Hi all, hope you are well. I’m back with another review, this time just a quick look at another 90s shareware platform game, Hocus Pocus.

Hi there.

It’s probably worth noting that there’s nothing sinister or deliberate in the timing of this review, although whether this is the right weekend for a trip back to a fictionalised version of the medieval Crusades will be a matter of personal taste.

Anyway, for no particular reason other than the fact we fancied another discussion, Stoo and I decided to take a look at the first Assassin’s Creed game. Hope you enjoy!

Moments in Gaming is where we look back on gaming experiences that have left a particularly strong impression on us over the years: mainly for good reasons, but sometimes for bad ones.

As it’s Star Wars Day (Fourth of May be with you!) we figured it was time for a couple of moments from LucasArts oldies, of which this is the second. (Here’s the first, plus one from the archives, too, for good measure).

While the protagonist of 2009’s The Force Unleashed may be able to pull a Star Destroyer into the ground with a mere look to the sky and some mild facial discomfort, for the mere mortals sat inside a one-man fighter during the early 90s, it was a fearsome battleship that would require the efforts of a coordinated attack group, and no small amount of luck, to bring down.

The simple polygons of 1993’s X-Wing may not be able to compare with the visual spectacle of Starkiller’s one-man destruction spree on Raxus Prime, or even the woolier, video-heavy charms of relative contemporary Rebel Assault, but for those of a certain generation the sight of that solitary, familiar, triangle shape in the far distance still stirs feelings of vague dread. You suddenly know the feeling that Red Leader, Gold Leader, Porkins et al. must have had in the pit of their stomachs as they commenced their final attack run in A New Hope.

The Death Star trench run is included in, and the natural finale of, X-Wing. But here the limitations of the technology are more evident, even though the trickiness of the task itself creates ample tension on its own.

It’s still not the most difficult mission in the game, though, for my money. In a game stacked with extremely punishing moments, my vote for that particular title would go to Tour II, Mission 10: Destroy the Intrepid.

***MILD SPOILERS/FAIRLY USELESS TIPS NOW FOLLOW***

Moments in Gaming: Destroy the Intrepid continued »

Moments in Gaming is where we look back on gaming experiences that have left a particularly strong impression on us over the years: mainly for good reasons, but sometimes for bad ones.

As it’s Star Wars Day (Fourth of May be with you!) we figured it was time for a couple of moments from LucasArts oldies, of which this is the first. (Here’s one from the archives, too, for good measure).

Exactly how strong in the Force can you be? Strong enough to be a bit handy with a laser sword? To raise a sunken X-Wing from a swamp? To choke a guy in a meeting that’s getting on your nerves?

The mysteries of this power were arguably diluted in the 00s by the prequel trilogy’s midichlorian blood test, a surfeit of lightsaber-wielding Jedi, and CG scenes that went far beyond what anyone who watched the original films might have thought possible.

How, then, to up the ante again for your new Star Wars action game, telling the tale of a previously unacknowledged apprentice of Darth Vader, who is also Extremely Strong in the Force?

In the early stages of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, our protagonist – known as Starkiller – represents a version of the dark side that involves locking yourself in your bedroom to listen to Linkin Park. He’s pretty good in a fight, though, as you find out by carving your way through level after level of hapless opponents: slicing them up, throwing them off cliffs and dropping big crates on them.

For late-game set-pieces, though, that won’t cut the mustard. Neither will another slightly hit-or-miss boss battle against another Force-enabled opponent. It’s time to give the player something they’ve never seen before.

***MODERATE SPOILERS FOLLOW***

Moments in Gaming: Pull It Down continued »

Hi all.

Hope you’re well. Nice weather we’re having, huh? My mood always gets a real lift in the spring.

[Note to self: check to see if ChatGPT could write these review intros so they sound more like a human has written them.]

Today’s review is of Jade Empire: Special Edition, from Bioware.

My most recent clearout of the ‘games cupboard’ followed the usual pattern of taking everything out, putting it on the floor and gazing at the mess I’d created while periodically puffing out my cheeks and scratching my head, before returning it all whence it came (albeit in a slightly different configuration) and telling myself that such an exercise represented a great use of an afternoon.

