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Rob Zacny

Episode 463: Classic Year in Review: 1994

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Three Moves Ahead 463:

Three Moves Ahead 463


Classic Year in Review: 1994
Sound Blaster! 3DFX! Games that go unpatched because there's no way to fix them! That's right, we're going back 25 years to 1994. Yes, 25 years. We're all hella old, in case that had not occurred to anyone. But who am I kidding, if you're listening to this show you are probably part of the gamer geriatrics, pausing from your record run of Chip's Challenge or Kye to dust off your AARP card and get cheap coffee at McDonald's, nursing it from 9 AM to 11 AM before going to the smaller grocery store in town because the bigger store just has too many choices and the lights are too bright. Anyway, lots of good games came out in 1994. Rowan correctly names the Overall Game of the Year while Rob and Sean have good intentions but are unfortunately wrong. Art by Carlos Villa.

X-COM: Enemy Unknown, Sid Meier's Colonization, Star Wars: TIE Fighter, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Ultima VIII: Pagan, Outpost, Final Fantasy VI (or III, whatever), Panzer General, Elder Scrolls: Arena, Liberty or Death, Perfect General II, Master of Magic, System Shock, Warcraft, Aces of the Deep, Lords of the Realm, Marathon

 

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One Game that came out in a "Gold" version in 1994 was Rings of Medusa. Though I never played the "Gold" version, the game was a great Overland Fantasy Strategy/RPG crossover where you had to fight armies, take over cities and find buried treasures. 

There was really no follower to the first game. the second game had a more Dungeon Crawl feel to it.

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5 minutes ago, Khan Khomrad said:

Is the banner of this show an artwork from frostpunk?

It's fan art for Final Fantasy 6. They discuss this scene (timestamp).

 

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Thanks for the show!

 

The 1994 wargames line-up is very interesting, especially if you like tactical games.

 

Panzer General and Perfect General II are good gateway wargames with great production values and easy-to-use interface.

 

Operation Crusader is part of the V for Victory series. It’s a great operational WW2 wargame with an innovative WEGO system.

 

TacOps is a very realistic modern squad-level wargame. It was released on Mac in 1994 and two years later for Windows. It also uses a WEGO system but doesn’t have any grids or hexes.

 

Tigers on the Prowl is by far the most realistic WW2 tactical wargame of its era, with detailed modelling of line of sight, armour penetration, supplies, chain of command and order delays. Definitely not for the faint of heart, though! It spawned a few sequels: Tigers on the Prowl 2, Panthers in the Shadow and Tiger Unleashed.

 

Wargame Construction Set II: Tanks! by Norm Kroger is also a tactical game: it covers platoon-level combat from 1918 to 1991, with a focus on mechanised warfare. It is much less detailed and realistic than Tigers on the Prowl or TacOps, but the interface is much friendlier and the IA is decent. Also, the scenario editor is very good. I discovered the game quite recently and it’s now one of my go-to games on my Android tablet (thank to the wonderful Magic Dosbox emulator).

 

 

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Having replayed X-Com and TIE Fighter just last year, I'd say they both hold up very well. TIE Fighter (and X-Wing) just has a responsiveness that I feel greatly helped immersion to a degree that other games (including the later X-Wing Alliance) never really matched. The original campaign in TIE Fighter (especially the early ones) were the real stand outs though. On top of creative mission design, they went a long way towards making you feel like a part of a larger operation that most other flight sims/space games didn't manage to do. (In fact, the TIE Fighter expansion campaigns also fall into the same trap, often pitting player and a handful of wingmen against seemingly endless waves of enemies).

 

My own 1994 shout-outs would have to include Raptor: Call of the Shadows for reasons of pure nostalgia. Playing it now,  the small size of the studio (6 individuals in the credits) is apparent in details like how few frames of animation there are (only the player's craft and a small number of enemies actually have any animation at all), but at the time, the detailed SVGA sprites on our 486 blew my 10-year old mind.

 

Shout out as well to EA's US Navy Fighters, one of the then-popular accessible 'survey' flight sims (the engine would be re-used under the Jane's branding for ATF and the Fighters Anthology collection) and the only one in its family to make use of FMV. Also an interestingly topical setting because the campaign depicts... a Russian invasion of the Ukraine, including seizing the Crimea and Ukrainian vessels of the Black Sea fleet.

 

Another minor omission is Bullfrog's Theme Park. And yes, I'm well aware that the definitive RollerCoaster Tycoon combines the uh, Theme of Theme Park with the developer (and seemingly a good chunk of the engine) of Transport Tycoon.

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As somebody who came to gaming late because I didn't have anything to play on Xcom is the only game that I put in significant time.  I do remember booting up tie fighter at my friends house often.

One suggestion for these shows - I'd love to hear what games you would like to see remade now.  I always think that remaking good games is a waste - it's the weird errors that need an update.  I get the sense that if somebody remade the wing commander game that would be pretty cool...

