The glory of Quest For Glory
Posted by Rowan Kaiser | Filed under gAmINg
Filed under: Features, PC, Retro, Adventure, RPGs
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity.
Quest For Glory is a five-title series of adventure/role-playing hybrids, with the first release in 1989, and the last in 1998. They were published by Sierra - a company whose fate was recently detailed to Joystiq by Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe - and used similar interfaces and graphics as other adventures, such as King's Quest or Gabriel Knight, combined with combat systems that varied from game to game.
Being a genre hybrid is one of the surest ways to become a beloved game. Panzer General, Deus Ex, and Mass Effect are all crossover hits, thanks in part to combining role-playing with other genres. Quality hybrids manage to feel both fresh conceptually and comfortable to actually play, a winning combination.
Continue reading The glory of Quest For Glory
The glory of Quest For Glory originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 17 May 2012 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Tags: Adventure, Features, PC, Retro, RPGs
Freedom Force: Superhero role-playing done right
Posted by Rowan Kaiser | Filed under gAmINg
Filed under: Features, PC, Retro, RPGs
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity.
Roleplaying games especially seemed to be a natural fit for superhero games. Both usually have origin stories, over-the-top villainy, straightforward morality and, most importantly, characters overcoming adversity by gaining more strength and greater power, with single characters or small party dynamics. There were a few attempts of varying success, like the simple RPG/adventure hybrid Superhero League Of Hoboken, but it still took until 2002 for a great superhero RPG to be released: Freedom Force.
Continue reading Freedom Force: Superhero role-playing done right
Freedom Force: Superhero role-playing done right originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 11 May 2012 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Tags: Features, PC, Retro, RPGs
Afghan photographers eschew electronics for wooden camera portraits (video)
Posted by Steve Dent | Filed under Techie Stuff
If retro-style snaps are worth a billion dollars à la Instagram, what does that say about the value of real prints taken with pre-WWII gear? Reminding us that early cameras were photochemical and shutterless, Kabul is home to two lone holdouts who still practice the 75-year-old art of wooden camera photography. Due to a ban on picture-taking by the Taliban, and then an influx of cheap digital cameras, the number of practitioners of kamra-e-faoree has steadily dwindled. But thanks to the Afghan Box Camera Project, the legacy left by these artisans is being preserved -- not least in the video above. Discover how it all works and then leave the faux-vintage to the hipsters.
Afghan photographers eschew electronics for wooden camera portraits (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 May 2012 14:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Retro
Wolfenstein 3D celebrates 20 years of machine guns and flag-obscured passages with free web version
Posted by Mat Smith | Filed under Techie Stuff
To commemorate the big two-oh years since its release, Bethesda has offered up the full Wolfenstein 3D experience to play for free in your web browser. Not only that, you'll also be able to play the id original on iOS devices gratis (at least for today) and creator John Carmack has decided to offer us a director's commentary on the game's development while shooting his way through a few levels. Watch, nod and reminisce right after the break, then hit up the source to play for yourself.
Wolfenstein 3D celebrates 20 years of machine guns and flag-obscured passages with free web version originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 May 2012 13:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Bizarre internal Apple video shows Steve Jobs rallying the troops against IBM
Posted by Darren Murph | Filed under Techie Stuff
We're going to warn you up front: what you're about to see is eccentric, puzzling, and perhaps even disturbing. And undoubtedly, it's the fanboy film to end all fanboy films. According to Network World, who managed to get ahold of an internal 'rally the troops' video, the referenced clip was produced with a $50,000 budget and shown to an international sales force at a 1984 meeting in Hawaii. The film, entitled "1944," was purportedly provided by one-time Apple employee Craig Elliott, now CEO of Pertino Networks. The vintage footage shows then-CEO Steve Jobs as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the nine minute film drags on to show Apple-clad soldiers lining up to do battle with IBM -- a massive, massive rival in the space during that era. The full watch can be found in the source link below (embedding was disabled), and again, this will absolutely freak you out. Fair warning.
