Just recently Scoob and I have been going through Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, and playing that pretty old FPS got me thinking about a really old FPS, in the shape of Dark Forces. I had played this not long after it came out in the 90s, but never finished it.

Last time I looked at the game, someone was working on a promising mod for it called DarkXL, which made the game a little more up to date and added in proper mouse controls. It was my plan to wait for that mod to be completed, but unfortunately it doesn't look like it's had any development for some years.

Out of curiosity, I did some searching as to whether there were any other ways to play the original game a bit more comfortably. As luck would have it, many people had reported success using a tool called GlovePIE, which makes it possible to play with the mouse.
So after a great deal of tinkering to get Dark Forces, DOSBox, GlovePIE and Fraps all configured so that I could play and take screenshots, I once again stepped into Kyle's boots, around two decades after first doing so.

This was a massive nostalgia trip, and though I couldn't remember all of the levels and locations in the game, many of them brought back memories of playing it as a teenager. Without a doubt, playing it with the mouse helped a great deal, and it was nowhere near as awkward as trying to play it on the keyboard. Yet, the game does not have a targeting reticule, and instead Kyle kind-of auto-aims at enemies in his line of sight. This means sometimes you can try and shoot at one enemy, but Kyle picks another and your shots go off in a totally different direction. Also, it makes it impossible to lead your targets when they are moving, as Kyle always aims at where they are at that moment. It made fighting flying enemies a lot harder such as the Dark Troopers and Boba Fett.

I thought at first that the game seemed really easy, and I picked up enough spare lives to max out at 9. Then I got captured by Jabba the Hutt and had to fight his Krayt Dragon. I didn't think I was supposed to fight it hand to hand so instead I was running around trying to escape somehow. By the time I gave up and just punched the thing in the face a bunch, I had lost 5 lives and was down to 4. From that point on, the game became a lot more challenging, and included some shady level design such as placing sneaky enemies waiting to ambush you as you go up elevators and such. My lives were slowly whittled away and I only had two remaining when I went against final boss General Mohc. Luckily, that guy gave me no trouble compared to his Dark Trooper underlings, and I was able to pull out the win.

Pretty damn stoked to have finally finished this game, as it's one of a handful that have hung over my head for years. It also means that I've completed the entire Jedi Knight series featuring Kyle, at long last. Cool.

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It's been quite a long time since I first tried Star Trek Fleet Ops, but just recently had another little hankering for it. I remember not really liking this mod when I first played it a few years ago, I think due to it not seeming like something that should be played single player.
For no other reason than just to check it out again, I did some skirmishes that unsurprisingly left me feeling exactly the same way about it. If I put on limited resources, the AI can build ships way faster than me. But if I use unlimited resources, I can go straight for big ships which the AI just doesn't do for some reason, and it's too easy.
Oh well.

Hot on the heels of Party Hard, we just got through another game with old style pixel graphics. There sure are a lot of games that look like this out these days...

This one is very much inspired by 80s, side-scrolling beat-em-ups like Double Dragon and Streets Of Rage, and that is why Scoob in particular really wanted to try it. In the game, which is called Mother Russia Bleeds, players take control of several characters who have been imprisoned in an alternate history Russia, where they have been turned into test subjects for a new drug called Nekro.
It's up to the players to escape, overthrow the evil government, and break their addiction to the drug.

Man, this game was dark, brutal and bloody. You can beat the absolute snot out of the bad guys, and they you, and it was not uncommon to see people getting their limbs or heads blown off or cut off.

There were a few irritating parts, and none more so than the end boss. After taking out the government stooges, the characters experience a vivid hallucination where they must fight a representation of the Nekro drug. The fight takes place over three progressively more frustrating stages. It probably took us 20-25 attempts to beat this guy on normal difficulty, until on the last try, everything just clicked into place and we took him down in very short order.

Overall, the gameplay was fairly solid, and probably the best game of this type I can remember playing. Not that I've played all that many, mind. As for the story though, it was pretty much your typical affair, with only the addition of the drug addiction making it stand out as anything different.

Mostly a fun game though, and one we were glad to have played.