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I'd still love a remake or a new Crimson Skies, but looking it up, the games were kinda flops which probably explains why that IP has been dormant since the original X-Box

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Is Lord of the Realm 2 generally considered bad or is that just Rowan? That was a heavily played game on our two computer LAN. It’s admittedly a stronger TBS game with all battles auto-resolved since the real-time AI was janky.

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Huge fan of all the X-Wing games (except XvT) but one thing I only realized much later is that it wasn't even Lucasarts who made the games but rather Totally Games, developers of other titles like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaft.  Have to say my opinion of Lucasarts dropped after knowing that.  The other game I played that they actually developed was Dark Forces, which to me was so reliant on recycling things from the movies that it ended up falling pretty flat.  Literally all the enemies in dark forces (except the Dark Troopers themselves) are just anything they could take from the movies, whereas the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games added so many new craft, many of which have since become canon.  Lucasarts is supposed to have a great pedigree in adventure games but I've yet to delve into any of those titles.  

 

I've tried several times to get into Master of Magic but find it very difficult with the graphics and interface.  Though I can still easily slide into a game of Master of Orion 1 with no qualms whatsoever. 

Jagged Alliance 1 is another game I simply can't get into, I don't understand why paid mercenaries don't have proper guns at the start and I need to acquire these through the missions themselves.  I understand that it's for the progression but thematically it's bonkers. 

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Thank you for this great trip down the nostalgia lane. And thums up for unmatched Tie fighter. You have mentioned some other gaming podcast while talking about Final Fantasy 6, but I cannot discern the name. Can you provide it in written form? Much obliged.

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The thing I most remember about the first Lords of the Realm, is how broken sheep where, I mean - everything you need was wool and the merchant to show up, because the profits would allow you to hire mercenaries, with them you could easily conquer neighbor counties easily, skipping the early game, even when it was  no longer enough, you mostly like have several counties which would allow you to rise proper armies.

 

Still, the castle construction and sieges were fun.

 

My shoutout would go for Might and Magic: World of Xeen, which was a compilation of MM4 and MM5, one of the best game of the franchise from the early history arc.

 

 

 

 

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I really loved Outpost when I played it one time at my cousin's house. I never got another chance to play it but apparently I dodged a huge bullet with that one. 

 

X-Com and Tie Fighter were my big favorites from this year. The recall there being a bunch of negative press around X-Com that made me want to play it even more and when I finally got my hands on it I was not disappointed in the least! 

 

I played Wing Commander at my older brothers behest and he also forced me to go to the movie. I never understood the draw if it when there were games like Tie Fighter and Elite that were so much better. The only Wing Commander I ever enjoyed was the one on SNES

 

Master of Magic was the one game that totally took over my life at some later point. I played that game for hundreds of hours probably way longer than had been intended by the developers. I was young enough to be lost in the story of each race and treat them like they were each worth playing through. I didn't know at that point how to min max every little thing and just played for the story that would developed in my head.

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1 hour ago, Valosar said:

X-Com and Tie Fighter were my big favorites from this year. The recall there being a bunch of negative press around X-Com that made me want to play it even more and when I finally got my hands on it I was not disappointed in the least! 

 

Negative press for X-com?

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I was waiting for some sweet Transport Tycoon discussion, and then THIS?! A big load of We Didn't Play It!

 

Really good to hear the Outpost bits. I played, I believe, the demo at some point in the nineties, predictably got nowhere fast but blamed it on my youthful and undeveloped gaming skills. At the time I couldn't quite wrap my head around the game being at fault. Silly me.

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Fantastic episode, loved all the TIE Fighter love! Still one of the best game of its type.

 

I wanted to mention a game that came out between Wing Commander 3 and TIE Fighter called Star Crusader which, in some ways, is better than both of them. An amazing story, a branching campaign that ultimately turns into two different campaigns, and a variety of mission design few other games have. It's worth playing for its story and its insane cutscenes:

 

StarCrusader_DOS_12.gif

 

But seriously it's a great game that anyone who liked TIE Fighter should play. It runs right out of the box on DOSBox too, so it's easy to get working. 

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8 hours ago, Brian Rubin said:

Fantastic episode, loved all the TIE Fighter love! Still one of the best game of its type.

 

I wanted to mention a game that came out between Wing Commander 3 and TIE Fighter called Star Crusader which, in some ways, is better than both of them. An amazing story, a branching campaign that ultimately turns into two different campaigns, and a variety of mission design few other games have. It's worth playing for its story and its insane cutscenes:

 

Never heard of Star Crusader but another space flight sim from the era is Renegade Legion: Battle for Jacob's Star.  I've yet to play it as I'm not savvy with dosbox, but from reviews I've heard it's okay if not up to the standards of Xwing & WC (It's actually from 1995 so should probably better mentioned in the subsequent poodcast)

 

240667-renegade-battle-for-jacob-s-star-

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Once we get to 1995, 96 and 97, there had better be some adventure games in these podcasts! Broken Sword, Toonstruck, MI3...

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