Bizarre internal Apple video shows Steve Jobs rallying the troops against IBM originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 May 2012 15:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Retro
Star Castle finally finds a home on the Atari 2600, gets a redesigned cartridge
Posted by Sarah Silbert | Filed under Techie Stuff
Halo may have made its way to the Atari 2600, but wouldn't porting a retro game to this '70s-era console be more appropriate? MAKE Magazine has the skinny on former Atari dev Scott Williamson's port of the Cinematronics shooter Star Castle. Though Atari execs decided the title was too complicated to bring over in the '80s, Williamson took it upon himself to make that transition possible. The result of some serious coding is 8K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM's worth of good ol' space war. But he didn't stop there -- he redesigned the cartridge with a transparent casing and LEDs that flash during gameplay. Click through to the source link for the full step-by-step.
Star Castle finally finds a home on the Atari 2600, gets a redesigned cartridge originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Apr 2012 03:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Retro
Fort Atlantic releases new album on modded NES cartridge, no chiptunes in sight
Posted by Donald Melanson | Filed under Techie Stuff
It's getting tough for bands to out retro each other these days (what with even cassettes making something of a comeback), but Birmingham, Alabama's own Fort Atlantic has managed to come up with something that's likely to break through the nostalgia-filled haze. While you'll soon be able to buy the band's self-titled debut album in all the usual formats, you can now pre-order a limited edition version that ships a week before the proper release date and comes in the form of an NES cartridge modded to hold a USB drive ($25 and apparently limited to just 50). That includes the full album in both lossless and MP3 formats, along with an added EP, videos and other bonuses. Unlike past NES album releases, though, there's no chiptunes to be found here -- you can listen to one song from the album courtesy of the Paste Magazine link below, and see frontman Jon Black explain the cartridge decision in the video after the break.
Continue reading Fort Atlantic releases new album on modded NES cartridge, no chiptunes in sight
Fort Atlantic releases new album on modded NES cartridge, no chiptunes in sight originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Retro
The surprising accessibility of older RPGs
Posted by Rowan Kaiser | Filed under gAmINg
Filed under: Features, PC, Retro, RPGs
This is a weekly column focusing on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity.
While mechanics and storylines may be roughly comparable, interfaces have definitely improved, and this is the problem. It's one thing to say that Wizardry VI has the best and most complex class system in gaming, but quite another to try to play it without knowing that you need to draw or find maps of its dungeon. Alternately, I can't count the number of people who I convince to try the original Fallout, only to see them getting frustrated at its difficulty spikes, lack of effective auto-save, and occasionally obtuse item manipulations. It happens to me to sometimes, especially with games that I didn't play when I was younger, which is why I was surprised recently to fall in love with Might & Magic III: Isles Of Terra.
Continue reading The surprising accessibility of older RPGs
The surprising accessibility of older RPGs originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Tags: Features, PC, Retro, RPGs
Apple eMate 300 prototype pops up on eBay, buy it now for $8,500
Posted by Edgar Alvarez | Filed under Techie Stuff
At this point we kind of just expect vintage Apple machines to surface on eBay: just last month we came across a WALT prototype, followed by a Macintosh 128k a few days ago. Now, the fresh face at eBay's auction party is Apple's eMate 300, which is said to be in "good working order" and showing no signs of wear. There's no bidding war going on at the moment, but there is a "Buy it now" option that's got the laptop priced at a whopping $8,500. Of course, you're likely to get your money's worth, with a 25 MHz ARM 710a RISC processor, a 480 x 320 display and an almighty stylus pen -- all while being powered by Cupertino's Newton OS. Think this is worth adding to your fancy collector's shelf? We'll let you chew on that while you pore over the sell-off page.
Apple eMate 300 prototype pops up on eBay, buy it now for $8,500 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Retro
