The brilliance and relative simplicity of modern DOSBox masks just what a pain in the arse actual MS-DOS could be when it came to gaming. Reacting to different titles’ demands for more conventional memory, EMS or XMS, or problems with graphics and sound cards, most PC gamers were forced to spend many a happy hour […]

For the first article in this series I wrote about Relic’s realtime strategy classic Homeworld, and I’m returning to it today. As you might expect for this sort of game, Homeworld lets you build warships of varying size and potency. You start out with small, speedy fighters and corvettes. A few missions later you’re granted […]

Stir up trouble, then escape it: that’s the heart of Need for Speed: Most Wanted. It’s not enough merely to lose the cops as soon as possible – you have to get them to escalate the pursuit, calling in backup, then the feds, then big 4x4s that veer across the carriageway and try to smash […]

After the top down heyday of the 16-bit football games, fans waited to see what developments the glorious CD revolution would bring. Glimpses came from two different versions of FIFA International Soccer: the fab-whizzo all-new 3DO game, and the DOS port of the original, the CD version of which featured audio commentary from the late […]

In the strategy game UFO: Enemy Unknown, the world is under attack from mysterious extra-terrestrials. They appear without warning, then vanish into the shadows. They raid cities, abduct people for experimentation, build hidden bases and even infiltrate national governments. Their campaign is a prelude to invasion of this planet, and brutal subjugation of the human […]

The first few campaigns of TIE fighter see you carrying out the sort of missions you’d expect for an Imperial pilot. You chase rebels in the aftermath of Hoth, destroy pirate outposts, and forcibly end conflicts between warring planets. Bringing a bit of peace and order to the galaxy, Galactic Empire style. The first mission […]

Let’s consider a conundrum facing point and click adventure games about pirates. We might expect it to feature some sort of combat. Pirates led a fairly violent life after all. I mean “boarding ships and taking stuff” was pretty much their job description. Even if you don’t go down that route, because your pirate hero […]

Last time, Stoo talked about how Doom is synonymous with the PC consolidating its position as a proper gaming machine. Today, we move a bit further forward into the mid-90s, and a point in time when console games on PC started to become a reality, and the phrase “anything console X can do, the PC […]

Doom is important to we PC fans, because it’s one of the greatest games from a time when the PC was finally asserting itself as a potent gaming machine. With increasing processor power, and developers settling on VGA and soundblaster as industry standards, we no longer needed to be so jealous of other formats. For […]

I first signed up for World of Warcraft in the early months of 2006. The Burning Crusade expansion had just been released and I narrowly missed the pre-expansion days, what we now call Vanilla. However, back then the early levelling process was pretty much unchanged from Vanilla. So I think i’m well versed in what was […]