever is legit!