Just recently got done going through a simple-looking but very violent game called Party Hard with the Scoob. In this game, you play as a character who loses his shit when a nearby party prevents him from getting to sleep. So to shut them up for good, he heads into the party to stealthily take out all of the attendees. When he's done with that party, he decides to go on the road, and crash parties all across the country to kill everyone at those as well.

Well, that's what seemed to be happening in the game. I couldn't really tell you to be honest, as we skipped all the cutscenes except the first and last ones. The story just didn't interest us at all. We just wanted to kill everyone.

So many games have been released in the last few years that use an older pixel graphics style, and this game is certainly one of them. Truth be told, I'm not a fan of this style, and would much prefer my game graphics to be sharper, cleaner and more modern. Still, at least this blocky style didn't really detract from the gameplay at all, unlike some other games I've tried like Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine.

There were some interesting and sneaky things you could do in this game, like setting traps and using secret entrances, all of which were useful in trying to accomplish your mission without being spotted. But some things didn't make sense. For example, you could throw people from the roof or from a boat in plain sight of other party-goers and they wouldn't care, whereas at all other times if they see anything suspicious they run to call the cops.

Anyway, it was a fun if not spectacular few hours, that finally gets 2018 on the board with a completed game.

So this is the 100th computer gaming entry into this blog, and it's been a long six months coming. It's also very much not worth the wait.

I've not really been playing games these last few months, and none at all that need to be completed. This is mostly because I made the decision over Christmas to make this a year more about tabletop games, but also because I got really burned out playing the Witcher 3 for pretty much three months straight late last year.

Instead, I've been dabbling in a couple of online games I've played in the past. One of them, which Scoob and I unsurprisingly started to play again back in March, was League Of Legends. With no other reason to create this update, I was hoping to hit my next 100 ARAM wins to fit in with the century theme of this update.

Alas, it was not to be, as last night I uninstalled the game after a run of three game losses that each had players on my team going AFK. In the last one, it was a 3v5 the entire game. We put up a good fight, all things considered. But we weren't going to win that.
Those three games came at the end of a much larger bad run that saw my team getting out-comped time and time again. There's nothing worse than feeling like there's no way to win because the other team has such better champions. It was even more frustrating as, after a pretty bad run upon rejoining the game, I'd actually been doing quite well for a few weeks and was really starting to stretch my lead. But one win in the last 16 games, through no real fault of my own, has just turned me way off the game.

When I got 100 wins my score was 100-91 (9 ahead). When I got 200 wins my score was 200-181 (19 ahead). When I got 300 wins my score was 300-279 (21 ahead). By the time the new style ARAM started in May, my score was a poor 341-335, just 5 wins ahead. However the new ARAM changed things for a while, and on 24th June I was back up to 25 wins ahead. But then these last couple of weeks have been a nightmare, and I've ended this run on 397-386, just 11 wins ahead. I thought it best to stop there before falling all the way down into negatives.

The match history website no longer works properly, so I can no longer filter my matches by champion or game mode. So this time I can't go through and get stats about my champions unless I count through all the games manually. And sod that.

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The other game I've been playing, though not really a lot, is Star Wars The Old Republic. I got back into this for a few reasons, most of them related to World Of Warcraft. See, back in May, a couple of things happened that really got me nostalgic for my WoW days.

Firstly, a Youtuber I had watched since the WoW Cataclysm beta, named TotalBiscuit, passed away from cancer. That got me thinking about those first vids I watched of his and just looking back at my very short time in that expansion.
Then, another online personality I watch sometimes called Crendor, started to do a challenge in WoW with his mates called the Darkest Dungeon challenge. I watched a few of those streams as they played through the first few dungeons as Alliance characters, and that got me thinking back to my early days as Jack Gooty going through those same dungeons.

At this point, I was hankering for a bit of MMORPG action, but as I still refuse to pay sub fees I decided to re-install TOR instead. This at least made some sense, as I've never hit top level in that game or even completed a single character's storyline.

I've literally just been chilling out in this game. I went back to the planets I raced through last time, being Taris, Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine, before catching up to where I left off in Kreethen's story on Alderaan. And that's pretty much where I'm at right now.

Nothing's really changed in the game, though this time I installed it without BitRaider so I'm having no problems at all logging in.