This is the final Origin review in the June 1994 PC Zone, a single page on the CD version of Shadowcaster:-
Shadowcaster Review – PC Zone
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Privateer 2 Demo – Second Attempt
My first attempts at finishing this demo didn’t go too well. On launching it always presents the player with a mission to rescue an ejected pilot. It’s the same mission each time but the location at which he has ejected is seemingly random. However, it never seemed to be so random that he was near enough to reach before the timer on the demo expired and my ship blew up.
However, one of the things I tried to run on my DOS PC was this demo and the first time I tried it the escape pod was only a single jump away from me. This should have made it easy, except I couldn’t remember the key to tractor him in (yes it’s T), and while I was randomly trying keys one of the enemy ships shot him down. It didn’t help that the demo was running way, way too quickly on the PII.
This at least confirmed it was possible to complete, and forearmed with the knowledge of which key to press I set out to have another go today. I never had such a short journey but I did manage to reach him 11 jumps from the start after several attempts. Not having much time left, I ignored the 3 fighters and tractored him straight in.
It’s not much of a reward for completing the mission but if a jobs worth doing… The idea of landing to collect the reward was completely out of the question as I had about 20 seconds left.
Ultima 8 Review – PC Zone
This is a review of Ultima 8 from the June 1994 PC Zone. The reviewer describes it as a love/hate sort of game which I can agree with falling more into the hate camp myself. He was clearly reviewing the first unpatched version and was suffering with the platform jumping.
I should have had more updates over the weekend but I’ve spent a crazy amount of time getting my Win 98/DOS machine up and running. I’ve got it dual booting into DOS 6.0 now, and have my AWE32 and SBLive coexisting inside Windows. I’ve also managed to get it wired up to my MT-32 and SC-155 via the AWE32. This isn’t ideal as it requires a TSR to process the MIDI in DOS but it works in most games. My USB keyboard causes glitches in DOS resulting in slowdown, or hanging/crashing. I’ve now given in on that and have just got a second keyboard which I swap to as needed.
I found an ancient serial ball-mouse which seems to work ok – first time I’ve used one of those in a very long time. I ought to get something a little better in the long run though. When I use it in Windows I keep finding myself scrolling a non-existent mouse wheel.
I’ve still got some problems in DOS. EMM386 refuses to load no matter what. I’ve tried excluding the entire possible memory range and still no luck. I’ve got QEMM 7.5 running but that is struggling as well as if I load QEMM itself into high memory it locks up. Any advice on that is welcome. I’m thinking that a newer version might be enough. With the tiny cd and mouse drivers I’ve still got plenty of free memory so I’m probably ok for all games except those few that insist on EMM386 anyway.
The only other problem I noticed is that I don’t appear to be able to redirect the MIDI of DOS games in Win 98 to the MIDI-out and I’m stuck with playing them through the AWE32. Not sure if I’d ever run into an occasion where this would be a big issue but it does rule out running some DOS games inside Win98 if I can’t fix it. I expect a poke around the registry might be needed. Other than that it appears to be working well but I’ve only quickly tried a few games. Highlights so far are playing the first level of Dark Forces and a quick blast on the 3dfx version of Carmageddon.
Ultima 9 Demo – Second Attempt
I managed to persuade a friend who was heading in the right direction to pick up that Pentium II on my behalf and he dropped it off Wednesday night. From what I’ve seen it looks like it’s barely been used which is exactly what I was hoping for. It turned out to have a 400 Mhz CPU which is perhaps a little slower than I was aiming for but it’s enough.
Getting the PC was only the beginning as I needed to set it up from scratch at this point. This is quite a chore with making boot disks, searching around for old drivers and then struggling to transfer files to a machine with no networking. It was a lot faster than it would have been had I not been through it before relatively recently.
I soon had Windows 98 set up and working with my Voodoo 3 + SB Live. I’ve slotted in my old AWE 32 sound card as well with the idea of setting it up to dual boot DOS next. I’d forgotten just how big the AWE32 cards were – it must have the same sort of surface area as the motherboard itself. The biggest pain in the process has been swapping my USB keyboard and mouse backward and forward, along with my memory stick. I’ve just ordered an extremely cheap second-hand KVM switch + cables off Ebay so I’ll see how that works out. The idea I had of not spending any money on gaming in the new year isn’t really working out so far but at least it’s only dribs and drabs.
Having got Win 98 running, I thought I’d better give the new machine a proper test so I loaded up the Ultima 9 demo and started from the beginning again. U9 must have been one of the last games built with 3dfx cards and Glide specifically in mind, largely thanks to its extended development time. This makes it probably the most demanding game I’ll ever throw at this PC. I wouldn’t say it ran silky smooth but it’s more than playable, especially for a prerelease version of a game that was notoriously demanding at the time.
I dashed through to the previous sticking point with the floating vase. This time it drops to the ground as it’s supposed to allowing me to play through the rest of Stonegate.
Immediately before I walk out of the front door, I’m teleported into Despise. I’d forgotten that this was even included in the demo. It is slightly altered from the final game as the entrance has been sealed off and I’m sure I wouldn’t usually get a full set of armour + sword so these must have been placed to beef up the demo’s fledgling Avatar.
Other than that it appears to be basically the same dungeon, with only minor differences such as a much duller looking Kiran shield when I get that far. I remember my way around well enough to not have any trouble progressing if it wasn’t for the incessant bugs. I’d hoped that this would prove to be bug-free now I was on appropriate hardware but no such luck. The best bug I run into involves some impromptu bareback rat rodeo. Once superglued to the rat, I can’t move and have to reload only to discover that I can’t move my Avatar from that savegame either now and have to go to the one before all the way back in Stonegate. From here on I save very frequently and always into a new file. I did find out later that this loading bug could be cured by restarting the game.
Several crashes, glitches and restarts later and I get to the bottom of the column at the end of the dungeon. There is what would have been a surprise in store if Natreg hadn’t already reminded me, as Iolo/Ooli isn’t there and is replaced by a demon who keeps summoning skeletons. I ignore the skeletons and hack away at the daemon. He is tough but falls after 20 or 30 hacks.
Immediately after grabbing the glyph, the advertisement avi plays and then I’m dumped back to Windows.
There was loads of gameplay in this demo and other than the bugs it showed most of the best aspects of U9, apart from the (fairly) open world. Getting it running might not be easy though and it needs a large dose of patience with the initial U9 release looking positively stable by comparison.
Pacific Strike Review – PC Zone
Pacific Strike was the featured game in the June 1994 issue of PC Zone, which is perhaps surprising in an issue that features a review of Ultima 8. Aside from getting pride of place on the cover, the issue included a keyboard overlay and a four page review:-
The reviewer starts off by stating how he hasn’t liked any of the Wing Commander games and finishes by blaming the speed of Origin’s games on bad programming. This doesn’t exactly ingratiate him to me but if you couldn’t cope with a bit of banter/abuse PC Zone wasn’t the magazine to read back in the 90’s. It is actually a fair review for the most part and I wouldn’t argue with the final score.
I did some more work on the site last night. Even the less observant will have noticed the new logo at the top. This came out better than I expected but I may still tweak it. It’s based on the 1989 Origin product catalog cover, except this has a whole lot more balls.
The more observant might have noticed that the images on this post actually use proper thumbnails instead of downloading the full size file and then scaling it down in your browser. This doesn’t sound like much but it’s a definite novelty for this site. Whether I can be bothered to go back through 600 posts and give them the same treatment is debatable but it wouldn’t be a bad idea. I’ll at least do the magazine scans. Before that, the next job is a new logo to replace the red dot that came with the theme.