At some point, when there was more of a premium on space, I’d evidently decided that there should be a hierarchy of sorts, with barebones budget releases relegated to a CD wallet, and only ‘proper’ boxed games with manuals worthy of a place on the shelf.

But then I got to the point where I’d filled up quite a large wallet and started to wonder whether I wanted to be the kind of person who owned multiple leather cases full of discs and decided to just leave any new purchases in their boxes on the shelves with the others. Where there had once been a two-tier system, there was now just a random assortment of games from the 90s and 00s, stored in different places.

The only new thought that occurred to me this time was: I haven’t actually added any boxed games to the collection for a while, and I’m not sure if I will again. My current circumstances are such that I no longer pass any charity shops or branches of CeX on a regular basis, and based on recent experiences, stocks of boxed PC oldies seem to be thinning out a little bit anyway.

In an effort to salvage something useful from the whole exercise, however, I did think it might be worth building on our previous series looking at old games boxes, which started as a vain effort to track down those titles lost in previous (genuine) clearouts and ended as a weird deep dive into the UK budget market and my enthusiastic patronage of it.

We recently reviewed Gun, my copy of which was re-released as part of Activision’s Best Of range. It caught my attention because it came with a printed manual and, apart from the slightly different front cover and spine, otherwise resembles the standard DVD release.

Which also makes it a little hard to determine the exact vintage of this budget line, although I’d guess 2006-2007 or so, given that the other ‘Best Of’ title in my collection, Quake 4 (never played it!) is also from 2005, as is the only other one I can find evidence of, Call of Duty: Deluxe Edition. (MobyGames gives a German release date for this edition of Quake 4 in June 2006, which sounds about right).

If printed manuals themselves weren’t quite dying out in the mid-00s, then it certainly seemed against the general direction of travel to include them in budget re-releases. In my memory, the minimalist approach of the likes of Sold Out and Xplosiv were starting to dominate by this point, squeezing out the mid-range ‘premium economy’ £12-15 editions like this particular (apparently short-lived) range.

Anyway, the two games I own stood out in my collection amongst a predominance of disc-only releases, and in whatever system I’d instituted back in the day, they’d managed to earn a hallowed place on the shelf rather than being ruthlessly stripped down, with the boxes jettisoned and the disc/cover art filed in one of three or four random places.

I joke, of course: after my latest endeavours, I know exactly where everything is – in a totally logical place that totally makes sense (totally). Join us next time, when I definitely won’t be tearing the house apart looking for a plastic folder containing a piece of artwork for a game I bought for £3 in 2009, before giving up and nicking a picture from MobyGames.

(Although I should point out that, for once, the pics in this piece are my own scans, rather than ones purloined from the great gaming database…)

Hello everyone. As promised, here is another review!

Sometimes we consider games that originated on other systems, so long as the PC version was released at least roughly around the same time. If on the other hand the port was years later it’s not really of interest to us. So Halo might happen one day but not Final Fantasy 6, even if the latter has now been released on Steam twice.

Today’s item is a little different though – while it only arrived on PC last year, it obviously has very close ties to one of the most important games ever released for MS-DOS. So then, read on for our review of Doom 64.

Hi there.

How’s it going? All good I hope? [What’s with all the question marks? Who are you talking to? Are they going to reply? Especially if you turn off comments on these posts? – Ed.]

Today we have another review for you. It seems to be pretty much all reviews at the moment, rather than any other pieces, which I guess is good news if you think we should just get on with reviewing old games in any case.

I have it on good authority that another review will follow this one, so if you’re missing the blog posts where we waffle on about feeling bad for not doing more reviews: apologies!

Anyway, in a break from the constant coverage of racing games of various vintages from yours truly, the game in question this time is Gun from Neversoft.

Hello all.

After exploring more recent games in our last few reviews, we’re going back to the 90s for today’s piece, in which we take a look at the action racer from Remedy and Apogee, Death Rally.

Hi all!

It’s been a while, but I have a new review for you. Today we’re looking at the action-RPG from Runic Games, Torchlight.

More reviews soon. Maybe. Hopefully.