03-01-2008, 12:10 AM
Quote:>They just don't make games like this any more.
After playing various games in a similar vein, that seems to be the case sadly. A few came close to having the same magic, but none so far imo duplicated it.
I thought it might just be nostalgia from my dorm years that makes certain games special to me, but as I've been installing these games on the new computer, getting the patches and looking for support information and whatnot, I've come to realize that some of the games I consider special are indeed special enough that people are devoting hours to improve them 10 years after the fact.
I had some graphical issues in Baldur's Gate that I needed to fix. Not only did I find the correct workaround to play it on Geforce 8 graphics cards without mods, but I also found a world of Infinity Engine modders who are still at it in 2007 and 2008. One could play BG with TotSC in a native widescreen resolution now (although IMHO these games should played at or close to their original resolution since every higher resolution is "zooming out" and changing the perspective quite a bit). More impressively, one who owns both BG and BG2 can now play BG as a total conversion within the BG2 engine, or play the entire BG series as a semi-continuous game under the BG2 engine. Or for that matter, play BG2 itself with the stone UI look of BG. That's not to mention all of the custom mods and scripts for these games over the last 10 years.
There are source ports of the original Quake that I never knew existed, giving it real time shadows, dynamic lighting, bumpmapping, high res textures, etc. Quake has a metascore in the mid-90s, and there is apparently still an active multiplayer community bigger than Q2 or Q3A. I notice that every Id Software title back to Keen including expansions is available on Steam now, at prices that are almost reasonable. I'm not familiar enough with Steam yet to buy games that way, but maybe...
I wonder what games of today will get such attention, 10+ years from now?
At any rate, I've installed almost all of my Windows games by now, and they all appear to work with little or no glitches. Even a few games that were borked on the old rig seem to work better now. My 3 main issues with Vista that have made it take way too much work have been drivers, drivers, and drivers.