Before proceeding with the review, I want to bring up the “elephant in the room” with Fallout: London. Something that bothered me throughout my first two playthroughs, and also something that can be mostly avoided with some careful planning and insight. And that is: avoiding the many bugs in the game…
Continue reading Fallout: London, PC [Part 2 – Avoiding the Bugs]
Created by Team FOLON, with the backing of gog.com, Fallout: London is a free total conversion for Fallout 4, turning the English capital city into a post-apocalyptic hellscape, with various different factions warring against each other.
The entire single-player campaign – the whole game, in fact – has been modified to give you a new storyline to play through, plus loads of other extras that accent the very Britishness of it all. The mod satirises British history, culture, and British manufacturing and consumerism, and has countless unique items and locations to discover while exploring.
Continue reading Fallout: London, PC [Part 1 – No Swimming in the River Thames]
Developed by Dynamix and published by Sierra On-line, Red Baron is a combat flight simulator set during The First World War. The game was innovative for the time, and garnered considerable praise from players and critics alike at the time of its original release – 1990.
Developed by Blizzard North and first published by Blizzard Entertainment in 1997, Diablo is a classic point-and-click action/RPG that features quests, monsters, real-time combat, magic, and dungeon-delving, in a way that is meant to appeal to those who prefer a more immediate style of gameplay, than the more ‘hardcore’, turn-based style of many RPGs. And – as a result – Diablo was a smash hit, and spawned a series that still (infamously) persists to this day.
Developed by Troika Games and published by Sierra On-Line in 2001, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura is a rich and complex RPG with isometric 2D graphics, set in a fantasy world undergoing an industrial revolution. The game mixes magic and technology in a Victorian-styled “Steampunk” setting; is completely open-ended, and features lots of different races (humans, orcs, gnomes, elves, dwarves), with complicated – even racist – societal themes developing as you discover the world and interact with its many characters.
Continue reading Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, PC
Xanadu Next was developed by Falcom and published for Windows PCs in Japan in 2005. It is a continuation of the Dragon Slayer series and a spin-off from Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II. The game remained untranslated into English until a worldwide release by XSEED Games in 2016. And I have to say: it’s a wonderful game, and is arguably the pinnacle of the long-running franchise.
The MS-DOS version of Cannon Fodder was ported by Audio Visual Magic Ltd., and was not the first version of Cannon Fodder released (as some seem to think – I’m looking at you, Moby Games). No – the original version of Cannon Fodder was the Amiga version, which was developed by Sensible Software themselves.
Created by Simon Phipps (co-founder of Core Design), and published by Gremlin Graphics in 1989, Switchblade is a platform action game that could be described as a ‘spiritual successor’ to the Rick Dangerous games (also created by Simon Phipps). Switchblade features similar gameplay and graphics to Rick Dangerous, although it is more refined, less cartoony, and is far less frustrating to play. Switchblade came out on the Atari ST first and ports for the Amiga, C64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum followed.
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is the second SCUMM game from Lucasfilm Games (aka LucasArts), after Maniac Mansion, with game development led by David Fox, and with Matthew Alan Kane as co-designer and co-programmer. It was originally released for the Commodore 64 in 1988, and this enhanced FM Towns port was published in Japan in 1990 by Fujitsu. The game is playable in both English and Japanese.
Continue reading Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, FM Towns
Origin/Blue Sky Productions‘ classic MS-DOS RPG, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, was released for the FM Towns in 1993 by Electronic Arts Victor, Inc.*
*= Electronic Arts Victor was a joint venture between Electronic Arts and the Victor Musical Industries subsidiary of JVC, established in September 1992 in Tokyo. Electronic Arts Victor‘s mission was to translate Electronic Arts‘ library of games to Japanese language and to distribute them in Japan, as well as to create original titles for the Japanese market.
Continue reading Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, FM Towns
The King of Grabs 