January 2006 Archives

For me, the peak of commercial PC gaming came in the first half of the 1990s, and ever since then the field has been in decline. It's obvious (yet strangely unacknowledged) that the industry is in a bad shape today, with the only thriving areas being strategy, FPS games, and of course the MMORPG. Entire once-prolific genres, like the graphic adventure, have all but disappeared. Truly great games now hit the PC at the rate of only a couple a year. At the peak of the industry it was more like one every one or two months. Skeptical? Find an old issue of PC Gamer from 1990-1995 and see how many games they reviewed that you or your friends still remember fondly.

Fortunately a few of these old classics, instead of fading into nostalgia, earn the privilege of rebirth through open source engines and remakes, ensuring that they will continue to serve their purpose of entertainment for years to come. Here are five classic PC games that can be enjoyed today on a variety of platforms. There are no half-finished projects here, no ugly clones, no idealistic Sourceforge endeavours that culminate in abandoned bug-ridden test builds. Each of these projects provides a fully functional and stable gaming engine which should match or even surpass the experience of the original. Most of these projects require data files (graphics, sounds, maps) from the original games. Where to find these, if you don't already possess them, is left as an exercise to the reader.

• Game: Star Control II (1992). Engine: The Ur-Quan Masters. It's sad that more people haven't played this excellent space exploration/combat game that also features an unexpectedly good story. No data files to hunt down for this one since they were open sourced with the application -- just download and play.
• Game: Ultima VII (1992). Engine: Exult. Behind U7's primitive graphics lies an RPG rich with interactivity in a way that only a handful of games before or since have ever managed. Sick of playing RPGs where NPCs stand around like idiots day and night just waiting for the hero to show up and talk to them? U7's population have lives. Also, this is no 20-hour casual game; U7 (in its two parts) is one of the biggest RPGs ever.
• Game: Sam and Max Hit the Road (1993). Engine: ScummVM. I chose Sam and Max because it's my favourite of the LucasArts games, with quirky graphics, excellent voice work and a script as funny as anything else ever written for a game, but ScummVM plays pretty much all the LucasArts games of the era, including classics like Day of the Tentacle, the first three Monkey Island games, and the underrated Full Throttle.
• Game: Marathon (1994). Engine: Aleph One. This one is going up on trust because I haven't actually played it for more than 30 seconds, but Mac users rate Bungie's Marathon series very highly. Now everyone gets the chance to play this trilogy of FPS games, released to the community by Bungie. Why not try making a list of the areas where Marathon is better than Halo?
• Game: Transport Tycoon Deluxe (1995). Engine: OpenTTD. A flawlessly accurate implementation of the strategy game I lost my youth to. Except now it does online multiplayer. I find myself in some kind of retro-gaming heaven.

This list isn't at all exhaustive and there are more of these projects springing up all the time, some of which are bound to eventually reach the stage where the games are polished and playable. Someday you might be able to play UFO: Enemy Unknown, the two Ultima Underworlds, or the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, etc). on your Mac or Linux box. But I'm glad I can't do that yet -- my free time's already spoken for. Back to OpenTTD!

Hey, all my friends are doing it.

An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn't certain of which direction to go, and he'd forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He'd sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: 'Now your third wish. What will it be?'
'Third wish?' The man was baffled. 'How can it be a third wish if I haven't had a first and second wish?'
'You've had two wishes already,' the hag said, 'but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That's why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.' She cackled at the poor berk. 'So it is that you have one wish left.'
'All right,' said the man, "I don't believe this, but there's no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am.'
'Funny,' said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. 'That was your first wish.'

-- Dialogue from Planescape: Torment

I only recently found out that the proofreading activity for old, out-of-copyright works intended for Project Gutenberg was an organised, distributed activity that for the past few years has been carried out (by volunteers) using the web app set up at PGDP. Out of curiosity I signed up, and over the last few weeks have done a couple hundred pages of 'P1' level proofreading (which basically amounts to correcting OCR errors before they're passed on to 'P2' for another pass to catch any that were missed).

There are so many projects on the go at any one time that I've found it very easy to choose those that I think look interesting. Since you end up taking pages out of a pool while other people are often doing the same, you aren't guaranteed consecutive pages, so the process doesn't always lend itself to following the narrative of a book (proofreaders are primarily there to correct errors, after all). But reading sections is still quite interesting, and I've resolved to read a couple of books for real when they show up on Gutenberg in a few months, fully proofread and formatted and complete.

After a tutorial project, the first project I decided to work on was the account of Captain Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin's ship's captain. The sections of the book I was proofreading were accounts of voyages before Darwin had joined the crew, but were no less interesting for it. At one point I felt a pang of recognition and, after some searching, realised that I was proofreading the original accounts of the capture of these Patagonian natives, which I had read about in the linked BBC article a couple of months before.

I've now moved on to Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, a new project added to the site yesterday to commemorate Franklin's 300th birthday (and already almost fully P1-proofread). Franklin was a smart man of many talents (and by today's standards, a total geek, in the most complimentary sense of the word) and his autobiography is fascinating throughout -- sometimes so much so that I forget I'm supposed to be correcting errors -- but my favourite passage so far is this one where the young Franklin struggles with his vegetarianism:

I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I consider'd, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

215 years dead and his personality still oozes off the page and inhabits the room. Amazing.

I suspect a predictable 43t-assisted new year resolutions post is probably somewhere on the way, but I haven't yet written it, so please accept instead a straightforward linkdump:

• My unquestioned assumption that nobody would ever think to make a sexy interpretation of the Firefox logo: crushed. (warning: slightly risque artwork)
• Useful and often hilarious life hacks in mp3: the 43 Folders podcast.
• Half-Life 2 players will appreciate the humour all the more in the thrice-weekly comic Concerned.
• Fruity Oaty Bars make a man out of a mouse!

Am I boring you, Toby?

I'm feeling a bit less ill this morning, so let's do this review of 2005 thing.

• I got a job
• I bought a Mac
• I got sunburnt

In conclusion: not a bad year, although I thought it started to drag a bit near the end. It was much better than 1989, but not as good as 1997.