February is traditionally the time for love, so let's get it on with five suiters from gaming past. First, we'll be wooing in style with National Lampoon's Blind Date (1994 Three Vision Interactive Pictures/Interactive Sales Group), an FMV consequence-driven adventure with some saucy comedy. Then, it's time to get some BANG! Gunship Elite (2000 Rayland Interactive & Red Storm Entertainment) for an energetic and fully-thrusted space sim. Quell your excitement as you dive deep into my personal pick, Sentient: Explore the Infinite (1997 Psygnosis Ltd), an action adventure that'll have your brain busting all over the place. Lap it all up doggy-style with a trip to the adventure game Dogday (1996 Asylum Productions Ltd). And, if you're still not satisfied, you can always play with your Mechwarrior (1989 Dynamix Inc, Activision Software & FASA Corporation).
I've a few updates comin' at ya for round two! Quik the Thunder Rabbit has a bunch of new additions, including the leaked prototype of the cancelled SNES sequel. UFOs (aka Gnap) now utilises ScummVM, though there's also the addition of a useful patch to update the remaining Windows original. Lastly, The X-Files: Resist or Serve makes better use of the graphic features of new emulators and re-vamped the remapped keyboard controls. See each page or the Game Updates section for a full rundown on what's new.
That's quite a night ahead of you. Next month is Movie March thanks to the Oscars airing on March 15th (see my predictions below). I'll be gathering together a quintet of movie-themed games and some of them have been long awaited! I'll see you all then...
Head on after the jump to see the games...
Click on the images below to head on over to the game page.
Click on the images below to head on over to the game page.
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2000 Rayland Interactive & Red Storm Entertainment
Windows
Simulation-Space-Science Fiction
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1997 Eyst Pty Ltd
Windows '95
Adventure-First Person-Animals!
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1989 Dynamix Inc, Activision Software & FASA Corporation
DOS
Action-Science Fiction-Mechs!
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1994 Three Vision Interactive Pictures/Interactive Sales Group
Windows 3.1
Adventure-Comedy-FMV-Mature
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1997 Psygnosis, Ltd
DOS
Action Adventure-Science Fiction-Outer Space
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Awesome, grabbing Bang : Gunship Elite and Sentient which I have never heard of but it looks really interesting.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this months selection.
Martian Gothic Unification definitely needs some help on new systems and if you like stuff like the original Resident Evil games, Silent Hill, Nocturne & Blair Witch it will be right up your street (available PS1 & PC). I kinda managaed to get it running without grid lines over the videos and into the game using DGVoodoo 2.86.5 but it asks for the disc and all the nocd I tried either didn't work or Windows Defender removed them and didn't allow to tell it to restore and ignore so almost definitely not a false positive!
It's on my to-do list. I did attempt it a few years ago though emulation (PCEm & DOSBox) but wasn't happy with the performance. I want to see if I can get it running well natively or through hooking programs like dgVoodoo but haven't attempted that yet. I do own the budget PC release as well as the PlayStation version and thought about doing just the latter but that isn't really in keeping with the site's mantra.
DeleteI'll likely look at it again for the October Halloween post, but I can't guarantee anything as of yet.
Sentient looks extremely interesting. I'm surprised it isn't the sort of game with a vocal cult following and lots of retrospectives written about it praising its ambition and forward thinkingness.
ReplyDeleteI just discovered Dog Day and was hoping it would be somewhere down the line. Really looks like the sort of game I would enjoy. Great job bringing up the original Mech Warrior to, really important piece of gaming history that needs to be available.
ReplyDeleteYou have an unmatched hability to show me games that I never heard about, thank you very much.
ReplyDeleteBiffman, you beautiful man, you did it. To me Mechwarrior is one of the ultimate "lost" franchises, a franchise that had enormous clout and presence in the 90"s only to be relegated to secondary status today. To add to the pain, as you undoubtedly already know, all previous Mechwarrior entries to the current 5th one are no longer available to buy and are difficult to make playable on modern PCs.
ReplyDeleteSo it brings me great joy to see this series make an appearance here, on this incredible website. I know your list of games to work on is massive but if you ever have a chance to continue working on this series, I'm sure many, including myself, would be very grateful. They deserve the chance to be played by a modern audience (Oh, there's also the spin-off Mech Commander series, but that's a story for another time). It is also unfortunate that due to the complex licensing issues surrounding the previous entries, the chance of seeing them ever be re-published are slim.
So thanks again Biffman, a great catch!