Earlier today I got news that they’ve added one of my all-time favorite games, and it didn’t take long for me to shell out the five smackers it cost. One of the nice things about GOG is that they adapt/port games to work on modern systems, and this was something I really looked forward to since in the past DK2 has proven somewhat finicky to get going on anything except a 1999-era computer. Those old machines (Voodoo graphics!) are starting to get VERY difficult procuring these days.

So I bought it from GOG and gave it a spin.

Of course it’s the same old game, so here’s some plus and minus with the GOG-version:

+ Installs really smoothly using their own installer.
+ Quick download and you get some bonus materials with the game, in this case a manual, a reference guide and a level editor.
+ Instant gratification, game starts almost immediately on a modern system.
+ Runs fine under Windows 7, in my case a 64-bit install. Can probably get it going under Wine too, with some coaxing.

- Still kind of funky settings-wise. I couldn’t get hardware-accelerated graphics going.
- Game is quite unstable. Less unstable than vanilla DK2, but still crashes quite often and randomly.

Totally worth five dollars, despite the oddities.

Maybe some day when I redo my kitchen I’ll steal this idea and do a pixelart tile motif in it somewhere…

Either click the link up there to go to Vimeo and watch the video in much better quality, or enjoy the embedded (lesser-quality) version down below.

One of my favorite games of all time is Blade Runner from 1997. It is loosely based on a similar concept to the favorite movie (which incidentally happens to be one of my all-time favorite movies) and follows a different member of the Blade Runner-unit, a man named McCoy. When released it was considered a landmark achievement and managed to mix atmospheric visuals and audio with a well-written plot. It also had up to thirteen (!) different endings, depending on the choices the player made. I managed to get eleven of them, that I know of.

Today I remembered the game for some reason. It’s been rattling around in one of the drawers in my desk for the last six or seven years, but today I dug it out. The game was a gift to me on my birthday from my then circle of friends, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The only sad part is that somehow, somewhen, the box has suffered some minor… uuh… cat-damage. So it has a somewhat pungent smell. But the contents were blissfully unharmed.

(Speaking of which, I miss these boxes. This was back in the day when games came in proper boxes, not just a keep-case. Actual cardboard boxes. I miss it.)

The game comes on four CDs, something which was impressive at the time. I popped the first disc into my drive, and installed it using Wine. I wasn’t sure if it would run, but I had nothing to lose. Also, I had even bigger doubts about Vista (which I occasionally dual-boot for gaming) running it.

Wine installed it just fine, and when I tried running it, it worked perfectly. Absolutely beautiful, and was fully playable. Audio, video, all worked fine. I had a fun half-hour running around in the game.

The introductory scroll of the game is an exact replica of that from the movie, complete with similar music. It sets the atmosphere for the rest of the game beautifully.

Sure, it looks a little odd since you can’t change the resolution of the game, and it was released loooong before widescreen monitors were invented. But it’s completely playable, and I might just dig into it – for nostalgias sake.

Now I’m gonna see if this thing can play Sky Shadow!

(Clicky)

SIMH is available in the Ubuntu repositories. It’s in one of the supplemental repos, multiverse or universe – I can’t remember. Installs easily. Getting the image running and understanding SIMH was a little tricky, but nothing you can’t figure out in half an hour or so provided you have some fairly advanced knowledge of computers. I managed to do it just fine with a little googling.

No, I don’t know why it says “1988″ in the screenshot.

The image isn’t completely ready. It boots in single-user mode and then you have to create a few directories that for some reason aren’t included. After that it’s bootable in multiuser-mode and runs just like on an actual PDP-11. Of course, text-mode UNIX isn’t exactly the most visually impressive operating system in the world, but it’s still quite neat.

I’m talking about SimCity 2000.

The first time I even heard about SimCity 2000 was back in late 1992 I think. I saw a preview of it in some computer magazine, and I thought that it looked cool. I actually had never played the very first SimCity so I didn’t really know what all the hubbub was about, but I thought it looked neat. The graphics were crisp and the game seemed like a perfect waste of time for a teenager such as myself. I think I also had just gotten ahold of my first Super VGA-compatible graphics adapter, and I looked forward to it.

And when it was released and I got it… I played it so much. I spent hours devising the perfect city, giving myself various challenges and exploring the open-ended toy that it was. I built arcologies and took my city into the distant future. It was, for lack of a better description, totally awesome.

Sure, there came other SimCity-games after 2000. I bought 3000 when it came out in ’99 and I played SimCity 4 as well. Not too long ago I gave SimCity Societies a go. These were all interesting in their own ways, but none of them came even close to having the insane replay value that SimCity 2000 has had over the years. None of them appealed to me in exactly the same kind of way that SimCity 2000 has for more than sixteen years.

There’s a lot of games which I consider absolutely immortal. The Sims for example. That was also a huge timesink and a joy to play. Or Dungeon Keeper 2. Or Doom.

But if I had to choose just one game to claim the prize as the best game I’ve every played, my money would be on good old SimCity 2000.

Here’s a screenshot of me playing SimCity 2000 Deluxe in a virtualized Windows XP. It works just fine under Wine too, but it gets a little confused unless you run Wine-applications in a faux desktop of their own. This just worked better for me since I already had the virtualized XP running.